Trees, Ballads, Iconoclasm and the Garden in Shakespeare’s Richard II

ABSTRACT This article reads Richard II’s garden scene in the context of early modern debates about sacramentalism and the created world. The garden scene reveals its awareness of these debates and the ways in which they occurred in genres both high (learned tracts, printed books) and low (oral cultures, cheap print). The gardener demonstrates his political and theological sophistication through his hands-on knowledge of gardening. In the same way, ordinary people off-stage participated in their culture’s most urgent controversies through popular genre that were frequently dismissed by their social betters.

decades of the sixteenth century, when Shakespeare was growing up, the reformation of nature was only just beginning to advance in the learned and Protestant forums of the sermon and printed tract. It is in these decades that we can trace the escalating divergence between unreformed, common cultures that remained invested in the potential for trees and plants to possess divine signification, and a reformed, literate disdain for such practices as backward and blasphemous.
The iconoclast Thomas Jackson articulates this disdain most acutely when he denounces certain devotional practices among the illiterate for whom, 'the marigold' was sometimes seen as deserving 'divine honour'. 3 Jackson's choice of this flower in particular is a glance at the long-standing practice among commoners of granting Marian names to local plants. 4 In one small phrase, Jackson's criticism manages to yoke together Catholicism, paganism and illiteracy as the mutually-informing cause of those backward devotional practices that learned reformers were attempting to purge from the English cultural landscape. It is more difficult to recuperate the views of those whom Jackson denounced; they did not possess his literacy or his ability to shape the historical record. But numerous extant materials do attest to the views of commoners: my primary focus here will be on ballads and Shakespeare's plays.
Shakespeare's corpus is attuned to the question of how humans ought to understand the created world as a source of divine reality. But the question of how we interpret this particular Shakespearean concern in light of mid-sixteenth century theological controversy has rarely been explored. Certainly, scholarly interest in the relationship between early modern theatre as performance space and iconoclast controversies has persisted for decades, to the extent that scholars would now appear to agree that such a relationship is undeniable. We might broadly divide this body of criticism into the view that plays 'embrace the charge of idolatry' in order to provide for audiences the reassurance of divine immanence in the representations of the Catholic past. 5 Or, alternatively, plays avoid the charge of idolatry by resurrecting the images of the old religion only to empty them of their theological content, and re-invest them with the 'charismatic magic' of the secular stage. 6 Much of this critical work focusses on the stage-presence of bodies: bleeding bodies, dead bodies, statuary bodies, 7 and this focus is logical: not only because so much early modern theatre, primarily tragedy, contains bleeding and statuary bodies but because 3 Jackson, A treatise containing the originall of vnbeliefe, 198-9. 4 Goody, The Culture of Flowers, 156. the ecclesiastical commission of York in 1576 specifically forbade any plays or pageants from representing the persons of the Trinity. The very bodily nature of the theatre was one of the reasons it came under iconoclast attack. And yet early modern theatre, especially that of Shakespeare, is also full of references to plants and trees, birds and animals, stars and planets: images that have not received scholarly attention for their role in iconoclast controversy. Scholars have, however, been very attentive to the seventeenth-century emergence of reformed modes of reading and interpreting nature, and of reformed attempts to reinvest the created world with some of the divine mystery of which it was robbed through developments in natural philosophy. Peter Harrison's workalso central to my argumenthas explored in detail this later problem, which was a primarily learned and Protestant problem. The seventeenth-century poets and divines who sought to re-locate the mysteries of the created world did so in thoroughly reformed style: they looked for references to trees and plants in scripture, they wrote poetry that sought the material presence of the divine in the landscape, onlyin the case of Marvell, Herbert and Vaughanto carefully deny such recognition as a naïve wish on the part of fallen man. Such doctrinal nicety was far less frequent among commoners. Already in the sixteenth-century, illiterates and semi-literates appear to be aware of how they were perceived by literates. That is, illiterates were aware of the growing concern among literate iconoclasts with what they described as an overly-simple belief in nature's capacity for divine signification. In this way, the ballad tradition and Shakespeare's theatre point to some of the ways that illiterates were active in early modern cultural and theological developments, rather than mere passive recipients of a changing world view.
As You Like It is the most obvious example of a play that engages the question of whether or not, and how, the created world is animated by divine reality. But Richard II also poses this question. The play's concern with divine right theory's sacralisation of the monarch's human body takes As You Like It's more playful questions about trees as either icons or idols to a more gravely philosophical register. Where the comedy exposes elite fantasies of a green idyll, the history exposes the elite fantasy of royal divinity. Richard II's common charactersthe Gardener and his assistantare shown to possess an ability to successfully read the created world for its revelation of higher truths. The singers of ballads, the workers of the land: in both plays, Shakespeare grants these characters a greater hold on reality, and on creation, than their betters. Whereas, the elite characterswhose equivalents off-stage are the period's literate political theorists and theological controversialistsare instead shown to fall from their illusions.
The texts examined here suggest that illiterates may have been resistant to learned reforms. Indeed, through the popular forums of singing and playing, illiterates might have participated in debates in ways that showed they were neither simply receiving nor actively resisting change but instead engaging closely with, and remaining uncertain about, the most pertinent questions of their generation. To make this claim, my work draws on Alison Shell's studies of oral culture, and on the more recent interest in early modern botanical cultures and their role in literary practice (Amy Tigner, Robert Watson, Leah Knight, Todd Borlik). It examines Richard II alongside early modern ballad culture in order to explore some of the ways in which a mostly theologically-moderate popular culture, persisting from the late-medieval period, sought to engage with the question of whether nature could be filled withor emptied ofdivine reality by human means alone, or if instead nature was simply what it had always been: matter created by God.

Living Trees, Loving Trees
Throughout the middle ages, a persistent visual and literary tradition depicted Christ as a tree. Most widespread in Tree of Jesse images, this trope also emerged in the more limited family tree of Anne and Joachim, Mary and Jesus. Simone dei Crocefissi's Dream of the Virgin (c. 1355-99; Figure x) depicts Christ as both tree and crucifixion emerging out of the pregnant belly of the sleeping virgin. Reaching up from their tomb in the ground below Mary are Anne and Joaquim, whose arms form the root system from which the tree grows. 8 The image draws equally upon the sensual, even erotic, dynamics of procreation and the dynamics of growth in the green and growing world: the grandparents are the roots from which springs the flowering child via the fertile body of the mother. But in its foreshadowing of the Crucifixion, the image signals the theological reality that even as Christ is born, or brought into being through Mary's dream, he is always already crucified. These are devotional images but they are also meditations on the doctrine of the Incarnation: a doctrine that perceives all material lifefrom trees and plants to human bodies and passionsas a source and signal of divine life. The Cherry Tree Carol contains a similar pattern. This ballad (dating from around the fifteenth century), is a folk song that describes a walk taken by Mary and Joseph in a cherry orchard. While walking, Mary asks Joseph to reach her some fruit because she is pregnant and hungry. This is the first Joseph has heard about her pregnancy and, galled by the news, he tells Mary to ask the father of her baby for cherries. So the baby in Mary's bellyboth child and father in this instancespeaks up and tells the tree to bend its branches so that Mary can reach the fruit. The miracle is then the cause of Joseph's conversion and he kneels and asks the baby when his birthday will be.
The Cherry Tree Carol is a folk song but it draws on a much wider, and often more learned, medieval investment in incarnate matter as a source of divine 8 For arguments about the relationship between the Tree of Jesse images, Eden and Marian iconography, see chapter 2 of Tigner, Literature and the Renaissance Garden and Fassler, "Mary's Nativity, Fulbert of Chartres, and the Stirps Jesse: Liturgical Innovation Circa 1000 and its Afterlife," 390-91. revelation for those who study and interpret it in the light of doctrine. In Sarah Beckwith's words: All of humankind strove to recognise, cultivate and restore the likeness to their creator that was always already there. These developments of the implications of the incarnation are then made on the basis of a Neoplatonising Augustinianism which imagined the entire visible world as bearing the traces (vestigia) of God. Christ's willingness to be incarnated, his embodiment, is crucial because it is only this condescension to the flesh which will allow other images to signify. It is only his incarnation which, by symbolising and embodying the union of image and exemplar, establishes for fallen man the possibility of a knowledge of God through his vestiges in nature. The world, then, as an image of God, is potent with signification. The material world becomes a text which may be interpreted, scrutinised, allegorised and investigated for the way it pointed to its exemplar and author: God. 9 This vision of an incarnate material world assumes a communion among all elements of the created world: plants and animals, humans and the divine. I use the word communion broadly but, as I will argue, it could also be used specifically, in that the medieval Book of Nature assumed a sacramental quality in all matter. That is, the medieval view of nature did not always distinguish between the divinity of nature as such and the uses of nature for devotion. But early modern iconoclasts asserted precisely this distinctionand in the most controversial terms. In the Elizabethan homily against Idolatry, we are told that: 'The things which were the good creatures of GOD before (as Trees or Stones) when they be once altered and fashioned into Images to bee worshipped, become abomination, a temptation unto the souls of men, and a snare for the feet of the unwise.' 10 In fact, man is by nature 'bent to worshipping of Images' just as he is 'bent to whoredom and adultery in the company of harlots ' (130-31).
It is in this same spirit that Thomas Jackson, hater of marigold-worship, denounced common heretics. But Jackson takes his views on blasphemy even further by aligning poets with flower-worshippers. He claims that 'the seminaries of Poetry' are 'the chief nurses of Idolatry … both lay like twins in the womb of the same unpurified affection'. 11 As Alison Shell has noted, Jackson held the view that simple or 'uncouth' minds were as easily disposed to the idolatrous appeal of poetry as they were to the idolatrous worship of nature. 'Crucifixes and marigolds could both be seen as dangerous because the imaginatively undisciplined observer might commit idolatry by confusing signifier with signified, and carrying admiration too farbut though crucifixes could be confiscated from churches, nothing could be done about the English meadow'. 12 The rhetorical collision, used by both the homilist and Jackson,9 Beckwith, Christ's Body, 49. 10 The Second Tome of Homilies. London, 1571. 33. 11 Jackson, A treatise containing the originall of vnbeliefe, 198-9. 12 Shell,72. See Jackson's twelve-book exposition (1613-57), especially in parts five (The Originall of Unbelief [1625]) and six (The Treatise of the Divine Essence and Attributes ). On Jackson, see also Hutton, between unchastity and idolatry, is a neat inversion of the devotional sensuality that had once been a standard feature of the Jesse Tree images. Where once Christ as tree was both sensual and spiritual, now for reformists depictions of Christ could only be truly spiritual if the sensual (the procreative and ornamental, but also the material, biographical, extra-biblical) dimensions were removed. More particularly, any blasphemous matter, even if it is not in itself sensual or erotic, is denounced as though it were dangerously unchaste: poetry and idolatry lie 'like twins in the womb of the same unpurified affection'. Metaphorical depictions of Christ were reinterpreted as blasphemous not just because they associate him with trees or with human sexuality, but because to associate him at all with matter had become a potential source of blasphemy.
Under the pressure of iconoclasm, the tropes of (botanical and bodily) divine generation contained within Jesse Tree images began to separate into two traditions. One of these traditions continued to associate the tree, especially fruit trees, with sensual delight or bawdy pleasure. And the other, more spiritual tradition retained the idea of Christ as a tree but removed any suggestion that Christ might be an actual tree. This second, reformed approach is exemplified by the late-seventeenth century ballad Christ Compared to an Apple-Tree.
The tree of life my soul hath seen, Laden with fruit, and always green; The trees of nature fruitless be, Compared with Christ the Apple-tree.
The ballad is a meditation on what it means to think of Christ as a tree that flowers, thrives and delights in the soul of the speaker. However, the speaker very clearly perceives the image of Christ as a tree only with his soul and not with his eyes. There is no biographical or extra-biblical narrative events in the ballad. Instead the narrative charts the speaker's internal change or conversion from one who does not 'see' Christ with his soul to one who does. Where The Cherry Tree Carol explores the doctrine of the Incarnation through a homely, extra-biblical story about the holy family in an orchard (and in doing so recognises the divine potential in actual trees), the reformed ballad draws instead on a learned suspicion of metaphor by building a similitude between Christ and tree that draws purely on the spiritual reality of faith as something that can be described directly as growing, fruiting, shading. It also establishes early in the first stanza that Christ as tree is 'the tree of life', thereby locating the firm biblical foundation for the image. The first stanza also makes clear that to see Christ as a tree with eyes of the soul is itself an act of iconoclast conversion, because it means turning one's worldly eyes 'Thomas Jackson, Oxford Platonist, and William Twisse, Aristotelean'. On Jackson and idolatry, see Reid, Literature and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century England, 185. away from the beauty of real trees: 'The trees of nature fruitless be / Compared with Christ the Apple Tree'.
Both ballads make a claim for the realfor true divine realityas something opposed to a purely human or misguided vision of reality, but they do so through opposing interpretations of the role of metaphor and the role of matter. The Cherry Tree Carol is an entirely 'fictional' or extra-biblical narrative and in this sense, an extended metaphor for biblical and doctrinal truths. It also embraces the capacity for the created world to signal and contain divine reality. And it is fully populist, aimed at both illiterate and literate singers: through its tone and its doctrinal orientation toward the common, universal experience of the divine in an everyday setting (a family walking in an orchard). The reformed ballad, however, posits as true the divine reality found in a denial of worldly beautywhich is also common beauty. It claims that metaphorical depictions of Christ are illegitimate, unless grounded in the literate sphere of biblical expression (the tree of life) because then the metaphor is in fact not a metaphor but an actual truth. Christ Compared to an Apple-tree assumes a learned knowledge on the part of singer/hearer whose understanding of the ballad's iconoclasm is central to its assertions of how the godly ought to view nature's gifts.
The other form of tree balladbawdy and without Christological association circulated widely in cheap print. The English Broadside Ballad Archive contains numerous songs about lovers meeting under trees or abandoned lovers weeping under trees. In one cautionary version of this form ('John and Betty, or the Vertue of Cherry-Stones', figure x), we hear about a whole group of maids from Kent who fall pregnant after meeting their men under cherry trees. It is in this category of tree ballad that we find Shakespearean lyrics like The Willow Tree in Othello. This songone of the rare instances in which we have both the extant printed ballad and its use onstageis about an abandoned lover who weeps under the willow tree. As You Like It contains numerous songs, pitched with various degrees of irony, about love and trees and indeed the whole play could be read as a dramatised version of the form. One bawdy tree ballad in particular deserves attention ('Wanton Widows pleasant Mistake, or A Wooden Image turne'd to Flesh and Blood', figure x). This song tells the story of a lonely widow who dresses a tree trunk in a man's shirt and hat and takes it to bed with her. She calls the tree Simon. But then a real man from the village steals into her room at night and replaces the tree with himself. For a while, the widow is happy to go along with the pretence that the real man is her wooden man, until the couple decide that they need to light a fire in the room to warm themselves during the night. So they burn Simon. In the final stanza, Simon is denounced as: A senseless Old Simon, that Wooden dull Tool! A silly dry Image, no, Burn the Old Fool: With a sweeter soft Armful much better supplied, She has warm Flesh and Bones now to lye by her side.
The legacy of iconoclast anxieties can be detected here, if only as a joke. Tree metaphors were widely denounced by reformers as unchaste modes of representation because they were false images. And here the wooden man is a 'senseless', 'dull' and 'silly image'. He is an empty signifier that the lovers burn in the fire of their delight. Without over-burdening a comic song with theological implications, it is possible to suggest that the joke in this ballad performs a certain intellectual feat when it keeps open the question of what has happened to the tree trunk. Is the trunk a false image that has been put to the flames of an iconoclast purging or has the tree 'become' the man in an act of sensual reanimation akin to the divine enlivening of matter?
The question of how far these popular ballads can be pressed into the service of theological controversy is important. It is now some decades since Alison Shell called for deeper investigation into the prejudices held by early modern literates about their illiterate contemporariesa call that has remained largely unheeded. 'Literates were educated into various kinds of dissociation from illiterates, which fostered the artificially sharp distinctions of polemic, and were fostered by them in turn. Consequently, there could occur a polemical isolation of the educated from the rest; literates' suspicion of illiterates is one of the great underexamined prejudices of the early modern period'. 13 Underwriting all other positions of prejudice held by literates against illiterates (that they were papists, pagans, heretics, thieves) was the more fundamental view that they were unable to participate in any legitimate public discourse and needed therefore to submit to the wisdom of the lettered. However, the veracity of this assumption could be interrogated by looking to the wit of those songs that were usually transmitted orally but which occasionally found their way into cheap print. 14 The sixteenth and seventeenth century development of reformed doctrines on nature became the province of the printed word, which, although mostly written in the vernacular, were composed in a highly learned dialect: the dialect of preachers and theologians, natural philosophers and medical men. The majority of the population had little access to this body of work because they could not read it and quite possibly had no interest in reading it. Alison Shell and Alexandra Walsham have both shown that in the sixteenth century popular devotions already embedded in the local landscape were becoming increasingly associated (in Protestant tracts) with Catholic and illiterate practice. For Shell: Protestantism benefited from the link between print and verifiability, and this in turn encouraged reformers and other Protestant writers to reframe a suspicion of the independent imagination, particularly where the imaginative agents were illiterate. An educated disapproval of religious metaphors developed within oral cultures, and a feeling that discredited techniques within natural science must originally have been disseminated by those interested in promoting theological error, both contributed to a widespread intuition of popish rural idolatry. Efforts to reform botany would have been spurred by the known use of flowers in pagan ritual, and classically educated clergy would have been especially alert to popish uses of flowers. 15 It is therefore possible that we might trace in the ballads a degree of resistance to the views exemplified by Thomas Jackson. That is, many ballads would seem to deny the literate view that the unlettered were too stupid to understand a metaphor and might therefore fall into papist or pagan heresies from which only the lettered could protect them through the enforcement of reform. I suggest that the Wanton Widow and her Wooden Simon offer precisely this resistance. The ballad's ability to open up an ironic space around the difference between tree trunk and man demonstrates a knowing playfulness, not just around the question of how metaphor works but around the precise terms of iconoclast controversy. This playfully unresolved question over whether the tree trunk is icon or idol, flesh or wood, chaste or unchaste, real or false, amounts to a moderate theological position. It is a moderate position because it is one willing to admit uncertainty on a point of such doctrinal controversy that most print commentators instead sought the political security of an immovable iconoclast stance. And yet, a similarly moderate position can be found occasionally in the learned domain of print. Lemnius Lemnius' An Herbal for the Bible is an earlysixteenth century Catholic humanist work of biblical exegesis that was translated into English by Thomas Newton in 1587. The translation at times is a straight-forward Protestantisation of the original. But at other times, Newton retains potential blasphemies in the original tract by instead explaining or justifying them. So we are told that the Prophets. vse so manie Similitudes, & make so many Comparisons of things fetched out of the verie secrets and bowels of Nature; as namely, from beasts, fouls, worms, creeping and swimming creatures, Herbes, Trees, the Elements, fire, water, earth, aire, riuers, brooks, wels, cesternes, seas, stars, pearls, stones, lightening, thunder, raine, dew, heate, drowth, cold, winds, blasts, haile, snowe, frost, ice, corne, seede, salt, leauen, nets, snares: and likewise from the humours in a mans bodie, Blood, milke, generatiue seede, menstrue, woman in trauell, child-birth, drosse, yron, golde, siluer, and innumerable other things, wherewith they learnedly beautifie their matter, and (as it were) brauely garnish and deck out their termes, words, and sentences with tropes and figuratiue Phrases, Metaphors, Translations, Parables, Comparisons, Collations, Examples, Schemes, and other ornaments of speech, giuing therby vnto their matter a certaine kind of liuelie gesture, and so consequently attiring it with light, perspicuitie, easinesse, estimation, and dignitie: stirring vp 15 Shell, Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England, 74. thereby mens drowsie minds, and awaking slothfull, negligent, carelesse, sluggish, and retchlesse people to the consideration and acknowledgement of the truth, and to the following and imbracing of godlines. 16 Newton is willing to allow metaphors drawn from naturetrees, weather, human bodies and passionsas part of the 'following and imbracing' of godliness, when the purpose of those metaphors is to stir up the minds of the godly with their lively gesture toward divine truth. Newton here uses the word 'lively' as it is used in early modern rhetorical manuals, to mean a figure of speech that is well-chosen, well-spoken, full of life, energetic, convincing. But his use of the word also includes a more medieval sense that nature is livelybecause it contains divine life.
I want to think for a moment about the capacity for this word 'lively' to articulate a specifically historical but changing idea about nature, or about creation broadly definedboth divine creation and the creative (metaphormaking) capacity of humans. The OED records various early modern uses for this word. Three of the most pertinent definitions are: alive or living, as in John Fisher's sermon against Luther, in which he describes Christ as the son of a 'lively' God, but also in John Maplet's 1567 natural history called The Greene Forest, in which Maplet observes that because 'the Lodestone … draweth Iron to it … the common people' have 'judged the Iron lively.' A second definition for 'lively' pertains to spiritual life. In a 1549 homily, we hear discussed the 'vnfruitfull fayth' or the 'faythe lyvely'. This is a similar sentiment to one found in the reformed ballad, Christ Compared to an Apple-Tree, in which a truly lively faith is one which recognises that the tree of life is superior to the actual tree. A third definition for 'lively' is merely to do with a fertile soil or earth. In Golding's 1564 translation of Metamorphoses: 'the fruitful seed of things well cherished in the fat and lively soil began in length of time to grow'.
Throughout the ballad tradition, 'lively' often means bawdy or ready for love, as in the lively lads and lasses who meet under fruit trees. And in Shakespeare's work we find this same definition used, as well as all the others listed above. Shakespeare's frequent use of 'lively' also includes a definition that is perhaps not covered by the OED's current provision. In at least two instances, Shakespeare uses 'lively' to distinguish a living body not from a dead one but from an inanimate object, in a kind of reverse iconoclasm. For instance, after Lavinia is mutilated she is described as a lively body, even though she has no hands or tongue. She is said to look like a lopped tree but she is still a living human body. And in The Winter's Tale, Paulina observes of Hermione's statue, that it is 'life as lively mocked as ever'.
It is curious that 'lively' seems to carry an almost universally happy associationexcept in antitheatrical writing. In Stephen Gosson, for instance, we hear first that we ought to trust the 'the word of God, for it is lively'. But then we are told that poetry and plays contain such 'Metaphors, Allegories and action so smooth so lively, so wanton, that the poison creeping on secretly without grief chokes us at last, and hurleth us down.' 17 And for Rainolds, actors offer such a 'lively' representation of 'lewd' and 'bad persons' that they themselves become bad, if they were not already. 18 It is perhaps not surprising then that 'lively' and 'quick' were the terms often deployed in late-medieval writingboth the writing of affective piety and in the emerging fifteenth and sixteenth century writing of anti-theatricalists. In both forums, idols were perceived as objects whose 'quickness' or liveliness were being negated, while icons were works 'quick' with divine reality. 19 Where once biblical drama was defended on the grounds that it was a lively or 'living' form of biblical exegesis, this very liveliness (the actor's body, the extra-biblical narrative events), quickly became suspicious to iconoclasts. 20 All of the above suggests that for early modern reformers, God's word alone could be 'lively' or enlivening, while the capacity for poets and players to animate reality with a lively poetry was increasingly seen as dangerous. This position is a direct reform, developed and strengthened over the previous century, of medieval affective piety with its desire to see the material representations of Christblood, tears, fleshanimated or enlivened by the faith of the onlooker. 21 Certainly, reformers could admit nature a certain liveliness, as long as it wasn't used for devotional purposes. If we return to the ballad of the Wanton Widow and her Wooden Simon we see that it is, perhaps, sexual delight that 'transforms' Simon from a tree into living flesh, just as in the medieval Jesse tree images it is the Incarnation that enlivens all human passion and all of the trees and plants, ensuring that creation as a wholebe it human or botanicalis lively with divine reality. It is this enlivening of matter that reformerswith the exception of Newton, translator of Lemnius' biblical Herbalwere almost uniformly worried about. For them liveliness must necessarily be confined to purely spiritual experience. Crucially, I think that it is this reformist mistrust of the material world that both Shakespeare and the ballad tradition were resisting.

Richard II in the Garden
The play in which Shakespeare poses his most obvious set of questions about the ways in which trees and plants can be said to signify is As You Like It.
17 Gosson, Playes Confuted (unnumbered pages). 18  With its ironic perspective on man's longing to experience nature's liveliness, this play's various pastoralisms are cliched attempts on the part of elite characters to animate the material world of the forest with a divine reality through which they might themselves be redeemedbe it the Duke's 'tongues in trees' or Orlando's bad tree-bark verses. In this play, trees don't signify Christ but elite characters do draw on the tree's bawdy or sensual iconography in their attempts to recuperate the meaningful identity they lost when they escaped or were ejected from the court. Robert Watson's work on the ironies of similitude in As You Like It shows how light-footed Shakespeare's theatre could be in its satire of elite nostalgia for a benign forest world that was in reality a space of economic hardship for commoners. Watson is highly attentive to As You Like It's treatment of the created world as a material reality that can only be understood through the metaphoric veil that is fallen human consciousness.
The pastoral genre is stubbornly artificial, as if to acknowledge that our hunger for simplicity is actually a symptom of sophistication, a self-conscious desire at once expressed and prevented by language. We gaze lovingly at ponds, but so did Narcissus; and the gates of Eden are firmly closed. As You Like It begins with that originary exclusion: 'As I remember, Adam, it was upon this fashion bequeath'd me … ' (1.1.1). Efforts to bridge, through simile, the gap between ourselves and nature, and between our minds and reality, again only confirm that there is really no way back. 22 It is true that the elite characters in the Forest of Arden remain woefully separated from the green world they wish to inhabit. Butand here Watson's study is less attentivethe common forest-dwellers are not so abused by unreality. Instead, they are shown to be uninterested in the green world as simile because for them it is mere locationa location so clipped around with the bad dealings of their superiors (enclosure, grain inflation, tenancy corruption, vagrancy laws) that the common forest-dweller may at any moment find themselves ejected from the forest or from life. Richard II is less satirical, but it nonetheless frames the question of how we are to understand the created world as a material reality infused with divine signification, and how this world is perceived and lived within differently by commoners, aristocrats, and the monarch himself as demi-Christ. Richard II's elite characters experience the same naive desire to have the created world signify but this condition is presented as tragic loss rather than comic deflation. From Gaunt's 'blessed isle' speech to the Duchess's extended description of Gaunt's family as a sacred tree hung with vials of blood, Richard II shows its characters have a deeply emotional investment in England as an incarnate reality that is constituted primarily through the green world and the blood and tears of princes. 23 This combination of images might not seem to invoke the question of whether or not nature contains either icons or idols, until we recognise that the blood and tears of princes are seen by royal characters as the very essence of their own divinity, of that sacramental character that God, in divine right theory, has granted to the human bodies of his royal representatives on earth. The same images can be found throughout the play in the mouths of almost every elite character. Carlisle argues that God is the gardener by whom Richard has been 'planted many years' and to depose him will result only in the 'blood of English' 'manur[ing] the ground' (4. 1.127-38). Later, when she sees Richard under guard, the queen claims to water 'with true love's tears' her 'fair rose,' the 'wither[ing]' king (5.1.6-11). Richard himself comforts the weeping Aumerle: 'we'll make foul weather with despised tears: / Our sighs and they shall lodge the summer corn / And make a dearth in this revolting land ' (3.3.161-163). Here are some more: 'Bear you well in this new spring of time / Lest you be cropped before you come to prime' (Edmund, 5.2.50). 'Thou, which knowst the way / To plant unrightful kings, wilt know again … another way / To pluck him headlong from the usurped throne' (Richard,. 'My soul is full of woe / That blood should sprinkle me to make me grow' (Bolingbroke, 5.6.45-6).
Richard spends considerable time trying to understand how the divinity placed in his body by virtue of his coronation can ever be taken away from him. He resists a political interpretation and sees instead that something sacramentally binding is being undone, which is, sacramentally speaking, impossible. Richard's critics, however, describe the king as having failed to manage England as garden. He has allowed the ground to 'choke' with 'weeds' and 'swarm' with 'caterpillars ' (3.4.44-46). It is the one real gardener in the play who most effectively manages his trees. The Gardener, of course, succeeds within his realm because he deals only with actual, rather than figurative, plants and is excluded from the elite world of politics. And yet he uses the same figurative language deployed by the play's elite characters and to similar effect: he too thinks through the problems posed by a created world that demands interpretation. Where the Plantagenets identify their bodies with the patterns of nature, assuming nature to be obedient to their rule, the Gardener instead figures his plants as political men who need management: his garden is a 'government', his apricots are unruly children; his sprays are too fast-growing and must be cut by his 'executioner ' (3.4.29-34).
And yet, in doing so, the Gardener recognises the possibility of the monarchs' vision. He calls Richard 'he that hath suffered this disordered spring' (which is a political statement presented through a botanical metaphor), but he then immediately says that Richard 'hath now met with the fall of leaf': an observation that reproduces Richard's own vision of the royal body as a part of the created world (3.4.48-9). Richard can only perceive the sacramentalism that draws his body and the created world into one divine reality, while the Gardener, like the singer of The Wanton Widow ballad, can enter into the royal perspective or stand apart from it, even dismantle it. Through his successful use of the monarch's own failed sacramentalism, the Gardener emerges as the most powerful character. He is the one who can best deploy the figures of speech that woefully frustrate elite characters, just as he can properly read and enter into the divine power which governs and destroys kings. The Gardener's plants, like his frustrated workmen, are subject to him. Where the Plantagenets worry that they cannot fully possess or control the created world they were born to govern, the Gardener's 'skill' in managing nature is instead largely invulnerable. His skill is not even 'subject' to a queen's curse. Rather, in the very plot of earth where the queen acknowledges her fall from power, there the Gardener plants his rue, transforming her bitter tears into his 'herb of grace ' (3.4.105).
Despite his sovereignty over the small 'compass' of his 'pale,' the Gardener acknowledges that the political turmoil beyond his walls is ultimately ensured not by the actions of individual men but by the continued cycles of nature and its demands for change: at 'time of year' the Gardener and his men 'wound' the 'skin' of their fruit tree, 'lest being over-proud in sap and blood, / With too much riches it confound itself ' (3.4.55-60). Unlike Richard and the queen, the Gardener's skill is his ability to read and interpret a power much greater than his own. He anticipates nature's cyclical movements and acts in sympathy with them: he cuts back wherever there is too much growth, and supports where there is 'oppression ' (3.4.31). In this way, he perceives the created world as a reality that can be uncoupled from monarchy, even while his trees can stand metaphorically for the king. In fact, it is common labour that best knows nature's cycles, not an elite self-identification. But this same common labour could be seenvia the Gardener's 'planting' of the queen's woeful bodyas another form of sacramentalism.
The Gardener's ability to read the political and divine reality of Richard's fall through the symbolic language of his garden is questioned by the queen, who points to the Gardener's social status: 'Though, old Adam's likeness set to dress this garden, / How dares thy harsh rude tongue sound this unpleasing news? ' (3.4.72-3). For the queen, the Gardener's lowness ought to exclude him from the interpretative activity in which she and Richard are continuallyand unsuccessfullyengaged. 'Dar'st thou, thou little better thing than earth, / Divine [Richard's] downfall? ' (3.4.78-9). For the queen, the Gardener is himself little better than the earth, but it is this very fact that signals the Gardener's expertise in reading trees for divine Revelation. The garden scene shows that the Gardener's reading of nature is correct, while the monarchs are misguided. Their over-investment in the reality of divine right theory, or, more broadly, in the sacramental and therefore binding nature of kingship, has blinded them to the wider metaphysical truth, as demonstrated by the divine reality lodged in nature's forms. The monarchs must face an unwelcome iconoclasm as it pertains to their own selves, precisely at the moment when they are confronted by the Gardener's correct reading of trees as true similes for the divine willthat is, as lively, quick and therefore just, idols.

Trees as Idols in the Theatre
Peter Harrison's work on the emergence of natural philosophy and biblical literalism as the two 'reformed' intellectual projects of early modernity explores the ways in which these new literate modes of interpretation were co-informing and mutually instrumental, however unwittingly, in emptying the incarnate world of its divine signification. In line with Beckwith's description of the incarnate world as a 'text' to be interpreted and scrutinised for signs of its author, Harrison narrates the long history of this developing perception of the created world from early writers in the Hexameron tradition -Origen, Basil, Ambrose, Hugh St Victorto seventeenth century reformists. Harrison notes that all of the elements of the visible world 'are "figures", which have been invested with divinely instituted significance '. 24 The creatures, then, are natural signs. It is this hieroglyphic conception of nature which undergirded the medieval belief that there were two booksthe book of nature and the book of scripture. The interpretation of the two books, moreover, took place as part of an integrated hermeneutical practice, premised on the principle that the meaning of the words of scripture could not be fully known until the meanings of the objects to which the words referred were also known. Linking the words of scripture with the objects of nature was the universal medieval practice of allegorical interpretation. Allegory was not, as we sometimes tend to think, a strategy for reading multiple meanings into the words of texts, but was rather a process through which the reader was drawn away from naked words to the infinitely more eloquent things of nature to which those words referred. 25 The Augustinian and Thomistic development of a tripartite interpretive model (literal, allegorical and moral) was developed in order to fruitfully identify divine Revelation within those elements of scripture (and nature) that, when read literally, appeared nonsensical. Of relevance to this study is the fact that while this interpretative system was developed by theological heavyweights, it was in practice a view of the world from which the illiterate populace was not excluded. 26 But as the seventeenth century approached, a greater divide opened up between the literate and illiteratethrough which the literate were increasingly drowned out of a public forum dominated by print. However, the ballad tradition and Shakespeare's theatre point to some of the ways that illiterates were active in early modern cultural and theological developments, rather than mere passive recipients of a changing world view. The texts examined here suggest that illiterates may have been resistant to learned reforms. The early modern theatre's role in controversy is widely recognised. 'The attacks upon the beginnings of the public theater and its fate in 1642 make amply clear that the stage was not viewed solely as a neutral cultural institution, purely secular and aesthetic. To an influential part of the intellectual elite it was an antagonist of and competitor with the progressive religious culture' of reform. 27 That progressive, elite culture helped to shape the conditions of the professional early modern playing houses through its role in the suppression of biblical drama. It then became highly attuned to perceived iconoclasm emerging in the work of Shakespeare and his peers.
The popular mediums of ballad and play inverted this dynamic, narrating instead the common view of the elite. Watson's work on As You Like It argues forcefully that this comedy was satirically attuned to the idolatry of its elite characters. However, Richard II is not concerned in the same way with nature as an Edenic or lost domain whose objects are inscribed by humans with a divine meaning from which they are forever separate. Certainly, the elite characters interpret their England as an Eden from which they have been ejected, and their factious infighting exposes their own acts of interpretation as partial and incomplete. Divine right theory cannot hold in the face of successive depositions. The Gardener, however, offers an interpretative framework for his garden that is proven by the events of the play to be correct. Unlike the common characters in As You Like It, the Gardener participates in an interpretative system that the elite characters assume is theirs alone. His allegorical reading of trees and plants is political in its analysis but it nonetheless deploys the interpretative methods of any exegete. Richard II stages the very real dynamics of a world whose signs are being emptied of their divine significationat least where the elite class is concerned. While the 'rude' and 'mean' characters are shown instead to hold the interpretative faculties through which the divine signification of the world might be restored, or through which it might never have fallen. King Richard sees himself as the subject of an iconoclast undoing; the gardener restores the world of trees and plants to that level of legitimate iconography. The theatre itself was uniquely able to explore late-sixteenth century concerns over the desacralisation of nature. Second only to liturgy, the theatre was the most prominent space in which early modern people from every social group came together to experience an embodied performance that had, since the reform of biblical drama, been emptied of its sacramental reality. We know from anti-theatrical writing that the theatre continued to be associated with idolatrous practices, even after it had ceased to depict any explicit biblical or sacramental material. 'Not content simply to insist on the immorality of the stage, the antitheatricalists use the term idolatry to suggest that theatre has something of the status of false religion'. 28 For this reason, we must take account of how nature's forms are treated onstage and how this treatment can be understood as a participation in those doctrinal controversies whose impact on the lives of the common populace, outside the theatre, would most certainly have ensured they were raised as pertinent questions inside the theatre. 'Drama became the most culturally potent artistic medium in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods; no other art, even those with greater prestige, could compete with it as the medium through which values were tested and inscribed'. 29 In Shakespeare's lifetime, the theatre occupied a unique position as a space in which ideas held by both literates and illiterates were explored. Shakespeare's plants (like those in ballads) offered playgoers a chance to re-enter, as one corporate body, a world that was disappearing under the pressure of reform. After all, the sacramental logic of the medieval cycle drama, out of which Shakespeare's theatre emerged, did not depend upon a naïve belief in the efficacy of devotional images. Instead it animated 'the intersubjective dimensions of theatre' to show that 'the presence of Christ and his absence are utterly bound up with our presence to each other'. 30 If Elizabethan men and women were becoming steadily alienated from the mystical reality of the created world, they could perhaps still find that divine realityeven if only partially, satirically, or questioninglyin the corporate experience of Shakespeare's theatre and the liveliness of his divine plants.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).