Chapter Three
Heterophony
This chapter is an effort to read heterophonic dialogism in the two Shakespeare plays Richard II and 1 Henry IV. This is accomplished by reading relationships among those discourses identified as characters. The fractal model of analysis is applied to reading at the level of heterophony. This analysis is focused on those interplays possible within a single national language. There is first a discussion of the texts, adaptation of the model for heterophonic analysis, and finally, the reading of the interactions.
The organization of the chapter falls into three parts: texts, theory, and reading. The first section includes the short introduction, Pretexts, and the discussion of the plays, Texts: Richard and Henry. The model developed in the first chapter is adapted in the second section, Fractal Heterophony. The reading is undertaken in the third section, Discourses. Texts: Richard and Henry begins by discussing the intertextuality of Richard II and 1 Henry IV. It continues with a discussion of mythos and dianoia, in which traditional terminology introduces the dialogical analysis. This concludes with consideration of the relation between semantics and power. Fractal Heterophony applies the theoretical model to a reading of the plays. Discourses examines the dialogical pairings: Richard-Bolingbroke, Henry-Hotspur, Falstaff-Hal.
Texts: Richard and Henry
I think of Richard and Henry speaking to each other. I am not so interested in what they say but rather in how they say what they say. Would they speak French? Richard II and Henry IV in dialogue. I imagine two men speaking to each other, speaking the same language. One is king, the other is about to become king, or perhaps, one is king and the other is no longer king. Perhaps they speak with equal levels of authority, at that moment of transference, transition, at the transference of title and power. But then, at that moment of equality, could they sway be equal? The removal of the crown and its handing over is not the same in direction and impulse as that of putting it on and seizing it. Halfway from home is qualitatively different on the trip away than it is on the return. Alike: same time and space, Plantagenet cousins, same type of education. Besides, characters not men. And yet, sets of discourses. That is, within the same language, and within a small space of the totality of English, demarcated by time and space, a common chronotope, within such similarity, the two men speak in difference.
Time beings
A difference even within a “single” being, as the unity of being in Bolingbroke and King Henry IV, not merely a solitary individual named differently across time, but two manifestations linked chronologically across history and intertextually between texts. For the English of Bolingbroke prior to his ascendence to king is not the English of Henry IV after. This is so if for no other reason that the lexicon has incorporated the term “Henry IV,” and this of course, has tremendous effect upon the subject Bolingbroke/Henry IV. To very loosely paraphrase Derrida paraphrasing Hegal, hearing himself utter “Henry IV” produces both the concept and the self-presence of the subject Henry IV (Of Grammatology 14).
But what interests me most in my concern for these utterances, the exchange between two kings, or perhaps better, between two half kings, one half full the other half empty, and the exchange between the self across time, is that element which underlies those “activities” whether I choose to emphasize speech or text, that is stylistic differences.
STYLE: By style here, I employ it in a variety of its meanings: a unit of a larger whole (English) made up of members sharing characteristics; prevailing custom; behavior fixed by repetition; the way parts are related in an organized whole; means to attain an end; characteristic attitudes and tastes as expressed or indicated in way of life; distinctive manner or method of expression; to give name. *Not only just the semiotics of style as “the word or combination of words by which something is called by means of which it can be distinguished or identified,” in other words, the signifier, but also, the systemization and semantics of signifiers, their fixity and means.
This dialogue between Richard II and Henry IV is dialogue of discourses whether between men, characters, or texts. Consider dialogue among critics to cleave or unify the texts (dialogue of cleave/union):
It has been a frequent concern of Shakespeare critics and editors to establish intertextual links among the plays Richard II, 1 and 2 Henry IV, and Henry V. For example, Richard II and Henry IV “are connected with a network of cross-references” (Tillyard 267). “Shakespeare wrote 1 Henry IV soon after Richard II. The plays are closely linked: 1 Henry IV begins very soon after the end of Richard II and often refers to the events of that play; anticipations of 1 Henry IV are planted in Richard II” (Shaaber 14). “That Richard II was also planned as the first part of a great tetralogy completed in 1 and 2 Henry IV and Henry V, is far from certain, although this view has been brilliantly maintained by recent scholars” (Black 17). In Tillyard’s view, the “network of cross-references” is the repetition of dramatic elements: elements of plot, of character, of style. Shaaber’s connects the plays through history: the chronology of the author’s composition of the plays and the chronology of the story of the plays. Black discusses the possibility of authorial intention as the unifying factor. These are just some of the more common means of unifying Richard II and 1 Henry IV; a less common example is Paul Werstine’s focus on the plays’ print shop composition:
The first three pages [of 1 Henry IV] (d5v-6v) were indeed the first to be set; these fell to Compositor B, who composed them seriatim while Compositor A was still at work on Richard II. Then Compositor A also turned to 1 Henry IV, setting the last half of quire e (e4-6v) at one type-case from one bloc of copy; at the same time, Compositor B set the first half of the quire (e1?]3v) at another type-case from his own bloc of copy. (253)
The impulse to read links, unities, leads to the conception of one text, Richard II through Henry V, which alternately becomes known as the second tetralogy, the Lancastrian tetralogy and the Henriad. This can be contrasted with the opposite impulse, that to read cleavage in, to disunite, one play. The best example of this opposite tendency is in the work done with King Lear. Beginning with the 1976 “Quarto and Folio King Lear and the Interpretation of Albany and Edgar,” Michael Warren has proposed the division of King Lear into two distinct plays. Warren and others reject the authority of modern editions of King Lear because of the unifying impulse of editors to conflate two early Lears into one, idiosyncratically conflated, Lear. Warren’s efforts to unravel the one play into two opens up a wider area of concern for interpretation; the reading of character becomes more complex:
Q and F reveal significant differences in the roles of Albany and Edgar, differences sufficiently great that one is obliged to interpret their characters differently in each… (“Quarto” 99)
and,
consideration of Kent in the Quarto and Folio texts separately leads one to perceive not that the qualities of character differ from text to text, as they do in the cases of Albany and Edgar, but that the role functions differently in each text, just as the play itself displays different elements of plot in each. (“Diminution” 59)
Interpretation of a character becomes a doubled act; there is the continual movement back and forth between the two texts. What is highlighted by this critical effort is the intertextual variation of character, or in the terminology of this study, an internal dialogism between Edgar and the earlier Edgar. This effort creates the possibility of reading harmony in variety, as Warren asserts of the two Kents, or disharmonies, as he envisions for both Albanys as well as for both Edgars. This is the doubled interpretative act; it supplements intratextual character analysis.
Ironically, this intertextuality is likewise highlighted by the opposite critical effort, that which seeks to read unities. One endeavor reads two plays out of one, and the opposite endeavor unifies two (or four) plays by links, cross-references and chronologies. Yet both result in an intertextual reading, a reading which moves back and forth between texts. Reading the variation in Quarto and Folio Edgars is similar to reading that in Richard II and 1 Henry IV Henry Bolingbrokes. This similar intertextualization comes about, despite the opposite impulses, because both critical efforts rely on the multiplicity of texts. Even the effort to unify four plays as one story, one history, and one authorial intention, ends up stressing multiple texts; the effort to unify falls short of creating a super monotext: the Henriad. This, despite Tillyard’s biological claim, “we must treat them as a single organism” (270). This falling short also applies also to the common editorial effort to unify the one play King Lear from an Ur-text and its revision. As Gary Taylor observes,
Attempts to support the traditional one-text theory by explaining certain Folio variants as the result of censorship thus lead inevitably to the assumption that the play must have been substantially revised at some time after its first performance. In other words, an attempt to prove that there was only ever one text eventually postulates that there were two. (“Monopolies” 75)
That postulate opens the possibility of an intertextual reading of the text(s). Any reading which concerns itself with (even the possibility of) multiple texts, creates the potential for intertextual dialogue.
In regard to the reading of Richard II and 1 Henry IV, two points emerge from the consideration of the diverse critical impulses: 1) though Richard II may be linked to, cross-referenced with, and chronologically precede 1 Henry IV, it nevertheless remains possible to read either as a distinct play, and 2) as distinct plays, Richard II and 1 Henry IV may be read as if engaged in dialogue, that is, read with attention to their dialogical relationship. It is this second consideration which guides the reading of the texts in this chapter. It permits a “wider area of concern” and makes interpretation that doubled act. Besides reading the intratextual interaction of any of the characters, it is possible to read the specific intertextuality afforded by the three characters common to both Richard II and to 1 Henry IV: Henry Bolingbroke, Hotspur and the Earl of Northumberland. There is, almost, another character common to both plays: many critics discuss Richard’s metaphorical presence in 1 Henry IV. His rhetorical presence, his trace, internally dialogizes Henry’s kingship. Critics see Richard’s shadow hanging around Henry’s court. Of course, Richard’s presence is of a different order than the clearer, obvious recurrences of the other three characters.
While Henry, Hotspur, Northumberland, and possibly Richard’s rhetorical trace, offer the occasion for reading back and forth between texts, there nevertheless remains a vast area for intratextual analysis. Consider the discursive variety in just 1 Henry IV alone: there is great range of styles from the language of Falstaff to that of King Henry, and from Hal’s to Hal’s. 1 Henry IV exhibits an exceptionally diverse network of discursive interaction. The two plays, Richard II and 1 Henry IV, are the focus of study here because of their rich potential for both types of reading: that within each play and that between the plays. And whether the dialogue be between Richard and Bolingbroke (intratext) or between Bolingbroke and King Henry IV (intertext), in either case, the interaction is read dialogically. The discourses in Richard II and 1 Henry IV are juxtaposed, are allowed to speak, to interanimate. Reading dialogisms opens up potential readings; it has, for example, permitted The Arte of English Poesie and the Chilam Balam to exchange dialogue.
The play referred to here as Richard II and R2 and currently known as The Tragedy of KingRichard the Second (Arden, Pelican, Riverside) was designated by two titles early in its history of printing. The Tragedie of King Richard the second appeared in single volume editions, Quartos 1-5 (1597-1615), before The Life and Death of King Richard the second appeared in the anthology, the First Folio (1623). Q1 appeared in 1597, having been entered into the Stationers’ Register on August 29 for publisher Androw Wise [Andrew Wise, Andrew Wyse]. While the Q1 title page lists Wise, printer “Valentine Simmes,” the acting company “Lorde Chamberlaine his Seruants,” and the location of the bookshop “Paules church yard at the signe of the Angel,” it lacks mention of the author. Wise later published Q2 and Q3, essentially the text of Q1 with many small variants. Q2 and Q3 are dated 1598.
A significant change occurs in the text when it is obtained by a new publisher. The passage commonly called the deposition scene (4.1.154-318) first appears in Q4 in 1608. Q4 and Q5 (1615) were printed by W. W. for Matthew Law; both Quartos ascribe the author: “by William Shake-speare.” The First Folio, published by John Heminge and Henry Condell in 1623, continues the inclusion of both the deposition scene and the author’s name and introduces for the first time act and scene divisions. These divisions are maintained today except that 5.3 is divided into scenes 3 and 4. Additions since the First Folio include the list of characters and locations.
The History of Henrie the Fovrth was entered in the Stationers’ Register February 25, 1598, for Andrew Wyse [Androw Wise, Andrew Wise]. Two versions from 1598 remain today: the complete Q1 and four leaves of Q0 which is believed to precede Q1. Several quartos precede the First Folio version (1623), Q2 (1599), Q3 (1604), Q4 (1608), Q5 (1613), and Q6 1622. Its title changed, as Shaaber notes, for textual reasons:
the play was called The History of Henry IV in all the early printings beginning with the quarto of 1598 (it was differentiated from the second part only when the two were first printed together in the [First] folio of 1623)…. (14)
Richard II and 1 Henry IV are regularly distinguished by critics, especially those who first seek their unity, because of the great difference in style. Richard II is regularly called the most poetic, most formal, most ceremonial of the Shakespeare plays. 1 Henry IV, on the other hand, with so a great variety, includes discourses, such as those of the tavern scenes, which are among the most prosaic, novelistic, and vulgar. To those critics who choose to interpret the disparity of styles, it is delicious irony that Richard II and 1 Henry IV exhibit such a difference despite their historical unities: those of history, story, and the writing of the plays. That irony, of course, is open to dialogical reading.
Mythos and Dianoia
One traditional path for approaching the two plays is to begin by recalling Aristotle’s distinction between mythos and dianoia. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics defines mythos as the “structure of events” and further, that “Plot is the Eng. word commonly used to translate Aristotle’s mythos…” (130, 622). A common distinction maintained by contemporary writers, that between plot and story, bifurcates the notion of mythos. Story is often taken to mean the chronological sequence of events which serve as the unedited context for plot:
“There is first a rambling and amorphous ‘story,’ often taken over from tradition or picked up from some other extraneous source… and then comes the serious business of making it into a play or an epic.” This making is essentially the making of story into plot. (E. M. Forster qtd. in Princeton 623)
Plot is a selective subset of story, for plot structures only those events presented in the literary work. In other words, the story of Richard II is a large set of elements, only some of which are present in the plot. And it is plot which constitutes the literary play Richard II. When conceived as story,mythos, is very similar to history: it is in this sense that Richard II is a history play. Those elements absent from the plot of Richard II are contained in the story of Richard II as well as in the history of the English crown (which contains the histories of Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V). The other aspect of mythos, that of plot, is the narrative sequence of events which constitute, and are contained in, Richard II, the play. Finally, the other term, dianoia, is well defined by Northrop Frye:
The best translation of dianoia is, perhaps, “theme,” and literature with this ideal or conceptual interest may be called thematic. When a reader of a novel asks, “How is this story going to turn out?” he is asking a question about the plot, specifically about that crucial aspect of the plot which Aristotle calls discovery or anagnorisis. But he is equally likely to ask, “What’s the point of this story?” This question relates to dianoia, and indicates that themes have their elements of discovery just as plots do. (52)
Turning first to mythos as plot, the plots of Richard II and 1 Henry IV can be outlined briefly as the power struggle for control of the English kingship. Richard II depicts the downfall of King Richard and the rise of King Henry. In the introduction to the Arden Richard II, Peter Ure itemizes a quadripartite structure:
(i) I.i-II. I. 223. Richard as king; the political crises with which he is faced (shown as derived in part from earlier events), and his lack of wisdom in dealing with them.
(ii) II. i. 224 to the end of III. i. Bolingbroke’s invasion, and the transference of real power.
(iii) III. ii to the end of V. i. Richard’s deposition, or what can perhaps be called his “passion”.
(iv) V. ii to the end. Bolingbroke as king; his mastery in a political crisis. (lxii).
The 1 Henry IV plot mythos is traced by Shaaber:
The structure of the play is simple and the plot moves somewhat slowly. In the early scenes three oppositions are lined up: that of the rebels and the king and the loyal part, that of Hotspur and the prince, that of the prince’s bad reputation and truant disposition and his actual sterling worth. All these are to be resolved on the battlefield of Shrewsbury and the play has little to do but march undeviatingly toward that final arbitrement. Successive scenes showing one or another of these opposed forces advancing towards the day of decision sharpen the oppositions. As the battle approaches, the alternating scenes become shorter and the various oppositions tend to merge. The events of the battle answer all questions: loyalty triumphs over disaffection, Hal over Hotspur, and the princes’s valor and fidelity over all suspicions. (17)
The plot mythoi of both Richard II and 1 Henry IV are sequences of power struggles for political authority.
The dianoia of Richard II and that of 1 Henry IV supplement the plot mythoi. For Frye, the supplement in necessary because, “every work of literature has both a fictional [mythos] and a thematic [dianoia] aspect…” (53). A theme of both plays, which well parallels the plot mythoi, is the point that political struggles are waged on linguistic battlefields. That is, the sequence of events comprising the plot demonstrates on several occasions that power is won, lost, or maintained through the use of the tongue (more often so, than through use of the sword). Two examples of this are the challenges of Mowbray and Bolingbroke in R2 1.1 and Hotspur and Glendower in 1H4 3.1. These sequences of events point to one dianoia: language manifests power (perhaps even better than the sword). This parallel of mythos and dianoia can be further extended to discursive activity. Plot, theme, and discourse all repeat the struggle for power through linguistic media. Richard and Henry use language as a means of expressing political power in the mythos of Richard II. The dianoia of this activity includes the expression of the language and power interrelationship. Then too, the discoursesRichard and Henry do, dialogically, struggle for semantic power. This final struggle is, of course, the focus of this chapter.
Considering the story aspect of mythos leads to the matter of the relationship of the plays to history. As context for plot, story fills the gaps left by the selective, narrative sequence of events. This expanded structure of events exists as a backdrop for the plot; it can be ignored; it can be alluded to. Story functions for plot as classical Latin functions for emerging Renaissance English, or in the way the history of a word internally dialogizes its contemporary use. Plot is internally dialogized because of story, as opera is by book, and Richard II by Woodstock. Yet despite the contextual panorama of story, it is not synonymous with history. While history is itself a story (in the sense of a scientific story), or series of stories, it does not necessarily contain the story which contains a literary plot. Difficulty arises, in part, from the question of truth as it is manifested in history and in literature. As Todorov observes,
literature is not a discourse that can or must be false, in contrast to the discourse of the sciences; it is a discourse that, precisely, cannot be subjected to the test of truth; it is neither true nor false, to raise this question has no meaning: this is what defines its very status as “fiction.”
Logically speaking, then, no sentence of the literary text is either true or false. (Introduction 18)
The dialogue between story and history is an area of serious concern for many critics. Under the heading readjustments, A. R. Humphreys introduces the Arden 1 Henry IV with
The best-known readjustments of serious history are in the ages of Henry, Hal, and Hotspur, derived from Daniel’s account [The First Fowre Bookes of the Ciuile Wars Between the Two Houses of Lancaster and Yorke (1595)]. Among others may be noted (i) the transference of the intended Crusade from the last to the first years of the reign; (ii) the arrival of the Percys at Windsor on the King’s summons rather than their own initiative; (iii) the postdating of Northumberland’s sickness; (iv) the bringing forward by several years of Prince John’s soldiership and Hal’s reconciliation with his father. (xxvii)
Humphreys quotes Edmund Chambers objection to literature which functions as poor history, “In Henry IV, chronicle-history becomes little more than a tapestried hanging… which serves as a background to groups of living personages conceived in quite another spirit and belonging to a very different order of reality…” (xlv). Finally, Humphreys’ notes a different sort of story-history relationship, “Falstaff was certainly once Oldcastle;” that is, a literary character emerges from a historical-literary character. There is both the story-history dialogue and the story-literary history dialogue.
The story-histories dialogues are echoed by similar dianoia. What is the point of a play which is selected to participate in historical events similar to those it represents? Ure lists three historical events in which the reading of Richard II was linked to real world politics. First, on February 7, 1601, followers of the Earl of Essex staged a production of Richard II (probably Shakespeare’s) the day before Essex’s attempt to seize the crown. Second, Sir John Hayward’s play, Henry IV, perhaps based on Shakespeare’s Richard II, was used in evidence against Essex and led to Hayward’s imprisonment. Third, Queen Elizabeth declared, “I am Richard II. know ye not that?” and was aware of “lively representation of his countenance and person” (lvii-lix). Ure discounts that Shakespeare intended a political allegory as a warning to Elizabeth. He does observe, however, that,
The fact that when the first Quarto was printed the deposition scene was omitted (and not restored until after Elizabeth’s death) suggests that official sensitivity about representing the discrowning of a monarch might have been sharpened by the currency of this analogy. (lvii)
Dianoia is remarkably similar to mythos, as least perhaps, in Elizabeth’s and Essex’s readings (and Hayward’s writing). Mythos, dianoia and discourse: language has the power to depose kings.
Semantic Power Plays
The similarity of mythos to dianoia is replicated in discourse: Richard II and 1 Henry IV manifest language and power relationships in each. In discourse, these “relationships of unevenness-subordination,” as Pêcheux calls them, are the sites of struggle for presence and semantic authority (135). Yet while mythos and dianoia seem to resolve conservatively, with the restoration of correct order (Hal is finally a true prince; Hayward is, after all, imprisoned), the discursive conflicts resist such resolution. Instead, the conflicting discourses dialogize; they assert the exotopy and radical heterogeneity that de Man observed as being characteristic of dialogism (Resistance to Theory 109). While mythos and dianoia are syntagmatic (mythos as chronological narrative structure, and dianoia, with its “elements of discovery,” emerges in the unfolding of story and plot), dialogic discourse is paradigmatic. The Richard II and 1 Henry IV discursive paradigms resist the resolution and closure proffered by mythos and plot syntagma. This dialogism is manifested in the failure of discourses (Richard, Henry, Falstaff, for example) to resolve conservatively, to relate dialectically, or to harmonize with the syntax of mythos or of dianoia. Dialogism instead induces discourse to achieve what White calls diataxis, the essentially ironic dynamics which continually challenge the preconceptions of self and other (Tropics 4). This ironic movement recalls Bakhtin’s notion of polyglot dialogism which, “fully frees consciousness from the tyranny of its own language and its own myth of language” (Dialogic Imagination 61). Diataxis and the milieu of heterophony compel the internally persuasive discourses in Richard II and 1 Henry IV to challenge and decenter (dialogize) any hegemonic and authoritative discourse.
Richard II and 1 Henry IV are discursive matrices in which claims of meaning and power are up for grabs. The plays function as organizations of discourse much in the way plot organizes character and action: the interactions of Richard (discourse and character) are indices of the power relationship with the alien other, Henry Bolingbroke. And because of diataxis, “discourse is always as much about discourse itself as it is about the objects that make up its subject matter,” or as it is about its manifestation by specific characters (White Tropics 4). The discourses labeled Richard and Henry Bolingbroke both do power in the act of uttering.
Richard II and 1 Henry IV both assert a poetics/power principle which offers a promise, implicitly, to those who engage in political struggle: he who masters the logos, dictates. They realize that promise in mythos, dianoia and discourse, albeit syntagmatically and conservatively in the first two. As organizations of discursive activity, the plays realize a poetics and politics which contextualize the forces of that activity: the discourse Hotspur leads rebellions while the discourse Hal valorizes the genealogy of kings. The establishment of either’s discursive authority transpires in the assertion of a particular semantic order. In this sense, Hotspur and Hal not only assert political power, they also define the terms of power: they attempt control of the logos. Finally, this study’s insistence on discursive interaction leads to viewing the semantics/power interrelationship as being very similar to a dialogue of speech-acts. Seen as such, discursive political actors become the speakers and performers of logos.
Fractal Heterophony
The plan for reading dialogisms in Richard II and 1 Henry IV is to apply the method prescribed by the model developed in the first chapter. The reading of the two plays is given form by the seven facet analysis of the fractal: level, set, genre, locus, tropics, force, and logism. The first three facets, level, set, and genre, are concerns on the largest, most general planes and are classificatory in function. They classify discourse and define its attributes. The second group, locus, tropics, and force, are more specific in focus; they define discursive activity and denote the dynamics of discourse. Together attribute and dynamics prescribe the quality of the final facet, logism; that is, they determine dialogism or monologism.
Attribute
The discourses which constitute Richard II and 1 Henry IV interanimate at the level of heterophony. This identification is the first step toward a strategy of reading dialogically. The dialogisms read in the two plays are located within the set of discourses and within one national language. Their reading is, as a result, not that of heteroglossia, as with the multilingual texts of Sor Juana, nor is it a reading of the heterosemia of prediscourse and paratext as in the final chapter. The heterophonic set of discourse is further characterized by genre: poetry and novel, for example. Each discursive interanimation within the two plays occurs at the level of heterophony. Set and genre subsume additional elements which require further amplification.
In regard to set, the discourses which constitute Richard II and 1 Henry IV bifurcate into social language and voice. Any discourse in the plays can be considered to possess these two general aspects of set. One is the aspect of the individual discourse, the internally persuasive individual voice. The discourse Richard is one voice. It is the manifestation of an individual selection and combination (similar to idiolect). Voices are primarily identified by character name. Then too, there are social languages, king, Englishman, and male, for example, which Richard also exteriorizes. Social languages are those culturally defined linguistic codes which exist within a single national language (similar to dialect, jargon, slang). As outlined in the first chapter, voice and social language are the extreme subdivisions of set: the voice of the individual and the social language of the group, which can be a small group, king, or large, male. Both types of interanimations, among voices, Richard and Bolingbroke, as well as those among social languages, king and duke, are discursive interanimations. Even a third possibility, interanimation between voice, Richard, and social language, king, can be read as a dialogue. All these heterophonic interanimations are understood to be discursive; voice and social language are both termed, generally, discourse.
Genre is the typology of sets. Discourses are characterized by their alignment with generic differentiae. There are as many genres of voices as there are individuals: as a unique selection and combination of language and unique realization of discourse, each voice is solitary and, by definition, internally persuasive. There are fewer social languages. These can be classified according to Bakhtin’s appended system of differentiation: genre, profession, social stratum, age, region/dialect, gender, and ethnicity. The individual voice Richard is then simultaneously aligned with poetry (genre), king (profession), high nobility (social stratum), adult (age), English court (region/dialect), male (gender), English (ethnicity). Falstaff, with novel, thief, low nobility, adult, English court-vulgar, male, English. Lady Mortimer: paratext, lady, daughter and wife, middle nobility, adult, paratext, female, Welsh. The distinction made in other types of studies (Marxist, for example) between individual and social role can be seen in the necessary dialogue between the internally persuasive and individual voice and the relatively authoritative social language. The first of the seven genres of social language, that of genre, is distinguished by Bakhtin in his differentiation of poetry and novel. The distinction between poetic and novelistic discourse is perhaps the most significant for this study. It allows for the delineation of a linguistics of power. Locating a discourse in relation to the poetic-code-syntagmatic axis and the novelistic-context-paradigmatic axis becomes the cardinal means of linking language form to political power.
Together level, set, and genre constitute the classification or attribute of a particular discourse. The attribute of a particular discourse is then innervated by the force or dynamics of locus, tropics and force. Attribute and dynamics make for the character of the logism: dialogic or monologic.
Dynamics
Locus is a dynamic conception of location. Rather than the notion of static, passive, and absolute place, locus here denotes relative location and movement within a power laden field, within a political hierarchy, an active contiguity to the center of power. Taken as such, the locus of a discourse is never ingenuous, innocuous, nor disinterested. Each discourse acts in a system of other discourses: those of other times and places, those with qualitatively different natures and different levels of power. Picture individual discourses as the charged particles of an atom or as magnetized bits coalescing like a rhizome: each movement requires power, displaces power, affects all. Richard begins at the locus of greatest power; Richard ends at a different locus, one of less power, supplanted. Hal’s locus is always more powerful than Falstaff’s, than Peto’s, than MistressQuickly’s. Hal begins at a relatively high and central locus and moves, so that at the end of 1 Henry IV,Hal ends at an even higher and more central locus. Locus, in this dynamic conception, is then the active and relative position of power within the “power laden field of discursive positionings.”
Tropics links together meaning, power, and linguistic form. Tropics is the means of ascribing meaning to the world; it precludes, and formulates the nature of, inter-action with that world. The tropes of discourse shape and determine knowledge of the alien other, and this knowledge always expresses power:
It is not the case, as might first appear, that knowledge follows after power to rationalize and justify its thoughtless actions; knowledge is the enabling condition of the exercise of power. Knowledge and power work in tandem: they are allied from the very beginning of any encounter with an “other.” (Junkerman N. pag.)
Tropics give the world meaning. The act of ascribing meaning is a political act.
There is, for example, a tremendous loss of power as the semantics change in solution to the equation Richard = X, where early mythos defined X = King Richard II and late mythos, X = Richard Plantagenet, former king. Use of tropes not only characterize the speaker but also determine his/her relationship with the other. When Richard speaks the king’s discourse, he speaks syntagmatically, his speech dominated by metonymy. Speaking metonymically characterizes Richard and shapes his discursive relationships early in Richard II: Richard locates himself at the locus of power; his is the authoritative discourse; he valorizes linearity and the syntagmatic and combinatory axis of language; his speech supports the established political genealogy. His language form is itself a political statement and a manifestation of power. Richard asserts a particular semantics, one which defines power: Richard = king.
A syntagmatic and metonymic discourse ascribes semantics through a process of renaming, of seeing meaning in combinatorial and syntagmatic relationships: it treats the dialogue of self and other as an occasion for seeing combinations in a preinscribed syntax. Meaning is established by renaming, redefining, elements which are seen to exist in some linear, syntagmatic relationship. When Richard says, “We were not born to sue but command” (R2 1.1.196), there is an assertion of the definition of self (simultaneously defining his relationship to others) which declares specific meaning (and power) in the affirmation of his place in the genealogical and political syntax of the English kingship. The metonymic mode is epistemic and emphasizes code: there is no creation of meaning on Richard’s part, but rather, a knowing, an affirmation and evocation of the correct, traditional and powerful authoritative discourse.
Conversely, a paradigmatic and metaphoric discourse ascribes semantics through a process of transference, of making meaning through selection and paradigmatic relationships: it treats the dialogue of self and other as an occasion for making substitutions in a mutable paradigm. Meaning is established by transference, by asserting the similarity (and difference) of separate elements which exist interchangeably in a paradigmatic relationship (metaphor emphasizing the similarity; irony, the difference). When Falstaff speaks as Prince Hal (1H4 2.4.413-456) there is a metaphoric (or more correctly, an ironic) remaking of self which predicates a specific semantics and simultaneous assertion of presence. The metaphoric mode is praxeological and emphasizes context: Falstaff’s mutable paradigm ironically dialogizes the authoritative syntagma which metonymically excludes him: he asserts (makes, creates) this interchangeability by entering an internally persuasive discourse in dialogue with the correct, traditional and powerful authoritative discourse.
Force is the rhetorical impetus; it is the movement and direction of the discourse. Bakhtin identifies two basic movements: 1) toward the authoritative discourse and the locus of power, the centripetal, and 2) the opposite, away from the authoritative discourse, the centrifugal. In R2 1.1, Richard controls the interaction with Mowbray and Bolingbroke through his centripetal king’s discourse: he asserts the authority of the established hierarchy and aligns his speech with poetry and the syntagmatic axis. In contrast, in 1H4 2.4, Falstaff is centrifugal in his dialogue with Prince Hal: he asserts presence when facing Hal’s marginalizing and relatively authoritative discourse, and, in so doing, Falstaff aligns his speech with the novelistic and the paradigmatic axis. Force, along with locus and tropics, serves as the dynamics which interact with attribute to create the particular manifestation of power specific to any discursive act, its relative dialogism and monologism.
The final pay-off of the interaction of attribute and dynamics is the qualitative description, logism. In the end, a particular discourse in a particular dialogue manifests dialogism or monologism. This is the essential consequence of dialogical analysis, the reason for level, set, genre, locus, tropics, and force. Monologism seeks to establish a monologue, a single correct discourse. Dialogism overturns monological tendencies; it establishes radical heterogeneity. The reading of the separate discourses in Richard II and in 1 Henry IV culminates in their identification as monologic or dialogic.
The strategy for reading Richard II and 1 Henry IV is to identify distinct discourses, juxtapose them, and note their interanimation, their heterophonic dialogism. Richard II and Henry IV will be heard to speak, with each other and with a mathematical form.
Discourses
Discourse of the Dead:
King Richard’s is the discourse of the dead. It is marked by past-oriented ritual speech and the affirmation of pre-inscribed code. Richard renames (sees, knows) himself king by espousing the syntagmatic and authoritative discourse of the dead fathers. This metonymic re-definition of self as the incarnate manifestation of a political genealogy simultaneously prefigures his relationships with others: Richard = king, therefore, others = subjects. Inherently, these “relationships of unevenness-subordination,” as Pêcheux calls them, are power relationships in which Richard monologizes from the locus of power each alien other (135). In his Etymologies and Genealogies, Bloch undertakes a “literary anthropology,” a task which delineates the intersection of genealogy, politics, power, and discourse. In demonstrating that “grammar [omitted here] and lineage are… part and parcel of a common representational model and of a similar set of representational practices,” Bloch identifies five characterizing elements: linearity, temporality, verticality, fixity, continuity (83). These criteria are well suited for reading Richard’s discourse:
1. Linearity. The founding moment of the family, situated in a mythic time beyond memory, is synonymous with attachment to land and castle. The kin group is unified by the property which establishes it both at a place and as a place within a differential typology of similarly grounded groups. Each family has its proper locus, its own territory, which remains indissociable from its proper name and from its proper place within the social hierarchy. Property is, moreover, transmitted patrilinearly from the original possessor of land, castle, and name to their present bearer. Thus a linear contiguity is preserved in the succession of family chiefs—the firstborn of the line—and in the metonymic relation of lineage to the symbols of traditional power. For just as the current heir retains metonymically a part of the essence of his original ancestor, both name and heraldic emblem, integral parts of the noble patrimony, are the synecdochic expressions of race and of land. The individual member of the continuous descendance maintains a genetic, organic, and participatory relation both to the property that passes through him and to its sacred signs….
2. Temporality. Consciousness of lineage implies an awareness of the family as a diachronic sequence of relations as opposed to the less temporalized notion of a clan extended in space. Ancestry supersedes affiliation within the noble kin group articulated as a series of successions, a race of heirs with a common past. In fact, antiquity is lineage’s chief claim to legitimacy; and the older the genealogy, the more prestigious and powerful that claim becomes….
3. Verticality. A corollary of the emphasis upon temporal definition is a tendency to stress the autonomy of each lineal strand. Blood ties are more important than affinal relations within a system of kinship which privileges descent—and even the consanguineal bonds between oldest males—while precluding any broader sense of horizontal integration…. According to the general rule of paterna paternis, materna maternis, the patrimony descended from a common ancestor is programmed to devolve exclusively to those who are genetically related. Property, like blood, flows downward in a straight line….
4. Fixity. Along with the linearity, temporality, and verticality of lineage is a general sense of fixity both in the family’s relation to property and in relation to other families…. Social relations between various dynastic houses as well as between aristocracy and other levels of society tend to be perceived as inflexible, “grounded,” permanent. Within the confines of such a fixed hierarchy, those with access to the sole source of power—immobile wealth—govern because their ancestors have always governed. Social movement is reduced to a minimum, and nobility, not mobility, is the defining social rule….
5. Continuity. The lineal family model is predicated upon the principles of partial resemblance, contiguity, and, above all, continuity. Thus the son reproduces the father, accedes to the paternal name, title, heraldic sign, and land. He represents an essential link in a genealogical chain, each part of which shares certain common traits with all others, and which, at least in theory if not in practice, remains unbroken from the first ancestor to the current heir. (Bloch 83-86)
As Fredric Jameson states, “In genealogical construction, we begin with a full-blown system… in terms of which elements of the past can ‘artificially’ be isolated as objective preconditions” (139).
Four of the genealogical elements, linearity, temporality, verticality, and continuity are essentially metonymic and syntagmatic manifestations. As Ducrot and Todorov state in the Encyclopedic Dictionary, “Another important divergence regarding the nature of syntagmatic relationships and, by correlation, of syntagmas concerns linearity” (107). The tropics of Richard’s discourse are metonymic, and when linguistic code is manifested in a social language, the result is a social linearity: patrilinear inheritance, chronology, political hierarchy, and spatial power relations. Ducrot and Todorov also state, in paraphrasing the linguist’s views, “the coexistence of two simultaneous features will not be regarded as constituting a syntagma” (107). As a linguistically and tropically syntagmatic discourse and a linear social discourse, the social language of the dead fathers recognizes only one king, and as syntagm incarnate, Richard reigns. Only after Richard is deposed can another syntagm exist. Bloch’s fifth criterion, fixity, refers to the rigid, immutable, anti-interchangeable, and anti-paradigmatic, authoritative discourse. Richard asserts a fixed linearity, temporality, verticality, and continuity, each of which is engendered by the social language of the dead fathers, of the dead fathers, of the dead fathers.
But by play’s end, Bolingbroke is king and Richard has become one of the dead fathers. Clearly then, the description of Richard’s discourse as the king’s, and the most authoritative is incorrect, at least by the end of Richard II. What has transpired? How is it that Bolingbroke, as Henry IV, assumes the throne, and assumably, the king’s discourse with it? These questions can be answered, on the planes of mythoi and dianoia, by tracing those “elements of discovery,” by tracing the narrative lines of story, plot, and theme. But on the plane of discourse something quite different has occurred. The discourses Richard and Bolingbroke have interanimated dialogically; they have interchanged. The delineation of this dialogism with follow, but initially, at least, it is apparent that Richard’s deposition is concurrent with a rupture with ritual and the movement away from the locus power. Once dialogized, the former authoritative world view fades: when he no longer sees himself as king, he no longer is king, and conversely, when he is no longer king, he no longer sees himself as king. So, the mirror of metonymy breaks, dismantling the poetry which had constituted power. In order to read the dissolution, it is first necessary to read the range of Richard’s discourse, or rather, to read those discourses called Richard.
Politics of Verse
Order
Richard II is the most poetic of the Shakespeare plays; Richard speaks the most poetry in the play. Poetry can be defined as a highly structured discourse, one in which form and code are privileged over content and context. Poetry opposes itself to novelistic and other discourses by the degree of order it exhibits. Over and against the relatively free form of paradigmatic dialogue, poetry asserts the monologic order of prescribed linguistic structure. While poetry primarily prescribes the concerns of form (such as iambic pentameter, eye rhyme, sonnet, poetic heteroepy), it does dictate matters of content too (carpe diem, Petrarchism, concrete poetry, poetic diction). The poetic prescription means that poetry signifies order. Michael Riffaterre notes that “The signs of specialized poetic usage (conventional poetic words) and perhaps others as well may be said to stand for texts: their significance issues from this vicarious textuality” (22). In Richard’s case, poetic discourse stands for the texts of the dead fathers; Richard (through the metonymic equation of speaker and speech) stands for the dead fathers.
Poetry and Song
When considered as Genette’s narration, or as speech act, Richard’s poetic discourse can be considered to aspire to ritual, ceremony, or song. When Richard asserts his kingship’s authority against the Bolingbroke threat, the diction elevates from the merely noble to the astronomical and on to the divine:
Discomfortable cousin! know’s 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?
So when this thief, this traitor Bolingbroke,
Who all this while hath revelled in the night
Whilst we were wand’ring with the Antipodes,
Shall see us rising in our throne, the east,
His treasons will sit blushing in his face,
Not able to endure the sight of day,
But self-affrighted tremble at his sin.
Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm off from an anointed king.
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord.
For every man that Bolingbroke hath pressed
To lift shrewd steel against our golden crown,
God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay
A glorious angel. Then, if angels fight,
Weak men must fall; for heaven still guards the right.
(R2 3.2.36-62)
Richard asserts the metonymic verticality (throne to heaven) and linearity (a genealogy of kings, ultimately back to God): Richard redefines king as sun (which relocates Richard in the heavens) and then metonymically links the sun with God. The revised linearity states: Richard = king = sun @ God. This occurs because “the poetic sign is determined by hypogrammatic derivation: a word or phrase is poeticized when it refers to (and, if a phrase, patterns itself upon) a preexistent word group;” that is, Richard’s divine poetry redefines Richard divinely (Riffaterre 23).
Because verse presupposes premeditation which consequently precludes improvisation, Richard (poetry, ritual, ceremony, song) monologizes the discourse with the alien other. Richard’s discourse at once signals the epistemic adherence to code and discounts the praxeological generative power of improvisation. It asserts that it cannot be refuted on the praxeological plane precisely because it inhibits synchronic interpersonal interaction. Richard’s divine poetic discourse denies presence to other voices and does so through a particular politics:
the language of poetic genres, when they approach their stylistic limit, often becomes authoritarian, dogmatic and conservative, sealing itself off from the influence of extraliterary social dialects. Therefore such ideas as a special “poetic language,” and a “language of the gods,” a “priestly language of poetry” and so forth could flourish on poetic soil. (Dialogic Imagination 287)
This divine monologue inhibits the possibility of dialogic exchange because it cannot be refuted: poetry and song, like myth, can never be demonstrated true or false; they just are.
Rhythm and Iambic Pentameter
Even poetic forms, which at first may seem apolitical, manifest power relations. Bakhtin describes the monologism of rhythm:
Rhythm, by creating an unmediated involvement between every aspect of the accentual system of the whole (via the most immediate rhythmic unities), destroys in embryo those social worlds of speech and of persons that are potentially embedded in the word: in any case, rhythm puts definite limits on them, does not let them unfold or materialize. Rhythm serves to strengthen and concentrate even further the unity and hermetic quality of the surface of poetic style, and of the unitary language that this style posits. (Dialogic Imagination 298)
In Poetry as Discourse, Antony Easthope argues that pentameter is determined ideologically and, “becomes a sign which includes and excludes, sanctions and denigrates, for it discriminates the ‘properly’ poetic from the ‘improperly’ poetic” (65). Further, this superiority is transferred to the speaker because, “The pattern learned by effort is presented as though it were unstudied, the contrivance is made to seem habitual, the speaker’s impersonal and superior tone appears effortless” (67). Intense poetic form, in and of itself, prefigures Richard’s discourse as the authoritative discourse. It also ideologically predetermines the definition of self and the relationships with others.
Poetry: Metaphor & Metonymic Grammar
R2 l.1: The Case of Monologism
In the mythos of Richard II, a prime tactic in the exercise of power is to control the logos. Richard’s king’s discourse replicates this in Richard’s administration of the Bolingbroke/Mowbray conflict (R2 1.1 and 1.3). The authoritative discourse is supported by a monologism which suppresses dialogic discourse. First of all, in Richard’s opening two speeches of the play, he confirms with the father that the plaintiff shall adhere to the authoritative discourse which confirms Richard and which Richard affirms:
Old John of Gaunt, time-honored Lancaster,
Hast thou, according to thy oath and band,
Brought hither Henry Hereford, they bold son,
Here to make good thy boist’rous late appeal,
Which then our leisure would not let us hear,
Against the Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Mowbray?
(1.1.1-6)
Tell me, moreover, hast thou sounded him
If he appeal the Duke on ancient malice,
Or worthily, as a good subject should,
On some known ground of treachery in him?
(1.1.8-11)
Richard seeks Gaunt’s assurance that Bolingbroke will proceed in the prescribed manner: that he see treachery in Mowbray only, and not in Richard, nor in the king’s discourse. Once assured, Richard calls forth Mowbray and Bolingbroke for a trial by discourse. Such a discursive contest would seen to require dialogue, something incongruous with Richard’s monologue. Richard inaugurates the occasion with poetic flourish:
High-stomach’d are they both and full of ire,
In rage, deaf as the sea, hasty as fire.
(1.1.18-19)
Plaintiff and defendant enter fawning, assuring Richard that each is a good subject and devotee of the code. Yet there is dissatisfaction with the monologism which only seeks centripetal discourse. Mowbray denounces the ineffectual discourse as a “trial of a woman’s war.” He then protests the political reality:
First, the fair reverence of your Highness curbs me
From giving reins and spurs to my free speech,
(1.1.54-55)
This strategy is important to Mowbray because Bolingbroke is more closely related to Richard: both are cousins, and grandsons of a King. Mowbray is less contiguous to Richard than is Bolingbroke. In the genealogy of power, Mowbray is farther from the authoritative lineage and locus of power. In other words, by circumscribing their speech by Richard’s monologism, Mowbray and Bolingbroke lose presence, and Mowbray is already less present. Therefore Mowbray seeks to assert an individually persuasive discourse, to sever Richard and Bolingbroke’s genealogical continuity, and to make himself coexist with Bolingbroke:
Setting aside his high blood’s royalty,
And let him be no kinsman to my liege,
I do defy him and I spit at him…
(1.1.58-60)
Despite the dictates of metonymy which sees a spit on royalty as a spit on the king, Richard concurs with Mowbray’s scheme:
Mowbray, impartial are our eyes and ears.
Were he my brother, nay, my kingdom’s heir,
As he is but my father’s brother’s son,
Now by my sceptre’s awe I make a vow,
Such neighbor nearness to our sacred blood
Should nothing privilege him nor partialize
The unstooping firmness of my upright soul.
He is our subject, Mowbray; so art thou:
Free speech and fearless I to thee allow.
(1.1.115-123)
But actually, how free is the free speech granted by a King? On the surface Richard grants what the genealogy of kings cannot allow (suspension of the laws of fixity, continuity, and verticality) and what the discourse of kings cannot allow (the coexistence of two simultaneous syntagma).
In any event this offer and the subsequent offer of egalitarian and paradigmatic trial by combat are both withdrawn by Richard. He does so centripetally, reaffirming the traditional logos. He resolves the conflict according to the established code; they are banished, renamed exiles; he will see them no more.
Richard and King Richard II: Voice and Social Language
Ritual discourse not only denies the internally persuasive discourse of others, but of the self too. Richard may possess the powerful knowledge and assert superiority over others, but yet, he can do so only through the metonymic social language, King Richard II, syntagm incarnate. But there is also the voice, Richard, the individual and internally persuasive discourse. “Every utterance participates in the ‘unitary language’ (in its centripetal forces and tendencies) and at the same time partakes of social and historical heteroglossia (the centrifugal, stratifying forces)” (Dialogic Imagination 272).
His authority is permitted in his role as agent of the fathers (they speak through him), and is extant as long as he speaks the correct formula (a ceremonial-mnemotechnic-hermeneutic recitation), and rejects the generative power of speech. This is in accord with Richard’s use of the royal ‘We’ and the notion of the King’s two bodies. The ‘We’ signifies the transhistorical body politic and the renaming of the individual body after it: that is, King Richard II, member of the social order, and Richard, the individual who defines himself King Richard II. The metonymic re-definition enables him to see himself as King, and he does so both in the sense of perceiving himself a King and perceiving as a King does. The suppression of Richard is the price for the authority of King Richard II, S[yntagm].I[ncarnte].
How thorough is King Richard’s participation in the “unitary language”? How good a poet is he? By play’s end, he is deposed and ends his life as Richard, former King, a state he considers very little better than death. Then he dies. There are many possible explanations. Perhaps Richard was not obviously the syntagm incarnate, that the Gaunt/Bolingbroke locus was too central, authoritative, and genealogically sound. Perhaps Richard insufficiently privileged the body politic, incompletely seeing himself King.
I had forgot myself. Am I not king?
Awake, thou coward majesty! thou sleepest.
Is not the king’s name twenty thousand names?
Arm, arm, my name! A puny subject strikes
At thy great glory. Look not to the ground,
Ye favorites of a king. Are we not high?
High be our thoughts….
(3.2.83-89)
It could have been some type of failure to fully speak the authoritative discourse or even, it could have been an intentional rejection of it. Coppélia Kahn sees this intentional rejection, “Richard fails to respect the fathers, flaunting the ‘fair sequence and succession’ governing both Bolingbroke’s inheritance and his own right to rule” (Man’s Estate, 49). Then too, it is possible that Bolingbroke dialogized the authoritative discourse and so deposed Richard. If so, then Richard’s failure may rest in ritual discourse itself, in its inability to improvise when necessary. It is also possible that Richard dialogized King Richard II, that he partook in the centrifugal heterophony. This conjecture can itself be dialogized by reading those discursive interanimations in which Richard engages.
Finally, the move from King Richard II to Richard Plantagenet, from S.I. to F.K., is also a move from enchantment to disenchantment. King Richard’s poetry and song (en-chant-ment) is not only of the dead fathers, but also, metonymically, with God, the ultimate father and begetter of the line. God spoke through King Richard II. He was divinely sanctioned. This explains the especially tragic vision of his movement as a fall from God. A consequence of this is that if Richard’s deposition is seen as a failure of the kingship, it is likewise a failure of God. In any case, a deposed king connotes this discursive failure: its subsequent manifestations are metonymically associated; they are weakened. Henry IV is less enchanting.
Dialogue: Bolingbroke and Mowbray
In 1.3 the discourses of Bolingbroke and Mowbray engage Richard’s. While the elements of discovery of mythos depict Richard’s administration of the Bolingbroke-Mowbray conflict, on the discursive plane the conflict is most clearly between the strains of Richard’s monologism and Mowbray’s dialogism. Mowbray and, to a lesser degree, Bolingbroke, threaten the king’s discourse with the centrifugal force of metaphoric discourse. They oppose Richard discursively with synchronic and generative internally persuasive dialogue. The opposition of discourses is made palpable by repeated images which recall the metonymic and metaphoric axes: seeing and making, eye and mouth, word and breath. Theirs is the world of heterophony and relative disenchantment (it is, however, far from a revolutionary world). Reading the monologic/dialogic tendencies explains, without recourse to history, mythos, or dianoia, why Mowbray is more severely punished than is Bolingbroke, and why Richard’s punishment is banishment.
Power Locus
The distance from Richard’s discourse can be illustrated by the different understandings of the locus of power. Richard’s central discourse derives genealogical power metonymically and diachronically from the dead. Late in 1.3 Bolingbroke seems to come to the realization that there is an alternate locus:
How long a time lies in one little word!
Four lagging winters and four wanton springs
End in a word, such is the breath of kings.
(1.3.213-15)
Power is located in the breath of kings, in the perlocutionary speech act, in the generative ability of speech, in the synchronic and physical manifestation of the word as speaker’s breath. Perhaps Richard’s power comes not in the knowledge of esoterica, but rather in the speech act.
The mythos of 1.3 begins with ceremonious preparation for the trial by combat between Mowbray and Bolingbroke. This ritual is replicated in ritualized discourse. Richard first bids his Marshal establish that the two combatants have focused their complaints upon one another (rather than, perhaps, on Richard or the authoritative discourse), and that they retain allegiance to the crown. The Marshal first speaks to Mowbray:
Mar. In God’s name and the king’s, say who thou art,
And why thou comest thus knightly clad in arms;
Against what man thou com’st, and what thy quarrel.
Speak truly on thy knighthood and thy oath,
As so defend thee heaven and thy valor!
Mow. My name is Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk,
Who hither come engagèd by my oath
(Which God defend a knight should violate!)
Both to defend my loyalty and truth
To God, my king, and my succeeding issue
Against the Duke of Hereford that appeals me;
And, by the grace of God and this mine arm,
To prove him, in defending of myself,
A traitor to my God, my king, and me;--
And as I truly fight, defend me heaven!
(1.3.11-25)
Mowbray is commanded “In God’s name and the king’s” to “speak truly.” The Marshal’s speech ritually calls up signs of genealogical contiguity: God, King, knight, oath, heaven, and valor. Mowbray’s response seems appropriately centripetal, and but the ten line reply is punctuated with fourteen assertions of self: I, me, my, mine, myself, Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk. What logically may seem an agreement to “speak truly” according to the ritual dictates of power, functions quite differently discursively: Mowbray asserts a presence of self, an internally persuasive voice, a praxeological discourse. Again, as in the effort to sever Richard and Bolingbroke’s familial contiguity, Mowbray dialogizes the authoritative discourse: he injects self into a discourse which demands self-effacement, and makes himself exist before Richard.
Richard then has the Marshal “depose” Bolingbroke, seeking similar response as sought from Mowbray:
Mar. What is thy name? and wherefore com’st thou hither, [t/o]
Before King Richard in his royal lists?
Against whom comest thou? and what’s thy quarrel?
Speak like a true knight, so defend thee heaven!
Bol. Harry of Hereford, Lancaster, and Derby
Am I, who ready here do stand in arms
To prove, by God’s grace and my body’s valor
In lists on Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk,
That he is a traitor foul and dangerous
To God of heaven, King Richard, and to me;
And as I truly fight, defend me heaven!
(1.3.31-41)
The Marshal’s “deposition” of Bolingbroke differs from that of Mowbray. With Mowbray the signs of contiguity were plentiful: seven mentions of God, king, knight, oath, heaven, and valor in five lines. With Bolingbroke there are but four in four lines: King Richard, royal, knight, and heaven. At least as significantly, name, that supreme sign of genealogy, is placed closer to Bolingbroke. To Mowbray, name is manifested at great remove as “God’s name and the king’s;” he does not name Richard in his response. Mowbray is commanded, “say who thou art.” However, Bolingbroke is asked, “What is thy name?” and the generic king is particularized as King Richard. Also, while Mowbray generically pledges loyalty “To God, my king, and my succeeding issue,” Bolingbroke specifies his place in the genealogical verticality and continuity, “To God of heaven, King Richard, and to me.” Name is more contiguous to him; King Richard is closer to his cousin than either God or king are to Mowbray. Correspondingly, Bolingbrokes makes much less reference to the self in his response, just six times in seven lines. Finally, Bolingbroke touches the king; he offers to kneel and kiss Richard’s hand. Bolingbroke’s lip service is less threatening and more appropriate, replete with its ritual fawning. Richard embraces family continuity,
We will descend and fold him in our arms.
Cousin of Hereford, as thy cause is right,
So be thy fortune in this royal fight!
(1.3.54-56)
Richard’s response is as much for Bolingbroke as for Mowbray: he at once embraces traditional power semantics and rejects dialogism. It is a royal fight, with Mowbray and the dead fathers as combatants, something of which Bolingbroke is perhaps little aware.
Powerful Breath
Yet perhaps Bolingbroke becomes aware. The aforementioned “breath of kings” could well mark this. The scene brims with mention of breath and mouth, with the physical manifestation of living speech, as it does with eye and sight. The metaphoric mouth and metonymic eye. Bolingbroke mentions breath first, (1.3.66), seeing it proof of vitality. Mowbray’s, “Take from my mouth the wish of happy years,” (1.3.94), seems to be read by Richard as Mowbray’s rejection an internally persuasive discourse. Richard welcomes him back, seeing Mowbray seeing metonymically:
Farewell, my lord. Securely I espy
Virtue with valor couchèd in thine eye.
(1.3.97-8)
The combat subsequently begins but is quickly stopped by Richard. As the appellants were denied trial by words, so are they denied resolution by present and physical action. The cessation of combat, akin to a deferral of dialogue (dramatic combat occurs, after all, in dramatic discourse), prevents the making of coexistent and coequal actors and the making of one traitor. The generative power of metaphoric discourse to make guilt and innocence is truncated; power is recognized to only come from the past. This is why Richard dictates banishment for both: he will see them no more. Of the two, Mowbray’s permanent banishment is more severe because his discourse is more dialogic.
Rich. The hopeless word of ‘never to return’
Breathe I against thee, upon pain of life.
Mow. A heavy sentence, my most sovereign liege,
And all unlooked for from your highness’ mouth;
(1.3.152-5)
Mowbray’s response to the banishment is a twenty line declaration of the individual’s manifestation of speech; it is “My native English,” and “my tongue’s use.” Mowbray accuses Richard of denying speech, “Within my mouth you have enjailed by tongue,” and that silence, “And dull, unfeeling, barren ignorance / Is made my jailer…” Mowbray climaxes with the desperate metaphor:
What is thy sentence then but speechless death,
Which robs my tongue from breathing native breath?
(1.3.172-73)
Richard rejects Mowbray’s speech, “After our sentence, plaining comes too late.” Richard’s sentence, when understood as utterance rather than as punishment, has ominous overtones in Mowbray’s association of Richard’s sentence with “speechless death.” Richard’s speech is speechless death, perhaps the speech of the dead, perhaps the speech leading to death. Mowbray re-cants, agrees to be unseen:
Then thus I turn me from my country’s light,
To dwell in solemn shades of endless night.
(1.3.176-7)
Richard commands that Mowbray and Bolingbroke swear, “so help you truth and God,” to never join forces, never write nor meet, to oppose “us, our state, our subjects, or our land.” He commands that they disappear, never meet (and so never speak), nor even write.
Immediately following Mowbray’s exit, after he is out of sight, Richard recants four years of Bolingbroke’s ten year banishment. This follows less than forty lines after his rejection of Mowbray’s “compassionate” appeal and “plaining.” It is at this point that Bolingbroke realizes the power of perlocution:
How long a time lies in one little word!
Four lagging winters and four wanton springs
End in a word, such is the breath of kings.
(1.3.213-15)
It is as if Mowbray’s centrifugal force had suddenly occurred to Bolingbroke. While Mowbray had been more dangerous to Richard because he dialogized, and Bolingbroke had not, the situation here changes. Mowbray recanted and ultimately accepted exile, but Bolingbroke faces for the first time an understandable demonstration of praxeological speech: four years voided by Richard’s breath. Gaunt then speaks, sounding as Mowbray might have, delimiting Richard’s claim as king, “thy kingdom cannot buy my breath.” The final mention of breath is in Bolingbroke’s strained metaphors,
I have too few [words] to take my leave of you,
When the tongue’s office should be prodigal
To breathe the abundant dolor of the heart.
(1.3.255-57)
Gaunt then commands Bolingbroke to, “Think not the king did banish thee, But thou the king.” It is as if he dictates Bolingbroke’s interchange with Richard, metaphorically or ironically.
Richard Dialogized
Eventually, Richard is deposed; Bolingbroke becomes King Henry IV. It occurs dialogically: the authoritative discourse (and the syntagm incarnate) is selected by the outcome of the dialogue. When forced into synchronic interanimation the authoritative discourse becomes a discourse, King Richard II becomes Richard, interchangeable in the mutable paradigm of dialogism. Did Bolingbroke dialogize Richard? Yes, to a degree. But Richard also dialogized himself: voice in dialogue with social language, Richard with King Richard II, internally persuasive discourse with authoritative discourse, syntagm with paradigm. Consider the discourse of Richard, former king. It demonstrates a failure of syntagmatic speech: metonymic and synecdochic re-seeing and genealogical politics are ineffectual after dialogism:
I have been studying how I may compare
This prison where I live unto the world;
And, for because the world is populous,
And here is not a creature but myself,
I cannot do it. Yet I’ll hammer it out.
My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul,
My soul the father, and these two beget
A generation of still-breeding thoughts;
And these same thoughts people this little world,
In humors like the people of this world,
For no thought is contented. The better sort,
As thoughts of things divine, are intermixed
With scruples, and do set the word itself
Against the word:
As thus, ‘Come, little ones,’ and then again,
‘It is as hard to come as for a camel
To thread the postern of a small needle’s eye.’
(5.5.1-17)
Disenchanted Kingship
Richard dies. Henry IV reigns. The transition from Bolingbroke to King Henry IV is the move from the status of subject to the status Richard held, that of king. But the kingship of Henry IV is not the kingship of Richard II. Henry’s is a problematic kingship. And the problem is, at least in effect, one of his own making, and is so whether Bolingbroke deposed Richard by dialogizing the authoritative discourse, or whether Richard deposed himself by the relative assertion of an internally persuasive discourse. The problem is essentially that of disenchantment. On the plane of mythos, the kingship is dramatically demonstrated to be vulnerable to usurpation, and the king subject to regicide. Discursively, the authoritative discourse proves vulnerable to dialogism. King Richard’s song becomes just one of many tunes available for selection. Richard II reads (in mythos and discourse) as the movement of the kingship and authoritative discourse from enchantment and monologism to disenchantment and dialogism. 1 Henry IV can be read as Henry’s struggle to re-enchant and re-monologize the kingship and discourse. But it is not until 2 Henry IV when Hal becomes Henry V that, genealogically and syntagmatically, the kingship is re-enchanted. Hal is, after all, son of a king; neither Richard nor Henry were (this explains, in part, Hal’s early errant behavior and distance from the disenchanted throne).
As long as two conditions exist, Richard’s deposition and Bolingbroke’s having employed a metaphoric discourse during the deposition, the kingship appears, by default, to have been devalued by Bolingbroke: Bolingbroke internally dialogizes Henry’s kingship. The kingship remains disenchanted whether Henry speaks the individual discourse which made him king, or whether he speaks the king’s discourse, in order to re-enchant the kingship and see himself as true a king as the one he deposed. The authoritative discourse remains relativized regardless of the type of discourse he speaks. Once relativized (Richard’s unitary divine speech became heterophonic human speech), discourse has dialogism as a backdrop; the effort to re-mystify it is dialogized from the start.
Neither syntagmatic nor paradigmatic tropics are wholly satisfactory for King Henry. To continue the individual and metaphoric discourse would mean to locate his kingship’s authority in his own breath, in his ability as an individual human to utter powerful speech acts. Henry speaks. This relativizes his breath and fails to assert his contiguity to God and the dead fathers. The other choice is to chant, like Richard, as Richard. King Henry IV sings. And yet, to choose to take up a self-effacing metonymic discourse offers a strange semantics: it would mean to defer his individual and generative power to the divine and paternal social authority in an attempt to re-enchant that kingship whose enchantment he has just successfully disenchanted. The individual speaker’s ability to make a kingship is opposed to the agent interpreter’s ability to see a divinely sanctioned kingship. Yet, the metonymic discourse can never be fully available to Henry: Bolingbroke dialogizes him.
But as King Henry says, “Thank God for Hotspur!” (1H4 1.1.109). To either dialogize or monologize, Henry must engage in discourse with an other. Dialogism and monologism describe a dialogical relationship: the word is at most only half one’s; it is always half the other’s. The dialogue with Hotspur mandates Henry’s move toward King Henry IV, and toward re-enchantment: Henry can speak poetry to Hotspur. Hotspur enters and threatens Henry’s claim to the throne. This dialogue permits Henry’s access to the dead; he can see a spit on him as a spit on the king as a spit on the former kings as a spit on God. Hotspur’s challenge, oddly, strengthens Henry’s kingship. This is opposite of the effect Bolingbroke’s challenge had on Richard’s kingship. This is partially due to Henry’s double dialogism: King Henry is externally dialogized by Hotspur and internally dialogized by Bolingbroke. So, Hotspur’s threat determines Henry’s response; Henry is faced with a dialogue which is qualitatively different from the one he engaged in with Richard. In any event, Henry begins his career as king as king.
Consider King Henry’s opening lines in 1 Henry IV:
So shaken as we are, so wan with care,
Find we a time for frighted peace to pant
And breathe short-winded accents of new broils
To be commenced in stronds afar remote.
No more the thirsty entrance of this soil
Shall daub her lips with her own children’s blood:
No more shall trenching war channel her fields,
Nor bruise her flow’rets with the armèd hoofs
Of hostile paces. Those opposèd eyes
Which, like meteors of a troubled heaven,
All of one nature, of one substance bred,
Did lately meet in the intestine shock
And furious close of civil butchery,
Shall now in mutual well-beseeming ranks
March all one way and be no more opposed
Against acquaintance, kindred, and allies.
The edge of war, like an ill-sheathèd knife,
No more shall cut his master.
(1.1.1-18)
The speech begins “So shaken,” but not one person is shaken, “we are.” In his final speech in Richard II, by way of contrast, King Henry lamented the metaphorically still warm Richard, “Though I did wish him dead, / I hate the murderer, love him murderèd.” While the “we” is ambiguous, possibly signifying the English court, the “I” is a clear assertion of the individual self. In 1 Henry IV, however, Henry is plural. As the speech unfolds, there is (as in R2 1.3) action of the organs of metonymy and of metaphor. While Bolingbroke had exhaled powerful breath, King Henry pants “short-winded accents.” The expression of power from the self outward is attenuated. The successful dialogism which deposed Richard is recalled as oral and genealogical perversion, “No more the thirsty entrance… Shall daub her lips with her own children’s blood.” Dialogism is an intrusive attack inward, on the center. The organs of metonymy are evoked: “opposèd eyes.” Contiguity and genealogy, embodied in the kingship, had been shaken to the center, to the intestines and butchered. The intrusive tool of “trenching” and “channeling,” “No more shall cut his master.” The knife shall be “sheathèd,” contained, and dialogic attack to the center shall cease.
Bolingbroke, Henry, and King Henry IV
Hotspur forces this dilemma on Henry: to assert voice, to dialogize Hotspur, but be subject to dialogism, or to assert social language, monologize Hotspur, but be subject to dialogism. In either case Hotspur speaks Hotspur. Henry can face him as Bolingbroke and struggle as he would have against Mowbray. Or he can face him as King Henry IV, align himself with God and lots of dead kings, and inhibit Hotspur’s access to dialogue. In any case the choice remains potential; Henry is denied real freedom of choice precisely because of his faith in the notion of kingship. His vision never approaches the revolutionary either. While his discourse might have been metaphoric and so enabled selection, it was never ironic. It did not seek complete reversal (making court politics carnivalesque). In the end, interanimated with Hotspur’s relatively more metaphoric discourse, Henry’s is the de facto metonymic discourse. The social language dominates and struggles to re-enchant. The dead kings speak through him; Richard speaks through him. Never fully able to speak, he is forced sing.
Hotspur Stutters
From his first encounter with Hotspur, Henry controls the logos. Whether or not his poetry is better than Richard’s is unimportant; he sings sufficiently well to maintain the kingship because Hotspur’s speaks so poorly. Henry’s control is contrasted with Hotspur’s internally persuasive, but out of control, discourse. Early in the play, Henry praises paradigmatic Hotspur as the “theme of honor’s tongue, ” and is impressed with his defiant pride (1.1.81). He also seeks an alternate descendant, Hotspur instead of Hal. It is possible that Henry’s praise for Hotspur also praises Bolingbroke: the valiant speaker, the perlocutionary valor. In Hotspur and Bolingbroke’s discourse of honor, authority is achieved through activity in life which is honored after death by the tongues of the descendants. “Honor’s tongue” calls to mind the living, active speaker. Later after their initial argument, Hotspur characterizes his tongue, his dialogical effort with Henry, “I will ease my heart, / Albeit I make a hazard of my head” (1.3,127-8). Hotspur’s hazardous discourse eventually threatens King Henry and Hotspur as well. His perlocution is great, and his passions, greater than logical.
The play is filled with examples of Hotspur’s failure in speech. In that initial encounter with King Henry (1.3), Hotspur engages in, but loses, the linguistic conflict. Henry speaks in first person singular (having refrained from we since 1.1.29), which might seem to signal a willingness to interanimate and to engage in dialogue with Hotspur. The speech climaxes, however, with “title of respect,” and is, ultimately, the king’s monologue:
My blood hath been too cold and temperate,
Unapt to stir at these indignities,
And you have found me, for accordingly
You tread upon my patience; but be sure
I will from henceforth rather be myself,
Mighty, and to be feared, than my condition,
Which hath been smooth as oil, soft as young down,
And therefore lost that title of respect
Which the proud soul ne’er pays but to the proud.
(1.3.1-9)
These lines are similar to those in the first act (1.1.1-18). They seem to bolster the condition of king-ness. His bemoaned anemia (blood = family = genealogy = king) indicates his embracing of the centripetal. His “title of respect” was lost, as if the kingship were naturally and genealogically his.
In the ensuing argument, King Henry and Hotspur compete, Henry trying inhibit dialogue, Hotspur trying to force a dialogue. Henry’s authoritative discourse seeks to monologize by asserting the unitary and poetic language. The closer to poetry, the closer to God and the dead kings. Hotspur argues, that is, asserts presence and a refusal to be monologized. While his efforts are to dialogize, it is done ineffectually, with the discourse at odds with itself. In other words, rather than opposing Henry’s poetry with a novelistic discourse, Hotspur opposes poetry with poetry. He employs poetry, an “authoritarian, dogmatic, and conservative” discourse which stands for a metonymic social text. As a result, the attempt to out-king the king is discursively doomed to failure. After all, Hotspur is taking on a king, many dead kings, and God. In this conflict, poetry is sign of mastery of speech. First, Hotspur:
He did confound the best part of an hour
In changing hardiment with great Glendower.
Three times they breathed, and three times
did they drink, [t/o]
Upon agreement, of swift Severn’s flood;
Who then, affrighted with their bloody looks,
Ran fearfully among the trembling reeds
And hid his crisp head in the hollow bank,
Bloodstainèd with these valiant combatants.
(1.3.100-107)
Up to these quoted lines, Hotspur’s blank verse has been relatively plain, devoid of much obvious poetic device. But as the argument intensifies and he is more clearly in combat, Hotspur intensifies the poeticization of his verse. Such a strategy, increasing poeticization, works in the king’s favor, whether it is realized by Hotspur or by Henry. Hotspur’s increasing affirmation of the syntagmatic increases the authority of Henry’s discourse.
The couplet which rhymes hour with Glendower stands out as one of the few mid-speech couplets (they are overwhelmingly confined to the ends of speeches). It is further highlighted through interlineal consonance: part of an hour, and, great Glendower. This couplet is followed by a repetition of clauses balanced around one word, similar to the rhetorical figures, isocolon, conduplicatio, symploce, parison: “Three times they breathed, and three times did they drink.” The “isocolon” is followed by a near couplet, the lines ending in flood, and in bloody looks. A line later, there is dense alliteration and assonance in one line: Andhid his crisp headin the hollow bank.
This is followed by Henry:
Thou dost belie him, Percy, thou dost belie him!
He never did encounter with Glendower.
I tell thee,
He durst as well have met the devil alone
As Owen Glendower for an enemy.
Art thou not ashamed? But, sirrah, henceforth
Let me not hear you speak of Mortimer.
Send me your prisoners with the speediest means,
Or you shall hear in such a kind from me
As will displease you. My Lord Northumberland,
We license your departure with your son.–
Send us your prisoners, or you will hear of it.
(1.3.113-124)
Immediately, Henry demonstrates his superiority as a poet. He appropriates Hotspur’s method and begins with another “isocolon” to surpass Hotspur’s. Hotspur’s “Three times they breathed, and three times did they drink” is merely echoic, balanced around the inconsequential and. Henry’s “Thou dost belie him, Percy, thou dost belie him!” is centered on Percy. The result is the focusing of attention of belie onto Percy; a much more effective use of the technique. This is followed by the next line’s internal rhyme, encounter with Glendower, which replicates the semantic connection of encounter with Glendower, also links He (Mortimer) with Percy. This line also begins a four line rhyme scheme in which lines of identical head rhyme, He and He, alternate with lines of feminine end rhyme, thee and enemy. There is the phonetic conflation of he (Mortimer) = thee (Percy) = enemy, plus the non rhyming line ending link Glendower with devil alone. Devil alone then is further tied to Owen Glendower of the next line, through chiasmus (three lines later there is an enjambed chiasmus, speediest means and me as will displease). After Henry names Hotspur according to the genealogical verticality, “sirrah,” he begins two lines of intense internal rhyme, linking line 1.3.119 with the second half of 1.3.120. The urgency of “Let me not hear you speak of Mortimer” is echoed in “speediest means.” King Henry’s monological imperative, the end of dialogue, dictates the speediest means in several ways. This speech marks the last exchange between King Henry and Hotspur. Try as he may to dialogize the king, Hotspur never again gets closer than to his heir and a dead battlefield imposter. The rhyme scheme further signals the end of dialogue; it marks the end of Henry’s combat as the individual voice. The echoes of me culminate in the couplet linking means with me. This assertion of self, especially the union of means with me, is then truncated and contrasted with the assertion of plural and royal Henry: Send me your prisoners with Send us your prisoners. End of dialogue, exit Henry. Beginning of monologue, enter King Henry IV. After this, Hotspur must face the office and discourse of the king. Finally there is the double couplet, the aforementioned means and me, and Northumberland and son. This final union, the expulsion of Northumberland and son, echoes and contrasts its previous occurrence in the near triplet:
In envy that my Lord Northumberland
Should be the father to so blest a son–
A son who is the theme of honor’s tongue,
(1.1.79-81)
King Henry IV exits and Hotspur is left victim of monologism. He breaks into monosyllabic rant, disregarding the diction and device he had employed against the king,
An if the devil come and roar for them,
I will not send them. I will after straight
And tell him so; for I will ease my heart,
Albeit I make a hazard of my head.
(1.3.125-28)
Very different from the likes of “He did confound the best part of an hour / In changing hardiment with the great Glendower.” These novelistic lines clearly do assert Hotspur the individual: I, I, I, I. The poetry of the king is avoided in the absence of the king. In the four lines which contain devil, roar, and hazard, there is also the potentially mild intention to “ease my heart” which seems a bit incongruous. Much more outstanding is the consonance and end stopped, heart, hazard and head. While Hotspur huffs and puffs his powerful breaths (as his name), his power seems directed toward suicide.
Women and Wales
Two other instances in particular, Hotspur’s encounter with his wife (2.3), and that with Glendower in Wales (3.1), further illustrate Hotspur’s discursive maneuvering. The scene with his wife halves: Hotspur attempts dialogue with a letter in the first part, and monologue with his wife in the second. Note the opening lines of his dialogue with the letter:
‘But, for mine own part, my lord, I could be well contented to be there, in respect of the love I bear your house.’ He could be contented–why is he not then? In respect of the love he bears our house! He shows in this he loves his own barn better than he loves our house. Let me see some more. ‘The purpose you undertake is dangerous’–why, that’s certain! ‘Tis dangerous to take a cold, to sleep, to drink; but I tell you, my lord fool, out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety. ‘The purpose you undertake is dangerous, the friends you have named uncertain, the time itself unsorted, and your whole plot too light for the counterpoise of so great an opposition.’ Say you so, say you so? I say unto you again, you are a shallow, cowardly hind, and you lie. What a lackbrain is this! By the Lord, our plot is a good plot as ever was laid; our friends true and constant: a good plot, good friends, and full of expectation; an excellent plot, very good friends….
(2.3.1-17)
His reaction to the letter is significant, because just as in the conclusion of his speech with the king, Hotspur attempts a prose dialogue in the speaker’s (in this case, writer’s) absence. Hotspur employed poetic device in his dialogue with the King when a novelistic discourse would have more readily advanced dialogism. In this dialogue with the letter, Hotspur employs the novelistic discourse but the other is absent, too distant for dialogism. What comes from this dialogism is the dialogism of his own discourse: Hotspur turning his speech against his speech.
The encounter with his wife is prefigured, in that the woman and feminine discourse has been marked as inferior. One occasion is Westmoreland’s “shameless transformation, / by those Welshwomen done,” (1.1.48-50). Another instance, is Northumberland’s paternal rebuke of Hotspur’s deaf rant in the king’s absence, the first mono-dialogue with the absent other which portends Hotspur’s dialogue with the letter:
Why, what a wasp-stung and impatient fool
Art thou to break into this woman’s mood,
Tying thine ear to no tongue but thine own!
(1.3.233-5)
In dialogue with his wife, Hotspur finds the situation reversed from that with the king: genre, male speaks through Hotspur, he is at the locus of power; Kate Percy speaks the female, weaker social language. Despite this advantage, Hotspur’s language again works against him. Immediately following Hotspur’s prose dialogue with the letter (which exhibited such clever speech as, “Say you so, say you so? I say unto you again, you are a shallow, cowardly hind, and you lie. What a lackbrain is this?”), Kate enters and speaks a very poetic discourse. The mythos depicts Kate’s demonstration of love and concern to know her husband’s plans of war; Hotspur avoids explanation. Discursively, Hotspur is forced into dialogue with the female-poet, simultaneously weaker yet more adept than he. His response: to absent himself, to deny discourse. Note the richness of Kate’s speech:
O my good lord, why are you thus alone?
For what offense have I this fortnight been
A banished woman from my Harry’s bed?
Tell me, sweet lord, what is’t that takes from thee
Thy stomach, pleasure, and thy golden sleep?
Why dost thou bend thine eyes upon the earth,
And start so often when thou sit’st alone?
Why hast thou lost the fresh blood in thy cheeks
And given my treasures and my rights of thee
To thick-eyed musing, and cursed melancholy?
(2.3.34-43)
And thou hast talked
Of sallies and retires, of trenches, tents,
Of palisadoes, frontiers, parapets,
Of basilisks, of cannon, culverin,
Of prisoners’ ransom, and of soldiers slain,
And all the currents of a heady fight.
(2.3.47-52)
She supersedes his prose ranting with logical, compassionate verse, rich in rhyme, alliteration, and assonance. Two lines in particular stands out, “Why hast thou lost the fresh blood in thy cheeks…To thick-eyed musing, and cursed melancholy?” First, Hotspur is accused of failing sexually, of not sufficiently acting like a man. This move dialogizes, undermines his male authority. But too, the lines hint at his political failing, his separation from the authoritative discourse: he has lost genealogical contiguity (perhaps through speech) and both sees poorly and speaks ineffectually.
She ends expressing the need to know what he plans, “else he loves me not.” After her capable speech, Hotspur speaks to a servant, “What ho! Is Gilliams with the packet gone?” He avoids dialogue and addresses another in plain prose. She presses the need to know “what carries” him away. He puns and echoes the “isocolons” before, “Why, my horse, my love–my horse!” The comic association of horse with her (my love) and the horse as his love is clarified lines later. Interestingly, he states he does not love her and calls for his horse. He denies her access to a dialogue, refuses to answer her questions.
In dialogue with the letter and monologue with Kate, Hotspur’s language is particularly weak. Alone with the letter, in the privacy of soliloquy, there is little to demonstrate Hotspur as master speech. In the sterile interaction with Kate, she is more capable a speaker than he. Hotspur the man monologizes Kate, “But yet a woman.” Monologue must content her; as she says, “It must of force.”
Finally there is Wales (3.1.). In a scene filled with examples of discursive failure, of dialogue manqué Hotspur’s does emerge as the authoritative discourse. He commands speech, executes effective perlocution, but in the end, it makes no sense, and its effects are negative. To begin with, there is generic conflict among the social languages male and female, and Englishman and Welshman. Mortimer and his wife are unable to interanimate, he speaks English, she Welsh. There is no heteroglossia, however; Lady Mortimer and Welsh exist only paratextually. They eventually communicate paratextually, through kisses and song. Owen Glendower admits to speaking a very Welsh English. Glendower, an ally of Hotspur’s against the English court authority, speaks the discourse of myth, as a mystic or sorcerer. As Englishman speaking to Welshman, and as higher noble to lower noble, Hotspur asserts his relative authority and monologizes Glendower’s attempted dialogue. Again, as in so many instances with Hotspur, this is realized in a counter productive manner. Hotspur’s relative authority stems precisely from his relative contiguity to the English throne: to assert such authority over the rebel Glendower is to affirm the authority of the king’s discourse which Hotspur ostensibly opposes (at play’s end, Glendower fails to participate in the armed rebellion). When Glendower does speak, Hotspur again attempts the king’s maneuver, inhibition of dialogue. Hotspur commands, “Speak it in Welsh.” This in effect, to English speaking Hotspur, means end of dialogue, do not speak at all. Then again, Hotspur and Kate fail in intercourses.
But despite the linguistic confusion, Hotspur is successful in his monologism. Hotspur creates a dispute over the potential division of the kingdom. His perlocution is effective: he speaks; he inhibits any dialogue; he wins a greater share. The share exists only potentially of course, yet once won, Hotspur rescinds his demand. It is successful yet ineffectual perlocution. Hotspur monologizes, but for what purpose? True he asserts his relative authority over Glendower but does so metonymically, adding stature to the authority he seeks to dialogize.
When the battle approaches, Hotspur turns to his supporters and describes his own discursive facility:
Better consider what you have to do
Than I, that have not well the gift of tongue,
Can lift your blood up with persuasion.
(5.2.76-78)
Richard had such a tongue. His rhetoric did lift Bolingbroke genealogically: to himself, “A God’s name, let it go!” (R2 3.3.146) and to Bolingbroke, “Your own is yours, and I am yours, and all” (R2 3.3.197). Hotspur’s final speech is cut short by his death. His language brings about his downfall, “ death / Lies on my tongue” (5.5.83-84). In the end, his speech fails; his final is sentence carried out by Prince Hal.
Falstaff and Hal
Falstaff and Prince Hal present a different variety of discourse and a different dialogue, different from either the Richard-Bolingbroke or the Henry-Hotspur interactions. In both of those cases, the most authoritative discourse, as manifested by the king, was an active participant in the monological and dialogical activity. Falstaff, however, makes no claim for the throne, and Hal is scheduled to have the kingship bestowed upon him, a gift of blood, through patrilineal consanguinity, passively (although Hal and Falstaff do defend the crown and both “kill” Hotspur). The absence of the supremely authoritative discourse likens the Falstaff-Hal dialogues to those aforementioned instances with women, the Welsh, and Hotspur. The dialogical presence of women and the Welsh further likens Falstaff-Hal to those discourses: the Hotspur-Kate and Hotspur-Glendower interactions introduced the social language genres of woman (gender) and Welsh (region/dialect). The dialogues of the two kings, Richard-Bolingbroke and Henry-Hotspur, were male, English discourses, differentiated only by genre (poetry and prose) and small, albeit quite significant, distance in social strata.
Falstaff and Hal live and speak in different worlds than those of Richard, Henry, Hotspur, Kate or Glendower. Falstaff and Hal speak with Mistress Quickly, with Poins, with Peto, with Francis. They speak in the most generically varied exchanges, in dialogues which employ the range of social languages: genre (poetry and prose), profession (hostess, sheriff, waiter, prince), social stratum (prince to thief), age (old Falstaff and young Hal), region/dialect (Eastcheap tavern and English court), gender (female Mistress Quickly), ethnicity (the Scot, Douglas). Then of course, there is the range in the single discourse, Hal, from Eastcheap tavern bad boy to court prince, a rough prose to a polished verse.
The movement from dialogue to dialogue within such thorough heterophony mandates proficient discursive skills. Hal, especially when compared with any other character, is the consummate polyphone. The discourse Hal is able to select tropic modes at will. Consider Hal’s two speeches which frame the scene in which Falstaff and Hal first appear, 1.2. First, in response to Falstaff’s simple request for the time, Hal elaborates:
Thou art so fat-witted with drinking of old sack, and unbottoning thee after supper, and sleeping upon benches after noon, that thou hast forgotten to demand that truly which thou wouldest truly know. What a devil hast thou to do with the time of the day? Unless hours were cups of sack, and minutes capons, and clocks the tongues of bawds, and dials the signs of leaping houses, and the blessed sun himself a fair hot wench in flame-colored taffeta, I see no reason why thou shouldst be so superfluous to demand the time of the day.
(1.2.2-11)
In contrast, there is the closing scene, Hal’s soliloquy:
I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humor of your idleness.
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wond’red at
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapors that did seem to strangle him.
If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work;
But when they seldom come, they wished-for come,
And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.
So, when this loose behaviour I throw off
And pay the debt I never promisèd,
By how much better than my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes;
And, like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glitt’ring o’er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.
I’ll so offend to make offense a skill,
Redeeming time when men think least I will.
(1.2.183-205)
Obviously, a prime difference is that between the prose of the first speech and the verse of the second. But there is the question of diction also. In the former, Hal’s words are markers of the Eastcheap tavern, of the lower social strata. “Bawds,” “leaping houses,” and the description of the sun, “a fair hot wench in flame-colored taffeta” connote a different social language and a different social stratum from any connoted by the court diction. The rhetorical transformation of the sun, which in the court social language marks the king, as the “fair hot wench” is characteristic of the tropical operation of the speech; it is ironic.
The poetry, diction, and tropics of Hal’s latter speech are those of the heir apparent. This sun is the court’s royal sun, that expression of verticality, which signifies the contiguity between king and God. It is a metonymic and centripetal discourse. In content it valorizes revelation over action, seeing and being seen over doing and making: he will be seen king-like despite what he does, “By how much better than my word I am.” The content emphasizes his king-like appearance, privileged over his word and base contacts. Discursively, he affirms the syntagmatic, rejects the paradigmatic internally persuasive discourse.
Metaphor and Irony, Selection and Reversal
The key to reading Hal is consideration of the apparent ease with which he selects discourses. This selection and substitution of genres denotes the paradigmatic orientation of Hal’s discourse. That is, even his metonymy, at least in the first soliloquy, is selected. It is as if Hal’s speech were the mutable paradigm, with various social language pieces to be selected and uttered by choice. This element of selection enables Hal’s flexible and mobile discourse: present, heterophonic, and dialogical. Yet this ability to choose is self-terminated by the choice in the soliloquy not to choose, by the effacement of paradigm and the assertion of monologue.
Such permutations are better understood, rather than as metaphoric selection, as ironic reversal. Irony is a related inversion of metaphor; both are paradigmatic. Theirs is a distinction of relative emphasis, because while both make a semantic transference, metaphor asserts similarity and irony asserts difference. Clearly they are related. Any such transference of meaning, assertion of similarity(or difference) of two separate entities must play off their differences (or similarities). Metaphor and irony gain meaning precisely in this dialogue between the polar assertions of similarity and of difference. Meaning is generated in the tension of these assertions; they are exotopic; they dialogize. In an odd twist, Hal’s soliloquy is ironically metonymic.
Hal’s ironically metonymic soliloquy is marked by a high degree of self-consciousness. In content, it marks his keen awareness of others’ images of him. This is characteristic of irony. Meaning is generated in the tension of one particular selection and reversal asserted over and against many possible others. Hal’s discourse can self-consciously, ironically, shift from genre to genre. Falstaff’s discourse is ironic also. While not shifting as much as Hal’s, Falstaff’s discourse is yet marked by an exceptional degree of self-consciousness, one at least equal to Hal’s. It is in dialogue with Falstaff that Hal’s most intensely novelistic and heterophonic speech occurs. And Falstaff’s interanimation is always keenly aware of the social context: he ironically dialogizes the prince and the authoritative and metonymic discourse. Falstaff provides the context and dialogical other for Hal’s utterance of “bawd,” “leaping houses” and the “fair hot wench.” Falstaff’s use of vulgar diction and Eastcheap tavern discourse with the prince is contextually ironic and minimizes their social differences. He engages Hal in dialogue and dialogizes their relationship.
Wit characterizes their ironic discourses just as ritual does the king’s metonymic discourse. Yet far from the discourse of the dead fathers, this witty discourse draws its strength from the present acts of utterance and performance. The relatively paradigmatic discourses of Bolingbroke and Hotspur sought diachronic dialogue similar to Falstaff and Hal’s, but lacked the element of wit so central to Falstaff and Hal’s. Bolingbroke and Hotspur made the call for a metaphoric dialogue and attempted to dialogize the authoritative discourse and so unseat the king. They stres |
