 Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Table of Contents Act II, Scene V Summary Edmund Mortimer, Richard Plantagenet’s maternal uncle, is near the end of his life. He sends for his nephew and Richard comes to see him in the prison. Richard asks him the circumstances surrounding his father’s death, Mortimer informs him about the wrongful usurpation by Henry IV. And how in the attempt to right this wrong, Richard’s father lost his life and Mortimer is sentenced to a lifetime in prison. Mortimer pronounces Richard his heir to the throne and advises him to be careful and implacable in his purpose. Mortimer dies leaving behind Richard who takes this advice to heart and soon leaves for the parliament, where he hopes to be restored to his old family name and fortune. Notes This scene foreshadows York’s claim to the crown: his father had married Anne Mortimer, and the Mortimers were, through the marriage of Edmund Mortimer, the third Earl of March to Philippa, daughter of the Duke of Clarence, descended from the third son of Edward III. Henry VI descended only from the fourth son, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. So, accordingly the throne rightfully belongs to the heir of the Mortimers, and Richard is the one whom Edmund Mortimer declares as his heir before dying. Edmund Mortimer is shown as a blind and broken figure, who dies in prison after wishing prosperity to Richard. He serves an important dramatic function. It is from him that the Yorkist cause derives its decisive initial impulse, when he describes in detail how he and his descendants have been forcibly disinherited by Bolingbroke and then exhorts his Kinsman to recover the title wrongfully held by the usurper’s grandson. The upheaval of the soon to come civil war draws its original impulse from Mortimer in this scene, where frustrated ambition is passed down to a youthful successor, eager to renew an almost extinguished claim to the crown. As the tragic relic of an insurrection ruthlessly crushed by Bolingbroke nearly thirty years earlier, Mortimer symbolizes the tragic emptiness of the ambition, which has wasted the vitality and promise of his own youth. In this play, whose later action is dominated by a series of attempts to snatch the crown, he is the first representative of the best for power, which impels them all. However, Mortimer’s attempt is long past, and the figure that communicates the same deadly impulse to Richard embodies the futility of all such aspirations. Emaciated, sightless and physically impotent after a lifetime of imprisonment, he is blind to his own example and substance that his pursuit of the crown has entailed; nor can Richard appreciate the moral lesson, which confronts him. Mortimer explains how Richard’s father was executed. Uncle, father, son are all victims of the same insane impulse, which obliterates all sense of personal danger and moral obligation by its promise of majesty and power. At the end of the scene, death puts an end to Mortimer’s exhausted and delusive hopes of achieving the crown. To Richard this final extinction of hope indicates only a want of lofty aspiration in Mortimer. "Here dies the dusky torch of Mortimer," he comments over his uncle’s body, "choked with ambition of the meaner sort." He further declares his intent to avenge the wrong done to him and to heed his uncle’s advice thus foreshadowing his implacability of purpose in achieving his ambition at all costs. Table of Contents | |
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