The mood of Richard II is bleak and grave, as it depicts the downfall of a monarch, an event that threatens to destabilize the kingdom of England. Richard II’s tragic end would have been familiar to audiences in Shakespeare’s time, and the play moves steadily towards this dark and inevitable conclusion. There are few if any moments of levity to lighten the mood, and the few moments of humor are clear examples of dark or “gallows” humor. There are none of the celebrations readers might expect from Shakespeare’s lighter comedies, and the atmosphere in court is tense and fearful, reflecting characters’ anxieties for the future of the kingdom.
Additionally, many of the play’s lengthier monologues and soliloquies are melancholic and introspective, from John of Gaunt’s deathbed reflections to King Richard II’s meditations on the transience of life. In many ways, the tragic king’s own speeches, full of self-pity and despair, set the mood for the play as a whole. When Richard II returns from Ireland and learns of Bolingbroke’s rebellion, he responds with a speech that is suffused with the language of death and decomposition:
Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs,
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.
Let’s choose executors and talk of wills.
And yet not so, for what can we bequeath
Save our deposèd bodies to the ground?
While his advisors urge him to take action, the King instead acts as though the battle has already been lost, and he grapples with his own mortality. He evokes a series of images commonly associated with death— graves, worms, epitaphs—and imagines the story of a person’s life as nothing but words written in dust, sure to be blown away and forgotten. Ultimately, he concludes gravely that all that is left at the end of life is a body buried under the ground, even for a figure as powerful as a King. This pessimistic speech, morbidly fixated on death and the futility of earthly endeavors, reflects the bleak mood of the play more broadly.
