What links elephants and garters? Not some particularly cruel experiment, but rather the fact that both are names that Shakespeare gives to inns. For the elephant, see my earlier piece; for the garter pub, found in The Merry Wives of Windsor, read on. In this play as elsewhere with the fourty-three uses of the word, much comic capital is drawn out of garters, with the innkeeper of the aforementioned establishment often referred to as my “host of the Garter”, implying, or course, that he is absurdly in possession of the highest honour in the realm, membership of the order of the garter (motto: ‘honi soit qui mal y pense’, ‘shame upon he who thinks ill of it’).

The order, and not the inn, is behind several other uses of the word, particularly in the histories. Talbot, the great warrior of Henry VI part I critically recalls how members of the order “of the garter were of noble birth, / Valiant and virtuous, full of haughty courage”; Richard III, on the other hand, swears “by my George, my garter, and my crown”, only to have Queen Elizabeth throw his words straight back at him:

QUEEN ELIZABETH By nothing; for this is no oath:
Thy George, profan’d, hath lost his lordly honour;
Thy garter, blemish’d, pawn’d his knightly virtue;
Thy crown, usurp’d, disgrac’d his kingly glory.
If something thou wouldst swear to be believ’d,
Swear then by something that thou has not wrong’d.

Queen Elizabeth’s distate for Richard and his unscrupulous use of what Talbot held so sacred are likely to have been shared by a character in Henry VIII, who, remarkably, is actually called “Garter” (presumably after his knighthood), and who gives a long eulogy on the newly-born “high and mighty Princess of England, Elizabeth” towards the end of the play.

As well as the knightly order, whether comically or reverentially evoked, one finds another, more sartorial use of garters. Iago demands one as a tourniquet as a way of covering his own murder of Roderigo in Othello; and Malvolio, famously humiliating himself by appearing “cross-gartered” before his mistress Olivia in Twelfth Night, is forced to admit that his costume causes some “obstruction in the blood”. By falling into the trap of the servants and Olivia’s extended family, Malvolio the butler in fact comes close to doing metaphorically what Theseus imagines the mechanicals’ scriptwriter might literally do in a Midsummer Night’s Dream, namely “hang’d himself in [a] garter”. Likewise, a disgruntled Falstaff tells Prince Hal to “hang thyself in thine own heir-apparent garters”.

A source of insults and humiliation, as well as more innocent foolery, this “narrow band of fabric fastened about the leg” is truly, as the Fool of King Lear puts it, “cruel garters” indeed.