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Symphonic Imagery in Richard II

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Richard D. Altick
Richard D. Altick*
Affiliation:
The Ohio State University
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Extract

Critics on occasion have remarked the peculiar unity of tone which distinguishes Richard II from most of Shakespeare's other plays. Walter Pater wrote that, like a musical composition, it possesses “a certain concentration of all its parts, a simple continuity, an evenness in execution, which are rare in the great dramatist. … It belongs to a small group of plays, where, by happy birth and consistent evolution, dramatic form approaches to something like the unity of a lyrical ballad, a lyric, a song, a single strain of music.” And J. Dover Wilson, in his edition of the play, has observed that “Richard II possesses a unity of tone and feeling greater than that attained in many of his greater plays, a unity found, I think, to the same degree elsewhere only in Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest.”

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 62 , Issue 2 , June 1947, pp. 339 - 365
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1947

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References

1 “Shakespeare's English Kings,” Appreciations, library ed. (London, 1910), pp. 202-203.

2 Richard II, ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge, 1939), pp. xiv-xv.

3 Appreciations, p. 194.

4 Throughout this paper I use the words image and imagery in their most inclusive sense of metaphorical as well as “picture-making” but non-figurative language.

5 Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Shakespeare's Imagery (Cambridge, 1936), pp. 352-353. I should add a word concerning a relatively little known book which anticipated Miss Spurgeon's general method of image-study as well as two or three of my own observations concerning Richard II. This is Shakespeare's Way: a Psychological Study, by the Rt. Rev. Msgr. F. C. Kolbe (London, 1930).

6 In Richard II the three words occur a total of 71 times; in King John, the nearest rival, 46.—I should note at this point that my identification of all the word- and image-themes to be discussed in this essay is based upon statistical study. A given word or group of related words is called a “theme” (a) if Bartlett's Concordance shows a definite numerical preponderance for Richard II or (b) if the word or group of words is so closely related to one of the fundamental ideas of the play that it is of greater importance than the comparative numerical frequency would imply. I have not included any arithmetic in this paper because all such tabulations obviously must be subjective to some degree. No two persons, doing the same counting for the same purpose, would arrive a t precisely the same numerical results. But I am confident that independent tabulation would enable anyone to arrive at my general conclusions. Statistics here, as in all such critical exercises, are merely grounds upon which to base a judgment that must eventually be a subjective one.

7 I am using the text of William A. Neilson and Charles J. Hill (Boston, 1942).

8 The much admired little passage about the roan Barbary takes on added poignancy when the other overtones of ground are remembered:

King Richard: Rode he on Barbary? Tell me, gentle friend,
How went he under him?
Groom: So proudly as if he disdain'd the ground.
(v.v. 81-83)

9 Shakespeare's Imagery, pp. 216-224.

10 We must not, of course, take garden too literally. Shakespeare obviously intended the term in its wider metaphorical sense of fields and orchards.

11 Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare (New York, 1939), p. 88.

12 A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 2d edition (London, 1905), pp. 335-356.

13 Shakespeare's Imagery, p. 334.

14 There are many more references to tears and weeping in Titus Andronicus, but the obvious inferiority of the poetry and the crudity of characterization make their presence far less remarkable.

15 Shakespeare, pp. 85-87.

16 Another way in which Shakespeare adds to the constant tragic sense of unsubstantiality in this play—the confusion of appearance and reality—is the repeated use of the adjective hollow, especially in connection with death: “our hollow parting” (i.iv.9), the “hollow womb” of the grave (ii.i.83), “the hollow eyes of death” (ii.i.270), a grave set in “the hollow ground” (iii.ii.140), “the hollow crown” in which Death keeps his court (iii.ii.160).

If we accept the hypothesis that at a given period in his life Shakespeare habitually thought of certain abstract ideas in terms of particular metaphors, there is a good case for dating these sonnets at the time of Richard II. Conventional though the sweet-sour and blot ideas may be, it is plain that Shakespeare had them constantly in mind when writing Richard II; they are a hallmark of the style of the play. Their occurrence in these sonnets is possibly significant.

18 . Shakespeare's Imagery, pp. 238-241.