SOURCE: Berninghausen, Thomas F. “Banishing Cain: The Gardening Metaphor in Richard II and the Genesis Myth of the Origin of History.” Essays in Literature 14, no. 1 (spring 1987): 3-14.

In the following essay, Berninghausen views the metaphorical relationship between gardening and kingship dramatized in Act III, scene iv of Richard II as the thematic touchstone of the drama.

In the years since E. M. W. Tillyard's classic study of Richard II,¹ the garden scene (III.iv) has become a focal point of controversy. The scene draws attention to the metaphorical equation of gardening and kingship. This equation, in concert with the Adam/Cain/Abel dynamic of Genesis, defines the rhetoric within which the verbal battles of Richard II are fought. Tillyard has argued that the garden scene acts as an objective commentary on the remainder of Richard II, with the chief gardener's speeches giving “both the pattern and the moral...