Broke in a Disorder'd String
On Richard II, Iris Murdoch and disenchantment
By my understanding, Shakespeare’s Richard II is a play about disenchantment. It raises the issue of how much of our happiness lies in self-deception, and the great sadness of the tale is to show us what happens to ourselves when that self-deception no longer washes.
The truth is that we rely on fictions in order to know how to live. Sanity and contentment depend to an extent on a sense that we are living out some kind of life-narrative, that our past, present and future somehow fit together with consistent themes, characters and intentions. If we believe that this narrative is being followed, then we achieve a delightful self-assurance. It is only when the life-narrative is interrupted – your fiancée dies, you get made redundant, you lose your throne – that our self-assurance collapses, and with it our sense of identity. The “music of our lives” is suddenly “broke in a disorder’d string,” out of tune and out of time. We don’t recognise it anymore. It is this interruption of melody or narrative and the desperate attempt to re-compose another which is, I suppose, what we mean by a mental breakdown – and this is exactly what Richard II suffers.
Perhaps this is why Richard accepts his dethronement so blithely, even welcoming it and hurrying it along. For him, it is “that sweet way to despair”. He accepts his fate not only because he is morbid and masochistic, but because it is at least a narrative which he can follow. It offers him a degree of certainty about his future, even if that future is going to end in the dungeons of Pomfret Castle. Any chance of hope or recovery becomes unwelcome to him because it would mean upsetting the narrative and thereby upsetting his own fragile sense of self. Richard welcomes the way to despair because it at least tells him which part to act: that of the martyr-king.
This brings to mind a book which I have recently read, Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good. Throughout her writings, Murdoch called for the cracking of the ego, what she termed “unselving”. She claimed, in an idea borrowed from Simone Weil, that we can only grow as moral creatures by paying a loving attention to reality. Like Richard II, too many of us construct our own fantasy of ourselves which prevents us from properly connecting with other people. It is only through an outward, objective, unvarnished attention to the particular that we recognise the unreality of our comfortable delusions and learn how to escape ourselves and how to love. And yet this raises the question: don’t many of us depend on these “self-deluding fantasies” in order to make sense of our lives? And aren’t most of them, providing comfort and refuge, relatively harmless? If it is true that “humankind cannot bear too much reality,” then is not to disenchant someone of their illusions, as Bolingbroke did, often the cruellest thing of all?
(By the way, if any of this has interested you, please come and see Richard II in St John’s Chapel in Eighth Week!)