Cloistered Contradictions: Depictions of Eden in Richard II Samuel Wilcox College

Immediately after learning of her husband’s imminent deposement, the Queen likens the abdication of King Richard II to the exile of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. “What Eve, what serpent hath suggested thee / [t]o make a second fall of cursèd man?” she cries out, linking the deposement of the monarch to temptation and original sin (3.4.75-6). In a garden herself, and learning of her husband’s capture from the Gardener, the Queen consciously leverages this allusion to Genesis as a means to reinforce a divinely ordained monarchical power. Placing herself and Richard in the Garden of Eden, but remaining distinct from Adam and Eve themselves, the Queen connects the kingship to a prelapsarian existence in the garden. A play dramatically invested in the relationship between the ruler and the landscape—in the construction of the head and the body politic—King Richard II echoes the Edenistic imagery to depict the downfall of one ruler, Richard, and the rise of another, Bullingbrook. Indeed, the garden becomes a clear metaphor for the country as a whole, while the monarch is meant to be the steward of that garden. As the play invokes the biblical allusions to the Garden of Eden, however, the play not only suggests the...