GARDENER    Go bind thou up yon dangling apricots

Which like unruly children make their sire

Stoop with oppression of their prodigal weight;

Give some supportance to the bending twigs.

Go thou and like an executioner

Cut off the heads of too-fast-growing sprays

That look too lofty in our commonwealth—

All must be even in our government.

You thus employed, I will go root away

The noisome weeds which without profit suck

The soil’s fertility from wholesome flowers.          (3.4.29-39)

Three distinct tasks establish this allegory, of the state as garden, the garden as state, a political and theatrical commonplace since at least the late middle ages. (Every coronation pageant since that of Henry VI had included a representation of the garden of the state.) The apricots need tying up; they’ve got too heavy for the tree as they ripen and it’s bowing beneath their weight. They’re like unruly children—apricots are named for their early fruiting, a praecox, as in precocious—they’re out of control, prodigals, spending their inheritance and giving their parents grey hairs. The conventional early modern spelling, apricocks, would give this a sexual innuendo too, a rampant libido (after all, Priapus is god of gardens) although this would be out of keeping with the Gardener’s earnestness in general. (His assistant or assistants might suppress a smirk.) And on other plants, some of the sprays, the shoots, have bolted, are growing out of control: they need to be pruned to keep everything neat and orderly, fair and equitable. (The executioner would seem more apt for dead-heading, but the choice of word will resonate not much later in the scene.) All must be even in our government. The Gardener himself isn’t going to sit back and supervise: having given instructions to his subordinates, in a clear and orderly fashion, he’s going to work alongside them, doing the weeding to clear the ground of noisome, noxious plants, the better for the flowers to grow and flourish.

The allegory isn’t subtle, but its totality—and this is just the start—persuades, as does the fact that it (like the rest of the play) entirely in verse; it’s a little interlude, a play within the play. The garden of the commonwealth, the nation is being oppressed by prodigals, some are being advanced too far and too fast at others’ expense, and still more are choking the lives of others, depriving them of the means to prosper and grow, sucking the land dry. It’s an attack on mismanagement and profligacy, favouritism and corruption, a sorry indictment of the state, the garden of England under King Richard; it’s a close-up of Gaunt’s prophetic vision of a fallen Eden.