The Tree that Hides the Man: The Use and Misuse of Arboreal Symbols in Thomas of Woodstock (c. 1591-1595)
Résumés
À la première modernité, le chêne, présenté comme un symbole de robustesse et d’immuabilité, est fréquemment associé à la figure royale. Pourtant, comme le souligne Andrew McRae (2012), « la politique du chêne – et des arbres plus généralement » – est loin d’être aussi claire et stable au XVIe siècle qu’elle ne le sera plus tard. De fait, si l’arbre est un trope rhétorique, il n’est pas étonnant qu’il soit soumis à des manipulations voire à des détournements en tous genres. Or c’est précisément cette instabilité sémantique dont se saisissent bon nombre de pièces historiques de la fin de l’ère élisabéthaine, notamment la pièce anonyme Thomas of Woodstock (c. 1591-1595). Souvent lue comme un préquel du Richard II de Shakespeare, la pièce propose un discours sur les arbres qui met en évidence leur fragilité mais aussi le caractère artificiel de leur utilisation. Notre article analyse ainsi comment ce discours, qui interroge la manipulation à la fois symbolique et concrète des arbres, contribue à une remise en cause de certains fondements de l’orthodoxie royale tels que la fusion des deux corps du roi et l’unicité du souverain.
Entrées d’index
Mots-clés :
chêne, lierre, vigne, germe, éclair, déclin, emblème, métaphore, flatterie, pièce historique, symbolique de l’arbreKeywords:
oak, ivy, vine, blossom, lightning, decay, emblem, metaphor, flattery, history play, tree symbolismPlan
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- 1 Edmund Spenser, The faerie qveene disposed into twelue books, fashioning XII. morall vertues, Londo (...)
- 2 Victoria Bladen, The Tree of Life and Arboreal Aesthetics in Early Modern Literature, New York, Rou (...)
- 3 Ibid., p. 161.
- 4 Anonymous, The speeches and honorable entertainment giuen to the Queenes Maiestie in progresse, at (...)
1The oak’s preeminence in the natural world was a commonplace in the early modern period. In Canto I of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590), the narrator – describing the woods in which the Redcrosse Knight and his two companions have taken refuge – refers to it as “The builder Oake, sole king of forrests all”.1 Spenser’s periphrasis gives us a glimpse of the numerous connections which existed in the early modern period between the natural and the political, mostly through the use of allegories and metaphors.2 And if the oak could be compared to a king, the reverse was equally true. That tree was then, as Victoria Bladen reminds us, “traditionally associated with monarchy,” connoting strength, majesty and protection.3 The image of the oak was used, for example, in one of Elizabeth’s progresses in Sussex in 1591, with a pageant featuring a wild man “cladde in Iuie” standing next to an oak tree who addressed the Queen thus: “This Oke, from whose bodie so many armes doe spread: and out of whose armes so many fingers spring: resembles in parte your strength & happinesse”.4 But this kind of emblematic stylization, based on positive connotations inherited from the Romans (who saw the oak as the sacred tree of Jupiter), tends to overlook how fragile the oak could also be.
- 5 Following on from one of Aesop’s Fables, the solid oak was often opposed to the more pliable reed, (...)
- 6 In Geffrey Whitney’s Choice of Emblems (1586), the oak is used as a visual and verbal illustration (...)
- 7 Richard Rainolde, A booke called the Foundacion of rhetorike, London, 1563, sig. N2v.
- 8 Andrew McRae, “Tree-felling in Early Modern England: Michael Drayton’s Environmentalism”, The Revie (...)
2In early modern representations, the image of the majestic and immovable oak coexisted with a more vulnerable version. If it was famous for its firm roots and its ability to withstand the passage of time, the oak was not indestructible: it was under constant threat (from the wind, ivy, or man) and could be blown away5 or cut down, fall and even “turn to dust”.6 The oak was therefore an ambivalent emblem and could also be used for humbling purposes. Richard Rainolde used it in this manner in his treatise A booke called the Foundacion of rhetorike (1563), to open one of his model speeches: “What kyngdome can alwaies assure his state, or glory? What strength can alwaies last? What power maie alwaies stande? The mightie Okes are somtyme caste from roote […]”.7 So the reference to the oak did not always glorify those it was supposed to represent. Furthermore, even though it was traditionally associated with the monarchy, it could also be used to refer to other figures of authority. It thus comes as no surprise that, as Andrew McRae puts it, “the politics of the oak – and of trees more generally – was by no means as settled as it would become in a later period”.8 In fact, this trope was submitted to all sorts of rhetorical and semantic manipulations in the early modern period, in rhetorical and political treatises as well as in drama.
- 9 Alzada J. Tipton, ““The meanest man… shall be permitted freely to accuse”: The Commoners in Woodsto (...)
3Such plasticity is particularly conspicuous in some late Elizabethan history plays which stage the troubled reigns of contested kings. In this article, I will focus on the anonymous Thomas of Woodstock (c. 1591-1595) which specifically deals with the use and misuse of trees – both as rhetorical tropes and as concrete natural elements – and questions royal symbols through it. The subversive treatment of trees in the play thus forms part of what Alzada J. Tipton describes as its “unabashedly radical politics”.9 Often read as a prequel to Richard II (1595), Woodstock is a form of neo-morality play which relates the events leading up to those presented in Shakespeare’s play, in particular Woodstock’s murder. At the centre of the play is the conflict between, on one side, King Richard II and his evil flatterers and, on the other, his wise and noble counselors (who are also his uncles). This conflict generates not only a series of direct verbal confrontations but also competing images – the oak being one of them. As the play does not adhere to only one association – the oak as the royal symbol of majesty –, it goes further by questioning its adequacy, showing how artificial such tropes can be when applied to particular political realities. What happens when there is a discrepancy between the king’s actual person and the image to which he is supposed to correspond? By raising this issue through the character of Richard, Woodstock calls into question the theoretical merging of the king’s two bodies, reintroducing the king’s body natural on stage. But the play also challenges royal orthodoxy itself: by using natural images, and naturalizing political events through them, it leads us to reflect on what is seen as natural or unnatural, allowed or forbidden, in the realm of politics.
“He’s but a blossom”: Inadequate Rhetorics
- 10 All references to the play are from Thomas of Woodstock or King Richard the Second, Part One, ed. P (...)
- 11 See David Womersley, “France in Shakespeare’s Henry V”, Renaissance Studies, 1.4, 1995, p. 446-447.
- 12 V. Bladen, op. cit., p. 11.
- 13 As Scott H. Hendrix puts it, the reformers saw themselves as “faithful laborers” and “thought they (...)
- 14 Richard Robinson, The vineyarde of vertue collected, composed, and digested into a tripartite order (...)
4Before focusing on the oak itself, I would like to situate it in the more general discourse on trees and plants that we find in the play. In Woodstock, there is often a striking discrepancy between positive images of growth and strength, used to refer to the state of England, and the actual political events which are unfolding before our eyes. In act 1 scene 3, we witness the arrival at court of the king’s new wife, Queen Anne, whose speech celebrates her new country of adoption through a series of comparisons between England and France, her native country. In opposition to “England’s fair Elysium”, France now appears to the queen “[l]ike brambles to the cedars, coarse to fine, / Or like the wild grape to the fruitful vine” (1.3.44-46).10 Incidentally, such a depiction of France was not uncommon in the early 1590s: many pamphlets of French news printed since after 1580 drew attention to religious conflicts ravaging the French landscape and pointed out that, conversely, such a tragic fate had so far spared England.11 In Woodstock, Queen Anne’s speech offers a similar contrast, painting France as a wasteland while depicting England as an Edenic paradise. Her use of the term “vine” has obvious biblical undertones, connoting redemption and regeneration,12 and points to the image of the vineyard, which was used by Protestant writers to refer to the process of Reformation.13 And England was of course part of that reformed vineyard, as the poet Richard Robinson explained in his Vineyard of Vertue (1579): he described England as a land of true spiritual fruitfulness, from which “that vnfruiteful figge tree of the Popes planting” had been plucked out and where “the vyne of [God’s] glorious Gospel” was now flourishing.14 But that fruitful vine is not the only natural symbol worthy of attention in Queen Anne’s praise: the reference to the “cedars” (a tree which, like the oak, had royal connotations) also paints England as a land of dynastic greatness and seems to pave the way for a celebration of its monarchy – and, therefore, of King Richard’s reign.
5However, such an optimistic description of England does not stand up to scrutiny. First, in the structure of the play, the Queen’s speech comes after two expository scenes which belie that ideal situation, exposing the main confrontation between the noble counsellors and the young flatterers, the latter having tried to poison the former. This celebration of England is thus voiced by a character who makes her first appearance in the play in scene 3, having “missed” the first two scenes. The reference to “the fruitful vine” is preceded by another biblical image in scene 1, with negative connotations this time, when one of the king’s uncles, the Duke of Lancaster, offers his own assessment of the political situation: “[…] We are all weary, / And fain we would lie down to rest ourselves, / But that so many serpents lurk i’th’ grass / We dare not sleep” (1.1.138-141). We are shown a corrupted garden whose various components have been turned into traps. The vine, for example, serves a dark purpose, since the poison intended for the king’s uncles was supposed to be served in wine. The image of the vineyard itself is later used by Richard, in act 4 scene 2, when the king and his minions, disguised as comedians, perform a masque for Woodstock at his residence, with the intent of using the show to distract and arrest him. The masque opens with one of the plotters playing Cynthia and telling of a wild boar spreading terror throughout the “forests” of “this large kingdom” (4.2.107; 109). Moments later, drums are heard and Woodstock learns that his house is surrounded with soldiers. The king, still disguised, then uses the reference to the boar again to target his uncle: “This is the cave that keeps the tuskèd boar / That roots up England’s vineyards uncontrolled.” (168-169) Replacing the “forests” of Cynthia’s speech with the “vineyards” in Richard’s allows the playwright to create a direct echo with Queen Anne’s celebration in act 1 and to assess how degraded England has become – even more so than at the beginning of the play. The land has been ravaged and desecrated – the emblematic “vine” giving way to the plural “vineyards” – but if, ironically, Richard’s description of the state of England is quite accurate, he is the one to blame for such a disaster, not his uncle.
- 15 V. Bladen, op. cit., p. 32.
- 16 The passage of our most drad Soueraigne Lady Quene Elyzabeth through the citie of London to westmin (...)
- 17 Tresilian reassures Greene, one of Richard’s flatterers, about how he intends to perform his future (...)
6This sense of discrepancy – between a fantasized version of England and the current state of the kingdom – is also present in the ironic use of the expression “flourishing commonwealth.” As Victoria Bladen argues, motifs of regeneration borrowed from the natural world were quite common in early modern political discourse, “to articulate optimism for a flourishing future”.15 For example, one of the tableaux designed for Elizabeth’s first London procession in 1558 features two trees standing on two different hills, one symbolizing a “decayed common weale” and the other one a “florishyng commonweale” (or “Respublica bene instituta”),16 which was a way of inviting the queen to follow the right path. This phrase, comparing political states to gardens, is used twice in Woodstock but, ironically enough, it serves as an inadequate conclusion to scenes of corruption or political plotting. It is not uttered by one of Richard’s virtuous uncles but by Nimble, a servant of Robert Tresilian, the corrupted Lord Chief Justice. We first encounter the phrase when Tresilian announces his future appointment as Lord Chief Justice to Nimble, who then replies: “The lord be praised, we shall have a flourishing commonwealth, sir.” (1.2.92-93) There is deep irony in this because, a few lines earlier, the same Tresilian states his intention to frame the law according to his and the flatterers’ own interests.17 The phrase comes back in act 3, when Tresilian decides to issue blank charters to be filled by the commons, a trick designed to steal as much money as he wants from them – and met with enthusiasm by Nimble: “God buy ye, my lord. We will domineer over the vulgar like so many Saint Georges over the poor dragons. Come, sirs; we are like to have a flourishing common wealth i’faith!” (3.1.171-174). In both cases, this hopeful prediction serves as a poor cover-up for personal “flourishing” and gain, far from advancing the interests of all. And the change in modals from one version to another – from “we shall” to “we are like to” – clearly suggests that, as the play unfolds, this “flourishing commonwealth” is less and less likely to become reality.
- 18 Using early modern gardening metaphors, flattery was perceived by many as the most dangerous kind o (...)
7But the sense of inadequacy between metaphors and real events culminates in scenes of flattery,18 particularly in the use the king’s minions make of the emblematic oak in one of their exchanges with Richard. After the great dispute of act 1 scene 3, during which Woodstock and the other peers openly criticize Richard’s reshuffling of government, act 2 opens with all the flatterers – Greene, Bagot, Bushy, Scroop and Tresilian – trying to convince the king that he has all the rights to get rid of his uncles if he wishes to do so. To further their cause, Greene offers the following argument:
GREENE – May not the lion roar, because he’s young?
What are your uncles but as elephants
That set their aged bodies to the oak?
You are the oak against whose stock they lean:
Fall from them once, and then destroy them ever. […] (2.1.18-22)
- 19 Donald F. Lach, “Asian Elephants in Renaissance Europe”, Journal of Asian History, vol. 1, n° 2, 19 (...)
- 20 Ibid., p. 140-141.
8Greene’s speech employs the traditional symbols of royalty, the lion and the oak, suggesting complete identification between them and the king through the use of the metaphor. By contrast, the king’s uncles are only compared to elephants, a species traditionally associated with virtue and which was supposed to “crush the symbols of evil in their trunks or under their feet”.19 However, they are here depicted as weak and dependent on trees, which was also the way elephants had been thought of since the Middles Ages. People imagined that elephants were jointless creatures which could not rise again if they lay down to sleep; so in order to rest, it was believed they had to lean against a tree.20 Here, Greene’s reference to the oak – whose emblematic quality is underlined by the use of the definite article – is clearly supposed to convey the superior nature of the king.
- 21 Timothy Kendall, Flovvers of epigrammes, out of sundrie the moste singular authours selected, as we (...)
- 22 Lach explains that, for medieval writers, “[t]o catch an elephant, the hunter need only discover an (...)
- 23 In 1604, George Wildey used the image of the oak falling to show how the corruption of rulers had c (...)
9But if the oak-elephant emblem initially pictures a balance of power which is supported by royal orthodoxy – in the sense that the peers depend on the king –, it is also partially belied by Richard’s age. Only a tall and robust oak could actually serve as a resting place for elephants but Richard is still a young king, not quite fully-grown. In fact, Greene first suggests how potentially inadequate his lion metaphor could be for a “young” king but he fails to do the same for the oak. By contrast, Timothy Kendall drew on both those examples in a 1577 epigram entitled “Tyme doeth all” when he wrote “The huge great Oke was once a plant, / a whelpe the lion fell”.21 But, as opposed to Kendall’s general lesson in humility, Greene’s speech sticks to the timeless nature of the oak, contrasting his “stock” with the elephants’ “aged bodies”, as though the uncles were the only ones subject to the passing of time. Earlier in the play, Greene uses the same contrast, when trying to defend him against his uncles “[w]hose home-spun judgements, like their frosty beards, / Would blast the blooming hopes of all your kingdom” (1.3.191-192). His “blooming” image seems to echo Queen Anne’s image of regeneration but it also indirectly points at the king’s lack of experience. In that same scene, Woodstock refers to it more directly, trying to excuse Richard’s faults by saying to the queen that “he’s but a blossom” (30). Competing representations of the king thus emerge, both borrowing from the natural world but each with a different purpose. Instead of setting Richard in a timeless frame with an emblematic reference he is clearly unworthy of, Woodstock’s comment reintroduces a natural time frame, reminding us of the lesson voiced by Kendall’s epigram. In doing so, Woodstock’s speech reintroduces the king’s body natural – that of a young and inexperienced man – whereas it should disappear behind his body politic, figured by the immemorial oak. Spectators can thus perceive how inadequate the image is when the king fails to conform to the model of the great and fully-grown oak. But this opposition between the mighty oak and the frail elephants is not only inadequate; it is also dangerous. Indeed, Greene’s invitation to “fall from them once” inevitably conveys an image of uprooting or cutting down.22 Even if his metaphors, by borrowing from both the arboreal and the animal worlds, ostensibly aim at introducing a clear distinction and severing the link between the king and his uncles, they nonetheless suggest that their fates are connected: the destruction of the elephants will necessarily entail that of the oak. The emblematic image therefore fails to isolate the king from his peers and indirectly conveys the dangers inherent in an intricate political reality.23
Challenging Royal Orthodoxy: Alternative (and Subversive) Representations
10As we have seen, the emblem of the oak traditionally connotes majesty and stability but Richard fails to conform to it: he listens to his young flatterers, expels his wise counselors, allows for corrupt taxation and even farms out his kingdom, dividing it between his four minions – which is theoretically impossible. Majesty and stability thus yield to degradation and chaos. The sense of inadequacy caused by such misuse of the emblematic oak thus weakens the image itself, which reverberates throughout the play. Thus weakened, the natural trope can be manipulated and reassigned to other characters, resulting in a blurred imagery which undermines Richard’s uniqueness as king. Ironically enough, the image of the oak is first assigned to somebody else in the play, before the flatterers even use it to praise their sovereign. In the first scene, while all the nobles present are aware of the dire situation in which the kingdom finds itself, the Earl of Arundel shares his surprise at the passivity shown by York, Lancaster and Woodstock, the king’s uncles:
ARUNDEL – You all are princes of the royal blood
Yet like great oaks ye let the ivy grow
To eat your hearts out with his false embraces;
Ye understand, my Lord?
WOODSTOCK – Ay, ay, good coz, as if ye plainly said,
‘Destroy those flatterers and tell King Richard
He does abase himself to countenance them.’
Soft, soft. (3.1.165-172)
- 24 The New Oxford Shakespeare, ed. Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus and Gabriel Egan, Oxford, Ox (...)
11The use of the oak to refer to non-royal figures was not uncommon in the early modern period, but in a play in which the king is specifically and emphatically compared to that tree, the shared attribution is meaningful – particularly when the simile is used in a negative way. This image is similar to the one present in Edward III (1592), when King Edward tries to defend his peers against the insults uttered by Prince Charles, one of the French king’s sons. Edward thus counters the prince’s offence – “agèd impotent” – by describing his nobility as follows: “Know that these grave scholars of experience, / Like stiff-grown oaks, will stand immovable / When whirlwind quickly turns up younger trees” (3.3.127-129).24 The image of the oak is not used elsewhere in the play so there is no sign of competition between its referents, even more so as it is brought up by the king himself to praise his own nobility and draw a clear divide between two generations and two nationalities. Even though the simile starts in a similarly positive way in Woodstock, it has a radically different dramatic function.
- 25 Rankins, in his Mirror of Monsters (1587), described flatterers as follows: “They cleaue to the coa (...)
- 26 Michael Drayton, Peirs Gaueston Earle of Cornvvall His life, death, and fortune, London, 1594, sig. (...)
- 27 Thomas Storer, The life and death of Thomas Wolsey Cardinall, London, 1599, sig. D1.
12Greene’s flattering reference to the oak only comes in act 2, which allows the uncles to preempt images such as this one, as if they were worthier of it than the king (not least because of their age and experience). However, the oak appears as an anti-model here, evoking weakness rather than strength, since it serves to present the noble counsellors as falling prey to hypocritical parasites – figured by the ivy – without opposing any form of resistance. The ivy has a long tradition of connoting flattery25 and more generally any ambitious or ambiguous kind of promiscuity, but in such metaphors, the tree or the pillar around which it grows usually figures the target of its snares – the king, most of the time. In Michael Drayton’s poem Piers Gaveston (1594) for example, Edward II is the “Oake” whose rootless body is being warmed by the “wanton Yuie” representing his French favourite;26 a few years later, in Thomas Storer’s The Life and Death of Thomas Wolsey (1599), the aspiring cardinal pictures himself as the “Iuie” winding around the shaft of his “crowned pillar”, Henry VII.27 But in Woodstock, it is the peers who are presented as the first victims of those parasites. The reference is ambiguous here because it is uncertain whether the “false embraces” are the flatterers’ or Richard’s – and the confusing “his” before the noun phrase reinforces that doubt. This ambiguity may stem from the fact that York and Woodstock have refused to doubt Richard and try to exonerate him from the poisoning attempt, laying all the blame on his flatterers instead. Woodstock’s reply to York’s conceit follows on this by removing all ambiguity and reintroducing a clear division between the king and his favorites, only identifying the latter with the ivy which would then have to be “destroyed.” Still, for a moment, by conflating the king and his minions in a single image, the play suggests that the hypocritical parasite in the kingdom might be the king himself.
13This variation on the oak is then picked up by Woodstock who offers another conceit, which has more to do with horticulture, and focuses not so much on the tree – now unnamed – as on its fruit:
WOODSTOCK – […] Fruit that grows high is not securely plucked;
We must use ladders and by steps ascend
Till by degrees we reach the altitude.
You conceit me too? Pray be smooth awhile. (1.1.173-176)
- 28 Woodstock’s reflection on orthodoxy echoes that of his character in the Mirror for Magistrates (155 (...)
14Though it may seem peaceful and pastoral, this metaphor flirts with the politically unorthodox. Turning the counsellors from passive subjects (oaks ensnared by the ivy) to active ones (men plucking fruits), this new conceit suggests that they have to act but the problem now is how, since there is not much they can do without falling into treason. Even if the horticultural, almost pastoral, image alleviates the violence of the action – removing the flatterers from the king’s side – this still amounts to undermining royal prerogative, which is not allowed in theory.28 And Woodstock’s conceit actually presents plucking as an unnatural and human intervention, symbolically expressed by the ladder, a human artefact made out of wood. Conversely, the ivy and the fruit, symbols of flattery and corruption, are natural elements, as though they were part and parcel of this political world. This is in fact how flattery was perceived at the time: it was condemned by writers who, at the same time, kept noting its overwhelming presence. But the opposition goes even further since the flatterers appear as emanations of the king, as part of his own body, as opposed to the isolated peers. Even though they are not trying to fell the tree, plucking its fruits still means attacking the royal body, a sinful activity which inevitably echoes the first biblical fruit plucking. This allusion to transgression could then lead us to revisit the previous conceit – the oak and the ivy – and read it as Robert Cawdry suggests in his Treasury or Storehouse of Similes (1600):
- 29 Robert Cawdry, A treasurie or store-house of similies both pleasaunt, delightfull, and profitable, (...)
As the Iuie by litle and little creepeth vpon the Oke, till at the last he doth ouer-grow and destroy the Oke: So likewise doth Sinne by little and little get vp, and get the strongest, and mightiest men sometimes vnder him; as it did Salomon, and Dauid, and Peter, and diuers others, for al their wisedome, and learning, and iudgement, and experience, which they had both of themselues, and of the world.29
15The juxtaposition of the two conceits thus raises the risk for the noble counsellors of sinning and reenacting the Fall. This is especially visible in the second metaphor, which evokes the dangers of physical fall (with its reference to the ladder and the hubristic ascent to some “altitude”), moral fall (the biblical fruit plucking) and political fall all together.
- 30 Jeffrey Paxton Hehmeyer, “Heralding the Commonplace: Authorship, Voice, and the Commonplace in Shak (...)
16Finally, this tension between orthodoxy and transgression also transpires through the form of the image itself. It begins as a proverb or aphorism but there is a contrast between the universal nature of the proverb and its problematic consequence or application. This actually conveys the tension counsellors have to deal with between plain speech and allusive speech, the latter being required to tackle highly sensitive political topics – here, it seems almost impossible to talk openly about sedition. However, the exchange between the peers undermines the self-effacing nature of the proverb, as Arundel’s and Woodstock’s conclusive questions both suggest: “Ye understand my Lord?” followed later by “You conceit me too?” As Jeffrey Paxton Hehmeyer argues, the aphorism “disguised a counsellor’s opinion under the cloak of ‘general truth’” and submerged “their individual will beneath that of the state”.30 The problem is that in this scene, the individual will is poorly disguised. The first line of Woodstock’s speech clearly reads as an aphorism but the subsequent gloss reintroduces an active “we,” making the conceit less obscure than it would normally seem. So what stands out is a clash between the general truth conveyed by the aphorism and the particular political situation it should apply to.
17Later in the play, Richard’s symbolical position is again threatened in another way: not only is the image of the oak assigned to other characters, but the king himself becomes one tree amongst others. In act 3, for instance, after Woodstock and the other wise counsellors have been expelled from court, they meet at Plashy House in the country, where Woodstock dwells, to discuss their next move. The place is surrounded by trees which become the topic of York and Woodstock’s exchange:
YORK – […] This house of Plashy, brother,
Stands in a sweet and pleasant air, i’faith:
’Tis near the Thames and circled round with trees
That in the summer serve for pleasant fans
To cool ye, and in winter strongly break
The stormy winds that else would nip ye too.
WOODSTOCK – And in faith, old York,
We have all need of some kind wintering:
We are beset, heaven shield, with many storms.
And yet these trees at length will prove to me
Like Richard and his riotous minions.
Their wanton heads so oft play with the winds,
Throwing their leaves so prodigally down,
They’ll leave me cold at last; and so will they
Make England wretched and, i’th’ end, themselves. (3.2.9-23)
- 31 This attitude fits with Woodstock’s position at this moment in the play, far from court, in the cou (...)
18Many elements in Woodstock’s speech bear witness to the degradation of Richard’s status. First, he does not refer to him as “King” but only uses his name. Then, Richard is included in a group with his flatterers, but it is a group of unnamed trees: the oak has gone, and with it the king’s uniqueness – a tenet of royal orthodoxy. This illustrates both Richard’s abasement and the rise of his flatterers, who have grown figuratively from “ivy” in act 1 to “trees” in act 3. However, these trees are presented as frail and eventually bare, thus conveying the debasing process Richard has initiated, stripping himself of all his majesty and authority. Like the tree when it has shed its leaves, the king has no clothes left. In addition, the comparison differs from the oak emblem we studied before in that the trees become the subjects and Richard and his flatterers become the objects: it is the trees which are compared to men and not the opposite. The trees are the ones that seem real here whereas Richard and his flatterers are images; the king thus seems to become a rhetorical trope, the mere archetype of a bad governor. Yet there is something unstoppable in that degrading and wasting process Richard is made responsible for: by assimilating a political event to the shedding of leaves, which is part of the normal life cycle of trees (just like ivy naturally grows around the oak), Woodstock’s conceit reveals his own inability to do anything to stop it.31
“The outward bark untouched”: Precarious Bodies
19In this blurred network of competing images, the actual tree thus reappears behind the emblem in all its concrete and precarious nature, now matching the king’s new status. The decaying process reaches its apex when the image of the oak returns for the last time in the play. At the very end of act 4, after Queen Anne’s sudden death, Richard is unexpectedly overwhelmed by grief and remorse and tries to go back on his decision to have Woodstock murdered:
KING RICHARD – Send post to Calais and bid Lapoole forbear
On pain of life to act our sad decree.
For heaven’s love, go prevent the tragedy.
We have too much provoked the powers divine
And here repent thy wrongs, good Uncle Woodstock,
The thought whereof confounds my memory.
If men might die when they would ’point the time,
The time is now King Richard would be gone,
For as a fearful thunderclap doth strike
The soundest body of the tallest oak
Yet harmless leaves the outward bark untouched,
So is King Richard struck. Come, come, let’s go.
My wounds are inward; inward burn my woe. (4.3.172-184)
- 32 Henry Smith, The sinfull mans search: or seeking of God, London, 1592, sig. C3.
20In his speech, Richard retains some of his royal character, repeating “King Richard” twice and using two superlative forms to refer to the oak, but the general impression – especially with this new oak image – is one of humility and despair. We are far from the majestic oak of act 2, all the more so as the thunderclap – traditionally associated with Jupiter – wounds the tree that is commonly referred to as the tree of Jupiter. The symbolism of the oak thus seems to collapse on itself and undermine Richard’s status as God’s representative on Earth. This providential punishment has a clear leveling effect, often displayed in early modern texts to show that even the strongest or greatest beings can experience a tragic fall. In one of his sermons, published in 1592 after his death, Henry Smith thus wondered: “But dooth not the Lord spare the Cedar tree for his height? nor the Oke for his strength? nor the Poplar for his smoothnesse? nor the Lawrel for his greennes? No verely”.32
21The striking of the oak also calls to mind a very similar image in another contemporary play, the 1595 anonymous Lamentable Tragedy of Locrine, which features at the beginning old King Brutus surrounded by his sons and nobility, reflecting upon the imminence of death. After comparing his arms to a decaying cedar, his speech switches to another simile which features the second emblematic royal tree:
- 33 Anonymous, The lamentable tragedie of Locrine, London, 1595, sig. A4.
BRUTUS – […] This heart my Lords, this neare appalled heart,
That was a terror to the bordring lands,
A dolefull scourge vnto my neighbor Kings,
Now by the weapons of vnpartiall death,
Is cloue asunder and bereft of life,
As when the sacred oake with thunderbolts,
Sent from the fiery circuit of the heauens,
Sliding along the aires celestiall valts,
Is rent and clouen to the verie rootes. (1.2.20-28)33
- 34 Timothie Bright, A treatise of melancholie Containing the causes thereof, & reasons of the strange (...)
- 35 “tous ceux qui, doutant d’eux-mêmes, entreprennent de chercher le salut dans un modèle : autre magi (...)
- 36 This tentative depiction of Richard’s inner turmoils fits in with the revival of “Taciteanism” whic (...)
22Despite some textual similarities, those two royal speeches offer two very different representations of the king. First, as opposed to Brutus, whose reign is about to end as the play opens, Richard is a young king whose effective rule has just started – he has just got rid of Woodstock’s Protectorship in act 2. And one would not expect such a decaying metaphor to apply to him so early in his reign. Moreover, in Richard’s speech, the oak seems to have lost its “sacred” quality. Its towering position is only based on observations and measures – “soundest”, “tallest” – which, deprived of any form of transcendence, almost point to a hubristic and desperate attempt at reaching the heavens. Similarly, whereas the lightning descends “from the fiery circuit of the heauens” in Brutus’s speech, it has no explicit divine origin in Richard’s, and is simply described as some natural phenomenon, thus severing even more the connection between God and his representative. But perhaps the most significant difference between Locrine and Woodstock lies in the wounds of the oak: while they are external – and thus easily perceptible – in the former play, they are invisible in the latter. If the outward bark seems intact, just as the repetition of “King Richard” suggests that Richard is still the king, his private and excessive passions torment him within. The lightning then becomes the sign of Richard being seized by guilt, which is how Timothie Bright describes a “distressed conscience” in his 1586 Treatise of Melancholy: “it taketh of a sodaine like lightning, and giueth no warning”.34 The image is no longer a transcendental one, but a psychological one. Richard’s conceit thus creates an outward/inward dichotomy and, by doing so, completes the degradation of his body politic, bringing to the fore his body natural – that of a guilty man. The oak, which in act 2 could still refer to the dominant position of the King, now only serves to illustrate the tragic situation of a king. This image, instead of setting him apart, brings him back to the human world, and eventually to himself. Ironically enough, this is exactly how model images work according to French philosopher Clément Rosset, who describes them as “magical other[s]” in his 1976 essay Le réel et son double [The Real and Its Double].35 Here, this magical figure no longer works as a form of escapism but as a mirror, as suggested by the chiasmus “My wounds are inward; inward burn my woe,” which pictures a king entrapped in his own conscience. The choice of the subjunctive also highlights Richard’s act of fully embracing his guilt. But we, as spectators, only get a glimpse of this: we are briefly shown what should remain hidden – the king’s inner turmoil – before Richard hurries off and leaves the stage.36
- 37 A. McRae, art. cit., p. 412.
- 38 On this topic, see for example Lea Luecking Frost, “The Historiography of Texts and Textiles in Tho (...)
- 39 We can find an example of the misuse of trees for fashion purposes in The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606) (...)
- 40 This emphasis on the plainness of oaks could also allude not only to Woodstock’s traditionally plai (...)
23The oak thus becomes a precarious tree in Richard’s conceit. But, despite their different meanings, all these variations on the oak (and more generally on trees) have something in common: they tend to paradoxically erase actual trees from the picture by turning them into rhetorical tools for human purposes. And this utilitarian conception extends beyond mere words since the play offers an intriguing similarity between the manipulation of arboreal symbols and the (mis)use of actual trees. In act 1 scene 3, Woodstock sheds light on the alarming disappearance of natural resources during the welcoming ceremony of Queen Anne. Richard’s uncle is known for usually dressing in plain clothing but he has to wear fine and sumptuous garments for the occasion. Still, as he remarks, these clothes weigh heavily on his horse’s shoulders: “A hundred oaks upon these shoulders hang / To make me brave upon your wedding day, / And more than that, to make my horse more tire, / Ten acres of good land are stitched up here.” (1.3.95-98) The reference to the hundred oaks here paradoxically insists on the precariousness of the tree – not just as an individual emblem but as a species – and evidences the “natural” cost of court fashion. Woodstock’s speech thereby echoes a widespread anxiety in the Tudor period, which was defined, as Andrew McRae explains, by “[t]he nightmare vision of an accelerating depletion of the nation’s wood and timber supplies”.37 Court fashion was one target of such anxious criticism, and it is no surprise if it is often attacked and mocked in Woodstock, for example with Richard and his flatterers adopting overly refined and ridiculous clothes.38 But those clothes can barely hide their moral corruption and point to Richard’s desecration of his own function as king instead. Like the symbolic oaks, the actual oaks felled for Woodstock’s attire39 are used to create the official image of a glorious political body. But instead of being erased, they reemerge in all their plainness as the source of this fashioning process in Woodstock’s discourse.40 This emphasis on the unadorned reality of trees serves as a reminder of the character’s broader preference for authenticity, which transpires in his traditional plain clothes but also in his speech since he is known for using blunt speech and rejecting ornamented flattery.
- 41 As Greene suggests, “[…] Lapoole, the governor of Calais, is new come over, who, with a troop of so (...)
24Woodstock thus seems to be the only character in the play who pays attention to actual trees and the ways they interact with men. If we go back to his exchange with his brother York in act 3, scene 2, when all peers are gathered at Plashy House, York’s comment on the trees surrounding the property clearly displays a utilitarian outlook, singling out how beneficial they are for Woodstock: in summer, they “serve for pleasant fans” while in winter, they “break / The stormy winds”. There is some irony in this praise though, because it means that the way trees are perceived only depends on the way they are of use to men. And a few scenes later, in act 4, those same trees will in fact serve to conceal the presence of the king’s soldiers41 and thus help foster Richard’s plot to arrest Woodstock. But, as opposed to York, Woodstock seems aware of such reversibility. He immediately qualifies York’s judgement: “Their wanton heads so oft play with the winds, / Throwing their leaves so prodigally down, / They’ll leave me cold at last” (3.2.20-22). Just like the emblematic oak failed to protect Richard, the trees at Plashy House are a deceptive kind of protection for his uncle. And if these lines allow him to comment on the political situation, they also reflect the discrepancy between human time and natural time. Even if the trees are depicted as diminished because of their leaf shedding, this process is part of their natural cycle. As York’s speech suggests, they will still stand through the seasons and when spring returns, leaves will too. The simile thus rather insists on Woodstock’s precarious body, set in a narrower form of mortal time. His body will be left “cold at last,” with the adverb clearly indicating that there will not be any kind of return or regeneration for him – nor for Richard. By stressing how abandoned he will be, Woodstock shows how the natural world follows its own path, without any consideration for men whatsoever.
- 42 V. Bladen, op. cit., p. 38.
25Woodstock’s lament is thus the final illustration of how arboreal images in the play both hide and reveal the human (and often tragic) condition of those they are supposed to describe. Those images are subjected to constant manipulation, which prevents us from attaching a definitive meaning to them – the oak being the foremost example here. For Richard, the oak refers to his body politic as well as to his body natural and conveys two radically different representations of a king: one based on political orthodoxy, and the other potentially destructive. The play thus uses the instability of its arboreal imagery to show how unstable – and dangerous – the political situation it is supposed to represent is. But this specific attention paid to trees in Woodstock does not mean that they are approached as actual natural elements. They are symbols and, as such, serve to describe or comment on human situations; they are only envisioned through a human perspective. This late Elizabethan play is marked by a utilitarian vision, for practical or aesthetic purposes, and trees rarely appear as natural elements worthy of acute description. Still, Woodstock’s evocation of the indifference of trees, and by extension, of their natural life, paves the way for a more naturalistic approach; in so doing, it hints at what Victoria Bladen has identified in the early modern period as “a shift involving the increasing interest in physical reality that coexisted with older symbolic frameworks of the world that over time lost their power, for many, to frame the perception of nature”.42 The play indeed alternates between highly stylized representations and more concrete and detailed depictions but, in a period still marked by the symbolic reading of nature offered by the Bible, it also reminds us that observation is yet to prevail over allegory.
Notes
1 Edmund Spenser, The faerie qveene disposed into twelue books, fashioning XII. morall vertues, London, 1590, sig. A4.
2 Victoria Bladen, The Tree of Life and Arboreal Aesthetics in Early Modern Literature, New York, Routledge, 2022, p. 79.
3 Ibid., p. 161.
4 Anonymous, The speeches and honorable entertainment giuen to the Queenes Maiestie in progresse, at Cowdrey in Sussex, by the right honorable the Lord Montacute, London, 1591, sig. B1r.
5 Following on from one of Aesop’s Fables, the solid oak was often opposed to the more pliable reed, as can be seen in the following lines from a 1560 book of epigrams by John Heywood: “In eche one storme a thousād okes downe are blowne, / In a thousand stormes not one reede ouerthrowne.” (John Heywood, A fourth hundred of epygrams, London, 1560, sig. C1).
6 In Geffrey Whitney’s Choice of Emblems (1586), the oak is used as a visual and verbal illustration of the motto “Tempus omnia terminat”; a woodcut of an oak tree fallen in a river is accompanied by a verse which includes the following line: “The greatest oke, in time to duste doth turne.” (Geffrey Whitney, A choice of emblemes, and other deuises, for the moste parte gathered out of sundrie writers, Leiden, 1586, sig. f3v).
7 Richard Rainolde, A booke called the Foundacion of rhetorike, London, 1563, sig. N2v.
8 Andrew McRae, “Tree-felling in Early Modern England: Michael Drayton’s Environmentalism”, The Review of English Studies, 63. 260, 2012, p. 410-30, here p. 414.
9 Alzada J. Tipton, ““The meanest man… shall be permitted freely to accuse”: The Commoners in Woodstock”, Comparative Drama, 32.1, 1998, p. 117-45, here p. 117. As Tipton points out, “Woodstock is unparalleled among Renaissance texts in its willingness to question princely authority and imagine the redistribution of that authority in more satisfactory ways” (Ibid.).
10 All references to the play are from Thomas of Woodstock or King Richard the Second, Part One, ed. Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2002.
11 See David Womersley, “France in Shakespeare’s Henry V”, Renaissance Studies, 1.4, 1995, p. 446-447.
12 V. Bladen, op. cit., p. 11.
13 As Scott H. Hendrix puts it, the reformers saw themselves as “faithful laborers” and “thought they were replanting Christianity in the vineyard of the Lord, that is, in the same European Christendom which, they believed, had been devastated by the medieval church.” (Scott H. Hendrix, Recultivating the Vineyard, The Reformation Agendas of Christianization, Louisville, Westminster John Knox Press, 2004, p. xvii)
14 Richard Robinson, The vineyarde of vertue collected, composed, and digested into a tripartite order, conteining XXXII. most excellent plants of fruitful vertue, London, 1579, sig. A4v-A5.
15 V. Bladen, op. cit., p. 32.
16 The passage of our most drad Soueraigne Lady Quene Elyzabeth through the citie of London to westminster the daye before her coronacion Anno 1558, London, 1558, sig. C3v-C4.
17 Tresilian reassures Greene, one of Richard’s flatterers, about how he intends to perform his future magistracy: “’Zounds, I will screw and wind the stubborn law / To any fashion that shall like you best. / It shall be law what I say is law, / And what’s most suitable to all your pleasures.” (1.2.45-48)
18 Using early modern gardening metaphors, flattery was perceived by many as the most dangerous kind of “weed”; William Rankins for example wrote, “Of all the stinking wéeds that choke swéet flowers growing in the garden of a florishing commonwealth. I find none sooner rooted nor more pestilent then the sensuall séed of flatterie, whose branches spred, and are nourished with the moist sappe of traiterous deuises, whose leaues are fresh and gréene, and whose blossoms gaie and gorgious to dazle their eyes, which peraduenture might decerne the secret poison & hidden harmes, that lurketh vnder the deadlie shadowe of so beautifull a trée.” (William Rankins, A mirrour of monsters, London, 1587, sig. D2v)
19 Donald F. Lach, “Asian Elephants in Renaissance Europe”, Journal of Asian History, vol. 1, n° 2, 1967, p. 133-176, here p. 141.
20 Ibid., p. 140-141.
21 Timothy Kendall, Flovvers of epigrammes, out of sundrie the moste singular authours selected, as well auncient as late writers. Pleasant and profitable to the expert readers of quicke capacitie…, London, 1577, sig. Q8v.
22 Lach explains that, for medieval writers, “[t]o catch an elephant, the hunter need only discover and cut down the tree while the elephant is sleeping against it” (D. F. Lach, art. cit., p. 141).
23 In 1604, George Wildey used the image of the oak falling to show how the corruption of rulers had consequences for their kingdoms as a whole; using such examples as Rehoboam and Jeroboam, Wildey wrote, “One therefore not vnfitly compares them vnto great oakes, that when they fall, beate downe all the vnder wood with them; so doe these.” (George Wildey, The doctrine of the Sabbath, London, 1604, sig. Y4v).
24 The New Oxford Shakespeare, ed. Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus and Gabriel Egan, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016.
25 Rankins, in his Mirror of Monsters (1587), described flatterers as follows: “They cleaue to the coates of highest in authoritie, not vnlike the Iuie, which créepeth vp the bodye of the mightie Oke, and being come vnto the toppe thereof, ouershadoweth his boughes with his twined branches.” (W. Rankins, op.cit., sig. D4)
26 Michael Drayton, Peirs Gaueston Earle of Cornvvall His life, death, and fortune, London, 1594, sig. C2.
27 Thomas Storer, The life and death of Thomas Wolsey Cardinall, London, 1599, sig. D1.
28 Woodstock’s reflection on orthodoxy echoes that of his character in the Mirror for Magistrates (1559), who clearly says that his fault was to try and replace Richard’s companions he deemed unfit for office: “For where as al kings haue counsel of their choyse / To whom they refer the rule of theyr lande, / With certayne famyliers in whom to reioyce, / For pleasure or profyt, as the case shall stande, / I not bearyng this, would nedes take in hande, / Maulgree his wyll those persons to dysgrace, / And such as I thought fyt to appoynt in their place.” (William Baldwin, A myrroure for magistrates, London, 1559, sig. C3v)
29 Robert Cawdry, A treasurie or store-house of similies both pleasaunt, delightfull, and profitable, for all estates of men in generall, London, 1600, sig. Vvvv1.
30 Jeffrey Paxton Hehmeyer, “Heralding the Commonplace: Authorship, Voice, and the Commonplace in Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece”, Shakespeare Quarterly, 64.2, 2013, p. 139-64, here p. 147.
31 This attitude fits with Woodstock’s position at this moment in the play, far from court, in the country, observing Richard’s misrule without being able to stop it; as he says a bit later in that scene, “So may we talk, but thus will Richard do.” (3.2.50)
32 Henry Smith, The sinfull mans search: or seeking of God, London, 1592, sig. C3.
33 Anonymous, The lamentable tragedie of Locrine, London, 1595, sig. A4.
34 Timothie Bright, A treatise of melancholie Containing the causes thereof, & reasons of the strange effects it worketh in our minds and bodies: with the physicke cure, and spirituall consolation for such as haue thereto adioyned an afflicted conscience, London, 1586, sig. N1v.
35 “tous ceux qui, doutant d’eux-mêmes, entreprennent de chercher le salut dans un modèle : autre magique dont j’espère qu’il me fera échapper à mon sort, alors qu’il m’enferme inexorablement en moi-même.” (Clément Rosset, Le réel et son double, Paris, Gallimard, 1993 [1976], p. 110)
36 This tentative depiction of Richard’s inner turmoils fits in with the revival of “Taciteanism” which, as Debora Shuger explains, characterized the late sixteenth century; this form of historiography was based on Tacitus and Suetonius, whose goal as historians was to track the “core selfhood” of those in power, and disclose its presence “beneath the stately masks which power uses to conceal its guilt”; it thus inevitably clashed with the more charitable and secretive modes of representation of the period. (Debora Shuger, Censorship and Cultural Sensibility, The Regulation of Language in Tudor-Stuart England, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006, p. 206-207)
37 A. McRae, art. cit., p. 412.
38 On this topic, see for example Lea Luecking Frost, “The Historiography of Texts and Textiles in Thomas of Woodstock”, English Literary Renaissance, vol. 45, n° 1, 2015.
39 We can find an example of the misuse of trees for fashion purposes in The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606), when Vindice ironically describes how flourishing the commonwealth is: “Fair trees, those comely foretops of the field, / Are cut to maintain head-tires: much untold.” (2.1.221-222) (Thomas Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy, ed. Brian Gibbons, London, Methuen, 2008)
40 This emphasis on the plainness of oaks could also allude not only to Woodstock’s traditionally plain clothes but also to his use of plain speech and his rejection of ornamented flattery, both defining features of his character.
41 As Greene suggests, “[…] Lapoole, the governor of Calais, is new come over, who, with a troop of soldiers closely ambushed in the woods near the house, shall shroud themselves till the masque be ended.” (4.1.101-104)
42 V. Bladen, op. cit., p. 38.
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Nicolas Thibault, « The Tree that Hides the Man: The Use and Misuse of Arboreal Symbols in Thomas of Woodstock (c. 1591-1595) », Études Épistémè [En ligne], 48 | 2025, mis en ligne le 16 mars 2026, consulté le 20 avril 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/episteme/22062 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/160fq
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