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Key to the First Exam: Richard II, I and II Henry IV Can wash the balm fron an anointed king. The breath of worldly men cannot depose The deputy elected by the Lord. Richard II, 3.2.54-7: The King speaks to Aumerle and the Bishop, asserting the divine right of kings and the sanctity of the king's two bodies. The king is consecrated by God, hedged about with divinity, and nothing can erase the balm that marks his election. Richard invokes the ideology of sacred kingship against the power of Bolingboke's armed might. It will not be enough.
More active-valiant or more valiant-young, More daring or more bold, is now alive To grace this latter age with noble deeds. For my part, I may speak it to my shame, I have a truant been to chivalry. I Henry IV 5.1.89-94. Hal to Worcester and the rebels before the battle of Shrewsbury. Hal's encomium graciously acknowledges Hotspur' s valor while admitting his own fault. But his language hints at Hotspur's desperate, even reckless, thirst for honor, and Hal's courtesy is more attractive than Hotspur's choleric scorn for the "madcap Prince of Wales . . . that daffed the world aside / And bid it pass" (4.1.957). I Henry IV 2.4.257-262. Falstaff to Hal and Poins in the alehouse when they try to shame him into admitting his cowardice in the robbery on Gads Hill. Falstaff's brilliant improvisation evades another reckoning (while admitting to cowardice in passing), but the joke plays as well on the sacredness of kings, who are not made by social custom but are ordained by God and can be recognized by their royal likenesses, the king of the beasts. And dressed myself in such humility That I did pluck allegiance from men's hearts. I Henry IV, 3.2.50-2: Henry to Hal when the father calls his prodigal son to a reckoning and explains his own crooked path to the crown. In his language the king represents him as a thief ("stole"), clothing himself in the appropriated garments of heavenly graciousness and sanctity but in fact drawing the allegiance of the realm from the king by force ("pluck"). is now bound in with shame, With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds. That England that was wont to conquer others Hath made a shameful conquest of itself. Richard II 2.1.61-6. The dying John of Gaunt prophesies to his brother York. "This blessed plot" of England, the realm which in Gaunt's feudal ideology belongs absolutely to the King, is now subject to legal contracts ("inky blots and rotten parchment bonds") in which the king, who ought to be above the law and a conqueror of others, makes himself a "bondslave to the law" (114) and submits to it as a higher authority. Identify four of the following terms: |