Magic Mirrors in Richard II

Abstract

Almost fifty years ago, Ernst Kantorowicz opined rather enigmatically that the looking glass in Richard II's deposition scene (act 4, scene 1) the of a mirror. (1) While much critical energy has been well spent on the rich iconographic tradition of the mirror--as symbol of both truth telling and falsity, of both vanity and self-knowledge--Kantorowicz's suggestive intuition has remained unexplored. (2) Yet, to ask why King Richard's does seem somehow is to activate some of the deposition scene's most powerful dramatic effects. One way to understand the mirror's aura is to recognize the episode as the climax in a sequence of three ritualized mirror spectacles that Richard deliberately imposes on Bolingbroke's would-be resignation scene. (Shakespeare's imagination also deliberately imposed them, for none of these incidents is traceable to his sources.) In each of these--the joint crown-holding tableau, Richard's formally enacted decoronation, and the episode proper--Richard conjures up specular images designed to have specific magical effects on the stage audience and on Bolingbroke in particular. His aim in the first two is to expose the contrived proceedings for what they are: a ceremonialized theft, a demonically inversive theater of state befitting Bolingbroke's upside-down world (79). In the third of these spectacles, embedded in a cluster of echoes from Doctor Faustus that evoke contemporary practices and witch beliefs, Richard deploys the stage-property in two complementary ways. As iconic symbol, it enriches the political and moral meanings of the preceding shows, which now coalesce within its frame. As literal looking glass wielded ritualistically, it enables Richard to simulate Elizabethan in a last effort to identify and indict Bolingbroke as demonic thief. However, while Richard's magic fails to move his onstage audience, it brings about an unexpected inner transformation. For in each of the mirror spectacles calculated to reflect Bolingbroke's demonic treason, Richard also glimpses himself. As a result, the episode proper is charged not only with Richard's animus toward Bolingbroke and his craving for self-justification but also with an anguished and courageous determination to confront his own moral being, his own demons. Situated at the play's climax, the scene's mirrors therefore bear heavily on Richard's characterization and on Shakespeare's representation of history both within and beyond the play. Let us begin by looking briefly at the ceremonial framing of the whole scene, for it defines the imaginative, moral, and political context for Richard's magic. Act 4, scene 1, begins with the formal entrance of BOLINGBROKE with the lords and others, named and unnamed, to Parliament. Despite the panoply of august persons (peers, senior ecclesiastics), herald, attendants, and officers, however, the imposing scene is a false shadow of the authority it pretends to embody. Holinshed reports that Bolingbroke had summoned Parliament vsing the name of king Richard in the writs directed forth to the lords, (3) as Shakespeare's Henry has also done. result can only be self-contradictory and self-invalidating, as Charles Forker suggests: The body that the usurper assembled to convict Richard of unfitness to rule had to be called in the name of the figure it was proposing to unseat Hence there is a gap between true and pretended authority that the appropriation of traditional setting, paraphernalia, and ritual cannot disguise. Indeed, such an appropriation is itself incriminating; for the scene's judicial function says Andrew Gurr, would require the royal regalia to be carried at the head of the procession, before the new judge Bullingbrook. It would also require the presence of the throne, since Parliament was formally rex in parliamento. …