Mowbray: The Man Who Knew Too Much
First appears: Act 1, Scene 1
Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, stands accused by Bolingbroke in Act 1, Scene 1 of multiple crimes including the murder of the Duke of Gloucester. He denies some of it, not all of it. His position is complicated because some of what he did he may have done at Richard's orders.
Richard stops the trial by combat before either man can land a blow and banishes both. Mowbray is banished for life, effectively a death sentence. He dies in Venice before the play's main action concludes, mentioned almost in passing in Act 4.
He is a man who knew too much about a murder the king was involved in, removed from England before he could speak. His final speech at the banishment, about how being stripped of his English language has made him voiceless, is the play's first meditation on what language and identity mean to a person.
Key Scenes
Famous Quotes
“The language I have learn'd these forty years, my native English, now I must forgo: and now my tongue's use is to me no more than an unstringed viol or a harp.”
Thomas Mowbray — Act 1, Scene 3