Bolingbroke. O, who can hold a fire in his hand
By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?*
Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite
By bare imagination of a feast?
Or wallow naked in December snow
By thinking on fantastic* summer’s heat?
O no, the apprehension of the good
Gives but the greater feeling to the worse.
Fell sorrow’s tooth doth never rankle more
Than when he bites, but lanceth not the sore.*
Gaunt. Come, come, my son, I’ll bring thee on thy way,
Had I thy youth and cause, I would not stay.*
My mother and my nurse that bears me yet.
Where’er I wander boast of this I can,
Though banish’d, yet a true-born Englishman.
From ‘Richard II’ by William Shakespeare (1564-1616), edited (1956) with notes by Peter Ure. The play was first performed in about 1595.
* A mountain range stretching across from the Black Sea in Russia and Georgia to Azerbaijan and the Caspian Sea. The regional climate is actually comparatively warm, but there is abundant snow in winter.
* The word ‘fantastic’ today generally has extravagant overtones, implying something stunning or wildly extreme, but here it just means imaginary, fancied.
* That is, that sorrow can be healing if its ‘bite’ also lances (surgically opens and drains) whatever it is that the patient is sorrowing over. By trying to soften sorrow’s bite, John of Gaunt may even be preventing sorrow from effecting Henry’s cure.
* Henry Bolingbroke (1366-1413) was, like Richard, a grandson of Edward III, and his ‘cause’ was to take the crown from his cousin. Henry’s hereditary right was much less: he was the son of Edward’s third son, John of Gaunt, whereas Richard was the son of Edward’s eldest, Edward the Black Prince, and was the late King’s own choice. But Richard had antagonised the Commons and many of his nobility, especially the powerful Percy family of Northumberland, and Henry promised to be less extravagant and more even-handed. In 1399, the year after he was banished, he returned and seized the throne with an army of no more than a few hundred men.