'Her Wholesome Herbs Swarming with Caterpillars'

Count on Falstaff for colorful, spirited invective: 

“Strike; down with them; cut the villains' throats:

ah! whoreson caterpillars! bacon-fed knaves! they

hate us youth: down with them: fleece them.”

 

This is from Act II, Scene 2 of Henry IV, Part 1, set on a highway where Falstaff and his drunken cronies (including Prince Henry) are robbing a group of travelers. I liked “whoreson caterpillars!” enough to remember it on Saturday when I found this in the garden:

 

That’s the caterpillar of a monarch butterfly, systematically defoliating one of our plants. I like butterflies even more than plants, so I took his picture and left him alone. Caterpillar has a complicated etymology, which we won’t go into here, but it seems to have entered English in the fifteenth century, a century and a half before Shakespeare. He liked the word enough to use it three other times in his work -- twice in Henry IV, Part 2, once in Venus and Adonis, and twice in Richard II. In each case, the insects are cited as rapacious consumers of vegetation. The second appearance of caterpillar in Richard II (Act III, Scene 4) is spoken in the Duke of York’s garden by a servant and is part of a beautiful, pertinent extended metaphor:      

 

“Why should we in the compass of a pale

Keep law and form and due proportion,

Showing, as in a model, our firm estate,

When our sea-walled garden, the whole land,

Is full of weeds, her fairest flowers choked up,

Her fruit-trees all upturned, her hedges ruin’d,

Her knots disorder’d and her wholesome herbs

Swarming with caterpillars?”