QUEEN Thou, old Adam’s likeness, set to dress this garden,
How dares thy harsh rude tongue sound this unpleasing news?
What Eve, what serpent, hath suggested thee
To make a second fall of cursèd man?
Why dost thou say King Richard is deposed?
Dar’st thou, thou little better thing than earth,
Divine his downfall? Say where, when and how
Cam’st thou by this ill tidings? Speak, thou wretch! (3.4.73-80)
The Queen does imperious rage as well as existential angst. Her explicit invocation of the garden of Eden demonstrates that she, like Richard (and perhaps even more than he does) understands what’s at stake here in the deposition of a king: a rupture in the fabric of the state, an overturning of its settled and expected hierarchies and structures, that makes it a second Fall. The Edenic language might seem, initially, to obscure the class antagonism here: one of the Queen’s objections seems to be that a man of the Gardener’s lowly status has no business talking about such things; he is a wretch, a little better thing than earth, and his tongue is harsh and rude. (It’s easy, sometimes, to treat this episode in the garden as a jewel-like little allegory, a glowing illumination in the margin of a manuscript. More to it than that.) The Gardener is old Adam’s likeness because he is a gardener.
But an audience in the 1590s might well be reminded of the Peasant’s Revolt in 1381—which the historical Richard II famously put down—in which the proverbial ‘But when Adam delved and Eve span, who was then a gentleman?’ seems first to have appeared, attributed to the Lollard preacher John Ball. Ball was a character in the anonymous play Jack Straw, about the Revolt, which appeared in 1593. Bolingbroke’s seizing of the crown was not a popular uprising, but one of the things that this garden scene does, and in particular the Queen’s high-handed response to the Gardener, is to activate some associations and language which might make it seem that way. The Queen suggests that the Gardener has been got at, lied to—what Eve, what serpent has suggested, that is, tempted, seduced, persuaded thee—that he’s just passing on gossip, perhaps, with no regard for its implications and consequences, a second fall of cursèd man. (An exaggeration, to compare the prospect of the King’s deposition with the Fall, but not wholly absurd—and it’s very much the way in which Richard views it. So the Queen here is both establishing the closeness of their relationship, and reinforcing some of the key terms and concepts for the scene which will soon follow.) The Gardener is a little better thing than earth both because of his lowly status and because he is old Adam’s likeness, Adam meaning earth(Hebrew adamah), and being made of the dust of the ground. (It’s tempting for this sometime-Spenserian to wonder whether there’s a play, too, on georgic, the poetry of rural life, which in some ways is what this scene is: georgos is the Greek name for a farmer, a gardener.)
But mostly the Queen both wants to know more and, implicitly, to know that it isn’t true, for the Gardener to confess it’s just hearsay, overheard in the potting shed, gossip, rumour. Angry and frightened, she wants circumstances, where, when and how he learned this. Speak, thou wretch! (He would, if he could get a word in edgeways.)
