"All souls that will be safe fly from my side; For time hath set a blot upon my pride."
Aumerle asks him to remember who he is, and at once he springs from dejection to confidence again. He cries:
"Awake, thou sluggard majesty! thou sleepest. Is not the king's name forty thousand names?"
The next moment Scroop speaks of cares, and forthwith fitful Richard is in the dumps once more. But this time his weakness is turned to resignation and sadness, and the pathos of this is brought out by the poet:
"Strives Bolingbroke to be as great as we? Greater he shall not be; if he serve God We'll serve him, too, and be his fellow so. Revolt our subjects? that we cannot mend; They break their faith to God, as well as us. Cry woe, destruction, ruin, loss, decay; The worst is death, and death will have his day."
Who does not hear Hamlet speaking in this memorable last line? Like Hamlet, too, this Richard is quick to suspect even his friends' loyalty. He guesses that Bagot, Bushy, and Green have made peace with Bolingbroke, and when Scroop seems to admit this, Richard is as quick as Hamlet to unpack his heart with words:
"O villains, vipers, damned without redemption! Dogs, easily won to fawn on any man! Snakes,"
But as soon as he learns that his friends are dead he breaks out in a long lament for them which ranges over everything from worms to kings, and in its melancholy pessimism is the prototype of those meditations which Shakespeare has put in the mouth of nearly all his favourite characters. Who is not reminded of Hamlet's great monologue when he reads:
"For within the hollow crown, That rounds the mortal temples of a king, Keeps Death his court: and there the antic sits Scoffing his state, and grinning at his pomp; Allowing him a breath, a little scene To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks; Infusing him with self and vain conceit, As if this flesh, which walls about our life, Were brass impregnable; and, humour'd thus, Comes at the last, and with a little pin[1] Bores through his castle wall, and--farewell, King!"
[Footnote 1: In Hamlet's famous soliloquy the pin is a "bodkin."]
Let us take another two lines of this soliloquy:
"For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings."