The Stylistic Self in Richard II

In the deposition scene of Richard II, Shakespeare's king obsessively repeats the word "myself." Only once in the play's first three acts does Richard use this word. But in the midst of the deposition, he says it seven times in seventy-five lines.1 Pressed by Bolingbroke to resign, Richard famously replies: "Ay, no. No, ay; for I must nothing be. / Therefore, no 'no', for I resign to thee. / Now mark me how I will undo myself" (4.1.201-3). The speech's wordplay has received much comment. Richard, we are told, plays on the homophone of "Ay" and "I" to express the annihilating impact of abdication: "I know no 'I.'" The lines represent, as Ernst Kantorowicz puts it in his influential reading, "the demise of Richard and the rise of a new body natural." We see the king "break apart" as the royal "we" slips away along with Richard's unified identity.2 But it is not the body natural's "I" that Richard suddenly repeats here; he has used "I" since the opening scene. Instead, he repeats "myself," a word-rather, a phrase-whose textual, linguistic, and literary condition calls into question the orthodox belief that deposition "break[s] apart" Richard's identity."Myself" counts as a phrase because in Shakespeare's time most reflexive pronouns appeared as not one but two words.3 The First Folio prints Richard's lines this way:Rich. I,no; no,I: for muft nothing bec:Therefore 110,110, for I refigne to thee.Now, marke me how I will vndoc my felfe.Figure 1: Excerpt from the First Folio, Sig. d2v. Image taken from The Bodleian First Folio: digital facsimile of the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays, Bodleian Arch. Gc. 7. URL : http ://firstfolio.bodleian.ox.ac.uk.Editors and scholars have largely taken the difference between the early modern "my seife" and the modern "myself" as an "accidental" textual feature, but the fact that "self" remains distinct from what possesses it ("me") suggests a complexity within orthographic convention. Even as "my self" func- tions reflexively and emphatically, the phrase features a "self" possessed grammatically by the personal pronoun "my." At once two words and one, it combines reflexivity (Richard undoes himself) and self-possession (he undoes his self). This peculiar morphology provides Richard the means to speak as if he possesses a self even as he talks about himself. Given the deposition scene's centuries-old status as a flashpoint of debate over sovereignty and selfhood, the king's repetition of "my self" introduces the question: if deposition is the "demise" of Richard's identity, why then would Shakespeare insist on, at the very moment of abdication, a term that denotes identity? Why, that is, would a figure supposedly losing his sense of self repeat a word that emphasizes self-possession?This essay argues that Richard is not losing but gaining a coherent sense of self. When Shakespeare gives Richard a flurry of "myself" s, he is activating a Senecan, Stoic keyword in early modern culture. In the 1580s and early 1590s, "my self" and other reflexive language had provided writers in the Senecan tragic vein with verbal resources for self-reference. While the vogue for Senecan drama leveled off in the mid-1590s, a Christianized Stoicism inspired by Seneca's writings found new popularity, and that trend too featured extensive use of reflexive language. This essay shows that Richard's repetition of "myself" constitutes a specifically Stoic linguistic capacity. In and after the deposition, he speaks with a new language of the self, rooted in the reflexivity of "my self." Both Senecan hero and sage, he finds personal empowerment in political disempowerment, and he manages to hold in unprecedented tension these evolving versions of the Stoic self. Such a dramatic trajectory cuts across the tradition that follows Kantorowicz in reading the play as Richard's journey from unity to fragmentation.4 Instead, only when Richard deposes himself, and in doing so completes his first sustained reflexive speech act, does he begin to speak with the unity of self-possession. …