The Importance Of Allegory In Shakespeare's Richard II

Many rulers throughout time have ruled unjustly or incompetently. When rulers do not rightfully rule, not much can change, since kings act as the deputy of God. William Shakespeare beautifully tackles this idea of when and how a king should lose his kingship, through allegories, in his play Richard II. Allegories have an effectiveness in revealing a political notion, that simply stating it does not have. Richard has allowed his garden, or his kingdom, to become a tangled mess, showing his ineffectiveness as a ruler. Shakespeare strategically slips in some allegories that try to tell the reader what to do about an ineffective ruler, like Richard.
Unlike the queen, who has no knowledge of Richard’s whereabouts, the gardeners have an ample amount of knowledge about Richard’s downfall. While weeding and tending to the garden the gardeners talk of politics:
Go, bind thou up young dangling apricokes
Which, like unruly children, make their sire
Stoop with oppression of their prodigal weight…
I will root away
The noisome weeds. (3. 4. 32-41)
One gardener tells the other gardener to bind

The gardeners both converse about what should happen to an inefficient ruler: “[Richard] that hath suffered this disordered spring / Hath now himself met with the fall of leaf”(3.4.52-53). While talking to one gardener, the other gardener states that Richard has ‘suffered’ meaning allowed the ‘disordered spring’ which symbolizes the tangled garden called the English government. The gardener then says that Richard has “met with the fall of leaf” meaning he has met the end of his reign. Similar to the natural changes in season the allegory of the garden suggests that Richard should naturally lose kingship, similar to the natural change of seasons. Then again, a gardener must pick out unwanted plants, that infest the garden, which might also suggest that a ruler might have to physically become