The Queen’s Conceit in Shakespeare’s Richard II

In act II, scene ii of Shakespeare’s Richard II, the Queen knows something that no one else knows: “Some unborn sorrow, ripe in Fortune’s womb, / Is coming towards me.” Criticism has tended to describe the Queen as giving birth to the necessary future of English monarchical history, but this article argues that by placing “Some unborn sorrow” in “Fortune’s womb” rather than her own, Shakespeare’s Queen knows the contingency of a future event that could have gone otherwise than it will. Her word for this form of knowledge is the “conceit”: a figured piece of language that substitutes the elegance of Occam’s Razor for the elaborate infrastructure of a poetic world.