Summary

In Windsor Castle, where the new King Henry IV (a.k.a. Bolingbroke) now resides, a nobleman called Sir Piers Exton is talking with his servants. He tells them that King Henry has asked his audience of courtiers, "Have I no friend will rid me of this living fear?" Exton reasonably interprets the "living fear" as a reference to the still-living King Richard, who is currently imprisoned at Pomfret Castle in the north of England. Exton thinks that he saw King Henry specifically look at him when he asked the question. He decides that, as the "king's friend" (11)—motivated either by loyalty or by hope of reward, or perhaps both—he will be the man to go and kill Richard.

Read a translation of Act 5. Scene 4.

We now move to Richard in Pomfret, who is soliloquizing to himself. Still trying to come to terms with his isolation from the world, he tries various metaphorical and metaphysical tricks to convince himself that he is not alone, but is still part of a populated world. A groom who has remained faithful to Richard comes in unexpectedly to wish Richard well and tell him how grieved he is to behold the former king's fall, but he cannot cheer the grieving king.

Then the castle's keeper enters with food for the former king. Richard, wary, bids the keeper taste of it first as he usually does (to prove it is not poisoned), but the keeper says that he cannot—one Sir Pierce of Exton, who has come to see him, has forbidden it. Angrily, Richard strikes the keeper, who cries out. Exton and his accomplices rush in. After a brief scuffle in which Richard apparently kills several of the accomplices, Exton succeeds in striking him down, and Richard, condemning Exton to burn in hell for his sin, dies. Troubled by doubt and guilt, Exton resolves to bury his slain accomplices at Pomfret and convey Richard's body to King Henry at Windsor.

Read a translation of Act 5: Scene 5.

Back at Windsor, we find Bolingbroke, the king, discussing the state of affairs with his advisors: the bad news is that there are rebels setting fire to towns in Gloucestershire in the northwest, but the good news is that the main conspirators against King Henry's life—Lord Salisbury, the Abbot of Westminster, and others—have been executed and their heads sent to London (presumably for public display as a warning to others). The Bishop of Carlisle has been left alive and is now presented to the king for his sentence; Bolingbroke shows the Bishop mercy and commands him to find a "secret place" (25), keep a low profile, and live out his life in peace.

Suddenly, Exton enters with the coffin containing Richard's body and tells Bolingbroke that he has taken the cue from his own mouth and murdered the former king. Bolingbroke, in some of the most highly loaded, double-edged, and ambiguous language in the play, says that while he admits he is very glad that Richard is dead, he denies that he actually ordered the former king's murder and declares that he now loathes and repudiates Exton. He orders Exton to leave the court and wander miserably in his guilt. Bolingbroke himself vows to take a pilgrimage to the Holy Land—Jerusalem—to wash the guilt of this murder from his soul. He orders a sad funeral for Richard and he and his retinue depart the stage in mourning.

Read a translation of Act 5. Scene 6.

Analysis

Richard's final speeches, which he makes in Act 5, Scene 5, are among his most interesting. As we have seen throughout the play, the more Richard's ability to actually get anything done is compromised, the more extraordinary his poetry becomes. Now, at last, Richard is literally imprisoned—he cannot go anywhere or do anything, and can only wait for his fate to come to him—and his poetry soars.

In his opening speech, we find Richard playing psychological games to try to convince himself that he is not alone. (He appears to be courting insanity when he does this, but that is apparently not of great concern to him.) Richard considers his isolation and tries to find ways to re-think its emptiness: "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 . . ." (1-5). This speech—along with much else that Richard says in this scene—can been read as a foreshadowing of the monologues Shakespeare will later write for Hamlet, another imprisoned intellect wandering in a gloomy castle and speculating on the nature of life, death, and identity. Hamlet, to whom Denmark seems as much a prison as Richard's literal jail cell, laments to his friends, "O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space — were it not that I have bad dreams" (Hamlet, II.iii.243-256).

The imprisoned Richard tries several ideas out on himself: perhaps he will pretend that his own thoughts are people, and thus populate his prison. Then again, perhaps he himself is more than one person, for so he feels himself to be: "[P]lay I in one person many people, / And none contented. Sometimes am I king, / Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar . . . / Then am I king'd again, and by and by / Think that I am unking'd by Bolingbroke, / And straight am nothing" (31-38).

This series of identity shifts ends with Richard imagining himself as "nothing": "Nor I, not any man that but man is, / With nothing shall be pleas'd, till he be eas'd / With being nothing" (39-41). Richard's syntax is obscure, but his general idea is clear: he tends strongly towards nihilism, the idea that there is no purpose or value to existence. In some ways, this attitude has been visible in Richard from the beginning and has manifested itself in Richard's perpetual passivity and willingness to give in to despair. Nihilism is very modern concept, and its appearance in some of Shakespeare's dark-tempered protagonists is part of what makes critics see him as being such a prophetic writer: he is "modern" before his time. (The play in which this idea will come to its fullest fruition is, of course, Hamlet.)

A more literal "nothing"-ness arrives at Richard's cell soon after his metaphysical musings, in the form of Exton and the other murderers. The death scene is surprisingly short; murdered kings in Shakespeare's plays often get long and poignant speeches between their stabbing and their death, but Richard barely has time to curse Exton grimly for his deed and to bid farewell to the living world: "Mount, mount, my soul! thy seat is up on high, / While my gross flesh sinks downward, here to die" (111-112).

King Henry's mixed reaction to Exton's news in Act 5, Scene 6 suggests that he realizes his own hypocrisy and feelings of guilt for Richard's death. His words to Exton demonstrate this extraordinary ambivalence: "They love not poison that do poison need, / Nor do I thee. Though I did wish him dead, / I hate the murtherer, love him murthered" (V.vi.38-40). Henry tries to lay the burden of guilt upon Exton, condemning him to wander "[w]ith Cain" throughout the world; but he is well aware of his own complicity in Richard's death, as is clear when he says to his court, "Lords, I protest my soul is full of woe / That blood should sprinkle me to make me grow" (45-6). However, the deed has been done, and the guilt of Richard's murder weighs heavily on Henry from almost the first moment of his reign. This guilt, and the pledge Henry makes to take a pilgrimage to "the Holy Land" (49), remain hanging in the air as the play concludes; they are the seeds of plot threads that will be worked out in the remaining three plays of the tetralogy.