 Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
Table of Contents Act II, SCENE 5 In another part of the field, King Henry enters alone away from the fray, bemoaning the current battle and seeing it as a sea whose currents go this way and that, moving against each other, but it is all the same sea even though one side wants to be the winner. He sees no winners however, just survivors. The King says he would rather be a shepherd than a king and sleep and live peacefully under a fresh tree's shade rather than drink from a golden cup and not sleep peacefully when care, mistrust and treason waits on him. Alarums are heard and a son enters who has killed his father by mistake as he was fighting on the other side, for the Yorkists. He sees the King sitting there and exclaims that the King resembles his father whom he had unwarily killed in fight. He asks God forgiveness and also his dead father's. The King says it is indeed a sad sight and while lions fight for their dens, poor lambs abide their enmity. He tells the son to weep and he shall also join him and let their hearts and eyes like civil war be blind with tears. Then enters a father who has killed his son and carries his body. Though the stout man had resisted, the father had killed the young man without knowing that it was his son. The father starts lamenting and asks his son to open his eyes and look at the showers of tears that have arisen, blown by the tempest of his heart upon his wounds. The father also curses the miserable age and the butchery and unnatural happenings occurring that a quarrel had caused. Seeing this sad spectacle, King Henry sighs and prays to heaven to have pity on them. He compares the purple blood on the man to the red rose, and his pale cheeks to the white rose, the fatal colors of the houses of Lancaster. Only one rose can flourish and the other shall fade. The son is frustrated about how he will face his mother after having killed his father. The father is despairing about having to face his wife after slaughtering his son, who, he says, will shed seas of tears and never be satisfied. King Henry realizes that all this has happened due to his inability to be a strong monarch and the nation will hold him responsible for all these woeful incidents. He thinks that his sorrow, as a king, is ten times greater than the father and son who mourn their dear one's death. The son takes away the body of his father and the father carries his son's body in his and the Queen enters with the Prince, who shouts to his father to flee, since they are being followed by Warwick, who is chasing them. The King is reluctant and cares little for his safety but does as he is told. Table of Contents | |
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