Richard II Suffering Quotes

 This is a little confusing. Basically Ross is saying that Richard's bad decisions have led to terrible consequences (here, the theft of Henry Bolingbroke's inheritance), but that the nobles have allowed it to happen. It's an interesting little passage, because the definition of suffering changes. In the first line, the meaning is the same as in modern English. In the third line, it means "to allow." Just another example of how passivity leads to disaster.

Wow. When Richard finds out that he's outmatched by Henry's army, he almost seems to take pleasure in talking about all the suffering he plans to do. Drama queen!

Jaded by a lifetime of being told what he wants to hear, Richard, who hasn't ever really suffered much, overreacts a little by forbidding anyone to give him what he most wants: comfort.

Richard fantasizes that his suffering will somehow be transformed into an act of revenge: his sighs and tears will cause a famine and punish the land.

In this metaphor, Richard links Henry Bolingbroke's luck to his own. In contrast to his former inability to see himself as separate from the crown, here he talks about the crown as if it were an independent thing, a well that fills either his or Henry's "bucket," but not both. In other words, when one bucket is full, the other is empty. One unexpected aspect of the metaphor is that the crown fills the buckets not with power or luck, as we might expect, but with suffering. Henry's good fortune is due to the fact that his bucket is "up" and therefore empty, while Richard's is heavy and low, because it's full of tears.

Suffering in this play often leads the sufferer to suddenly see the truth. Richard has by all accounts spent most of his tenure as king "blind" to the treason around him. In fact, he prefers to be surrounded by liars who tell him whatever he wants to hear, even if it damages his position in the kingdom. Having just lost his crown, Richard recognizes that, although his vision might be physically blurred (because he's crying), he's actually seeing clearly for the fist time. He recognizes (a little late, it's true) that the people surrounding him are traitors.

Finding that his face doesn't "reflect" his new degraded state, Richard smashes the mirror and tells King Henry to look at how sorrow has "ruined" his face (actually the mirror). It's a smart switch: even more important than a "real" face, Richard seems to be saying, is the face's reflection. Smash the reflection and you also smash the thing it reflects. In other words, life is an illusion.

In kind of a sweet moment, Richard promises the queen that, since she has a longer way to go, he'll groan twice as much so that they end up suffering the same amount. Notice that Richard has started using his expressions of grief to measure distance and, elsewhere, time.

York's description of Richard's humiliating walk is really moving and totally consistent with Richard's passivity. Even now, the only kind of "combat" he seems to be capable of is the combat of "tears and smiles."

Richard, who once upon a time could (as Henry Bolingbroke put it) make four years go by in a breath, now measures time in units of misery. This reflects how totally he's lost control.