William Shakespeare's The Tragedy of King Richard II, first published in a quarto edition in 1597, is the first of a sequence of four historical plays known as the second tetrology, dealing with the early stages of a power struggle between the houses of Lancaster and York. The play's Richard II has been called both fickle and self-indulgent; however, several extended soliloquies in the play demonstrate how deeply realized his character is. During one of these soliloquies, which takes place after his imprisonment and before his murder, he seems to rediscover the qualities of pride, confidence and courage that he had lost when he was dethroned, and so he goes to his death with a spirit more powerful than ever before from now. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay The scene (5.5), begins in the keep of Pomfret Castle, where Richard is held prisoner, and begins on a despondent note as he tries to reconcile his life in prison with the life he has led as king: Ho studied how I can compare this prison I live in to the world; And, since the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I will solve it. (5.5.1-5) Despite his despondency, Richard begins to explore how he might live his life in the microcosm of the fortress, while still maintaining some semblance of his former life. He finds his life in the keep lacking because it is uninhabited. However, the last line indicates a reversal in this attitude. He is beginning to fight against the internal forces that threaten to drag him into despair and loneliness when he states, in the fifth line, that "it will put him to the test." Since a king needs a family and subjects, he seems to have decided to his private world, as we will discover in the next lines: My brain I will prove the female to my soul, My soul the father; yet these two generate a generation of thoughts still alive; and these same thoughts populate this little world, with moods like those of the people of this world, for no thought is happy... (5.5.6-11) Apart from the obvious metaphorical qualities of this sentence, that is, that it is creating a world within itself, symbolic relationships seem to exist between some words. He calls his “soul” “father,” as if to express God's relationship to the soul (i.e., God is the father of the soul). And it places his brain as the female of his soul, implying that the brain nourishes and cares for the soul, which was begotten by God. These two concepts are then linked together, as the mother (perhaps symbolic of Mother Earth) and the father (symbolic of God) produce a "still reproducing" generation of thoughts, as in the world outside Richard's prison, where God and the Earth have produced constantly reproducing people. In this way Richard creates within himself the same relationship that exists in the natural world. It is probably significant that Richard speaks of thoughts and people as not contented, because in historical context the people of England had been in revolt since the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 (McKay et al., 452). McKay, Hill, and Butler argue that the Peasants' Revolt was probably the largest revolt of the Middle Ages and that "decades of aristocratic violence, largely perpetuated against weak peasants, had bred hostility and bitterness" (453). They add that Richard II later met with the leaders of the revolt, accepted charters securing their freedom, deceived them with false promises, and then put down the revolt. The next twenty lines of the soliloquy focus on the nascent thoughts in Richard's mind, and slowly transform them into the feelings of comfort thatthey represent for Richard. It begins with the character of the thoughts: The best, as thoughts of divine things, are mingled with scruples, and contrast the word itself with the word: Thus, "Come, my little one," and then again, "It is difficult to come as for a camel threading the eye of a needle". (5.5.11-17) He then moves on to portraying them as real people, painting metaphors of them – and of them in a similar situation to his. Nor will it be the last; like elegant beggars who, sitting in stocks, shelter their shame, which many have, and others have to sit there. And in this thought they find a kind of relief, carrying their own misfortunes on the shoulders of those who previously endured similar ones. (5.5.25-30)With these descriptions of his thoughts - similar to the thoughts of others who have suffered the same fate as Richard - he finds comfort in realizing that he is not the only one to have been imprisoned, to have had these thoughts of despair. And in comparing himself to a “dignified [simple] beggar” he seems to again address the fact that he has actually been lowered to mortal status, as he had previously done when speaking to his wife in the first scene of the same act: “. ..we think our previous state is a happy dream/from which we have awakened the truth of what we areî (5.1.18-19). From these lines (5.5.25-30) through line 41 Richard chatters back and forth about whether being a king is better than being a beggar. He finally comes to a decision about his peace of mind, and connects it to his own mortality, when he decides that no man will find well-being until he is happy with who he is, even if he has nothing: “Not even I, nor anyone.” the man who is not man,/will be pleased with nothing until he is relieved/of being nothing...” (5.5.39-41). Notice that, in the first line of these three, Richard lowers himself from God's representative on Earth to being "but [a] man." Since this is a historical work, time plays an important role: history could not happen without time, and time would have difficulty existing without creating history. So, in this sense, the two terms are almost synonymous in meaning. And Richard's imprisonment is the physical manifestation of time at its worst, where it can actually cause suffering. It is important to note that Richard is imprisoned in three ways: in his mind, in the natural world, and in time, but it is equally important to note that time is the imprisoned man's main enemy, a fact that Richard seems to understand well. When he hears music playing, the rhythm of the music leads him to reflect on time and its flow. He talks about time as if it were an enemy, or a precious resource that he has abused and mistreated, that has come back to seek revenge: I wasted time, and now time wastes me; Because now time has made me its paralyzer. clock:My thoughts are minute; and with sighs their clocks grind upon my eyes, the external clock, towards which my finger, like the tip of a dial, still points, to purge them of tears. (5.5.49-54)Here he not only complains about his waste of time, but talks about time both in its internal and external aspects. Inside himself he marks time through his thoughts, while outside himself the minutes mark their path through tears of regret. "[M]inutes, times and hours" (5.5.58), for Richard, have now become "... sighs, tears and groans" (5.5.57). But even if he shouts at the music and its marked rhythm "...You don't play anymore" (5.5.61), he still gives his blessing to the music itself, because it is a sign of declaration of love, "...love for Riccardo/It is a strange pin in this world that hates everything" (5.5.65-66). At the end of this soliloquy, Riccardo has realized that he is a mortal man like all the others, but that God and his feelings are Still, 1969. 554-667.