Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame, Enter King RICHARD, and QUEEN; AUMERLE, BUSHY, York. The king is come: deal mildly with his youth; For young hot colts, being rag'd, do rage the more. Queen. How fares our noble uncle, Lancaster? K. Rich. What, comfort, man! How is't with aged Gaunt. O, how that name befits my composition! K. Rich. Can sick men play so nicely with their names? Gaunt. No; misery makes sport to mock itself: Since thou dost seek to kill my name in me, I mock my name, great king, to flatter thee. K. Rich. Should dying men flatter with those that lives? Gaunt. No, no; men living flatter those that die. 8 flatter WITH those that live?] The folio omits the preposition. Farther on it reads, "I see thee ill :" the quartos, "and see thee ill." K. Rich. I am in health, I breathe, and see thee ill. Gaunt. Now, He that made me knows I see thee ill; Ill in myself to see, and in thee seeing ill. Thy death-bed is no lesser than the land, Wherein thou liest in reputation sick; And thou, too careless patient as thou art, Commit'st thy 'nointed body to the cure Of those physicians that first wounded thee. A thousand flatterers sit within thy crown, Whose compass is no bigger than thy head, And yet, incaged in so small a verge', The waste is no whit lesser than thy land. O! had thy grandsire, with a prophet's eye, Seen how his son's son should destroy his sons, From forth thy reach he would have laid thy shame, Deposing thee before thou wert possess'd, Which art possess'd now to depose thyself. Why, cousin, wert thou regent of the world, It were a shame to let this land by lease; But for thy world enjoying but this land, Is it not more than shame to shame it so? Landlord of England art thou now, not king': Thy state of law is bondslave to the law, And thou K. Rich. A lunatic lean-witted fool', And yet, INCAGED in so small a verge,] The four early quartos have inraged: the error is corrected in the first folio. 1 Landlord of England art thou now, not king :] In the old copies, this line is differently printed: in the quarto, 1597, thus :— "Landlord of England art thou now not, not king;" and so it is repeated in the quartos of 1598 and 1608; but that of 1615 substitutes nor for the last not. The folio, 1623, reads, "Landlord of England art thou, and not king;" which is much less forcible than our text, in which the repetition of the negative, injurious to the metre and to the sense of the passage, is omitted. None of the commentators have pointed out the variation. The allusion, of course, is to the manner in which Richard had let out his kingdom "to farm." 2 A lunatic lean-witted fool,] This is the reading of all the quarto editions: the folio gives it thus : "And Rich. And thou a lunatic lean-witted fool," &c. Presuming on an ague's privilege, Dar'st with thy frozen admonition Make pale our cheek, chasing the royal blood3 This tongue that runs so roundly in thy head, That blood already, like the pelican, Hast thou tapp'd out, and drunkenly carous'd. That thou respect'st not spilling Edward's blood. [Exit, borne out by his Attendants. K. Rich. And let them die, that age and sullens have1, For both hast thou, and both become the grave. York. I do beseech your majesty, impute his words To wayward sickliness and age in him: 3 CHASING the royal blood] So all the quartos: the folio, 1623, chafing. And let them die, that age and SULLENS have,] This is the reading of all the old copies, and therefore to be adopted; but it may be doubted whether it be correct. In a MS. common-place book of the time, already quoted, the couplet runs as follows, under the head of " Age and Fulness," "And let them die, that age and fulness have, For both hast thou, and both become the grave." "Sullens" might be easily misread by the compositor for fulness; but, nevertheless, what York says seems to show, that the King meant to reproach Gaunt with ill-temper. He loves you, on my life, and holds you dear K. Rich. Right, you say true; as Hereford's love, so his: As theirs, so mine; and all be as it is. Enter NORTHUMBERLAND. North. My liege, old Gaunt commends him to your majesty. K. Rich. What says he? North. Nay, nothing; all is said. His tongue is now a stringless instrument: Words, life, and all, old Lancaster hath spent. York. Be York the next that must be bankrupt so! Though death be poor, it ends a mortal woe. K. Rich. The ripest fruit first falls, and so doth he: And for these great affairs do ask some charge, York. How long shall I be patient? Ah! how long Shall tender duty make me suffer wrong? Not Gloster's death, nor Hereford's banishment, Of whom thy father, prince of Wales, was first: Than was that young and princely gentleman. K. Rich. Why, uncle, what's the matter? His livery, and deny his offer'd homage, 3 Accomplished with THE number of thy hours ;] This is the correct reading of the folio: the quartos all have the indefinite for the definite article. 6 His LIVERY,] "On the death of every person (says Malone) who held by knight's service, the escheator of the court in which he died summoned a jury, who inquired what estate he died seized of, and of what age his next heir was. If he was under age, he became a ward of the king; but if he was found to be of full age, he then had a right to sue out a writ of ouster le main, that is, his livery, that the king's hand might be taken off, and the land delivered to him." |