Every one will admit that the poet himself speaks here, at least, from the words “I'll give my jewels” to the words “Would not this ill do well?” But the melancholy mood, the pathetic acceptance of the inevitable, the tender poetic embroidery now suit the King who is fashioned in the poet's likeness.
The next moment Richard revolts once more against his fate:
“Base court, where kings grow base,
To come at traitors' calls, and do them grace.”
And when Bolingbroke kneels to him he plays upon words, as Gaunt did a little earlier in the play misery making sport to mock itself. He says:
“Up, cousin, up; your heart is up, I know,
Thus high at least, although your knee be low”—
and then he abandons himself to do “what force will have us do.”
The Queen's wretchedness is next used to heighten our sympathy with Richard, and immediately afterwards we have that curious scene between the gardener and his servant which is merely youthful Shakespeare, for such a gardener and such a servant never yet existed. The scene {Footnote: Coleridge gives this scene as an instance of Shakespeare's “wonderful judgement”; the introduction of the gardener, he says, “realizes the thing,” and, indeed, the introduction of a gardener would have this tendency, but not the introduction of this pompous, priggish philosopher togged out in old Adam's likeness. Here is the way this gardener criticises the King:
“All superfluous branches
We lop away, that bearing boughs may live;
Had he done so, himself had borne the crown,
Which waste of idle hours hath quite thrown down."}
shows the extravagance of Shakespeare's love of hierarchy, and shows
also that his power of realizing character is as yet but slight. The
abdication follows, when Richard in exquisite speech after speech
unpacks his heavy heart. To the very last his irresolution comes to show
as often as his melancholy. Bolingbroke is sharply practical:
“Are you contented to resign the crown?”
Richard answers: