Richard and Anne: A Platonic Love Story
Mary Purnell
A heart-wrenching, 79-line goodbye, the sheer length of the parting scene between Richard and Anne at the end of Richard II tells a story. Both make moves to take leave of the other five times before they finally do, engaging in a “You hang up! No, you hang up!” kind of exchange that would almost be funny if it weren’t so very sad. They fill their final moments together with talk of their mutual sorrow, of how “two together weeping make one woe” (V.i.88) – a sour remembrance of marriage vows that called for man and wife to become one. Most likely, however, that unity would come through shared joy, not despair.
This is how the real Richard and Anne felt about each other. Historically, the two “were rarely separated” (Hilton 289); Holinshed recounts in his Chronicles of England that Anne travelled with her husband on numerous political and military exploits, and that Richard “loved hir intirelie” (481). According to the historian, when she died in 1394, “the king took such a conceit with the house of Shene, where she departed this life, that he caused the buildings to be throwne downe and defaced” (481).
The closeness of their relationship is not lost from Shakespeare’s Richard II, but it exists almost exclusively in the Queen’s lines. She spends the entirety of the play in a profound melancholy, and it’s not long before we get a sense of why: “I know no cause / why I should welcome such a guest as grief,” she explains to Bushy, “save bidding farewell to so sweet a guest / as my sweet Richard” (II.ii.6-9). From her second line in the play, Anne’s devotion to her husband steps into the front and center of her character. Through her sorrow at his departure, Shakespeare recreates the relationship of the young couple that hardly spent time apart.
But he takes it further. Something else is upsetting the Queen, something “more than with parting from [her] lord the king” (13). She senses something terrible, some approaching doom – “some unborn sorrow ripe in Fortune’s womb” (10). We know that as fate would have it, she was right.
Anne’s melancholy in the play is much more than a momentary case of the blues: albeit unwittingly, she is prophesying her husband’s demise. There’s a certain power in the queen’s hazy sense of foreboding; she is so connected to her husband that she feels the tremors of his coming deposition and death in her “inward soul” well before anyone in the palace has cause for concern (29). This connection transcends the physical, assuming a spiritual quality so heightened and powerful that it becomes mystical and prophetic.
And yet, the king and queen hardly interact at all. Until their moving goodbye in Act Five, their only exchange comes in the form of an offhand comment as they take leave of the dying Gaunt: Richard says to his wife, “Come on, our queen. Tomorrow must we part. / Be merry, for our time of stay is short” (II.i.231-232).
Anne and Richard barely interact in the play, but they somehow remain totally in sync on a spiritual level. As evidenced by Anne’s strange, metaphysical line to her husband’s world, there’s some invisible connection between them that is completely independent of physical and verbal interaction, thereby epitomizing Platonic love.
Whether or not they’re true, rumors flew in Richard’s day that called his sexual orientation into question. It appears Shakespeare was well aware of these rumors, given Bolingbroke’s eyebrow-raiser of an accusation against Bushy and Green for certain undisclosed “foul wrongs” with the king (III.i.15). While we may never know if there was any truth to these rumors in real life, their verity in the context of Shakespeare’s play would only serve to further emphasize the purely platonic love that the characters of Richard and Anne share.
This is how the real Richard and Anne felt about each other. Historically, the two “were rarely separated” (Hilton 289); Holinshed recounts in his Chronicles of England that Anne travelled with her husband on numerous political and military exploits, and that Richard “loved hir intirelie” (481). According to the historian, when she died in 1394, “the king took such a conceit with the house of Shene, where she departed this life, that he caused the buildings to be throwne downe and defaced” (481).
The closeness of their relationship is not lost from Shakespeare’s Richard II, but it exists almost exclusively in the Queen’s lines. She spends the entirety of the play in a profound melancholy, and it’s not long before we get a sense of why: “I know no cause / why I should welcome such a guest as grief,” she explains to Bushy, “save bidding farewell to so sweet a guest / as my sweet Richard” (II.ii.6-9). From her second line in the play, Anne’s devotion to her husband steps into the front and center of her character. Through her sorrow at his departure, Shakespeare recreates the relationship of the young couple that hardly spent time apart.
But he takes it further. Something else is upsetting the Queen, something “more than with parting from [her] lord the king” (13). She senses something terrible, some approaching doom – “some unborn sorrow ripe in Fortune’s womb” (10). We know that as fate would have it, she was right.
Anne’s melancholy in the play is much more than a momentary case of the blues: albeit unwittingly, she is prophesying her husband’s demise. There’s a certain power in the queen’s hazy sense of foreboding; she is so connected to her husband that she feels the tremors of his coming deposition and death in her “inward soul” well before anyone in the palace has cause for concern (29). This connection transcends the physical, assuming a spiritual quality so heightened and powerful that it becomes mystical and prophetic.
And yet, the king and queen hardly interact at all. Until their moving goodbye in Act Five, their only exchange comes in the form of an offhand comment as they take leave of the dying Gaunt: Richard says to his wife, “Come on, our queen. Tomorrow must we part. / Be merry, for our time of stay is short” (II.i.231-232).
Anne and Richard barely interact in the play, but they somehow remain totally in sync on a spiritual level. As evidenced by Anne’s strange, metaphysical line to her husband’s world, there’s some invisible connection between them that is completely independent of physical and verbal interaction, thereby epitomizing Platonic love.
Whether or not they’re true, rumors flew in Richard’s day that called his sexual orientation into question. It appears Shakespeare was well aware of these rumors, given Bolingbroke’s eyebrow-raiser of an accusation against Bushy and Green for certain undisclosed “foul wrongs” with the king (III.i.15). While we may never know if there was any truth to these rumors in real life, their verity in the context of Shakespeare’s play would only serve to further emphasize the purely platonic love that the characters of Richard and Anne share.