ABSTRACT
In his deft, workmanlike adaptation of Shakespeare’s Richard II, performed at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1719, Lewis Theobald reduced John of Gaunt’s prophetic speech about England, “This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle” (2.1.40), to a shadow of itself and transposed it from the dying Gaunt to the young Duke of Aumerle. In Theobald’s play, Aumerle and the Lord Salisbury have been sentenced to death for their part in the plot to kill the new king, Henry Bullingbrook. The Bishop of Carlisle has also been sentenced but receives a pardon at the last moment and then plays out a heartfelt parting scene with the two doomed conspirators:
When the younger condemned man, Aumerle, pauses on his way off-stage to his execution, Salisbury speaks encouragingly to him:
Aumerle’s response includes six lines from Gaunt’s speech (note that the “suff’ring king” here is of course Richard not Bullingbrook):
Carlisle’s Christian encouragement of the condemned men, Salisbury’s word “pilgrimage,” which he uses to characterize their impending deaths, and Aumerle’s muted Christological reference to blood’s (but not their blood’s) redemptive capacity point to the persistence of a Christian dimension in English history and politics, but Theobald is careful mostly to expunge the strongly Christian quality of the much longer original, or at least the Christian quality of the language of the original.2 He keeps the reference to the pagan god Mars but cuts “This other Eden, demiparadise” (2.1.42). He cuts also the incantatory “This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England” (2.1.50), the lines about the “teeming womb of royal kings” along with their famous deeds “For Christian service and true chivalry.” Gone too is the reference to “the world’s ransom, blessed Mary’s Son”; and where Shakespeare has “This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,” Theobald writes, “This land of liberty, this dear, dear land,” a change that anticipates David Hume’s complaint that “in all the historical plays of Shakespeare … there is scarcely any mention of civil Liberty.” About Gaunt’s speech, Hume says,
Beyond the truncation and alteration of the speech itself, the context of the praise of England is completely altered. In the original, the vision of a royal, Christian, heroic England with its roots in the grand project of recovering the Holy Land from the infidel, a view that resonates with the Reformation ideal of England’s apostolic mission, dissolves into the grimy mercantilism of leases and inky blots and rotten parchment bonds. Old Gaunt, father of the future king, is on his death-bed and is inspired by a force that seems to speak within him or through him (note the play on “inspired” and “expiring,” as if the breath that speaks now is the expiration of a new breath that has been breathed into him; and note that he does not wait to speak the speech to the king, but utters his prophecy only in York’s-and our-presence): “Methinks I am a prophet new inspir’d, / And thus expiring do foretell of him” (2.1.31-32). In Theobald’s version, the speech comes near the end of the play rather than near the beginning. By the way, Theobald begins the action of his play, which is fashioned to observe the unities, with Richard’s return from Ireland (3.2 in the original); a very large stock of unused material is thereby made available, including the reference to the “long and weary pilgrimage,” which is Bullingbrook’s phrase in the original, and the six lines of Gaunt’s speech given to Aumerle.
