The line “The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts,” inaugurates the trial by invoking a preexisting nursery rhyme as if it were a legal document. Carroll imports a piece of children’s culture into a courtroom, collapsing boundaries between play and procedure. The accusation’s authority rests not on evidence or reasoning but on the rhyme’s familiarity and meter. The court treats the verse as dispositive: immediately after the stanza is read, the King urges the jury to “Consider your verdict,” signaling that a conclusion is expected because the script (the rhyme) already supplies a narrative of guilt. The tarts themselves—placed conspicuously in the courtroom—function as props that literalize the rhyme’s plot while adding to the absurdity of proof by display. For Alice, who recognizes courtroom trappings from books, the scene initially matches what she “has read,” but the substitution of rhyme for law exposes that those trappings are hollow. The quote thus frames the entire trial as a theatrical recitation where roles (Herald, Judge, Jury) and rules (verdicts, evidence) are mimed rather than understood, critiquing systems that rely on formula over reason.