Our play begins at a highly dramatic moment in Richard's reign. Like nearly all of Shakespeare's plays it takes right off from the get go leaving most in the audience unfamiliar with the story scratching their heads. There is clearly a quarrel occurring and the King, in his medieval capacity as supreme judge, is supposed to settle it. Bolingbroke and Mowbray are at each other's throats, throwing down gauntlets, making bold speeches, but so far as the audience is concerned, not being very helpful about the cause of this squabble. Bolingbroke calls Mowbray a traitor and a miscreant (don't you love that word). But he does not explain why he thinks him a traitor. And even if he is a traitor, isn't that the King's business not Bolingbroke's? For his part Mowbray calls Bolingbroke a slanderous villain. Well, I can understand that. If someone calls you a traitor, you probably want to say that he is lying. What is also interesting about these speeches is that even though nothing much is explained, they are long and full of literary language. After Bolingbroke has called Mowbray a miscreant, he says:

Too good to be so, and too bad to live,
Since the more fair the crystal in the sky,
The uglier seem the clouds that in it fly. (I, 1 40-43)

The analogy of Mowbray's high birth and nobility to the clear bright sky and his actions as dark and threatening storm clouds is ingenious, entertaining, perhaps witty, but from our point of view those three lines might have been better spent telling us what exactly he did so we could begin to get a grip on the story.