My progress:
Shakespeare Reading Project
Henry VI, parts 1, 2, 3 and Richard III
Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Taming of the Shrew
Titus Andronicus
The Comedy of Errors
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Romeo & Juliet
A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Richard II

I benefited from absorbing all the commentary on Richard II, because I don’t think I was picking up on the subtleties and what was happening in the language. Similar to Love’s Labour’s Lost, Richard II is a play about language, about how Richard’s language moves from empty rhetoric to poetry, showing – maybe? – his unfitness for the role of king. Harold Goddard refers to Richard II as a “narcissist king”, made most explicit in the famous deposition scene where he is stripped of his crown. What does he do the moment the crown is off his head? He calls for a mirror. He gazes upon himself. What does he look like without the crown? He has no concept of his SELF without a crown on his head. It’s a perfect example of a “mirror moment“, which I’ve been writing about for years and years – I even created an Instagram account solely for mirror moments – and I included the Richard II mirror moment in my Oscilloscope essay on male mirror moments

As I was reading Richard II, I kept thinking of Tsar Nicholas, and how his often infuriating passivity – his sluggish unimaginative day-dream-y personality – came from how he thought about his role. He considered himself an autocrat, he assumed it was forever. The winds of change were upon his land, and he could not adjust. He was the worst possible person for that particular moment in time.

Sorry, bro, but no.

Every democratic change pushed through – changes which might have saved him or at least staved off the catastrophe – he resisted. He allowed some change but then got in the way by insisting on doing everything himself. He is a deeply frustrating historical figure. Maddening. If I were being mean, I would call him a pussy-whipped idiot and I’m not sorry. I have no love for monarchs anyway. No Kings. My people are Irish. My ancestors are referred to as “rug-headed kerns Which live like venom” in Richard II. Look forward to your downfall. I’ve read biographies and histories of Nicholas and Alexandra, I’ve read their correspodence, and the two of them are MADDENING. These people are going to kill you, don’t you get that?? Rasputin is a PROBLEM. Put your foot down, Nicholas, get your wife under control! But he couldn’t. He didn’t really understand he was trapped until it was too late. I imagine he died still confused about how it had all happened.

Richard II, too, just assumes the divine right of kings will last forever. He does not understand what is happening until it’s too late.

Queen Elizabeth, apparently, saw the play when it was revived in 1601 and said, “I am Richard the Second, know ye not that?” Which is pretty interesting. She, too, was a poet. England was very proud of its absolute monarch, as well as their recent defeat of the Spanish Armada, but they also worried about what would come next, since the Queen showed no signs of marrying and/or producing an heir. Succession was on everyone’s minds and could be seen as the subtext screaming underneath all of these history plays. I squint at the family tree in my Riverside Shakespeare, but honestly the details of each “branch” are sometimes hard to hold onto, mentally. Richard II was seen as a nostalgic figure, symbolic of English unity (about to fall apart after him).

The history plays exist in clusters, triads – or maybe quartets, since some of the plays have multiple parts. You could see the three Henry VI plays and Richard III as the same narrative. The next cluster is Richard II, the two Henry IVs, and Henry V. The rise and fall of the Lancaster line. Or fall and rise. I get confused. From Richard II we move into Bolingbroke’s (Henry IV’s) chaotic reign. In Henry IV, Henry’s son hangs out with low-lifes in taverns, including a person named Sir John Falstaff, and shows no interest in being a king. In Henry V, of course, that wild son becomes king, victorious in his battle with France, where he makes a great speech (“we few, we happy few”) … but if you think about it for more than five minutes, the battle fought is not exactly the beach at Normandy. That’s a pretty rousing speech for what is, essentially, a rapacious land-grab.

Speaking of “we few, we happy few”, the old John of Gaunt in Richard II has a patriotic speech to rival that one in his death-bed scene. “This England …”

In Richard II, Shakespeare was more into the poetry than the history. Richard II is close – in form and style – to Romeo and Juliet and Midsummer – written around-ish the same time. The playwright was spreading his wings, lyrically. These plays make another kind of cluster, a stylistic one.

Quotes on the play

“There is often, as palpably in Richard II, a backdrop of sacred time, biblical time, the Edenic pattern of disobedience and fall, and the promise and expectation of redemption. When in Henry IV Part 1 Bolingbroke’s famously ‘wild’ son, Prince Hal, speaks in soliloquy of ‘redeeming time when men least think I will’, he is, and Shakespeare is, invoking a tacit pattern of Christian salvation, together with the popular story of the prodigal son. In Richard II, the Edenic note — already describing England as a paradise lost — is struck, as we will see, by the elderly and dying John Gaunt.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Richard is the government, he is the state, he is England itself — and he is seated there, in the state chamber of Windsor Castle, to give judgment and to rule, to execute and in fact to personify the great role of medieval kingship, to be a leader and the center of his world. And this, we are about to see, is just what he cannot do.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Gaunt plays a part akin to Mercutio in Romeo & Juliet, a play written in the same years. He urges the power of the imagination, of poetry and of transforming language, as a way to deal with things as they are, but Bolingbroke is a realist, not an idealist.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

On the Biblical metaphor of Banishment:

“The Gardener, although he is a worker, not a nobleman, speaks in verse, not prose, and in fact all of Richard II is in verse, underscoring both its celebrated ‘poetic’ qualities and the degree to which some of the characters, at least, resist facing facts about the changing locus of power in England.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“John of Gaunt’s deathbed speech [in Act II] is one of the great speeches of all early Shakespearean drama, one often — like many such ringing pronouncements in the plays — quoted out of context as pure patriotic praise of the land and its people. But as a full citation of the speech will make plain, the joyous note with which the speech apears to begin soon reveals itself as part of an elegiac lament… This is a breathtaking speech in more than one sense, because the whole speech of twenty lines is a single sentence … Significantly, the grammatical subject of the sentence, ‘this England,’ appears for the first time halfway through. What the demonstrative pronoun ‘this’ refers to is not made explicit until ten lines later … And yet, as John Gaunt goes on to explain, this vital correspondence — this identity — has been lost.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“The design of this play, as a number of others by Shakespeare, is what might be called ‘chiastic’–that is, X-shaped, one protagonist rises as another falls.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All
On “Here, cousin, seize the crown”:

“The image of two hands on a crown was a palpable sign of civil war, one that will appear again in the early moments of King Lear … Richard has indeed prophesied a civil war that will tear England apart.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Henry V will be called ‘the mirror of all Christian kings’ [Henry V, 2.o.6]. Richard is as he is about to acknowledge, a failed mirror.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Many critics have compared [Richard II] to the Metaphysical poets of the early 17th century (Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Thomas Traherne and others) because of his willingness to hammer out incommensurable and difficult comparisons.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“[The character of Richard II] is a study in fantasy. Over and over, critics have spoken of Richard’s imagination. But it is not imagination that he possesses; it is only the raw material of imagination.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“What more natural for a child who knows he is to inherit a throne than to play at being king, or for a sensitive and poetic youth who wears a crown–while others govern in his name–to go on conceiving life as a brilliant spectacle of which he is the center?”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“By this bit of cowardice [calling off the duel] Richard not only sealed his own doom, but initiated that century of feuds and quarrels which culminated in the War of the Roses.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

Richard speaking to the two dukes after calling off the duel, in what we now would call “word salad”:

“What a denunciation of war! What an appeal for peace! … And not one word of it sincere. The tortuously long sentence, the involved construction, the piled-up relative clauses, the pronouns with ambiguous antecedents, the excess of hyphenated adjectives, all go to show how a poetically gifted but mentally dishonest and frightened man expresses himself when he opens his mouth … Examine the speech, and it falls to pieces like the pack of words it is.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“Why should a professed lover of tranquility like Richard wish to keep peace asleep? Obviously, when peace sleeps, war and domestic turmoil have their chance.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“‘I have been studying how long compare
This prison where I live unto the world…’
It is as if Hamlet were being born under our very eyes — one of the Hamlets, that is, the Jacques-Hamlet. And when music penetrates Richard’s cell there are even premonitions of King Lear.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“The plain implication of the play up to this point has been that a sentimental pacifism is nothing but violence in disguise and is likely to be converted into it at a moment’s notice. The death scene of Richard is a stunning translation of that truth into art.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“…where [Richard] failed, his gardeners succeeded.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“[Shakespeare] has not made a great man of [Richard]. He has made a poet, a great minor poet. The author of Richard II is perhaps more interested in poetry than he will ever be again.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“It is the work of an awakening genius who has fallen in love with the language he writes; who realizes the full possibilities of its idiom and scale; and who lets himself go.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“The play is organized about a hero who, more indeed than contenting himself with the role of minor poet, luxuriates in it. His theme is himself. He dramatizes his grief. He spends himself in poetry–which is something he loves more than power…His self-love is grounded upon an infatuation with the art he so proudly and self-consciously practices.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“The thought of nothingness moves him to request that a mirror be brought so that he can gaze upon his bankrupt self.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“Richard is Shakespeare’s finest poet thus far, and in spite of everything he is a touching person. He is not a great man, nor is the play in consequence a considerable tragedy. But as a performer on the lyre Richard has no match …”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“As dramatizer of himself he will be tutor to a long posterity, though none of his pupils–Hamlet is the best known–will be exactly like him. As for his favorite subject, sorrow, there will be Constance in King John to explore it even further than he has explored it–to tread, indeed, the limit which his tact as an artist has prevented him from trampling.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“Bolingbroke, crowned Henry IV, has still one worry, the behavior of his son amongst the taverns of London where Falstaff is King; and Falstaff will throw a new light on everything. But Richard II admits no such light. It sings in its own darkness, listening sweetly to itself.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“…yet we confess that we prefer the nature and feeling of [Richard II] to the noise and bustle of [Richard III].
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

“… his sensibility, absorbed in his own person, and unused to misfortune, is not only tenderly alive to its own sufferings, but without the fortitude to bear them.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

“…there is neither truth nor honor in all these noble persons: they answer words with words, as they do blows with blows, in mere self-defense: nor have they any principle whatever but that of courage in maintaining any wrong they dare commit, or any falsehood which they find it useful to assert.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

“They are just the same now as they were then.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

^^ This is one of the things you really get from the history plays. People in power do not change. Nothing has changed.

“The character of Bolingbroke, afterwards Henry IV, is drawn with a masterly hand: — patient for occasion, and then steadily availing himself of it, seeing his advantage afar off, but only seizing on it when he has it within his reach, humble, crafty, bold, and aspiring encroaching by regular but slow degrees, building power on opinion and cementing opinion by power.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

“[Bolingbroke’s] bold assertion of his own rights, his pretended submission to the king, and the ascendancy which he tacitly assumes over him without openly claiming it, as soon as he has him in his power, are characteristic traits of this ambitious and political usurper.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

“Set battle pieces remain in King John…but they are absent in Richard III. In Henry V, battle scenes subside into the Chorus … In King John and Richard II, Shakespeare also drops the subplot, like Cade’s rebellion in Henry VI, in favor of the depiction of a few characters. There is a consequent loss of the sense of the whole of society that we find in the earlier histories.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture

“In Richard II, there is no suspense: Richard goes downhill and Bolingbroke goes uphill. Bolingbroke is passive, accepts circumstances, relies on others, and has kinghood thrust upon him.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture

“Constance in King John and Richard in Richard II represent a combination of dramatic and lyric writing. Shakespeare was learning to find a character suitable to a lyric style. Mark Van Doren notes that Constance is the last of Shakespeare’s wailing women.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture

“Richard is an early version of Hamlet. He can also be compared to other unsuitable kings, to Henry VI, a pious man who would be a monk and is forced to be king … and to Richard III, a man of action, who insists upon becoming king … which is what Bolingbroke does not do.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture

“Richard II has only literary gifts, and he is stupid. Hamlet has intellectual ones, and can see what hapens to him is universal. Richard sees only himself. Both characters are egotistic, though Hamlet does more harm. Behind both is the real grief of the reflective melancholic person over the problem of whether to be or not to be. For Hamlet, it is an open possibility to choose one or the other. The only escape for Richard is into language. Shakespeare is able to work the lyrical style out of his system through the depiction of Richard II and proceed to the men of action in the plays of his middle period. In his last period he develops lyrical lays that avoid men of action.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture

“…uneven but superb, and it is the best of all Shakespeare’s histories, except for the Falstaffifiad, the two parts of Henry IV.”
— Harold Bloom, The Invention of the Human

“It is better to think of Richard II as chronicle rather than tragedy, and of Richard himself neither as hero nor as villain but as victim, primarily of his own self-indulgence, yet also of the power of his imagination.”
— Harold Bloom, The Invention of the Human

“It is a radically experimental play, questing for the limits of a metaphysical lyricism, and brilliantly successful if we accept its rather stringent terms.”
— Harold Bloom, The Invention of the Human

“No! Shakespeare’s kings are not, nor are meant to be, great men.”
— Walter Pater

“Ironies of syntax and of metaphor abound in Richard II, and Shakespeare seems intentionally to make us uneasy with not less than everything that is said by everyone in the play. In that respect at least Richard II is an overture to Hamlet. Hamlet rarely means what he says or says what he means; as I have noted already, he anticipates Nietzsche’s diction that we find words only for what is already dead in our hearts, so there is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.
— Harold Bloom, The Invention of the Human

On Act II, sc i, 31-66 – “Methinks I am a prophet”

“This splendid patriotic rant, together with a similar declamation by John of Gaunt’s grandson, Henry V, in his play, had their finest reverberations in the London of 1940-41, when England stood alone against Hitler.”
— Harold Bloom, The Invention of the Human

“The pathos increases when Richard compares himself to the rising sun, the most inappropriate image possible for a man upon whom the sun has gone down.”
— Harold Bloom, The Invention of the Human

On Act III, sc ii, 144-177:

“When he realizes that all have abandoned him, he yields to a luxuriant despair so powerfully expressed as to transcend any previous eloquence in Shakespeare … To see what this is not, think of Lear’s ‘Take physic, pomp.’ In the great king’s recognition of common mortality, there is an opening to all others, to poor naked wretches, wheresoever they are, who suffer the merciless storm with Lear. Richard opens only to Richard, and to other murdered kings before him.”
— Harold Bloom, The Invention of the Human

“Once he starts, Richard cannot stop, as in ‘a little grave,/a little little grave, an obscene grave’. This obsessive self-pity offends moralizing critics, but it thrilled the great Irish poet Yeats, who found in Richard an apocalyptic imagination. The brilliant fantasia that develops Richard’s tears has in it a quality of visionary irony new to Shakespeare and anticipatory of Donne.”
— Harold Bloom, The Invention of the Human

“One might argue, ‘Well, but what else can Richard do?’ To which the answer is, ‘Anything at all, except to make Bolingbroke’s job so much easier for him.'”
— Harold Bloom, The Invention of the Human

Surrendering the crown:

“One could feel chagrin at Shakespeare’s juxtaposition of a word man and a brutal politician if a critique of poetry were the issue, but of course it is not, and Richard’s juggling with wordplay distracts him from any effective resistance. He cannot stop his own flood of eloquence, though he knows he must drown by it.”
— Harold Bloom, The Invention of the Human

“Shakespeare both exploits the final caprice and criticizes it by flamboyantly exhibiting his own emancipation from Marlowe, whose Edward II has hovered near throughout the play. What clearer signal of Shakespeare’s achieved autonomy could he send to the audience than this dazzling parody of one of Marlowe’s most notorious purple passages. Faustus’ acclamation of Helen of Troy: ‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships / and burnt the topless tower of Ilium?’… Richard’s outrageous and desperate narcissism, as the king’s lost glory becomes his own Helen of Troy.”
— Harold Bloom, The Invention of the Human

“…the empty political laurels go to Richard, and the menacing political realism is entirely Bolingbroke’s. But what a marvelous poet-playwright/actor-critic is lost in Richard: the breaking of the glass, the argument over ‘shadow’ (at once sorrow and stage representation), and the culmination of irony in thanking Bolingbroke for instruction–all these constitute a theatrical breakthrough for Shakespeare.”
— Harold Bloom, The Invention of the Human

Richard’s Act V soliloquy:

“…the height of Shakespeare’s achievement in this difficult mode before Hamlet perfected it.”
— Harold Bloom, The Invention of the Human

“Richard is the first figure in Shakespeare who manifests this fissure between human and aesthetic stature, but greater personages will follow after: Iago, Edmund, Macbeth among them. They are free artists of themselves.”
— Harold Bloom, The Invention of the Human

“Hamlet’s intellect leaped to the realization that Denmark and the world were prisons for his spirit, but Richard hammers it out, since he is infinitely less swift in thought. His little world, his poor self, has no faith in salvation; his desperation can conceive of no escape, and so he recites the earliest Shakespearean litany of nihilism predating Much Ado About Nothing and prophesying Hamlet, Iago, and Laertes.”
— Harold Bloom, The Invention of the Human

“Though Richard dies with little dignity, his utterance is still preferable to Bolingbroke’s absurd hypocrisy that closes the play…Partly this is prelude to the two parts of Henry IV when the usurper never enjoys an instance of peace, yet the dark taste it leaves badly requires a sweetening of wit. A year later more than that arrived, with the genius of Sir John Falstaff.”
— Harold Bloom, The Invention of the Human

“[Shakespeare] carries on his study of the proper use of power that he started in the first tetralogy.”
— Herschel Baker, Riverside Shakespeare

“Here [and in King John, Shakespeare] uses history not just to prop a dogma or adorn a moral, but to see how men conduct themselves, and why. The Bastard Faulconbridge, almost alone among the swarms of men and women in the earlier history plays, achieves the status of a character, with an identity beyond his dramaturgic and thematic function. Except for moments now and then, we see the others only in their proper roles: Talbot as the man of patriotic valor, Beaufort … as the proud, ambitious prelate, Margaret as the fiend of France, King Henry as the pious weakling, Suffolk as the crafty politician, even Richard of Gloucester, despite his virtuous skill in acting as the Yorkian villain.”
— Herschel Baker, Riverside Shakespeare

“An incorrigible egotist, [Richard II] contemplates himself with endless fascination and — poet that he is — he records his findings in poetry so persuasive we almost think it’s true.”
— Herschel Baker, Riverside Shakespeare

“His inability to distinguish the external sign or symbol — his royal tithe, for example; or his sceptre, or a gesture, or the ceremonies of his office — from what the symbol represents is as much a factor in his fall as his abuse of office.”
— Herschel Baker, Riverside Shakespeare

Quotes from the play

“…the tongueless caverns of the earth.”
— BOLINGBROKE, Act I, sc i, 105

RICHARD:
Rage must be withstood;
Give me his gage. Lions make leopards tame.
MOWBREY:
Yea, but not change his spots.
— Act I, sc i, 173-175

Grief boundeth when it falls,
Not with empty hollowness, but weight.
— DUCHESS OF GLOUCESTER, Act I, sc ii, 58-59

And now my tongue’s use is to me no more
Than an unstringed viol or a harp
Or like a cunning instrument cas’d up.
Or being open, put into his hands
That knows no touch to tune the harmony.
Within my mouth you have enjail’d my tongue.
— MOWBREY, Act I, sc iii, 161-166

GAUNT:
Thy grief is but thy absence for a time.
BOLINGBROKE:
Joy absent; grief is present for that time.
GAUNT:
What is six winters? they are quickly gone.
BOLINGBROKE:
To men in joy, but grief makes one hour ten.
— Act I, sc iii, 258-261

Teach thy necessity to reason thus.
There is no virtue like necessity.
— GAUNT, Act I, sc iii, 277-278

For gnarling sorrow hath less power to bite
The men that mocks at it and sets it light.
— GAUNT, Act I, sc iii, 292-293

O no, the apprehension of the good
Gives but the greater feeling to the worse.
— BOLINGBROKE, Act I, sc iii, 300-301

Now put it, God, in the physician’s mind,
To help him to his grave immediately!
The lining of his coffers shall make coats
To deck out our soldiers for these Irish wars.
— RICHARD, Act I, sc iv, 59-62

More are men’s ends mark’d than their lives before
The setting sun, and music at the close,
As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last.
— GAUNT, Act II, sc i, 11-13

This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war.
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall …
this teeming womb of royal kings …
this dear, dear land.
Dear for her reputation through the world
Is now teas’d out — I die pronouncing it —
Like to a tenement or pelting farm …
— GAUNT, soliloquy, Act II, sc i, 43-60

We must supplant those rough rug-headed kerns
Which live like venom where no venom else
But only they have privilege to live.
— RICHARD on the Irish. Act II, sc i, 156=158

If then we shall shake off our slavish yoke,
Imp out our drooping country’s broken wing,
Redeem from broking pawn the blemished crown,
Wipe off the dust that hides our scepter’s gilt,
And make high majesty look like itself.
— NORTHUMBERLAND, Act II, sc i, 291-295

Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows,
Which shows like grief itself, but is not so;
For sorrow’s eyes, glazed with blinding tears,
Divides one thing entire to many objects.
— BUSHY, Act II, sc ii, 14-17

BUSHY:
…’tis with false sorrow’s eye,
Which for things true weeps things imaginary.
QUEEN:
It may be so but yet my inward soul
Persuades me it is otherwise.
— Act II, sc ii, 26-29

^^ Clinical depression.

For nothing hath begot my something grief,
Or something hath the nothing that I grieve —
‘Tis in reversion that I do possess —
But what it is that is not yet known what
I cannot name; ’tis nameless woe, I wot.
— QUEEN, Act II, sc ii, 36-40

Come, sister — cousin, I would say — pray pardon me.
— YORK, Act II, sc ii, 105

I am a subject,
And I challenge law. Attorneys are denied me,
And therefore personally I lay my claim
To my inheritance of free descent.
— BOLINGBROKE, Act II, sc iii, 133-136

…the center pillars of the commonwealth,
Which I have sworn to weed and pluck away.
— BOLINGBROKE, Act II, sc iii, 166-167

Discomfortable cousin, know’st thou not
That when the searching eye of heaven is hid
Behind the globe that lights the lower world,
Then thieves and robbers range abroad unseen
In murders and in outrage boldly here?
But when from under this terrestrial ball
He fires the proud tops of the eastern pines
And darts his light through every guilty hole,
Then murders, treasons, and detested sins,
The cloak of night being plucked from off their backs,
Stand bare and naked, trembling at themselves.
— RICHARD, Act III, sc iii, 36-46

For within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be feared, and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life
Were brass impregnable; and humored thus,
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell, king!
— RICHARD, Act III, sc iii, 160-170

O that I were as great
As is my grief, or lesser than my name!
Or that I could forget what I have been!
Or not remember what I must be now!
— KING RICHARD, Act III, sc iii, 136-139

… my large kingdom for a little grave,
A little little grave, an obscene grave …
— RICHARD, Act III, sc iii, 53-54

Down, down I come, like glist’ring Phaëton,
Wanting the manage of unruly jades.
In the base court—base court, where kings grow base,
To come at traitors’ calls and do them grace.
In the base court come down—down court, down king,
For nightowls shriek where mounting larks should sing.
— RICHARD, Act III, sc iii, 178-183

RICHARD:
Up, cousin, up, your heart is up, I know.
This high at least [touching the crown] although your knees be low.
BOLINGBROKE:
My gracious lord, I come but for mine own.
RICHARD:
Your own is yours, and I am yours, and all.
— Act III, sc iii, 194-197

Why should we, in the compass of a pale,
Keep law and form and due proportion,
Showing as in a model our firm estate,
When our sea-wallèd garden, the whole land,
Is full of weeds, her fairest flowers choked up,
Her fruit trees all unpruned, her hedges ruined,
Her knots disordered, and her wholesome herbs
Swarming with caterpillars?
— GARDENER’S MAN, Act III, sc iv, 40-47

Their fortunes both are weighed.
In your lord’s scale is nothing but himself
And some few vanities that make him light,
But in the balance of great Bolingbroke,
Besides himself, are all the English peers,
And with that odds he weighs King Richard down.
— GARDENER, Act III, sc iv, 85-89

Give me the crown.—Here, cousin, seize the crown.
Here, cousin.
On this side my hand, on that side thine.
Now is this golden crown like a deep well
That owes two buckets, filling one another,
The emptier ever dancing in the air,
The other down, unseen, and full of water.
— RICHARD, Act IV, sc i, 181-187

BOLINGBROKE:
Are you contented to resign the crown?
RICHARD:
Ay, no, no, ay: for I must nothing be;
Therefore no, no, for I resign to thee.
— Act IV, sc i, 200-202

Was this the face … this face, the face …
— RICHARD (looking in mirror – quoting Marlowe!), Act IV, sc i

… to think our former state a happy dream,
From which awak’d, the truth of what we are
Shows us but this.
— RICHARD, to QUEEN, Act V, sc i, 17-19

The love of wicked men converts to fear,
That fear to hate, and hate turns one or both
To worthy danger and deserved death.
— RICHARD, Act V, sc i, 66-68

Alack, poor Richard.
— DUCHESS OF YORK, Act V, sc ii, 22

^^ I wondered if Benjamin Franklin got the name of his almanack from this but it appears not.

Can no man tell me of my unthrifty son?
’Tis full three months since I did see him last.
If any plague hang over us, ’tis he.
I would to God, my lords, he might be found.
Inquire at London, ’mongst the taverns there,
For there, they say, he daily doth frequent
With unrestrainèd loose companions,
Even such, they say, as stand in narrow lanes
And beat our watch and rob our passengers,
While he, young wanton and effeminate boy,
Takes on the point of honor to support
So dissolute a crew.
— KING HENRY IV, Act V, sc iii, 1-12

^^ preparing the stage for Falstaff.

Mount, mount, my soul! Thy seat is up on high,
Whils’t my gross flesh sinks downward, here to die.
— RICHARD, Act V, sc v, 111-112