"The Caterpillars of the Commonwealth"

This week I've been digging into the first cycle of Shakespeare's history plays: Richard II, Henry IV (Parts 1 and 2) and Henry V, having watched again the BBC's astonishing television series The Hollow Crown. Populated by the cream of British stage actors, and produced as part of the UK's 2012 "Cultural Olympics" (to coincide with the London Summer Olympics), The Hollow Crown (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHia1zu_YNI) garnered both rave reviews and a host of awards for its cast and crew.

But it is a tangled web (no, not a quote from Shakespeare, as it is so often thought, but rather from Sir Walter Scott) that we enter when we get into the history plays, and for a scorecard of the players  I've relied on Peter Saccio's dense but in informative Shakespeare's English Kings: History, Chronicle, and Drama (Oxford University Press, 2000).

As Shakespeare draws him, Richard II is the flawed, doomed and (eventually rather demented) king surrounded by self-promoters and scoundrels and sycophants. The man who would eventually take his crown, Henry Bolingbroke, describes Richard's advisors as "caterpillars of the commonwealth" (2.3.11), munching their way through the lush and lovely garden that is England.

The phrase 'caterpillars of the commonwealth' was not new with Shakespeare. In 1577 A Description of Elizabethan England has a chapter on "The Provision for the Poor" (Book III., Chapter 5) which differentiates between the "godly poor" and the "ungracious rabble," and rebukes those who are strong and able-bodied but refuse to work:

"But in fine they are all thieves and caterpillars in the commonwealth, and by the Word of God not permitted to eat, but they do but lick the sweat from the true labourers’ brows, and bereave the godly poor of that which is due unto them, to maintain their excess, consuming the charity of well-disposed people bestowed upon them, after a most wicked and detestable manner."

The Description is a polemical tract by the English Calvinist William Harrison (1534-1593) and was included in Raphael Holinshead's Chronicles of England, Scotlande and Irelande [1587], a principal source for Shakespeare's English history plays. (For more about Harrison see G.J. R. Parry, A Protestant Vision: William Harrison and the Reformation of Elizabethan England [Cambridge University Press, 2002 http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/302]).

But it is no wonder that Shakespeare plucked the juicy phrase "caterpillars of the commonwealth" for his own use. As a word-picture it is sublime! The root word 'pil' in caterpillar is the same as that in pillage: i.e., “to rob, plunder, or ravage.” Caterpillars of the Commonwealth  evokes the ravaging of Eden, the despoilation of what is fruitful, the ruination of the orderly and the good by greedy predators.

But it is interesting that Shakespeare intentionally shifted the referent of the phrase from the "undeserving poor" of Harrison/Holinshead to those involved in political intrigue, plotting, and malice.  And Richard II is not the only place that this derogative use of caterpillars appears in the history plays to refer to politics.  In Henry IV a messenger to the king also refers to an approaching rebel troop of “scholars, lawyers, courtiers, gentlemen”  as “false caterpillars.” As an insult, caterpillars of the Commonwealth is as fit for the Elizabethan Court as it is, at times, for the American Congress or the English Parliament.

So, if you are hunting for an insult for your favorite crop of politicians, Will Shakespeare is your man! (Do have a look at the do-it-yourself Shakespeare Insult Kit at http://www.pangloss.com/seidel/Shaker/)