Richard personifies the swords of Mowbray and Bolingbroke, imagining them as two lawyers arbitrating a dispute. Agreeing, for now, to accept their petition for trial by combat, the King states:
At Coventry upon Saint Lambert’s day.
There shall your swords and lances arbitrate
The swelling difference of your settled hate.
Since we cannot atone you, we shall see
Justice design the victor’s chivalry.—
In imagining their weapons as “arbitrating” a settlement, Richard emphasizes the legal status of a “trial by combat.” Rather than being represented in a court of law by two lawyers, then, the two men will use weapons to settle their dispute. Whoever wins, according to the law, will be declared victor and their version of events will be accepted as the truth by all. For Mowbray and Bolingbroke, both their sense of honor and their lives will be on the line.
Dueling was forbidden by law during Shakespeare's own lifetime, but here he portrays the earlier medieval society of England as one which took the legal status of dueling very seriously, as a legitimate substitute for trial by jury. The King’s speech affirms this legitimacy, both in metaphorically casting the swords as lawyers, and by stating that “Justice” will aid the innocent party and ultimately lead them to victory.
The Queen personifies the concept of hope as a false flatterer. While the King’s councilors, Bushy, Bagot, and Green, attempt to reassure the Queen that her husband will emerge victorious from his conflict with Bolingbroke, she rejects these consolations, stating:
Who shall hinder me?
I will despair and be at enmity
With cozening hope. He is a flatterer,
A parasite, a keeper-back of death,
Who gently would dissolve the bands of life
Which false hope lingers in extremity.
Her speech attributes various human qualities to the abstract concept of hope, who is presented as a smooth-talking con man. First, she describes hope as “cozening,” or in other words, a deceptive figure who will say anything to get his way. He is, she further argues, a “flatterer” and “parasite” who would deceive her with pacifying messages. Last, she compares hope to death, which is similarly personified here. While death would “gently dissolve the bands of life,” or in other words, allow life to come to a quick and painless end, hope instead prolongs suffering. The Queen states that, by despairing openly, she will make hope her enemy.
In personifying hope in this manner, the Queen suggests that hope, like a flatterer, simply tells a person what they want to hear, and obscures uncomfortable truths which should be confronted directly. Her speech here also suggests that the Queen is aware of the cause of her husband’s political downfall—his retinue, Bushy, Bagot, and Green, are themselves likely flatterers who have served as “parasites” of the throne.
Bushy, one of the flatterers surrounding King Richard II, personifies the abstract concept of “sorrow” in a speech to the Queen. He suggests that she has allowed her anxieties to get the best of her, stating:
For sorrow’s eyes, glazed with blinding tears,
Divides one thing entire to many objects,
Like perspectives, which rightly gazed upon
Show nothing but confusion.
Here, Bushy attributes human qualities to the abstract concept of sorrow. Its tears have “glazed” its eyes and have refracted back one image into twenty, like an image seen through crystal. Sorrow, in other words, is blinded by its own tears, imagining multiple problems when there might only be one. Sorrow struggles to make sense of what it sees, and the result is “nothing but confusion.” Bushy, then, attempts to minimize the Queen’s anxieties by suggesting that she is imagining dangers that do not exist as a result of her anxieties regarding the King’s voyage to Ireland.
Through this personification of sorrow, Bushy vividly describes the ways in which anxiety or grief can affect how a person views the world around them. Our senses, he suggests, do not convey neutral or objective information to us, but rather, they can be influenced by various factors, including our emotions. Though he urges the Queen not to be misled by her anxieties, her feeling of impending doom lingers.
