Language and Reality in Richard II

Richard stands at Flint Castle and speaks to Bolingbroke across the divide, declaring that “Not all the water in the rough rude sea / Can wash the balm from an anointed king.” The words are beautiful and absolute. They assert that no physical force can undo what language and ceremony have made real. An anointing is a fact; water cannot erase it. This is Richard’s deepest faith: that words and names and titles are not mere sounds but actual things, endowed with power. The name “king” should carry weight because God spoke it into being. But the play systematically proves that Richard has confused language with reality.

As the play moves forward, language becomes increasingly divorced from what it names. Bolingbroke claims he comes only to reclaim his inheritance, but his army grows. He speaks of loyalty while gathering power. Richard speaks of kingship and divinity while becoming powerless. The deposition scene in Act 4 is an exquisite example: Richard performs his own removal from power, narrating it in elaborate language as he does it. “Now mark me how I will undo myself,” he says, turning his loss into poetry. The crown is handed over, but Richard makes it into a ceremony, a work of art. Language becomes the only thing Richard can still command.

Bolingbroke, by contrast, understands that words are just sounds. He does not waste time on grand declarations. He acts. When he wants power, he takes it. He speaks plainly to common people, and they follow him—not because his words are beautiful but because his words match what he is actually doing. Where Richard separates language from action, creating a tragic gap between what he says and what he is, Bolingbroke unites them. His speech and his power are one thing. Yet there is something troubling in this too. If language has no special power, if words are just air, then what is left? Beauty disappears. Meaning becomes contingent on force.

By the end, Richard has become pure language. In his cell, he speaks and philosophizes and creates meaning through words when he can create nothing else. “The shadow of my sorrow,” he calls his grief—acknowledging that even his deepest feelings are just shadows, reflections, language about something that cannot be spoken directly. The play suggests that language is both necessary and dangerously misleading. Richard believed in the magic of words—in names and titles and sacred speech—and was destroyed by that faith. Bolingbroke ignores language entirely and becomes king. But neither approach brings peace. The play ends with Richard dead and Bolingbroke guilty, suggesting that language and reality are forever mismatched, and that believing in either one too completely will break you.