Music at the Close

Abstract This chapter presents a reading of a single play, and a single scene, that both Englands Parnassus and Bel-vedére found irresistible: John of Gaunt’s dying moments in Richard II. Both anthologies gather the sententiae he bequeaths to his onlookers; Englands Parnassus also includes his paean to England, ‘This sceptred Ile’, making it the first collection to anthologize this perennial anthology-piece. This chapter explores the particular resonance, and extractability, of dying words, known for their proverbial truthfulness, and implicated in complex ways with the idea of dramatic character. It traces the parallel notions of nation-building in Shakespeare’s history and the anthologies in which it featured, while also observing the temporal syncopations of the political and the aesthetic. And it observes the affinity between anthologies and dying words, its passages picked like flowers from their first settings and wilting in their readers’ hands.