Use Of Divine Rhetoric In Shakespeare's Richard II

She argues that because terms like “divine inspiration” or “sacred spirit” were usable when praising Queen Elizabeth I that a sacred ruler, one endowed with a divine aura or “sacred spirit,” could exist outside the sanctified, yet corrupted autocracy Richard represents (56). In Elizabethan England, two centuries after Richard was overthrown, the divine rhetoric Shakespeare utilizes in Richard’s speeches, like the one above, clearly had not disappeared. This rhetoric’s ability to cycle in and out of popularity means that though Richard’s particular divinity suffers under the weight of his usurpation, and Bolingbroke, the destroyer of the Richard’s throne’s divinity, struggles to establish himself as a divine ruler, Elizabeth could use divine rhetoric because the usurpation of Richard did not mark the descent of the monarchy’s divine aura and did not destroy the concept of the sacred ruler in England.
Though this aura would seem to survive the historical fall of King Richard II within the context of Richard II, the initial

Perhaps more significantly, no army of humans come to defend his right either, as he claims soon after his speech about divine right, “the blood of twenty thousand men / did triumph in my face and they are fled; / And till so much blood thither come again / Have I not reason to look pale and dead?” (3.2, 76-79). Learning that all mortal troops, who once defended his divine right to rule, have left him defenseless, Richard grows pale—his absolute power weakened. When beautiful speech must culminate in action, Richard finds all human soldiers, who were moments earlier nothing in comparison with the angelic ones at his beck and call, have left him—the unfavorable, reckless ruler, who like a landlord rather than a king, has leased out royal lands—for the