ABSTRACT
In the last moments of his life, Richard follows his loving queen’s injunction to emulate the royal lion, who thrusts out his paw in noble resistance at the moment of his death (V.i.29-34). Behaving, for once, like the warrior kings who were his ancestors, he kills two of his assassins with his own hands, and he uses his dying breath to reassert his status as king and to reclaim the land as his kingdom: “Exton, thy fierce hand/Hath with the King’s blood stain’d the King’s own land” (V.v.109-10). In the Henry IV plays, England is no longer a kingdom, but an aggregate of heterogeneous people and places. Geographical space replaces allegiance to monarchial authority as the defining principle of Englishness, but England is not yet a unified nation, for it is divided by endless civil wars.
