The word 'alley' collocates with 'orchard' in three of its four occurrences. 'Orchard' is not a particularly rare word. It occurs 19 times in 10 different plays. It occurs most often (5x) in Much Ado about Nothing, where the orchard functions as a symbolic space of erotic deception and error.
The first error occurs when Antonio tells Leonatus that "walking in a thick-pleach'd alley in mine orchard" the Prince was overheard speaking about his love of Hero to Claudio (MAN 1.2.10). We are told specifically that Claudio witnesses the false spectacle of Hero's infidelity from an "orchard" (MAN 3.3.151, 5.1.237). And Beatrice is talked into her love for Benedick through Hero's plot:
4 Whisper her ear, and tell her I and Ursley
5 Walk in the orchard, and our whole discourse
6 Is all of her. Say that thou overheardst us,
7 And bid her steal into the pleached bower,
8 Where honeysuckles, ripened by the sun,
9 Forbid the sun to enter,
. . . .
15 Now, Ursula, when Beatrice doth come,
16 As we do trace this alley up and down,
17 Our talk must only be of Benedick.
This orchard with its alleys and channels of faulty visual and verbal communication returns in Hamlet as the site of the King's murder, but now the power of verbal deception is turned into literal poison:
Sleeping within my orchard,
60 My custom always of the afternoon,
61 Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole,
62 With juice of cursed hebona in a vial,
63 And in the porches of my ears did pour
64 The leprous distillment, whose effect
65 Holds such an enmity with blood of man
66 That swift as quicksilver it courses through
67 The natural gates and alleys of the body,
The single other occurrence of 'alley' (Com. 4.2.38) does not bear on this context.
25 July, 1999
mailto:martinmueller@nwu.edu