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-wallèd 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? (3.4.40-47)
The allegorically and politically sophisticated Gardener has trained his servant well, enabling him to argue back by elaborating the Gardener’s own terms. Why should we in the compass of a pale, that is, in this enclosed garden (a pale is a fence made from stakes or poles, as in palisade) keep everything neat and tidy? (This emphasis on law and form and due proportion in a garden probably makes even more sense in a highly patterned early modern garden, where symmetry of design, paths, arbours, and especially knots was highly prized and cultivated.) The firm estate, the solid, stable ordering of our garden here should be like a model of the land at large. But instead our sea-wallèd garden, England (Gaunt had described England as the precious stone set in the silver sea, which serves it in the office of a wall) the whole land is full of weeds, overgrown, polluted, chaotic, poisoned, corrupt. The fairest flowers are choked up, stifled, unable to flourish. The fruit trees haven’t been pruned (and so they won’t be able to bear fruit as well as they should, and the harvest will be poor; there will be famine); the hedges are ruined (so the boundaries between different fields and estates have become uncertain; stock can wander at will, get into the crops), the knots, the most sophisticated, ordered, elite feature of the garden, offering an opportunity to display wit and taste—they’re disordered too, no longer, perhaps, neatly dividing a parterre in a kitchen garden, so that the wholesome herbs are ruined, swarming with caterpillars, caterpillars like Bushy, Bagot, and Green, described as such by Bolingbroke in 2.3 (the caterpillars of the commonwealth which I have sworn to weed and pluck away; caterpillars were thought to be parasites, like Richard’s favourites). It’s all been neglected, ruined. Why should we bother with our own garden, when the macrocosm of which it’s meant to be the micro is in such a mess?
