On the Wheel of Fortune, going down

In The Tragedy of Julius Caesar (as it is titled in the Folio of 1623), as in The Tragedy of King Richard the Second, Shakespeare is concerned with the downward swing of the Wheel of Fortuna, and even with what happens after a great historical ruler has reached bottom. After all, as Stanley Wells points out in his introduction to Julius Caesar, "Caesar is dead before the play is half over".

So in Richard II, the King's headlong fall takes place in the exact middle of the play, in 3.2. This is a highly compressed scene which begins with Richard's return from Ireland and his bold assertions that the very English stones and the angels of heaven too will fight for his divinely given kingship. But almost immediately after these assertions, by around line 150, Richard is dramatizing his fall by inviting his astonished court to sit upon the ground with him and "tell sad stories of the death of kings," all deposed by the various means of war, poison, murder. (Some are haunted by the ghosts of the rulers they've killed, as we'll see Brutus is in Julius Caesar.)

To an audience sensitive to the proper physical deportment and position of a king -- he is literally to be above his subjects -- this sitting on the ground is a stark gesture of abdication. (Remember there are very few stage directions in the early texts of the plays; but the Bishop of Carlisle's reproach, "My lord, wise men ne'er sit and wail their woes," suggests that the actor playing Richard really did sit down on stage, in all his 'kingly' robes.) It looks forward to the highly symbolic gesture of Richard coming down from the "walls" of Flint Castle in the very next scene -- from the balcony above the stage to the level of the other actors on the stage. This kind of physical enacting of high and low points in the career of a ruler also resonates through the more metaphorical allusions to "mounting Bolingbroke" and to Bolingbroke and Richard as "two buckets" in 4.1.189-90:

That bucket down and full of tears am I,
Drinking my griefs, whilst you mount up on high.