University of Cape Town – ELL2014F

Peter Anderson

11 April 2015

‘Sitting in an English Garden waiting for the Sun’:
Or, why no-one ever listens to sad stories of the death of kings’ gardeners, in William Shakespeare’s ‘The Life and Death of King Richard II’

“The fall that takes place [in Richard II] is the fall of an ideal.
The garden that was England, the enclosed state of medieval hierarchy, is now itself subject to a fall.”
– Marjorie Gardner in Shakespeare After All (2005: 245)

It seems fair to say the history of the English monarchy would no longer be of any soul-catching, heart-rending interest to the world in general were it not for William Shakespeare. That is not to do disservice to the practical achievements of a series of eras incited by the efforts of quite a few particularly intriguing Kings and Queens, but merely to make a- probably the- foundational point of consideration when contrasting the Bard’s ‘Histories’, particularly the ‘Henriad’ Quadrilogy in question, with the honest-to-goodliness facts of the world-bound matter they depict: the dramatization of history necessarily entails its mythologization. It takes a poetic genius like Shakespeare to construct and convey capital-H History’s ever-presence through proclamatory words alone. Richard II (1595), as the introductory installment in the series, is relatively underserved (if the term could ever be used in relation to Shakespeare Studies) within this perspective; the play flat-out requires an elucidation not just of the “spoiled, narcissistic, self-destructive poet” (Greenblatt, 2004: 300) occupying its eponymous center but, further, of the ways in which we, the audience, are interpellated into his simultaneous veneration and disparagement. As Marjorie Garber puts it, “[w]hatever history’s verdict on Richard of Bordeaux, poetry’s assessment of him is, however reluctantly, admiring” (2005: 258), and Elizabethan audiences haven’t been the only perennial suckers since 1595 for worthy verse. The scene though that exemplifies ‘our’ relationship to the once and former king is one he’s paradoxically absent from: Act 3, Scene IV; ‘The Gardener’s Scene’, in which the king, the English nation and the audience itself metaphorically materialize for the purposes of our meditation. It is this dissonant departure from Richard’s four-act-long lament of his own downfall that deserves an analysis matched in immersive insight to the occasionally offhand majesty of Shakespeare’s art.

Despite his unparalleled reputation for literary humanism, Shakespeare never really betrayed a certain loyalty to the centralizing dramas of the Rich and the rich in Power. This is partly because he wrote for an audience that adored ‘high’ narrative (if sometimes only as a foil to its ‘low’ entertainment environs), partly because he had an enduring obsession with the introversion & responsibility that complements the Freedom such status affords, but especially, in the case of the Henriad and his other Histories, because the recorded words and deeds of kings and nobles were available for him to draw on, while those of their lower class countrymen were decidedly not. The latter were not significant in the scheme of English history and when they do appear in the Histories they either serve as functionaries, as arbiters of miniscule sub-plots, or they speak only of the protagonist’s pains. The intrigue of ‘The Gardener’s Scene’ perhaps lies in its combination of the use of all three roles for its titular character in what you could deem the play’s one purely plotless and ahistorical moment. In Garber’s words again, it is a prime example of “a “window scene,” a moment of perception that introduces characters we have not met before and will not meet again, but whose observations and actions comment trenchantly on the play of which they are a part.” (2005: 245-6) In Richard II we have not even yet encountered characters of the same class as the Gardener and Servants who share the majority of the lines, but it begins first with the Queen languishing outside, lamenting with her ladies the lack of “sport” to “drive away the heavy thought of care” (3. IV. 1-2) for her husband’s fate that we already know via dramatic irony is perfectly justified. Her insoluble angst is thankfully interrupted by the entrance of three of her garden staff, of whom both she and we are interested to overhear “talk of state”(3. IV. 27) as we have only so far heard mention amongst the nobles of the “wavering commons” without once hearing from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, what the base opinion of Power’s recent machinations actually is. And, on cue, the three speak of their daily charge (the garden itself) as a veritable metonym for the Kingdom, contextualizing the entirety of the preceding three acts of the play in the botanical terms they ‘inherently’ understand:

SERVANT : Why should we, in the compass of a pale,                                                    Keep law and form and due proportion,                                                                              Showing as in a model our firm estate,
When our sea-walled garden, the whole land,
Is full of weeds, her fairest flowers choked up,                                                                         Her fruit trees all unpruned, her hedges ruined,                                                                         Her knots disordered and her wholesome herbs.                                                                 Swarming with caterpillars?

GARDENER: Hold thy Peace.                                                                                                 He that hath suffered this disordered spring                                                                              Hath now himself met with the fall of leaf.

(3. IV. 40-9)

They go on to speculate over Richard’s critical failures, what counter-measures he could have enacted for his security in “idle hours” (3. IV. 66) and then- shadowing most audiences at this point- predict the inevitability of his deposition, before the Queen herself intercedes to end their intention “[t]o make a second fall of cursed man”. The gardener, quite amazingly, answers back in unhappy correction to confirm his employer’s ignorance and further exacerbate her disquiet. For his misfortunate status as her too-late messenger, the Queen curses his “skill” (3. IV. 103)- the work that defines his place in society- along with her own fate as the wife of an unseated monarch. The gardener, however, keeps the last word, accepting her grievance as qualified and planting “a bank of rue” where her recent tears just fell “[i]n the rememberance of a weeping queen.” (3. IV. 107)

There is nothing ostensibly essential about this scene. The audience might in retrospect appreciate the check-in with the Queen before the melodrama of her and Richard’s later extended parting, and it does provide some exposition to prepare for the completion of Richard’s abdication of his identity- the throne. But its simplest function is just as a charitable respite between the twin monolithic showcases of the ‘Debasement Scene’ at Flint Castle and the ‘Deposition Scene’ in Parliament, but even then this purpose is undercut in the latter by the untaxingly chaotic comedy of the many gage-throwings and accusations that fizzle off before Richard’s eventual aggrieved arrival. Instead, what we can actually perceive in this scene is one of Shakespeare’s subtlest instances of ironized class commentary; a concern in Richard II as otherwise inconspicuous as it is virtually trumpeted in the remaining three plays of the Henriad through the presence of Falstaff and his company. Garber explains the subtext of the Gardener’s own metaphor: ”Just as the garden is a common image for the state, so in Renaissance literature the gardener was often both a king figure and a God figure, and this Gardener rules his little island with an orderliness and care that stands in sharp contrast to that of Richard.” (2005: 246) Just subsequent to Richard’s ‘debasement’ to the ground-level of his subjects, a typical subject is implicitly claiming his own superiority in ‘governance’ to the still-reigning King. It is this perceived gall that so irks the Queen’s unknowing sense of propriety, and thus she sets about abusing him by resorting to the biblical analogies that usually consecrate the hegemony of their shared Christian Kingdom (“What Eve, what serpent hath suggested thee…” (3. IV. 75)) and by denying his right, as a “little better thing than Earth”(3. IV. 78), to use his “harsh rude tongue” (3. IV. 74) to speak of the toppling of a divine order. It should now be recalled that “[t]he Gardener, although he is a worker, not a nobleman, speaks in verse, not prose, and in fact all of Richard II is in verse…” (Garber, 2005: 246) and so the linguistic difference between the King and the commoner in this play is evidently one of refinement not of category, which is to say in direct opposition to Shakespeare’s method at the other end of the Henriad, where Henry V’s inflamed versified war cries are made nigh-on epochal by their bare contrast with the flat prose spoken by the majority of his soldiers. It is perhaps unfair then to agree with the Queen’s harangue of the Gardener’s perfectly apt usage of poetry, but the fact that he, as the only lower-class character in Richard II possessed of more than two lines, still nonetheless aspires to reflect “the splendor of [Shakespeare’s] lyric impulse” (Ackroyd, 2005: 265) in imitation of Richard’s own performative bent makes him a unintended radical, a stain on the otherwise pristine vista of verse that stands out even more than it would if he were to speak in prose.

What is poetry after all, if not order, metre and a signpost of hierarchical luxury? As hinted before, the fact that Richard II is the only one of Shakespeare’s English History plays to be written entirely according to the internal strictness of poetic dialogue – as if, in this one instance, the dramatization of history were synonymous with its versification – surely allows us the leap of logic to claim that this technique hagiographically emphasizes Richard II’s late-medieval reign as an era of accepted Order (socially, linguistically, politically) preceding a flux of democratization, of relative anarchy (exemplified by Falstaff), predicted more apocalyptically within the play itself as the inevitable ‘revenge of nature’ following the deposition of a Christian nation’s rightful king. Richard himself is undoubtedly the key case-study in this linguistic idealization of the Chain of Being. As the poet-professor Mark Van Doren put it “[Shakespeare] has not made a great man of [Richard II]. He has made a poet, a great minor poet” (2005: 68) whose “theme is himself. He dramatizes his grief. He spends himself in poetry- which is something he loves more than power and more than any other person.” (2005: 72) Almost from the moment he returns to Welsh soil from the Irish front only to hear of Bolingbroke’s ‘rebellion’, his raw anger is tempered by the ease with which he falls into telling “sad stories of the death of kings…” (3. II. 156) He is the only character in the play to take consistent opportunities to soliloquize or indeed monologue at all and, in comparison to his unceasing verbiage throughout his deposal, Bolingbroke remains practically speechless. But it is exactly this verbal impotence, this impossibility he finds to poeticize himself out of his condition that dooms Richard (and the medieval social order) to a political reliquary. It is no longer enough for him simply to be born, and to speak with the poignant grandeur1 of, a king; he has to remember to govern with wisdom and discrete authority too, qualities which Bolingbroke happens to represent to a T.

This is also, of course, the Gardener’s own diagnosis of Richard’s failure, that he should have “trimmed and dressed his land/ as we this garden!” (3. IV. 56-7) But what gives this character such detached, objective judgement in the midst of a veritable Revolution? He doesn’t give a specific answer when confronted on his knowledge by the Queen, only that “[He] speak[s] no more than everyone doth know.” (3. IV. 91) And coming where it does in the scheme of the play- as Richard has just acceded to the loss of all power but his life and title- and coming from whom says it- the one speaking commoner in the play, the crowd’s representative- we should assume this ‘everyone’, in Shakespeare’s signature gesture of populism, to include ourselves, the audience. Thus, the Gardener is, in the defining instance, a commentator inserted into the play at its fulcrum-point

1. The Gardener chips in here: “ In [Richard’s] scale is nothing but himself/ And some few vanities that make him light…” (3. IV. 85-6) while Bolingbroke has the support of the masses.

between Richard’s fall and Bolingbroke’s rise. He knows more of Richard’s fate than the Queen does because he’s essentially watched the entirety of events from our position, implicitly judging that, as Jean Renoir would say, ‘everyone has their reasons’. After the end of Act 3, it can’t be doubted that Henry IV will soon “[a]scend his throne, descending now from [Richard]” (4.I. 111) but it remains painfully ambiguous- to us and the Gardener- whether this is an ascent or descent for the nation as a whole, especially considering that the new king inaugurates his rule with the old’s ‘accidental’ assassination by Exton. This ambiguity should thus be redoubled back into Shakespeare’s views on both History and Violence. Without Richard’s deposition, the War of the Roses would not have ensued but neither would Henry V have synthesized Richard II & Falstaff’s majestic eloquence with the mass appeal once held by his father to become a “Star of England” at Agincourt. The oxymoronic morality of dramatised History is thus Shakespeare’s defining thematic concern through the Henriad, as dialectically inextricable as life and death, rise and fall.

Shakespeare was not a historian, yet our conceptions of Roman emperors and English kings would undoubtedly be hollow and plain without his imagination’s influence. If this can be put down to any one reason besides his still mysterious genius, it would be his capacity to weave the recorded lives of powerful men into grandiloquent stories with the material of poetry, inevitably embellishing his protagonists with the forcefulness of his own command of language and portrayal. However, it is exactly ‘language and portrayal’ that Shakespeare himself, as we have seen, implicitly questions in the Gardener’s Scene. As Stephen Greenblatt historicizes: “The distinction between tragedy and history was not an important one for Shakespeare… the underlying structure of most of human history, with its endless pattern of rise and fall, seemed to him tragic, and conversely tragedy as he conceived it was rooted in history.” (2004: 296-7) This inherent ambiguity in dramatization itself- between the poetic and the accurate- along with its marginalization of non-dramatic, uninteresting figures- of individuals in the addressed crowd- have been shown to be Shakespeare’s points of fascination in this scene and thus also surely should be ours too when reading it.

Word Count: 2245

Reference List:

Ackroyd, Peter. 2005. Shakespeare: The Biography. Chatto & Windus: London. Garber, Marjorie. 2005. Shakespeare After All. First Anchor Books Edition: New York.

Greenblatt, Stephen. 2004. Will in the World. Jonathan Cape: London.

Van Doren, Mark. 2005. Shakespeare. New York Review Books Classics: New York.

Irrelevant After-quote included here only for the sheer coincidence of its discovery during a break from this essay’s composition:

“Wake Up. Poetry is Shakespeare and nobody but Shakespeare and don’t Pound me no Tolstoy me broach me no rejoinder! Shakespeare is a vast continent, Shelley is a village. Why do you insist … on being DIFFERENT and choosing unlikely Shelley for your hero, why do you be afraid of being like everybody else and admitting the Supreme Greatness of Bard William Shakespeare? How, ask Burroughs about Shakespeare, he spent years with the Immortal Bard on his lap … Burroughs in fact bespeaks himself like Shakespeare.”

– Jack Kerouac in a letter to Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso (December 10, 1957)