Shakespeare's Botanical Imagination 9789048551101

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1. Plant Power and Agency
1. Vegetable Virtues
2. The “idle weeds that grow in the sustaining corn”: Generating Plants in King Lear
3. Botanical Barbary: Punning, Race, and Plant Life in Othello 4.3
Part 2. Human-Vegetable Affinities and Transformations
4. Shakespeare’s Botanical Grace
5. “Circummured” Plants and Women in Measure for Measure
6. Cymbeline’s Plant People
7. ‘Thou art translated’: Plants of Passage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Part 3. Plants and Temporalities
8. Clockwork Plants and Shakespeare’s Overlapping Notions of Time
9. The Verdant Imagination in Shakespeare’s Sonnets
10. The Botanical Revisions of 3 Henry VI
11. Botanomorphism and Temporality: Imagining Humans as Plants in Two Shakespeare Plays
Afterword
Index

Citation preview

Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination

Environmental Humanities in Pre-modern Cultures This series in environmental humanities offers approaches to medieval, early modern, and global pre-industrial cultures from interdisciplinary environmental perspectives. We invite submissions (both monographs and edited collections) in the fields of ecocriticism, specifically ecofeminism and new ecocritical analyses of under-represented literatures; queer ecologies; posthumanism; waste studies; environmental history; environmental archaeology; animal studies and zooarchaeology; landscape studies; ‘blue humanities’, and studies of environmental/natural disasters and change and their effects on pre-modern cultures. Series Editor Heide Estes, University of Cambridge and Monmouth University Editorial Board Steven Mentz, St. John’s University Gillian Overing, Wake Forest University Philip Slavin, University of Kent

Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination

Edited by Susan C. Staub

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Crane, Walter. “Eglantine.” Flowers from Shakespeare’s garden. [London]: Cassell & Co., Ltd, https://library.si.edu/digital-library/book/flowersfromshak00cran. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives. Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 133 2 e-isbn 978 90 4855 110 1 doi 10.5117/9789463721332 nur 685 © The authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2023 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

List of Figures

7

Acknowledgments 9 Introduction 11 Susan C. Staub

Part 1  Plant Power and Agency 1. Vegetable Virtues

Rebecca Bushnell

43

2. The “idle weeds that grow in the sustaining corn”: Generating Plants in King Lear 63 Susan C. Staub

3. Botanical Barbary: Punning, Race, and Plant Life in Othello 4.3 Hillary M. Nunn

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Part 2 Human-Vegetable Affinities and Transformations 4. Shakespeare’s Botanical Grace Rebecca Totaro

105

5. “Circummured” Plants and Women in Measure for Measure 127 Claire Duncan

6. Cymbeline’s Plant People Jeffrey Theis

149

7. ‘Thou art translated’: Plants of Passage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 171 Lisa Hopkins

Part 3  Plants and Temporalities 8. Clockwork Plants and Shakespeare’s Overlapping Notions of Time

193

9. The Verdant Imagination in Shakespeare’s Sonnets

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Miranda Wilson

Elizabeth D. Gruber

10. The Botanical Revisions of 3 Henry VI 243 Jason Hogue

11. Botanomorphism and Temporality: Imagining Humans as Plants in Two Shakespeare Plays Elizabeth Crachiolo

267

Afterword 285 Vin Nardizzi

Index 295



List of Figures

Figure 1

Figure 2 Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure 5

Figure 6

Title page. John Gerard, The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes, by John Norton, London, 1597. Special Collections, Getty Research Institute, J. Paul Getty Trust, Los Angeles. Courtesy of HathiTrust.12 Frontispiece of Ralph Austen’s A Treatise of Fruit Trees (Oxford, 1653). This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.135 Athanasius Kircher, “Sunflower Clock,” from Magnes siue de arte magnetica opvs tripartitvm. Rome: 1641. Photo courtesy of Special Collections, The University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press, Newark, Delaware.195 “Portable Drum Watch,” with both a mechanical dial and a sundial (1550–1570). From the workshop of Christoph Schissler. Courtesy of The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.199 The title page of John Parkinson’s 1629 Paradisi in Sole. Woodcut by Christopher Switzer. Photo courtesy of Special Collections, The University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press, Newark, Delaware.203 Figure of Time with scythe, hourglass and clock. Martin Parker, “Take Time, While Time Is,” first printed in the last years of James I and reprinted in 1638. © British Library Board, The Roxburghe Ballads Collection, C.20.f.7.398–399.213

Acknowledgments As I began developing this collection, I approached both established and emerging scholars whose work I admired and whom I wanted to put in conversation. Although I knew their scholarship, some of them I had never met. I thank my contributors for trusting me and the project and for sticking with it through all the turmoil of the pandemic—and for their lovely essays. My editor, Erika Gaffney, has been invaluable in guiding me through this process and patiently answering my endless questions. My thanks as well to Chantal Nicolaes, the project manager at Amsterdam, whose care and diligence I greatly appreciated as the book moved toward production. I am also grateful to the reviewers whose suggestions made this a better collection. I thank Vin Nardizzi for his wisdom and generosity, as well as Rebecca Bushnell, Lisa Hopkins, and Rebecca Totaro for their advice. I also want to express my appreciation to Shawn Whitener and Ellen Burnette in Information Technology Services at my university, who were extraordinarily helpful in sorting through some knotty formatting issues. Last, but not least, I am grateful to my “ever faithful research assistant,” Steven H. Smith, who is not an academic, but who learned how to use all the databases—including EEBO—in order to help me check the footnotes and bibliographic entries. His meticulous work and keen eye saved me a lot of grief.

Introduction Susan C. Staub Abstract This introduction summarizes some of the different ways that plants are enmeshed in all aspects of human life in the early modern period and in Shakespeare’s works. It points to the many ways that plants in the period are vital and active, part of a network of meaning that belies our own sense of the word “vegetable.” These various interpretations of plants provide context for the essays gathered in this volume. Essays in this collection show the power plants have to interact with and affect humans; how the boundary between plant and human is often blurred; and how considering temporality in conjunction with plants forces a reconsideration both of time and of human life. Keywords: vitalism, trans-corporeality, indistinction, critical plant studies, ecocriticism

In May 2015, botanist Mark Griffiths ignited a firestorm among Shakespeare scholars with his identification of one of the male figures on the 1597 title page of John Gerard’s Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes as Shakespeare. Hailing it as the “literary discovery of the century,” the editor of Country Life, where Griffiths detailed his rationale for the identification, proclaimed the image “the only known and demonstrably authentic portrait of the world’s greatest writer made in his lifetime.” “This is Shakespeare in his pomp with a film star’s good looks, sharing the company of Lord Burghley, the most powerful man in the land. It changes a great deal of what we know about the Bard,” the editor crowed.1 Claiming to have “cracked the Tudor code,” 1 Mark Hedges, “The Literary Discovery of the Century,” 103. Griffiths’ discovery also ignited a tweetstorm. In reaction, Stanley Wells tweeted, “So apparently Shakespeare went around in fancy dress holding a fritillary in one hand and a cob of corn in the other.” Shakespeare Magazine@ UKShakespeare tweeted an image of the Incredible Hulk in a ruff with the caption, “Incredibly,

Staub, S.C. (ed.), Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463721332_intro

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Figure 1: Griffiths’ hypothetical Shakespeare figure, circled. Title page. John Gerard, The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes, by John Norton, 1597. Special Collections, Getty Research Institute, J. Paul Getty Trust, Los Angeles. Courtesy of HathiTrust.

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Griffiths examined the elements of the image, in particular, the laurel on the man’s head, the snake’s head fritillary in his right hand and the ear of corn in his left, and the symbol on the plinth underneath the figure, to prove his claim.2 News of Griffiths’ “discovery” quickly spread across the world with headlines heralding the find: “‘True face of Shakespeare’ appears in botany book,” the BBC declared; “William Shakespeare: Newly-discovered image revealed,” asserted The Telegraph matter-of-factly. A headline in The Washington Post was a bit cheekier: “Is this 400-year-old portrait of a hunky corn enthusiast really Shakespeare’s ‘true face’?” it asked.3 Although Griffiths’ identification has been contested, it is not hard to see why such a claim might be appealing, especially to scholars interested in Shakespeare’s botanical knowledge. 4 Shakespeare has long been praised as the poet of nature—a “natural” genius inspired by the nonhuman world around him and of which he seemed to have intimate knowledge.5 His plays teem with various kinds of fauna—with lions, and tigers, and bears; with maggots, flies, and worms. Buffeted by storms, devoured by animals, defined by the ebb and flow of this genuine portrait of William Shakespeare has been hiding in plain sight for four centuries …,” to cite just two among other snarky tweets that erupted with the publication of The Country Life article. 2 Griffiths, “Face to Face with Shakespeare,” 129–30. Griffiths posits that the fritillary references the flower into which Adonis is transformed in Venus and Adonis, the corn, Marcus’s call for Rome to gather “this scatter’d corn into one mutual sheaf” in Titus Andronicus. But as scholars have pointed out, there is disagreement about what flower Adonis’s blood generates and the corn referenced in Titus is grain rather than maize. After scholars disputed his identification, Griffiths followed up with “Why the fourth man can’t be anybody but Shakespeare.” 3 Tim Masters, “‘True Face of Shakespeare’,” BBC News; Anita Singh, “William Shakespeare: Newly-Discovered,” The Telegraph; Abby Ohlheiser, “Is This 400-Year-Old Portrait,” Washington Post. Some scholars have suggested Shakespeare knew Gerard; others that he had a hand in writing Gerard’s Herbal. 4 Although the “science” of botany is usually considered to have developed in the eighteenth century with Carl Linnaeus’ Systemae Naturae (1735), we can certainly see the beginnings of botany in Shakespeare’s time. Leah Knight classifies the use of the word “botany” in the period as a “harmless anachronism” (“Botany,” 276). In this volume, I use the word botany broadly to cover anything plant related, including horticultural, gardening, and herbal medical and domestic practices. 5 Samuel Johnson made this assessment of Shakespeare popular in his “Preface to Shakespeare,” 1067. By “nature” Johnson meant human life more generally, but this phrase has since been used to suggest Shakespeare’s keen interest in the organic world as well. And as Johnson articulates his defense of Shakespeare’s less learned writing as compared to other authors, he uses botanical analogies: Shakespeare’s plays, he explains, are “a forest, in which oaks extend their branches, and pines tower in the air, interspersed sometimes with weeds and brambles, and sometimes giving shelter to myrtles and roses” (1076).

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the Nile River, Shakespeare’s characters often seem profoundly aware of the natural realm—not simply of the changing seasons and weather and the natural cycles of life and death they reflect, but also of the disturbances wrought by human intrusions upon that world. And his plays are filled with the language of plants. Writing on the cusp of modern botany and also during the heyday of English herbals and garden manuals in what Leah Knight characterizes as “an English botanical renaissance”6 (the first original English herbal, William Turner’s A New Herbal was in progress the year Shakespeare was born, the third volume published in 1568; Henry Lyte’s A Niewe Herball or Historie of Plantes in 1578; Gerard’s enormously influential Herball in 1597), Shakespeare references at least 180 plants in his works7 as well as makes numerous allusions to horticultural and botanical practices such as grafting, pruning, weeding, and coppicing. As he does so, he suggests the intimate interconnectedness between plant and human life that seems to be severed when the human/nonhuman binary is reified concurrent with more scientific studies of the botanical world in the eighteenth century. Plants have been of interest to Shakespeare scholars at least since the nineteenth century, resulting in a subgenre of collections of Shakespeare’s plant references that continues to this day. Studies such as Henry Ellacombe’s Plant-Lore and Garden-Craft of Shakespeare (1878) and Leopold Harley Grindon’s The Shakespeare Flora (1883) tended to be encyclopedic in scope, cataloging the plants in alphabetical order, identifying them, and pointing to their specific occurrences in Shakespeare’s works or listing and describing them play by play.8 One need only look at the number of 6 Knight, Of Books and Botany, 6. As Knight points out elsewhere, “Shakespeare’s life happened to span one of the most productive historical periods in the accumulation of basic botanical knowledge, if not its systemization” (“Botany,” 281). A New Herbal was published in three installations, in 1551, 1562, and 1568. Earlier herbals, such as Lyte’s Niewe Herbal, were largely translations. Turner’s work differed in that it sought to name and define English plants accurately and to describe them from personal observation (Rydén, Shakespearean Plant Names, 15). Although he has often been accused of being a self-aggrandizing plagiarist, Gerard’s influence in the period is indisputable. Knight offers an interesting refutation of the claims made against Gerard, Of Books and Botany, 78–83. See also, Sarah Neville, Early Modern Herbals and the Book Trade, 244–62. 7 Scholars differ on the exact count. Rydén counts 190 (Shakespeare’s Plant Names, 20). 8 Ellacombe, Plant-Lore and the Garden-Craft of Shakespeare (1878); Grindon, The Shakespeare Flora (1883). Other earlier studies include Sidney Beisly, Shakspere’s Garden (1864); J. H. Bloom, Shakespeare’s Garden (1903); Esther Singleton, The Shakespeare Garden (1922); Frederick Savage, The Flora and Folklore of Shakespeare (1923); and Eleanour Rohde, Shakespeare’s Wild Flowers: Fairy Lore, Garden (1935). Ellacombe’s study remains one of the most thorough and useful of these early works. The later twentieth century saw the publication of Jessica Kerr, Shakespeare’s Flowers (1969) and Mats Rydén, Shakespearean Plant Names: Identifications and Interpretations

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Shakespeare gardens the world over for proof of the historic fascination with Shakespeare’s plants even beyond scholarship. Nonetheless, only recently, influenced by ecocritical studies, as well as related critical methodologies such as ecofeminism, posthumanism, and new materialism have scholars broadened and complicated the analysis of Shakespeare’s botanizing. This recent work has elucidated the cultural, ideological, and material importance of Shakespeare’s plant life.9 In the last ten years or so, the more general field of Environmental Humanities has likewise witnessed an intensifying interest in plants, what scholars refer to as a “vegetal turn.” According to Jeffrey T. Nealon, plants “are becoming the new animals.”10 Many of the debates in contemporary scholarship have been important to the newer field of critical plant studies (CPS) as well. CPS seeks to remedy the Western tendency to devalue plants as merely utilitarian and separate from humans apart from their use value.11 In (1978). More recent compilations include Vivian Thomas and Nicki Faircloth, Shakespeare’s Plants and Gardens: A Dictionary (2014); Margaret Willes, A Shakespearean Botanical (2015); and Gerit Quealy, Botanical Shakespeare (2017). 9 Although not as vast as the scholarship on Shakespeare’s animals, analyses of Shakespeare’s plants are growing. Early ecocritical work on Shakespeare such as Todd Borlik’s Ecocriticism and Early Modern English Literature and Gabriel Egan’s Green Shakespeare both touch on plants: Borlik on the effects of climate change and Egan on plant-human analogies in several of Shakespeare’s plays. In Wooden Os Vin Nardizzi considers the material presence of trees in Shakespearean theater and culture; similarly, Jeffrey Theis posits the interplay between deforestation, nation building, and pastoral in several chapters in Writing the Forest in Early Modern England. Charlotte Scott’s Shakespeare’s Nature: From Cultivation to Culture offers a fascinating examination of the implications of the language and practice of husbandry in the plays. While not strictly about Shakespeare, Amy Tigner’s Literature and the Renaissance Garden from Elizabeth I to Charles I considers the varied aspects of the garden, particularly its political meanings in several plays. Victoria Bladen’s recent book, The Tree of Life and Arboreal Aesthetics in Early Modern Literature, likewise includes a chapter on Shakespeare. Rebecca Laroche and Jennifer Munroe have been at the forefront of recovering women’s domestic engagement with plants in the period, and their book Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory includes a provocative section on Shakespeare’s plants that reconfigures women and plants as “active, co-creative subjects, not passive objects for male (and ‘human’ as an extension of dominant male) consumption” (120). Two book length studies are in progress at the time I write: Jessica Rosenberg’s book Botanical Poetics, forthcoming in 2022, and Bonnie Lander Johnson, Shakespeare’s Plants: Botany and Belief in Elizabethan London. Other important work on Shakespeare’s botany has been published in individual essays in journals and collections too numerous to recount here. In putting together this volume, I’ve come to recognize the broad, rich, and active scholarly work both in terms of methodology and international range being done on early modern plants that extends far beyond what this volume can cover. Much of that scholarship influences this introduction and the essays gathered here. 10 Nealon, Plant Theory, xiv. 11 Matthew Hall, Plants as Persons, 8. See also, Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking, one of the most influential texts in critical plant studies.

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Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, a work that has become one of the seminal texts of critical plant studies and that makes several appearances in this collection, Michael Marder laments the marginal status often accorded to plants, noting that although they are all around us and we depend upon them for survival—for food, clothing, shelter, pleasure—plants tend to exist only in the background for most humans. He contends, “Plants are the weeds of metaphysics: devalued, unwanted in its carefully cultivated garden, yet growing in-between the classical categories of the thing, the animal, and the human.”12 Similarly, Michael Pollan depicts plants as “the mute, immobile furniture of our world—useful enough, and generally attractive, but obviously second-class citizens in the republic of life on Earth.”13 Characterizing plant-life as a blind spot in metaphysics, Marder calls for a reevaluation of plant ontology. Such a rethinking, he argues, would reconfigure the traditional hierarchies of Western thought, a goal articulated by several of the essays in Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination as well. As Hannah Stark explains, “The last few years has seen the eruption of a vigorous and intensifying debate about the place of plants in human systems of meaning, including their cultural life, their discursive framing in academic and popular understandings, and their philosophical meaning.”14 Like animal studies, critical plant studies contests the privileged place of human over nonhuman life as it examines that relationship using a variety of disciplinary lenses. In this scholarship, plants are recognized as having agency, sentience, and even desire, interestingly, harking back to the early modern vitalist beliefs that I will discuss below and that several essays in this collection consider. These arguments seek to counter the long-held interpretation of plants as deficient, an assessment prominent in classical Greek philosophy and developed by Christian philosophers. Critical plant studies scholars are especially interested in the historical and continuing connection of plants with biopolitics.15 Of particular importance is the emphasis CPS places on the heteronomy of plants, their dependence on soil, sun, climate, animals, humans, etc. for their existence, allowing studies of plants to probe the nested aspect of all of nature, human and nonhuman, that ecocriticism has long emphasized. Furthermore, as it endeavors to bring plants “back into history” and to imagine “a vegetal subjectivity … defined … by collectivity rather than individuality,” critical plant studies articulates 12 Marder, Plant-Thinking, 90. 13 Pollan, “Foreword,” Brilliant Green, xi. 14 Stark, “Deleuze and Critical Plant Studies,” 180. 15 Catriona Sandilands, “Plants,” 157.

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a goal similar to that of ecofeminism: to speak “for all marginalized beings as it speaks for plants.”16 Essays in this collection engage with this scholarship by emphasizing the interdependence and entanglement of plants with humans and human life in Shakespeare’s works. As Mats Rydén asserts, “With their virtues and properties (real or imagined) plants were, to an extent unknown today, in the centre of everyone’s life.”17 Similarly, as Rebecca Bushnell notes in this collection, discussions of plant blindness often fail to take early modern plant-thinking into account. Further, while contemporary culture tends to consider plants as passive, sessile, and senseless, using the adjectives “vegetative” and “plant-like” to connote privation and stasis, early modern notions of plants imagine something significantly more vital.18 Obviously, plants are fundamental to human survival, but Shakespeare’s varied use of them suggests that they represent an essential part of human identity. In our interest in engaging with plants in ways that show their interconnection with human identity as well as in their participation in “networks of meaning that are ‘simultaneously real, social and narrated,’” we at least partially diverge from Marder, who posits the absolute ontological otherness of plants.19 It is to this network of meanings that Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination attends, analyzing both the material, literal plants as well as their symbolic functions in Shakespeare’s writings. And as it does so, it takes its cue partly from Feerick and Nardizzi’s The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, among other scholarship, as it seeks to call attention to the “soft boundary” between the human and nonhuman and to add a few kinks to the Great Chain of Being.20 Taken together, these essays extend the challenge increasingly being made by animal studies, critical plant studies, 16 Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari, “Botany,” 160. On plant heteronomy as opposed to human autonomy, see Marder, Plant-Thinking, 67–74. Curiously, Marder sees freedom in plant dependency. 17 Rydén, Shakespearean Plant Names, 17. 18 Plants actually do move, just not in ways that are immediately noticeable, as Marder concedes, 21; their roots spread, their branches and stems reach upwards; their flowers and leaves turn toward the sun; their seeds scatter; and, as anyone who gardens can attest, they jump all over the landscape. More recent studies have shown that they also react emotionally, such as in distress when insects nibble on their leaves. 19 Boehrer, Animal Characters, 186. Boehrer is here answering Erika Fudge’s insistence that animals be read as animals rather than symbols. 20 Jean E. Feerick and Vin Nardizzi, “Introduction,” The Indistinct Human, 3. Once disparaged as too simplistic in its assessment of the hierarchy of nature, E. M. W. Tillyard’s Great Chain of Being has been recuperated. See, for instance, Robert N. Watson, “The Ecology of Self in Midsummer Night’s Dream” and Gabriel Egan, “Gaia and the Great Chain of Being.”

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and posthumanism about the privileged position of humans in relation to non-human life, a consideration critical to confronting the ecological crises of the Anthropocene. While animals have dominated discussions of the nonhuman, a focus on plants allows us to further recognize the ethical implications of the shared materiality of all animate and inanimate things that Jane Bennett theorizes in her book Vibrant Matter.21 We expand not just the anthropocentric but the zoocentic to include plants, thus further complicating the binary between human-nonhuman creation and interrogating both what it is to be human and narratives of human exceptionalism. This collection, then, develops the kind of “plant thinking” that Brits and Gibson characterize as “an exploration of the paradoxes of human exceptionalism” by refocusing on plants “as more than a backdrop to human action.”22 Marder points to Aristotle’s typology of the tripartite soul (vegetative, sensitive, and intellectual) as the originary source for the denigration of plants as a lesser creation. Since Aristotle, he maintains, plants have been perceived as deficient—lacking eyes, reason, speech, desire; in other words, plants lack agency.23 Historically, Aristotle’s system has been read hierarchically, placing plants at the bottom, above minerals, but below sensitive animals and rational humans. In this schema, however, the plant-soul is characterized by its impulse toward generation, nutrition, and growth, activities that all living creatures have in common. Although humans may claim superiority, or at least uniqueness, because they are animated by all three souls, “all matter is ensouled,” as Feerick and Nardizzi emphasize. The higher souls build on each lower one, resulting in what Renaissance natural philosophy dubs “indistinction.” Even early modern thinkers who assert humankind’s privileged position nonetheless recognize it as contingent and tenuous, particularly in regards to the “‘lower’ faculties” such as fertility and reproduction.24 For Galen plants are foundational: “the first principle of all things is that of a plant, which produces artery and vein and nerve, bone also, not from blood, but from seed itself.”25 We might even argue that they are “prehuman,” a level of existence that seems to fascinate Shakespeare and that we see in his concern with the boundaries separating human and nonhuman, according to Boehrer.26 Milton will later take this continuum to its logical conclusion with his suggestion that all of creation derives from 21 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 12–13. 22 Baylee Brits and Prudence Gibson, “Introduction,” Covert Plants, 16. 23 Marder, Plant-Thinking, 20–23. 24 Feerick and Nardizzi, The Indistinct Human, 2–4. 25 Galen, De Semine, quoted in Linda Deer Richardson, Academic Theories of Generation, 65. 26 Boehrer, “Shakespeare and the Character of Sheep,” 58.

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the same matter, “one first matter all” (5.471). In Book 5 of Paradise Lost when Raphael depicts the human ascent to spirituality as a tree, the roots growing into the lighter “green stalk, from thence the leaves / More aery, last the bright consummate flow’r / Spirits odorous breathes,” he makes this slippage explicit (5.481–82).27 The three-part soul schema can thus be reinterpreted as a continuum of lifeforms, a non-binary schema in which humans share characteristics not just with animals but with botanical life, resulting in a disquieting blurring of categories in the scala naturae in the period.28 One need only consider speculation about hybrid plant life forms, what Jean Bodin names “plantanimals,” to get a sense of this fluidity.29 (The vegetable lamb, the barnacle goose, and even the infamous mandrake provide examples of such hybrid forms.) Aristotle’s schema of the tripartite soul hovers in the background of several of these essays not only because it points to the permeable boundaries between human and vegetable, but also because plant-soul functions emphasize reproduction, growth, and decay, a focus that at once connects plant life to human generation (discussed in my essay and Claire Duncan’s) and that also emphasizes plants as markers of time, an aspect of plant life touched upon by Theis and Hopkins and developed most fully in the essays in Part 3: “Plants and Temporalities.” Discussing nature more generally, early modern ecocritical scholars have long noted the “sprawling mesh of interconnection without a definite center or edge” that Timothy Morton argues is necessary to ecological thought.30 Gail Kern Paster’s important work on the humors has elucidated the reciprocal and hence the ecological nature of embodiment in the period in her analyses of the various exchanges between the body and the world.31 Mary FloydWilson similarly argues that early modern people lived their lives “with the conviction that their emotions, behavior and practices were affected by and dependent on, secret sympathies and antipathies that coursed through the natural world,” a system that calls humankind’s place in it into question.32 All matter was vital, animated by a kind of spirit that coursed throughout 27 Milton, Paradise Lost, edited by Merritt Y. Hughes. 28 See Bushnell, The Marvels of the World, 73–74. See also, Edward J. Geisweidt, “Horticulture of the Head,” para. 4–6. 29 Fabrizio Bigotti, “Vegetable Life,” 394. Bodin lists the mimosa pudica, also called “touch me not,” known for its sensitivity to any kind of touch as an example of plantanimal (394). On the barnacle goose tree and the vegetable lamb, see Whitney Anne Trettien, “Plant→Animal→Book.” 30 Morton, The Ecological Thought, 8. 31 See, for example, Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body. 32 Floyd-Wilson, Occult Knowledge, 1. See also, Tom MacFaul, Shakespeare and the Natural World, 1.

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the universe. Such vitalist ideas posit a reciprocity among things, “an ebb and flow of exchange” between human bodies and environment where both transform and shape the other.33 As Leah S. Marcus explains, early modern vitalists believed “in some type of invisible, immanent force or network of forces, whether material or immaterial, that operates within and between things, linking them and determining their relations with each other.”34 Once dismissed as superstition, contemporary scholars such as Jane Bennett have recovered aspects of early modern vitalist thought (now sometimes referred to as neo or new vitalism) as a way to contend with current environmental concerns. The recuperation of vitalist ideas is crucial to contemporary efforts to redefine our relationship with the nonhuman because as Bennett explains, it flattens hierarchical notions of the world and as it does, “the implicit moral imperative of Western thought—‘Thou shall identify and defend what is special about Man’—loses some of its salience.”35 Stacy Alaimo’s concept of trans-corporeality—the idea that “all creatures, as embodied beings, are intermeshed with the dynamic, material world, which crosses through them, transforms them, and is transformed by them”—conveys a similar relationship and provides a useful tool for investigating aspects of Shakespeare’s plant thinking.36 Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination considers various aspects of Shakespeare’s plants: the literal plants in all their materiality; the symbolic meanings of plants; and the ways the rhetoric of plants elucidates human life and social structures. As Leah Knight explains, in Shakespeare and elsewhere in early modern culture, plants were not simply a part of everyday life; they “offered a lexical field to which Shakespeare and his contemporaries knew they could appeal and be largely understood.”37 These essays illustrate how plants are interwoven into all aspects of early modern life—in medicine and domestic life; in folklore; in configurations of class, race, and gender; in monarchical and political rhetoric. Botanical discourse in the period was social discourse; the cultivation of plants was analogous to the cultivation of people. As several recent scholars have shown, botanic language is deeply encoded into the very structures of Renaissance life.38 In their dictionary 33 Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett Sullivan, Environment and Embodiment, 4. 34 Marcus, “Why the ‘Pathetic Fallacy’ Isn’t One,” 13. 35 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 112. On the recovery of vitalist thought, see Marcus, “Why the ‘Pathetic Fallacy’ Isn’t One,” 13. 36 Alaimo, “Trans-corporeality,” 435. 37 Knight, “Botany,” 281. 38 Charlotte Scott makes this argument about husbandry in the period in Shakespeare’s Nature. Looking at the rhetoric of gardening and horticultural manuals, Rebecca Bushnell similarly

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of Shakespeare’s plant lore, Vivian Thomas and Nicki Faircloth provide an apt summary: “Plants were freighted with meaning, spiritual, emotional, and medicinal: they possessed a voice which could be simple and direct, or multivalent and perplexing.”39 It is those multiple plant voices that this collection contemplates. The thread that runs throughout this collection is the blurring of boundaries—between human and plant, cultivated and wild, magic and science, art and nature; between life and death and between various constructs of time. All of the essays in this collection engage in some way with two overlapping questions central to much current scholarship: what is humankind’s relationship to the nonhuman? And, concomitantly, what does it mean to be human? Early modern animal studies scholars have been at the forefront of these conversations for some twenty years now, but only recently have scholars started thinking in similar ways regarding plants. This collection has two main goals: to move plants to the foreground, showing how they are dynamic and vital actors on Shakespeare’s stage and to point to the intimate interconnection between humans and plants. Many of these essays also complicate the traditional hierarchy of human-animal-plant. What makes Shakespeare’s moment in botanical history so interesting is its intermingling of older ideas about vegetal life with the nascent scientific interests evident in various botanical writings in the period. Although the focus remained largely medicinal and agricultural (and sometimes economic), attempts to categorize plants systematically and to move beyond classical authorities such as Aristotle, Pliny, and Theophrastus through empirical study and first-hand observation of plants in their habitats point to a growing scientific bent that began in earnest in the sixteenth century.40 The concern with naming plants and chronicling their usefulness to human bodies that the popularity of herbals indicates suggests the tension inherent in humankind’s relationship to plants. While cataloguing and standardizing the names of plants was an essential goal of herbals, they also sought to describe each plant, setting forth its medicinal and other effects on argues that “the self could be imagined as cultured or cultivated,” A Culture of Teaching, 81. The growing number of essays on Shakespeare’s plays that investigate grafting and its connection to gender, marriage, and race attests to this use of botanical discourse. As Bushnell points out, debates over plant cultivation “were often coded debates about the natural order of human society,” The Marvels of the World, 74. 39 Thomas and Faircloth, Shakespeare’s Plants and Gardens, 1. 40 Mats Rydén, Shakespearean Plant Names, 13. Peter Harrison suggests that this turn toward more direct engagement with nature was motivated by “a general impulse to reform the spheres of religion and learning,” “Natural History,” 123.

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human bodies, but also indicating how and where each plant grows and in which season. In addition to their “affects and effects,” what they refer to as “virtues,” herbals chronicle the lifecycles—the seasons and growth patterns as well as the places and environments—the ecoclimates—where certain plants grow, thus creating a temporal and geographic record of vegetal life that offers parallels and tropes with which to interpret human life. Gerard, for instance, always enumerates where each plant grows, when it is in season or when it will flower, speaking in terms of “flourishing and fading.” He notes of cowslips, for example, that “they ioie in moist and dankish places,” even locating them precisely in “a woode called Clapdale, three miles from a towne in Yorkeshire called Settle.” He continues by explaining that they “flourish from Aprill to the end of May, and some one or other of them do flower all the winterlong.”41 He depicts a plant time that is cyclic—recurring and regenerating—and plants that are abounding—spreading roots and growing upwards and outwards. The descriptions and woodcut illustrations that accompany the plants often anatomize them into parts—leaves, stems, flowers, fruits, roots—in ways that mimic early modern anatomy manuals and thus connect with other scientific endeavors from the period. This blazoning of plant parts in some ways replicates the blazoning of the sonnet lady and to similar effect: dismembering, fragmenting, and potentially silencing its subject. 42 On the one hand, then, Gerard’s entries point to a desire to know and control plant growth; on the other, they suggest how embedded plants are both with humans and with their environments. The woodcut images have a curious isolating effect, giving the individual plants status and importance, while simultaneously removing them from their environments. As Laroche and Munroe emphasize, relationships between humans and plants are “at once symbiotic and in tension.”43 This double effect hints at the increasingly vexed relationship between people and plants in the period that becomes exacerbated with the discovery of previously unknown plants in the New World and with other scientific advances such as the Linnaean schema for categorizing plants. 44 41 Gerard, The Herball, 637. 42 Nardizzi calls attention to the blazoning effect of Gerard’s descriptions in “Daphne Described,” 148–49. On the effect of the blazon in sonnet sequences, see Nancy Vickers’ classic essay, “Diana Described.” 43 Rebecca Laroche and Jennifer Munroe, Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory, xv. 44 On the move to a seemingly less anthropocentric classification of plants, one that increasingly values plants for their own sake, see Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 72–78, 178–79.

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Curiously, the scientific understanding of plants suggested by the interest in pharmacology and plant morphology coexisted alongside magic and folklore. 45 In his Herball, Gerard inadvertently confirms this duality with his insistence on eschewing superstition, what he calls “foolish fansie,” while simultaneously recounting the “fiction he denounces,” a move Leah Knight describes as “hav[ing] his ‘fansie’ and mock[ing] it too.”46 The study of botany during Shakespeare’s lifetime thus bears witness to Mary D. Garrard’s assessment of the period as a moment of transition from an organic perspective “in which humans felt at home and participated affectively in the ‘enchanted’ world of nature” to “a scientific consciousness, which perceives humans as detached from nature.”47 We can find hints of this tension in various kinds of botanical writing in the period as well as in Shakespeare’s works. One of the places where the interconnectedness of human and vegetal bodies is most explicit in the period is in the doctrine of signatures, a plant cosmology that originated with the Greeks and that was still operative in various early modern natural histories. Often simplified as the premise that a plant’s physical resemblance to human body parts indicates its therapeutic value (so for instance, bloodroot with its vivid red sap remedies circulatory problems, eyebright with its resemblance to the eye cures vision problems), it was actually more complex. Plants were also thought to correspond to planets, elements, and humors and to coexist in sympathetic relationship not just with humans but with the macrocosm. These correspondences indicate a plant’s curative effects, but also suggest more intricate connections among all living things. 48 Discerning a plant’s signatures required examining its taste, smell, and tactile elements (thorniness or stickiness, for example), and demanded human sensory awareness of plant attributes beyond simple appearance. These intimate interactions between plants and humans are largely lost with the decline of vitalist beliefs. While the system of signatures is predicated on individual plants’ usefulness to humans and is therefore largely anthropocentric, it nonetheless posits a profound kinship between both human and botanical bodies, and both, in turn, 45 In “Shakespeare and Mandragora” Giovanni Antonini and Gloria Grazia Rosa examine Shakespeare’s changing interpretation of mandrakes, arguing that earlier allusions tended to be connected to magic, whereas allusions in the later plays tended to be pharmacological, suggesting a shift to more scientific thinking. 46 Knight, Of Books and Botany, 104. 47 Garrard, Brunelleschi’s Egg, 2. 48 Thomas Efferth and Henry J. Greten, “Doctrine of Signatures.” This essay provides a good overview of the doctrine of signatures. See also, Matthew Wood, “The Doctrine of Signatures.”

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with the entire cosmos. More than simply analogical, systems such as the doctrine of signatures point to the “plenary participation in everything else” that Laurie Shannon finds characteristic of humans in the period. 49 These resemblances are developed in herbals and husbandry manuals, where human anatomy provides analogues for various plant parts. These texts extend the correspondences to social and political structures as well, as Jean Feerick cogently explains in her essay “Botanical Shakespeares.”50 This vegetalizing of humans and human concepts hardly seems a decentering of the human world but rather a kind of narcissism, as Michael Marder legitimately contends. Other scholars, however, argue that such anthropomorphism might be viewed as “multidirectional,” having the potential effect of reconfiguring human/plant relationships in ways that actually revalue plant life. Speaking, for example, of “mother trees” and their “children” serves to “re-place” humans “within nature,” Anna M. Lawrence posits, thus conceivably countering “claims to human exceptionalism” because it indicates a willingness “to attach ourselves to the things which plants care about, and which in the end, humans must care about too if we are to build a more sustainable relation to our planet.”51 While the vegetablehuman homologies examined in this collection may not always obliterate human distinction, they do point to “an intertwined environmentality” and suggest how complicated attempts to segregate “human and inhuman, culture and nature” actually are, as Cohen asserts.52 These various interpretations of plants provide context for the essays gathered here. The collection is divided into three overlapping sections that consider important ways that Shakespeare imagines vegetable life: “Plant Power and Agency”; “Human-Vegetable Affinities and Transformations”; and “Plants and Temporalities”. 49 Shannon, “Poor, Bare, Forked,” 172. Even plant names suggest their connection to humans. As Foucault points out in The Order of Things, plant naming before Descartes made use not just of resemblances and virtues, but of all “the legends and stories with which [the plant] had been involved, its place in heraldry, the medicaments that were concocted from its substance, the foods it provided, what the ancients recorded of it, and what travellers might have said of it. The history of a living being was that being itself, within the whole semantic network that connected it to the world” (140). 50 Feerick, “Botanical Shakespeares.” Feerick is especially interested in the ways that humanplant analogies interrogate social hierarchies and racial difference. 51 Lawrence, “Listening to Plants,” 636. Here she picks up on the argument Suzanne Simard makes in Finding the Mother Tree. Lawrence suggests that rather than recognizing human aff inities in plants, we might instead recognize “Them in Us” (636), an idea that Elizabeth Crachiolo similarly considers in her essay in this volume. 52 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Introduction: Ecostitial,” iv.

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Part 1: Plant Power and Agency Essays in the first section all discuss plant power (material or metaphoric), what herbals refer to as “virtue,” the distinctive effects of a particular plant on the human body. But as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen defines it, virtue is “the substance of the world,” the fundamental property of all living things, human and nonhuman. Most basically, virtue is the power to act. Cohen characterizes it as the “most inhumanly powerful word in medieval English,” positing that “vertu resides in the substance of the world,” with meanings as varied as “energy, might and vitality to potential, magic and force.”53 As Holly A. Crocker puts it, “From heads to hands, and from rocks to plants, virtues suffused all material bodies in premodern England.”54 Plant virtue is also connected to vegetative soul functions, as Cohen suggests when he defines it as “life force: reproduction and vitality, affect and health, that which moves the flesh,” thereby suggesting innate capacities experienced by all living beings.55 Plants, then, act—on human bodies, on the environment, and on the world at large. And they in turn are acted upon. As Cohen sums it up, “humans are merely some actors among many, none of which are exceptional or a priori privileged.”56 As essays in this section illustrate, in the early modern period the word “vegetable” signifies vitality rather than the passivity that it frequently connotes now. The inaugural essay in the volume, Rebecca Bushnell’s “Vegetable Virtues,” sets the stage for the essays that follow and engages with all three of the foci of this collection, teasing out how plant virtue is entangled with human virtue in Shakespeare’s plays. Beginning with an examination of virtue as it pertains to plants, Bushnell emphasizes its instability and volatility, possessing positive and negative potential (both curative and deadly) only realized when it is “brought to bear on a body or the world.” Bushnell names this characteristic “vegetable virtue,” noting that the word “vegetable” connotes action rather than inertia in Shakespeare’s imagination. Building on the dual definitions of virtue as both the inherent power in plants but also as “positive moral qualities” in humans, Bushnell shows how the etymological connection between plant and human virtue complicates both concepts. “[I]n both people and plants, vegetable virtue is never still,” but is growing and 53 Cohen continues, “Stones and leaves radiate vertu as easily as knights, horses and clerics. Humans may ally themselves with the vertu of gems or herbs to accomplish through mineral and vegetal friendship feats otherwise impossible,” “An Abecedarium for the Elements,” 292. 54 Crocker, The Matter of Virtue, 2. 55 Cohen, “An Abecedarium for the Elements,” 292. 56 Cohen, “Introduction: Ecostitial,” v.

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ever changing, a characteristic that points both to the generative power and temporality that are explored in other essays in this volume. Shakespeare’s plays use the ambivalence of plant virtue to confound notions of human virtue, particularly in tragedies such as Hamlet, Bushnell illustrates. My essay, “The ‘idle weeds that grow in the sustaining corn’: Generating Plants in King Lear,” continues the examination of plant power by examining the rampantly growing, weedy cornfield of Act 4, a space connected with female bodies in the play. In an example of what Cohen calls the “marvelously disruptive emergence … of nonhuman agency,”57 the weeds in the play seem to have an almost preternatural impulse to grow despite human desires. They, along with the storm, become one of the more potent signs of life and vitality in the play. As such, they offer a striking example of Bennett’s “vibrant matter”: “the capacity of things—edibles, commodities, storms, metals—not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own.”58 Looking at philosophical, religious, and political interpretations of weeds, I seek to reconfigure Lear’s crown as emblematic of his connection with his daughters, his kingdom, and with nonhuman nature. The final essay in this section, Hillary M. Nunn’s “Botanical Barbary: Punning, Race and Plant Life in Othello 4.3,” turns to the material effects of plants by looking at women’s domestic knowledge of the properties of barberries and their everyday uses in culinary and cosmetic recipes. In her analysis of the undressing scene in Othello, Nunn points to the linguistic connections and orthographic echoes between the character Barbary and both the geographic place and the common English barberry shrub. Noted specifically for their ability to bleach hair, barberries evoke the period’s ideal of beauty, a beauty that is fair and blonde, and thus with their verbal echo of the place Barbary, they problematize the play’s geographical and racial classifications. Nunn’s essay explores barberries as a way of showing how domestic plant knowledge complicates the cultural geography of Othello, shedding new light on the play’s anxieties regarding racial categorizations and their connection to female sexuality. Although this section highlights plant power, all three essays also illustrate the various ways that plants were connected to human concepts in the early modern period—in terms of morality, gender and class, and race and ethnicity; essays in the second section, “Human-Vegetable Affinities and Transformations,” interact with this section in their consideration of the 57 Cohen, “Introduction: Ecostitial,” v. 58 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, viii.

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interconnections between plant and human life, but they do so by imagining a more direct embeddedness between plants and humans, showing still other ways that plants blur boundaries.

Part 2: Human-Vegetable Affinities and Transformations While the previous section examined the vital effects of plants on humans, most of the essays in this section point to the creaturely “indistinction” developed in Feerick and Nardizzi’s collection, thus challenging “absolute anthropocentrism,” the belief that “human beings are radically … different from all other life on earth” and “that this difference renders humankind superior to the rest of earthly creation.”59 We do not have to look through many of Shakespeare’s plays to find instances where humans are likened to plants, as I have already pointed out: Perdita is a blossom, Desdemona is a weed, Titus a shrub, Ophelia a rose of May, to cite just a few examples. In her study of Shakespeare’s imagery, Caroline Spurgeon long ago noted that Shakespeare “visualizes human beings as plants and trees, choked with weeds, or well pruned and trained and bearing ripe fruits, sweet smelling as a rose or noxious as a weed.”60 Plants are likewise everywhere invested with human characteristics in early modern husbandry manuals and herbals where apples are amorous and mad, wild flowers and uncultivated plants are frequently labeled bastards, sap is blood, trees have heads, arms, even feelings. In his essay, “Daphne Described,” Vin Nardizzi even imagines human hands lurking in the illustration for laurel in Gerard’s Herball.61 As Jean Feerick explains in her important essay “Botanical Shakespeares,” the human and botanical coalesce in botanical literature and throughout Shakespeare’s plays. Hands become lilies and tremble like aspen leaves; babies are blossoms. Skin is bark; arms are branches; hands are withered herbs “meet for plucking up” (Titus Andronicus, 3.1.178).62 Similarly, in his analysis of hair, Edward J. Geisweidt argues that “vegetable and human are sympathetically inter-fashioned” in Shakespeare’s plays, concluding that “the early modern English were more aware of their vegetable affinities than we have realized.”63 Rebecca Bushnell explains a similar correspondence 59 Bruce Boehrer, Shakespeare among the Animals, 6. 60 Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery, 19. 61 Vin Nardizzi, “Daphne Described,” 151. 62 Feerick, “Botanical Shakespeares,” 84–86. Bruno Latour characterizes this melding of the natural and human worlds as a particularly premodern sensibility, as Feerick notes. 63 Geisweidt, “Horticulture of the Head,” para. 20, 24.

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between gardens and the human mind in humanist pedagogy: “gardens and schoolrooms overlapped most clearly where the human body and mind were understood to emulate or even share a plant’s nature.”64 This section considers this murky, often liminal interrelationship between humans and plants. All of the essays in Part 2 consider some kind of transformation: from human to plant, from place to place, from one time to another, to varying effect. Several essays pick up on the long tradition of human-plant metamorphosis that Shakespeare inherited from Ovid, thus continuing the debates about the ontological otherness of plants compared to humans/animals that concern critical plant studies scholars and that we see complicated in early modern notions of vitalism in the previous section. In these moments of transformation, Shakespeare dissolves the human in favor of something wondrous, resistant, even more than human. Human-plant metamorphosis not only suggests the instability of the human-plant divide, it actually replicates plant life. Unlike animals, plants are characterized by metamorphosis: cotyledons transform into true leaves, buds become flowers, flowers become fruit. Others essays in this section explore the floral analogies traditionally associated with women and the arboreal analogies often connected with kingship and familial relationships. In the first essay in this section, “Shakespeare’s Botanical Grace,” Rebecca Totaro contemplates Shakespeare’s manipulation of Ovidian human-plant metamorphoses. Looking at those places where verbal botanical tributes substitute for the material flowers that historically have been used to memorialize the dead and give comfort to those who remain, she calls attention to the plague-time context often in the background of Shakespeare’s works. These moments, which Totaro characterizes as “pronouncements of botanical excess,” occur mostly when other characters eulogize the dead (or perceived dead) as plants: “the sweet marjoram … or rather the herb of grace” that memorializes Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well; the various flowers that blazon Innogen65 in Cymbeline; or Ophelia’s transformation into a “metaphorical bouquet” by Gertrude in Hamlet, for example. Paradoxically, these transformations of characters into metaphoric plants revalue the individual human lives that have been devalued in the plays, and interestingly, 64 Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching, 90. 65 There is controversy about the spelling of this name. Although the Folio spelling is Imogen, in her edition of the play Valerie Wayne prefers “Innogen,” positing that “Imogen” was a minim error in which “nn” was mistaken for “m” (Arden 3 rd series, 71). In this collection the spelling varies based on the edition of the play that the contributor used.

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become a compensatory response to human diminishment, the kind of reductive dehumanization Totaro argues happens in plague accounts in the period where humans become mere numbers. Among these tributes, Ophelia’s is unique, powerfully exceeding the others Totaro considers, and becomes a moment of “botanical grace,” a spontaneous, life affirming moment of recompense—a gift to the audience. In her essay, Claire Duncan speculates on the unintended effects of analogizing fertile female bodies as flowers. Starting with the premise that Angelo’s “garden circummured with bricks” in Measure for Measure is the thematic and spatial center of the play’s attempts to restrain the fertility of the female body, Duncan examines the garden location of the bed trick in “‘Circummured’ Plants and Women in Measure for Measure.” Duncan shows how this garden space is constructed as a hortus conclusus, an enclosed, protected site that functions as a kind of fantasy trope for the simultaneously fertile yet impermeable virginal female body. Using early modern horticultural and gardening manuals, Duncan demonstrates that, like the play, these texts conflate the fertile land with the fertile female body, both of which must be managed and checked, a contention that parallels my argument about land in King Lear. Examining the play through the lens of early modern gardening manuals illustrates “the material ways that the early moderns attempted to circumscribe the growth of Nature through enclosed gardens.” Ultimately, however, the botanical rhetoric joins with “the floral metaphor of deflowered maid” to create “a slippage between the two virginal bodies in the play and the plant matter that makes up the garden.” The transformation of Isabella and Mariana into flowers at once reconstructs the bed trick into a flower-bed trick, and, Duncan concludes, opens up the opportunity for the female-horticultural body to become a site of resistance to the masculine imperative to control fertility. In “Cymbeline’s Plant People,” Jeffrey Theis examines the intersection of plant and human in order to illustrate the ways that identity formation, both national and individual, is enmeshed with non-human nature in general and with plants in particular in Cymbeline. Reading the characters as plants, Theis evokes Stacy Alaimo’s concept of trans-corporeality, showing how the characters’ plant affinities reflect the instability of identity in the play. Rather than being distinct individuals, each character is “part of a natural world independent from human systems” while also interdependent on each other—a kind of assemblage that is geographically and temporally influenced (in a way that I would argue interestingly replicates the plants Gerard describes in his Herball). Posthumus and the kidnapped princes are transplants that flourish or languish in their respective environments.

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Plants are connected with humans in other ways as well, where the villainous characters, such as the Queen, are not analogized to plants but instead use plants to assert mastery over nature and other humans. Interestingly, in both Totaro’s and Theis’s arguments, plants become the measure of the human, rather than the other way around. The romance genre is plant-based as well, Theis argues, where plant time coincides with the long span of time characteristic of romances. In his analysis of the temporal frame of the play, Theis looks forward to the essays in Part 3. In “‘Thou art translated’: Plants of Passage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Lisa Hopkins is also concerned with the transformative power of plants, but her focus is on the multiple ways that the many plants in A Midsummer Night’s Dream facilitate transitions of all sorts—from one time or season to another, from one place to another, from one life stage to another, from one color to another, even from one state of mind to another. Shakespeare figures plants as agents of transition and crossover between different domains, Hopkins argues, noting how in perhaps Shakespeare’s most magical play, the botanical and folkloric ideas associated with the various plants become a gateway to the realm of magic. Like Totaro, Hopkins is interested in Ovidian transformations as well, particularly when the mulberry turns black in reaction to Pyramus’s death and when Daphne is metamorphosed into a laurel tree. Pointing to the traditional association of women and flowers that Claire Duncan also explores in her essay, Hopkins notes how flowers, particularly the rose, mark the passage between virginity and marriage, a passage that supports the play’s marriage theme. While the familiar folklore Shakespeare utilizes in the play creates a point of intersection between the supernatural and the natural, Hopkins asserts that it also serves “to figure plants … as agents of change, transition, and mobility,” a point that effectively transitions us to Part 3 and its consideration of plant temporalities.

Part 3: Plants and Temporalities All of creation is affected by time, and yet, as scholars have shown, time is complex. As Mary Wiesner-Hanks argues, “time is an embodied aspect of human existence, but also mediated by culture; experiences and understandings of time change, and the early modern period may have been an era when they changed significantly, with the introduction of new vocabularies and technologies of time.”66 As we have seen, herbals and horticultural manuals are 66 Wiesner-Hanks, Gendered Temporalities, 9.

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concerned with temporality, and they seem to encode the vicissitudes of plant time into their texts. In what Jessica Rosenberg characterizes as a “rhetoric of anticipation,” these manuals fold readers “into the inhuman rhythms of plant time” by teaching that planting is “an environment of risk, promise, investment, disappointment, [and] decay.”67 As Rebecca Bushnell explains in her book Green Desire, literary texts as well as garden writings “compared people to plants in their common experience of growing, flourishing, and fading,” the unavoidable markers of time.68 The essays in this section examine various temporal constructs in relation to plant life. They point to the multiplicities of time and show how considering temporality in conjunction with plants (literal or metaphoric) forces a reconsideration both of time and of human life—blurring boundaries of past, present, and future; pointing to other temporal structures—historic, macrocosmic, divine, and ecological; and in places, challenging anthropocentric understandings of time. Thinking through time returns us to the questions posed earlier in Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination—what happens when we side-step the comfortable Aristotelian divisions of plant-animal-human, and instead consider Bennett’s vibrant materiality as expansive and capacious, including us as well as the plants of the “lower” orders? What happens to our sense of the human when we attend to the affinities between how plants, as well as people, body forth time’s progress? In the first essay in this section, Miranda Wilson ponders the mechanical and the natural as she contemplates “clockwork plants” and other constructs of time in the early modern period in “Clockwork Plants and Shakespeare’s Overlapping Notions of Time.” Noting the period’s sense of the human body as a clock, Wilson shows how timekeeping in Shakespeare allows for an overlap between mechanical technology, the human body, and plant time (the passage of time as understood and experienced through the vegetative world). Starting with Athanasius Kircher’s fascinating experiments with his sunflower clock, Wilson points to the varied ways that early modern thinkers imagined organic lifeforms, including plants, as translators of time, thus again, highlighting the shared experience between human and plant: “men as plants increase,” as Shakespeare reminds us in Sonnet 15. And as Wilson puts it, “the temporal processes that we observe in plants also drive our animal lives.” The human body, then, becomes a site where multiple forms of time telling converge, again disrupting the comfortable separation of the living and non-living, plant and animal. But unlike mechanical time telling, the watches and clocks that seem to click off the inexorable moments 67 Rosenberg, “Before and After Plants,” 467. 68 Bushnell, Green Desire, 136.

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towards decay and death, “plants reveal the connections between matter and place, as well as the forces that shape them both.” Wilson concludes that the human experience of plant time in Shakespeare creates a “temporal communion” that moves our awareness from the “microcosm of the lost minute” to “the macrocosm of divine and universal patterns.” In “The Verdant Imagination in Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” Elizabeth D. Gruber likewise considers the temporal materiality of plants and their engagement with time and death, but unlike Wilson, she finds the Sonnets’ evocation of plant time alienating. In her ecocritical reading of the Sonnets, Gruber examines the conjunction of the organic and the symbolic in order to show how Shakespeare transfers the traditional vegetative powers of regeneration and growth from plants to poetry, “ultimately yielding a new ecopolitics of regeneration.” Providing a counterargument to this collection’s other discussions of the affinities between botanical and human bodies, she posits that human-plant indistinction does not represent a consoling egalitarianism but rather ignores the unique psychological needs of humans. Whereas Totaro and Theis discover something positive, even comforting, in the botanic transformations often depicted in Shakespeare’s works, Gruber finds little solace in the plant analogies in the Sonnets, where, she argues, an awareness of the eventual breakdown of human to humus evokes dread. Perhaps Shakespeare’s shift away from the age-old trope of the “eternizing properties of vegetation” reflects his awareness that “the ‘human’ was being reconstituted” in the period, she suggests. Gruber argues that the botanical language of Shakespeare’s sonnets actually anticipates a change in Renaissance thought, a change marked by a shift from an agrarian reciprocity of humans and nature to an atomic view characterized by mechanism and human isolation from the environment. Given the importance of time and the cycles of history, we might expect that Shakespeare would appropriate botanical imagery in his history plays. Indeed, one of his most famous plant analogies occurs in Richard II where he likens the king to a negligent gardener. History plays are Janus-faced, looking backward to the past and forward to Shakespeare’s time simultaneously. The “dynamic mixture of temporalities” that Jessica Rosenberg finds in gardening manuals, “futurological, nostalgic, memorial, recursive, cyclical,” seem precisely those of the history play.69 In “The Botanical Revisions of 3 Henry VI,” Jason Hogue provides a detailed textual analysis of the variants in the First Folio version of 3 Henry VI and the first printed version of the play, the 1595 octavo The True Tragedy, illustrating how even single word changes 69 Rosenberg, “Before and After Plants,” 468.

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heighten the botanical registers of the play and provide evidence that the Folio version is a careful botanical revision of the octavo. These emendations are important not just for the ways that they seem to pun on Plantagenet and “highlight the iconography of the War of the Roses,” but for the intertextual relationship they develop with the other plays in Shakespeare’s first tetralogy by creating a kind of retroactive chronological coherence in the Folio. As he compares the botanical discourse in each, Hogue illustrates that the Folio text expands the vegetal imagery in ways that develop the concerns of the history play as genre as well as the specific focus of this particular history cycle. The botanical emendations Hogue scrutinizes point to the temporal concerns of the genre in its obsession with succession and the long and vexed march of monarchical and providential time in which the fruiting, harvest, and the felling of trees parallel the rise and fall of kings. Hogue ends with a fascinating explication of the “external/eternal” variant in the two versions of the play, but rather than privilege one play text over the other, he concludes by borrowing a notion from critical plant studies and calls for a celebration of multiplicity and proliferation—of both texts and plants. The final essay might be read as a kind of coda to the volume as it looks forward to future critical plant studies readings of Shakespeare’s plays. Although other essays have nodded toward some of the concerns of critical plant studies, Crachiolo engages more fully with Michael Marder’s notion of “plant-thinking,” specifically in relationship to plant temporality. In “Botanomorphism and Temporality,” Elizabeth Crachiolo shifts the terms of analysis to what she calls “botanomorphism,” the ways that human characters “are endowed with the characteristics, physical and ontological, of plants, in a kind of extreme metaphor.” Rather than positing how plants probe what it is to be human as other essayists do in this collection, Crachiolo explores “what it means to be a plant.” Looking at Richard II and The Winter’s Tale, Crachiolo finds that botanical temporalities in the plays—temporalities that are cyclic, repetitive, and reproductive—resist closure. In Richard II, where politics is “a fundamentally vegetal endeavor,” she argues that the characters’ “plantiness” resituates the human in the larger perspective of history and nation. Since The Winter’s Tale is structured around seasonal change and concomitantly, the “lives of plants over time,” this play, too, figures characters as embodied plants. This mapping of plant temporality onto the characters in both plays decenters the human in favor of a long ecological perspective rather than a purely human one. In his “Afterword,” Vin Nardizzi moves us to the present as he reflects on Maggie O’Farrell’s reimagining of Shakespeare’s botanical knowledge in her recent novel Hamnet. In O’Farrell’s fictional account of Shakespeare (who

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is never actually named in the novel), Shakespeare is guilty of the kind of plant blindness that Marder and others decry as so endemic to contemporary culture. As Nardizzi notes, such a move—while interesting to contemplate, especially since it highlights women’s very real involvement in botanical endeavors in the period—seems almost anathema to Shakespeare scholars. While many readers and viewers today, like Agnes’s unnamed husband in Hamnet, might not recognize the variety of flora surrounding us, no one could ever accuse Shakespeare of plant blindness, as these essays prove. Nardizzi also points to the difficulties and complexities involved in recovering the sources of Shakespeare’s “botanical imagination,” noting the various ways essays in this collection seek to elucidate the plants Shakespeare includes— perusing printed and manuscript materials such as herbals, histories, and recipe books; through careful textual analysis; by engaging with various images; and even moving beyond historicist contextualization to the more philosophical concerns of critical plant studies. The possibilities are vast. When some twenty-four years after Shakespeare’s death, John Parkinson titled the volume meant to be his magnum opus Theatrum Botanicum: The Theatre of Plantes, he alluded to plants as actors on the stage of the natural world. Parkinson’s title might accurately describe Shakespeare’s botanizing.70 Although most of the plants named in Shakespeare’s plays are not physically present on the stage, they are nonetheless performers, as these essays show. In “Ophelia’s Plants and the Death of Violets,” Rebecca Laroche illustrates how the presence of the actual plants and flowers on stage in Ophelia’s mad scene has the potential to decenter the play away from Hamlet, providing “two alternative views within the play”: “a space that is not corrupted by human presence and a character’s action that is not determined by Hamlet. In this way, the ecocritical call for attention to the nonhuman coincides with the feminist reworkings of history to include previously underdeveloped perspectives,” Laroche concludes.71 The material plants are not often depicted on the stage in performance, but perhaps they should be, as Laroche argues. Focusing on the plants of Shakespeare’s botanical imagination in our analyses of the plays and poetry offers similar potential for reconfiguring the world of Shakespeare. Their virtues can act on us as viewers and readers if we attend to them—moving us, shaping 70 This title seems connected with the more general trope of the world as theater, i.e., the theater mundi. For a thorough discussion of all the texts constructed as theaters, see Ann Blair, The Theater of Nature, especially chapter 5. 71 Laroche, “Ophelia’s Plants and the Death of Violets,” 212. In my essay on King Lear in this collection, I consider the effect of various stagings of actual weeds in Lear’s crown.

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us, and perhaps altering not just our interpretations of his works, but our notions of our place and responsibilities as humans on the stage of our world.

Bibliography Primary Sources Gerard, John. The Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes. London, 1597. Johnson, Samuel. “Preface to the Plays of William Shakespeare.” In EighteenthCentury English Literature, edited by Geoffrey Tillotson, et al. 1066–1076. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1969. Milton, John. Paradise Lost. In John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, edited by Merritt Y. Hughes. New York: Odyssey Press, 1957. Parkinson, John. Theatrum Botanicum: The Theatre of Plantes. London, 1640. Shakespeare, William. Cymbeline. Edited by Valerie Wayne. Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.

Secondary Sources Alaimo, Stacy. “Trans-corporeality.” In Posthuman Glossary, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova, 435–38. New York: Bloomsbury, 2018. Antonini, Giovanni and Gloria Grazia Rosa. “Shakespeare and Mandragora.” In Questioning Bodies in Shakespeare’s Rome, edited by Maria Del Sapio Garbero, Nancy Isenberg, and Maddalena Pennacchia, 295–307. Göttingen: V&R Uni Press, 2010. Beisly, Sidney. Shakspere’s Garden, of the Plants and Flowers Named in His Works described and Defined. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1864. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Bigotti, Frabrizio. “Vegetable Life: Applications, Implications, and Transformations of a Classical Concept (1500–1700).” In Vegetative Powers: The Roots of Life in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Natural Philosophy, edited by Frabrizio Baldassari and Andrea Blank, 383–406. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2021. Bladen, Victoria. The Tree of Life and Arboreal Aesthetics. New York: Routledge, 2022. Blair, Ann. The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Bloom, J. H. Shakespeare’s Garden. London: Methuen, 1903. Boehrer, Bruce Thomas. Animal Characters: Nonhuman Beings in Early Modern Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.

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Boehrer, Bruce Thomas. Shakespeare among the Animals: Nature and Society in the Drama of Early Modern England. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Boehrer, Bruce Thomas. “Shakespeare and the Character of Sheep.” In Posthumanist Shakespeares, edited by Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus, 58–76. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Borlik, Todd A. Ecocriticism and Early Modern English Literature. New York: Routledge, 2011. Brits, Baylee, and Prudence Gibson, eds. “Introduction.” Covert Plants: Vegetal Consciousness and Agency in an Anthropocentric World, 11–21. Santa Barbara, CA: Punctum Books, 2018. Bushnell, Rebecca W. A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. Bushnell, Rebecca W. Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. Bushnell, Rebecca, ed. The Marvels of the World: An Anthology of Nature Writing Before 1700. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “An Abecedarium for the Elements.” Postmedieval 2, no. 3 (Fall, 2011): 291–303. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, ed. “Introduction: Ecostitial.” Inhuman Nature, ii–x. Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books, 2014. Crocker, Holly A. The Matter of Virtue: Women’s Ethical Action from Chaucer to Shakespeare. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Efferth, Thomas, and Henry J. Greten, “Doctrine of Signatures – Mystic Heritage or Outdated Relict from Middle-Aged Phytotherapy?” Medicinal and Aromatic Plants 5, no. 4 (2016): E177. doi:10.4172/2167–0412.1000e177. Egan, Gabriel. “Gaia and the Great Chain of Being.” In Ecocritical Shakespeare, edited by Lynne Bruckner and Dan Brayton, 57–70. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. Egan, Gabriel. Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism. New York: Routledge, 2006. Ellacombe, Henry N., Rev. The Plant-Lore and Garden-Craft of Shakespeare. London: Satchell and Co., 1884. Feerick, Jean. “Botanical Shakespeares: The Racial Logic of Plant Life in Titus Andronicus.” South Central Review 26, no. 1/2 (2009): 82–102. Feerick, Jean E., and Vin Nardizzi, eds. The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Floyd-Wilson, Mary. Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Floyd-Wilson, Mary, and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. “Introduction.” Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England, edited by Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., 1–13. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

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Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Routledge, 2005. Garrard, Mary D. Brunelleschi’s Egg: Nature, Art, and Gender in Renaissance Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Geisweidt, Edward J. “Horticulture of the Head: The Vegetable Life of Hair in Early Modern English Thought.” Early Modern Literary Studies 19, no. 6 (2009): 1–24. http://purl.oclc.org/emls/si-19/geishair.html. Griffiths, Mark. “Face to Face with Shakespeare.” Country Life, May 20, 2015, 120–38. Griffiths, Mark. “Why the Fourth Man Can’t Be Anybody but Shakespeare.” Country Life, May 22, 2015, https://www.countrylife.co.uk/country-life/the-true-face-ofshakespeare-why-the-fourth-man-cant-be-anybody-but-shakespeare-72456. Grindon, Leo Hartley. The Shakespearean Flora: A Guide to All the Principal Passages in which Mention Is Made of Trees, Plants, Flowers, and Vegetable Productions. Manchester: Palmer and Howe, 1883. Hall, Matthew. Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2011. Harrison, Peter. “Natural History.” In Wrestling with Nature: From Omens to Science, edited by Peter Harrison, Ronald L. Numbers, and Michael H. Shank, 117–48. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Hedges, Mark. “The Literary Discovery of the Century.” Country Life, May 20, 2015, 103. Kerr, Jessica. Shakespeare’s Flowers. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1969. Knight, Leah. “Botany.” In The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare, edited by Bruce R. Smith and Katherine Rowe, 276–82. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Knight, Leah. Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England: Sixteenth-Century Plants and Print Culture. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. Laroche, Rebecca. “Ophelia’s Plants and the Death of Violets.” In Ecocritical Shakespeare, edited by Lynne Bruckner and Dan Brayton, 211–21. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. Laroche, Rebecca, and Jennifer Munroe. Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. Lawrence, Anna M. “Listening to Plants: Conversations between Critical Plant Studies and Vegetal Geography.” Progress in Human Geography 46, no. 2 (2022): 629–51. MacFaul, Tom. Shakespeare and the Natural World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Marcus, Leah, S. “Why the ‘Pathetic Fallacy’ Isn’t One: Early Modern Vitalism and the Emotions of Nature in Shakespeare and Milton.” Australian Literary Studies 30, no. 2 (2015): 11–28.

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Marder, Michael. Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Masters, Tim. “‘True Face of Shakespeare’ Appears in Botany Book.” May 19, 2015, BBC News, https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-32782267. Meeker, Natania, and Antónia Szabari. “Botany.” In Gender: Matter. Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks, edited by Stacy Alaimo, 153–69. Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan, 2017. Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Nardizzi, Vin. “Daphne Described: Ovidian Poetry and Speculative Natural History in Gerard’s Herball.” Philological Quarterly 98, no. 1–2 (2019): 137–56. Nardizzi, Vin. Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Nealon, Jeffrey T. Plant Theory: Biopower & Vegetable Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016. Neville, Sarah. Early Modern Herbals and the Book Trade: English Stationers and the Commodification of Botany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Ohlheiser, Abby. “Is This 400-Year-Old Portrait of a Hunky Corn Enthusiast Really Shakespeare’s ‘True Face’?” Washington Post, May 19, 2015. Quealy, Gerit. Botanical Shakespeare: An Illustrated Compendium of All the Flowers, Fruits, Herbs, Trees, Seeds, and Grasses Cited by the World’s Greatest Playwright. New York: Harper Collins, 2017. Paster, Gail Kern. Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Pollan, Michael. “Foreword.” Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence, by Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola, Translated by Joan Benham, xi–xiii. Washington: Island Press, 2015. Richardson, Linda Deer. Academic Theories of Generations in the Renaissance: The Contemporaries and Successors of Jean Fernel (1497–1558). Edited by Benjamin Goldberg. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2018. Rohde, Eleanour Sinclair. Shakespeare’s Wild Flowers: Fairy Lore, Gardens, Herbs, Gatherers of Simples, & Bee Lore. London: Medici Society, 1935. Rosenberg, Jessica. “Before and After Plants.” Postmedieval 9, no. 4 (2018): 467–77. Rydén, Mats. Shakespearean Plant Names: Identifications and Interpretations. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, International, 1978. Sandilands, Catriona. “Plants.” In The Cambridge Companion to Environmental Humanities, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Stephanie Foote, 156–169. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Savage, Frederick. The Flora & Folklore of Shakespeare. London: E.J. Burrow & Co., 1923.

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Scott, Charlotte. Shakespeare’s Nature: From Cultivation to Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Shakespeare Magazine. Twitter Post. May 21, 2015, 6:03 AM. https://twitter.com/ UKShakespeare/status/601327565274505216. Shannon, Laurie. “Poor, Bare, Forked: Animal Sovereignty, Human Negative Exceptionalism, and the Natural History of King Lear.” Shakespeare Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2009): 168–96. Singh, Anita. “William Shakespeare: Newly-Discovered Image Revealed.” Telegraph, May 19, 2015. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/11614625/William-Shakespeare-Newly-discovered-image-revealed.html. Singleton, Esther. The Shakespeare Garden. New York: Century Company, 1922. Spurgeon, Caroline F. E. Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Stark, Hannah. “Deleuze and Critical Plant Studies.” In Deleuze and the Non/ Human, edited by Jon Roffe and Hannah Stark, 180–96. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Theis, Jeffrey S. Writing the Forest in Early Modern England: A Sylvan Pastoral Nation. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2009. Tigner, Amy L. Literature and the Renaissance Garden from Elizabeth I to Charles II: England’s Paradise. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Thomas, Vivian, and Nicki Faircloth. Shakespeare’s Plants and Gardens: A Dictionary. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. Trettien, Whitney Anne. “Plant→Animal→Book: Magnifying a Microhistory of Media Circuits.” Postmedieval 3, no. 1 (2012): 97–118. Vickers, Nancy. “Diana Described: Scattered Women and Scattered Rhyme.” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 2 (1981): 265–279. Watson, Robert N. “The Ecology of Self in Midsummer Night’s Dream.” In Ecocritical Shakespeare, edited by Lynne Bruckner and Dan Brayton, 33–56. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E., ed., Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018. Wells, Stanley Sir. Twitter Post. May 19, 2015, 6 AM. https://twitter.com/stanley_wells/ status/600601987160416260. Willes, Margaret. A Shakespearean Botanical. Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2015. Wood, Matthew. “The Doctrine of Signatures.” http://www.naturasophia.com/ Signatures.html.

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About the Author Susan C. Staub is Professor of English at Appalachian State University. Her publications include Nature’s Cruel Stepdames: Representations of Women and Crime in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and The Literary Mother, as well as numerous essays on Early Modern prose fiction, Shakespeare, and Spenser. Her current book project focuses on Shakespeare and botany.

Part 1 Plant Power and Agency

1.

Vegetable Virtues Rebecca Bushnell Abstract Herbal medicine attributes to plants “virtues,” understood as their effects on animal bodies. In early modern English the meaning of the word virtue encompasses positive moral qualities, but also efficacy; in plants that agency may be both deadly and beneficial. This essay reviews how early modern botanical discourse uses virtue to signal plants’ power to influence the world. It then examines how that attribution intersects with a discourse of dynamic human virtue in Shakespeare, including his references to herbal cures as well as explicit references to plant virtues in King Lear, Cymbeline, and Pericles. The final section turns to the more complex relationship of botanical and human virtue in Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. Keywords: virtue, plant power, botanical discourse, instability, potential, medicine

In Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, Michael Marder asks how we can encounter plants as other than human: can we find a way to understand that plants “are capable, in their own fashion, of accessing, influencing, and being influenced by a world that does not overlap the human Lebenswelt but that corresponds to the vegetal modes of dwelling on and in the earth?” He grapples with how plants might escape “the objectifying grasp of metaphysics and its political-economic avatars,” which deny them “the core values of autonomy, individualization, self-identity, originality, and essentiality.”1 That said, as Marder himself recognizes, limiting oneself to Western metaphysics (as he does) excludes alternative modes of conceiving vegetal life. In particular, Marder does not engage with concepts of plant 1 Marder, Plant-Thinking, 8, 55.

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power intrinsic to premodern natural history and herbal medicine, which attribute “virtues” to plants. “Virtue” is a complex word, encompassing the more familiar meaning of positive moral qualities, but also the sense of efficacy, both “a power inherent in a thing” or “a capacity for producing a certain effect.” When it comes to connecting virtue to plants, the Oxford English Dictionary narrows the scope to “power to affect the body in a beneficial manner; strengthening, sustaining, or healing power.”2 However, the OED has missed those texts that tell us that plant “virtue” may be deadly as well as beneficial. Tanya Pollard reminds us that in their uses in early herbal medicine good herbs and drugs “could bring about serious, even lethal, damage, while the most toxic substances could, paradoxically, have medicinal value.”3 Virtue in plants may thus be good or bad, or good and bad simultaneously; on its own, plant virtue is power without value until brought to bear on a body or in the world. In La Sepmaine ou Creation du Monde (translated by Josuah Sylvester as Divine Weeks and Works), Guillaume Du Bartas celebrates the potent sway of plant virtues over every aspect of Creation: Nor (powerfull Hearbs) do we alonely finde Your vertues working in frail humane kinde; But you can force the fiercest Animals, The fellest Fiends, the firmest Mineralls, Yea, fairest Planets (if Antiquitie Have not bely’d the Haggs of Thessalie). 4

Du Bartas thus imagines plants expanding their influence beyond people to the entire world. In his catalogue of remarkable plants Du Bartas pays special attention to aconite or wolfsbane, a powerful neurotoxin, as a kind of individual agent: O valiant Venome! O courageous Plant! Disdainfull Poyson! noble combatant! That scorneth aid, and loves alone to fight, 2 OED Online, “virtue, n.,” II, 8, d. 3 Pollard, Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England, 4. Pollard notes that the word “pharmacy” “stems from the Greek pharmakon, meaning poison, remedy, and love potion; both poison and potion come from the Latin potio, or drink; venom,” 4. 4 Du Bartas, Bartas: His Deuine Weekes and Workes, 78.

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That none partake the glory of his might: For, if he finde our bodies fore-possest With other Poyson, then he lets vs rest, And with his Rivall enters secret Duel, One to one, strong to strong, cruel to cruel, Still fighting fierce, and never over-giue Till they both dying, give Man leave to live. (80)

As the passage from Du Bartas suggests, at this time it was common to compare people with plants, as well as plants with people. Plants echoed the features of the human body, while people were also imagined to grow like plants, and overall plant life functioned symbolically in every aspect of culture. As Vin Nardizzi and Jean E. Feerick have written, because of their shared materiality and modes of existence, the boundaries among humans, animals, and plants were often “soft” or confused.5 Du Bartas here figures aconite as a valiant fighter when locked in mortal combat with another poison, where the human body is merely a passive field of battle. In turn, aconite itself assumes the guise of a human agent, where the text attributes to it human virtues—courage, valor, and nobility—while also characterizing it as cruel and ambitious. That is, the plant’s virtue is reimagined as a martial virtue in action, with all its moral ambivalence.6 In this sense, the duality of this powerful plant, both deadly and beneficial, parallels the complexity of warlike virtue, where the positive effects of a lust for glory can slide into unchecked ambition and scorn, and courage in battle may lead to savagery. This essay uncovers the ways in which the early modern botanical discourse of virtue was thus entangled with concepts of human virtue, as particularly evident in Shakespeare’s plays where virtue seen abstractly is not a fixed value. The topic of virtue’s meaning in early modern England is, of course, a vastly complex subject, whether considered more broadly in the history of philosophy or in the context of the discourse of virtue in Shakespeare’s plays. One approach has been to follow the categories of Christian “virtues” inherited from medieval philosophy and theology (understood as the cardinal and theological virtues). Another critical strand 5 Feerick and Nardizzi, The Indistinct Human, 1–9. See also Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching, chapter 3, on analogies between horticulture and education; Goody, Culture of Flowers, on flower symbolism. 6 Shakespeare mentions aconite in 2 Henry IV, 4. 4.48, comparing its strength and violence with that of gunpowder. All quotes are from the Riverside Shakespeare (1974 edition). See Pollard on aconite, 30.

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has framed the study of virtue in Shakespeare through “virtue ethics,” an approach based on Aristotelean philosophy that focuses on how virtues such as prudence or temperance are embedded in human character and realized in action.7 This essay comes at the question of virtue in Shakespeare’s plays from another direction by rooting the concept in the associations of virtue with plants. In this, my own approach is closer to that of Julia Lupton in Thinking with Shakespeare, as well as Holly Crocker in her The Matter of Virtue: Women’s Ethical Action from Chaucer to Shakespeare, who examines what she calls the material virtues, whereby “Virtues did things in the world, uniting body and soul through a system of everyday ethics in premodern England.”8 Here I mostly focus on how, in this period, aligning ideas of plant virtue as a form of power with human virtue could undermine a sense of moral fixity. I begin by briefly surveying the attribution of virtues to plants, extending from their uses in humoral medical practice to their supposed transformative powers in nature. I then turn to consider the ways in which concepts of plant power intersect with a discourse of dynamic and unstable human virtue in some of Shakespeare’s plays. Several plays feature examples of herbal medical practice neatly aligned with human virtue, sometimes moving beyond pharmacology; in Hamlet, most tellingly, imagery of dangerous and volatile plant life evokes the instability of that virtue. This essay is thus entitled “vegetable virtue” to capture that sense of the adjective “vegetable” where Andrew Marvell invokes “vegetable love” in “To His Coy Mistress” and John Milton describes “vegetable gold” on the Tree of Life; in both cases “vegetable” connotes growth and movement, not stasis. So, too, in both people and plants, vegetable virtue is never still, whether for good or ill.

Plant Power in Early Modern Medicine and Magic In early modern England, knowledge of herbal virtues stemmed both from folk practice and a long tradition of written herbals dating back to antiquity.9 7 See Beauregard, Virtue’s Own Feature: Shakespeare and the Virtue Ethics Tradition; also, Lupton and Sherman, eds., Shakespeare and Virtue. On virtue ethics more generally, see Daniel C. Russell, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Virtue Ethics. 8 Crocker, The Matter of Virtue, 9. After I completed this essay, I also had a chance to read Jessica Rosenberg’s Botanical Poetics, which offers an in-depth consideration of the concept of plant virtue. See also Rosenberg, “Stewardship and Resilience.” 9 See Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine, on how “sharp taste, pungent aroma, and unusual texture as well as readily perceptible action of some kind (for example,

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Most often herbal treatment was based on Galenic medicine, whereby the qualities of a plant—defined as hot or cold, dry or wet—counteracted a patient’s humoral imbalance. Thus, for example, in this typical description, in his New Herbal William Turner observed that: Chamomille is hote and drye in the fyrste degre. Chamomyle in subtilnes is lyke the rose but in heate it draweth more nere the qualite of oyle whyche is verye agreynge vnto the nature of man and temperate. Therefore it is good agaynst werynes, it swageth ake, and vnbindeth and louseth it y t is stretched oute softeneth it that is but measurably harde and setteth it abroad that was narrowly thrust together.10

Here the plant’s “heat” is described as moderate but still effective in both stimulating the body and softening its tense or hardened parts, restoring that human body to its “nature.” In this kind of account, the plant’s materiality meshes with humans’: in the end they are made of the same kind of matter. Beyond the effects of shared materiality, a plant’s virtue could be inferred from homologies of form, echoing beliefs in the sympathies and antipathies that animate all the natural world. Some theories of plant effectiveness were based on the doctrine of signatures, whereby the effectiveness of a plant was derived from its resemblance to a part of the human body: for example, the daisy plant eyebright, with its circular center, was used to treat the eyes. But the interpretations were not limited to analogies with the human body. For example, an ancient tradition associated sweet basil with protection against snakes, a notion that likely originated in observing the snakelike shape of its roots. One medieval herbal states that “if anyone has this plant with him, none of the following kinds of snakes can harm him”: the “basil plant has all of their strength, and if any person has the plant with him, that person will be strong against all kinds of snakes.”11 The plant thus does not have to resemble or enter into a person’s body to work; rather, its power is independent of that body, having “all the strength” of the snake that is its antagonist. Even without such homologies, some people believed ordinary plants capable of magical effects. John Gerard may begin his description of the as a laxative or opiate) were all properties that might lead to the classif ication of a plant as medicinal” (141). On herbal medicine see also Anderson, An Illustrated History of the Herbals; Arber, Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution; Rohde, The Old English Herbals; Stannard, Herbs and Herbalism in the Middle Ages and Renaissance; and Kerwin, Beyond the Body, chapter 2. 10 Turner, The First and Second Parts of the Herbal of William Turner, 48. 11 Van Arsdall, Medieval Herbal Remedies, 204–5.

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virtues of the marigold more practically in stating that “it is thought to strengthen and comfort the heart very much, and also to withstand poyson, as also to be good against pestilent Agues, being taken any way.”12 However, other writers went much further, attributing marvelous powers to this common flower. That extraordinary compilation of “secrets,” The Secrets of Albertus Magnus (falsely attributed to the medieval natural philosopher Albertus Magnus), observes of the marigold that The vertue of this herbe is maruelous: for if it be gathered, the Sunne beyng in the signe Leo, in August, and be wrapped in the leafe of a Laurell, or baye tree, & a wolues tooth to the be added therto, no mā shalbe able to haue a word to speake against the bearer therof, but woordes of peace. And yf any thing be stolen, if the bearer of the thinges before named, lay them vnder hys head in ye nyght, he shall see the thefe, & all hys cōnditiōs. And moreouer, yt the forsayd herbe be put in any church, where women be, whyche haue broken Matrymonye on theyr parte, they shall neuer be able to go forthe of the churche, excepte it be put awaye. And thys last poynte hath bene proued, and is very true.13

The plant’s potency thus exceeds even its material nature or form; it is as mysterious as it is “marvelous.” Such effects call to mind the pansy, called “love-in-idleness” in A Midsummer’s Night Dream, which “will make or man or woman madly dote / Upon the next live creature that it sees” (2.1.171–172). Here the pansy is both enchanted and ordinary, native to both fairyland and this world.14 Like “love-in-idleness,” the Secrets’ marigold’s powers influence human behavior, functioning in this case to aid in social control, whether it be of language, criminality, or sexuality. Plant virtues can thus expose the qualities of human virtue—or vice.

Plant and Human Virtues In early modernity the distinction between human and plant virtue could indeed often be muddled. The epistle to the reader in John Parkinson’s Paradisi in Sole begins with a paean to herbs and flowers that celebrates their “virtues and properties” by comparing those vegetal virtues to human ones: 12 Gerard, The Herball, 741. This is just the beginning of the medical benefits of the marigold. 13 The Boke of the Secretes of Albertus Magnus, sig. Aiiiv–iiii. 14 See Mary Floyd-Wilson, “Potions, Passion, and Fairy Knowledge,” 187.

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That as many herbes and flowers with their fragrant sweete smels doe comfort, and as it were reuiue the spirits, and perfume a whole house; euen so such men as liue vertuously, labouring to doe good, and profit the Church of God and the Common wealth by their paines or penne, doe as it were send forth a pleasing savour of sweet instructions, not only to that time wherein they liue, and are fresh, but being drye, withered and dead, cease not in all after ages to doe as much or more. Many herbes and flowers that haue small beautie or savour to commend them, haue much more good vse and vertue: so many men of excellent rare parts and good qualities doe lye hid vnknown and not respected, untill time and vse of them doe set forth their properties. Againe, many flowers haue a glorious shew of beauty and brauery, yet stinking in smell, or else of no other vse: so many doe make a glorious ostentation, and flourish in the world, when as if they stinke not horribly before God, and all good men, yet surely they haue no other vertue then their outside to commend them, or leave behind them. Some also rise vp and appear like a Lilly among Thornes, or as a goodly Flower among many Weedes or Grasse, eyther by their honourable authoritie, or eminence of learning or riches, whereby they excell others, and thereby may doe good to many.15

Here Parkinson does assume that virtue is generally a positive value, but he observes that it manifests variously according to the type of person or plant. Whether in a plant or person, virtue is not always static. Some people and plants may appear virtuous, but it is only a sham, while in others, virtues “rise up.” Some virtues are evident, while others may be overlooked at first but are then seen in action.16 In both plants and people, virtue is thus complicated and multilayered; it may be hidden or even deceptive. In her discussion of virtue in Thinking with Shakespeare, by emphasizing potentiality, Julia Lupton constructs an analogy between human and “thingly virtues,” or the generative power that can be attributed to non-human entities, such as plants and stones: Such thingly virtues are ever ready to flower into use, yet themselves participate in a dormancy that keeps its own measure in the order of being, the “blossoming time / that from the seedness the bare fallow brings / to teeming foison” (Measure for Measure, 1.4.41–43). Political 15 Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole, “Epistle to the Reader,” n.p. 16 See Crocker, 14–17, on the ways in which virtue was understood to be deceptive, or to turn to vice, especially in women.

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virtues are fundamentally active, existing only in their practice, while vital virtues subsist as latencies and tendencies with the power to burst into flower, or die stillborn.17

This view of virtue as potential corresponds with Parkinson’s sense that in “many herbes and flowers that haue small beautie or savour to commend them, haue much more good vse and vertue: so many men of excellent rare parts and good qualities doe lye hid vnknown and not respected, untill time and use of them doe set forth their properties.” In making her own analogy, Lupton points to Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well, who “brings together the traditional attributes of feminine virtue with the pharmacist’s knowledge of the virtues of things in order to identify the practice of virtue more broadly with the self-realizing interests of the new professional classes.”18 As Holly Crocker has noted, this kind of premodern thinking about virtue could be particularly productive for constructing a form of positive virtue for women in embodied action, in contrast to a dominant narrative that conveyed distrust of feminine virtue.19 Although All’s Well never specifies the composition of the prescription “of rare and prov’d effects” (1.3.223) that Helena uses to heal the King’s fistula, a reader or spectator would surely imagine a mixture of plants, minerals, or animal parts. Helena suggests that the compound’s powers go beyond the ordinary practice of physic, being “sanctified / By th’ luckiest stars in heaven” (245–46). As Lupton suggests, in so doing, Shakespeare gestures here at a kind of mystical connection between Helena’s “youth, beauty, wisdom, and courage” (2.1.181) and the virtues of her “receipt.” In this play, as elsewhere in Shakespeare’s works, virtue is potential—and potent—in both people and the things of the earth.20

Plant Virtues in Shakespeare Given how important herbs were in early modern medicine, it is not surprising that Shakespeare’s plays refer frequently to plant power, whether explicitly in scenes involving medical practice or indirectly in figurative 17 Lupton, Thinking with Shakespeare, 10. Here Lupton draws on the work of Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter, and of other scholars who promulgate the “new vitalism” or object-oriented ontology. See also Rosenberg, Botanical Poetics, chapter 2. 18 Lupton, Thinking with Shakespeare, 10. 19 Crocker, The Matter of Virtue, “Introduction.” 20 See also Lupton’s lecture on “Shakespeare’s Virtues,” focusing on Twelfth Night.

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language.21 For example, conversing with the Doctor as the English army approaches, Macbeth refers to rhubarb or “cyme” (likely senna) as a purgative in wishing for something to “scour these English hence” (5.3.55–6). In Much Ado About Nothing, Beatrice, Hero, and Margaret joke about love, sex, and marriage, while Beatrice claims she is “stuffed and cannot smell”: literally, Beatrice has a head cold. Margaret advises Beatrice to procure some “distill’d carduus benedictus, and lay it to your heart; it is the only thing for a qualm.” While the joke is clearly on “benedictus,” or Benedict, laid on her heart, Margaret protests that she only means using “plain holy-thistle” as a cure for the cold (3.4.63–80). In both of these cases, Shakespeare thus draws on common knowledge of herbal cures as a rich source for metaphor or wordplay. Rue may be Shakespeare’s most well-known herb, featured in scenes that exploit the obvious analogies between the plant’s virtues and the human emotion the word may signify.22 In Paradisi in Sole, Parkinson describes rue’s virtues as follows: The many good properties whereunto Rue serueth, hath I thinke in former times caused the English name of Herbe Grace to be giuen unto it. For without doubt it is a most wholesome herbe, although bitter and strong, and could our dainty stomackes brooke the vse thereof, it would worke admirable effects being carefully and skilfully applyed, as time and occasion did require: but not vndiscreetly or hand ouer head, as many vse to doe that haue no skill. (530)

While the etymology of “rue” denoting regret differs from that of “rue” naming the plant, the two meanings merged in the early modern imagination, linking the effects of this bitter, strong, and corrosive herb with the pain of remorse that eats away at the conscience. While Parkinson noted that the name “herb grace” comes from “its many good properties” (where “grace” denotes merely beneficial efficacy), grace clearly also evoked rue’s association with repentance, which comes by God’s grace.23 In the

21 In Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance, David F. Hoeniger cites the many ways in which the plays recognize the virtues of plants. 22 Hoeniger, Medicine and Shakespeare, 250. 23 Regarding the line in Richard III, where Richard states “small herbs have grace, great weeds to grow apace” (2.4.13), Hoeniger suggests that grace here is like power or virtue, 250. See Hoeniger’s broader discussion of rue in association with repentance, as herb grace, Medicine and Shakespeare, 251–52.

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emblematic garden scene in Richard II, after the weeping queen Isabella exits, the Gardener pronounces, Here did she fall a tear, here in this place I’ll set a bank of rue, sour herb of grace. Rue, even for ruth, here shortly shall be seen, In the remembrance of a weeping queen. (3.4.104–7)

In Hamlet, it has often been assumed the mad Ophelia offers “rue,” “what we call herb of grace a Sundays,” to Gertrude, who is repenting for her marriage to Claudius (4.5.181–83). None of these passages mixing human and plant values explicitly uses the term “virtue.” However, elsewhere Shakespeare does use the word in scenes where people, good and evil, apply pharmacology. In Cymbeline, the malevolent Queen is portrayed as practicing distillation, as did so many household mistresses.24 However, here the Queen exceeds that function, asking the doctor Cornelius to provide her with poisonous compounds. Although she really wants the drugs to kill Imogen, she claims she ordered them only to experiment on cats and dogs: To try the vigor of them, and apply Allayments to their act, and by them gather Their several virtues and effects. (1.5.21–3)

In this context, the compounds’ virtues have nothing to do with virtuous or healing effects, just as the Queen herself is hardly a virtuous woman. While Cornelius does not give her what she desires, substituting a drug that will merely imitate death, the message is the same: plants can ruthlessly overcome the human and animal body, without regard to benefit.25 In contrast, in King Lear plant virtue is linked with Cordelia and the beneficent Doctor who treats the mad king. In Act 4 Cordelia reports how Lear was met, Crown’d with rank fumitory and furrow weeds, With hardocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo flowers, 24 On women as herbalists and distillers, see Rebecca Laroche, Medical Authority and Englishwomen’s Herbal Texts, and Wendy Wall, Recipes for Thought. 25 See Pollard, Drugs and Theater, chapter 2, on narcotic drugs in Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra.

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Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow In our sustaining corn. (4.4.3–6)

She then asks the Doctor how they might restore Lear’s sanity: he replies, with “repose,” which can be provoked by “many simples operative, whose power / Will close the eyes of anguish.” Cordelia then exclaims: All blest secrets, All you unpublish’d virtues of the earth, Spring with my tears! be aidant and remediate In the good man’s distress! (4.4.14–18)

The harm of the idle weeds crowning Lear is thus contrasted with the virtues attributed to the herbal simples that will make Lear sleep and relieve his madness. These virtues are “secrets” or “unpublished,” latent until made vital by the virtuous Cordelia’s tears, thus evoking Lupton’s characterization of human and “thingly” virtue as potential, realized in action. In Pericles, like Cordelia, the noble Cerimon holds himself as virtuous, while practicing physic and valuing the virtues inherent in earthy things. He first declares his credo that “Virtue and cunning were endowments greater / Than nobleness and riches.” He then speaks of his work in physic in which he seeks the aid of “the blest infusions / That dwells in vegetives, in metals, stones” (3.2. 27–36). While usually infusions are made from herbs, these lines suggest that the infusions “dwell” in earthly things, thus employing a rare Shakespearean usage of “infusion” meaning “infused temperament; character imparted by nature,”26 that is, virtue. In a virtuous circle, Cerimon’s physic will further the revival of Thaisa, whose coffin has washed up on the shores of Ephesus. The dead will be brought back to life, through “blest infusions,” like the “blest secrets” of the earth revivified by Cordelia’s tears.27 These examples connecting human and plant virtue do fall neatly on one side or the other of a moral balance: the evil Queen in Cymbeline draws on the deadly potential of plants, whereas like Helena, Cordelia and Cerimon align their own virtue with plants’ beneficial powers. This alignment reflects the fact that in romance and comedy, the spheres of good and evil tend to be more clearly distinct. As the Friar of Romeo and Juliet suggests, however, as potential in both plants or people, more often virtue is neither stable 26 OED, “infusion, n.,” 2, c. 27 On Cerimon as a “magus-like figure” like Helena, see Barbara Howard Traister, “‘Note Her a Little Farther’: Doctors and Healers,” 49.

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nor uniform. With their ability to both harm and heal, plant virtues can be linked to the fundamentally dynamic and potentially tragic nature of human virtue, capable of both good and ill. When the Friar speaks of his collection of “baleful weeds and preciousjuiced flowers” as he awaits Romeo in Act 2, he signals that kind of duality from the beginning. He ponders how humans “suck” on the earth’s bosom to find plants, those “children” that are “Many for many virtues excellent, / None but for some and yet all different.” The earth is figured as both the “womb” and “tomb” of plants, in a cycle of both life and death aligned with the opposition of “precious-juiced flower” and “baleful weed.” The Friar then shifts to praise the “grace” of earthly things: O, mickle is the powerful grace that lies In, plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities: For nought so vile that on the earth doth live But to the earth some special good doth give; Nor aught so good but, strain’d from that fair use, Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse.

In this case, the value of grace in plants is unstable; while at first it appears beneficial, like God’s grace, its meaning clearly shifts more to efficacy alone when it can be abused. The Friar then explicitly compares vegetal and human virtue, when he notes that “Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied, / And vice sometimes by action dignified.” He uses the example of a small flower in which, he says, Poison hath residence and medicine power; For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part, Being tasted, slays all senses with the heart. Two such opposed kings encamp them still In man as well as herbs, grace and rude will; And where the worser is predominant, Full soon the canker death eats up that plant. (2.3.8–30)

As Lynette Hunter has observed, four of Romeo and Juliet’s main characters (Romeo, Juliet, Paris, and Mercutio) are referred to as flowers. In the context of this passage, to compare them with flowers suggests that they too can be possessed by the forces of both “grace and rude will,” where “grace” shifts back to a positive connotation when opposed by “rude will,” violent and strong desire. Both people and plants are thus characterized as a field

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of a war waged by these “better” and “worse” powers, equal in strength as “two opposed kings.” In this dynamic state both are vulnerable to “canker death.”28 Canker was understood as a malady affecting both human flesh and plant tissue: in people, canker is an ulcerous sore or a form of cancer; in plants, canker denotes various diseases characterized by slow decay. In both, canker signifies a malignancy caused by the predominance of the “worser” virtue. In this way, the duality of plant virtue suggests the complexity of tragic virtue in human beings, both in this play and in other Shakespearean tragedies, where the better part of the tragic figure is also the worse, when the “good,” “strained from that fair use, / Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse.” In Romeo and Juliet, we see that love, expressed as irrational desire, becomes destructive, as it also does in Antony and Cleopatra and Othello. In Coriolanus and Macbeth, martial virtues and a lust for glory spiral into overweening ambition and consequent ruin, while in Hamlet, a sense of filial duty and the defense of honor culminate in bloody revenge and catastrophe.

Botanical and Human Virtue in Hamlet Curiously enough, unlike so many other Shakespeare’s plays, outside of this passage Romeo and Juliet never uses the word “virtue” directly with respect to its characters’ moral qualities. In contrast, another tragedy steeped in imagery of flowers, weeds, and poisons, Hamlet is obsessed with the qualities of human virtue. Hamlet can thus sustain a deeper analysis of how imagery of powerful—and harmful—plants becomes intertwined with a deeply skeptical and tragic view of human virtue. In Hamlet, virtue is indeed “vegetable”: it is “rank” and “like wax”; virtue is subject to canker and fundamentally vulnerable to decay. While the main setting for Hamlet’s plot is a castle, the play also summons up many images of vegetation associated with mortality. Old Hamlet is poisoned in his orchard, and the king in the “Murder of Gonzago” dumb show rests on a bank of flowers. Most notably, in her madness Ophelia memorably 28 Hunter, “Cankers in Romeo and Juliet,” 179. Hunter’s reading of disease and diagnosis in Romeo and Juliet focuses on the play’s blend of Galenic and Paracelsan medicine for the treatment of melancholia that affects and corrupts both individuals and the community as a whole. See also William Kerwin, Beyond the Body, chapter 2, on apothecaries. For an in-depth reading of Romeo and Juliet from the point of view of “letters, flowers, and slips,” see Rosenberg, Botanical Poetics, 111–25.

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distributes flowers and herbs, and she dies garlanded with “crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples” (4.7.69) and clutching a broken bough. Many critics associate her with all those plants’ “emblematic usages” or symbolism, while they do not agree on their meanings.29 However, some readers remind us to instead consider the virtues attributed to them; for example, Robert Painter and Brian Parker note that most of her plants have antifertility or abortifacient properties, and Rebecca Laroche reads them as herbs that ease pain and counteract poison, figuring Ophelia as a practitioner of herbal medicine.30 The play thus creates an environment in which plants function both symbolically and literally, but always with a taint of power or danger. Indeed, plants have their most formidable presences in the play as poison: the “hebonon” or “hebona” poured in the ear of Hamlet’s father and the deadly “simples” that anoint Laertes’ sword. Debate continues over the identity of “hebona”; Ryan J. Huxtable lists six candidates that scholars have proposed: ebony, the tree of life, yew, henbane, tobacco, or spotted hemlock (he opts for hemlock, which he notes was called “herb bennet”).31 Whatever exactly it is meant to be, people assume it is a plant compound. “The Mousetrap” scene that echoes Old Hamlet’s murder establishes that case, where Lucianus describes the poison he uses: Thou mixture rank, of midnight weeds collected, With Hecat’s ban thrice blasted, thrice [infected], Thy natural magic and dire property On wholesome life usurps immediately. (3.2.257–60)

The source of Laertes’s “unction” is also not specified, but we can infer that it is vegetal because it is “Collected from all simples that have virtue / Under the moon” (4.7.144–145; a “simple” is an herbal medicine containing one ingredient). In both cases plants quickly overwhelm and destroy the human body. Hebona acts with hideous effect on Hamlet’s father, causing 29 Goody, Culture of Flowers, 180. On Perdita’s symbolic distribution of flowers in The Winter’s Tale, see Bushnell, Green Desire, 121–2. See the note in the Arden edition, 417–18. On Ophelia and flowers, see de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet, 116–26. 30 Painter and Parker, “Ophelia’s Flowers Again.” Laroche, “Ophelia’s Plants and the Death of Violets,” 220. See also Crocker, The Matter of Virtue, 33–34, on how we can see this scene as “a practice of material ethics, a bodily virtue that allows Ophelia to protest the harms she undergoes,” 34. 31 Huxtable, “On the Nature of Shakespeare’s Cursed Hebona,” 262–80. Hoeniger opts for henbane, Medicine and Shakespeare, 254. On poison in Hamlet in association with theater and language, see Pollard, Drugs and Theater, chapter 5.

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his blood to curdle and a foul leprous crust to form on his skin; just a scratch with Laertes’ poison causes “contagion” and death. Laertes’ reference to the virtue of the simples in his unction harks back to his remarks about Ophelia’s virtue in Act 1, Scene 3, where he compares young maids and plants in warning Ophelia against trusting Hamlet. Hamlet may love her now, Laertes says, and “now no soil nor cautel doth besmirch / The virtue of his will” (15–16), but he reminds her that Hamlet’s “will is not his own” and thus he may change. Here virtue reads ambiguously, connoting both its positive moral sense, but also its meaning as merely strength or power; the sense is that virtue can yield to circumstance. After telling Ophelia again that Hamlet cannot choose for himself, Laertes compares the vulnerability of female virtue to new plants being blasted by “canker” if exposed too early on a spring morning: The chariest maid is prodigal enough If she unmask her beauty to the moon. Virtue itself scapes not calumnious strokes. The canker galls the infants of the spring Too oft before their buttons be disclos’d, And in the morn and liquid dew of youth Contagious blastments are most imminent. (36–42)

The passage echoes the Friar’s speech where he speaks of the contest between “grace” and “rude will” in people as well as plants, where, if will prevails, “canker” consumes them; here virtue is easily “galled” by exposure (“gall” is also a term for plant disease that produces an excrescence on a plant’s body). The general sense of both passages is that virtue is neither a single or pure force, in either men or women; rather, virtue can be altered, contaminated, blasted, or corrupted.32 In fact, the ghost of Hamlet’s father seems to be the play’s only character who believes that virtue is something fixed, when he contrasts virtue with lust, “as it never will be mov’d, / Though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven” (1.5.53–4). For Hamlet, however, virtue is always under attack and capable of shifting; virtue, that is, may be “as wax” (3.4.84). In his remarks to Horatio in Act 1, Scene 4, Hamlet contemplates how men’s virtues, “be they as pure as grace,” are susceptible to corruption, if only from the “general censure” (33–5). In another horticultural metaphor, when he protests that 32 Hamlet also compares Claudius to a “mildewed ear” (3.4.64), another image of a diseased plant if “ear” is taken to refer to an ear of maize.

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Ophelia should not have believed him that he loved her, he pronounces that “virtue cannot so / Inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it” (3.1.116–18.) While the referent of “it” is ambiguous, the line suggests the inability of the virtue of a new graft added to an older stem to alter its nature; virtue is powerless to change the nature of the implicitly sinful status quo. The scene in which Hamlet confronts Gertrude in her closet directly addresses the vulnerability and dangerous potential of human virtue through images of plants and gardens rotting, becoming diseased, or growing out of control.33 Hamlet begins his rant against Gertrude by accusing her of an as yet unnamed act of sin: Such an act That blurs the grace and blush of modesty, Calls virtue hypocrite, takes off the rose From the fair forehead of an innocent love And sets a blister there …. (3.4. 40–4)

This passage mingles words associated with human and vegetal virtue and matter. The sin Hamlet associates with the remarriage “blurs” the “grace and blush” of womanly virtue (echoing the name of rue as the “herb grace” and the Friar’s use of the “grace” as efficacy). This idea is paired with the metaphor of a rose plucked from the “forehead” of love and replaced with a blister. While some scholars have read the blister as a mark of punishment of prostitutes, the meaning of these lines has been disputed. If one foregrounds instead the horticultural context, the blister evokes once again a canker (a plant can also “blister”), like the “blastments” or “galls” destroying the young buds exposed too soon in the spring. In these attacks on women, both human virtue and a flower’s nature are figured as all too vulnerable. As foreshadowed by this passage, Hamlet’s attack on Gertrude is rife with imagery of plants seen at once as ineffectual or weakened in their virtue and all too strong in their “rankness.” He begs her: Lay not that flattering unction to your soul, That not your trespass but my madness speaks; It will but skin and film the ulcerous place, Whiles rank corruption, mining all within, Infects unseen. (3.4.145–49) 33 On this garden imagery associated with corrupted sexuality, see Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet, 102–5.

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This ineffective “unction” foreshadows the deadly unction on Laertes’ foil; in Hamlet’s imagination, in contrast, plant virtue is too weak to really cure disease. However, in asking Gertrude to refrain from sleeping with Claudius, “not spreading the compost on the weeds / To make them ranker” (151–2), Hamlet presents a contrary image of vegetation run rampant to refer to her sexual excess. In early modern English “rank” could mean profuse, strong, or vigorous, without a moral connotation, while it could also bear a negative meaning, whether material, in the sense of being coarse or rotten, or in a moral sense, when applied to people, as corrupt or foul. “Rank” was also used to refer to poison. When Hamlet earlier compares this world to “an unweeded garden / That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature / Possess it merely” (1.2.135–37) and Lucianus’s poison is described as a “mixture rank,” rankness belongs to the vegetal domain, with connotations of “strong and vigorous” that slide easily into the senses of rotten or destructive. When Claudius also calls his “offense” “rank” (3.3.36), and Hamlet threatens Gertrude with the foul image of the “rank sweat of an unseamed bed” (3.4.92),34 while we have moved to another register of meaning, the lines seem to echo the other uses of rankness in the play. Here the meaning of “rank” thus slips between the vegetal and human realms; in the context where it is used, it highlights the ways in which virtue “revolts from true birth,” its inherent potential either declining into corruption, losing its efficacy, or “running rampant” to destroy rather than heal. The darkness of the vegetal world in Hamlet, associated with unchecked growth, vulnerability to corruption, and death, returns us to this essay’s beginning, with its consideration of the fundamentally amoral nature of plant virtue, counteracting the desire to define it merely as what helps people. Plant virtue was understood as potential, power neither inherently beneficial nor deadly until activated in the world. In that sense, plant power was indeed fundamentally independent of humanity, until manifested in the human or animal body or in human behavior. In this sense, like the materiality of plants themselves, virtue was vegetable, that is, not static but rather always capable of change, both growing and dying. Thus, in a world in which humans were so often compared to plants, the notion of plant virtue could easily become intertwined with representations of the dynamic nature of human virtue. In Shakespeare’s comedies and romances, concepts of beneficial or deadly virtues in plants align more readily with the nature of the beneficent or malevolent characters who deploy them: Cerimon, Helena, and Cymbeline’s Queen. In the tragedies however, in the 34 Polonius also refers to the notion of the “rank” offenses that people commit (2.1.20).

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Friar’s words, the “mickle” grace in plants and people is such that even the vilest might give the earth “some special good,” but in turn, the good “stumble” on “abuse.”

Bibliography Primary sources Anonymous. The Boke of Secretes of Albertus Magnus of the Vertues of Herbes, Stones, and Certayne Beasts: Also, a Boke of the Same Author, of the Maruaylous Thinges of the World, and of Certaine Effectes Caused of Certaine Beastes. London, 1560. Du Bartas, Guillaume. La sepmaine ou creation du monde. Translated by Josuah Sylvester as Bartas: His Deuine Weekes and Workes Translated. London, 1608. Gerard, John, The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes … very much enlarged and amended by Thomas Johnson. London, 1633. Parkinson, John. Paradisi in Sole: Paradisus Terrestris. London, 1629. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. Edited by G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974. Turner, William. The First and Seconde Partes of the Herbal of William Turner Doctor in Physick, Lately Ouersene, Corrected and Enlarged with the Thirde Parte. Cologne, 1568.

Secondary sources Anderson, Frank J. An Illustrated History of the Herbals. New York: Columbia University Press. 1977. Arber, Agnes. Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany, 1470–1670. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953. Beauregard, David N. Virtue’s Own Feature: Shakespeare and the Virtue Ethics Tradition. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Bushnell, Rebecca W. A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. Bushnell, Rebecca W. Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003.

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Crocker, Holly. The Matter of Virtue: Women’s Ethical Action from Chaucer to Shakespeare. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. de Grazia, Margreta. Hamlet without Hamlet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Feerick, Jean E., and Vin Nardizzi, eds. The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Floyd-Wilson, Mary. “Potions, Passion, and Fairy Knowledge in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” In Shakespeare in Our Time: A Shakespeare Association of America Collection, edited by Dympna Callaghan and Suzanne Gossett, 184–88. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Goody, Jack. The Culture of Flowers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Hoeniger, David F. Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992. Hunter, Lynette. “Cankers in Romeo and Juliet: Sixteenth-Century Medicine at a Figural/Literal Cusp.” In Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure on the Early Modern Stage, edited by Stephanie Moss and Kaara L. Peterson, 171–85. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Huxtable, Ryan J. “On the Nature of Shakespeare’s Cursed Hebon.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 36, no. 2 (1993): 262–80. Kerwin, William. Beyond the Body: The Boundaries of Medicine and English Renaissance Drama. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005. Laroche, Rebecca. Medical Authority and Englishwomen’s Herbal Texts, 1550–1650. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. Laroche, Rebecca. “Ophelia’s Plants and the Death of Violets.” In Ecocritical Shakespeare, edited by Lynne Bruckner, and Dan Brayton, 211–21. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001. Lupton, Julia Reinhard. “Shakespeare’s Virtues,” lecture delivered at the Folger Shakespeare Library, April 23, 2018. https://folgerpedia.folger.edu/mediawiki/ media/images_pedia_folgerpedia_mw/8/8f/Transcript_of_Julia_Reinhard_Lupton_Birthday_Lecture.pdf?utm_source=wordfly&utm_medium=email&utm_ campaign=PPENCORES1.22.2021&utm_content=version_A&promo=14809. Lupton, Julia Reinhard. Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Lupton, Julia, and Donovan Sherman, eds. Shakespeare and Virtue: A Handbook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Marder, Michael. Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Painter, Robert, and Brian Parker. “Ophelia’s Flowers Again.” Notes and Queries 41, no. 11 (1994): 42–44.

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Pollard, Tanya. Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Rohde, Eleanour Sinclair. The Old English Herbals. New York: Dover, 1971. Rosenberg, Jessica. Botanical Poetics: Early Modern Plant Books and the Husbandry of Print. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. Rosenberg, Jessica. “Stewardship and Resilience: The Environmental Virtues.” In Shakespeare and Virtue: A Handbook, edited by Julia Lupton and Donovan Sherman, 230–43. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Russell, Daniel C., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Virtue Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Siraisi, Nancy G. Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Stannard, Jerry. Herbs and Herbalism in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Edited by Katherine Stannard and Richard Kay. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999. Traister, Barbara Howard. “‘Note Her a Little Farther’: Doctors and Healers in the Drama of Shakespeare.” In Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure on the Early Modern Stage, edited by Stephanie Moss and Kaara L. Peterson, 43–52. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Van Arsdall, Anne. Medieval Herbal Remedies: The Old English Herbarium and Anglo-Saxon Medicine. London: Routledge, 2002. Wall, Wendy. Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.

About the Author Rebecca Bushnell, a professor emerita at the University of Pennsylvania, has written books on Greek and Renaissance tragedy, early modern political thought, humanist pedagogy, early modern English gardening, and time in drama, film, and videogames. Her newest book is The Marvels of the World: An Anthology of Nature Writing Before 1700.

2.

The “idle weeds that grow in the sustaining corn”: Generating Plants in King Lear Susan C. Staub

Abstract This essay considers the rampantly growing cornfield of Act 4 of King Lear in order to interrogate the play’s dual interest in land and female bodies. Looking in particular at weeds, I seek to reconfigure the weedy crown Lear fashions as emblematic of his connection with his daughters, his kingdom, and with nonhuman nature. Weeds, the lowest class of plant life, provide an apt metaphor for the vexed hierarchies of the play. Traditionally defined simply as “plants out of place,” weeds are devalued because they defy human control. My argument sees weeds as part of the ecological order—weeds come after the storm—even if they challenge human order. A reading that focuses on the fertility of the land evidenced by the weeds and on the human responsibility for and connection to what grows there offers hope for both the literal and the social landscape of the play. Keywords: generation, arable field, female bodies, agency, resistance, vulnerability

In Act 4 of King Lear, when Cordelia describes Lear as “mad as the vexed sea,” singing aloud as he wanders through the cornfield wearing his parodic crown of “rank fumitor” and other weeds (4.4.2–7), she reminds us of the repercussions that Lear’s abdication has evoked, not just to his family and kingdom but to the very land he should metaphorically husband.1 The 1 I am using King Lear, Combined Text from The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd Edition. Other plays that I cite are also from this edition and will be noted parenthetically.

Staub, S.C. (ed.), Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463721332_ch02

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abundant and even sexy landscape of Act 1—rich and pleasure-filled, with “plenteous rivers and wide-skirted meads” (1.1.63)—has been reduced to a field of darnel and nettles, pernicious weeds that mimic, poison, and choke the corn (i.e., grain) necessary to sustain Lear’s subjects. But this scene also suggests the complexity of nonhuman nature in the play, a nature that is teeming and alive and vitally enmeshed with humankind.2 In this essay, I ponder how this scene interrogates one of the primary issues of the play, in particular, its dual investment in land and female bodies. I am interested in two interrelated concerns in King Lear: the fertile British landscape and the play’s anxiety about female reproduction. These two issues overlap because both monarchical and patriarchal power are vested in land and human procreation. It is, in fact, the anxiety about female inheritance of the land that inaugurates the play’s crisis, a crisis that is never satisfyingly resolved.3 Shifting our attention from the storm to the cornfield and the weeds that grow there directly connects the landscape with the female body in the play and points to the regenerative potential of both. 4 While recent scholarship has paid increasing attention to the play’s questioning of humankind’s sovereignty over nonhuman nature, what has been considered less frequently, as Rebecca Laroche and Jennifer Munroe point out, “is how such arrogance is simultaneously towards the poor and women such that the human exceptionalism rejected by the play applies equally (and at the same moment) to hierarchies of human over human and human over nonhuman.”5 Weeds, the lowest class of plant life, provide an apt metaphor for such vexed hierarchies.6 Traditionally, weeds, defined simply as “plants out of place,” are devalued because they defy human control. More generally, weeds belong to the larger category of “matter out 2 For a discussion of the vitalism of the play, see Leah S. Marcus, “King Lear and the Death of the World.” 3 See Stephanie Chamberlain, “‘She is herself a dowry’.” In Janet Adelman’s assessment, the play reverses the usual pattern of inheritance as it construes “Lear’s fault itself as the legacy of the female, the contaminating maternal inheritance that cannot be disowned or suppressed” (Suffocating Mothers, 115). 4 In Shakespeare’s Feminine Endings Philippa Berry connects the flooded land of the storm with female bodies (162–63). Here, I am more interested in the growing cornfield, but the two spaces are clearly connected and dependent on one another, the rains of Act 3 helping to generate the plants of Act 4. 5 Laroche and Munroe, Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory, 82. Laurie Shannon calls attention to the play’s corrective of human exceptionalism in her discussion of animals in “Poor, Bare, Forked” and The Accommodated Animal. See also, the introduction to Feerick and Nardizzi, The Indistinct Human. 6 Nina Edwards defines weeds as the “underclass of plant world,” Weeds, 7.

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of place,” to borrow Mary Douglas’s term for dirt from her seminal book Purity and Danger. Dirt, Douglas posits, is “matter out of place,” something that transgresses borders and is perceived as contaminating. “As we know it,” she writes, “dirt is essentially disorder. There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder … Dirt offends against order.”7 Likewise, weeds offend against order. Given this definition, Cordelia becomes analogous to a weed, as do Edmund and the “poor naked wretches” for whom Lear realizes he has “ta’en too little care” (3.4.29, 33–4). As Jean E. Feerick and others have shown, and as I note in the introduction, botanical discourse in the period constantly compares plant life to humans in ways that move beyond simple analogy, linking plants to human anatomy and classifying them with the same sorts of judgmental and hierarchical language used to characterize humans, their behavior, and social structures.8 Perhaps more than any other category of plant, weeds tend to be anthropomorphized, often accorded an almost preternatural agency.9 In herbals, all plants are described in terms of their “virtues,” a complex word that connects plant life to ideas of human morality, both goodness and corruption, as Rebecca Bushnell suggests in the previous essay in this collection.10 Botanical rhetoric, then, “could constitute a supple and powerful tool for grappling with the contradictions produced by an eroding social hierarchy,” in Feerick’s assessment.11 Although my essay is mostly interested in gender, I will glance at other marginalized, or “disordered,” entities such as the poor and the so-called “illegitimate,” in passing. A reconsideration of the fertile, arable field suggests a way to partially unsettle the binaries of the play—male/ female, culture/nature, human/nonhuman, good/evil.12 As I will show, the plot blurs these categories. While the play does not ultimately offer the redemption it might and that it seems to hint it will, a potential curative 7 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, 2. 8 Feerick, “Botanical Shakespeares.” 9 The OED Online even notes the figurative use of weed to characterize a “noxious, troublesome, or useless person,” “weed, n.,” 1, II, 7. 10 We see the slippage between plant virtue and human virtue in the ways that horticultural texts speak of weeding as a kind of moral imperative: “Now Weeds are but the emblems of Vices; just as the purest grains, or choicest flowers are the representatives of Vertues. Let no Misselto spread near your Vine; no Ivy intwist your Elm; no Darnel infect your Field,” Richard Braithwaite contends in his “Advice to a Farmer” (The captive-captain, 33). 11 Feerick, “Botanical Shakespeares,” 86. 12 In an important essay, Steve Mentz argues that viewing the play through a meteorological lens “can help transform sterile dualisms and static ecosystems into pluralized and dynamic conceptions of self and nature,” “Strange Weather,” 140. Here, I seek to build on part of Mentz’s argument by reconsidering the play through a botanical and agricultural lens.

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to the play’s deep misogyny lies in the earth and in a change of perspective both toward its reproductive powers and towards women and other matter/ people considered “out of place.” Janet Adelman notes that the landscape at the beginning of the play is “reassuringly abundant and reassuringly under male control,”13 but it is so because it largely exists only in the abstract, as a map. Francis Barker characterizes the land represented by the map as a place of “ideal emptiness.” “No one,” he emphasizes, “lives or works in the countryside of Lear’s map.”14 As the play begins, Lear commodifies land, setting his daughters in competition for it and using it to evoke their declarations of love and to assert his power over them in a violation of social norms.15 In so doing, Lear denies Cordelia’s paternity, delegitimizing her, and metaphorically turning her into a weed, extricated from the British landscape and discarded. And like a weed, she will later return as an invasive foreign force poised to overtake her homeland. The map with which the play begins suggests how far removed Lear is from the land and the people that he governs. An objectified representation of sovereign power with imaginary boundaries providing an illusion of knowledge and control, the map reduces the land to “a visual fetish,” as Dan Brayton describes it, where “the female body becomes the site of negotiation over property rights. The exchange between Lear and his daughters situates them metonymically as equal to the territories they will inherit, the fruitful bearers of Lear’s (e)state who will carry his lands into other hands.”16 Lear’s callous treatment of the land here parallels the treatment of women in the play. It is only through the physical interaction with that landscape in the storm and later in the arable field that Lear at least partially comes to recognize his interconnectedness with his daughters, with the land and its people, and further, with the nonhuman plants and animals that also inhabit it.17 In a play with no mothers, a play in which “patrilineage [is] on the verge of extinction,”18 King Lear is peculiarly obsessed with fertility, with the female capacity for reproduction, a capacity that is ultimately displaced 13 Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 111. 14 Barker, The Culture of Violence, 3–4. 15 As Chamberlain explains, common law dictated that, in the absence of male heirs, all daughters were expected to inherit an equal portion of the estate, “‘She is herself a dowry’,” 176–77. And as Cordelia rightly points out, Lear’s actions verge on incest. 16 Brayton, “‘Angling in the Lake of Darkness’,” 402. 17 The 2018 National Theatre production of King Lear directed by Jonathan Munby effectively illustrates this aspect of the scene by depicting Lear capriciously cutting the map apart with scissors. On Lear’s growing awareness of his connection with animals, see Laurie Shannon, The Accommodated Animal. 18 Chamberlain, “‘She is herself a dowry’,” 184.

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onto the field. One of the most troubling things about this play is its almost pathological misogyny, its constant references to the female body and its reproductive processes as dark, rank, and contaminating. The play seems to fantasize about male parthenogenesis by excising all mothers from the text, but it nonetheless exhibits an incredible nervousness about maternity, repeatedly calling attention to breeding and conception, usually with disgust.19 Its opening riff on illegitimacy, with Gloucester’s coarse question, “do you smell a fault?” (1.1.14–15), inaugurates this tone (“fault” being early modern slang for female genitals),20 a tone that continues with Lear’s horrifying curse on Goneril’s body— Hear, Nature hear! Dear goddess, hear! Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend To make this creature fruitful! Into her womb convey sterility! Dry up in her the organs of increase; And from her derogate body never spring A babe to honor her. (1.4.242-48)

As Pascale Drouet suggests, this curse echoes God’s curse on Cain in Genesis, banishing him from the fertile earth.21 But Lear has no control over the natural processes of the earth (or his daughters, for that matter), a truth that the weeds will confirm. Even as late as Act 4.6 this degradation continues, with its dark, stinking, sulfurous hell womb: Down from the waist they are centaurs, … there’s hell, there’s darkness, There’s the sulphurous pit: burning, scalding, Stench, consumption. (122-27)22

Here, Lear presents female bodies as dirty and defiling, yet significantly, at this moment he has come to associate the “stench” of female sexuality with his own mortality. 19 For a more developed examination of this aspect of the play, see Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 103–129. 20 Colleen Kennedy, “‘Do You Smell a Fault?’,” para. 1. 21 Drouet, “‘I Speak This in Hunger for Bread’,” 10–11. 22 Actually, this attitude never completely subsides. It continues even in the last scene of the play with Edgar’s self-righteous response to Gloucester’s blinding, “The dark and vicious place where thee he got / Cost him his eyes” (5.3.164–65).

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Shakespeare presents us with three landscapes in King Lear: the storm soaked, muddy and washed out landscape of the middle scenes, a setting too wet to cultivate;23 the imagined chalky cliffs of Dover; and the one that I am interested in, the overgrown arable field of Act 4.24 Curiously, although there are no heirs to the throne in the play and human generation seems thwarted, the field in contrast is exceedingly fecund; and the presence of the various plants growing among the corn gives proof of the goodness and fruitfulness of the British soil.25 In this space, the play complicates what Linda Woodbridge dubs the “anti-fertility agenda” of Shakespearean tragedy.26 This is not the barren, post-apocalyptic world—the “blasted heath”—of so many productions of the play, but a place teeming with plant life, including grain.27 (It seems important that the weeds grow among the corn; the corn still grows, at least offering the potential for sustenance even if threatened.) It is almost as if Lear’s earlier impotent command to the thunder, “Strike flat the rotundity o’ th’ world / Crack Nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once” (3.2.7–8) (with germens being seed and mould the womb), is perversely actualized in the overgrown space Lear’s negligence has created. The seemingly nihilistic and profligate desire to ejaculate all the semen of the future and thus stop the earth-womb from gestating seems paradoxically realized in a field full of germinating weeds. Stanley Wells associates the word “germen” with “the female reproductive element,” i.e., the ovum, rather than with sperm, arguing that Lear thinks of “the world as a vast woman from whom all the means of conception could be squeezed out.”28 Either way, Lear’s curse conflates fertility with destruction. But 23 Interestingly, gynecological manuals suggest that lascivious women are excessively wet and thus are able to reproduce without men, but they generate mola, a kind of unproductive generation that seems analogous to weeds. Jakob Rueff, The Expert Midwife (1637), 139. The wet landscape here likewise escapes patriarchal control and proliferates with weeds. 24 The land actually seems similar to the muddy landscape of Antony and Cleopatra, where plants and animals spontaneously and boundlessly generate after the flooding of the Nile. 25 Phillipa Berry makes this point in Shakespeare’s Feminine Endings, 164. Berry notes that although all of the “‘weeds’ in Lear’s garland … seem to confirm a negative view of ‘waste,’ all these plants could be read as signs of fruitfulness, since they typically grew in moist and fertile ground.” 26 Woodbridge, “Tragedies,” 214. 27 Tradition characterizes this space as a “blasted heath,” a setting nowhere noted in either the quarto or the Folio version of the play. The emendation seems to derive from Naham Tate’s adaptation where this scene is described as “desert heath.” See Frederick T. Flahiff, “Lear’s Map,” 22. Taking their cue from Tate’s “blasted heath,” many productions maintain the hostile, desolate setting. But this is no heath, a landscape that Markham describes as bearing “no grasse at all, but only a vilde, filthie, black-brown weede,” a place that “only maintaineth life and no more,” Farewell to Husbandry, 38. 28 Wells, The History of King Lear, note to Scene 9, line 8.

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as I hope to show, the field also offers a counter narrative to the negative generation Lear evokes throughout the rest of the play. Although the scene is only narrated,29 the play’s progression from the court to the unnamed locale of the storm to the cornfield is significant because it points to the material effects of human actions on the landscape, and reciprocally, the land on humans. In other plays Shakespeare also uses corn (what Thomas and Faircloth explain refers to any grain crop used as a food source, “the basic sustenance of life”30) to suggest how human actions cause disturbances in the natural world. Weeds in an arable field are invariably negative, a perversion of “natural” order, where natural is what is cultivated.31 Citing most of the same weeds, Burgundy laments the ravages of war on France’s agriculture in Henry V: … her fallow leas The darnel, hemlock, and rank fumitory Doth root upon, while that the coulter rusts That should deracinate such savagery. (5.2.44–47)

That the weeds are characterized as savage by Burgundy and must be “deracinated,” or exterminated, points to the threat they pose to the commonwealth and constructs them as alien and other. “All her husbandry doth lie on heaps,” Burgundy says, “Corrupting in it [sic] own fertility” (5.2.39–40), a phrase that suggests the idea that unchecked fertility is deadly.32 When Shakespeare presents Lear wandering though the cornfield in Act 4, he evokes a host of gendered associations. The figuration of woman as land is ancient and is a pervasive trope in the early modern period.33 Early 29 Although we only hear of Lear wandering through the field, stage directions often have him entering with his botanical crown, though the phrasing varies. Many editions follow the late seventeenth-century direction, “Enter Lear, fantastically dressed with wild flowers”; other texts use “Enter Lear, crowned with weeds and flowers.” Even the phrasing of the stage directions suggests the arbitrary classification of the plants that I am considering here. The Norton edition that I am using avoids the choice altogether, using simply, “Enter Lear.” Neither the 1608 quarto nor the Folio stage directions refers to Lear’s weedy crown. 30 Vivian Thomas and Nicki Faircloth, Shakespeare’s Plants and Gardens, 86. 31 Feerick makes this point in her discussion of Burgundy’s lines in Henry V, “Economies of Nature in Shakespeare,” 33. 32 Katherine Eggert describes France as “grotesquely fertile” when not “husbanded,” resulting in “a kind of female parthenogenesis, where nature’s prickly products grow in the absence of men’s tools,” a perversion of the patriarchal and thus, “natural,” order. (Showing Like a Queen, 94) 33 See Horst Breur, “Theories of Generation.”

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modern medical manuals everywhere pick up on this analogy and frequently compare the female body to an arable field and conception to the sowing of corn and other seeds.34 In Shakespeare and in other drama of the period, the female body is likened to a cornf ield as well, sometimes in violent ways. In a perversion of agricultural husbandry, Demetrius, for example, encourages Chiron to rape Lavinia in Titus Andronicus by constructing her as a cornfield: “First, thrash the corn, then after burn the straw” (2.3.123). Shakespeare uses similar botanical tropes throughout his plays—in Hamlet where Gertrude is figured as a garden rank with weeds and in Othello’s assessment of Desdemona as a weed when he doubts her faithfulness, an image that associates her with spontaneous breeding and rot (“As summer flies are in the shambles, / That quicken even with blowing.” 4.2.65–66), to provide just two examples. Weeds in such analogies become symptomatic of a transgressive and/or diseased sexuality. Horticultural manuals reverse the image, constructing the land as a female body fertilized and tended by the male gardener or farmer. Weeds in these texts are also often characterized in sexualized terms, largely because weeds represent a form of unrestrained generation. As we might expect, writers from the period frequently liken the king to steward or farmer tending the land through careful planting, weeding, and pruning, the idea being that through the cultivation of the soil “all common wealths are maintained and vpheld,” in the words of Gervase Markham.35 The abundance and fruitfulness of the earth are “an incomparable earthly blessing,” but one that requires tillage, “without the which, neither king nor state can be maintained.”36 Shakespeare uses this analogy as well, most notably in the famous garden scene in Richard II where the gardener condemns the wasteful king for neglecting to trim and dress the land as one would a garden. In such similes, as Amy L. Tigner argues, “weeds come to represent the loss of control of the political state due to the moral failings of the monarch and by extension the body politic.”37 Given that King James 34 See, for instance, Helkiah Crooke, who calls the womb “a fertil field” in his Microkosmographia (1615), explaining that human seeds are like the seeds of plants (262, 271). In other places, where writers seek to explain why conception does not occur, the womb becomes land where the weather is too cold or wet for the seed to fructify (Raynalde, Birth of Mankind, 189). Even Jane Sharp, who frequently challenges commonplace tropes, uses the analogy: “Man in the act of procreation is the agent and tiller and sower of the ground, woman is the patient or ground to be tilled” (Midwives Book, 32). 35 Markham, The English Husbandman, unnumbered page. 36 John Moore, A Target for Tillage, 4. 37 Tigner, Literature and the Renaissance Garden, 70.

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analogized his kingship to husbandman and landlord, this scene holds significant interest for Shakespeare’s audience.38 Throughout history weeds have carried a lot of cultural baggage. Beyond the political connotations I have already discussed, weeds had strong spiritual and social associations. Biblically and mythologically, weeds (or at least the need to eradicate them) are the sign of a fallen world, representing the end of the Golden Age or the result of God’s curse of Adam and Eve. In fact, female bodies and weeds are explicitly linked in the biblical punishments for the Fall. Women must suffer pain in childbirth while men sweat the labor of husbandry: In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children, and thy desire shall be subject to thine husband, and he shall rule over thee. Also to Adam he said, Because thou hast obeyed the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, (whereof I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it) cursed is the earth for thy sake: in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee, and thou shalt eat the herb of the field.

The marginal note in the Geneva Bible suggests that weeds are no longer natural but degraded plants: “These are not the natural fruits of the earth, but proceed from the corruption of sin.”39 In accordance with the biblical injunction that the woman’s “desire shall be subject to thine husband,” gynecological writings “extend husbandry to include tending to the metaphorically horticultural bodies of women.”40 Just as the land must be husbanded and its fertility controlled, so too, the maternal body must be managed. In her essay later in this collection, Claire Duncan examines the effects of such rhetorical analogies in Measure for Measure. In addition to the political, social, and religious connotations, literal weeds in food crops can have serious implications for human survival. In a series of important essays, Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Richard Marggraf Turley, and Howard Thomas point to the lived experience of food insecurity and shortages in the early modern period that King Lear reflects. 41 Focus38 Brayton, “Angling in the Lake,” 402. 39 Genesis 3: 16–18. Geneva Bible, 1599. 40 Claire Duncan, “Nature’s Bastards,” 128. Duncan extends this argument in her essay in this collection. See also, Mary Fissell, Vernacular Bodies, 201–7. 41 Archer, Turley, Thomas, “The Autumn King”; “Reading Shakespeare against the Grain”; “Remembering Darnel,” as well as their essay on King Lear in Food and the Literary Imagination.

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ing specifically on the darnel in Lear’s weedy crown, they emphasize its contaminating effects on grain crops, a factor contributing to the unstable food supply in the period. Darnel, the most storied of the plants that Cordelia lists in her description of Lear’s crown, has been identified as tares, the “bad seed,” sown by Satan in the “Parable of the Tares.”42 Sometimes called “mimic wheat,” it is a grass commonly found in wheat fields, and it is hard to distinguish from wheat until it matures. Since ancient times, writers such as Pliny, Ovid, and Galen warned of its dangers. Because it is almost indistinguishable from grain crops, invariably, darnel would be harvested along with the rye or wheat it infects. When its seeds were inadvertently mixed into bread, it caused a host of symptoms in those who ate it: nausea, ringing in the ears, and diarrhea, to name just a few. It was recognized as a narcotic or intoxicant, causing delirium and hallucinations, explaining why some scholars link Lear’s symptoms to darnel poisoning.43 “The image of Lear wearing a crown of weeds amid a field of unharvested corn,” Archer, Turley, and Thomas contend, “is symptomatic of a disastrous and seemingly irrevocable breakdown in the production, distribution and consumption of food within the kingdom.”44 Although I find this reading compelling, I want to complicate the negative interpretations a bit by thinking more fully about both weeds in general and about the specific weeds Lear picks and the fact that he picks them. Exactly what is a weed? Botanically, there is little that differentiates a weed from any other plant. Put most simply, weeds have traditionally been defined as “plants that grow where they are not wanted.” As such, they pose a threat to the garden or field’s order, interfering with human desires and needs. 45 They offer a vivid example of Jane Bennett’s concept of “vibrant matter”: “the capacity of things—edibles, commodities, storms, metals—not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities or tendencies of their own.”46 We tend to characterize weeds in derisive terms because they elude our control, humbling—even shaming—us in the process. Although they In these essays, the authors provide a fascinating account of the literary, religious, social, and agricultural significance of darnel. 42 In “The Parable of the Tares” (Matthew 13: 24–43), Christ tells the story of the man who sowed good seed in his field but while he slept after all his hard labors, his enemy (Satan) came and sowed tares (darnel) among his grain. 43 Archer, Turley, Thomas, “The Autumn King,” 527. 44 Archer, Turley, and Thomas, “The Autumn King,” 524. 45 Pollan, Second Nature, 105. 46 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, viii.

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possess growth patterns similar to other plants (and indeed, in another place might not even be classified as weeds), they undermine the productivity of the field and are given an almost unnatural agency exceeding that of other plants. They are thus coded as the enemy of civilization. The terms used to describe them in horticultural manuals are moralistic and judgmental: weeds are promiscuous and opportunistic; their growth is characterized as obscenely vigorous, ignoring proper boundaries as they grow wild and rank, seemingly of their own accord. In her book on weeds, Nina Edwards calls attention to the similarity of the German word for “weed,” Unkraut, with the Nazi word for Jew, Unmensch, noting that both are characterized as illegitimate, as lesser: un-herb and un-person. 47 In the hierarchy of plant life, weeds are at the bottom, hardly worthy of the name “plant.” Yet paradoxically, as Richard Mabey explains in his very interesting and delightfully titled book, Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think about Nature, weeds are a microcosm of human culture. Rather than an enemy of civilization, they are the effect of it. Although associated with things wild and out of control, they are actually a consequence of cultivation, of the intrusion of civilization onto the natural space. Weeds thrive on disturbed soils and are the result of human activity, most living in habitats changed by humans—farmland, gardens, and roadsides. They compete with humans for control of the land and must be held in check.48 Michael Pollan explains, “consider what weeding is: the process by which we make informed choices in nature, discriminate between good and bad, apply our intelligence and sweat to the earth. To weed is to apply culture to nature—which is why we say, when we are weeding, that we are cultivating the soil.”49 A weed, then, is a cultural construct, much as Edmund’s bastardy or illegitimacy is. Edmund, the “natural” child, is conceived and born outside of normative societal structures and challenges their boundaries.50 But weeds are not always devalued. Writers throughout the early modern period call attention to the diversity of plant life, often questioning the tendency to judge some plants as useless or purely evil, i.e., as weeds. Shakespeare even suggests a symbiotic relationship between weeds and valued 47 Edwards, Weeds, 7. 48 Mabey, Weeds, 11–14. 49 Pollan, Second Nature, 115. The period made the connection between the need to cultivate people as well. On this idea see Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching, chapter 3. 50 And, as Alison Findlay, notes, because they were conceived outside of wedlock, bastards were thought to be more robust than children conceived in wedlock, a characteristic they share with weeds (Illegitimate Power, 130).

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plants in places. Nettle benefits from the fertile soil while the strawberries covered by nettle thrive, for example: The strawberry grows underneath the nettle, And wholesome berries thrive and ripen best Neighboured by fruit of baser quality (Henry V, 1.1.60–62)

Further, not all Biblical commentators considered weeds a postlapsarian phenomenon since such a notion implies that creation was initially incomplete.51 They argue for the value of all of creation. Friar Lawrence expresses this idea in Romeo and Juliet, where he explains that “naught so vile that on the earth doth live / But to the earth some special good doth give.” And, he suggests, human “abuse” is what diverts things from their “special good” (2.2.17–20). Making the connection between humans and plants, John Parkinson puts forth a similar idea: Many herbes and flowers that haue small beautie or sauour to commend them, haue much more good vse and vertue: so many men of excellent rare parts and good qualities doe lye hid vnknown and not respected, vntill time and vse of them doe set forth their properties.52

Herbals almost always note the “virtues” of the plants they detail, virtues in this instance meaning usefulness or eff icacy, but the word “virtue,” as I suggested earlier, also serves to connect those plants with humans, particularly with female sexuality. All plants have virtue, whether “nocent or innocent,” discoverable through their “Signatures,” characteristics discernable through a careful examination of their morphology and appearance.53 As Rebecca Bushnell explains in her essay in this volume, plant virtues were not necessarily good; virtue here is latent until it interacts with a human body or the world. But the word does suggest agency, or in Bushnell’s words, “plant power.” And it points to the reciprocal relationship between plants and humans. Botanical virtues were often hidden 51 Arnold Williams, The Common Expositor, 108–9. 52 John Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole, unnumbered page. George Gascoigne also points to the potential usefulness of all plants in his defense of his poetry: “Weedes might seeme to some judgements, neither pleasant nor yet profitable, and therefore meete to bee cast away. But as many weedes are right medicinable, so may you find in this none so vile or stinking, but that it hath in it some vertue if it be rightly handled. Mary you must take heede how you use them,” The Posies, 13. 53 William Coles, Adam in Eden, unnumbered page.

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and secret, causing Parkinson to caution against dismissing any plant outright; the good botanist instead seeks to expose its secrets. Often so indistinguishable were so-called good plants from weeds that William Turner likewise fretted that “precious herbes” might be dismissed by the ignorant as “wedes or grasse.”54 Even the dreaded darnel is given its due. Herbalists of the period contended that darnel results from the degeneration of good seed, “of corne that goeth out of kynde,”55 but it was not considered irrevocably tainted. Early modern botanical writers placed significant importance on environmental conditions and recognized that plants can change with their habitat. So just as tares might turn wheat to poison, likewise, darnel might turn to nourishing wheat. Concomitant with the analogies that connected weeding with the maintenance of the nation was a discourse that advocated patience and the need to coexist with undesirable people and things. We see evidence of this belief in explanations of why Jesus advises leaving the darnel growing in the “Parable of the Tares.” Ostensibly, this delay was so that the weed might ultimately be distinguished from the grain (and by extension, the evil person from the good), yet paradoxically, some interpreted this restraint as a lesson about the importance of tolerance. Making the analogy with people, Erasmus explains, The servants who wish to root up the tares before the time are those who think that false prophets and heresiarchs are to be removed by sword and death, whereas the Master wished not to destroy but to tolerate them if perchance they might turn and from tares become wheat. If they do not turn they are reserved for the judgment of Him who will punish them some day.56

Rooting up the tares too early suggests hubris and exposes the limitations of human as opposed to Godly power.57 Furthermore, others argued, weeds were inevitable so they might as well be accepted: “such a field hath not been seen without tares.”58 Placed in the context of sermons and biblical 54 William Turner, “To the most noble and learned Princesse,” The First and Seconde Partes of the Herbal, unnumbered page. 55 Turner, 129. 56 Erasmus, Paraphrase on Matthew, quoted in Roland H. Bainton, “The Parable of the Tares as Proof,” 83. See Bainton for a fuller discussion of the historical interpretation of this parable as calling for religious liberty. 57 James E. McWilliams, “Worshipping Weeds,” 296. 58 Thomas Blake, A Treatise of the Covenant with God, quoted in McWilliams, 296.

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exegesis, then, rather than madness, the weedy crown may signal Lear’s recognition of his own arrogance and of an acceptance of difference. The recognition that plants can change based on their environment is important for my argument because it too suggests easy slippage in plant hierarchy and again, points to the importance of nurture, not just in caring for plants but of people too. Neither seed nor character is completely innate. Just as the wheat seed might degenerate through neglect so might humans. Plants that mutated into weeds or that only partially resembled their “kinds” were often tagged bastards, offering yet another instance where botanic rhetoric mimicked human social structures, its language “steeped in the language not so much of sex as of relationship and inheritance (threatened by bastardy),” as Katherine Myers points out. But a plant “bastard” was not always a negative appellation, as Myers further explains, and plants characterized as bastards were sometimes valued, even revered.59 This rhetoric resounds in the play, with Edmund, but also with Lear’s daughters. Lear offers a negative example of this idea when he characterizes Goneril as a “degenerate bastard” (1.4.220), disclaiming all responsibility for her character and suggesting that like darnel, she has mutated into something malicious and deadly. A consideration of the specific weeds Cordelia enumerates in Lear’s crown—the “rank fumitor and furrow weeds, / With burdocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckooflowers, / Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow in our sustaining corn” (4.4.3–6)—reveals how important these plants are to the issues of the play.60 Most of these weeds were considered poisonous, 59 Katherine Myers, “‘Men as Plants Increase’,” 178. Myers cites the trumpet daffodil, what Tradescant called, “This ‘Prince of Daffodils’,” as an example of a “bastard” plant considered favorably. On plant bastards in the play, see also, Archer, Turley, Thomas, “The Autumn King,” 529. 60 All too often, productions of the play evade the complexities of Lear’s makeshift crown, either by depicting it in ways that mitigate Lear’s culpability or that remove the ecological and cultural resonances of weeds. The most common depictions allude to Christ’s crown of thorns or Ophelia’s coronet of wild flowers. See Archer, Turley, and Thomas for a discussion of the way that these interpretations diminish “the deeply unsettling nature and political implications of Lear’s madness,” Food and the Literary Imagination, 90. Two recent productions reconfigure the crown in ways that focus on masculine embodiment rather than on nature, using props associated with manhood rather than with plants for Lear’s crown. In the 2018 National Theatre production directed by Jonathan Munby with Ian McKellen as King Lear, Lear substitutes a necktie with a half dead flower and a few sticks cocked off to the side for his crown. An emblem of professional manhood (what anthropologists sometimes characterize as a phallic symbol, a displaced codpiece), the necktie crown here seems a mockery of Lear’s position in this production as an urban man of the world, a very modern king dressed as a suit-clad businessman earlier in the play. Likewise, the 2018 BBC production directed by Richard Eyre, with Anthony Hopkins as Lear, also dissociates Lear from nature; there, the top hat earlier worn by the Fool replaces Lear’s vegetal crown. Both these productions seek to comment on the worldview evoked by

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but all were thought curative taken in small doses or mixed with other elements, prompting some scholars to suggest that Lear has inadvertently picked plants that will cure what ails him.61 Some herbals recommend that leaves of fumitory (also called “earth smoke” since its leaves were thought to resemble mist) be smoked as a remedy for “disorders of the head.” (It was also thought to expel evil spirits if burned in the house.) Both fumitory and hemlock were held to aid eyesight; together, then, the weeds in Lear’s crown pick up on the two main image clusters of the play: madness and blindness.62 All of these weeds are weeds of furrows, the rows where food crops are planted, and as I have already noted, they grow in cultivated fields or gardens. All require rich, fertile ground, and most grow rampantly (nettle grows so fast that it was considered a diabolical plant).63 Several of them are distinguished by their unpleasant smells—the fumitory and hemlock have a noxious smell, burdock, bitter. Fumitory was thought to spring forth spontaneously without seed, engendered by vapors rising from the earth. With a possible pun on Lear’s lost status as king, Cordelia calls Lear’s crown “rank,” that is, “luxurious and vigorous in growth,” “lustful and licentious,” but also “having an offensively strong smell,” “corrupt, foul.”64 The word “rank” here not only denotes the aggressive growth of these plants, then, but also anticipates the smells of mortality that Lear tries to remove from his hand later in Act 4 when he meets up with the blinded Gloucester. He here conjures the smells of the fertile female body that the play constantly evokes, its sulfur and musky wetness redolent of sex, a “conflation of the odor di femmina and the odor mortis,” as Colleen Kennedy phrases it.65 But interestingly, it is Lear’s engagement with weedy nature that has forced his recognition of his own plant-like duality and of his connection with the femininity he berates throughout the play. contemporary political events—Brexit/Trump—and the world they depict seems desolate and alienated from the natural world. In the Munby production, Lear seems to have taken residence in a homeless (or refugee) camp, with fire barrels, concrete walls, and a stark set strewn with a few wildflowers and weeds that Lear has discarded. In the Eyre production, Lear travels around a blighted urban landscape, along highways and outside of a shopping complex, pushing a shopping cart at one point to show his connection with his homeless subjects. Although both of these productions seem interested in connecting the play to twenty-first-century politics and social justice issues, they seem less interested in exploring the environmental issues that are inextricably linked to them. 61 F.G. Butler, “Lear’s Crown of Weeds,” 401. 62 Tigner, Literature and the Renaissance Garden, 110–11. 63 Mabey, Weeds, 67–70. 64 OED, “rank,” adj. and adv., 6;16;15a. Also, “of soil, land: extremely rich, heavy, or fertile,” 13a. 65 Kennedy, “‘Do You Smell a Fault?’” para. 23, para. 2.

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Many of these plants were held to be efficacious in aiding reproduction, continuing the focus on female bodies and sexuality we see in the rest of the play. Several were thought to be effective in the treatment of gynecological problems. Darnel, for instance, treats excessive menstruation, aids in conception, and facilitates childbirth. Nettles “staie the whites” (a mucousy discharge from the vagina) and were thought to cure infertility. And finally, hemlock aids in breastfeeding. (Interestingly, hemlock was also thought to prevent children from growing into puberty: “lay the leaues of Hemlocke to the stones of yong boyes or virgin brests,” the Herball advises, “and by that meanes to keepe those parts from growing great; for it doth not only cause those members to pine away,” perhaps a fantasy cure for the troubled sexuality of the play, but one that would ultimately end the world altogether.)66 The very name cuckoo flower is suggestive of female betrayal; the more common name, “lady’s smock,” also evocative of female sexuality.67 Likewise, one variety of cuckoo flowers can “help men to beget male children,” something the play hints was needed all along.68 My point here is that the weedy crown is richly ambivalent, drawing attention both toward Lear’s and the country’s degeneration, but also to their generative potential. Joy Kennedy suggests that Lear’s weedy crown recalls the archetypal figure of the Green Man, the leafy or weed covered head often seen in medieval churches. Kennedy defines this figure as Nature personified, the symbol of “fertility, copulation, and rebirth” but also of death and decay. Pointing to the poisonous and parasitic nature of the weeds in his crown, she explains that in the Middle Ages, depictions of the relationship between the Green Man and humans is hostile. “The naturalistic images of birth, growth, copulation, and rot (death) come full circle in the play,” she posits. While I disagree with Kennedy’s assessment that Lear as Green Man points to “a wild world barren” of any “saving grace,” I find the green man image useful for its suggestion of the duality of life and death and also of hybridity, of a creature both plant and man.69 The Green Man thus symbolizes both estrangement from and embeddedness in nature. While the existence of the weeds in the field may suggest Lear’s negligence, the fact that he picks and wears them can be read variously. Almost 66 Gerard, The Herball, (1633 ed.): darnell, 72; nettle, 704; hemlock, 1063. 67 Cuckoo flowers bloomed around the time cuckoo birds returned in the spring, hence the name. Further, as Archer, Turley and Thomas suggest, cuckoo flowers evoke the “associated notion of treachery from within—as cuckoldry, illegitimacy, and familial deception,” “The Autumn King,” 523. 68 F.G. Butler, “Lear’s Crown of Weeds,” 405. 69 Kennedy, “Shakespeare’s King Lear,” 60–62.

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weed-like himself, covered in vegetal detritus, Cordelia describes Lear as “ungoverned” (4.4.18), a word that at once suggests something wild and unchecked like the field (and the kingdom he has failed to tend), and that also points to the power he now lacks as king. But this moment might also be read as emblematic of his own affinity with the weeds, with those “out of place” entities such as the “poor naked wretches” (3.4.29) he only became aware of in the storm. Further, at this moment, he actively engages with the land that was merely an abstraction to him early in the play. Although the weeds Lear plucks may be read as continuing the misogynist obsession with generation and female bodies of the rest of the play, they also serve as a reminder of his interconnectedness with the earth and with its potential, with the “virtue” hidden in everything and everyone.70 The king who earlier chafed at his connection with nonhuman nature, who admonished Goneril and Regan to “reason not the need” else “man’s life’s cheap as beast’s” (2.4.259, 262) seems momentarily enmeshed in it. In Cordelia’s description, Lear becomes indiscernible from the grain and weeds, no longer alienated from the reproductive forces that surround him. This is not a pastoral vision, but one that at least acquiesces to the greater power of the external world and perhaps offers an acknowledgment of vulnerability in the face of it.71 Unlike the monarchical crown, the crown here suggests a moment of humility rather than power, perhaps even a mockery of human presumption. Unfortunately, the recognition I am positing here proves unsustainable for Lear. As Cordelia calls on the “unpublished virtues of the earth” to “spring” with her tears (4.4.15–16), her words harken back to the patriarchal abuse of the play’s opening scene where Lear sought to “publish” (that is, “to make public,” according to the OED, but also to announce or read the marriage banns in church) his desires, subjecting the female body and the land to masculine whims and removing agency from both. In referencing the unpublished (“Not revealed or disclosed; kept secret”72) aspect of the plants, though, Cordelia opens up a space of power and resistance. Laroche and Munroe maintain that 70 Lesley Kordecki and Karla Koskinen intimate that Lear’s “flowered crown” evokes a kind of marriage by characterizing him as “bridelike,” noting that the crown “eerily incorporates unto him both his enemies, women and Nature; only in madness does Lear find a way into the natural and feminine world,” Re-Visioning Lear’s Daughters, 170. Laroche and Munroe, on the other hand, challenge the very idea that Lear is mad in this scene, arguing instead that Lear has discovered “an alternative way of being, a state of transcorporeality” achieved through his interconnection with the nonhuman, Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory, 86. 71 For a view of the play as “ecological disequilibrium,” see Mentz, “Strange Weather.” My argument sees weeds as part of the ecological order—weeds come after the storm—even if they challenge human order. 72 OED, “publish, v.,” I and I, 1. b; “unpublished, adj.,” 2.

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Cordelia connects the plants with her own “corporeality,” suggesting that the “cure for Lear’s madness is embodied jointly in herself and in the nonhuman world.” As she does so, she gestures toward female domestic knowledge of medicine, a knowledge embedded in women’s direct experience of nature.73 In addition, her evocation of the “secrets” of nature yokes the plants together with the “secrets” of women, the mysterious and often threatening workings of the female body and women’s privileged knowledge of sexuality and generative processes considered hidden to men. This conjoining of nature with her own body creates what Leah Marcus calls a “network of sympathy,” extending the connections that Lear begins to notice in the storm and that I am arguing culminates when he fashions his weedy crown.74 With her tears, Cordelia metaphorically takes on the masculine role of inseminating the earth and offers a corrective to Lear’s earlier wasteful spilling forth of “all the germens” of the world. Roles symbolically reversed, Lear is now the untilled field, as Frederick O. Waage suggests, and Cordelia looks to the “virtues of the earth” to “re-husband him.”75 Her detailed knowledge and recognition of plant power also suggest Cordelia would make a better monarch (and gardener) than her father. She “redeems nature” (4.6.198). Nonetheless, the play foils our expectations of a restoration when Lear enters with Cordelia’s body, declaring her “dead as earth” (5.3.235), a trope that circles back to the notion of female body as land so important to the play. And it points to the inextricable connection humans have to that land: “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” But Lear’s assessment that the earth is dead suggests that the earlier moment of connectedness is lost. The earth is not dead, and the play and its weedy field have proved that. As Marcus puts it, “with Cordelia’s death, all of Lear’s hard-won capacity to attune himself to the sympathies of things is lost.”76 By the last scene the play does seem to follow the paradigm set forth by Randall Martin, who argues, “Extinction rather than genetic inheritance is the biological norm of Shakespearean tragedy.”77 The Lear family has been wiped out and whether Edgar or Albany takes the throne doesn’t matter; inheritance has been stopped. Nonetheless, in its resistant fertility, the maternal earth suggests a remedy both for what ails Lear, the hysterica passio that he complains of earlier in the play, and also, perhaps a cure for what ails his society. In the gut-wrenching last moments 73 Munroe and Laroche, Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory, 84. 74 Marcus, “King Lear and the Death,” 430. 75 Waage, “Shakespeare Unearth’d,” 153. 76 Marcus, “King Lear and the Death,” 431. 77 Martin, Shakespeare and Ecology, 150.

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of the play when Cordelia, the woman who would redeem nature, dies, as does Lear, it almost seems as if only the weeds survive. But as they do, they symbolically offer a curative in their tenacity and teeming life. Weeds are largely a social construct, a construct that ignores their very real importance: as Mabey points out, they repair and stabilize landscapes destroyed by flood, fire, and war. They serve as food and medicine for both animals and humans. They provide material to make dye, clothing, and other human necessities. They restore and feed the soil. They are prolific seed producers, often surviving dormant in soil hundreds of years before sprouting to life again.78 A plant’s classification as a weed depends on one’s perspective. What is needed in this play is a change in perspective. My reading of the weeds in King Lear suggests a more optimistic view of the play than is supported by its action. It does feel, as Leah Marcus characterizes it, like “nothing less than the death of the world.”79 Like legions of readers before me, I am troubled that Cordelia and Lear die, that only men survive the play, and that the play’s misogyny remains intact. But a reading that focuses on the fertility of the land and on the human responsibility for and connection to what grows there offers hope for both the literal and the social landscape of the play. The fact that the play fails to actualize that possibility does not make it “a wasteland with no restorative powers to fertilize it again.”80 The land itself is fertile and alive. Furthermore, in their generating resistance the weeds force a reevaluation of categories and value systems. As he ends his book on weeds, Richard Mabey provides an apt conclusion for my meandering through Lear’s cornfield: Weeds “are the boundary breakers, the stateless minority, who remind us that life is not that tidy. They could help us learn to live across nature’s borderlines again.”81

Bibliography Primary Sources Braithwaite, Richard. The captive-captain, or, The restrain’d cavalier drawn to his full bodie in these characters … presented and acted to life in a suit of durance, an habit suiting best with his place of residence. London: Printed by J. Grismond, 1665. 78 Mabey, Weeds, 289-90. 79 Marcus, “King Lear and the Death,” 423. 80 Marzena Czubak, “Life and Sterility in King Lear,” 174. 81 Mabey, Weeds, 291–92.

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Coles, William. Adam in Eden, Or Nature’s Paradise the History of Plants, Fruits, Herbs and Flowers. London, 1657. Crooke, Helkiah. Mikrokosmographia: a description of the body of man. London, 1615. Eyre, Richard, dir. King Lear. BBC, 2018. Gascoigne, George. The Posies of George Gascoigne Esquire. In The Complete Works of George Gascoigne, ed. John W. Cunliffe, Vol. 1. New York: Greenwood Press, 1969. Geneva Bible. 1599 Edition. BibleGateway. https://www.biblegateway.com/. Gerard, John. The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes, gathered by iohn gerarde of london master in chirurgerie very much enlarged and amended by thomas iohnson citizen and apothecarye of london. London, 1633. Markham, Gervase. The English Husbandman: the First Part. London, 1613. Markham, Gervase. Markhams Farewell to Husbandry. London, 1620. Moore, John. A Target for Tillage Briefly Containing the most Necessary, Pretious, and Profitable Vse Thereof both for King and State. London, 1612. Munby, Jonathan, dir. King Lear. National Theatre, 2018. Parkinson, John. Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris. London,1629. Raynalde, Thomas. The Birth of Mankind, Otherwise Named, The Woman’s Book. Ed. Elaine Hobby. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2009. Rueff, Jakob. The Expert Midwife, or an Excellent and Most Necessary Treatise of the Generation and Birth of Man. London, 1637. Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd ed. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016. Sharp, Jane. The Midwives Book, or the Whole Art of Midwifery Discovered. Ed. Elaine Hobby. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Turner, William. The First and Seconde Partes of the Herbal of William Turner Doctor in Phisick. Cologne, 1568.

Secondary Sources Adelman, Janet. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest. New York: Routledge, 1992. Archer, Jayne Elisabeth, Richard Marggraf Turley, and Howard Thomas. “The Autumn King: Remembering the Land in King Lear.” Shakespeare Quarterly 63, no. 4 (2012): 518–43. Archer, Jayne Elisabeth, Richard Marggraf Turley, and Howard Thomas. Food and the Literary Imagination. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Archer, Jayne Elisabeth, Richard Marggraf Turley, and Howard Thomas. “Reading Shakespeare with the Grain: Sustainability and the Hunger Business.” Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 19, no. 1 (2015): 8–20.

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Bainton, Roland H. “The Parable of the Tares as the Proof Text for Religious Liberty to the End of the Sixteenth Century.” Church History 1, no. 2 (1932): 67–89. Barker, Francis. The Culture of Violence: Tragedy and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Berry, Philippa. Shakespeare’s Feminine Endings: Disfiguring Death in the Tragedies. London: Routledge, 1999. Brayton, Dan. “Angling in the Lake of Darkness: Possession, Dispossession, and the Politics of Discovery in King Lear.” ELH 70, no. 2 (2003): 399–426. Breur, Horst. “Theories of Generation in Shakespeare.” Journal of European Studies 20, no. 4 (1990): 325–42. Bushnell, Rebecca W. A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. Butler, F.G. “Lear’s Crown of Weeds.” English Studies 70, no. 5 (1989): 395–406. Chamberlain, “‘She is herself a dowry’: King Lear and the Problem of Female Entitlement in Early Modern England.” In Domestic Arrangements in Early Modern England, edited by Kari Boyd McBride, 169–187. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2002. Cuzbak, Marzena. “Life and Sterility in King Lear.” Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 23 (1989): 163–74. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge Classics, 2003. Drouet, Pascale. “‘I Speak This in Hunger for Bread’: Representing and Staging Hunger in Shakespeare’s King Lear and Coriolanus.” In Hunger on the Stage, edited by Elizabeth Angel-Perez and Alexandra Poulain, 2–16. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. Duncan, Claire. “Nature’s Bastards: Grafted Generation in Early Modern England.” Renaissance and Reformation 38, no. 2 (2015): 121–47. Edwards, Nina. Weeds. London: Reaktion Books, 2015. Eggert, Katherine. Showing Like a Queen: Female Authority and Literary Experiment in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Feerick, Jean E. “Botanical Shakespeares: The Racial Logic of Plant Life in Titus Andronicus.” South Central Review 26, no. 1/2 (2009): 82–102. Feerick, Jean E. “Economies of Nature in Shakespeare.” Shakespeare Studies 39 (2011): 32–42. Feerick, Jean E., and Vin Nardizzi, eds. “Introduction.” The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

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Findlay, Alison. Illegitimate Power: Bastards in Renaissance Drama. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994. Fissell, Mary E. Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Flahiff, Frederick T. “Lear’s Map,” Cahiers Élisabéthains 30, no. 1 (1986): 17–33. Kennedy, Colleen. “‘Do You Smell a Fault?’: Detecting and Deodorizing King Lear’s Distinctly Feminine Odor.” Appositions: Studies in the Renaissance/Early Modern Literature and Culture 3 (2010). http://appositions.blogspot.com/2010/05/colleenkennedy-deodorizing-king-lear.html. Kennedy, Joy. “Shakespeare’s King Lear.” The Explicator 60, no. 2 (2002): 60–62. Kordecki, Lesley, and Karla Koskinen. Re-Visioning Lear’s Daughters: Testing Feminist Criticism and Theory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Laroche, Rebecca, and Jennifer Munroe. Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2017. Mabey, Richard. Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think about Nature. London: Profile Books, 2010. Marcus, Leah S. “King Lear and the Death of the World.” In The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy, eds. Michael Neill and David Schalkwyk, 421–36. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Martin, Randall. Shakespeare & Ecology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. McWilliams, James E. “Worshipping Weeds: The Parable of the Tares, the Rhetoric of Ecology, and the Origins of Agrarian Exceptionalism in Early America.” Environmental History 16, no. 2 (2011): 290–311. Mentz, Steve. “Strange Weather in King Lear.” Shakespeare 6, no. 2 (2010): 139–52. Myers, Katherine. “‘Men as plants increase’: Botanical Meaning in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.” Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 40, no. 2 (2020): 171–90. Pollan, Michael. Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education. New York: Grove Press, 1991. Shannon, Laurie. The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Shannon, Laurie. “Poor, Bare, Forked: Animal Sovereignty, Human Negative Exceptionalism, and the Natural History of King Lear.” Shakespeare Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2009): 168–96. Thomas, Howard, Jayne Elisabeth Archer, and Richard Marggraf Turley. “Remembering Darnel, a Forgotten Plant of Literary, Religious and Evolutionary Significance.” Journal of Ethnobiology 36, no. 1 (2016): 29–44. Thomas, Vivian, and Nicki Faircloth. Shakespeare’s Plants and Gardens: A Dictionary. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Tigner, Amy L. Literature and the Renaissance Garden from Elizabeth I to Charles I: England’s Paradise. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012.

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Waage, Frederick O. “Shakespeare Unearth’d.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 12, no. 2 (2005): 139–64. Wells, Stanley, ed. The History of King Lear: The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Williams, Arnold. The Common Expositor: An Account of the Commentaries of Genesis, 1527–1633. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948. Woodbridge, “Tragedies.” In An Oxford Guide to Shakespeare, edited by Stanley Wells and Lena Cowan Orlin, 212–30. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

About the Author Susan C. Staub is Professor of English at Appalachian State University. Her publications include Nature’s Cruel Stepdames: Representations of Women and Crime in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and The Literary Mother, as well as numerous essays on Early Modern prose fiction, Shakespeare, and Spenser. Her current book project focuses on Shakespeare and botany.

3.

Botanical Barbary: Punning, Race, and Plant Life in Othello 4.3 Hillary M. Nunn

Abstract The barberry plant never appears in Othello, but its resonances in Act 4 Scene 3 crystalize the play’s concerns with racial status, women’s domestic knowledge, and European beauty standards. Scholars have begun to consider the scene’s global context, concentrating on Desdemona’s revelations about her mother’s servant, Barbary. Yet Barbary’s name also conjures images of the more familiar barberry bushes of England, which proved common in recipes for lightening hair. The scene’s invocation of the barberry plant underscores the play’s concerns with culturally determined notions of beauty and the potential for “fair” outsides to mask unchaste interiors. In considering barberries beside Barbary, this essay sheds new light on the play’s anxieties regarding racial categorizations, beauty, and female virtue. Keywords: race, geography, puns, blackness, cosmetics, domesticity

In Act 4 Scene 3 of Othello, Desdemona and Emilia engage in a lengthy conversation that reveals their private thoughts about women’s power within marriage. At the same time, Desdemona’s recollections of her early life highlight the wider context of what otherwise looks like a thoroughly domestic scene. Preparing for bed after Othello’s violent outburst, Desdemona remembers the mournful song her mother’s maid Barbary sang as she died. With the mention of Barbary, awareness of the outside world—beyond the boundaries of Venetian society as well as beyond the bedroom—creeps into this scene, and the resonances of this global context have registered, even if vaguely, in scholarship since the 1970s. Leslie Fiedler, for example, interrupts a rollicking exploration of the scene as evidence of the play’s

Staub, S.C. (ed.), Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463721332_ch03

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desire to prove women “weak and false” to wonder at the presence of “a ghost called ‘Barbarie’—an odd name, really, being not merely a variant form of ‘Barbara’ but also one-half of Iago’s insulting epithet for Othello: ‘your daughter covered with a Barbary horse’.”1 Fiedler then muses, “‘Barbary’Berber-barbarian—it is a fascinating series, not so much irrelevant as displaced and to be solved, resolved, like some riddling conjunction in a dream.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, Fielder does not take up the riddle himself, turning quickly to argue, in a move that has drawn criticism from scholars like Kim F. Hall, that Othello’s “blackness … is primarily symbolic,” and that Desdemona’s repeated associations with “fairness” show that “[f]or Shakespeare’s contemporaries blonde equals beautiful, and beautiful equals good.”2 Nested within this scene’s compelling and intimate conversation, Barbary’s name conjures for Fiedler images of the far-off Barbary coast and the valuable horses associated with it; what’s more, his reading of the name also suggests that the maid herself shared Othello’s African roots and dark complexion. Barbary is, in short, linked not just with Desdemona’s mother; she is associated with Othello through an imagined if murky common genealogy, and her name brings her into a near conjunction with the animals of her homeland. These associations, moreover, stress her variation from English standards of beauty, ones that emphasized “fairness” beyond all else. What has so far gone unexplored, however, is the name Barbary’s conjuring of the humble barberry, a thoroughly English plant whose name ironically echoes the sound of the maid’s suggested far-off African homeland. Both meanings linger in the theater when Barbary’s name is uttered, thanks to what Patricia Parker calls “unstable orthographies and sound.”3 Parker’s work points out that the sound barbary resonated with an astounding number of meanings in the period, though she concentrates on the network of connotations rooted in the resonating terms “barbering, Barbary, barbarisms, and the barbarian.” Her study of beards and shaving in early modern drama, with its emphasis on seafaring encounters, leaves the humble domestic barberry and its shrub largely out of the mix.4 Yet barberries clearly add a 1 Fiedler offers no citation for Iago’s insult, which occurs at 1.1.110. All quotations from Othello refer to the play as published in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, edited by Stephen Orgel and A.R. Braunmuller. 2 Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare, 168–73. For Hall’s critique, see Things of Darkness, 3. 3 Parker, “Barbers and Barbary,” 205. Parker further explores networks of polyglot puns in her article “What’s in a Name: And More,” cited below, and in her book, Shakespearean Intersections, which does not directly treat puns related to this argument. 4 Parker mentions barberries once, in her work regarding Barbary and barbering; this reference occurs as she quotes an extended punning dialogue in Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West,

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contrasting, more domesticated meaning to this elaborate network, given that barberries were part of everyday life in England. Barberries are routinely featured in English household texts of the period, suggesting that the berries and the bushes on which they grew proved plentiful in both city and country settings. The number of recipes for preserving barberries found in early modern recipe manuscripts conjure images of lanes and gardens overrun with the fruit, on bushes that John Gerard notes growing everywhere from “desart grounds” to hedges “at the borders of fields,”5 and the number of medicinal concoctions that incorporate the plant and its products reveals that they were perceived as significant in health care—especially as a treatment for jaundice—as well. But the barberry plant was also valued for its cosmetic properties, specifically for its ability to lighten hair. With its power to make fair what is initially dark, this common English shrub supplied an avenue through which cultural beauty ideals could be reached, allowing those whose appearance varied from local standards to achieve them. Despite its dyeing power, the barberry’s echo of Barbary, the African coastal region home to dark-skinned Moors, simultaneously underscores physical traits directly opposed to Europe’s culturally valued fairness. Treating the name “Barbary” as a homonym that conjures images of a local plant even as it evokes the history of a doomed household servant, this essay explores the associations unleashed in Desdemona and Emilia’s conversation, where the word’s utterance reenacts a collision between the everyday botanical world of England and exotic worlds across the Mediterranean. Hearing barberry in the maid Barbary’s name underscores her racial isolation as an African in a Venetian setting, while also suggesting the hope that her isolation may be overcome, that golden hair and its symbolic fairness is in reach through the barberry’s lightening powers. The qualities associated with the plant reflect human virtues, as Bushnell explains in this volume; the barberry’s cosmetic properties offer a way to alter those physical traits and the inner character associated with them. Even though barberries never appear in Othello, their resonances in Act 4 Scene 3 crystalize the play’s concerns with racial status, women’s domestic knowledge, and European beauty standards, tightly packing these subjects into the shape of an everyday English fruit. In exploring the network of meaning that comes from these perhaps unexpected Barbary soundalikes, this reading complements Patricia Parker’s where Parker notes that the word “barberies” refers, in this usage, to “barbershops as well as the barberries alternately spelled ‘barbarian’ or ‘Barbaryn frute’.” “Barbers and Barbary,” 203. 5 Gerard, The Herball, 1325.

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discussion of another berry: the mulberry.6 Through what Parker calls a pattern of “[k]aleidoscopic punning,” the mulberry carried in the early modern period a “wealth of associations lost to our awareness.”7 She points out that “moor” and “mulberry” are both evoked by the densely-packed syllable “mor-,” which resonates with meanings that branch out through multiple languages holding currency in early modern polyglot society. Her argument unfurls from an examination of puns associated with Thomas More’s Latinized name, “Morus,” which produced a series of mocking insults based on its alternate translation as “fool.”8 Yet Parker notes that morus also meant “black,”9 and her analysis names the mulberry tree morus and its fruit mora as an additional vital element in this network framing the syllable’s meaning. Mulberry trees, she points out, were often labeled as “moore trees” and their berries called “moor-berries”;10 these berries, in turn, become eroticized through their association with dark-skinned women. In Othello, Parker sees these associations coalescing in the actions surrounding the handkerchief (likely produced from silkworms working in mulberry trees).11 If, as Ian Smith has argued, the handkerchief should be envisioned as black, Parker concludes, then Desdemona’s connection to the cloth emphasizes her increasing “sexual blackness” rather than her virginity.12 The play as whole, and especially the action between Desdemona and Emilia in Act 4 Scene 3, illustrates “the growing lexicon of color and exoticism” in the period by “recall[ing] the mulberry’s emblematic blackening and stain—in the ‘white’ evoked in the ‘fair’ Desdemona … the ‘red’ of the spotted handkerchief, and the black of both ‘Moor’ and the ‘Desdemon’ whose ‘white’ is progressively blackened as the play proceeds.”13 Parker does not, however, pursue the potential corresponding range of berry puns 6 See also Lisa Hopkin’s discussion of mulberries in her contribution to this volume. 7 Parker, “What’s in a Name,” 121, 134. Investigating what she calls the “bookishness” of plants in early modern culture, Knight enumerates a wide variety of these puns to assert “language used to discuss books, texts, and writing appealed to an imaginative link between the verbal and the herbal.” See Knight, Of Books and Botany, 10–11. 8 Parker, “What’s in a Name,” 102. 9 Parker, “What’s in a Name,” 106. 10 Parker points out that “morus was rendered by Wycliff as the ‘more’ or ‘moore’ tree” and refers to mulberries as “morberries,” “What’s in a Name,” 109. 11 Parker, “What’s in a Name,” 134. 12 Parker, Shakespearean Intersections, 270. For more on the handkerchief’s color, see Smith, “Othello’s Black Handkerchief.” The strawberries that spot the handkerchief add further botanical reference to the cloth. For more on their significance, see Ross, “The Meaning of Strawberries in Shakespeare,” 226. 13 Parker, “What’s in a Name,” 124, 133 (emphasis hers).

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rooted in Barbary’s name, even though this corresponding network offers rich, contrasting, and enlightening material when considered alongside the darkening power of mulberries. Such resonant punning illustrates that deeply ingrained references to darkness are invoked whenever the mulberry is mentioned; the barberry, with its recognized ability to lighten hair, provides an opposing force, pushing back against these images of encroaching stain, whenever its image is conjured. These implied powers of the barberry, moreover, are themselves nested within a name associated with blackness. As much as it suggests the potential for fairness, the name Barbary brings with it images of dark hair and racial features that the barberry’s lightening power worked to counteract. In the Barbary-barberry network, as a result, the two extremes of “dark” and “fair” collide, creating a powerful encapsulation of the tensions animating not just Othello’s Act 4 Scene 3, but the play as a whole. Juxtaposing exotic origins and native English barberries with Barbary, the maid who nevertheless provides domestic service, the scene calls upon familiar plants and foreign lands to underscore the tension between the local and the exotic, and the cultural meanings attached to those categories. The barberry bush, after all, proved a common sight in England, aligning Barbary with audience members’ everyday experiences of the botanical world. Nicholas Culpeper’s The English Physitian calls the barberry plant a shrub “so wel known to every Boy and Girl that hath but attained to the age of seven years, that it needs no Description.”14 Gerard’s Herball offers further evidence of the bush’s common status, observing that “[t]hey are planted in most of our English gardens”; the book even describes two London variants—one whose berry “is as big as three of the common kinde” and “another without any stone”—before noting that it is available in London shops. The Herball describes the barberry shrub as “very full of white and prickly thornes,” specifying that “the floures be yellow,” the berries are red when ripe, and that “the root is yellow, disperseth it selfe farre abroad, and is of a wooddy substance.”15 Indeed, the berry is so common that recipes for making barberry jam and pies, as well as for preserving the fruits for winter use, abound in early modern printed and manuscript recipe books. Sarah Longe, for example, includes two recipes “To Preserve Barberies,” and another “To make Conserve of Barberries.”16 A manuscript at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia offers instructions “To keepe Barberryes to hold 14 Culpeper, The English Physitian, 10. 15 Gerard, The Herball, 1325–26. 16 Longe, Receipt book of Sarah Longe, 7r and 9r, 14v.

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the colour all the yeere.”17 Charles Estienne, meanwhile, prints recipes for conserves, preserves, and syrups made from barberries.18 The plant’s astringent properties made it valuable for home health care as well, where it was especially prized for its ability to alleviate the symptoms of jaundice—a disease recognized through its power to alter fair complexions. Margaret Baker, for example, uses barberries as a key ingredient in her manuscript’s prescription “for the yellow Janders,” which instructs caretakers to “Take one handful of the inner pille of barbery; boyle [in] a quart of alle.”19 Nicholas Webster’s home medical manuscript also calls on barberries to cure yellow jaundice, combining it not just with ale but with goose dung and lice; the groundbreaking collection Natura Exenterata includes a similarly graphic recipe specifically calling for the “Inner bark of a Barbary tree.”20 Gerard specifies that the “barke of the roots” are best suited to treat the condition, “with good successe.”21 While clearly based in a desire to restore health, such treatments further associate the barberry with the restoration of “fairness” to English bodies.22 Curing jaundice, after all, requires alleviating the yellow cast that signals the disease’s presence, restoring the pale qualities so essential to the era’s beauty standards. At the same time, the undulations between the plant’s Latinate name berberis and the more common spelling barberry suggest a perceived connection to the inhabitants of exotic, supposedly barbarian territories. Thus, even while it conjures images of such a well-known domestic plant, Barbary’s name invokes contrary images of the unknown, the dangerous and the untamed. The inhabitants of Barbary—referred to sometimes as Berbers or, more simply, as barbarians—were labeled Moors, like Othello, and their skin color is often similarly identified, imprecisely, as black and tawny.23 The language of the scene, in the form of the maid’s name, thus 17 Manuscript Recipes, 219. 18 Estienne, Maison Rustique, 422. 19 Baker, Receipt Book, 37v. 20 Webster, Certain profitable and well-experienced collections, 34v and Philiatros, Natura Exenterata, 188. 21 Gerard, The Herball, 1326. 22 Gerard also notes that barberries “allayeth the heat of the bloud” and “coole hote stomacks,” suggesting they can restore qualities linked with Englishness within the body as well. The Herball, 1326. 23 Ogilby identifies Moors as “the Natives” of Barbary, even though he recognizes Arabs and Turks as living there as well. “The Moors are of two sorts,” he continues, listing “Whites, resident about the Sea-Coast, and in the Cities of Corsaire, Algier, Tunis, Sallee, Tripolis, Bonne, and Bugie; and Blacks, which dwell in the South.” See Ogilby, Africa: Being an Accurate Description of the Regions of Aegypt, Barbary, Lybia, 147.

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brings images linked to Africa into Desdemona’s bedroom while she talks to Emilia about expectations of fidelity in marriage. When Emilia proclaims, “who would not make her husband a cuckold to make him a monarch?” (4.3.75–76), she conjures yet another association linked to Barbary. As Parker points out, Florio’s Italian-English dictionary Worlde of Wordes listed “shee-barber” and “common harlot” both as definitions for Barbiera.24 The word’s meanings thus range across a wide geographical scope, connecting women’s chastity to colonial impulses—impulses that likely played a role in the maid Barbary’s arrival in Venice as well as her death. The echoes of her name thus expand from the local to the global, before contracting again, thus establishing Barbary as a term that encompasses elements of the familiar as well as the foreign, not to mention the less easily classified spaces in between. The barberry’s power to lighten hair lends a surprising intimacy to the global concerns that Barbary’s name raises. The spelling berberies, for example, in Ambroise Paré’s discussion of the berry’s dyeing power, invites a surprisingly intimate link between the homegrown plant’s domestic uses and the Berbers of Northern Africa, listing “gentian. & berber” among the Latinized ingredients needed “to make the haires of a flaxen colour.”25 The homely barberry bush, with its echoes of Barbarian lands often figured as dark, contains within it the contrasting power to create the fair hair that epitomized beauty in English culture. As Edith Snook points out, “blonde hair, along with white skin and red lips and cheeks, has been identified as one of the core attributes of Renaissance female beauty,”26 and the humble, common barberry supplied an easy way to bring both hair and complexion to a more pronounced state of fairness. The barberry’s power as a hair dye, moreover, proves well-known in botanical and medical sources. Gerard’s Herball describes steeping roots of the barberry bush with lye and ash, telling readers that “haire often moistned therewith, maketh it yellow.”27 Dorothy Pagett’s recipe manuscript, meanwhile, lists under the heading “Hayre to make Yellow” directions to “Steep the rootes of the Barbery Bush in strong led” and apply the concoction while sitting before the fire; the result will be hair of “a very fair colour.”28 Similarly, Culpeper declares that “[t]he Hair 24 Parker, “Barbers and Barbary,” 202. 25 Paré, The Works of that Famous Chirurgion Ambroise Parey, 1082. 26 Snook, “Beautiful Hair, Health, and Privilege,” 24. 27 Gerard, The Herball, 1326. 28 Pagett, Pagett recipes for medical remedies, 167. Her first recipe uses yellow leaves and the third uses honey.

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washed with the Ly made of the Ashes of the [barberry] Tree and Ater [gall], ‘twil make it turn yellow.”29 The barberry bush’s lightening traits exist alongside images of Africa linked with Barbary’s name, and these seemingly contrary associations create jarring moments of dramatic irony for Othello’s pun-conscious audience members. The conjuring of an African maid, in other words, brings with it a set of opposing images: golden hair, achieved through cosmetic means, and newly lightened complexions, signaling English ideals of health and beauty. This occurs even though—and perhaps because—it remains unclear who exactly Barbary is, and what place she occupied in the household, even after Desdemona identifies her as she undresses in 4.3: My mother had a maid called Barbary. She was in love; and he she loved proved mad And did forsake her. She had a song of ‘Willow’; An old thing ‘twas, but it expressed her fortune, And she died singing it. (26–30)30

The explanation leaves Barbary’s position fundamentally mysterious, shedding little light on the specifics of her origins or the days of her life before coming to Venice. Though we should not assume she arrived there by her own choice, it is diff icult to see Barbary as anything but a classic loose end, described solely through a chain of relationships that are themselves unexplored in the play; she is, after all, known in connection to Desdemona’s mother, who is herself not a direct presence in the dramatic action. Desdemona offers no explicit indication of how long Barbary served the household or in what capacity, and audiences only know that her death left an impression on her mistress’s child. Her identification as a “maid” suggests that she may have served as a personal attendant, inviting audiences to project Barbary’s presence onto Emilia’s actions as she helps Desdemona prepare for bed. Furthermore, it is important to recognize that the one thing audiences know about the maid—her name—may not have been one that she recognized as her own even though she was, as Desdemona says, “called Barbary.” 29 Culpeper, The English Physitian, 10. 30 The Quarto identif ies the maid as “Barbary” and refers to the Willow Song, but it never requires that Desdemona sing it. In fact, it provides no words for the song itself. The Folio, on the other hand, calls the maid “Barbara,” and offers the lyrics, punctuated by Desdemona’s directions to Emilia while preparing her for bed.

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The very word at the center of the scene’s dense networks of puns—the word that conjures barberries as well as prostitutes, Berbers, pirates, haircutters, medical practitioners, and far-off lands—was likely imposed upon the maid rather than claimed by her. As Imtiaz Habib’s work with London civic records shows, names like “Moor” and “Blackmore” were often attached to black servants; the play’s Barbary may be an extension of that pattern, suggesting her origins on the Barbary coast, as well as an English tendency to refer to Africans by place of origin. In fact, Habib includes in his lists of black citizens of London several who are named Barbary. In that sense, Barbary’s name cues images not just of an exotic place, but of local people—perhaps even Renaissance playgoers—who were marked as racially other. Legal records from 1598 strengthen this possibility, recording testimony from a woman named “Barbary Moore also Browne” charged with prostitution. She testified that a man named Robert Everett had “thuse and carnall knowledge of her bodye … at the house of one Alice Morrise Fishwyf,” and a few days later, Alice Morris was brought in on charges of pandering. This woman, named Barbary on official documents, thus carries a name that doubly certifies how she is seen in English society—as a prostitute as well as a racial outsider—and her name itself bolsters a connection that, in Habib’s words, reinforces “blackness as a prohibited social pathology.”31 The name Barbary, then, need not be read as any more personally meaningful for Desdemona’s household servant than monikers like “the Moor” would be for Othello. This cloud of associations surrounding Barbary’s name comes to envelop Desdemona, linking her to a perception of blackness that eats away at the idealized fairness she enjoyed at the play’s beginning. Her body, after all, provides the scene with its visual focus, with audiences watching Desdemona prepare for bed as she retells Barbary’s story. As she sings Barbary’s song of the willow, Desdemona implicitly invites audience members to picture her, rather than Barbary, undergoing a sudden death as the result of a catastrophic love. This quiet moment of reflection, giving voice to the tragedy of her mother’s maid, brings images of Barbary—with her Africanness and barbarian roots—into collision with the idealized, virginal purity that Desdemona projected at the play’s start. The moment underscores the gradual staining of her reputation and her flesh—already associated, as Parker points out, with the sullying power of mulberries and the silk handkerchief they help produce. Furthermore, when Desdemona sings, she imagines herself adopting not only Barbary’s lyrics but also her posture. “I have much to do,” she tells Emilia, “But to go hang my head all at one side 31 Habib, Black Lives in the English Archives, 107–8, 327.

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/ And sing … like poor Barbary” (31–33). Desdemona’s insistence that she emulates Barbary’s gestures tempts audiences to envision the young bride as the embodiment of the unfortunate maid. Desdemona, as a result, may seem a little bit less herself—a little less fair, and even a little bit more barbarous. As the young woman invites audience members to see her body as a reincarnation of Barbary’s, the scene releases a second chain of associations to strengthen that intersection, drawing attention to Desdemona’s often-blond hair. When tending to hair is the visual center of the scene as Desdemona sings of Barbary, as it often is in modern productions, the action reminds viewers simultaneously of the value of idealized, fair English complexions and the dyeing powers of barberries, highlighting notions of artifice even as they remind audiences of common beauty practices. Desdemona voices her requests to Emilia to “Prithee unpin me” (21) and “unpin me here” (34) just before and soon after telling Barbary’s story; even if these orders refer to unpinning clothing rather than hair, as Denise Walen has argued, the physical actions they prompt underscore Desdemona’s bodily appearance and her preparations for bed.32 Though it would be impossible to know with certainty that early modern Desdemonas were always blonde, she is repeatedly labeled “fair”;33 this, moreover, would accord with the idealized “moderate blondness of white Englishwomen” which became what Korhonen calls a “kind of local pride.”34 This “local pride” in turn contrasts with the hair and skin of those—like Barbary—who hail from non-European locations. 32 Walen suggests the “unpinning” that Desdemona requests signaled the process of undressing, and the gradual revelation of her undergarments certainly contributes to the accumulating suggestions of her worldliness in the scene; it is clear, though, that “pinning” was also associated with hair in the period. While the Oxford English Dictionary does not directly associate “unpinning” with hair, it is clear that women used pins in their coiffures. A full text search of the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership database reveals such usage, as in the story of a Chinese princess who “would haue destroyed her selfe with a siluer pinne, which she had to trim vp her haire.” See González de Mendoza, The historie of the great and mightie kingdome of China, 28. For more on Walen’s argument, see “Unpinning Desdemona,” 490. 33 Modern Desdemonas often are blonde, and their light hair is often central to the scene’s power. Productions making hair the focus of this scene include Orson Welles’ film, in which Desdemona runs her hands through her blonde hair, even though the Willow song is omitted; though Oliver Parker’s Desdemona is brunette, she brushes her hair in the scene. The inclusion of multiple actors of color in Othello casts has altered notions of Othello’s (and Barbary’s) racial isolation but has also highlighted the consistent blondness of Desdemona. This is especially so when Emilia is played by a person of color, as is the case in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2015 production (with Ayesha Dharker as Emilia and Joanna Vanderham as Desdemona; see O’Connor, “Othello at the Royal Shakespeare Company,” 58) and in the 2018 Globe production, where Sheila Atim’s “‘Willow Song’ duet with Jessica Warbeck’s Desdemona was a moment of great poignancy.” See Miller, “Othello,” 697. 34 Anu Korhonen, “Self and Society,” 42.

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As Snook argues, “Early modern whiteness possesses a type of hair, as well as a skin color, and like white skin, that hair is as defined by normativity and privilege—to profound effect.”35 Those native to other countries—“the inhabitants of hot, dry regions, such as Moors and those from Egypt, Spain and Ethiopia”—grew less desirable dark, curly hair regarded as “deviant.”36 The fair Desdemona’s song of Barbary, then, invites these images of foreignness and even corruption into her bedroom, tainting her by association, even as her seemingly innocent discussion of infidelity leaves a whiff of another kind of barbarousness in the air. In short, it invites viewers to wonder if she is really indeed fair, or if she knows how to achieve the look of fairness through domestic ingenuity—perhaps learned at the hands of her mother’s maid. Whether or not she has anything to hide, Desdemona’s lengthy preparations for bed call attention to the deliberate, complicated work involved in appearing fair—in color and in virtue—and thus raise suspicions regarding the instant cultural alignment of these inner and outer qualities. The complex network of meanings invoked by the maid’s name suggests that Barbary might have highlighted Venetian women’s perceived beauty simply by her presence. According to Kim F. Hall, European women commonly brought African servants into their households—and positioned them in portraits—to provide a vivid, lightening point of contrast, one that underscored white women’s embodiment of female “fairness.” In these portraits, “the European woman and her attendant are always connected in subtle ways, usually through the very objects on display.” The portraits associate both the lady of the house and her servant with glistening valuables, notably pearls, to create “a biased comparison of the attendant’s black skin with the white skin of the woman.”37 Even though Barbary never fully materializes in the play, and even though Emilia is the one tending to Desdemona, the maid’s name invokes this system of contrasts, with Desdemona’s physical fairness—and often, specifically, her golden hair—as the shining object linking the two women. The contrasting images of dark and light embedded in the echoes of Barbary and barberry, however, trouble straightforward divisions between the two women and their social roles. 35 Snook, “Beautiful Hair, Health, and Privilege,” 23. 36 Snook, “Beautiful Hair, Health, and Privilege,” 38. 37 See Hall, Things of Darkness, 244. Hall further remarks that “The placement of black faces on furniture, flasks, signs, lights, and other artifacts indicates that dark-skinned Africans were objects of symbolic importance and cultural exchange long before they became a numerically significant group in the English population. Later, the appearance of actual black attendants in English portraiture is associated with the increase in consumer goods in the seventeenth century,” 212.

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The dangerous blurring of Desdemona’s idealized, fair beauty with the image of her mother’s distraught and “deviant” African maid becomes even richer when considering hair’s role as a link between the human and plant realms during the early modern period. Just as certain plants grow naturally in certain geographical locations, certain varieties of hair flourish on different humans, who are themselves linked to particular places on the earth. Early modern thinkers, as Edward J. Geisweidt points out, followed Galen in treating the human body as a landscape with hair as an equivalent of vegetative growth, where “vegetable plants and landscapes [shared] a relationship homologous to that between hair and body parts.” Plants, in essence, function as the earth’s hair, and human hair is the body’s vegetable growth. Geisweidt’s conclusion that “hair materializes the mutual vitality between people and plants” thus expands English understanding of the relationship between individual bodies and their natural environments, derived from the Hippocratic treatise on Airs, Waters, Places.38 The treatise takes as its starting point the assertion that the composition of human bodies reflects the particular environments they inhabit—an assertion that many have seen as supporting notions of physical difference that nurture colonialist thinking.39 The plants surrounding humans mattered, since their bodies and the native vegetation shared the same makeup, thanks to the particular geographical location they inhabited. But, in the scene playing out in Desdemona’s bedroom, the barberry’s power to lighten hair troubles these direct connections between geography and bodily traits. The name Barbary, after all, conjures images of North Africa and its Moorish inhabitants, and, in the same breath, the word evokes the barberries that grow in London’s soil. As a result, the maid Barbary is not easy to secure in a single geographical location; her name, just like her body, is never firmly rooted. Like Othello, she contains contrary elements of her native Africa, her Venetian home, and the land surrounding the English stage where Desdemona’s song conjures her ghostly presence. The lightening effects of barberries, intertwined with the associations of racial difference suggested in Barbary’s name, create dissonance and apprehension—inscribing Barbary’s racial otherness and raising suspicions that Desdemona, who speaks her name, may not be as naturally fair as she once seemed. The presence of Barbary and, by extension, barberries in the scene, in short, troubles what were normally considered straightforward geographical and racial categories, 38 Geisweidt, “Horticulture of the Head,” para 12, 24. 39 For a summary of scholarship linking Airs, Waters, Places to colonialist thinking, see Lo Presti, “Shaping the Difference,” 174.

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potentially leading to the cultural dissonance that played a role in the death of Desdemona’s mother’s maid, and the eventual downfall of Desdemona herself. In 4.3, Desdemona repeatedly speaks a word that names not just the maid Barbary, but a North African region associated with darkness and barbarity and, paradoxically, a homely English shrub that could be used to lighten hair and restore a jaundiced complexion to fairness. In a stupefying bit of botanical drama, this scene sets the charged network of meanings surrounding mor-, specifically its resonances with darkness in words like moor and mulberries, onto a collision course with the lightening powers embedded in barberries, ironically invoked through the story of the maid Barbary. Barberries strive to counteract the staining power of mulberries in the scene, resulting in a duel between two plants renowned for their dyeing properties. The scene’s invocation of the barberry plant thus conjures both the play’s concerns with culturally determined notions of beauty and efforts to create, through domestic ingenuity, “fair” outsides. Intertwining these contradictions in a name that invokes both Africa and a familiar domestic plant, Othello reminds audiences that hair, and the ethnicities it supposedly demarcated, could be altered with the help of everyday plant materials and domestic—in this case, explicitly feminine—knowledge. Such associations of Barbary with barberries, as well as with dark-skinned North African servants, highlight the relationships between living things and the lands upon which they thrive. Barbary, singing the Willow Song, withers and dies once transplanted; she cannot thrive, long-term, in the environment that surrounds her in Venice. While the race of the maid Desdemona mentions is never labeled clearly in a way recognizable to modern ears, her name carries her blackness, and her contrast to Desdemona’s oft-stated fairness, onto the stage. This contrast is central to Toni Morrison’s play Desdemona, which gives Barbary a substantial on-stage role as well as explicitly African roots, though this decision has not always resonated well with reviewers. Jorg von Uthmann bristles at the character’s very name, preferring that she be called Barbara, in accordance with some later editions of the play. He asserts that the maid “has been rechristened ‘Barbary,’ which we are led to believe makes her African.” He grants the name Barbara’s connection with the Barbary coast, but concludes that “Shakespeare’s Barbara was surely no more African than Barbara Bush or Barbra Streisand.”40 Such a reaction is inconsistent 40 von Uthmann, “Desdemona Gets Even.” He is also not alone in this erasure. Nineteenthcentury performances of Othello typically contained no mention yet alone performance of Barbary’s song, allegedly to keep Desdemona from the scandal of preparing for bed in front of the audience’s prying eyes. This meant that for over a century, audience members heard nothing

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with the polyglot world of the early modern theater, where the network of meanings invoked by the word barbary and its homophone barberry would reverberate with the many racially-charged meanings that Parker maps onto the syllable mor-. Barbary’s name, in short, recalls the practices of immigration, servitude, and even slavery that would have brought her to Venice, while also conjuring associations with the professions of both prostitution and medical care. These in turn strengthen connections to the barberry bush, whose uses in home medical manuals include the lightening of hair and the treatment of jaundice, a disease that clouded the idealized fair complexions of English people who suffered from the condition. We do not need to settle on the precise details of Barbary’s story for the multivalent resonances of her name to have an impact on the play. The action of purposeful hair-lightening associated with her name outlines a path by which one might become, as in the Duke of Venice’s Act 1 comment to Othello, “far more fair than black”(1.3.290), suggesting an awareness that borders between the barbarian and the supposedly civilized proved uncomfortably permeable. The story of Barbary’s doomed love, echoing with her name’s evocations of the Berber lands of North Africa, the cosmetic lightening qualities of the barberry plant, and the sexually charged associations of barbers nests into 4.3 a miniature drama analogous to Othello’s. Barbary’s story, however, plays out on a domestic level alien to Othello. Her brief, domestic history reflects anxieties about sexuality, travel, and outsider status, and, significantly, about color. The single word “Barbary” thus invites us to consider a new dimension of the play’s homebound geography, one that intersects not just with the exotic but the everyday botanical world surrounding the theater.

Bibliography Primary Sources Baker, Margaret. Receipt Book of Margaret Baker. c. 1675. Folger M.S. V.a. 619. Culpeper, Nicholas. The English Physitian. London, 1652. about Barbary on stage, which is all the more notable because the scene remained a highlight of continental productions. See Schütz, “Desdemona’s Changing Voices: From the ‘Willow Song’ to the ‘Canzona del Salice’.” Julia Hankey’s study of Othello’s performance history shows that, at least as early as 1755, American and English stagings routinely ended the scene with Desdemona dismissing Emilia while proclaiming, “We must not now displease [Othello]” (17). The scene not only has no song; it has only the first seventeen of what is usually around one hundred lines. Barbary’s song thus remained absent from the American stage until Edwin Booth brought the scene into his 1869 production in New York. See Hankey, Othello: Shakespeare in Production, 255.

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Estienne, Charles. Maison rustique, or The countrey farme. London, 1616. Gerard, John. The Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes. London, 1633. González de Mendoza, Juan. The historie of the great and mightie kingdome of China, 1588. Longe, Sarah. Receipt Book of Sarah Longe. c. 1610. Folger V.a.425. “Manuscript Recipes: A Very Interesting MS. Volume of Medical and Household Recipes. c. 1640.” College of Physicians of Philadelphia CPP 10a214. Morrison, Toni and Rokia Traoré. Desdemona. London: Oberon, 2012. Ogilby, John. Africa: Being an Accurate Description of the Regions of Aegypt, Barbary, Lybia. London, 1670. Pagett, Dorothy. Pagett recipes for medical remedies, circa 1640–1650. New York Academy of Medicine Library. MS Folio. Paré, Ambroise. The Works of that Famous Chirurgion Ambroise Parey translated out of Latine and Compared with the French by Th. Johnson. London, 1634. Parker, Oliver, dir. Othello. Castle Rock, 1995. Philiatros, Natura exenterata: or Nature unbowelled by the most exquisite anatomizers of her. London, 1655. Shakespeare, William. Othello. In William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, edited by Stephen Orgel and A.R. Braunmuller, 1392-1444. New York: Pelican, 2002. Webster, Nicholas. Certain profitable and well experienced collections …. c. 1650. Folger Va. 364. Welles, Orson, dir. Othello. United Artists, 1951.

Secondary Sources Fiedler, Leslie. The Stranger in Shakespeare. New York: Stein and Day, 1973. Geisweidt, Edward J. “Horticulture of the Head: The Vegetable Life of Hair in Early Modern English Thought.” Early Modern Literary Studies 19, no. 6 (2009): 1–24. http://purl.oclc.org/emls/si-19/geishair.html. Habib, Imtiaz. Black Lives in the English Archives 1500–1677: Imprints of the Invisible. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2008. Hall, Kim F. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. Hankey, Julie. Othello: Shakespeare in Production. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Knight, Leah. Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England: Sixteenth-Century Plants and Print Culture. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2008. Korhonen, Anu. “Self and Society.” In A Cultural History of Hair in the Renaissance, vol. 3, edited by Edith Snook, 39–52. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Lo Presti, Roberto. “Shaping the Difference: The Medical Inquiry into the Nature of Places and the Early Birth of Anthropology in the Hippocratic Treatise Airs

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Waters Places.” In Medicine and Space: Body, Surroundings and Borders in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, edited by Patricia A. Baker, Han Nijdam, and Karine van’t Land, 169–95. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Miller, Gemma. “Othello, by Shakespeare’s Globe (Review).” Shakespeare Bulletin 36, no. 4 (2018): 695–98. O’Connor, “Othello at the Royal Shakespeare Company.” Shakespeare Newsletter 55, no. 1 (2015): 58–59. Parker, Patricia. “Barbers and Barbary: Early Modern Cultural Semantics.” Renaissance Drama 33 (2004): 201–44. Parker, Patricia. Shakespearean Intersections: Language, Contexts, Critical Keywords. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Parker, Patricia. “What’s in a Name: And More.” Sederi: Revista de la Sociedad Española de Estudios Renacentistas Ingleses 11 (2002): 101–49. Ross, Lawrence J. “The Meaning of Strawberries in Shakespeare.” Studies in the Renaissance 7 (1960): 225–40. Schütz, Chantal. “Desdemona’s Changing Voices: From the ‘Willow Song’ to the ‘Canzona del Salice’.” Sillages critiques 16 (2013). http://sillagescritiques.revues. org/2847. Smith, Ian. “Othello’s Black Handkerchief.” Shakespeare Quarterly 64, no. 1 (2013): 1–25. Snook, Edith. “Beautiful Hair, Health, and Privilege in Early Modern England.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2015): 22–51. von Uthmann, Jorg. “Desdemona Gets Even in Morrison-Sellars Othello Remix: Review.” Bloomberg News. Oct 19, 2011. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/201110-19/desdemona-gets-even-in-morrison-sellars-remix-of-othello-jorg-vonuthmann.html. Walen, Denise A. “Unpinning Desdemona.” Shakespeare Quarterly 58, no. 4 (2007): 487–508.

About the Author Hillary M. Nunn, Professor of English at The University of Akron, is co-editor of In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: English Cooking at Home and Abroad (Amsterdam UP) with Madeline Bassnett and author of Staging Anatomies: Dissection and Tragedy in the Early Stuart Era (Ashgate, 2005).

Part 2 Human-Vegetable Affinities and Transformations

4. Shakespeare’s Botanical Grace Rebecca Totaro Abstract Treating Shakespeare’s and Ovid’s literary representations of botanical transformations, with attention to Shakespeare’s distinguishing plaguetime context, I examine several examples of Shakespeare’s representation of failed and successful botanical transformations, with focus on Ophelia’s, which closes this paper. Hers is one that Shakespeare attends to with extra care in each of its aspects, complexly detailing its pre-conditions, material manifestation, witness-reporting, and after-effects. Alone among others represented by premodern writers, Ophelia’s transformation is better considered as a botanical tribute and triumph and, more powerfully still, as a gift of “botanical grace” that has continued to signify over centuries. Keywords: burial, plague, oppression, Ovid, memorialization, gift

The transformation of humans into botanical subjects occurs with some frequency in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, one of Shakespeare’s most-utilized source texts. The best known of these botanical transformations are of Daphne into a laurel as she is chased by Apollo; Narcissus into a flower, having wasted away while self-gazing; and Adonis, whose blood Venus infuses with nectar to produce a flower to cherish in his place. These relatively short stories involve tragic combinations of love and/or danger, and they end when the beloved becomes forever a botanical subject upon the loss of his or her human form. Peter Travis explains the permanence of these transformations: … Ovid’s narrative takes the absolute equals sign of metaphor (Clytie is a flower) and explores the graduated process of selection involved in metaphoric translation: the dissimilar features between girl and flower are suppressed; their analogous features are made more nearly identical,

Staub, S.C. (ed.), Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463721332_ch04

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even though (and very importantly) at translation’s end traces of the girl’s physical and emotional identity remain firmly intact.1

Conveying closure and resembling what archaeologists call “botanical tributes,” Ovid’s botanical transformations do more than relate a fascinating tale of metamorphosis and explanation for the power of the particular plant or tree (e.g., the laurel).2 They signal for readers, then as now, the importance for humans of funeral rituals and of the optics of botanical flourishing. In their spontaneous generation and excessive displays in Ovid, and more so in Shakespeare, botanical transformations also function as gifts both unmerited by their witness-recipients and having the potential to initiate change and healing.3 For these reasons, I refer to some of these transformations as instances of “botanical grace,” and this paper culminates in the discussion of Shakespeare’s most potent of botanical transformations—the one he created for Ophelia. It is a transformation Shakespeare attended to with care, complexly detailing its pre-conditions, witness-reporting, material manifestation, and after-effects. Alone among similar transformations represented by premodern writers generally, Ophelia’s transformation has remained powerfully significant over centuries as well, making available for future generations the potential of its rare gift of botanical grace. In his representations of botanical transformation associated with Ophelia, Adonis, and Innogen, and All’s Well’s Helena, Shakespeare largely follows Ovid. The humans for whom he creates these transformations have been under oppression and threat, lacking means of their own to avoid the harm coming to them from significantly more powerful forces. Their transformations, following those in Ovid, signify their sudden, notable, yet gentle removal from suffering. As in Ovid, each transformation poetically speaks to the tragic situation of the deceased, and many of them function as a gift, offering relief to witnesses unable or unwilling to take action to prevent harm. Ovid and Shakespeare both include the reader/audience among those witnesses who are the beneficiaries of this gift. Shakespeare departs from Ovid in several key ways as well. He creates transformations primarily for female characters and loosens the tight correspondence between the human subject and its singular botanical sign 1 Travis, “Chaucer’s Heliotropes and the Poetics of Metaphor,” 402. 2 See Rachel Ives, “Investigating Botanical Tributes.” For a much broader examination of the use of flowers at funerals, dating back to the Neanderthals and crossing continental boundaries, see Goody, The Culture of Flowers. 3 In this volume, please see “‘Thou art translated’: Plants of Passage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in which Lisa Hopkins discusses plants “as agents of change, transition, and mobility.”

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(the “equals sign” of which Travis speaks in the quotation above), creating with the tribute a more complexly depicted human-botanical bouquet that in its variety and trans-corporeality is at once striking, uncomfortable, and suited to the human whose suffering it marks. Shakespeare also develops the post-tribute storyline, showing the transformation’s impacts on witnesses. To a much greater degree than Ovid, Shakespeare also develops the plot-specific precondition for each transformation: diminishment of human uniqueness under oppression. This precondition for Ovid’s and Shakespeare’s botanical transformations is nearly the same precondition for premodern representations of the act of cursing with effect. Shakespeare’s acts of cursing in particular come about only when a person is placed under such enormous pressures that, without relief, he or she cannot endure. 4 The articulation of the curse itself is the opening of a relief valve, allowing for directed passage of built up energy that prolongs the life of its host but has potential to damage those in its range, as well as its host. Death followed by botanical transformation in Shakespeare occurs when a body has no relief valve to vent the same build-up of pressures. By the time Shakespeare presents a botanical transformation, cursing has ceased to be an available option, or it never was one. The offering of human-crafted botanical tribute is also impossible in these sudden, tragic, and unusual cases of death. The botanical transformation thus stands as a memorial, a witness to death in the silence of shock, as if nature speaks where humans cannot. Like Ovid’s transformations, but to a much greater extent, Shakespeare supplies audiences with a sense of justice for those whose suffering and death was tragically unwarranted and tragically preventable. Additionally, Shakespeare’s audiences were interpreting the social, psychological, and material import of his transformations within their historical context of plague-time London. Shakespeare’s representations of botanical transformation surely resonated with the many wishes of those unable to offer botanical tributes for their loved ones who died of plague and were denied burial rites. As Michael Neill and others have amply demonstrated, all burial practices of the early modern period were of special concern due to regular visitations of bubonic plague. Accounting for the “acute anxieties about the properties of burial” he finds in early modern tragedy, Neill explains, “Since the rites of funeral represent a traditional society’s last line of defense against mortality, the horror of mass death is always most painfully felt in the breakdown of burial custom.”5 As Sarah 4 Totaro, Meteorology and Physiology, 98–117. 5 Neill, Issues of Death, 265, 18.

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Tarlow has shown, in spite of Reformation theology that undermined the value of the physical body, especially after death, early moderns went to great lengths even during times of plague to prepare with care the bodies of loved ones they sought to bury in individual graves.6 Botanical transformations in Shakespeare are thus informed by this history of botanical tribute that adds to their representational success. His botanical tributes are offerings of comfort in times of extreme, individually oppressive suffering. * Among the most thorough-going of Shakespeare’s representations of the preconditions for and plague-time context of botanical transformation is All’s Well That Ends Well. Shakespeare opens the play with a court culture built upon oppression of individuality. At news of her son’s appointment at court, the Countess proclaims, for example, “In delivering my son from me, I bury a second / husband” (1.1.1–2). This is an expression of love registered in its loss, but by rendering her “son” Bertram “a second husband,” the Countess values him using a one-to-one ratio, man for man. Intending to comfort the Countess and Bertram, Lafew then speaks in kind: “You shall find of the king a husband, madam; you, / sir, a father” (1.1.6–7). The king can stand in for the dead man as well: king, father, son—interchangeable all, apparently. Later, Shakespeare offers a similar rhetoric of human exchangeability at the king’s palace, when the Duchess’s ward, Helena, claims she can cure the king’s fistula, and he replies, “Sweet practiser, thy physic I will try, / That ministers thine own death if I die” (2.1.184–85). One life for one life. Helena quickly learns the court’s accounting methods and requests a man of her choice for marriage if she saves the king’s life: save a man, gain one more. Later in the play, she also orchestrates a bed trick, one female body for another, and she is successful in achieving her goal. Shakespeare resolves the play in awkward comedy, no need, apparently, for the salve of botanical transformation. For a moment, however, Shakespeare allows audiences to imagine that Helena’s death and botanical transformation replace her full assimilation into court life. As part of the bed trick, Helena has it rumored that she is dead. When the Countess, Lafew, and Clown hear this news, they mourn her loss, assured of her death. Commenting on Helena’s uniqueness, the Countess leads:

6 Tarlow, “Candied Fruit or Carrionlie Carkase?,” 23–27.

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… it was the death of the most virtuous gentlewoman that ever nature had praise for creating. If she had partaken of my flesh, and cost me the dearest groans of a mother, I could not have owed her a more rooted love. Lafew: ‘Twas a good lady, ‘twas a good lady: we may pick a thousand salads ere we light on such another herb. Clown: Indeed, sir, she was the sweet marjoram of the salad, or rather, the herb of grace. (4.5.8–16)

Here, Shakespeare offers a memorial in which Helena is no longer an interchangeable human subject but rather a uniquely trans-corporeal human-botanical subject: she earned a “rooted love” and “she was the sweet marjoram of the salad, or rather, the herb of grace.” Lafeu is quite specific in his intent, choosing “herb of grace” as the best botanical subject with which to memorialize Helena. Having first called her “Sweet Marjoram,” on second thought he changes his mind: “or rather, [she was] the herb of grace”—an herb with more applications for direct healing. At the time, both sweet marjoram and herb of grace were used as part of preservatives against the plague. Sweet marjoram occasionally appears as an herb to fill a nosegay. Functioning a bit like a scented facemask, the nosegay was thought to prevent noxious odors from penetrating the body, thus preserving the user from infection. Herb of grace, also called rue and detailed at more length in this volume by Rebecca Bushnell, was used sometimes in the same capacity.7 For example, in the small set of plague remedies included at the end of the English government’s nationwide quarantine orders for plague-time, based on continental models and issued in 1578 and in subsequent plague years, herb of grace / rue appears in An other preservative for the poor. It shall be good to take a handful of Rue and as much common Wormwood and bruise them a little and put them into a pot of Earth or Tin, with so much Vinegar as shall cover the herbs. Keep this pot close covered or stopt, and when you fear any infection, dip into this Vinegar a piece of a sponge and carry it in your hand and smell to it, or else put it into a round ball

7 See Oxford English Dictionary, “rue,” n. 2; “herb-grace,” n. 1: “An olde name for the herb Rue, Ruta graveolens.”

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of Ivory or Juniper made full of holes of the one side; carrying it in your hand, use to smell thereunto, renewing it once in a day.8

More often herb of grace / rue appears as an internally applied herb in a larger edible mixture (most frequently ground together with walnuts, figs) or steeped in a tea, as in the following usage from the same list of recipes: Mithridates Medicine. Take of good Figs, not worm-eaten, clean washed; of Walnuts, the kernels clean picked; of either of them an hundred; of the leaves of green Rue, otherwise called Herb of grace, the weight of two scruples; of common Salt, the weight of four drams. Cut the Figs in pieces and stamp them and the Walnut kernels together in a mortar of Marble or wood a good space until they be very small, and then put your Rue leaves unto them. Stamp and stir them well together with the rest. Last, put in the Salt and stamp and stir these things together until they be incorporated and made of one substance. Of the which, take the quantity of two or three Figs every morning fasting.

In another preparation, the medium for internal consumption is a tea made from steeped leaves of rue and wormwood, with the addition of dried and powdered juniper berries.9 Herb of grace / rue was also associated with the figurative qualities of both of its names, being the act of grace God supplies in allowing the herb to exist for human healing beyond human merit. This is reinforced in the definition for rue: “sorrow, distress; penitence, repentance; regret”; “pity; compassion” (OED, “rue, n.,” 1:1, 2), the herb of grace assuaging the emotional condition of ruing. In literal uses of herb of grace / rue elsewhere in Shakespeare, the associations are the same. The following exchange in Richard II between the Queen and Gardener has already been treated in this volume by Bushnell but is worth revisiting in its distinctly plague-time context here. In this exchange, Shakespeare combines the queen’s mild curse with the gardener’s unsolicited future gift of a botanical tribute: Queen: Gard’ner, for telling me these news of woe, Pray God the plants thou graft’st may never grow. 8 Queen Elizabeth, Orders thought meet by her Majesty, 191. See Basing and Rhodes, “English Plague Regulations,” on England’s review of continental models of plague orders. See also, Bushnell, “Vegetable Virtues” in this volume. 9 Queen Elizabeth, Orders thought meet by her Majesty, 189, 190.

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Exeunt QUEEN and Ladies Gardener: Poor queen, so that thy state might be no worse I would my skill were subject to thy curse. Here did she fall a tear. Here in this place I’ll set a bank of rue, sour herb-of-grace. Rue even for ruth here shortly shall be seen In the remembrance of a weeping queen. (3.4.101–108)

Pitying the Queen, who will return to London to find the king deposed, the Gardener’s words allow us to imagine that it was in part the Queen’s tears—“here did she fall a tear”—that enabled the growth of this healing, memorial herb. In Jeffrey Doty’s framing of this scene, “the gardener’s kind response to the queen’s curse can be read in metatheatrical terms: while Shakespeare, like the gardener, strips royalty of its magic, he likewise makes kings and queens accessible to audiences in personal and political terms.”10 The botanically-registered recognition and kindness shown the queen by the gardener humanizes both of them at once, increasing the audience’s connection to them in a single exchange. Interestingly, the gardener’s reply also generously both supports the queen in the intention of her curse and turns her tears to a botanically productive end, extending to her grace that might live on in the botanical form of rue once the “weeping queen” is gone. In All’s Well, the campaign of diminishment remains so thorough-going that the moment of potential botanical transformation and freedom is fleeting. Helena is, by choice, assimilated into the leveling court culture that we might say in this context resembles the plague pit, where each body is an identity-less, memorial-lacking figure among uncounted others: a body for a body, a title for a title. As Emily Gerstell concludes about this play, its “people are commodities, transferable objects that can be traded, ‘bequeathed,’ and purchased ‘at market price’” and there is no one who escapes this paltry system of accounting—not Helena and not even the women of Florence, who seem safely entrenched in positions outside of the court, until its ending.11 * A prominent part of lived experience in the years that Shakespeare was likely writing All’s Well That Ends Well, the London Bills of Mortality exemplify a 10 Doty, “Shakespeare’s Richard II, ‘Popularity,’ and the Early Modern Public Sphere” treats this passage when discussing the England-as-garden motif in the play, 198. 11 Gerstell, “All’s [Not] Well,” 208.

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version of this leveling effect when death is the oppressor.12 In these years, the dead bodies in each of London’s church parishes were reported collectively as numbers in columns that were published weekly as the London Bills of Mortality. This numerically focused form for the publication of the plague experience emerged in Elizabethan England as a new and extremely popular subgenre of plague writing.13 The bills gave people a way to determine their travel schedules and more accurately be assured of the wellbeing of loved ones within and outside of London. As discussed at a Folger Institute symposium on the bills, their production would lead to the emergence of population studies and to the increase generally in the quantification of human experience.14 The formal qualities of the London Bills of Mortality served important functions, but they also muted the voices of individuals, turning them into sets of numbers, diminishing the complex stories that Richelle Munkhoff, Deborah Harkness, Scott Oldenburg and others have been working to recover.15 Munkhoff, for example, has uncovered the selection process for the searchers who examined bodies to see who died from 12 In 1603–1604, theaters were closed due to an outbreak of plague, and scholars imagine this was the most likely time for the play’s creation, though our only published record of it is the 1623 Folio. For a full account of the dating of Shakespeare’s plays, see the British Library, Treasures in Full: Shakespeare in Quarto page for Shakespeare’s Works. In these years, the bills became a point of regular conversation. In his play from the same years, Ben Jonson captures these features of the bills in The Alchemist (1610), as his character Jeremy/Face explains to the conmen he has invited to practice in his master’s home during plague-time that the master will not come back suddenly: “While there dies one, a week, / O’the plague,” the master is “safe from thinking toward London” (1.1.182–83). Later, when the master unexpectedly appears, the group revisits their earlier conversation: “SUBTLE- You said he would not come, / While there died one a week, within the liberties. / FACE. No: ‘twas within the walls” (4.7.115–17). The master and servants rely on the numbers in the bills, and they rely on other people to be doing the same. Those occupying the master’s home got the verbal message, not the numbers, wrong. The numbers had accurately predicted his return. It is the human error of mishearing the narrative around those numbers that leads to an entertaining confusion at the end of the play before Jonson resolves his comedy. Nevertheless, the power of the form of the bills to communicate across miles and to serve many needs is undeniable. 13 Rebecca Totaro, The Plague in Print, 197–203. 14 “London Bills of Mortality” Symposium, Folger Shakespeare Library, April 19–21, 2018. For more on the bills, see the project “Death by Numbers: Quantitatively Analyzing the London Bills of Mortality”; Stephen Greenberg, “Plague, the Printing Press, and Public Health in SeventeenthCentury London,” esp. 526–27; and for more on another popular culture reporting method for these figures, allowing for their owner’s interaction, see Sperry, “Lord Have Mercy on Us: Broadsides and London Plague.” 15 Munkhoff, “Poor Women and Parish Public Health”; Harkness, “A View from the Streets”; Oldenburg, A Weaver-Poet and the Plague.

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plague and who reported those numbers to church and civic authorities for inclusion in the London Bills. Here Munkhoff cites the 1592 parish records from St. Margaret Lothbury as a means of revealing the lives behind the numbers: Thare was Caulide before the parishe, these personns hereafter folloinge that have weekly pencion out of the parishe for thare releefe, To saie, Axtons weedowe, Bristowes wedow, Jonne Abowen, Elzabethe Chaukeley, Elzabeth Foxe, Raphe Brokefild his wyfe for hur husbandes pencion, Katheren Crye and Annys Tysse, and these being thus Cauled to Choose amongest them 2 personns to be the vewers of the ded Corpses of shuche as shoulders dye in this parishe, and to geve Trewe knowledge unto the Clarke of suche as shoulde die of the plauge, thare was Chosen Annis Tyse and Katheren Crye and they to taake thare ooth before the Deputey consernynge that Charge accordinge to thorder.16

The vestry records offer a view of the experience of living and dying in plague-time that numbers alone cannot. They give us names that remind us that the numbers in the plague bills are only part of the story—each number the product of a much larger process of painstaking information collection by these local parish women, witnessing their neighbors’ hardships, likely with no funeral tribute possible, no other witness to the meaning of each person to the others. The end of Shakespeare’s comedy of All’s Well is the return of Helena to this realm of number, of oppressive court culture, and of (metaphorically) the plague pit sans memorial—all in spite of her gift as a healer that, were it not for Lafew’s gesture toward botanical transformation, is all but forgotten by the end of the play. * In Cymbeline (1609), Shakespeare follows All’s Well by offering a female protagonist similarly subject to an oppressive court system. Shakespeare also offers a scene of mistaken memorial that allows audiences to imagine the virtue of the play’s protagonist as warranting botanical tribute. Whereas Helena learns to use the methods of her oppressive treatment to achieve similarly systematic gains within a system of oppression, however, Innogen, lead female character of Cymbeline, does not. Innogen instead risks literal death as she attempts to withstand the harm that comes from refusing to 16 Munkhoff, “Searchers of the Dead,” 17.

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participate in the system of diminishment. In this play, also in contrast to All’s Well, Shakespeare provides his virtuous protagonist with two instrumental forms of support: early and frequent critics of the oppressive ruling system and, in scholar William Thorne’s words, “nature herself.”17 The play’s critics of the system—a First Lord, Second Gentleman, and Cornelius among them—make it clear immediately that Innogen has an array of supporters, in spite of the challenges she faces from what we soon find is a ruling minority. Among those challenges is the false besmirching of her reputation by Iachimo, which leads her husband Posthumus to order her death and, with the help of his servant who also believes her virtuous, to her cross-dressed performance as a page boy while waiting for resolution. In this attire, she meets her long-lost brothers, Guiderius and Arviragus, and earns their admiration, and in this attire, she drinks a potion that renders her unconscious and seemingly dead. Were this a tragedy, Arviragus’ words of botanical tribute that follow would, for Shakespeare’s audiences, be a fitting acknowledgment of Innogen’s value: With fairest flowers Whilst summer lasts and I live here, Fidele, I’ll sweeten thy sad grave: thou shalt not lack The flower that’s like thy face, pale primrose, nor The azured harebell, like thy veins, no, nor The leaf of eglantine, whom not to slander, Out-sweeten’d not thy breath: the ruddock would, With charitable bill, —O bill, sore-shaming Those rich-left heirs that let their fathers lie Without a monument!—bring thee all this; Yea, and furr’d moss besides, when flowers are none, To winter-ground thy corse. (4.2.218–27)

This is a poignant expression of love and of grief. It is also a pronouncement of botanical excess, and more specifically, of a human-botanical transcorporeality created with Arviragus’s similes, likening face, veins, and breath each to primrose, harebell, and eglantine.18 Arviragus also mentions the bills of mortality and the plague pit, wherein rich sons bury “their fathers 17 Thorne, “Cymbeline: ‘Lopp’d Branches’,” 152. 18 For more on the human-botanical interface common in the period, see Jean E. Feerick, “Botanical Shakespeares.” She writes, aptly, “Human flesh hardly conjures for us images of

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… without a monument.” Arviragus’s natural monument—“all this … and furr’d moss besides, when flowers are none”—will, instead, endure as a unique witness for a special loved one.19 Guiderius’s response to Arviragus’s words, however, shows that he is accounting for lives more in keeping with the system employed by the court characters in All’s Well: Prithee, have done; And do not play in wench-like words with that Which is so serious. Let us bury him, And not protract with admiration what Is now due debt. To the grave! (228–32)

Whether or not Guiderius is emotionally uncomfortable with Arviragus’s display, he judges it to be in excess of standard procedures for the “serious” situation of burying a body “due” to “the grave.” The situation should not elicit the “protract[ion]” of “admiration” and wonder. Clearly, Arviragus feels differently, and when Shakespeare places in tension the Arviragus vs. Guiderius responses to Innogen’s perceived death, audiences are positioned to feel the friction and to find Arviragus’s spontaneous expression of a botanical tribute more satisfying. Audiences, after all, know that Fidele is Innogen, that she is virtuous and due “admiration,” and that Arviragus is her long-lost brother. In other words, by this time in the play, the audience has seen what Guiderius has not. We know that had Innogen/Fidele died from the poison, the tragedy would have demanded at minimum the botanical tribute Arviragus offers. We know as well, thanks to the research of David Cressy, that in early modern England “[f]lowers and garlands were traditionally carried before the corpse of a young girl or an unmarried woman, then hung in the church above the place where she sat.”20 Furthermore, Rosie Morris reminds us of flowers, trees, or bushes. For us, such categories are distinct. But for Shakespeare and his earliest auditors and readers, laws of kind were similar among people as among plants,” 86. 19 Please see Jeffrey Theis’s discussion of “botanical memorials” in “Cymbeline’s Plant People” in this volume. 20 Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 472. Rosie Morris also writes, “From the late Middle Ages to relatively recent times garlanding was an established aspect of Anglican funeral rite … recorded in most parts of Britain … Of course, floral tributes have always been widespread in European society” (“Maidens’ Garlands,” 271). See also, on the relationship between Ophelia’s garland and Lear’s, both self-made with herbs that match their perceived afflictions, Frank McCombie, “Garlands in Hamlet and King Lear,” 132–34; and on the “[t]he garland … allowed at

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the connection between the rosary, the crowns of flowers that take similar shape to wreaths, and the Virgin Mary: It is possible that the crown of roses, or “chapelet” in the context of the medieval cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary, was a forerunner of the maidens’ garland. The reward was symbolized by the “crown” awarded to those who died in youth, usually female virgins, celebrating their “triumphant victory over lusts of the flesh.”21

The copious flowering following Innogen/Fidele’s death and as articulated by Arviragus was not, then, the product of Shakespeare’s imagination alone but was rooted in related practices at the time meant to recognize and give comfort to witnesses. Innogen is a virgin who indeed would have had a premature, tragic death had she succumbed to the poison. Although Arviragus could have known nothing of these facts, the audience does and credits him with powers of perception sensitive to his kinswoman. “The whole scene is decidedly central to the action,” William Thorne explains, “for it magnifies the theme of regeneration, and the subsequent dialogue makes clear that this was a necessary experience, vital to the relationship between the main characters”22 and to their perception by Shakespeare’s audiences. Bonnie Lander Johnson also finds this scene pivotal for the play. She reads Innogen’s near death, memorialization, and awakening as among Shakespeare’s efforts to represent the “essential self,” which, she says, is nearly impossible to do on stage. Shakespeare “does this,” she says, “by pushing his heroine as close to death as possible, making her relinquish everything, and then allowing her to speak at the very moment when she is least recognizable to herself or the audience.” Her return to life embedded in “social, ideological, and existential structures” is a return in which she has what Lander Johnson calls “audacious control.”23 This is a dramatically satisfying extension of Arviragus’s botanical tribute for Innogen, in spite of the fact that by the end of the play, these characters also return to court

Ophelia’s burial—her ‘virgin crants’—even though ‘her death was doubtful’,” see Clare Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual, 117–18. 21 Morris, “Maidens’ Garlands,” 272. See also Sophie Duncan’s treatment of the “coronet” as a way for Gertrude to assert either Ophelia’s noble quality or her distinction nevertheless from royalty, citing The Tempest’s coronet versus crown distinction (Shakespeare’s Props, 47). Please also see in this volume Claire Duncan’s related essay treating the “paradox of enclosed fertility.” 22 Thorne, “Cymbeline: ‘Lopp’d Branches’,” 156. 23 Lander Johnson, “Interpreting the Person,” 180, 184.

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life. The botanical tribute offered thus has a small touch of the “botanical grace” Shakespeare more fully offers in his stories of outright tragedy. * In his tragedies, botanical transformation occurs only after an individual entirely surrenders control to the force(s) of oppression, and restoration has ceased to be an option. Early in Venus and Adonis (1592–3), Shakespeare shows this oppression, as the goddess Venus pressures the human Adonis to perform for her sexually: “Torches are made to light, jewels to wear,” she explains, continuing, Dainties to taste, fresh beauty for the use, Herbs for their smell, and sappy plants to bear: Things growing to themselves are growth’s abuse: Seeds spring from seeds and beauty breedeth beauty; Thou wast begot; to get it is thy duty. (162–68)

Venus accounts for Adonis in ways that deny him agency beyond that measured by her narrow standards: “[F]resh beauty for the use … to get is thy duty.” With these words, she also translates him into a bouquet that was intended to be presented to her. He is the trans-corporeal human-botanical subject to be consumed as she “taste[s],” “smell[s],” “bear[s],” and “breed[s].” These words of literary blazon, however, take on added, ironic meaning in the context of the preceding discussion of Shakespeare’s botanical transformations and given that we know the end of the story. Before the end, however, Shakespeare will have given Adonis exclamations and actions of protest by which to show his unwillingness to accept Venus’s terms for his value. In one instance, Adonis says of the literally physical pressure Venus places on him, You hurt my hand with wringing; let us part, And leave this idle theme, this bootless chat: Remove your siege from my unyielding heart; To love’s alarms it will not ope the gate: Dismiss your vows, your feigned tears, your flattery; For where a heart is hard they make no battery. (421–26)

Adonis articulates the pressures that transformed Helena in All’s Well not into a botanical subject but into a conforming, less complex human one.

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Adonis instead vocally refuses to be converted by the “siege” of “feigned tears” and “flattery” and attempts here to dissuade Venus first by words and then by distance. The night before the fatal bore hunt, Venus says to Adonis, “I prophesy thy death, my living sorry, / If thou encounter with the boar tomorrow” (671–72). As Duncan-Jones explains, “Venus has used the word prophesy, and as a goddess, she has the power not merely to foresee future events but to shape them.” Venus crushes him with words as she had crushed his hand with the holding of it and as she will clip his memorial image. For these reasons, Duncan-Jones concludes, “It is in Venus and Adonis that the metamorphosis of [a plague-time] playing field to killing field can be seen most clearly.”24 On the killing field, with Adonis’s dead body before her, Venus remains stalwart in excessive displays of desired possession of Adonis, cursing love: ‘Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend: …. It shall be cause of war and dire events, And set dissension ‘twixt the son and sire; Subject and servile to all discontents, As dry combustious matter is to fire: Sith in his prime Death doth my love destroy, They that love best their love shall not enjoy.’ (1136, 1159–64)

This is a pronouncement of a kind of revenge, wishing harm to result from all loves. It is also a pronouncement absent in Ovid, who focuses Venus’s attention on matching the power of the destinies in willful resuscitation of the dead. Shakespeare does not intend for Venus’s curse to stand, however. A miraculous transformation outside of the bounds of nature and outside of Venus’s intent immediately follows her curse of “They that love best.” Shakespeare’s speaker explains, By this, the boy that by her side lay kill’d Was melted like a vapour from her sight, And in his blood that on the ground lay spill’d, A purple flower sprung up, chequer’d with white, Resembling well his pale cheeks and the blood Which in round drops upon their whiteness stood. (1165–1170) 24 Katherine Duncan-Jones, “Playing Fields or Killing Fields,” 133–134. Please also see Dympna Callaghan’s treatment of “early modern anxieties about the integrity of human identity” and the poem’s incestuous father-son-flower scene in “(Un)natural Loving,” 72–75.

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Forever escaping the pressures of a less than gracious goddess, Adonis passively “Was melted.” No other information about what causes this “melt[ing]” appears. The Oxford English Dictionary includes among the definitions of “melt” most used by Shakespeare two that suit the action of this scene; both definitions capture the sense of vanishing rather than of liquefying.25 Adonis’s body miraculously vanishes, and it is replaced by as miraculous “A purple flower … Resembling well his pale cheeks and the blood.” This flower is an undeserved, unprecedented gift for Venus and for the reader. A miraculous, spontaneous materialization, it might have been accompanied by other supernatural benefits into the future—gifts of comfort resulting from its tending, as promised by Arviragus for Innogen’s flowers. But Shakespeare’s Venus almost immediately clips it: She bows her head, the new-sprung flower to smell, Comparing it to her Adonis’ breath; And says within her bosom it shall dwell, Since he himself is reft from her by death: She crops the stalk, and in the breach appears Green dropping sap, which she compares to tears. ‘Poor flower,’ quoth she, ‘this was thy father’s guise, Sweet issue of a more sweet-smelling sire, For every little grief to wet his eyes: To grow unto himself was his desire, And so ‘tis shine; but know, it is as good To wither in my breast as in his blood.’ (1171–82)

This flower that might have renewed itself annually, like the human who preceded it, instead will “wither in [her] breast.” Venus chooses to enforce Adonis’s proximity to her, again, having learned no lessons. Readers, more than Venus, understand the meaning and potential of this flower. This botanical growth is a miraculous response to tragic death. It blossoms to speak for those who recognize Adonis’s loss and to offer the potential for regular remembrance and the memorial healing that can come with time. With the inability to pause and her quick plucking, however, Shakespeare’s Venus denies herself and the reader the opportunity to linger in the hope of new growth.

25 Oxford English Dictionary, “melt, v.,” 1, “To … dissolve, or disperse”; 1.e., “Of a person, etc.: To vanish or disappear.”

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These reactions to Adonis’s death as well as to the growth spontaneously of the flower from Adonis’s blood are absent from Ovid’s telling of the story. When his Venus sees the dead Adonis, she curses the destinies and determines, In a flowre thy blood I will bestowe. Hadst thou the powre, Persephonee rank sented Mints to make Of womens limbes? and may not I lyke powre upon mee take Without disdelne and spyght, too turne Adonis too a flowre? This sed, shee sprinckled Nectar on the blood, which through the powre Therof did swell like bubbles sheere that ryse in weather cleere On water. And before that full an howre expyred weere, Of all one colour with the blood a flowre she there did fynd, Even like the flowre of that same tree whose frute in tender rynde Have pleasant graynes inclosde. (10.851–60)

Ovid’s Venus curses the destinies, not love. She also acts to bring the flower into existence by “sprinkle[ing] Nectar on the blood,” and she leaves the flower planted so that memorially, each year, it will revive, as if for her. Ovid’s Venus and his readers understand that the flower is not Adonis but that it provides some comfort to the witnesses of his tragic loss. Shakespeare’s Venus does not appreciate either the difference between flower and man or the potential of this botanical gift, and we are left sole witnesses to additionally unnecessary loss. * In Hamlet (1600–1601), we are also the intended recipients of a complex gift of botanical transformation. In a passage many can recite by heart, Shakespeare concludes what we might call Ophelia’s crushing at court with this scene of uncomfortable beauty: There is a willow grows aslant a brook, That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream; There with fantastic garlands did she come Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples That liberal shepherds give a grosser name, But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them: There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;

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When down her weedy trophies and herself Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide; And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up: Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes; As one incapable of her own distress, Or like a creature native and indued Unto that element: but long it could not be Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay To muddy death. (4.7.164–81)

Ophelia has selected these flowers herself, for herself, having made her own “garland” and “coronet” on the way to the brook, there to hang them in the willow. These flowers later, when they fall into the brook with her, become her virginal crown or wreath, ready for the funeral procession that will not be held. As Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor point out in their note in the Arden edition of the play, moreover, the flowers named above, each of them, are wildflowers.26 Like Adonis, who becomes an unspecified “purple flower,” and Helena, compared by Lafew to herb of grace / rue, which also was a common herb, Ophelia’s are field flowers, freely available to all of Shakespeare’s audience members because spontaneously growing in the natural environment of England. In this way, they are all the more free gifts of the kind James Kearney tells us that Luther and Derrida alike deemed “impossible” and “unthinkable” like faith and grace themselves.27 And what “Pull’d” her to her death are human trappings—“clothes spread wide,” suggesting that were it not for them, Ophelia might have persisted longer in the trans-corporeal condition of being “like a creature native and indued / Unto that element” of water, floating like the flowers in her wreaths. Ophelia’s prior lesson-bearing distribution of flowers similarly predicts her tragic demise, the creation of her own botanical tribute, and its expression in wildflower commonality. Ophelia had told the members of the court, “There’s rue / for you; and here’s some for me: / we may call it herb-grace o’ Sundays: / O you must wear your rue with a difference” (4.5.173–76). This is a scene that reinforces Gertrude’s later report of Ophelia’s death in the brook, helping us imagine that her report has truth in it, in spite of its being, as Michael Neill reminds us, a scene known to us only by Gertrude’s account.28 26 Thompson and Taylor, Hamlet, 437. 27 Kearney, “Hospitality’s Risk, Grace’s Bargain,” 102. 28 Neill, Issues of Death, 233.

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She is apparently the sole witness to Ophelia’s possibly accidental, possibly intentional, and surely preventable death. In the imaginations of those who hear Gertrude’s account, nevertheless, Ophelia takes nearly botanical form. For much longer than a moment, we who hear Gertrude’s account have room to imagine Ophelia’s preservation and even her comfort before her watery death.29 This pause of imagination has potential to act as a soothing balm for those who witness Ophelia’s having slowly been “undone”—a term Gabriel Egan tells us is one Shakespeare uses frequently to mean “the state of having suffered a calamity that cannot be fixed.”30 The larger context Egan supplies for this term is ecological disaster, with its catastrophic and irremediable harms, but the scope of the tragedy of Ophelia’s death in many ways matches it. Ophelia was young, a virgin, sweet, smart, with a promising future, and her death was preventable. Many witnesses stood by and watched life events unfold in that direction, unable or unwilling to intervene. The scope of her tragedy, like the scope of the tragedy caused by bubonic plague, also makes more potent the potential gift of botanical transformation. Ophelia’s scene of transformation is especially potent, operating not only as a botanical tribute but as nothing less than botanical grace in being an undeserved, spontaneous gift able to spark new blossoming in the lives of those who pause to observe it. We know this to be true by the afterlife of Ophelia’s tribute. Nineteenth-century painter John Everett Millais and twenty-first century Nihon Hoso Kyokai (NHK: Japan Broadcasting Company)—with the now-iconic 1852 painting, Ophelia, and with the short, animated f ilm “Ophelia, not yet,” respectively—are among many who have since Shakespeare’s time extended his gift of botanical grace.31 Both Millais and NHK add complexity to Shakespeare’s written and performed representation of Ophelia’s combined death and funeral tribute. In both of their representations, for example, Ophelia lives, breathing in a state 29 In times of plague, there is increased danger from those peddling fraudulent hope, but I see botanical transformation as healing hope. See Ernst Bloch from whom I borrow the term “fraudulent hope.” Bloch calls it “one of the greatest malefactors, even enervators, of the human race” (The Principle of Hope, 5). For more on the need for and dangers associated with hope, see Totaro, Suffering in Paradise, especially the chapter on Jonson’s The Alchemist (109–21). 30 Egan, Shakespeare and Ecocritical Theory, 8. 31 See Andreea Serhan, “‘Ophelia divided from herself’ (Hamlet, 4.5.2944–45): Ophelia’s Manga Afterlives,” 107; Yukari Yoshihara, “Toward ‘Reciprocal Legitimation’”; Laurence RoussillonConstanty, “Tracing Ophelia from Millais to Contemporary Art.” For a definition of iconic, which I found thanks to Roussillon-Constanty, see Martin Kemp, Christ to Coke, 3. Finally, please see Peterson and Williams, eds., The Afterlife of Ophelia, including their introduction and Delphine Gervais de Lafond’s chapter 10, “Ophélie in Nineteenth-Century French Painting.”

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of watery suspension, “not yet” dead. Both turn the scene into a visually powerful enactment of botanical-human substance and beauty that exists beyond the tragic grasps of dangerous court cultures, oppressive or thwarted love, and the plague. They present in new form the gift of botanical grace that invites us to pause, to see, and to fight for what is dear before it is undone.

Bibliography Primary Sources Jonson, Ben. The Alchemist. Edited by Elizabeth Cook. London: Bloomsbury, Methuen, 2017. Millais, John Everett. Ophelia. 1852. Tate Modern, London. https://www.tate.org. uk/art/artworks/millais-ophelia-n01506. Nihon Hoso Kyokai (NHK: Japan Broadcasting Company). “Ophelia, not yet.” Dailymotion. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x34wgvl. Ovid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation, 1567. Edited by John Frederick Nims. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2000. Queen Elizabeth I. “Orders thought meet by her Majesty and her privy Council.” In The Plague in Print: Essential Elizabethan Sources, 1558–1603, edited by Rebecca Totaro, 179–96. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2010. Shakespeare, William. All’s Well That Ends Well. Edited by G. K. Hunter. London: Methuen & Co., 1959; Arden Shakespeare, reprinted 2000. Shakespeare, William. Cymbeline. Edited by Valerie Wayne. Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. London: Bloomsbury, 2006. Shakespeare, William. Richard II. In The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems. Oxford World’s Classics, edited by Stanley Wells, 339–67. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Shakespeare, William. Venus and Adonis. In The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems. Oxford World’s Classics, edited by Stanley Wells, 175–236. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Secondary Sources Basing, Patricia, and Dennis E. Rhodes, “English Plague Regulations and Italian Models: Printed and Manuscript Items in the Yelverton Collection.” British Library Journal 23, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 60–67.

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Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope. Vol. 1. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1986. British Library. Treasures in Full: Shakespeare in Quarto. https://www.bl.uk/ treasures/shakespeare/plays.html. Callaghan, Dympna. “(Un)natural Loving: Swine, Pets and Flowers in Venus and Adonis.” In Textures of Renaissance Knowledge, edited by Phillipa Berry and Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, 58–78. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Cressy, David. Birth, Marriage, Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. “Death By Numbers: Quantitatively Analyzing the London Bills of Mortality.” https://deathbynumbers.org/. De Lafond, Delphine Gervais. “Ophélie in Nineteenth-Century French Painting.” In The Afterlife of Ophelia, edited by Kaara L. Peterson and Deanne Williams, 169–91. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Doty, Jeffrey S. “Shakespeare’s Richard II, ‘Popularity,’ and the Early Modern Public Sphere.” Shakespeare Quarterly 61, no. 2 (2010): 183–205. Duncan, Sophie. Shakespeare’s Props: Memory and Cognition. New York: Routledge, 2019. Duncan-Jones, Katherine. “Playing Fields or Killing Fields: Shakespeare’s Poems and ‘Sonnets’.” Shakespeare Quarterly 54, no. 2 (2003): 127–41. Egan, Gabriel. Shakespeare and Ecocritical Theory. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2015. Feerick, Jean E. “Botanical Shakespeares: The Racial Logic of Plant Life in Titus Andronicus. South Central Review 26, no. 1/2 (2009): 82–102. Gerstell, Emily C. “All’s [Not] Well: Female Service and ‘Vendible’ Virginity in Shakespeare’s Problem Play.” Journal of Early Modern Studies 4 (2015): 187–211. Gittings, Clare. Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England. Dover, N.H.: Croom Helm, 1984. Goody, Jack. The Culture of Flowers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Greenberg, Stephen. “Plague, the Printing Press, and Public Health in SeventeenthCentury London.” Huntington Library Quarterly 67, no. 4 (2004): 508–27. Harkness, Deborah E. “A View from the Streets: Women and Medical Work in Elizabethan London.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 82, no. 1 (2008): 52–85. Ives, Rachel. “Investigating Botanical Tributes in Post-Medieval British Burials: Archaeological Evidence from Three Burial Grounds.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 25, no. 1 (2021): 1142–64. Kearney, James. “Hospitality’s Risk, Grace’s Bargain: Uncertain Economies in The Winter’s Tale.” In Shakespeare and Hospitality: Ethics, Politics, and Exchange, edited by David B. Goldstein and Julia Reinhard Lupton, 89–111. New York: Routledge, 2016.

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Kemp, Martin. Christ to Coke: How Image Becomes Icon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Lander Johnson, Bonnie. “Interpreting the Person: Tradition, Conflict, and Cymbeline’s Imogen.” Shakespeare Quarterly 59, no. 2 (2008): 156–84. “London Bills of Mortality.” Symposium. Folger Shakespeare Library, April 19–21, 2018. https://folgerpedia.folger.edu/London_Bills_of_Mortality_(symposium). McCombie, Frank. “‘Garlands in Hamlet and King Lear’.” Notes and Queries 28, no. 2 (1981): 132–34. Morris, Rosie. “Maidens’ Garlands: A Funeral Custom of Post-Reformation England.” In The Archaeology of Post-Medieval Religion, edited by Chris King and Duncan Sayer, 271–82. Rochester, NY: The Boydell Press, 2011. Munkhoff, Richelle. “Poor Women and Parish Public Health in Sixteenth-Century London.” Renaissance Studies 28, no. 4 (2014): 579–96. Munkhoff, Richelle. “Searchers of the Dead: Authority, Marginality, and the Interpretation of Plague in England, 1574–1665.” Gender and History 11, no. 1 (1999): 1–29. Neill, Michael. Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Oldenburg, Scott. A Weaver-Poet and the Plague: Labor, Poverty, and the Household in Shakespeare’s London. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020. Peterson, Kaara L., and Deanne Williams, eds. The Afterlife of Ophelia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Roussillon-Constanty, Laurence. “Tracing Ophelia from Millais to Contemporary Art: Literary, Pictorial and Digital Icons.” Cahiers Victoriens & Édouardiens 89 (2019): 1–12. Serhan, Andreea. “‘Ophelia divided from herself’ (Hamlet, 4.5.2944–45): Ophelia’s Manga Afterlives.” Critical Survey 33, no. 1 (2021): 103–18. Sperry, Eileen. “Lord Have Mercy on Us: Broadsides and London Plague Life.” Sixteenth Century Journal 49, no. 1 (2018): 95–113. Tarlow, Sarah. “Candied Fruit or Carrionlie Carkase? Beliefs about the Dead Body in Early Modern Britain.” In Death Across Oceans: Archaeology of Coffins and Vaults in Britain, America, and Australia, edited by Harold Mytum and Laurie Burgess, 23–35. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2018. Thorne, William Barry. “Cymbeline: ‘Lopp’d Branches’ and the Concept of Regeneration.” Shakespeare Quarterly 20, no. 2 (1969): 143–59. Totaro, Rebecca. Meteorology and Physiology in Early Modern Culture: Earthquakes, Human Identity, and Textual Representation. Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture. New York: Routledge, 2018. Totaro, Rebecca. The Plague in Print: Essential Elizabethan Sources, 1558–1603. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2010.

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Travis, Peter W. “Chaucer’s Heliotropes and the Poetics of Metaphor.” Speculum 72, no. 2 (1997): 399–427. Yoshihara, Yukari. “Toward ‘Reciprocal Legitimation’ between Shakespeare’s Works and Manga.” Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance 14, no. 29 (2016): 107–22.

About the Author Rebecca Totaro is Associate Dean and Professor of English at Florida Gulf Coast University. A Penn State University Press book series editor, Totaro is author/editor of five books on plague and early modern disaster, the most recent being Meteorology and Physiology in Early Modern Culture.

5.

“Circummured” Plants and Women in Measure for Measure Claire Duncan

Abstract Measure for Measure’s “garden circummured with brick” (4.1.25) resembles early modern horticultural discourse that urges gardeners to try to enclose the feminized generativity of Nature. Yet, as the play repeatedly shows, fertility is not so easy to control. Mariana and Isabella prove indistinguishable to Angelo, and it is Mariana who is, in Angelo’s words, “a deflowered maid” (4.4.20). This essay argues that the bed trick’s garden location and Angelo’s floral metaphor enact a slippage between human and plant: the bed trick becomes a flower-bed trick. Using an ecofeminist lens, I contend that Isabella’s (and Mariana’s) transformation into plant matter creates female-horticultural bodies that can resist as women with autonomy over their sexualized bodies and as plants that elude human control. Keywords: gender, virginity, floral metaphor, horticulture, hortus conclusus, garden

William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (c. 1603) takes place in a series of enclosed spaces, from Vienna with its surrounding wall designating “the suburbs” from “the city,” to the friar’s cell, “the cloister” (1.2.154), “the prison” (2.3.5), “the moated grange” (3.1.254), and the various rooms inside the palace and court.1 The play hinges on secrets and attempts to legislate private life for the public good. Whether it is claustrophobic or claustrophilic, this play hems in its characters, both spatially and psychologically,2 containing them 1 Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, 1.2.78–79. All references are to The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd edition. 2 For a reading of the psychological state of pregnancy in Measure for Measure, see Mary Thomas Crane, “Male Pregnancy.”

Staub, S.C. (ed.), Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463721332_ch05

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and forcing them to make impossible decisions—decisions about the female body, and more precisely, the ability of that body to remain enclosed.3 At the thematic and spatial center of the play is a space that is never actually staged, Angelo’s “garden circummured with brick” (4.1.25). Though there are no other spatial indicators in this relentlessly city-located play where there might be room for an ecofeminist reading, I contend that the enclosed garden of Measure for Measure, in which the offstage bed trick (the only sex in a sex-obsessed play) occurs, is the key to unlocking the secrets of the play’s obsession with enclosed female bodies. 4 This garden is, I argue, a version of the hortus conclusus, a version supposed to contain the one female body in the play that desires to remain perpetually contained. Yet, it is a garden whose owner intends to use that space to deflower that very same woman, Isabella. Many of the essays in this volume examine moments of human-plant contact and find a fundamental slippage that breaks down the boundaries of these supposedly discrete categories. Whether material, symbolic, or rhetorical, these encounters between human and plant trouble any notions of human privilege and position the botanical bodies on Shakespeare’s stage as central actors themselves. In this essay I ask what would it mean for us to take this spatial placement of a virginal body in an enclosed garden as a kind of transformation of that body into a garden? While the reality in early 3 Jonathan Dollimore’s “Transgression and Surveillance” provides the foundational reading about the attempts to discipline and control sexuality in the play. Janet Adelman’s Suffocating Mothers particularly links those attempts to control of the female generative body. 4 There has been much scholarship on early modern gardens, including influential work like John Dixon Hunt’s Garden and Grove: The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English Imagination 1600–1750 that particularly focuses on the early modern garden’s place in landscape architectural history. Scholars like Joan Thirsk, Anthony Low, and Andrew McRae have also located the early modern garden in the context of agrarian history. In The Renaissance Garden in England, Roy Strong examines physical early modern gardens of the Elizabethan nobility such as William Cecil’s Theobalds. Alexander Samson’s introduction to a special issue of Renaissance Studies approaches early modern gardens and poetics to examine their interplay and metaphorical overlaps. Though this essay shares with this body of scholarship a focus on gardens in early modern England, my approach foregrounds the gender dynamics at play, which come into clearer focus through popular early modern gardening manuals. Rebecca Bushnell’s Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens shifted the critical conversation to include these types of manuals and horticultural treatises as legitimate sources for understanding not only how gardening was carried out in practice, but also how gardens were imagined through popular discourse. In this essay, however, I am particularly building on early modern ecofeminist work like Jennifer Munroe and Rebecca Laroche’s Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory; Sylvia Bowerbank’s Speaking for Nature; Munroe’s Gender and the Garden; Munroe and Laroche’s Ecofeminist Approaches; and Amy Tigner’s Literature and the Renaissance Garden.

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modern England was that women were located in gardens as gardeners, and, as Hillary M. Nunn’s essay in this volume attests, had their own knowledge about encountering and using plants, women are most often erased from this authoritative position in literature and scientific treatises in favor of a fantasy in which they metaphorically become the garden. As a version of the Catholic hortus conclusus, the enclosed garden represents Isabella, whose desire to become a nun would ensure her own virginal containment, but who cannot ultimately access the impossible virginal fertility of the Virgin Mary. Only with the help of Mariana and the bed trick in this enclosed garden space can Isabella maintain her virginity and appear to fulfill Angelo’s sexual coercion. Mariana and Isabella prove indistinguishable to Angelo, and it is actually Mariana who is, in Angelo’s plant metaphor, “a deflowered maid” (4.4.20). This essay argues that the bed trick’s garden location and the floral metaphor demonstrate a slippage between the two virginal bodies and the plant matter that makes up the garden. Examining Measure for Measure through the lens of early modern gardening manuals shows the material ways that the early moderns attempted to circumscribe the growth of Nature through enclosed gardens and to understand the floral fertility within those bounds. Yet the question of just how effective any of these horticultural and corporeal boundaries can be remains, for the hyper-defined border of the enclosed garden might prove to be a fantasy of impermeability that fails to contain the all too permeable female body. And Isabella and Mariana’s substitution demonstrates that the flowers themselves might be unrecognizable in spite of any human attempts to categorize them. The indecipherability of the female body in the enclosed garden reveals how female-plant bodies can be a site of continued resistance to patriarchal attempts to control generative growth, whether human or horticultural. The enclosed garden is part of a biblical tradition that begins in the Song of Songs, where the singer explains, “Hortus conclusus soror mea, sponsa, hortus conclusus fons signatus,” translated as “A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed up.”5 While this line describes Solomon’s beloved in celebration of their marriage, in exegetical tradition it is extrapolated to signify the Church as the bride of Christ, and later in the twelfth century, the theologian Bernard of Clairvaux argued that it was the Virgin Mary who was the bride in Song of Songs.6 The hortus 5 The Vulgate Bible, Song of Songs, 4:12. For a discussion of the Song of Songs and the hortus conclusus tradition, see Tigner, Literature and the Renaissance Garden, 222–3. 6 For more on a spiritual reading of Song of Songs in the early modern literary tradition, see Stanley Stewart, The Enclosed Garden, 19–30.

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conclusus thus becomes an emblem of the perpetual virginity of the Virgin Mary: the green space bounded by impermeable walls mirrors Mary’s body that is at once miraculously fertile and virginal.7 Poised to enter the cloister (1.2.154), Isabella in Measure for Measure is preparing to become a nun. To join “the votarists of Saint Clare” (1.4.5), Isabella would, after the period of the novitiate, take part in the ceremony of solemn vows, in which there was often a ring placed on the finger of the nun and she might wear something similar to a wedding headdress: Isabella would make a vow of chastity and become a bride of Christ.8 The vow of chastity was in imitation of the Virgin Mary and her perpetual virginity, and it is precisely the virginity of Isabella that will be at stake in the play. By choosing to become a nun, Isabella wants to maintain the boundaries of her body; she desires to be enclosed. Indeed, the cloister would physically contain her body as represented onstage in 1.4 when Isabella must use “the key” to open the gate to the cloister before a man is permitted entrance (1.4.8).9 In addition to the physical wall that encloses the cloister, upon becoming a nun, Isabella’s body would be maintained as a kind of secret from patriarchal society. Not only would she not circulate on the marriage market, but the rules of the cloister stipulate that “when you have vowed, you must not speak to men / But in the presence of the prioress” (1.4.10–11), a measure that could be a way of preventing potentially naughty nuns from engaging in forbidden activities, but is also a way of protecting women like Isabella who desire by choice to control the bounded integrity of their virginal bodies. The cloister’s rule that “if you speak, you must not show your face” suggests that even when men have been allowed through the cloister wall, the nuns within are still symbolically hidden and inaccessible to men (1.4.12). This description of the veiled female body anticipates the final scene in the play in which Mariana appears veiled and “will not show [her] face / Until [her] husband bid[s]” (5.1.168–169). Instead of marrying and becoming a feme covert under the laws of coverture as Mariana eventually 7 Helen Ostovich, “‘Here in this garden’,” explains that “the hortus conclusus image derives from the Christian reading of the ‘Song of Songs,’ in which the enclosed garden, shut off from the earthly world, is symbolic of virginity, and all its plants testify to the purity of the virgin’s enclosed womb. As a subject for paintings, the paradise garden of the early fifteenth century shows the virgin in the company of saints, meditating in an enclosed garden of spiritual peace, a contrast to carnal gardens of love, where physical and emotional delight is the focus,” 23. 8 See Theodora Jankowski, “Pure Resistance,” for further discussion of the convent as a space of female resistance, and the representation of this Catholic space in Protestant early modern England. 9 For a discussion of the potential power of holding keys to a locked private space and the material objects that provided that power, see Sasha Roberts, “Shakespeare ‘creepes’,” 52–54.

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will, Isabella wants to enter the cloister, to be contained not by marriage, but by the enclosed space and rules of the religious cloister. Isabella has control over her body as emblematized by her control over Lucio’s entrance into the cloister space. She holds the key: within that bounded secret space, she has power. However, once Isabella is forced out of the cloister space to intervene for her brother, her power over her own body rapidly diminishes. While in the cloister—a word stemming from the Latin claustrum, or lock—her body is locked up by her own choice, a kind of secret kept away from the male gaze.10 And it is precisely that bounded quality that paradoxically attracts the unwanted attention of Angelo. In his soliloquy after he meets Isabella, Angelo asks himself, “dost thou desire her foully for those things / That make her good?” (2.2.178–79). Were it not for the virginal enclosed state of her body, Angelo would not desire Isabella, but of course in carrying out his desires, Angelo would transform Isabella’s body from bounded to that very openness that he loathes. He wants her to “give up your body to such sweet uncleanness / As she that he hath stained” (2.4.54–55), with these images of stains drawing on the understanding that the Virgin Mary was conceived in the womb of her mother free from the stain of original sin brought upon humanity by Eve’s eating the apple.11 Part of the hortus conclusus association with Mary is a kind of revision of the Garden of Eden—often itself depicted as enclosed—with the walls of the hortus protecting Mary from any sin. Mary’s unbroken corporeal boundaries rewrite Eve’s paradise-losing act of bodily boundary breaking. Mary’s body remains perfectly intact, with the garden representing the unstained fertility both of her own enclosed womb and the womb of her mother. However, it is precisely this paradox of enclosed fertility with which Measure for Measure struggles. How can the female body be fruitful, fulfilling its fertile role in patriarchal society, and still maintain its chaste boundaries? Angelo attempts to control the relentlessly fecund female body by placing Isabella in his own enclosed garden. Through this locational containment in the garden, Isabella’s body becomes—at least according to Angelo’s plan—the garden itself, the hortus conclusus. Although this garden never appears onstage, I contend that Isabella’s description of it enacts one of the many substitutions in this play: Isabella’s body, speaking 10 OED, “Cloister, n.” 11 By having an “immaculate” conception, Mary is free from any macula, Latin for stain. For further discussion of the relationship between the hortus conclusus tradition and the Garden of Eden, see Tigner, Literature and the Renaissance Garden, 216 and 223.

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the lines, becomes the space about which she speaks.12 The interior space of the female body with its unknowable womb becomes yet another of the play’s substitutable interior spaces: indeed, all of the cloistral spaces are perhaps a way of visualizing that womb, the central problem of the play. Yet with her maintained virginity, the interior of Isabella’s body can be spatially represented only by an enclosed garden. She is transformed into a green space of Nature’s fertility, but also a space where humans try to carefully control that fertility. She is the “garden circummured with brick” (4.1.25); the generative potential contained impermeably in her body is converted into Nature’s growth contained by brick walls. While Isabella attempts to maintain control over the boundaries of her body, this association with Angelo’s hortus conclusus threatens to blur a different boundary: the line between human and nonhuman becomes tenuous. While Angelo and Measure for Measure struggle with questions about how to control the fertility of the female body, they locate the virginal female body in a space associated with an unattainable simultaneous virginity and fertility. In metonymically making the interface between human and nonhuman porous at precisely the point of the generative female body, the play seems to be suggesting that if the strict enforcement of the laws cannot effectively contain the fertility of its female bodies, then perhaps the brick wall of the enclosed garden can.

Growing Nature Holding in mind all of these associations of the hortus conclusus with the miraculously intact and growing female body, I turn now to the texts that grapple with managing the fertility of Nature in these enclosed gardens in early modern England—horticultural treatises and gardening manuals.13 12 Ostovich argues that “Iconographically, a budding virgin is a hortus conclusus, a metaphor rendered concrete at the centre of Shakespeare’s play Richard II by Isabel’s appearance within a garden” (“‘Here in this garden’,” 21). Here, I contend that even without the physical presence of the garden as an onstage locale, the metaphor is concretized through Isabella’s description of the garden space. 13 Benjamin Bertram’s “Discourse of Husbandry” examines the rhetoric of husbandry in the play. While some of the primary husbandry sources that he uses overlap with what I am calling gardening manuals, Bertram’s argument takes for granted that husbandry is something desirable. Because of my interest in Angelo’s enclosed garden, I am focusing here on gardening manuals; this focus fits the play’s obsession with the fertility of the female body, as these are the treatises primarily concerned with controlling the fertility of Nature’s feminized body. Looking at the play and the gardening treatises from an ecofeminist perspective shows husbandry is a means

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One of the earliest horticultural treatises, Leonard Mascall’s A Booke of the Arte and maner how to Plant and Graffe all sortes of Trees, asks, What greater pleasure can there bee, than to smell the sweete odour of Herbes, Trees, and Fruites, and to beholde the goodlie colour of the same, whiche in certaine tymes of the yere commeth forthe of the Wombe of their mother and nourse, and so to understande the secrete operation in the same.14

Mascall imagines Nature as an abundantly fertile “mother” whose “wombe” spontaneously generates horticultural life. William Lawson’s gardening manual likewise casts Nature as “the great mother,” “our common mother the Earth (which is like in this point to all other mothers that beare),” and “the universall Mother.”15 These slippages between plant and human center on generation, perhaps pointing toward the Aristotelian tripartite soul with the plant-soul’s reproductive focus. The early modern horticultural texts imagine Nature as a feminized generative body and the man’s role as gardener is to intervene in order to control its abundance and improve it for human use. Rebecca Bushnell reminds us that this type of book is designed “to teach the reader to shape an order in nature, whether through pruning, design, or grafting.”16 Hill’s A most briefe and pleasaunte treatise teachyng how to dresse, sowe, and set a garden (1558) explains “howe necessarie a thing it was to knowe the right use of ordering and dressynge of a Gardeyn, and the remedies also, for such defautes as happen amonge herbes, and flowers.”17 Hill emphasizes how the gardener brings “order” to the “defautes” of horticultural growth, suggesting that Nature’s generative fecundity is usually disorderly and defective without the appropriately intervening hand of the gardener. Lawson likewise emphasizes the role of human intervention, asking, “what is Art more than a prouident and skilfull Collectrix of the faults of nature?” (A3r). He goes on to explain that “when good ground naturally brings forth thistles, trees stand too thicke, or too thin, or disorderly, or (without dressing) put forth unprofitable suckers, and such like. All which, and a thousand more, art reformeth” (A3r). Indeed, he claims that “if nature would giue of control that does not necessarily better the conditions of growth. Bertram examines the discourse of husbandry solely from the agent of that husbandry, the husbandman; whereas, I am interested in how the supposed objects of that husbandry might resist it. 14 Mascall, A Booke, A.iir. 15 Lawson, A new orchard, 2, 42, 57. 16 Bushnell, Green Desire, 74. 17 Thomas Hill, A most briefe and pleasaunte treatise, A.iiir.

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leaue to man by Art, to dresse the rootes of trees, to take away the tawes, and tangles, that lap and fret and grow superfluously and disorderly, … we should haue trees of woonderfull greatnesse, and infinite durance” (24). Coupled with this image of overgrown plants, the word “lap” points towards the female reproductive body and its potential unruliness. For Lawson, Nature’s growth is “disorderly” and requires the reforming of human art in order to generate in an appropriately controlled manner. Gervase Markham addresses the role of the husbandman gardener in taming the growth of Nature. He explains that “a Husbandman is the Maister of the earth, turning sterrillitie and barrainenesse, into fruitfulnesse and increase.”18 In this formulation, Nature’s fertility is actually dangerously unfruitful, and appears to require the mastery of the husbandman to grow anything at all. A few sentences later, however, Markham nuances this claim: “it is most necessary for keeping the earth in order, which else would grow wilde, and like a wildernesse, brambles and weeds choaking vp better Plants, and nothing remayning but a Chaos of confusednesse” (A3v). It turns out that Nature is not sterile and barren, but that what she would grow wildly is potentially not fruitful for humans, and like the weeds Susan C. Staub examines in her essay in this volume, is connected with the rampantly generative female body. According to the gardening manuals, the gardener comes up against the abundant fertility of Nature and must use his art (learned from the treatise) to rein in that fertility, and to harness it for his own uses.

Enclosing the Garden When imagining their role in understanding and circumscribing Nature’s fertility, these treatises teach their readership to garden in order to tame that fertility, and central to that act of creating a garden is the wall. Figure 2, the frontispiece to Ralph Austen’s A Treatise of Fruit Trees (1653), depicts the kind of early modern English garden imagined in many of these treatises, with fruit trees neatly laid out in four different sections surrounding an intricate flower and herb knot garden at the center.19 Around the edge of the garden on the front facing side are more trees or other wall-growing 18 Markham, The English husbandman, A3r. 19 Austen, A treatise of fruit-trees. It is not surprising that Austen’s treatise of all the early modern English gardening manuals directly quotes this biblical source, given that his is perhaps the most spiritually concerned, as part of Samuel Hartlib’s circle of agricultural reformers. For more on Austen and this frontispiece, see Tigner, Literature and the Renaissance Garden, 216–18.

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Figure 2: Frontispiece of Ralph Austen’s A Treatise of Fruit Trees (Oxford, 1653). This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

plants that cling to a brick wall. However, this image goes even further in enclosing the garden, as the brick wall is itself circled by a decorative closed ring, which contains the translated quotation from Song of Songs equating the female body with the enclosed garden. Like the image from Austen’s treatise, the garden in Measure for Measure is surrounded by brick. Indeed, when Isabella depicts the “garden cirummured

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with brick” in which Angelo plans to carry out his sexual coercion, the play pauses for nine lines of spatial description. And what this description emphasizes is precisely how enclosed this garden is. The play’s imagining of Angelo’s garden with its doubly locked doors and brick walls draws on early modern gardening discourse that exhibits surprising attention to the actual structure that surrounds the garden, rather than just the ways to grow that garden. Or perhaps it is not actually surprising, given the anxiety that the horticultural treatises exhibit about Nature’s wild fertility. The word “garden” itself etymologically builds in the idea of enclosure.20 Hill’s The gardeners labryinth (1577) traces that relation back to the emergence of the garden in the Classical world, explaining: A Garden plotte in the Auncient time at Rome, was none other, than a small and simple inclosure of ground, whiche through the labour and diligence of the husbandman, yelded a commoditie and yearely reuenew unto him. But after yeares (that man more esteemed of himselfe, sought an easier life) deuised and framed this ground plotte, for the minde, as for pleasure and delight.21

By its earliest definition then, a garden must be enclosed, but where previously gardens were used for economic purposes, Hill tracks the movement to the type of garden that we might imagine Angelo having, a place for devout contemplation—or for illicit pleasure.22 As the garden gains in estimation as a location of pleasure, gardens began to be built adjoining city houses, but Hill is careful to note that while they could survive “open, and undefended in the wyde fielde” (2), that having now moved into the city, they require defenses. Indeed, Hill spends the first part of his treatise describing how the space for the enclosure of the garden should be chosen, underlining the fruitlessness of having an unenclosed garden: For asmuche as the same may be thought a mere madnesse, to have chosen out a fitte plotte of grounde, and to cast, digge, and dresse it seemely in all poyntes: yet lying open day and night, aswell to the incursious and common haunte, as to the injuries to be wrought and done by robbers 20 OED, “Garden, n.,” 1. 21 Hill, The gardeners labyrinth, 1–2. 22 The garden could be a religious hortus conclusus, or, as it eventually becomes for Angelo, like the secret garden for sexual encounters in the tradition of the Roman de la Rose—something perhaps more akin to the Italian Renaissance giardino segreto. For more on the relationship between these two kinds of gardens, see Gianni Venturi, “The Giardino Segreto.”

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or theeues, foules and beastes: for that cause, I here minde to intreate of the sundry maners of fensing, and compassing in the Garden groundes in auncient time. (11)

According to Hill’s treatise, it does not matter how well you have cultivated your garden if you are not enclosing it. Hill imagines the unenclosed garden as lying vulnerable and accessible. The garden is “open” anytime, to anyone, but rather than that openness making it a public space of community, it makes the space less valuable. The garden itself needs to be protected from the “incursious and common haunte” who would penetrate the space—or worse yet, from the “robbers or theeues” who would steal from that garden. Like the virginal female body that Measure for Measure transforms into Angelo’s hortus conclusus, the gardens lose their value if they are not enclosed with some kind of “fensing.” In Measure for Measure, Angelo seems to have followed the instruction of these kinds of early modern gardening manuals; the play makes it clear that his garden is a private space that is not publicly accessible, for it is “a garden circummured with brick” (4.1.25). “Circummured” is Shakespeare’s coinage, adding the prefix “circum” meaning “around,” to the Latin murare meaning “to wall.”23 In one new word, Shakespeare encapsulates the idea of an enclosed garden—the surrounding walls delineate and define the space of the garden. This wall circumscribing Angelo’s garden is made of “brick,” a substance that requires extra human intervention: the clay must be shaped and then hardened by baking. Hill’s Gardeners labyrinth provides a hierarchy of different types of garden walls, explaining that “the skilfull and warie husbande men … buylte them walles about of free stone artly layed and mortered together, & some did, with baked bricke like handled” (11–12). John Parkinson, an apothecary and botanist at the courts of James I and Charles I, writes in Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris (1629) that a garden must have “such helpes of bricke or stone wals to defend it,” again imagining the space as vulnerable to unwanted incursions without the construction of a brick barrier to surround it.24 John Rea’s later flower-gardening manual, Flora, agrees that “[f]or the Foundation and a foot higher, Stone may serve, but after Brick is best.”25 Indeed, a brick wall, with its carefully shaped bricks 23 OED, “Circummure, v.” 24 Parkinson, Paradisi, 1. Parkinson kept his own enclosed botanical garden in London (though not attached to his home) at Long Acre in Covent Garden. 25 Rea, Flora, 3. This treatise focuses on naming, identifying, and describing the characteristics of the individual kinds of flowers. These acts of categorizing and classifying plants that the horticultural manuals perform are a way of controlling and ordering Nature according to a

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and mortar filling any gaps between the solid structure, is a seemingly impermeable boundary. And yet, Hill’s Gardeners labyrinth explains that “THe most commendable inclosure for euery Garden plot, is a quick set Hedge, made with the Brambles and white Thorne: but the stronger and most defensiue Hedge is the same” (13), because after careful setting, this enclosure will strengthen and grow on its own and will not require the same repairs that a brick wall would. Lawson agrees that “fences of dead-wood, as pales, will not last” (15), favoring living fences of “quickwood, and moats” (16). Measure for Measure depicts one potentially nature-derived boundary in the “moated grange” (3.1.254). The protective moat underlines the ongoing maintenance of Mariana’s virginity after rejection by her betrothed Angelo, upon which the later substitution of her body for Isabella’s will depend. Unlike a moat created by diverting a natural water source, or a growing hedge, a brick wall is a human-made enclosure—an enclosure that is not contingent on the fertility of Nature. Given Angelo’s obsession with limiting and containing the fertility of the female body throughout the play, it is not surprising then that his method of enclosing the garden rejects Nature’s fertility in favor of a dead and impermeable human-made structure. Angelo over-compensates for a potential weakness: his hardline stance against sexual depravity masks his hypocritical desire for Isabella; his garden is enclosed by a brick wall, because he is so concerned that it not be penetrated—unless he desires it. Yet, the gardening manuals provide a glimmer of doubt as to the efficacy of such a human-reliant wall: perhaps the growth of nature is better suited to protect itself. Lawson worries that even the best fence may not be enough to keep the space of the garden safe from unwanted entrants. He explains that you must “Fence well therefore, let your plot be wholly in your owne power, that you make all your fence your selfe: for neighbours fencing is none at all, or very careless” (14). Access must be carefully regulated and control cannot be given by default to someone else through a fence. Lawson continues this depiction of the garden as a place simply waiting for an intrusion from someone else, providing an ominous warning to “Take heed of a doore or window, (yea of a wall) of any other mans … yea, though it be nayld up, or the wall be high, for perhaps they will prove theeves” (14–15). A New Orchard and Garden now opens up the practical probability that the wall that must be so carefully constructed to demarcate the boundaries of the garden space cannot remain human system. For more on how naming and classifying plants was an attempt to order the natural world, see Anna Pavord, The Naming of Names.

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fully closed: it needs openings like “a doore or window.” Indeed, the owner of the garden space must be allowed to enter it. As with the wall itself then, the question is who controls these points of ingress. The owner cannot let the openings be “of any other mans”; they must be his doors and windows, his entrances into the garden, his movement into the enclosed space. Just as the threshold of the enclosed garden is vital to controlling its space, so too is maintaining the bodily membrane marking the enclosure of the female body—the hymen. There may be “theeues” lurking outside, waiting to steal flowers from the garden, or perhaps virginity from the female body. By desiring to enter the cloister (itself a kind of hortus conclusus that she enters willingly), Isabella recognizes the power of her virginity and seeks to preserve her authority over her own body.26

Unlocking the Garden Isabella’s description of Angelo’s garden in Measure for Measure echoes the emphasis on the vulnerability of gardens and their entry points in these popular gardening manuals. Angelo seems to have heeded and expanded on the warnings about access points in early modern gardens: entrance into his garden requires first going through “a plancked gate, / That makes his opening with this bigger key” (4.1.27–28), and then using yet another key to get through “a little door” (4.1.29). Angelo’s walled garden has only one point of entry, and then a second threshold, contingent on unlocking the first one. If the image of the enclosed garden is emblematic of a female body, then Angelo’s version of the female body is unsurprisingly doubly enclosed. This locking only serves to make Angelo’s desire for Isabella more perverse: he requires that she is the one to use the keys to penetrate the walls of the garden space. Indeed, making Isabella complicit in the penetration of the garden mirrors Angelo’s use of extortion to get what he wants; he forces her to consent to what should be his act of rape. By having Isabella (and then later Mariana) unlock the thresholds of the garden, Angelo forces them to spatially enact their own hymeneal breakage.27 James Wolveridge’s obstetrical treatise, Speculum Matricis 26 For more on virginal resistance, see Jankowski, “Pure Resistance,” 227. 27 Though it is Mariana who will go into the garden to lose her virginity to Angelo, he seems to have Isabella walk through the process, as he “did show [her] / The way twice o’er” (4.1.37–38), giving her some control over the space through the keys. For more on women and keys, see Katharine R. Larson, Early Modern Women, 48–50.

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Hybernicum (1670), depicts a similarly spatial relationship between keys and the hymen when he imagines how his treatise is “the Key unlocks a Cabinet, / … / It breaks the Hymen, and the Maidenhead.”28 Wolveridge understands the process of unlocking the female body as a physical breaking of that body’s “Hymen, and the Maidenhead.” The treatise then switches from one image of a feminized body with a penetrable threshold—the hymen—to another image that emphasizes the closure, but potential opening of Nature and all female bodies—“Natures Gate” (a2r). Nature becomes a kind of hortus conclusus here, but the walls of the garden, the gate, and the keys to unlock that gate are not controlled by Nature herself, but by the male author. Measure for Measure complicates the idea of who can control the space of the enclosed garden—and therefore the hymen of the virginal female body—by making Angelo the owner of the space and Isabella the feminized garden, but giving Isabella the keys. Though she is coerced into enacting the spatial version of her own loss of virginity by unlocking the garden gates, Isabella’s access to the keys allows her to eventually control the space and substitute in Mariana’s body. Yet, for Wolveridge, the gated garden and the intact hymen are not permitted to remain, because the female body must become fertile. And, other than for the Virgin Mary, this fertility requires opening. Wolveridge’s prefatory poem imagines that a child passes through the “gate” and moves from the “mother-womb to the mother-earth” (a2r). The once virginal female body is now the “mother-womb” and the “gate” where the hymen had been is again opened, though this time not by sex, but by childbirth. In this moment of opening, the female body becomes equated with the feminized body of Nature, or “mother-earth.” This hortus conclusus cannot remain enclosed, with the fertility of the female body pushing through its boundaries. Measure for Measure likewise pushes towards the bounds of the impossibly unachievable virginal-fruitful hortus conclusus tradition. Juliet enacts the fruitful part of this equation, but because she is unmarried and not under the coverture of a husband, she denies the possibility of the enclosed garden. Sex visibly marks the female body as open: it “with character too gross is writ on Juliet” (1.2.132). Indeed, Juliet’s unmistakably pregnant body is paraded in a public display of her crime—a failure to maintain her body as a private object. Even when a pregnant female body, like Mistress Elbow’s, is contained by marriage, Measure for Measure expresses anxiety about the visibility of its penetrability: Mistress Elbow is “great-bellied” (2.1.91) and cannot contain her appetite, entering a brothel 28 Wolveridge, Speculum Matricis, a1 r.

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because of her “longing … / for stewed prunes” (2.1.81–82)—a longing that indexes an unruly sexual appetite, and an anxiety about the unknowability of paternity in the face of female spatial mobility. 29 Though played for laughs, Elbow has not kept his wife appropriately enclosed, has not (as Angelo would have it) kept her locked in a private inaccessible space. In fact, by venturing into the suburbs of Vienna where the brothels are located, Mistress Elbow has taken herself outside the confines of the city’s walls. According to the play’s logic, the brothels are a kind of excessively generative and specifically unbounded sexual garden: by entering that space of uncontained sexuality, the boundedness of Mistress Elbow’s own generativity comes into question. If the female body is dangerously porous in Measure for Measure, then as embodied in Angelo’s garden, its openings are paradoxically extra closed. Just as in the gardening manuals, the question then becomes one of who controls access to those doors, who holds their keys. For the gardening manuals, the owner of the garden (who is perhaps not coincidentally often called the husbandman) is not conflated with the garden itself, just as the description of Angelo’s garden is not a description of his body. The enclosed garden is then Nature’s gendered body circumscribed by the horticultural control of the husbandman, just as the generative human body is imagined to be rendered impermeable through the coverture of a husband. Of course, the problem with this model of containment is that in the postlapsarian world, other than for the Virgin Mary, generation requires the porousness of the female body at least twice over—once for conception and once for parturition. In Measure for Measure, Angelo owns the garden and should fit into what Hill calls “the husbandly Gardener and owner” (L2r) in the Gardeners labyrinth; however, Angelo is unwilling to marry and so the garden becomes the body of the virginal Isabella, whose penetration he desires precisely and paradoxically because of her enclosed-ness that he would rend open.30 The play’s disturbing version of the hortus conclusus can only flourish in the substitution of Mariana’s body for Isabella’s, one sealed virgin for another, one who actually wants to marry Angelo for one who seeks perpetual virginity. Isabella and Mariana together can be 29 As another threshold, the mouth substitutes for the vagina, with Mistress Elbow eating the stewed prunes (with a pun on stews as brothels) in a kind of re-enactment of Eve’s eating the apple, resulting in her curse of labor pains. For further discussion of Mistress Elbow, see Mario DiGangi, “Pleasure and Danger.” 30 Over the course of The Gardeners labyrinth, Hill refers to the “husbandly gardener” an additional eight times, emphasizing the potential relationship between being a gardener and being a husband (30, 55, 57, 58, and in part 2: L2r, 5, 13, 84).

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transformed into the totality of the hortus conclusus: Isabella can remain circummured and Mariana can become fruitful.31

Flowering the Body The success of Mariana’s substitution for Isabella hinges on one final, even more specific, horticultural transformation or metamorphosis. Several other essays in this collection imagine Shakespearean moments of metamorphosis in the Ovidian tradition, and I propose that in Measure for Measure, these physical and rhetorical substitutions are a metamorphosis that blurs the lines between plant and human. Angelo provides a hint of what the enclosed garden contains when he describes the once-virginal body that he coerces as “a deflowered maid” (4.4.20). While deflowering persists today as a colloquial term for the loss of virginity, putting it back into its early modern context reveals that the metaphor is far more physically realized than it might appear. Not only does this metaphor extend the link to the virginal body as an enclosed garden, but early modern obstetrical and gynecological manuals treat it as a bodily fact. As Peter Chamberlen explains in Dr. Chamberlain’s Midwifes Practice (1665), “usually Maids begin to bloom at the second seaven years,” imagining the virginal female body as a flower that blooms into sexuality around the age of fourteen.32 Indeed, the connection between virgins and flowers, explored elsewhere in this collection by Lisa Hopkins, is extensive in cultural tradition, with the Virgin Mary herself being especially linked to the rose, lily, and the violet.33 The association is taken up by the Petrarchan poetic tradition, as Lucio demonstrates when he first meets Isabella, addressing directly her status as “virgin” and immediately linking his knowledge of that fact to her “cheek-roses” (1.4.16). In this formulation, her blushing signifies her purity, even as the florification of a part of her body signifies her being in bloom. Lucio engages in a partial Petrarchan blazon of Isabella’s body here, but it is 31 The play calls into question their division into those two different roles: the Duke appears to offer (or perhaps, given the power dynamic, coerce) marriage to Isabella. Measure for Measure, then, seems to suggest the failure of the Catholic hortus conclusus tradition at suitably enclosing the female body, and offers in its stead the coverture of Protestant marriage—though as the play has already shown, its efficacy may be likewise questionable. 32 Chamberlen, Dr. Chamberlain’s, 69. This blooming of the virginal female body may be related to her reaching menarche, or what early modern medical literature often referred to as having her first “flowers.” See Thomas Raynalde, Byrth of Mankinde, Hiii; and Jakob Rüff, Expert Midwife, 191, 192. 33 See Jack Goody, The Culture of Flowers, 155–6; and Roy Strong, The Artist, 103–7. For a discussion of Elizabeth I’s association with flowers, see Bushnell, Green Desire, 118.

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also a floral transformation in which her cheek-roses as marker of virginity substitute for another part of her body—the hymen—that is also floral in early modern discourse. To be no longer virginal is to be “deflowered,” according to Rüff’s The Expert Midwife (59). Later obstetrical treatises fully elaborate this metaphor of deflowering. Nicholas Culpeper’s A Directory for Midwives (1651) describes that “the Carunculae, or fleshy knobs together with this [membrane], resemble the form of a Rose half blown, and therefore anciently called a flower, and thence came the word [To deflower a Virgin].”34 Thomas Chamberlayne’s The Compleat Midwifes Practice (1659) also metamorphoses the hymen into a flower, explaining that it is called “by the French Bouton de Rose; for that it beareth a near resemblance with the expanded bud of a Rose or Gillo-Flower; Hence therefore originally sprung that common expression of the Deflowering of Virgins.”35 In attempting to describe the hymen, that most crucial and unknowable membrane, both texts use the image of “a flower,” enacting a transformation of a part of the virginal female body into a horticultural body. The line between human and horticultural body is blurred, as the female virginal body contains a rose precisely at the fraught point of entry into her body. If Isabella and Mariana’s bodies are enclosed gardens, that (as the gardening manuals suggest) must be guarded from thieves, then the valuable objects that their gardens contain are flowers.36 Indeed, gardeners like Parkinson imagine that they should “furnish the inward parts, and beds with those fine flowers.”37 The “inward parts” of the garden, just like the inner parts of the virginal body, contain flowers. And the flowers are laid out in “beds.” If we follow through on this horticultural logic and imagine Mariana and Isabella as gardens with floral hymens, the substitution of one virginal body for the other becomes synecdochically the substitution of one flower for another. The bed trick in Measure for Measure, then, becomes a kind of flower-bed trick. Angelo may attempt to control the generativity of the garden through his ownership, but in fact, its growth exceeds his control—and his knowledge. He does not recognize the replacement of one flower with another. The gardening manuals may claim to provide their readers with the knowledge to control the growth of Nature, but their very existence suggests that that control was only limitedly successful. Herbals like John Gerard’s The Herball and Parkinson’s 34 Culpeper, A Directory, 30. 35 Chamberlayne, The compleat midwifes, 302. 36 Indeed, beginning around the time of Measure for Measure, the flower trade was taking off and bulbs were becoming quite valuable. See Tigner, Literature and the Renaissance Garden, 159–94. 37 Parkinson, Paradisi, 8.

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Paradisi were catalogues detailing the names and characteristics of plants, including intricate woodcuts of each plant. This need to categorize and describe testifies to precisely how difficult it was for early modern humans to recognize and differentiate between the thousands of plants that were growing around them.38 Parkinson expresses precisely this kind of anxiety about the interchangeability of flowers, acknowledging the possibility that “a counterfeit one hath beene put in the place thereof; and thus many have been deceiued of their daintiest flowers, without remedy or true knowledge of the defect.”39 Controlling the space of the garden as an embodiment of herself, Isabella gains the ability to replace her flower with “a counterfeit one,” leaving Angelo “without remedy or true knowledge of the defect.” From a horticultural perspective, the flower-bed trick is made possible by man’s inability to ever precisely know and control Nature’s growth. Angelo may own the space of the garden, but as transformed horticultural bodies, Isabella and Mariana have the “true knowledge” and agency to resist his, and perhaps even the Duke’s, attempts to control their generativity. While the Duke’s proposal to Isabella in the last moments of the play and Isabella’s troubling silence in response have long provoked critical debates about her ability to resist patriarchal reabsorption through marriage, I wonder if her silence might signify her choice to remain a horticultural subject. 40 Where silence from a human might signify acquiescence, or at the very least powerlessness under the authority of the Duke, a horticultural body does not need speech to resist: as no longer only human, as a flower garden, Isabella resists circumscription by patriarchal society and maintains control over her own body.

Bibliography Primary Sources Austen, Ralph. A treatise of fruit-trees: shewing the manner of grafting, setting, pruning, and order of them in all respects. Oxford, 1653. 38 With colonial endeavors to the New World and increased trade to the East, the early modern period also saw an influx of new plants (flowers in particular) that were not native to England. See Tigner, Literature and the Renaissance Garden, 159–60. 39 Parkinson, Paradisi, 13. 40 For example, Jankowski argues that “here silence … represents her choice to resist the Duke” (“Pure Resistance,” 249). Steven Mullaney in The Place of the Stage disagrees and falls into the camp that does not believe her silence indicates resistance (110).

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Chamberlayne, Thomas. The Compleat Midwife’s Practice Enlarged. In the most Weighty and High Concernments of the Birth of Man. London, 1659. Chamberlen, Peter. Dr. Chamberlain’s Midwifes Practice: Or, A Guide for Women. London, 1665. Culpeper, Nicholas. A Directory for Midwives: or, A Guide for Women. London, 1651. Gerard, John. The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes. London, 1597. Hill, Thomas. The gardeners labyrinth containing a discourse of the gardeners life, in the yearly travels to be bestowed on his plot of earth, for the use of a garden: with the later inventions, and rare secretes thereunto added (as the like) not heretofore published. London, 1577. Hill, Thomas. A most briefe and pleasaunte treatise, teachyng how to dresse, sowe, and set a garden. London, 1558. Lawson, William. A new orchard and garden. Or The best way for planting, grafting, and to make the ground good, for a rich orchard. London, 1618. Markham, Gervase. The English husbandman. The first part: containing the knowledge of the true nature of every soyle within this kingdome. London, 1613. Mascall, Leonard. A Booke of the Arte and maner how to Plant and Graffe all sortes of Trees. London, 1582. Parkinson, John. Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris. London: 1629. Raynalde, Thomas. The byrth of mankinde, otherwyse named the womans booke. London, 1545. Rea, John. Flora: Seu De Florum Cultura. Or, A Complete Florilege, Furnished with all Requisites belonging to a Florist. London, 1665. Rüff, Jakob. The Expert Midwife. London, 1637. Shakespeare, William. Measure for Measure. In The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd ed., edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus, 2048-2108. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008. Wolveridge, James. Speculum Matricis Hybernicum; or, the Irish Midwives Handmaid. London, 1670.

Secondary Sources Adelman, Janet. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest. New York: Routledge, 1992. Bertram, Benjamin. “Measure for Measure and the Discourse of Husbandry.” Modern Philology 110, no. 4 (2013): 459–88. Bowerbank, Sylvia. Speaking for Nature: Women and Ecologies of Early Modern England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Bushnell, Rebecca. Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens. New York: Cornell University Press, 2003.

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Crane, Mary Thomas. “Male Pregnancy and Cognitive Permeability in Measure for Measure.” Shakespeare Quarterly 39, no. 3 (1998): 269–92. DiGangi, Mario. “Pleasure and Danger: Measuring Female Sexuality in Measure for Measure.” English Literary History 60, no. 3 (1993): 589–609. Dollimore, Jonathan. “Transgression and Surveillance in Measure for Measure.” In Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, 72–87. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985. Goody, Jack. The Culture of Flowers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Hunt, John Dixon. Garden and Grove: The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English Imagination, 1600–1750. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986. Jankowski, Theodora A. “Pure Resistance: Queer(y)ing Virginity in William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure.” Shakespeare Studies 26 (1998): 218–55. Laroche, Rebecca, and Jennifer Munroe. Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Larson, Katherine R. Early Modern Women in Conversation. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Low, Anthony. The Georgic Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. McRae, Andrew. God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Mullaney, Steven. The Place of the Stage: License, Play and Power in Renaissance England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Munroe, Jennifer. Gender and the Garden in Early Modern English Literature. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008. Munroe, Jennifer, and Rebecca Laroche, eds. Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity. New York: Palgrave, 2011. Ostovich, Helen. “‘Here in this garden’: The Iconography of the Virgin Queen in Shakespeare’s Richard II.” In Marian Moments in Early Modern British Drama, edited by Regina Buccola and Lisa Hopkins, 21–34. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007. Pavord, Anna. The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants. New York: Bloomsbury, 2005. Roberts, Sasha. “Shakespeare ‘creepes into the womens closets about bedtime’: Women Reading in a Room of Their Own.” In Renaissance Configurations: Voices/Bodies/Spaces, 1580–1690, edited by Gordon McMullan, 30–63. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Samson, Alexander, ed. “Introduction. ‘Locus Amoenus’: Gardens and Horticulture in the Renaissance.” Renaissance Studies 25, no. 1 (2011): 1–23. Stewart, Stanley. The Enclosed Garden: The Tradition and the Image in SeventeenthCentury Poetry. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966. Strong, Roy. The Artist and the Garden. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

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Thirsk, Joan, ed. An Agrarian History of England and Wales: 1500–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967. Tigner, Amy L. Literature and the Renaissance Garden from Elizabeth I to Charles II: England’s Paradise. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012. Venturi, Gianni. “The Giardino Segreto of the Renaissance.” In The History of Garden Design: The Western Tradition from the Renaissance to the Present Day, edited by Monique Mosser and Georges Teyssot, 88–90. London: Thames and Hudson, 1991.

About the Author Claire Duncan completed her PhD from University of Toronto in 2017. Her research focuses on plants and women in early modern England, especially honing in on moments where they mingle as hybrid horticultural bodies. She works in the not-for-profit sector in communications and marketing.

6. Cymbeline’s Plant People Jeffrey Theis Abstract Characters in Cymbeline are consistently described as plants or as utilizing plants. Thinking of characters as plants allows us to take a trans-corporeal perspective on identity in the play where human beings are materially interwoven with their surrounding environment rather than separate from and dominating the natural world. Focusing on people as living, developing plants also emphasizes ongoing process and transformation rather than fixed, static identities. Keywords: ecocriticism, trans-corporeality, non-human, time, romance

“I cannot delve him to the root.”1 So begins the first Gentleman in describing Posthumus’s obscure lineage to the second Gentleman in Cymbeline. In a play concerned with individual and nationalist identities, plants, animals, climate, and geology not only situate characters within British ecologies, they offer ways to think about human identities as enmeshed in the non-human world. Many leading characters are linked to non-human nature in multiple ways. Innogen is likened to the air, to a budded branch and vines, her brothers to cedar branches and their rocky cave, Posthumus to plants and to a lion, and both the doctor and Queen’s characters are developed through their knowledge and manipulation of botanicals. Who and what one is can only be determined through one’s connection rather than opposition to the non-human. Although still considered one of Shakespeare’s lesser plays,

1 William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, Arden 3rd Series, ed. Valerie Wayne, 1.1.28. An early version of this essay was written for the Shakespeare Association of America seminar in 2018, “Object Lessons in Personhood,” led by Kevin Curran. I am especially appreciative of feedback from Ben Bertram. The seeds for many of the ideas were planted by the “Home Ecologies” seminar from the 2017 SAA, co-led by Jennifer Munroe and Mary Trull.

Staub, S.C. (ed.), Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463721332_ch06

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Cymbeline presents one of Shakespeare’s most developed explorations of humanity’s place in the natural world. During the early modern period, the def inition of the human most commonly occurs through exceptionalism; one is what one is because one is not someone or something else. As Laurie Shannon argues, human exceptionalist discourse typically posits man as better than and above the environment. But through her focus on natural history and the zoographic tradition, Shannon persuasively argues that Shakespeare and Montaigne occasionally spin this construction on its head to argue that humankind is less than, not greater than, the animal world. Lacking a hide/shell adequate to nature’s extremes, mankind is “unaccommodated” and found incapable when challenged by nature’s extremes.2 During the period a non-binary view on human/animal also existed in which mankind shares attributes with the created world such as the vegetative, sensitive, and intellectual souls. As Susan C. Staub notes in the introduction to this collection, the Aristotelian concept of the tripartite soul merges with animist materialism to link the vegetal with the human. While this non-binary approach still posited man as the supreme earthly example of these souls, it placed humanity on a continuum.3 Just as with the non-human animal, the plant shares qualities with the human animal that invite comparison of similitudes that, initially, bring the human and non-human together. Yet, as Hillary Nunn argues in the case of greensick virgins, a person could, in theory, dangerously slide into the vegetal world, losing human health and identity.4 While the human might share qualities with animals and plants, they ultimately have some qualities or essence that, for better or worse, distinguish them from their animal and vegetal cousins. More recent ecocritical theory builds upon the concept of human beings as existing on a continuum sharing attributes with plants and animals but questions and complicates the differentiating impulses still apparent in the vegetative, sensitive, and intellectual souls model. In Bodily Natures, Stacy Alaimo challenges the exceptionalist identity through the concept of “trans-corporeality.” Trans-corporeality offers a useful contrast to Shannon’s negative exceptionalism as a way to see early modern human beings in relation to and as part of the environment. For Alaimo, “the human is always 2 Shannon, “Poor, Bare, Forked,” esp. 172–74 and 195. See also Shannon’s development of this idea in The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales. 3 See Shannon’s summary of Aristotle and Pico della Mirandola’s views in “Poor, Bare, Forked,” 172. 4 Nunn, “On Vegetating Virgins.”

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intermeshed with the more-than-human world,” and this inclusiveness “underlies the extent to which the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment’.”5 All of these approaches to defining human identity, be it exceptionalist (positive or negative), slightly binary but on a continuum, or trans-corporeal, posit that one’s sense of self or identity does not come sui generis; rather, it is through external things that we dialectically construct our sense of self. But how we construct that sense of self has profound implications for how human beings see themselves in their environment. To be similar to yet ultimately different from animals and plants can create a human being, and by extension human society, alienated from the natural world, even if only proximally alienated. But to see us as made up of and shaped by the more-than-human world implies that we are always of our environment. The question of self and identity pervades Shakespeare’s corpus of works, but it is often underappreciated how thoroughly Shakespeare posits the issue of identity within a broader environmental frame. Identity and environment are central to Cymbeline—a play rife with kidnapped children, cross-dressing heroines, a decapitated-disguised step-brother, and an orphan hero all traversing across England and Wales with expeditions to Rome. Perhaps most illustrative of using the external, non-human to construct identity is Jupiter’s riddling tablet left on Posthumus’s chest; yet overlooked is how the riddle establishes human identities paradoxically by dehumanizing and recasting them in terms of the non-human environment of plants, elements, and animals. Posthumus Leonatus is a “lion’s whelp,” which is a literalization of his being son of Leonatus—lion born. Innogen is the materially immaterial “piece of air.” The princes are branches of a cedar tree that will be reconnected to the trunk, thus, connecting them to their father, and, by extension, rendering the men of the family one singular tree. But this clarity only comes through the long discovery of Act 5, Scene 5 along with the Soothsayer’s interpretation. Posthumus’s initial, muddled interpretation of the tablet is telling, however, for how we might begin to assess Jupiter’s ecovision: ‘Tis still a dream, or else such stuff as madmen Tongue and brain not; either both, or nothing, Or senseless speaking, or a speaking such As sense cannot untie. Be what it is, 5 Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 2. Much of this theory is also informed by the move to reinvesting matter with agentic qualities developed by Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter.

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The action of my life is like it, which I’ll keep, If but for sympathy. (5.4.116–21)

The riddling prophecy is a jumble of thought and sense that Posthumus’s reason and speech cannot interpret. But his faulty modes of interpretation and navigating the human world have already been exposed and then destroyed earlier in the play. He lacks social status and significance in a corrupt, royal court, and his ready belief in Iachimo’s lies reveals his vision of the world is clouded by patriarchal anxiety. The ideology governing both human realms, Cymbeline’s court and Roman exile, are toxic and place one’s ultimate value and status upon the ability to control other people and the world around them. For example, the Queen has risen to power in the court seeking to advance her and her lineage over all else, and Posthumus’s bet with Iachimo, and its outcome, presumes that men are superior to and can control women’s desires and bodies. Epistemology and ontology fail him. Jupiter’s tablet, then, serves to defamiliarize Posthumus’s already confused world; yet, Posthumus says, “The action of my life is like it.” He recognizes something relevant to him in the tablet’s words, but he doesn’t have an adequate interpretive frame to make it coherent. Jupiter’s prophecy defamiliarizes as it turns people into non-people, and it calls into question the relationship between the human and non-human. The tablet and Posthumus’s initial interpretation set up the play’s final scene and its various discoveries and reunions, but it also serves post hoc as a guide for the audience to go back to earlier scenes in the play to consider how human identity is inseparable from non-human nature. In addition to casting human beings as parts of nature, the prophecy also constructs human individuals as fragmented parts only made whole when connected to others. For Posthumus, he is not only a lion, he is the offspring of another lion. For Innogen, she is not the air itself; rather, she is a “piece” of it. The princes are not individual trees, they are part of another tree. Each attains a fuller sense of their identity by being reconstructed as a part of a natural world independent from human systems. In addition, each of these identities does not cast the characters as distinct individuals but, rather, as interconnected and interdependent. For these four characters, their nature-based identities do not fit the exceptionalist paradigm as being better or worse than the environment; instead, they point more toward the trans-corporeal, where similitude and likeness to natural objects/beings suggests a material connection between the human and non-human. Fittingly, this riddle presents us with a paradoxical process of identity formation. For while these characters find their identities as aspects of the non-human world, seeing themselves as

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such, in turn, establishes a more clear and firm identity that allows them to find their rightful place in the court and in the world. Their naturalized, or naturalizing, identities present a sharp contrast to the social climbing Queen and her comedic blockhead son, Cloten. As I will demonstrate, both the Queen and Cloten see themselves as separate from nature as a means to mark their power and status. But, in another of the play’s paradoxes, the more they present themselves as masters of their world, the more diminished they are in terms of identity and status. The particular spin that the play presents on the trans-corporeal identity leads to a particularly complicated relationship between the individual, nature, and social status. Trans-corporeality would seem to instill a sense of humility in which human beings see themselves as part of nature, not separate from the environment. But for Posthumus and the royal siblings, the blending of human and non-human ironically places and justifies that placement at the top of their social world; whereas, the Queen and Cloten’s exceptionalist approach renders them food for worms and at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Cymbeline takes an all-encompassing approach to the natural world and various ecosystems, and it is important to note that Shakespeare’s play engages rocks, air, earth, birds and mammals, as well as small plants and stately trees to create a comprehensive vision for how and why human beings must understand themselves and others through their environments. By narrowing our focus primarily to plants, however, we can start to see at play the tension between exceptionalist and trans-corporeal constructions of human identity as well as a focus on long-term growth and development. Examining how characters use plants and, more radically, how some characters are plants allows us to see the Queen’s manipulation of plants as an example of exceptionalist thinking while descriptions of Posthumus, the princes, and Innogen as plants helps us see how geographically and ontologically their identities are place-based, trans-corporeal, and more than human. In addition, the focus on plants in the play shifts one’s perspective on time as Shakespearean romances are wont to do. When we think of Posthumus as an eagle or a lion (1.1.140, 5.4.108), the focus tends to be on fixed qualities like divinity/royalty/bravery, but descriptions of him as a plant focus more on temporally governed growth that requires patience.

Part 1: Exceptionalism Found Wanting: Being Out of Place The sense of place and one’s place in the world is made central to Cymbeline in the opening scene when the two gentlemen discuss the upheaval in

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Cymbeline’s court. There is an especially strong focus on displacement and false or misunderstood identities. No one is in her or his proper place nor is anyone’s true identity as it outwardly seems. The two princes were abducted twenty years ago. Posthumus is banished; the courtiers all shape their reactions to please the king but inwardly rue the new Queen’s rise and Cymbeline’s siding with the Queen and her son, Cloten, and against the wishes of his daughter, Innogen. For Posthumus, both his identity and development are described in place-based, botanical terms. When the first gentleman says, “I cannot delve him to the root” (1.1.28), he initiates a complex and extended metaphor of Posthumus as plant. Posthumus’s life and childhood development are seen in botanical terms. Cymbeline takes in the orphan and “Breeds him” giving him support so that “in’s spring became a harvest,” Posthumus later becoming “A sample to the youngest, to th’ more mature / A glass that feated them, and to the graver / A child that guided dotards” (lines 42, 46, 48–50). He is part of a family tree that cannot be easily traced back. In addition, Cymbeline himself is a foster parent/gardener who has transplanted Posthumus to the court where he “breeds” him so that he can ripen and yield a productive harvest. The first Gentleman might be offering an unintentional note of caution here. While a quick harvest seems to praise both the gardener (Cymbeline) and plant (Posthumus), we soon learn that Posthumus needs much more growth and development, and the play itself prioritizes patience and duration over quick results. Still, according to the Gentleman’s report, this productivity makes Posthumus a positive model for all ages, young, middle aged, and the elderly. Indeed, the reference to “dotards” completes the botanical metaphor as dotards are old trees that have the trunk and/or limbs decaying.6 If we think of Cymbeline as a dotard (Jupiter’s prophecy presents him as a cedar that has lost its branches), the raging king is immune to Posthumus’s charms. As a transplant, the court is not Posthumus’s native environment, but he has thrived under Cymbeline’s care, only to be displaced (“banished”) when he marries the native Innogen. The gentleman does not specify the plant species that Posthumus is. This lack of precision certainly helps underscore the ambiguity of his lineage and identity. What appears more important to the speaker is the use value of Posthumus-as-plant. He is a beneficial plant that should be productive and 6 OED, “dotard,” A. adj. 2: “A tree that has lost its top or branches, and of which the trunk alone remains, more or less in a state of decay. Sometimes identified with pollard; sometimes apparently distinguished, as having lost its branches by damage or decay, and not by lopping or polling.” B., n.2: “Of a tree: remaining as a decayed trunk without branches.”

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certainly aids all ages of humanity. In other plays, Shakespeare often casts the question of lineage and offspring in horticultural terms with a focus on the act of grafting. As Miranda Wilson argues, grafting as a metaphor for procreation can be ambiguous and fraught. In The Rape of Lucrece, Lucrece sees herself as a slip married to the stock that is her husband, but her rape, in her mind, not only pollutes her but works backward to pollute her husband’s stock.7 Procreation as seen through the metaphor of grafting, however, often renders the plants themselves as passive, non-agentic, and turns the focus to the gardener who brings the two plants together. Who the gardener is indicates who is in control not only of nature but of the family lineage seen through this horticultural practice. Erin Ellerbeck argues that the grafting trope, in the case of the Duchess in The Duchess of Malfi, is a model of female agency as the Duchess, not the patriarchs of her family, chooses with whom she wishes to breed. Ellerbeck persuasively argues that the play, “… uses a botanical model … to express a deviation from normal patterns of aristocratic procreation and to point to relationships that flourish in interdependent and exceptional ways.”8 The burgeoning publication of agricultural and horticultural improvement manuals further brought the discourse of grafting, in particular, and agrarian improvement techniques, in general, into the vernacular. Climatic stresses on agricultural yields brought on by the Little Ice Age as well as demographic pressures brought on by rising and mobile populations necessitated and further intensified innovations in farming and gardening.9 Within Shakespeare’s time, then, grafting is not only a marker of the gardener’s ingenuity and control, it also is part of a larger anxiety regarding dearth and environmental instability. Grafting as a trope for procreation and lineage pervades Shakespeare’s canon from the marginal references in The Rape of Lucrece and All’s Well That Ends Well to the much more famous debate between Perdita and Polixenes in The Winter’s Tale. Although Jean Feerick finds ample examples of grafting in Cymbeline, I will argue that the play’s references to this horticultural technique are both minimal and minimized.10 Presumably, the princes as cedar branches will be grafted back to the “old stock” trunk that is their father, Cymbeline, but even that 7 Wilson, “Bastard Grafts, Crafted Fruits,” 104–5. 8 Ellerbeck, “‘A Bett’ring of Nature’,” 94. Not only pregnancy but adoption also is cast in grafting terms as a means to explore family and lineage; see Ellerbeck’s article “Adoption and the Language of Horticulture.” 9 See Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age. 10 Feerick, “The Imperial Graft,” 211–27. Although I think Feerick overstates the link between grafting and the mixing of races in the play, as the primary references to grafting are restorations

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grafting reference is oblique and framed more as a reparation of a unified, continuous botanical identity rather than horticultural innovation. In the case of Posthumus, he is a whole plant of great value, but his identity is unclear not due to grafting or hybridization; rather, the entirety of the plant is uncertain as his roots/origins are hidden. Nonetheless, as with the gardener who grafts the plant for its betterment, there is human agency involved with Posthumus-as-plant. Cymbeline is described as breeding the orphan in his court. The gentleman’s description focuses on Posthumus’s being a transplant that has thrived in new soil because of the planter-king’s actions as well as the subject-plant’s own intrinsic qualities.11 As we will see contrasted later in Cloten and the Queen’s nativist rhetoric, Posthumus’s introduction suggests a complex and nuanced approach to ecological, placebased identity where identity and place are changeable and transferrable but only under the right growing conditions. Innogen also thinks of her husband as a plant, but she does so in ways that dramatically revise the Gentleman’s metaphor in terms of time, agency, and identity. After her father finds her and Posthumus secretly meeting in the garden and then exiles Posthumus, Innogen says, “… comes in my father, / And, like the tyrannous breathing of the north, / Shakes all our buds from growing” (1.3.35–37).12 Here, she and Posthumus are one plant, still with no reference to grafting, and instead of an early spring harvest, their buds have yet to open. She uses the language of botany to speak of a futurity curtailed. In addition, there is a note of irony as Innogen, who in the later prophecy is likened to air, represents her father as a devastating north wind. She erases his human agency as planter, turning him into part of the climate system that was especially devastating during the Little Ice Age—north winds off of the Atlantic Ocean. By representing them as one plant, Innogen is idealistically erasing key individual differences between her husband and herself, yet she also sees marriage as its own intermeshed of plants rather than innovations, her larger argument that the play’s interests in plants engages an acceptance of mingling with other cultures and ecosystems is compelling. 11 Randall Martin offers an engaging, yet different reading of Posthumus as plant. His focus is on Cymbeline as an agrarian who is failing to support his country by shifting from a diversity of crops to a monocultural focus (from supporting different people in court to just supporting the Queen and her son and also his related severing of international relationships). Here, I shift focus away from Cymbeline as farmer to Posthumus as plant to think about how the analogy makes us think about identity and place. See Shakespeare and Ecology, “Biospheric Ecologies in Cymbeline,” esp. 115–17. 12 Of this quotation, Feerick sees Innogen as a sapling, but the use of “our” and the fact that buds could be on any plant, regardless of age, suggest Innogen is speaking inclusively of her marriage and not of her individual identity as a young tree. See “Imperial Graft,” 223.

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process of growth and development wherein Posthumus’s maturation is contingent upon Innogen’s own growth with marriage not as end-goal but the start of new, or continued development. Thinking of Posthumus as a complete, displaced plant offers one way to understand Posthumus’s quick, drastic shift toward misogynistic thinking when exiled to Rome. The British court has been an environment that nurtures his growth into an admirable character, but transplanted yet again to the hyper-masculine world of Rome, the change of environment does not allow Posthumus to continue his growth trajectory as a plant unified with Innogen; rather, he deviates from his prior direction of growth. His growth in both environments, however, suggests that his identity is not determined solely by his plant-like nature; instead, the plant’s trans-corporeality—taking in the soil and environmental influences—directly changes the composition of the plant itself. An ecocritical reading of Posthumus as plant, then, reveals an identity that is malleable, enmeshed, and interdependent in its immediate environment—for good or for ill. Contrasting Posthumus’s identity as a displaced plant is the Queen’s association with the palace garden, surrounding environment, and the botanicals growing there. Ostensibly to let Innogen and Posthumus say their farewell privately, she says she will “fetch a turn about the garden” (1.1.82). In addition, Act 1, Scene 5 occurs either in the court garden or nearby as the Queen instructs her ladies: “Whiles yet the dew’s on ground, gather those flowers, / Make haste. Who has the note of them?” (1.5.1–2). The ladies bring back “violets, cowslips, and the primroses” that she will use in her closet for her botanical concoctions (83–84). At first glance, such associations with garden and plants make the Queen appear to have intimate knowledge of the environment and advance the sense that she is of this place, yet these comments to her ladies bookend a much more disquieting conversation with Cornelius, the doctor. He says, My conscience bids me ask—wherefore you have Commanded of me these most poisonous compounds, Which are the movers of a languishing death, But though slow, deadly. (1.5.7–10)

To which she replies: I wonder, doctor, Thou ask’st me such a question. Have I not been Thy pupil long? Hast thou not learned me how

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To make perfumes? Distill? Preserve? Yea, so That our great King himself doth woo me oft For my confections? Having thus far proceeded, Unless thou think’st me devilish, is’t not meet That I did amplify my judgement in Other conclusions? I will try the forces Of these thy compounds on such creatures as We count not worth the hanging—but none human— To try the vigour of them and apply Allayments to their act, and by them gather Their several virtues and effects. (10–23)

Rebecca Laroche and Jennifer Munroe argue that the connection between women and nature in Shakespeare’s texts often reveals unrecognized and undervalued sources of empowerment both for women and the natural world. In the case of the Queen, however, we find a cautionary view on women and power. Cornelius seems to have been teaching the Queen a proto-scientific approach to observing and manipulating the natural world to try “conclusions.” She proceeds from the processes of distilling and preserving nature’s compounds for medicinal health to the more sinister attempt to create poisons. While she promises not to use them on human beings (though Cornelius correctly suspects she’s lying so he will substitute more benign drugs in their stead), the fact that she seeks to kill living beings indicates she does not see herself as of and within the world; rather, she is an actor upon and observer of nature. Cornelius suspects she might use the poison on cats and dogs (38), and he directly tells her, ‘Your highness / Shall from this practice but make hard your heart’ (23–24). In Shakespeare’s plays, the distillation and creation of compounds from nature’s materials reveals much about how individual characters see themselves within the natural world as well as within human society. Helena, in All’s Well That Ends Well, distills a cure for the king, while Friar Lawrence, in Romeo and Juliet, meditates on ways in which nature’s ingredients are multipurpose and can heal or destroy. And, as I will develop later in this essay, Guiderius and Arviragus evince a contrasting knowledge of botanical medicinals to heal human beings. The Queen’s engagement with the natural world is a means of demonstrating mastery not only of nature but of the human beings who present obstacles to her relentless social climbing.13 13 See Laroche and Munroe, Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory for a more nuanced discussion of gender and nature.

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Cloten, the Queen’s son, is equally out of place in the court—albeit less intelligently so. The Arden 3rd Series edition notes the OED definitions aligned with his name: “clot poll,” a thick or wooden head (alluding to his body’s later being severed from said head) or “blockhead, dolt” or the word “clot.”14 Focus on Cloten’s identity tends to center on his donning Posthumus’s clothes and Innogen’s inability to discern between the two when she awakes in the cave next to Cloten’s headless trunk. Innogen’s mistake does enhance the ways in which Cloten and Posthumus are foil characters, and the collapsing distinctions point up the men’s flawed sense of rage and injured self-worth due to Innogen’s real, in Cloten’s case, and perceived, in Posthumus’s case, spurning of their love. Cloten can also be linked more strongly to the natural world. Innogen refers to him as a “puttock” (a scavenger bird of prey) as opposed to the “eagle” that is Posthumus (1.1.140–41). Not noted in the Arden, his name might also carry aural affinities with “clote,” which could be the burdock plant or “the prickly balls or burs which it bears.”15 According to Vivian Thomas and Nicki Faircloth, the “[b]urdock has a range of herbal and medicinal uses. Of value as fodder only for the donkey, it was symbolic of worthlessness.”16 Finally, his name might allude to a “hardened lump of earth,” especially associated with dirt, mud, or clay.17 Linguistically and through Innogen’s avian analogy, the link between Cloten and nature lowers him in a hierarchical world he so desperately wants to ascend until he’s tossed to the dirt, perhaps ironically because he is dirt. Posthumus, the Queen, and Cloten are all out of place in one way or another. Yet it is the Queen and Cloten who strongly voice a nativist, localized rhetoric that speaks strongly of place. This rhetoric comes out in their advocacy to Cymbeline that he dismiss Caesar’s demanded tribute. Cloten says, “Britain’s a world / By itself, and we will nothing pay / For wearing our noses.” And the Queen adds, … Remember sir, my liege, The kings your ancestors, together with The natural bravery of your isle, which stands As Neptune’s park, ribbed and paled in With oaks unscalable and roaring waters, 14 Cymbeline, Arden edition, 141, note 8. In her introduction to the Arden, Valerie Wayne also discusses the possibility of doubling the roles of Posthumus and Cloten to reinforce their misogyny toward Innogen, see 87–88. 15 OED, “clote, n,” 1. 16 Thomas and Faircloth, Shakespeare’s Plants and Gardens, 64. 17 OED, “clot, n.,” 3, a.

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With sands that will not bear your enemies’ boats, But suck them up to th’topmast. (3.1.12–14, 16–22)

Echoing the nationalistic ecocentrism of John of Gaunt’s “This England” speech in Richard II, Cloten and the Queen set Britain as a region separate and protected from other countries—the Roman Empire in this case. Randall Martin argues, however, that the kind of “biospheric regionalism” voiced by the Queen and her son that has infected Cymbeline’s court has created a rigid and arbitrary separation from other regions.18 While this rhetoric could be seen as an admirable type of localism that attends to one’s immediate ecosystems to create a sense of place where people are part of and strengthened by their immediate environment, situating this language in the Queen and Cloten calls such regionalism into doubt. For both characters, there is a strong desire to control the world around them and to simultaneously reinforce and climb the hierarchy of power—a hierarchy that defines both the human and non-human. In her botanical experiments and distillations, the Queen puts into practice the dangerous implications of her nativist rhetoric. The desire to know and control the local plant world is not indicative of a curiosity regarding nature’s wonders; rather, it manifests her goal to control both plant and human worlds. Martin persuasively argues that Shakespeare challenges that concept of ecological place to offer a more subtle, dynamic construction of ecocritical place. The play’s quick shifts between various regions and locations (Wales, “Lud’s town”/London, Italy) suggest a much livelier interplay between the local and the distant with the transfer of people, ideas, and materials from one region to another. For Martin, this play is global in focus and its optimistic ending “is suggestive of today’s need to merge regional and national interests with multilateral political action to avert global dangers such as rising sea levels and eroding biodiversity.”19

Part 2: Trans-Corporeal Status If the Queen and Cloten use human exceptionalism and ecoregionalism unsuccessfully in an effort to wield power over the human and nonhuman, Jupiter provides the “legitimate” royal children and Posthumus with trans-corporeal identities that simultaneously render them one with the 18 Martin, Shakespeare and Ecology, 118. 19 Martin, Shakespeare and Ecology, 115.

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non-human environment while justifying their elevated place in the court. Throughout their Welsh scenes, Guiderius, Arviragus, and Posthumus’s animal-like aggression and agility aligns them with the environment; yet, at critical times, they are represented or see themselves as plants. In addition, the Welsh scenes further link Innogen to botany. Paradoxically, the first and most important way in which the princes reveal that the court is their just abode is how they test and prove themselves in the mountainous wilds of Wales. Guiderius and Arviragus’s home in a cave contrasts with the opulent corruption of the court. The two men bristle at being kept in such a natural, constricting environment when they crave the chivalric challenges of court, but Belarius notes that the cave teaches them humility, and their life hunting in the wilderness develops and brings out their strength and knowledge of nature. Here we see the affordances of the natural world, the dynamic interactions between human beings and the environment as both shaping and then confirming their personalities and identities.20 Their hunting, like the Queen’s poison, might bring death to animals, but their violence is part of their environment as a means of sustenance whereas the Queen’s violence is a marker of pointless cruelty. Belarius, though, also sees the boys as plants in ways that further complicate the agrarian and horticultural identities first developed in Posthumus’s introduction. After Guiderius kills Cloten, Belarius says: … O thou goddess, Thou divine Nature, thyself thou blazon’st In these two princely boys! They are as gentle As zephyrs blowing below the violet, Not wagging his sweet head, and yet as rough, Their royal blood enchafed, as the rud’st wind That by the top doth take the mountain pine And make him stoop to th’ vale. ‘Tis wonder That an invisible instinct should frame them To royalty unlearned, honour untaught, Civility not seen from other, valour That wildly grows in them but yields a crop As if it had been sowed …. (4.2.168–80) 20 For more on affordances, see James Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception and Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment. Although not necessarily focusing on the ecological environments, Julia Lupton offers a sustained application of Gibson’s concept of affordances to various Shakespeare locations in Shakespeare Dwelling.

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For Belarius, Nature itself confirms and reveals the boys’ identities. In a beautiful, unintentional sense of congruence, this speech weaves together the brothers with their father and sister as all of them are types of wind. The boys can be as gentle “as zephyrs blowing below the violet, / Not wagging his sweet head,” not unlike Innogen being a “delicate piece of air.” But they also have the force to make a “mountain pine” “stoop,” similar to Cymbeline’s being a north wind. In Wales, they are able to calibrate their wind to the occasion. More important, though, is that their valor, itself, is seen as a plant. Contrasting to Posthumus being a plant tended to by Cymbeline, these princes and their princely qualities have an ambiguous relationship to the gardener. Their valor is “as if it had been sowed,” but who sowed it is unclear. Literally, they have been planted by Belarius himself since he abducted them and took them to the Welsh mountains and forests where he has raised them with great emotional care. As in the case with Cymbeline transplanting Posthumus in the court, Belarius has planted these boys in new soil—Wales. Or, perhaps in thinking about Wales as a source of British identity, he has returned these seeds to native soil? What is more important to Belarius is not who planted them but that it “wildly grows in them but yields a crop.” This speech offers a contrast to the Queen’s use of the medicinal garden where every plant is chosen and carefully tended by human beings. In a trans-corporeal and ecological sense, their growing to fruition depends upon the local, harsh environment of Wales. Their characteristics and qualities directly come from the microclimate and through the dynamic process of having to survive unsupported and untended by a human gardener. Guiderius and Arviragus’s wild growth and fruition also demonstrate a local knowledge of plants that contrasts with both the Queen and Cornelius’s botanical knowledge as they meet, tend to, and then mistakenly grieve Innogen/Fidele. Innogen, herself, has been seemingly undone by plants. The mole underneath her breast, part of Iachimo’s supposed evidence of Innogen’s infidelity, is “cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops / I’th’ bottom of a cowslip” (2.2.38–39). Cowslips were also a plant the Queen was having gathered for her (1.6.83); although delicate and having medicinal uses, this delicate flower shifts from medicinal to poisonous devices through human intervention.21 But when the brothers seek to ease Fidele’s suffering, they also use botanical knowledge.

21 Thomas and Faircloth, Shakespeare’s Plants and Gardens, 89–90.

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… I do note That grief and patience, rooted in him both, Mingle their spurs together. Grow patience, And let the stinking elder, grief, untwine His perishing root with the increasing vine. (4.2.56–60)

In the Arden edition notes, Patience is also “the common name for an edible dock called monk’s rhubarb that had purgative and healing properties” (286). According to the OED, patience could either be a cultivated, medicinal herb, or it could be a wild, other form of dock.22 Dock is not a vine, however, and one wonders if there is not also an oblique reference to wedding imagery with the vine and elm being intertwined. Both the Arden and Vivian Thomas and Nicki Faircloth also note biblical allusions with the elder being associated either with the cross or with the tree from which Judas hanged himself; yet, Thomas and Faircloth also note that the tree was indigenous to England and had many medicinal properties. Here is an example where Shakespeare overlays multiple meanings on the natural world with Arviragus citing the emblematic, human-imposed meaning of grief onto the elder; yet, the brothers also display deep, local knowledge both of how these plants could be deep-rooted as well as having medicinal properties. Elsewhere in this collection, Rebecca Totaro situates this blazon of flowers within the context of plague and memorializing the dead. For Totaro, these plants offer psychological comfort to the living, and I would argue that this comfort is derived from a place-based, botanical knowledge that Innogen’s brothers have gained through their Welsh upbringing. This conversation also indicates that life in Wales does not merely reveal their true nobility in a naturalizing, obfuscational manner. Instead, wisdom and admirable qualities come through local knowledge developed experientially over time. Being planted in Wales benefits the maturation of Guiderius and Arviragus, and, in a more conflicted way, it does so for their sister, Innogen, as well. Innogen does not necessarily “thrive” in the wild, but her donning the disguise of a man and her search for Posthumus reveal a physical strength and commitment that comes through hardship in nature. Along with the brothers wishing that the deep-rooted Patience will overcome her grief, Innogen is also associated with flowers at her supposed death. Arviragus says, 22 OED, “patience, n.,” 2, 1 & 2.

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With fairest flowers Whilst summer lasts and I live here, Fidele, I’ll sweeten thy sad grave.

And he counts, “Pale primrose,” “azured harebell,” “leaf of eglantine” among the memorial flowers (4.2.217–222). When the seasons change, “furred moss” will substitute. These botanical memorials, we should note, will mark the seasons, and in that sense, change, but they also differ from the prior plant references in that they shift the temporal focus. Rather than conveying dynamic process and change, either through growth or through transformation into healing medicinals that spur positive change within the body, they look backward and signal a fixed memory of the person who was even if the seasons continue to change. The links to nature that these characters create and develop are only intensified by Jupiter’s tablet, which is now worth revisiting. Upon awakening after the dream vision scene, Posthumus reads: Whenas a lion’s whelp shall to himself unknown, without seeking find, and be embraced by a piece of tender air; and when from a stately cedar shall be lopped branches which, being dead many years, shall after revive, be jointed to the old stock and freshly grow; then shall Posthumus end his miseries, Britain be fortunate and flourish in peace and plenty. (5.4.108–115)

The four characters are rendered as very different parts of the non-human world: Posthumus is an animal (lion), Innogen is an element (air), and the princes are plants (branches of a cedar tree). Not representing them as all animals, or all plants, or all elements enhances the ecological diversity that they represent. Certainly, each character embodies some quality appropriate to what they are likened to, but the diversity also allows Shakespeare to cast a wider view on what the natural world is and the value it has for human beings. Where the Queen sought to distil and transform plants, initially into beneficent medicines and then into noxious poisons, Jupiter’s riddling prophecy suggests that a plant’s greatest virtue is in being itself. Only when the branches of the cedar are grafted to the rest of the tree will the entire tree thrive and be rejuvenated. As mentioned earlier, Shakespeare’s representation of grafting differs from how he deploys it in his other works. While grafting still is a marker of lineage and family, in other plays and poems it marks innovation, change, and the development of new blood

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lines. Grafting in Cymbeline, however, is a mark of ecological and dynastic restoration.23 Instead of considering the grafting language of gardening and orchard manuals, it might be better to look to forestry practices and consider the boys to have been mistakenly pruned from their tree and only now restored. Indeed, if we think of Cymbeline as the dotard not healed by Posthumus at the play’s beginning, we now can see the only healing as coming within the family. The prophecy, then, is not only oblique, it also is somewhat misleading. The branches once thought dead are not the only tree parts that are revived as Cymbeline himself; the lopped off and overly pruned old tree also is revivified. Restoration and healing are endemic to the cedar as a species. Vivian Thomas and Nicki Faircloth write, An evergreen conifer of the genus Cedrus especially Cedrus libani (more fully cedar of Lebanon) is native to Asia Minor. Familiar from classical, mythological and biblical sources, the suggested date of introduction is 1630–40, with specimens from seed still being scarce in the 1650s. The biblical cedar of Lebanon was regarded as sacred, the tree of the Cross. It was used emblematically and with reference to its biblically recorded qualities of height, strength and longevity. Gerard … emphasizes its durability, resistance to disease and describes the wood as “odiferous.”24

Clearly, in representing the princes and Cymbeline as a cedar, Shakespeare is not interested in them as native plants—what with the cedar only being planted in England a few decades after Shakespeare’s death. Shakespeare could have chosen the oak instead of the cedar as the oak is both native to Britain as well as closely associated with English royalty, but the cedar’s “height, strength and longevity” are attributes shared by the oak.25 In addition, if Shakespeare is aware of Gerard’s text, he might be alluding to the cedar’s “resistance to disease” as a counter to the deadly poisons the Queen sought from her plants. The Soothsayer’s interpretation of Jupiter’s 23 For a very different view on wood and restoration of human beings, see Vin Nardizzi’s “The Wooden Matter of Human Bodies” in The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature. Nardizzi’s argument presents a unique way to think about grafting with different species being “grafted” together if we think of a wooden leg as a grafted prosthesis or supplement to the human body. In this sense, restoration takes on added resonance as the human leg is not restored but substituted with the non-human in ways that call into question where the human begins and ends. 24 Thomas and Faircloth, Shakespeare’s Plants and Gardens, 74. 25 The cedar can take on a range of meanings in early modern English writing. James Howell’s Dendrologia figures the German ruler as a cedar as opposed to the English monarch who is an oak. John Milton’s Paradise Lost is filled with cedars and other evergreens in the representation of Eden. See my early work on these texts in Writing the Forest, esp. 216, 267, 280–82.

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tablet speaks of the boys as branches “for many years thought dead, are now revived, / To the majestic cedar joined, whose issue / Promises Britain peace and plenty” (5.5.455–57). Merging the biblical and mythological, the Soothsayer sees the plant’s own intrinsic qualities as not only resisting disease but overcoming death itself. The restoration of the plant suggests ecological plenty as tree and country conjoin. As opposed to the exceptionalist discourse of the Queen and Cloten, the restored cedar tree presents the blurring of distinctions between family members (father and sons are unified) while intimating that human and national prosperity only come when they are synchronized with vegetal prosperity and growth. Posthumus accepts his leonine identity in the long recognition scene; indeed, by shifting species from plant to animal, he and other characters can finally “delve him to the root.” But Posthumus also returns to the plant imagery that the gentlemen first used in describing him in act one. To Innogen he says, “Hang there like fruit, my soul, / Till the tree die” (5.5.262–63). The early harvest, mentioned in the opening scene, was premature, and this later fruiting includes Innogen as she is, presumably, the vine on which this fruited soul hangs supported by Posthumus who now is a tree. Belarius uses the very same fruited tree analogy for himself earlier in the play when trying to dissuade the princes from idealizing life in the court. Of his favored early days in court, Belarius says, … Cymbeline loved me, And when a soldier was the theme, my name Was not far off. Then was I as a tree Whose boughs did bend with fruit; but in one night A storm or robbery, call it what you will, Shook down my mellow hangings, nay my leaves, And left me bare to weather. (3.3.58–64)

Both Belarius and Posthumus find their identity and value as plants. The soul and good works are the fruits that cling to and depend on the tree. Posthumus’s journey in the play, then, is not so much one in which he becomes a lion like his father was. His journey is much more localized, as the audience thinks of his obscure and hidden root, his robust growth that supports young and old alike, and then his transformation from human insecurities and misogyny to an interdependent identity. He has shifted from a singular plant in the Gentleman’s opening exposition, to something more mutual and complex. Innogen spoke of her and Posthumus as a unified plant where “all our buds” are kept from growing. But this analogy clearly

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overstated their similarities and erased individual differences. Innogen has been seen as two, deep-rooted plants vying within her (grief versus patience). But in playing on the conventional emblem of marriage with the fruiting vine supported by the tree, the two characters arrive at a final, plant-based identity. Innogen’s patience is rewarded, and it overcomes her grief. In this new configuration, each character has their own individual identity, one a tree and the other a fruiting vine, but they are so interconnected and symbiotic that Posthumus’s fruited soul is born of Innogen’s vine. While some plant references seem to be emblematic of key virtues, the play’s thorough engagement with the horticultural reveals a much more interesting way of seeing the world and humanity’s place within that world by focusing on temporality. Vegetal temporality, though, needs to be seen through the prism of genre. In contrasting essays in this collection, Miranda Wilson and Elizabeth D. Gruber both focus on vegetal time in the sonnets, a tight, compact genre. The genre of romance, in general, and in Shakespeare’s late plays in particular, has an elastic and expansive view on time itself. The princes were abducted twenty years ago. In Pericles, the hero wanders year-in-and-year-out. Time jumps into The Winter’s Tale to gloss over sixteen years. The Tempest, seemingly the most compressed in time of all of Shakespeare’s plays, begins by noting that twelve years have passed since Prospero and Miranda’s exile, and clearly Prospero has been obsessing over this event for each of those long years. In Cymbeline, Pisanio provides the romance-view on time. Wanting to know what has happened to Innogen, Posthumus, and Cloten, he says he is “Perplexed in all. The heavens still must work. / … All other doubts by time let them be cleared: / Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered” (4.3.41, 45–46). Pisanio, working his hardest throughout the play to use his own personal agency to help Posthumus and Innogen, now realizes the limits of human control over events, giving over agency to the non-human—in this case the heavens and fortune. Patience, that ultimate value in romances, must bring the ship to port. Posthumus, Innogen, Guiderius, and Arviragus are all represented as plants in the process of growth that depends upon patience. The focus is not on any fixed characteristic or quality of the plant; instead, we think of them in a dynamic, growing relationship of change and alteration, of being rooted or transplanted and finding one’s sustenance in local soils, of being challenged and nurtured by the weather, of growing through multiple seasons toward a harvest. What Shakespeare represents, then, is the process of unfolding and becoming that only can come through horticultural patience.

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These four characters all become, in some way, plants as their identities are confirmed, revealed, and developed. In this play, to be one’s self is to be another thing. That other thing is primarily a plant, but as plants all of them connect materially and share their identities with other human beings. Thinking of people as plants not only makes us think about rootedness, growth, and strength, it also makes us think about how different parts of the plant share and transfer their materiality across various, interdependent parts. To be a person (as a valued individual but perhaps also as an empathetic being that cares for others) is to be a thing of and with the non-human world. By looking to the external and non-human, characters find positive affirmation and development of their distinctive identities. This view of the play echoes Randall Martin’s ecocritical argument that the play eschews a narrow, localized nativism in favor of a more sophisticated engagement of multiple local ecosystems informed by and interacting with larger political and regional interests. Jean Feerick comes to a similar conclusion when she argues references to grafting in the play advance a theory of hybridity of both British and Roman identities.26 But for all the travel and displacement in this play, there is a strong longing for rootedness and connection that is nourished by the idea of people being plants. In addition, in the references to grafting, the play generally focuses on the wholeness of plants rather than the human-focused action of grafting. The play continually balances the competing drives of engagement with other ecologies and cultures with the desire for rootedness, identity, and interconnection that does not overwhelm one’s sense of place. There is a paradox here, however; while Innogen, her brothers, and Posthumus find their identities within and in terms of nature, they return back to the court that seemed so separate from nature. Belarius speaks of the honesty in nature as opposed to the treachery found in the emulative, slanderous court. In addition, the play’s heroine and heroes find strength in a non-exceptionalist relation to nature but doing so justifies their high (exceptional) position in the social hierarchy. Shakespeare, then, does not advance a trans-corporeal identity to say human beings are all equal and that equality is due to our interrelatedness to the non-human material world. But the play does reward characters who embrace a sense that they are enmeshed in the material world and whose strengths and identities come from and are not opposed to the non-human. Does this process of establishing personhood indirectly also reify royal blood and status? The 26 Martin, Shakespeare and Ecology, 114. Feerick, “Imperial Graft,” 224–25.

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happy endings for Cymbeline’s biological children and the deaths of the Queen and Cloten imply such a conclusion. But Posthumus’s own advancement in status, perhaps, suggests a moderating, more inclusive approach to identity and self-worth. He is not royal and his misogyny demonstrates he is a deeply flawed person. His cultivation by Cymbeline, his love of Innogen, and his persistent links to the natural world present him and his identity as perpetually evolving and growing; thus, he presents a middle ground between the Queen and Cymbeline’s children. Posthumus’s trans-corporeal enmeshment with the natural world does not reveal an identity that was there all along; it helps him become a more clearly defined, better individual interdependent upon others and nature itself.

Bibliography Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Ellerbeck, Erin. “‘A Bett’ring of Nature’: Grafting and Embryonic Development in The Duchess of Malfi.” In The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, edited by Jean E. Feerick and Vin Nardizzi, 85–99. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Ellerbeck, Erin. “Adoption and the Language of Horticulture in All’s Well That Ends Well.” Studies in English Literature 51, no. 2 (2011): 305–26. Fagan, Brian. The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300–1850. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Feerick, Jean E. “The Imperial Graft: Horticulture, Hybridity, and the Art of Mingling Races in Henry V and Cymbeline.” In Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race, edited by Valerie Traub, 211–227. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Gibson, James. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. New York: Taylor and Francis, 1986. Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge, 2011. Laroche, Rebecca, and Jennifer Munroe. Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Lupton, Julia Reinhart. Shakespeare Dwelling: Designs for the Theater of Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Martin, Randall. Shakespeare and Ecology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

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Nardizzi, Vin. “The Wooden Matter of Human Bodies: Prosthesis and Stump in A Larum for London.” In The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, eds. Jean E. Feerick and Vin Nardizzi, 119–36. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Nunn, Hillary M. “On Vegetating Virgins: Greensickness and the Plant Realm in Early Modern Literature.” In The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, edited by Jean E. Feerick and Vin Nardizzi, 159–177. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Shakespeare, William. Cymbeline. Edited by Valerie Wayne. Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Shannon, Laurie. The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Shannon, Laurie. “Poor, Bare, Forked: Animal Sovereignty, Human Negative Exceptionalism, and the Natural History of King Lear.” Shakespeare Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2009): 168–96. Theis, Jeffrey S. Writing the Forest in Early Modern England: A Sylvan Pastoral Nation. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2009. Thomas, Vivian, and Nicki Faircloth. Shakespeare’s Plants and Gardens: A Dictionary. Revised ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Wilson, Miranda. “Bastard Grafts, Crafted Fruits: Shakespeare’s Planted Families.” In The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, edited by Jean E. Feerick and Vin Nardizzi, 103–17. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

About the Author Jeffrey Theis is a professor of English at Salem State University. His past research has focused on forests in early modern writing. His current book project focuses on the relationships between dwelling places and nature in Shakespeare and Milton’s writings.

7.

‘Thou art translated’: Plants of Passage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream Lisa Hopkins

Abstract A Midsummer Night’s Dream abounds in plant life. This essay argues that just as the wood outside Athens demarcates a border between the city and fairyland, so many of the plants in the play either emblematize or were thought to facilitate passage from one state or place to another. Love-in-idleness may be described as “a little western flower,” but some of the other plants in the play come from the east; some are boundary plants; and some were thought to give access to fairyland or to alternative states of mind. There is also a trio of plants (thyme, mulberry, and pansy) which are sometimes white but may be changed to purple either magically or by natural means, figuring transition. Keywords: fairylore, transplantation, boundaries, transition, hallucinogens

A Midsummer Night’s Dream abounds in plant life. It refers to between thirty and forty separate plants or flowers,1 and it has characters named Peaseblossom, Mustardseed and Quince. There is a modern rose called A Midsummer Night’s Dream,2 and one of the plants in the play has become 1 Roses (I.i.77), wheat and hawthorn buds (I.i.185), primroses (1.1.215), cowslips (2.1.10), acorncups (2.1.30–31), “love-in-idleness” (2.1.168), daphne (2.1.231), wild thyme, oxlips, violets, woodbine, musk-roses, and eglantine (2.1.249–52), lilies (3.1.88), apricots, dewberries, purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries (3.1.159–60), squash and peascod (3.1.179–80), cherries (3.2.209), knot-grass (3.2.329), thistles (4.1.11), honeysuckle, ivy, and elms (4.1.42–44), onions and garlic (4.2.40), mulberries (5.1.147), and leeks (5.1.322). There is a longer list in Vivian Thomas and Nicki Faircloth, Shakespeare’s Plants and Gardens, 367, but it includes words which are plant-related rather than actually plants. Productions of the play at the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum have stressed the connection. 2 Royal Horticultural Society, “Rosa Midsummer Night’s Dream (‘Rawroyal’).”

Staub, S.C. (ed.), Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463721332_ch07

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so famous that it has acquired virtually a life of its own: on February 14, 2002 The Daily Telegraph ran an article explaining that the plant-based love potion used by Oberon on Titania, Lysander, and Demetrius wouldn’t actually work,3 as if anyone had ever seriously supposed that it might. In this essay I argue that just as the wood outside Athens demarcates a border between the city and fairyland, so the plants found in the wood also belong in two spheres, the scientific one of botany and the mystical one of fairylore; if the naturalist John Gerard is one of the play’s godfathers, the historian and antiquary William Camden is the other, since there is a potential parallel between the way plants are figured in the play and Camden’s interest in plants connected with Roman remains such as the Roman nettle and the Roman Wall plant. Gerard’s and Camden’s domains may seem very different from each other, but I argue that, in keeping with this collection’s general emphasis on the blurring of boundaries, A Midsummer Night’s Dream figures plants as agents of transition and crossover between different domains, sometimes because they are ingested, sometimes because they are applied externally, sometimes because they grow at threshold points, and conceivably, sometimes because they are inhaled. I have argued elsewhere that the use of the name “Paris” in Romeo and Juliet alludes to Herb Paris, and that Shakespeare might have heard of it through personal contact with Gerard. 4 Romeo and Juliet too is full of references to plants, but many of them are dangerous, either causing death or simulating it. In this, as in so many other ways, A Midsummer Night’s Dream inverts the earlier play. The opening sonnet which foretells the lovers’ tragedy becomes Quince’s mangled Prologue in six and eight; the lovers marry instead of dying; and plants, which in Romeo and Juliet are turned into potions that usher those who take them entirely out of the world, become in A Midsummer Night’s Dream portals between the mundane world and a magical one. Matthew Woodcock observes that “[c]ritics have often noted how A Midsummer Night’s Dream is full of disjunctures and juxtapositions between the different source materials and registers that Shakespeare brings together.”5 One such reconciliation of disjunctures is the way the play marries the science of botany with the customs and beliefs of folklore. A number of the plants mentioned in A Midsummer Night’s Dream had medicinal associations. Lou Agnes Reynolds and Paul Sawyer note of Cobweb, Peaseblossom, Mustardseed, and Moth that “each of these fairy servants represents an item 3 4 5

David Derbyshire, “Midsummer Night Love Potion Proves a Work of Fiction.” Hopkins, “Herb Paris, Romeo and Juliet and Thomas Hesketh.” Woodcock, “Spirits of Another Sort,” 117.

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used in household remedies” and that “Bottom’s greetings to Peaseblossom and Mustardseed play upon the medicinal uses of the pea and mustard plants.”6 Some of the plants named in the play had, however, a dual identity, in that they could be of interest to both the botanically and the folklorically minded. One example is the primrose. John Gerard declared that “[t]he roots of Primrose stamped and strained, and the juice sniffed into the nose with a quill or such like, purgeth the brain, and qualifieth the pain of the megrim.”7 Primroses were also considered to have potentially magical properties—if you ate primroses you would see fairies8—and when Hermia reminds Helena of “the wood, where often you and I / Upon faint primrose beds were wont to lie” (1.1.214–15), we may think primarily of their folkloric associations rather than their medicinal ones, and understand them as gateway plants which give access to the realm of magic. A similar idea of plants facilitating passage might be in play when Helena refers to the time: “When wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear” (1.1.185). This is clearly a moment of transition, but hawthorn can also suggest transition through space as well as through time: in Irish mythology hawthorns guard the entrance to the fairy realm.9 Peter Quince, a character whose name connects him to plants, announces that “[t]his green plot shall be our stage, this hawthorn-brake our tiring-house” (3.1.3–4). Hawthorn presides over the change in status as mechanicals turn into actors and Bottom and Flute turn into Pyramus and Thisbe, and the interface between the fairy world and the real one is garlanded and guarded by plants. Bottom advises the rest of the mechanicals to “eat no onions or garlic” (4.2.40); this may be sensible enough advice for actors, but it may also help them to pass into the fairy world, where such mundane plants presumably do not flourish. Conversely, Puck notes of the fleeing mechanicals, “briars and thorns at their apparel snatch” (3.2.29), implying that once they have approached the threshold of the fairy realm it may not be that easy to leave it again. Honeysuckle too could be seen as simultaneously medical, magical, and liminal. Vivian Thomas and Nicki Faircloth observe that “[h]oneysuckle served a wide range of medical purposes,”10 but it also supposedly protects against evil.11 Most notably, it needs support to climb, as Titania reminds us when she says of herself and Bottom, 6 Reynolds and Sawyer, “Folk Medicine and the Four Fairies,” 513. 7 Gerard, Gerard’s Herball, 179. 8 “The Folklore and Traditions of the Irish Hedgerow.” 9 “The Folklore and Traditions.” 10 Thomas and Faircloth, Shakespeare’s Plants and Gardens, 185. 11 “The Folklore and Traditions.”

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So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle Gently entwist; the female ivy so Enrings the barky fingers of the elm. (4.1.42–44)

Honeysuckle does indeed twist and twine; it is therefore often found growing round hedges, walls and fences in ways which could make it too a threshold plant. Finally, Thisbe eulogizes Pyramus in entirely floral terms: These lily lips, This cherry nose, These yellow cowslip cheeks, Are gone, are gone! Lovers, make moan; His eyes were green as leeks. (5.1.317–22)

Some of these uses of plant imagery are obviously ridiculous. Of course, Pyramus’s lips are not like lilies (or if they are, it is probably not good news); if his nose is like a cherry, it suggests he has been drinking more than is good for him; his eyes may possibly have been green as leeks, but it is not the sort of comparison one normally finds in a blazon. He sounds like nothing so much as a painting by Arcimboldo, whose connection with Rudolf II could have brought him to the attention of some Englishmen (indeed Robert N. Watson reproduces an Arcimboldo painting as part of his discussion of the play).12 But the figuring of Pyramus’s cheeks as cowslips is suggestive. Cowslips, like so many of the plants in the play, had medicinal potential: Gerard says that “[a]n unguent made with the juice of Cowslips and oile of Linseed, cureth all scaldings or burnings with fire, water, or otherwise.”13 The play also connects them directly to Queen Elizabeth: The cowslips tall her pensioners be, In their gold coats spots you see; Those be rubies, fairy favours, In those freckles live their savours. (2.1.10–13)

Elizabeth is suggested by the term “pensioners” but seems disavowed by the idea of spottedness, since one of her favored emblems was the ermine, an 12 Watson, “The Ecology of Self,” 43. 13 Gerard’s Herball, 179. See endnote 7.

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animal which was supposedly willing to die rather than allow its beautiful white coat to be spotted. In the case of the cowslip, however, it is the spot which confers value, being both compared to a ruby and attributed with the bestowal of savor. Cowslips may seem the humblest and commonest of flowers, but in Dream they suggest both magic and medicine, both fairy queen and real queen, and both Pyramus and Bottom. Moreover, the fact that Ariel lies in the “bell” of a cowslip hints that the cowslip (like fairy foxglove) is a plant which can be figured as ringing,14 with the potential implication that the sound it makes is heard in the fairy world rather than the real one; it too is thus a plant of passage. A Midsummer Night’s Dream also seems to hint that the properties of plants may be affected by the calendar. This was a genuine horticultural belief: Trea Martyn notes that in the garden John Gerard built at Theobalds “[t]he phases of the moon and times of year determined the best times for sowing.”15 The importance of seasonal or astrological influences was also, however, a tenet of folklore. Lou Agnes Reynolds and Paul Sawyer contend that “one basic principle ruled the collecting of medical products: those gathered in the light of the moon are beneficial and healing; those gathered in the dark are evil and death-dealing.” They add that “[t]o the Elizabethans no subject, apart from love, was more appropriate to Midsummer’s Night than folk medicine” because “[i]t was believed that on this night of the Summer Solstice, plants were granted a magic power that they possessed at no other time of the year,” and they suggest that the love-potion might have something in common with St John’s Wort,16 which would be a specific temporal connection since Midsummer Eve coincided with the feast of St. John. Midsummer Eve, or for that matter the eve of any saint’s day, was a time of transition, a temporal rather than a physical threshold but still a liminal moment, and such moments were often connected with the flowering or emergence of particular plants (snowdrops, for instance, are supposed to appear by February 2 to celebrate Candlemas). As well as time, location might also have an effect on the properties of plants. Although A Midsummer Night’s Dream is supposedly set in a wood outside Athens, Kim F. Hall notes that at least one aspect of it seems to invite us to think of Scotland: “Many of the play’s editors have made the link between the mechanicals’ concerns that Snug’s lion would frighten the ladies in the audience and an entertainment at the christening of James I’s 14 The Tempest, 5.1.89. 15 Martyn, Elizabeth in the Garden, 159. 16 Reynolds and Sawyer, “Folk Medicine and the Four Fairies,” 515, 513, 517.

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son, Prince Henry Frederick.”17 In that context, the existence of a character named “Wall” might possibly have reminded some people in the audience of the most famous structure in the region of the Border between England and Scotland, Hadrian’s Wall, close to which there was indeed a village called Wall. Shakespeare shows knowledge of Border affairs in Henry IV, Part 2, where Pistol says, “Thrust him downstairs? Know we not Galloway nags?” (2.4.185–6); the Penguin editor’s note glosses this as prostitutes, but Alastair Moffat notes the importance of Galloway nags for reivers, and observes that “when the era of reiving came to an end at the beginning of the seventeenth century, it was specifically forbidden to own a pony of a certain value—in other words a good Galloway nag.”18 It is perhaps not surprising that Shakespeare should be aware of such things since Lord Hunsdon, the first patron of his company, was a Border Warden (later, it would be Hunsdon’s son Sir Robert Carey who rode to tell James of Scotland that Queen Elizabeth had died and he was now King of England, and Catherine Loomis has suggested that Carey’s bloodstained state on arrival is echoed in Macbeth by Duncan’s question, “What bloody man is that?”).19 Steven May has proposed that A Midsummer Night’s Dream offers some topical allusions to the Carey family,20 and several scholars have considered it possible that there is a link between A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the wedding of Elizabeth Carey, whose grandfather Lord Hunsdon was a warden of the Scottish Border.21 If that were the case, it would support the suggestion that the play might be interested in customs and stories connected to the Border region. There was at least one folklore belief which specifically connected Hadrian’s Wall with semi-magical plants. In Britannia, Camden, who says the Romans planted wild chives at Carvoran to cure wounds,22 notes a continuing belief in the curative powers of plants grown close to the wall, declaring (in Philemon Holland’s translation) that The fabulous tales of the common people concerning this wall I doe wittingly and willingly overpasse. Yet this one thing which I was enformed of by men of good credite I will not conceale from the reader. There 17 Hall, Things of Darkness, 23. For details of the incident see Edith Rickert, “Political Propaganda and Satire in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” 18 Moffat, The Reivers, 52–3, 57. 19 Macbeth, 2.2.1. Loomis, “‘What bloody man is that?’” 20 May, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Carey-Berkeley Wedding.” 21 On the arguments for the Carey wedding, see David Wiles, Shakespeare’s Almanac and Helen Hackett, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” 22 Robert Witcher, “On Rome’s Ecological Contribution.”

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continueth a settled perswasion among a great part of the people there about, and the same received by tradition, that the Roman souldiers of the marches did plant heere every where in old time for their use certaine medicinable herbes for to cure wounds, whence it is that some Empiricke practioners of Chirurgery in Scotland flocke hither every yeere in the beginning of Summer to gather such Simples and wound herbes, the vertue whereof they highly commend as found by long experience, and to be of singular efficacie.23

Camden declares that he will have no truck with “vulgar report,” but this story about plants is different, being vouched for by “men of good credite” and apparently also supported by the behavior of Scottish surgeons: there is a plant growing near the wall which can cure wounds if it is gathered early in the summer. We are not far away here from the world of magic, and the credibility of Camden’s assertion that faith in the plant’s powers survives is boosted by the fact that it is possible to trace other beliefs which connect plants to the wall: fairy foxglove, also known as Roman Wall Plant,24 is still sometimes said to have grown only where Roman soldiers have trod (and does indeed grow in the village of Wall).25 The “Simples and wound herbes” growing near the wall are not only quasi-magical; they are also imports, brought by the Romans and deliberately introduced into the landscape in exactly the same way as Hadrian’s Wall itself. Some of the plants in A Midsummer Night’s Dream were also famous as immigrants, and this is partly why plants in the play can so easily figure transition. Love-in-idleness may be described as “a little western flower” (2.1.166), but others of the plants in the play are definitely not Western. Pliny said the Romans brought cherry trees to Britain, having encountered them themselves in the course of Lucius Lucullus’ campaign against Mithridates (the prevalence of wild cherries growing by the sides of roads is sometimes attributed to legionaries spitting out cherry stones as they marched); cherries are mentioned twice, first when Demetrius says to Helena “O how ripe in show / Thy lips, those kissing cherries, tempting grow!” (3.2.139–40) and secondly when Helena herself reminds Hermia of how they grew together, Like to a double cherry, seeming parted, 23 William Camden, Britannia, “The Picts Wall,” para. 12. 24 D. C. Watts, Elsevier’s Dictionary of Plant Lore, 143. 25 “Fairy Foxglove.”

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But yet an union in partition, Two lovely berries moulded on one stem. (3.2.208–11)

Apricots too, which Titania orders the fairies to feed to Bottom (3.1.159), were an exotic introduction; Hakluyt considered the apricot (prunus armeniaca) to have arrived in England only in the reign of Henry VIII, and until well into the seventeenth century they were considered tender in most parts of England, flourishing only in Kent.26 Other plants in Dream are also immigrants. Oberon says, I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine. There sleeps Titania sometime of the night, Lull’d in these flowers with dances and delight. (2.1.249–55)

By “woodbine” Oberon probably means honeysuckle,27 and honeysuckle, violets, oxlips, and eglantine would all have been understood as native English plants. Thyme, though, has a very different pedigree of which Shakespeare might well have been aware, for in Pliny’s Natural History, thyme is the first plant considered in the chapter on “Flowers and Herbs,” and he says it “flowers about the period of the summer solstice.” Pliny also explains that “[a]ttic honey has a greater reputation than that of any other kind in the whole world. And so thyme has been imported from Attica and, as I am informed, grown with difficulty from the flower. But another characteristic of Attic thyme proved a hindrance: survival depends on a sea breeze.”28 Shakespeare’s insistence that the thyme “blows” might conceivably be colored by a memory of Pliny’s sea breeze, and since Attica is the region around Athens, it is perfectly appropriate for a bank of thyme to grow in the domain of Duke Theseus, but many varieties of thyme will grow perfectly well in England; it can assimilate and acclimatize in something of the same way that Titania hopes her Indian pageboy will flourish away from the place where he was born. As well as suggesting both Greece and England, thyme has an inherent duality of another sort. Gerard says, 26 Thomas and Faircloth, Shakespeare’s Plants and Gardens, 28–29. 27 See Kew, “Plants in Shakespeare” and the Woodland Trust’s Shakespeare plant identification sheet. 28 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 229.

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Both Dioscorides and Pliny make two kindes of Serpillum, that is, of creeping or wilde Time; whereof the first is our common creeping Time, which is so well knowne, that it needeth no description; yet this ye shall understand, that it beareth floures of a purple colour, as every body knoweth. Of which kinde I found another sort, which floures as white as snow, and have planted it in my garden, where it becommeth an herbe of great beauty.29

Purple thyme might be a natural variation, or it could conceivably be understood as artificially induced. Katherine Myers notes that “two suggestions for changing flower colour were current. [Giambattista della] Porta recommended grafting … Another practice was putting various coloured substances around roots to influence flower pigmentation,”30 and Rebecca Bushnell observes that “[i]n the early modern period, a dramatically or multicolored flower was always valued over the white flower, as was the double over the single bloom, and much effort was expended into transforming white and single flowers into something rich and strange.” Indeed, Bushnell points out, “Francis Bacon thought that the color white was often a sign of the flower’s degeneration, or a lack of culture, since ‘it is observed by some that gilly-flowers, sweet-williams, violets, that are coloured, if they be neglected, and neither watered, nor new moulded, nor transplanted, will turn white. And it is probable that the white with much culture may turn coloured’.”31 The fact that thyme can be either white or purple aligns it with two other plants in the play: love-in-idleness and the mulberry. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a Theban girl wonders which story to tell and settles on one about “how the tree which used to have white berries now bears fruit dyed deep purple by the stain of blood.” This turns out to be the introduction to the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, who “agreed to meet at Ninus’ tomb, and to hide in the shade of its tree. For a tree grew there, a tall mulberry, hung thick with snowy fruits; it stood close by a cool spring.” When Pyramus kills himself, “The fruits of the tree were sprinkled with his blood, and changed to a dark purple hue. The roots, soaked in his gore, tinged the hanging berries with the same rich colour”; as a result, when Thisbe returns, “although she recognized the spot, and the shape of the tree, yet the colour of its fruit 29 Gerard, Gerard’s Herball, 129. 30 Myers, ‘“Men as plants increase’,” 178. 31 Bushnell, Green Desire, 133. She notes too that “Thomas Hill’s Natural and Artificial Conclusions instructed the reader ‘how to make sundrie devises or Armes or suche like, in a Rose, Carnation, or Flower de luce or Lily”’ (143).

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made her uncertain; she was unable to decide whether this was the place or not.” Thisbe’s last words are to the tree and exhort it, “bear for ever the marks of our death: always have fruit of a dark and mournful hue, to make men remember the blood we two have shed!”32 Purple mulberries (more properly black) are thus connected to mythology, but they are also a simple natural variation (though this was not always well understood; the reason for the failure of King James’s efforts to establish a silk industry in London was that he planted black mulberries instead of white).33 The story of Pyramus and Thisbe thus centers on plants and transformation,34 and reminds us that, like thyme, mulberries too may be either white or purple. A third plant completes the pattern. “Cupid’s flower” is often assumed to be a pansy, and the experiment reported in The Telegraph was performed on the wild pansy, viola tricolor. The name viola tricolor suggests that the plant typically has three colors, but Shakespeare speaks of only two, purple and white. Oberon tells Puck, Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell: It fell upon a little western flower, Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound: And maidens call it ‘love-in-idleness’. Fetch me that flower; the herb I show’d thee once. The juice of it, on sleeping eyelids laid, Will make or man or woman madly dote Upon the next live creature that it sees. Fetch me this herb. (2.1.165–73)

Later, Puck when preparing to anoint Demetrius confirms that the flower is indeed now purple: Flower of this purple dye, Hit with Cupid’s archery, Sink in apple of his eye. (3.2.102–4)

In fact, the plant might perhaps be imagined as not necessarily either solely white or solely purple but as sometimes displaying both those colors, since a wild pansy flower may well be particolored. If white and purple figure 32 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 96–98. 33 Morus londinium, “Timeline of the Mulberry in London.” 34 Margaret Willes, A Shakespearean Botanical, 126, comments on the connection.

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separate states in thyme and in mulberry trees, the white and purple of lovein-idleness thus seems liminal, figuring a point of transition and mingling with obvious applicability to the dual nature of the wood, and affording another example of plants as guardians of thresholds and facilitators of passages from one place or state to another. Mulberries are not the only suggestive berries in the play. Titania, doting on Bottom, instructs the fairies to “Feed him with apricocks and dewberries, / With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries” (3.1.159–60). Thomas and Faircloth observe that we cannot be certain what is meant by “dewberries”: “The contemporary usage is not clear and probably covered a wide range of berry-bearing bushes.”35 What we do know, however, is that the word “dewberry” had been used before in a play, specif ically in Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage. Annaliese Connolly identifies the reuse of dewberries in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as part of a wider pattern of engagement with Marlowe’s play,36 but it is also worth noting that Shakespeare’s garden is not stocked with quite the same plants as Marlowe’s: Feed him with apricocks and dewberries, With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries; The honey-bags steal from the humble-bees. (MND 3.1.159–61)

While in Dido, I have an orchard that hath store of plums, Brown almonds, services, ripe figs, and dates, Dewberries, apples, yellow oranges; A garden where are bee-hives full of honey.37

Titania’s figs are green; the nurse’s are ripe. Both have access to honey, but Titania offers apricots, grapes, and mulberries to the nurse’s almonds, services, apples, and oranges. One possible difference, I suggest, is that at least some of the plants found in the nurse’s garden really might grow in a Tunisian one, whereas Titania’s is more resolutely English (however improbable the grapes may sound, The Vyne, a Tudor country house in Hampshire, is so called because the Romans are said to have planted the first grapes in England there), and this in turn may be related to the fact 35 Thomas and Faircloth, Shakespeare’s Plants and Gardens, 105. 36 Connolly, “Evaluating Virginity,” 146–47. 37 Christopher Marlowe, Dido Queen of Carthage, 4.5.4–7.

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that the garden in Dido, Queen of Carthage is a place referred to only in passing in the play and is visited only for a specific purpose, while the wood in Dream is both a location in its own right and a place in which one world can give access to another. Richard Mabey notes that the plants mentioned in Dream “grow in different habitats, and flower at different times of the year”;38 this is true, but what the play fundamentally suggests is that, in line with the ideas which will be explored in the next section of this book, at least some of those plants can offer a passage into a different clime or season. Other plants in the play are connected to a transition of another sort, that from the single state to the married. Flowers are often associated with women, and that is certainly the case in Dream. Puck says that Titania “perforce withholds the loved boy, / Crowns him with flowers, and makes him all her joy” (2.1.26–7), and Helena remembers how, We, Hermia, like two artificial gods, Have with our needles created both one flower, Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion, Both warbling of one song, both in one key, As if our hands, our sides, voices and minds, Had been incorporate. (3.2.203–8)

In their turn, flowers apparently respond to the emotions and situations of women: Titania muses, The moon, methinks, looks with a watery eye, And when she weeps, weeps every little flower, Lamenting some enforced chastity. (3.1.191–93)

It is therefore not surprising that some of the plants mentioned in A Midsummer Night’s Dream support the marriage theme of the play. Thomas and Faircloth note that an acorn cup was “a fertility symbol with the cup as the feminine and the acorn as the masculine parts,” and that “both ‘apricocks’ and ‘figs’ are sexually suggestive”;39 it therefore makes sense that Egeus lists nosegays amongst the allurements Lysander has supposedly offered to Hermia as he attempts to induce her to change her status from single woman to married one (1.1.34). 38 Mabey, Weeds, 12. 39 Thomas and Faircloth, Shakespeare’s Plants and Gardens, 20, 28.

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There is, however, a tension between the sexual suggestiveness of plants and the fact that many of the flowers mentioned in the play are ones particularly connected with the queen. Trea Martyn observes that in the Rainbow Portrait Elizabeth’s dress is “embroidered with wild flowers—honeysuckle, gillyflowers, pansies and cowslips,”40 and Vivian Thomas and Nicki Faircloth note that “[r]epresenting virginity, cherries were embroidered on Queen Elizabeth’s clothing.”41 The queen was also associated with the Tudor rose, but there is considerable iconographical complexity attached to the play’s use of roses. When Lysander speaks of them to Helena, they seem to function as simple emblems of beauty, as they would in a blazon: “How now, my love? Why is your cheek so pale? / How chance the roses there do fade so fast?” (1.1.128–9). There is however a rather different set of implications to Theseus’ warning that earthlier happy is the rose distill’d Than that which, withering on the virgin thorn, Grows, lives, and dies, in single blessedness. (1.1.77)

However appropriate to a marriage, this is obviously off-message in a play performed in front of a virgin queen. The status of the rose as symbol of beauty is troubled again when Titania says, The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose; And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown, An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds Is, as in mockery, set. (3.1.107–11)

This rose has kept its color, unlike those in Hermia’s cheeks, but is touched by frost and associated with the unnatural and unseasonal. Caught between winter and summer, it becomes an apt emblem of the transition between seasons as well as of the transition from virginity to marriage, and the uneasiness imported by the sensitivities attached to the iconography of Elizabeth also draws attention to another interface, that between the comic world of the play and the more serious one of the real audience—with even the possibility of a glance at that most unspeakable of transition points,

40 Martyn, Elizabeth in the Garden, 269. 41 Thomas and Faircloth, Shakespeare’s Plants and Gardens, 78.

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the change of sovereign which would become inevitable when the aging queen eventually died. One of the specific kinds of rose mentioned in the play activates a further set of associations, again connected with transition and with passage from one place to another. Musk roses, which are mentioned again when Titania sends “[s]ome to kill cankers in the musk-rose buds” (2.2.3) and when she promises Bottom that she will “stick musk-roses in thy sleek smooth head” (4.1.3), were imports. The elder Richard Hakluyt, who was a lawyer, observed that musk roses were introduced into England in around 1532 from either North Africa or Spain (and connected this specifically with the Roman propensity for importing plants). 42 The elder Hakluyt was a member of the Middle Temple, the Inn of Court most closely associated with overseas exploration, but the Inns in general were interested in voyaging, and it might therefore be suggestive that there is an intriguing overlap between the plants mentioned in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the plants ordered for the Gray’s Inn garden founded by Sir Francis Bacon in the late 1590s. Jill Francis notes that “[t]he accounts indicate the purchase of a phenomenal number of hedging plants … [including] 16 cherry trees and 66 elms … 3,700 eglantine plants … [and] 1600 woodbines (honeysuckle),”43 and as in the wood outside Athens, many of these were intended as liminal or threshold plants, since they were to be used to create borders and demarcations (Francis’s term for what Bacon ordered is “hedging plants”). Bacon’s honeysuckles and eglantines were not the only plants with which the Inns of Court were connected; as Hakluyt’s comment on musk-roses suggests, members of the Inns were also interested in imported plants, and in one imported plant in particular. Lauren Working notes that “[t]he Inns … provided physical spaces where gentlemen might meet to discuss colonial projects … Richard Hakluyt … attributed his interests in colonization to visits to his cousin’s chambers at the Middle Temple”; she comments too on “appropriations of Native Americans at the Inns, specifically through tobacco smoking and the staging of two masques featuring American motifs.”44 However counterintuitive it may seem, tobacco was considered to have medicinal properties; in his tract Tabacco, published in 1595 perhaps at much 42 Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 241. In another place, he also notes that the Romans brought “all kinds of beasts and fowles, and all herbs, trees, busks and plants that might yield profit or pleasure to their country of Italie,” The Original Writings & Correspondence of Richard Hakluyt, 193–94. 43 Francis, Gardens and Gardening, 291. 44 Working, “Locating Colonization,” 32–33.

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the same time as the first performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Anthony Chute assures the reader that in respect of curing wounds, cuts, or other harmes (almost whatsoeuer) and in which this hearbe is of vertue to heale, while it is yet greene, that the same naturall operations in it then; the verie same are to be had it, whe it is now dried, according to the Indians of Trinidade vse, in laying it in the shadow, and where no wind or sunne come to draw out the power of vertue in exhalations.

He also asks, “Who hath euer found a more soueraign remedy against coughs, rheume in the stomacke, head, and eyes?” and declares that it takes away “all wearinesse of body.”45 Chute even goes so far as to call tobacco “this diuine hearbe” (sig. A. iir), and Peter C. Mancall notes that “indigenous Americans linked tobacco to religious practice.”46 If the Roman empire brought Britain one magic plant, the new empire which Britain hoped to establish in America seemed to have furnished another. A Midsummer Night’s Dream also features a magical plant, or rather two. The magic properties of love-in-idleness have been much commented on, but it is less often observed that Oberon adds soon after, “ere I take this charm from off her sight / (As I can take it with another herb)” (2.1.183–4). When he actually applies that other herb, he says, See as thou wast wont to see: Dian’s bud o’er Cupid’s flower Hath such force and blessed power. (4.1.71–73)

Anca Vlasopolos notes that “Dian’s bud” has sometimes been identified as agnus castus, but argues that it is in fact mugwort,47 which Gerard identifies as an antidote to almost anything: “he who hath it about him can be hurt by no poysonsome medicines, nor by any wilde beast, neither yet by the Sun it selfe; and also that it is drunke against Opium, or the juyce of blacke Poppy.”48 If one googles “mugwort,” almost the first thing one will find 45 Chute, Tabacco, 1–2, 9, and 11. 46 Mancall, Nature and Culture, 33. 47 Vlasopolos, “The Ritual of Midsummer,” 25. 48 Gerard’s Herbal, 254. He also considers it another threshold plant—“Mugwort groweth wilde in sundry places about the borders of fields, about high waies, brooke sides, and such like places”—and connects it with death when he notes that “Mugwort is called in Latine, Artemisia, which name it had of Artemisia Queene of Halicarnassus, and wife of noble Mausolus King of

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will be a recommendation to smoke it, 49 which suggests an intriguing new possibility for the way that magic plants might affect the lovers’ perception; maybe the experiment reported in The Daily Telegraph was applying the wrong process to the plant by distilling it.50 There is also a possible glance at a third plant associated with magical transformation when Helena says to Demetrius, Run when you will; the story shall be chang’d: Apollo flies, and Daphne holds the chase. (2.1. 230–31)

Although Helena does not explicitly mention the plant daphne, Thomas and Faircloth note that it was popular in Shakespeare’s England: “Some contemporary writers applied laurel to the native spurge-laurel, Daphne laureola L., or the native Daphne mezereum L.”51 (Mezereon, which flourishes in Derbyshire, has recently been proposed as one of the modern “Wonders of the Peak,” to replace one of those listed by Thomas Hobbes which no longer exists).52 It was well known that Daphne the nymph was metamorphosed into daphne the plant, and the trope of metamorphosis suggests yet a further way in which plants can effect or be associated with dramatic personal change. Rebecca Bushnell notes that “[m]ore than any other type of early modern writing, literary texts compared people to plants in their common experience of growing, flourishing, and fading.”53 No one could be expected to take seriously the idea that a person might actually become a plant, but stories in which such things happen may figure the transformative effect which plants may have on people. Long before the lexis of wellness and doctors’ decision to “prescribe” gardening as both therapy and cure, Shakespeare understood the restorative potential of the green world, a viewpoint for which A Midsummer Night’s Dream is often adduced as Exhibit Caria, who adopted it for her owne herbe” (254). Artemisia swallowed the ashes of Mausolus before building the first mausoleum in his honor, so the plant is inherently linked with ingestion. 49 “Smoking Mugwort.” 50 This is a possibility often hinted at in modern performance. In the 2013 production directed by Michael Grandage at the Noël Coward Theatre, the fairies’ greeting to Bottom was not “Hail, mortal” but “Inhale, mortal,” and in the BBC’s ShakespeaRe-Told version directed by Peter Bowker, the Theseus character is asked by his wife what he has been smoking. The discovery of cannabis traces in pipes unearthed in Shakespeare’s home at New Place in Stratford did nothing to discourage such suggestions (See “Cannabis Discovered in Tobacco Pipes.”), but A Midsummer Night’s Dream does insist that the plants are applied to the eye. 51 Thomas and Faircloth, Shakespeare’s Plants and Gardens, 202. 52 Roly Smith, Wonders of the Peak, 80–81. 53 Bushnell, Green Desire, 136.

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A. In this sense Helena is right: she is like Daphne in that she achieves her heart’s desire, although in her case that is not the same as Daphne’s and no physical transformation is involved. Plants might however be translated in other ways, for many made good migrants. Lubaaba Al-Azami points out that when English merchants attempted to trade with India, they found that their goods did not travel well: “The Mughals had minimal interest in English imports that … did not suit their warm climes, such as woollens”; by contrast, exports from India, which were typically plant-based—“spices, such as cloves and peppercorns; textiles, from silk brocades to cotton calicoes; and dyes, most notably indigo”—were if anything even more desirable and useful abroad than at home.54 Lou Agnes Reynolds and Paul Sawyer declare that “[i]n A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, Shakespeare seems to have taken this familiar folklore concerning the magic power of plants as a meeting point between the supernatural and natural worlds.”55 I suggest that he has also used it to figure plants, so often migrants themselves, as agents of change, transition, and mobility. Acknowledgments With thanks to Colm MacCrossan, Tom Rutter, and Matt Steggle.

Bibliography Primary Sources A Vision of Britain through Time. https://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/travellers/ Camden/28. Camden, William. Britannia. Translated by Philemon Holland. London, 1610. Chute, Anthony. Tabacco. London: William Barlow, 1595. Gerard, John. Gerard’s Herball: The Essence thereof distilled by Marcus Woodward from the Edition of Th. Johnson, 1636. London: The Minerva Press, 2001. Hakluyt, Richard. The Original Writings & Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts. Volume I. Introduction and notes by E.G.R. Taylor. London: Printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1935. Hakluyt, Richard. The Principal Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation. Vol. 5. Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1905–8.

54 Lubaaba Al-Azami, ‘“In the spiced Indian air.’” 55 Reynolds and Sawyer, “Folk Medicine and the Four Fairies,” 517.

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Marlowe, Christopher. Dido Queen of Carthage. Edited by Mark Thornton Burnett. London: J. M. Dent, 1999. Ovid, Metamorphoses. Translated by Mary M. Innes. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978. Pliny the Elder, Natural History: A Selection. Rev. ed. Translated by John F. Healy. New York: Penguin, 2004. Shakespeare, William. Henry IV, Part 2. Edited by P. H. Davison. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. Edited by Nicholas Brooke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Edited by Harold F. Brooks. London: Thomson Learning, 2004. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1999.

Secondary Sources Al-Azami, Lubaaba. “‘In the spiced Indian air’: Trading Coin and Cloth in the Empire of the Great Mughal.” Shakespeare and Beyond, March 2021. https:// memorients.com/articles/in-the-spiced-indian-air-trading-coin-and-cloth-inthe-empire-of-the-great-mughal. Bushnell, Rebecca. Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens. Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2003. Connolly, Annaliese. “Evaluating Virginity: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Iconography of Marriage.” In Goddesses and Queens: The Iconography of Elizabeth I, edited by Annaliese Connolly and Lisa Hopkins, 136–53. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Derbyshire, David. “Midsummer Night Love Potion Proves a Work of Fiction.” Daily Telegraph, February 14, 2002, 12 AM, GMT. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ uknews/1384809/Midsummer-night-love-potion-proves-a-work-of-fiction.html. “Fairy Foxglove.” Plant-Lore: Collecting the Folklore and Uses of Plants. http://www. plant-lore.com/fairy-foxglove/. “The Folklore and Traditions of the Irish Hedgerow.” http://irishhedgerows.weebly. com/flora.html. Francis, Jill. Gardens and Gardening in Early Modern England and Wales. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. Hackett, Helen. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” In The Comedies, edited by Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard, 338–57. Vol. 3 of A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works. Oxford, Blackwell, 2003. Hall, Kim F. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.

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Hopkins, Lisa. “Herb Paris, Romeo and Juliet and Thomas Hesketh.” Notes and Queries 65, no. 4 (December 2018): 530–33. Kew Royal Botanic Gardens. “Plants in Shakespeare.” https://www.kew.org/ read-and-watch/plants-in-shakespeare. Loomis, Catherine. “‘What bloody man is that?’: Sir Robert Carey and Shakespeare’s Bloody Sergeant.” Notes and Queries 48, no. 3 (2001): 296–98. Mabey, Richard. Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think about Nature. London: Profile Books, 2010. Makin, Bonnie. “Cannabis Discovered in Tobacco Pipes Found in William Shakespeare’s Garden.” The Daily Telegraph, August 9, 2015. Mancall, Peter C. Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Martyn, Trea. Elizabeth in the Garden: A Story of Love, Rivalry, and Spectacular Design. London: Faber and Faber, 2008. May, Steven W. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Carey-Berkeley Wedding.” Renaissance Papers (1983): 43–52. Moffatt, Alistair. The Reivers: The Story of the Border Reivers. Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2010. Morus Londinium. “Timeline of the Mulberry in London: A Summary of London’s Mulberry Heritage.” https://www.moruslondinium.org/research/timeline. Myers, Katherine. “‘Men as plants increase’: Botanical Meaning in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.” Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 40, no. 2 (2020): 171–90. Reynolds, Lou Agnes, and Paul Sawyer. “Folk Medicine and the Four Fairies of A Midsummer-Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare Quarterly 10, no. 4 (1959): 513–21. Rickert, Edith. “Political Propaganda and Satire in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Modern Philology 21, no. 1 (1923): 53–87. Royal Horticultural Society, “Rosa Midsummer Night’s Dream (‘Rawroyal’) (F).” https:// www.rhs.org.uk/Plants/209927/Rosa-Midsummer-Night-s-Dream-Rawroyal-(F)/ Details. Smith, Roly. Wonders of the Peak Then and Now. Sheff ield: Byway Publications, 2018. “Smoking Mugwort the Plant that Takes Your Dreams Higher.” Real Leaf Blog. https:// www.real-leaf.com/blogs/realleaf-blog/smoking-mugwort-for-lucid-dreams. Thomas, Vivian, and Nicki Faircloth. Shakespeare’s Plants and Gardens: A Dictionary. Rev. ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Watson, Robert N. “The Ecology of Self in Midsummer Night’s Dream.” In Ecocritical Shakespeare, edited by Lynne Bruckner and Dan Brayton, 33–56. New York: Taylor and Francis, 2011. Watts, D. C. Elsevier’s Dictionary of Plant Lore. London: Elsevier, Inc., 2007.

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Wiles, David. Shakespeare’s Almanac: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Marriage, and the Elizabethan Calendar. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993. Willes, Margaret. A Shakespearean Botanical. Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2015. Witcher, Robert. “On Rome’s Ecological Contribution to British Flora and Fauna: Landscape, Legacy and Identity.” Landscape History 34, no. 2 (2013): 5–26. Woodcock, Matthew. “Spirits of Another Sort: Constructing Shakespeare’s Fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” In A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Critical Guide, edited by Regina Buccola, 112–30. London: Continuum, 2010. Woodland Trust. “Shakespeare’s Plant Identification Sheet.” https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/media/40455/gtsa-shakespeare-plant-id-sheet.pdf. Working, Lauren. “Locating Colonization at the Jacobean Inns of Court.” The Historical Journal 61, no. 1 (2018): 29–51. Vlasopolos, Anca. “The Ritual of Midsummer: A Pattern for A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Renaissance Quarterly 31, no. 1 (1978): 21–29.

About the Author Lisa Hopkins is Professor of English at Sheffield Hallam University and co-edits Shakespeare, Journal of Marlowe Studies, and Arden Studies in Early Modern Drama. Her most recent publications are Greeks and Trojans on the Early Modern English Stage (De Gruyter, 2020) and Burial Plots in British Detective Fiction (Palgrave, 2021).

Part 3 Plants and Temporalities

8. Clockwork Plants and Shakespeare’s Overlapping Notions of Time Miranda Wilson

Abstract This paper explores how the human body’s relationship to time often emerges as both mechanical and plant-like in the writings of an array of early modern authors. Starting with a sunflower clock theorized by Athanasius Kircher, I move into a discussion on how early modern time-sense relies on multiple forms of temporal experience, including the mechanical, the organic, and the environmental. Using Shakespeare as well as the work of horticultural writers, I explore how early modern notions of “keeping time” trouble Aristotelean divisions between organic forms, and how they suggest kinship between the vegetative and the human. Keywords: Plant, garden, time, mechanical clock, mechanical watch, environment.

In the mid-1630s, Athanasius Kircher, the Jesuit inventor, astronomer, medical writer, and would-be translator of Egyptian hieroglyphics, created a device with such powerful implications that fellow scientists and theologians from across Europe, including Pierre Gassendi and René Descartes, discussed and debated it.1 Kircher claimed that, with the aid of a sunflower seed, he had created a perfect clock, one that used a theorized magnetic connection between plants and the sun to run a timepiece more accurate and more perpetual than either the era’s ubiquitous sundials or its increasingly available mechanical timepieces. This clock, as reported by early observers, ran

1 On the scope of Kircher’s influence and his place in seventeenth-century thought, see Paula Findlen’s introduction to Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything, 1–6.

Staub, S.C. (ed.), Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463721332_ch08

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without the benefit of direct sunlight, for instance in a darkened room.2 And unlike the “rank” and poisonous “midnight weeds” commonly believed to derive their power from the absence of the moon or sun, the sunflower clock promised to demonstrate a consistent solar influence, no less true and life-giving for being invisible.3 While Kircher could not, subsequently, show that his sunflower seed clock worked as promised, he continued to experiment, substituting a root balanced in water for the original seed during a demonstration in Rome, and later attaching an entire sunflower plant to a rotating disk. This final experiment, described in Kircher’s Magnes siue de arte magnetica (1641), includes a beautiful and detailed engraving of a sunflower in full bloom, growing through a cork disk floating on a pool of water [Figure 3]. Beneath the disk, Kircher writes, the roots of the plant hover, wrapped in wool, unmoored from the earth which encloses the less artful sunflowers depicted around the basin. 4 A banner above the flower declares this a “ΩΡΟΕΚΟΝΙΟΝ ΕΛΙΟΤΡΟΠΙΚΟΝ,” a Heliotropic Horoscope.5 Heavenly hands hold the dial, signaling the flower’s place within a divine temporal pattern, while a beam emitted from the flower’s center indicates the correct time. This “marriage of art and nature” dominates a landscape dotted with other flowers and overseen by the sun, which, Kircher maintains, moves around the stationary earth. For Kircher, the dream of the sunflower clock arises from his desire to prove the otherwise unobservable forces aligning and ordering the physical world. He reasons that the magnetic force of the sun, demonstrated by the movement of the sunflower’s head as well as by the vertical orientation of plants in general, creates what we and the flower experience as temporality. The sunflower, like all plants, is already a clock, even before Kircher positions it within his delicate mechanism of water and cork. And what can be said of the sunflower can be said for all the living and non-living parts of the terrestrial system. This sense of universal alignment intrigued both the 2 For a discussion of the early reception of Kircher’s sunflower clock, see Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination, 14–6; Roberto Buonanno, The Stars of Galileo, 9–11. 3 Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, 3.2.245–46. The murderous Lucianus plucks such weeds in “The Mousetrap,” but the link between moonless nights and poisonous plants is traditional and widespread, including in Shakespeare’s works. See for instance, Macbeth, 4.1.25 and Cymbeline, 4.2.284–286. All references to Shakespeare come from the Oxford anthology. All references to Shakespeare’s poetry use line numbers to indicate citation. 4 Athanasius Kircher, “Horoscopium Botanicum,” 736–41. See fol. 730 for the image of the sunflower clock. 5 The Oxford English Dictionary, “horoscope, n.,” definition 2, notes the seventeenth-century use of “horoscope” to signify a “[a] figure or table on which the hours are marked.”

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Figure 3: Athanasius Kircher, “Sunflower Clock,” from Magnes siue de arte magnetica opvs tripartitvm. Rome: 1641. Photo courtesy of Special Collections, The University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press, Newark, Delaware.

strictly geocentric Kircher, and those, like Galileo’s friend and supporter, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, who were convinced of a Copernican heliocentric system.6 Whether the sun moved around the earth, or the earth around the sun, the sunflower’s rotation might transform such motion 6 For more on the seventeenth-century interest in magnetism and universal alignment, see Hankins and Silverman, Instruments, 22–23; Koen Vermeir, “‘Bent and Directed Toward Him’,” 61–63.

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into a temporal system. This fabulous, and ultimately impossible clock promised to make time-telling so perfect that those who observed it could understand their own temporal place in the macrocosm. Kircher’s design attests to seventeenth-century ideas of plants that scholars generally locate with later thinkers, such as Jean-Jacques d’Ortous de Mairan and Carl Linnaeus. De Mairan, commonly cited as the first scientist to experiment with chronobiology, hypothesized in 1729 that plants sensed the movement of the sun even without access to sunlight.7 In Philosophia Botanica (1753), Carl Linnaeus articulated a theory of endogenous (internal) time when he proposed a flower-clock which might mark the hours through the opening and closing of blossoms.8 De Mairan quickly moved away from his experiments with plants, and Linnaeus’s clock, like Kircher’s, proved unworkable, but their eighteenth-century theories of a temporal regulator within plants survives in our contemporary notion of a circadian rhythm ordering the lives of all creatures, from fungi to photosynthesizing organisms to reptiles and mammals. The importance of de Mairan’s and Linnaeus’s theories, however, should not blind us to the ways seventeenth-century thinkers imagined organic life of all kinds functioning to translate time. Early modern inventors, scientists, and artisans, as well as poets, dramatists, and horticulturalists, share a sense that timekeeping involves multiple systems, multiple physicalities, and multiple relationships to the world. They also share a belief that human life can be understood as plantlike, and that our kinship with plants can be understood in temporal terms. Our animal bodies, rooted in a vegetative world, tell time in ways that can adjust, or render observable, the passage of time marked by the dials, hands, gnomon, and bells of other horological devices. While deep temporal affinities between plants, machines, and humans shape a variety of discourses in early modern England, in this chapter I lean on William Shakespeare’s plays and poetry to explore the ubiquitous early modern interest in overlapping systems of telling time. In Shakespeare, as in the works of so many of his contemporaries, we see dizzying shifts between mechanical, vegetative, and flesh-based clocks. The human body, for Shakespeare and his audience, often acts less like the “paragon of animals” briefly imagined by Hamlet, than the violets described by a cautious Laertes (“Forward not permanent, sweet not lasting, / The perfume and suppliance of a minute, / No more”), or like the unruly, clockwork bodies mocked by Shakespeare’s earlier Biron (“Still a-repairing, ever out frame, / And never 7 de Mairan, “Observation Botanique,” 35. 8 Linnaeus, Philosophia Botanica, 274–75.

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going aright”).9 Shakespeare helps us see how multiple forms of time-telling converge within the fragile human body. And taken together, Shakespeare’s overlapping, enmeshed systems of time-telling invite us to join a vibrant and sophisticated early modern conversation, one that may have been muted by both later historical notions of universal, regulated clock-time, and by Descartes’ famous characterization of humans as, at least potentially, “masters and possessours of Nature.”10 This early modern conversation still speaks to us and includes us, as we look for better ways to understand our entwined relationship to the world. My interest in the multiplicity and irregularity of early modern timekeeping contributes to a larger scholarly exploration of how early moderns muddled the categories of plant and animal, living and non-living. It also engages with scholarship on how early modern women and men experienced time. For many scholars, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries chart a progression from English reliance on solar time, exemplified by the sundial and seasonal agricultural patterns, to an era in which human life becomes increasingly defined and ordered by mechanical time.11 As clocks and watches break up the flow of time into increasingly smaller segments (first hours, then, in the sixteenth century, minutes, and finally, in the late-seventeenth century, seconds), they make way for a new, recognizably modern understanding of temporal control and ownership.12 Our struggle to mark time, however, intensifies the already tight traditional connection between time’s passage and our own progress toward the grave. As we learn to watch the clock, we learn new ways to notice and mourn the loss of hours and minutes.13 This oscillation between temporal control and private loss certainly shapes tragic moments such as at the end of Richard II. Debased and 9 Hamlet, 2.2.309, Hamlet, 1.3.7–10, and Love’s Labour’s Lost, 3.1.186–87. 10 René Descartes, A Discourse of a Method, 100. 11 Unlike non-mechanical horologes, such as clepsydras, candle clocks, hourglasses, and sundials, mechanical clocks and watches rely on weights or springs for power. For a discussion of the increasing availability of mechanical clocks and watches in early modern England, see Moira Donald, “‘The Greatest Necessity for Every Rank of Men’,” 57–63. 12 On the connection between mechanical time and social patterns, see Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour, 1. For representative arguments for an increasingly regulated sense of time in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Ricardo J. Quinones, The Renaissance Discovery of Time, 3, 6–7; Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality, 80–81; Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 200; Adam Max Cohen, Technology and the Early Modern Self, 28, 31–39; Christina Juliet Faraday, “Tudor Time Machines,” 245–47, 259. 13 On the ways clocks and watches can create anxiety over the loss of time, see especially, Quinones, Renaissance Discovery of Time, 3, 135–46; Eric C. Brown, “Violence, Ritual,” 16; Crosby, The Measure of Reality, 92.

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imprisoned, Richard imagines himself not as a king, but as a body-madeclock for others to set and read. For now hath time made me his numb’ring clock. My thoughts are minutes, and with sighs they jar Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch Whereto my finger, like a dial’s point, Is pointing still … (5.5.50–53)

Having lost his crown and his place in the world, Richard sees himself as both mechanical and absurd; not even, finally, the clock’s face or its internal mechanisms, but simply the “jack of the clock” (5.5.60), emerging to strike the hours. His every breath and thought sweep him relentlessly toward a death which he knows will give order, “proud joy,” and legitimacy to time’s temporary master, Bolingbroke (5.5.59). What many critics do not acknowledge, however, is how failure, uncertainty, and interdependence shape early modern experiences with time. Despite the dreadful, mechanical progress of mortality suggested by the end of Richard II, and despite whatever desires early modern women and men might have had to regulate, own, and subdue the hours and minutes of their days, technological limitations ensured that mechanical clocks and watches remained only one of many ways to establish time-sense in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.14 Until the mid-seventeenth century’s innovations of the pendulum clock, hairspring, and anchor escapement, clocks and watches all ran at different rates, both in relationship to each other and depending upon how long they had been running. As early modern writers universally acknowledge, mechanical timepieces of all sizes and qualities needed both constant adjustment and constant attention if they were to have any use at all. So unreliable were mechanical timepieces that Tiffany Stern declares, in her study of telling time in the playhouse, “In Shakespeare’s day, it would barely have been worth a playhouse’s while expending money on so ungovernable a device.”15 Rather than being ruled by a singular clock, the habits and patterns of early modern daily life would have found their shape and meaning through multiple horological mechanisms and from multiple perspectives. Early modern Englishwomen and -men would have heard, seen, and felt time’s 14 For more on the multiplicity of time-telling in early modern England, see Miranda Wilson, “Gifts of Imperfection,” 45–47; Wilson, Poison’s Dark Works, xx–xxiii. 15 Tiffany Stern, “Time for Shakespeare,” 14.

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Figure 4: “Portable Drum Watch,” with both a mechanical dial and a sundial (1550–1570). From the workshop of Christoph Schissler. Courtesy of The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

passage through the apparent movement of the sun and stars across the sky, through changes in the natural world, and through their observation of hourglasses, sundials, lunar dials, clepsydras, parish clocks, personal clocks, and portable watches. Horological devices often involved more than one method for time-telling, for instance, a combination of sundial and mechanical watch, or an hourglass and sundial [Figure 4]. The abundant opportunities to tell time in early modern England, and the cultural desire to do so, draw attention to what might, from our twentyfirst-century perspective, seem like temporal chaos. Not only did personal clocks and watches run at different rates and need constant attention and readjustment from their owners, but sundials and lunar dials could only operate when the sun or moon was visible, hourglasses and clepsydras could be stopped or started by the human hand and could be influenced by environmental factors, while the mechanical weight-driven bells of parish clocks all tolled at different moments.16 The rapid proliferation of time-telling devices in early modern England exacerbated, rather than solved, the problem of marking time. As I have argued elsewhere, the many iterations of “What’s a clock?” in Shakespeare’s plays and in the work of so many other writers, signal just how difficult, and how social, “telling time” could be in early modern England.17

16 On the technological problems of clocks and watches, see Wilson, Poison’s Dark Works, 142–49. For a discussion of the ways London parish clocks produced a variety of temporal patterns, see Stern, “Time for Shakespeare,” 18–19. 17 Wilson, Poison’s Dark Works, 144–45. In Shakespeare’s works alone, the question prompts important discussions of time in As You Like It, Richard III, and 1 Henry IV. The question comes up more glancingly in 2 Henry IV, Henry VIII, Julius Caesar, Measure for Measure, and The Merry Wives of Windsor.

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Arthur F. Kinney makes this point in Shakespeare’s Webs, arguing that in his plays, Shakespeare contrasts “elastic” personal time with clock time, rendering the experience of time “perspectival.”18 Kinney goes on to argue that in Shakespeare’s England, as in his works, there is never just one way to tell time. Rosalind’s lessons to Orlando, especially her sense that “[t]ime travels in divers paces with divers persons” (As You Like It, 3.2.301–2), find an echo in Falstaff’s “Shrewsbury clock” (1 Henry IV, 5.4.141–45) and Petruchio’s claim to Kate that “[i]t shall be what o’clock I say it is” (Taming of the Shrew, 4.3.193).19 Kinney’s notion of “perspectival” time helps us see how early modern experiences of temporality alter with proximity to power, or as women and men feel love or repugnance or fear. For Kinney and other critics who acknowledge the problems of telling time well, our sense of ourselves in time depends upon both our desires, and those of the time-tellers around us. By turning to a critic working in a very different cultural and historical moment, we can see how early modern time-sense might also, like Kircher’s sunflower clock, depend upon our rootedness in, and our attunement with, the shifting natural world around us. In her study of long eighteenth-century efforts to mediate between “placebased, organic time” and mechanical time, Kate Wersan provides a way to move past common assumptions linking modernity and mechanical time. Writing of the ways horticulturalists addressed the problems of time-keeping by considering the growth cycles of early melons, she argues, “Efforts to find order in the tumult of wind and leaves, frosts and thaws, floods, droughts, and harvests are all part of this history. Seen this way, the history of time is, inherently, a history of environmental perception.”20 Wersan’s argument has implications for earlier conceptions of time-keeping, as well as for the continual play between plants and humans. The horticulturalists she studies know that mechanical time, for a variety of reasons, could not be the primary or dominant means for establishing time-sense. From their perspective, “to accept any … timekeeping technologies as the best method to interpret nature and organize human activity would have compromised their empirical understanding of the natural world as stable and rationally organized.”21 For these men, as for Kircher before them, plants offer an opportunity to understand time as it works through, and in, the material world. These writers demonstrate how we might counterpoise an impulse 18 19 20 21

Arthur F. Kinney, Shakespeare’s Webs, 70. Kinney, 87–89. Wersan, “The Early Melon,” 284, 283–84. Wersan, “The Early Melon,” 306.

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to use, inscribe, and divide time into increments with a view of time both more “perspectival” and “environmental.” As individual horologes, we may all tell time differently, but collectively we share with plants a temporal alignment no less powerful for being so often unmarked. Of all the many spaces in which early modern writers might imagine the temporal confluence of human and plant life—including forests, fields, marshes, and waters—the garden remains one of the most suggestive and rich. For, as early modern writers and readers knew from Genesis 2:4 and the many texts expounding on it, the Garden of Eden was humanity’s first home. Planted by a benevolent Creator, this originary space is a vegetal world, where grows “euery tree, that was fayre to syght, and pleasaunt to eate.”22 Only after the man is placed in the garden, only after we read of Eden’s river and its distributaries, and only after the man is commanded to “worke it, and kepe it,” does God create the animals that are to be the man’s first “helpe lyke.”23 The affinity between garden and home resonates through Shakespeare’s plays and outwards into early modern culture. We sense this affinity, for instance, in John of Gaunt’s paean to England as “this other Eden, demiparadise” (Richard II, 2.1.42), as well as in the less-lofty comment by Jake Cade that “Adam was a gardener” (2 Henry VI, 4.2.133). We see echoes of it as well in Beatrice’s comments on her kinship to “Adam’s sons” (Much Ado, 2.1.57–58). On Shakespeare’s stage, the connections between garden, home, and kin are physical as well as poetic. As Deborah Solomon argues, even when Shakespeare’s language creates a “greenwood” or “forest,” the ordered and relatively bare space of the wooden stage would have evoked for Shakespeare’s audiences the enclosed space of a garden far more strongly than a tangled wood.24 John Milton would later rely on the correspondences of stage, home, and garden when he describes Eden as a “Silvan Scene … a woody Theatre / Of stateliest view …. Which to our general Sire gave prospect large.”25 In Shakespeare and Milton the world of plants, the world of the garden, is the ground from which springs human action and reaction. Plants and their gardens speak to us of what we have been, what we are, and what, eventually, we will become. Inspired by the image of a world in which humans and plants comprise all there is of life, John Gerard writes in the opening moments of his influential 22 Genesis 2:9. All scriptural references come from The. Holie. Bible (1568), also called The Bishops Bible. 23 Genesis 2:10–18. 24 Solomon, ‘“All in a Garden Green’,” 228–29. For more on both the composition and the implications of the theater’s wooden spaces, see Vin Nardizzi, Wooden Os, 24–28. 25 John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 4, 140–44.

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Herball (1597), “the world can brag of no more ancient monument than Paradise, and the garden of Eden: and the fruits of the earth may contend for seignioritie, seeing their mother was the first creature that conceiued, and they themselues, the first fruit she brought foorth.”26 The scope of this plant-world also shapes readers’ opening engagement with John Parkinson’s Paradisi in Sole (1629), a work so popular that it went through three subsequent printings in the seventeenth century [Figure 5]. Christopher Switzer’s title page woodcut for Paradisi in Sole depicts Eden as an improbable, verdant collection of plants from diverse locations and climes. Adam and Eve tend fruit trees and strawberries, while sunflowers, crocuses, tulips, roses, cacti, pineapple trees, and enormous carnations, cyclamens and lilies flourish around them. As befits a place of perfection, early summer strawberries share a space with autumnal grapes, and both are surrounded by flowers that, in a postlapsarian world, can only bloom in spring, or summer, or fall.27 Returning to Wersan’s notion of “environmental perception,” Switzer’s Edenic woodcut offers not only a moment before sin, but a moment before time. These are plants that have yet to become clocks; they are not tied to a particular season or place. As the poet Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas describes in his extended exploration of the world’s beginning, “in all soyles, all seasons, all things grew.”28 And since they are pre-temporal, these plants also lack the specific associations of age, sin, melancholy, loss, mortality, and betrayal which Ophelia uses to such effect when she offers flowers and herbs to Laertes, Claudius, and Gertrude, saving of course, some of the bitter plant, rue, for herself (Hamlet, 4.5.175–84). These Edenic plants, and the humans who grow with them, exist outside the process of signification, just as they exist outside any system of time. As if to emphasize the importance and primacy of plant life in Eden, as well as the Garden’s timelessness, Switzer’s Adam and Eve share this blessed space with several “foule of the ayre” and “mouing creature[s], which the waters brought foorth,” but the only other “beast of the field” allowed is a vegetable Tartary lamb, growing from its 26 John Gerard, Herball, “To the courteous and well-willing Readers,” n. pag. 27 A number of plants depicted here, including the sunflower and pineapple, only arrived in England as a result of exploration of the Americas. Others, like the strawberry and lily were well known to English readers. Readers of this work could f ind the plants of Switzer’s Eden later represented in Parkinson’s commentary and accompanying images, including details of the timing of blossoms and fruit. See, for instance, the extended entry for the “gilloflower” (also, in Parkinson, called carnations and pinks), which details the wide variety in the flower’s appearance, as well as its tendency to bloom in late summer, 306–18. 28 Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas, “The first booke of the first day,” in The Second Weeke. Josuah Sylvester’s 1598 translation of this work is unpaginated.

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Figure 5: The title page of John Parkinson’s 1629 Paradisi in Sole. Woodcut by Christopher Switzer. Photo courtesy of Special Collections, The University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press, Newark, Delaware.

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central stalk, and just as fixed in the ground as any flower.29 By including the vegetable lamb, Switzer follows the earlier Du Bartas, who also places these creatures within Eden, where they form a natural maze, or hedge, through which Adam can wander, “musing” on the Creator’s work. As Du Bartas describes it, this lamb exemplifies the “wondrous vertue” of God in the Garden. “The beast hath roote, the plant hath flesh and bloud; / The nimble plant can turne it too and fro.”30 A hybrid form of life, stationary and yet mobile, driven by appetite to eat the plants around it, yet “lust-les,” the vegetable lamb could be seen as a way to understand Adam and Eve before their fatal interaction with the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Like the lamb, they may move and eat, they may feel desire and pleasure, and blood runs through their flesh. Also like the lamb, they live without sin, “lust-les,” and virtuously anchored to their proper place within an ordered realm. For Du Bartas, Switzer, and Parkinson, Eden represents the moment before divisions of kind or category order the world, and in it we see revealed the likeness between all that grows, all that lives. After the fall, of course, the universal clock starts, and, as Shakespeare’s wise gardener, Perdita, reminds us in The Winter’s Tale, plants and people become creatures in time. To the youthful Florizel, Perdita wishes, “[F]lowers o’th’spring that might become your time of day,” while for the middle-aged Polixenes and Camillo, she reserves “hot lavender” and marigold, “that goes to bed wi’th’ sun, and with him rises, weeping” (4.4.112–14, 103–6). Like Perdita, Parkinson sees a postlapsarian correspondence between plants and the lives of even his most exalted readers. Imagining his book as a “speaking Garden,” he prays that his dedicatee, Henrietta Maria, may learn from his book and the natural world the best pattern for her own earthly “fruition,” so that she may find her eventual place in a “heauenly Paradise.”31 In the pages that follow, Parkinson advises his general readers to note the similarity between their acts of good or ill in the world and the growth and use of plants. “Many herbes and flowers that haue small beautie or sauour to commend them, haue much more good vse and vertue: so many men of excellent rare parts and good qualities doe lye hid vnknown and 29 Genesis 1:2–25. The first story of creation in Genesis emphasizes the distinction between animals in the air and waters, all of which are created on the fifth day, and animals of the earth which are created on the sixth day. The second story of creation also distinguishes between beasts of the field and fowl of the air, although they are created simultaneously. For more on early modern treatments of the vegetable lamb, see Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, An Oak Spring Flora, 160. 30 Du Bartas, “The first booke of the first day,” n. pag. 31 Parkinson, “THE QVEENES MOST EXCELLENT MAIESTIE,” Paradisi in Sole, 2.

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not respected, vntill time and vse of them doe set forth their properties.”32 Such a move echoes the opening conversation between the Bishop of Eli and the Archbishop of Canterbury in Shakespeare’s Henry V. Considering the transformation of their sovereign, Shakespeare’s churchman hit upon one way to make sense of what would otherwise be a “miracle”; their new king is like the strawberry whose, … wholesome berries thrive and ripen best Neighboured by fruit of baser quality; And so the Prince obscured his contemplation Under the veil of wildness – which, no doubt, Grew like the summer grass, fastest by night, Unseen, yet crescive in his faculty. (1.1.62–67)

For both Parkinson and Shakespeare, plants provide more than a metaphor for human life, they offer a way to understand our physical and temporal place in a fallen world, as well as a way to anticipate our progress to the next. Parkinson casts his plants of “small beautie or sauour” as passively awaiting a moment of “vse,” by God or by other humans. Shakespeare’s Henry has a more active role, encompassing both the weeds that obscure his spiritual “contemplation” and the fruit that exemplifies it. But whether writers imagine our plant-like humanity as passive or active, we exist like Kircher’s fantastical, floating sunflower. Our movement, as well as our physical orientation and growth, all tell a temporal story, making and marking us time’s creatures. If we, along with early modern writers and readers, imagine ourselves as time-telling plants rooted in a world defined by temporal forces, our ways of reading the garden, that familiar microcosm of the natural world, must also change. And such a change can be unsettling. Many of us living in the twenty-first century feel comfortable seeing ourselves as inhabitants, owners, and enjoyers of an environment that is itself a site of work or recreation. Much of the abundant work of scholars interested in early modern gardens shares this perspective. Picking up on early modern writers’ reliance on horticultural language, many critics note how attending to the world of plants and gardens, both those that are imaginary and those that are (or could be) real, allows us to explore an ever-shifting range of cultural interests and theoretical positions.

32 Parkinson, “To the Courteous Reader,” Paradisi in Sole, n. pag.

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Despite their divergent interests, and despite the different work they do with the images and practices of early modern gardens, many critics share a sense that the plant-space of the garden creates a conflict between the cyclical patterns of vegetative growth, decay, and regeneration and the linear, more tragic trajectory of human life.33 At times, critics resolve this conflict by recasting the garden as a place where, as Elise Lonich Ryan argues in her exploration of Lucy Hutchinson’s “Elegies,” early modern writers could imagine “a site for meetings between human and divine.”34 At other times, critics use the garden as a way to work through early modern political nostalgia, fantasies of conquest, or the gendering logic of early modern England.35 For most critics, however, their interpretive work relies on a continued split between the garden as a site of labor, and the men and women who either work or recreate within its boundaries.36 The garden, with its variety of beneficial and noxious plants, its ongoing tasks of pruning, weeding, planting and transplanting, serves as a way to imagine each human’s struggle with the recalcitrant material of the world, including (or especially) the material of the human body. In this sense, Iago’s ironic advice to Roderigo serves as a model for the way many scholars of the early modern read the relationship between plant and human, Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners; so that if we will plant nettles or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs or distract it with many, either to have it sterile with idleness or manured with industry, why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills. (Othello, 1.3.320–26)

From this perspective, the garden and the plants within it matter primarily as matter. In a move reminiscent of Aristotle’s arguments on the subordination of women to men in generation, the vegetative space of the garden provides material that can be shaped and read by the more active, and more 33 The history of scholarship on gardens and Shakespeare is so varied, that I must resort to highlighting trends. 34 Elise Lonich Ryan, “Gardens of Grief,” 213. 35 For an example of how the bodies represented by gardens can work as nostalgia for Elizabeth I, see Amy Tigner, “The Winter’s Tale,” especially 115, 117–18, 121–22. For a fascinating look at the overlapping language of military and horticultural diagrams, see Katherine O. Acheson, “Military Illustration, Garden Design,” in passim. For one discussion of gardens as a gendering space, see Adrienne Redding, “Liminal Gardens,” 143–44. 36 For a recent example of how gardens serve as sites of gendered labor, see Rebecca Laroche and Jennifer Munroe, “On a Bank of Rue,” 45.

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perfect, agency of humans.37 Such a perspective also tends to distinguish human time-sense from the time-sense of the vegetative world. While the plants of a garden follow seasonal patterns, the gardener, like the makers of the time-telling devices so often included in early modern gardens, sets, alters, adjusts, and aligns material in ways that foreground time’s passage.38 We might, with good reason, hear with skepticism Iago’s words on our ability to garden willfully and well; however, his imagery relies on a logic familiar to early modern readers and writers (as well as to the scholars who study them). Adhering to Aristotelian distinctions, texts often emphasize the differences between the life of plants and animals, including the highest animal, those gardeners of the world, women and men. From Aristotle and his imitators, readers learn that plants are connected in some way to all life; however, only animals and humans have a sensory relationship to the world.39 And according to the author of the Pseudo-Aristotelian De Plantis, only animals and humans can feel desire. 40 Following this line of reasoning, the late-seventeenth-century horticulturalist, William Hughes, sees such a distinction between the realms of plants and animals that in his opening pages of The Compleat Vineyard (1670), he ponders whether Aristotle might have erred, and whether plants can even be said to have life. [T]o speak rigourously, I cannot allow Plants or Vegetables of any kind to have life; they are not se moventia, they have not a principle of motion in them, but onely a vegetative spirit or life; and it is the operation of outward Agents upon them, as the Earth, Water, Air, Sun, &c. which setteth the motion on Foot, by which they increase and grow; and so nearly imitate the motions of life in Animals, whose beginning is from within. 41

For Hughes, agency, acting as a form of desire or impulse toward increase, growth, and movement, signals the animal state of being in the world. Plants, passively acted upon by the larger world, take on the subordinated 37 For Aristotle’s alignment of men with greater activity and greater perfection, as well as his corresponding alignment of women with matter and with a lower degree of perfection, see Generation of Animals, 731b24–732a11. All references to Aristotle’s works and the pseudoAristotelian On Plants come from The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation. 2 Vol. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. All references to Aristotle use the Bekker numbering system. 38 For a short early modern discussion of the placement of clocks in gardens, see William Lawson, A New Orchard and Garden, 57. 39 Aristotle, Generation, 730b32–731a34; Aristotle, On the Soul, 411b10–31. 40 Aristotle, pseudo, On Plants, 815b20–26. 41 William Hughes, The Compleat Vineyard, 2.

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position of the material, a position which calls into question, at least for Hughes, their place within the category of the living. Their “vegetative spirit” works as an imitation of animal life, rather than a step in the progression away from the lifeless state of stones. And yet, Aristotle’s famous division of the natural world into separate kingdoms was never as neat as he, or his early modern imitators, might have liked. 42 In History of Animals, Aristotle writes, “Nature proceeds little by little from things lifeless to animal life in such a way that it is impossible to determine the exact line of demarcation, nor on which side thereof an intermediate form should lie …. Indeed … there is observed in plants a continuous scale of ascent toward the animal.”43 As Jean Ferrick has argued, early modern writers, including Shakespeare, were well aware of the “correspondences” Aristotle allowed between the plant, the animal, and the human. Considering the language and logic of Titus Andronicus, a play fascinated with all the ways a body might be changed, Feerick writes, “for Shakespeare and his earliest auditors and readers, laws of kind were similar among people as among plants.”44 For all their usefulness as a site for metaphoric and critical labor, and despite all the ways they can be used to naturalize Aristotelean hierarchies both organic and social, plants and the places they thrive continue to foster breakdowns of category and type. When this happens, early modern writers are free to consider the ways time works through bodies, and through the natural world. Hughes, for example, in the sections immediately preceding and following his declarations on the sharp distinction between plants and humans, undercuts the notion of lifeless, vegetative “imitation” by turning attention to the lost space of Eden, where, as we have seen, Aristotelean kingdoms of life are far less distinct. Some plants embody, for him, a prelapsarian way of being in a postlapsarian world. In particular, he argues that vines evoke both the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Even in the fallen world, vines remain “fruitful” and “commodious” (a word with strong early modern connotations of usefulness, generosity, and ease). Unlike Adam, who must labor “in sorowe,” for “breade” that can only be achieved with the “sweatte of [his] face,”45 Hughes’ vines grow with “easiness,” and a sense of goodwill that “refuseth not almost any kind of Country in the 42 Wilson, “Bastard Grafts,” 106–8. 43 Aristotle, History, 588b5–12. 44 Jean Feerick, “Botanical Shakespeares,” 84, 86. 45 Genesis 3:17–19.

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World … yea, and in many places in rocky and gravelly ground it growth abundantly and most plentifully.”46 His description here might serve as a model for proper and pleasant human activity, where charity and generous interaction shape the patterns of life. Hughes demonstrates that the Aristotelean model of separation and division, even when embraced by early modern writers, constitutes an imperfect way for imagining human’s place in the garden and our relationship to the life and death of plants. For many of Hughes’ fellow-horticulturalists, the delight we have upon entering a garden remains distinctly non-Aristotelian; our pleasure has everything to do with degrees of difference, rather than distinctions of kind. As William Lawson asks in A New Orchard and Garden (1618), What can your eye desire to see, your eares to heare, your mouth to taste, or your nose to smell, that is not to be had in an Orchard? with abundance and variety? What more delightsome than an infinite varieties of sweet smelling flowers? decking with sundry coloures the greene mantle of the Earth, the vniuersall Mother of us all, so by them bespotted, so dyed, that all the world cannot sample them …47

Every sense we possess creates a connection between the ongoing transformations of the natural world and those less perceptible transformations governing our physicality. In Lawson’s celebration of the garden, we feel and perceive a relationship to the verdant world that goes beyond the purely metaphorical, and which acknowledges our limited ability to control our own growth, flowering, and decline. As Lawson puts it, the green spaces of the world “call home” our “ouer-wearied spirits,” and in them we find our proper place. 48 We see the power of the garden-home as well in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 16. While the first four lines of the sonnet emphasize the great and violent struggle between “time” and the young man, the poem quickly shifts from a focus on “war,” to a consideration of the “mightier way” to victory (1–4). The young man, now at the “top” of his “happy hours,” can plant his own beauty in his choice of “maiden gardens yet unset” with hope of seeing this beauty continue in the world (5–7). It is tempting to see the young man in this line as an hourglass at the moment it is tipped to start the descent of 46 Hughes, The Compleat Vineyard, 2–3. 47 Lawson, A New Orchard and Garden, 57. 48 Lawson, A New Orchard and Garden, 56.

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the finely ground material within it. Alternately, the line may ask us to imagine the young man as a sundial with the gnomon’s shadow pointed to midday or as the hour hand of a mechanical dial as it passes the apex of the circle. Each of these possibilities emphasizes the young man’s place in a natural world defined through time. And taken together they underscore the multiple ways the sonnet asks us to imagine the sexuality and materiality of the young man. Acting simultaneously as the gardener, the seed or slip planted in “virtuous” (9) ground, and a timepiece marking the moment, he will beautify the world and make it perfect. And only when the distinction between human and plant dissolves can the young man both “keep” and “fortify” himself (13, 3). Early modern horticulturalists sometimes approach the world of plants with a passion matching that of Sonnet 16. For instance, in his “A Preface to the Reader” for The Spirituall Use of An Orchard (1657), a work suffused with both admiration for plants and a yearning for spiritual connection with them, Ralph Austen writes, Fruit-trees, though they are dumb companions, yet (in a sence) we may discourse with them …. Fruit-trees discover many things of God, and many things of our selves, and concerning our duty to God. We enquire of, and discourse with Fruit-trees when we consider, and meditate of them …. Fruit-trees speak to the mind, and tell us many things, and teach us many good lessons. 49

Austen argues that when humans use the fruits, bark, or leaves of plants for food, shelter, warmth, or delight, we fulfil only part of the divine task given to Adam when he is “put … in the Garden of Eden, that he myght worke it and kepe it.”50 Austen counsels his readers to care for the trees in an orchard because from them, we learn our proper orientation to God. “Now what Creatures,” he asks, “beare resemblance to man in so many respects as Fruit-trees?”51 For Austen and so many early modern writers, when we acknowledge the connections between flesh and plant, we partake of a more upright, more constant, and more joyful sense of our temporal and physical place in the world. One striking moment of connection between plant and human arises when Romeo and Juliet’s Friar Laurence looks ahead to his day’s work in the 49 Ralph Austen, The Spirituall Use of an Orchard, n. pag. 50 Genesis 2:15. Austen discusses this moment in Genesis in A Treatise of Frvit-Trees, 12. 51 Austen, The Spirituall Use of an Orchard, n. pag.

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fields around Verona. In this moment of meditation, of preparation, Friar Laurence speaks to more than Paracelsian theories of the good and ill in plants. His words render the vegetative pharmakon human. Within the infant rind of this weak flower Poison hath residence, and medicine power, For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part; Being tasted, slays all senses with the heart. Two such opposèd kings encamp them still In man as well as herbs—grace and rude will. (2.2.23–28)

Friar Laurence goes on to remind us that “herbs” and “man” face the same perils from within, the “canker” which both personifies and hastens death (30). This “canker” calls up the connections between plant and human in other ways, as well. For early modern readers and writers, a canker can suggest cancer, a devouring worm, or a disease that weakens stems and bark.52 The canker, and the constellation of threats it evokes, reminds us that plants are kin to us; we share with them a common stock, a common action in the world, and a common trajectory toward death.53 This notion of overlap, or shared experience, shoots though Shakespeare’s Sonnet 15, as well: When I perceive that men as plants increase, Cheerèd and checked even by the selfsame sky; Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease, And wear their brave state out of memory (lines 5–10)

Shakespeare’s use of “as” signals possibilities. While we could read the line as simile (“When I perceive that men, just like plants, increase”), a construction that emphasizes an apparent similarity despite fundamental differences, early modern uses of as also suggest connection (“When I perceive that man and also plants”).54 The two readings encourage us to see our being in the world as shaped by temporal patterns of universal import. Just like plants, we “vaunt in our youthful sap, at height decrease” because the temporal processes that we observe in plants also drive our animal lives. 52 See the OED for the full range of suggestive meanings to the word, “canker.” 53 For more on the ways early modern uses of “stock” emphasize similar operations in the plant and the animal, see Wilson, “Bastard Grafts,” 103–5. 54 The OED cites a range of possible meanings for as, including also, like, and in the same way.

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Despite the importance of Aristotelian categories, and not-withstanding early modern innovations in taxonomical divisions between plants and animals, plants can be seen as experiencing time in ways that overlap with a human approach to temporal patterns.55 Plants teach not only how to mark time, but how to feel time. Our joy in the garden comes tempered by the notion that its various plants easily create an evolving memento mori in which mutability, death, and decay hold sway. Shakespeare’s sonnets repeatedly rely upon this notion when they urge both the young man and the reader to see how tightly plant-time merges with the organic clock of the human body. Sonnet 12, for instance, begins with the speaker marking time through a mechanical device: “When I do count the clock that tells the time” (1). Here, the speaker emphasizes a mediated experience of time and its passage. While the clock “tells” time, the information it offers, the story it tells, must be “counted,” or interpreted, by the speaker in order to be understood. The speaker, however, quickly shifts away from his regulated and distancing interaction with the clock toward something far more akin to Wersan’s “environmental perception.” In the second line, he replaces mechanical time with solar time, and then immediately shifts to seasonal time as understood through observable changes in the bodies of violets, trees, plants of the field, and through the “sable curls” and “bristling beards” of the humans around him. The effect here is one of rapid temporal and spatial expansion, from the individualized and private experience of noting a clock to contemplation of the vast “wastes of time” (10) where all things, plant and human, face “time’s scythe” (13) together. The traditional figure of Time evoked in Sonnet 12 reminds us that despite Austen’s optimistic affinity with the trees of the arbor, our lives are perhaps more akin to the violets (3) and “summer’s green” (7) of the poem than to the “lofty trees” evoked in lines five and six. In Martin Parker’s ballad, ‘Take Time, While Time Is,” for instance, Time holds not only a scythe, but, as is often the case in images from the period, an hourglass and mechanical clock [Figure 6]. There is nothing stealthy or uncertain about this figure; nothing hidden or obtuse. He does not, as Macbeth imagines, “[creep] in this petty pace from day to day” (5.5.19). Rather, everything he signifies, and everything he intends, is broadcast by the objects he brings with him. And in this woodcut, as in so many other written and visual texts, the flowers and grass that dot the ground around the figure of Time stand in for us—their vulnerability and brevity are ours, as well. 55 For a discussion of early modern taxonomical works, see Cristina Bellorini, The World of Plants, 70–84.

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Figure 6: Figure of Time with scythe, hourglass and clock. Martin Parker, “Take Time, While Time Is,” first printed in the last years of James I and reprinted in 1638. © British Library Board, The Roxburghe Ballads Collection, C.20.f.7.398–399.

Such images arise from the rich scriptural tradition of both Hebrew and Christian texts. In Psalms, we hear that, “The dayes of man are as the dayes of an hearbe: he flourisheth as a flowre in the fielde / For the winde passeth ouer it, and it is no more seene: and the place therof knoweth it no more” (103:15–16). In Job, humanity’s plant-like qualities suggest such impermanence that even our materiality comes into question. “He commeth vp, and is cut downe, like a floure. He fleeth as it were a shadow, and neuer continueth in one state” (14:2).56 The apparent transience of some plant life, and the ways it signals the transience of human existence, remains so conventional, in fact, that its appearance may obscure the different possibilities that emerge when we imagine our existence as beings rooted in the world. While the temporal and physical story told to us by plants can be melancholy, this melancholy is not the same as that evoked by mechanical watches and clocks, or even by the older technologies of timekeeping like the sundial and hourglass. All forms of timekeeping, both organic and inorganic, remind us that tempus fugit, but as Jasmin Mersmann points out in her consideration of early modern sundials, timekeeping devices 56 The idea that all human life should be seen as fleeting as grass, as impermanent as a flower, can be seen in multiple books of the Tanakh and the Greek New Testament. See for instance, Psalm 90:5, Isaiah 40:6, James 1:10–11, and 1 Peter 1:24.

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primarily “represent” cosmic motions.57 Their tale of time’s passage comes tinged with the alienation and distance inherent to all projects of mediation. Plants as clocks do more than represent the passage of time; they perform it through their daily and seasonal changes. Their performance, as Kircher and Austen and Shakespeare remind us, also acts as an invitation. Through their demonstrations of time, plants reveal the connections between matter and place, as well as the forces that shape them both. They offer us a form of temporal communion through which our experience of ourselves as individual, flesh-based clocks, shifts and we move from the microcosm of the lost minute, or hour, to the macrocosm of divine and universal patterns.

Bibliography Primary Sources Aristotle. Generation of Animals, trans. A. Platt, ed. Jonathon Barnes. The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, sixth printing, with corrections. 1 Vol. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Aristotle. History of Animals, trans. D’A.W. Thompson, ed. Jonathon Barnes. The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, sixth printing, with corrections. 1 Vol. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Aristotle. On the Soul, trans. J.A. Smith. The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, sixth printing, with corrections. 1 Vol. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Aristotle, pseudo. On Plants, trans. E.S. Forster, ed. Jonathon Barnes. The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation. 2 Vol. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Austen, Ralph. The Spirituall Use of an Orchard, or Garden of Fruit-Trees, Oxford: Printed by Henry Hall for Thomas Robinson, 1657. Austen, Ralph. A Treatise of Frvit-Trees, Shewing the manner of Grafting, Setting, Pruning, and Ordering of them in all respects. Oxford: Tho. Robinson, 1653. De Mairan, Jean-Jacques d’Ortous. “Observation Botanique,” first published in Histoire de l’Academie Royale des Sciences, Paris, 1729, p. 35, trans. Jonathan Sobel. https://jonathansobel1.wordpress.com/2019/03/14/botanical-observation/. Du Bartas, Guillaume de Salluste. The Second Weeke or Childhood of the World. Trans. Josuah Sylvester. London, P.S., 1598. 57 Mersmann, “Moving Shadows,” 99–101. Mersmann considers sundials an exception to this rule since the shadow cast by a gnomon serves as an index for solar time.

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Descartes, René. A Discourse of a Method For the Wel-Guiding of Reason, And the Discovery of Truth in the Sciences. London: Printed by Thomas Newcomb, 1649. Gerard, John. The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes. London: John Norton, 1597. Hughes, William. The Compleat Vineyard: Or, an Excellent Way For the Planting of Vines. London: Printed by J.C. for William Crook, 1670. Kircher, Athanasius. “Horoscopium Botanicum, siuè Horologium ope Heliotropiorum construere.” In Magnes siue De Arte Magnetica Opvs Tripartitvm. Rome: Ludouici Grignani, 1641. Lawson, William. A New Orchard and Garden, Or The best way for planting, grafting, and to make any ground good, for a rich Orchard: Particularly in the North parts of England. London: By Bar: Alsop for Roger Iackson, 1618. Linnaeus, Carl. Philosophia Botanica, in qua Explicantur Fundamenta Botanica. Stockholm, Godofr. Kiesewetter, 1751. Milton, John. Paradise Lost, in John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. New York, McMillan Publishing Company, 1957. Parker, Martin. “Take Time, While Time Is.” London: Printed by M.P. for Henry Gosson, 1601–1640. In the Roxburghe Ballads Collection of the British Library, C.20.f.7.398–399. Parkinson, John. Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris, Or A Garden of All Sorts of Pleasant Flowers. London: Printed by Humphrey Lownes and Robert Young, 1629. Shakespeare, William, The Complete Works, 2nd ed. Edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. The. Holie. Bible. Conteynyng the Olde Testament and the Newe. London: In povvles Churchyarde by Richarde Iugge, printer to the Queenes Maiestie, 1568.

Secondary Sources Acheson, Katherine O. “Military Illustration, Garden Design, and Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’ [with illustrations].” English Literary Renaissance 41, no. 1 (2011): 146–88. Bellorini, Cristina. The World of Plants in Renaissance Tuscany: Medicine and Botany. The History of Medicine in Context Series. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2016. Brown, Eric C. “Violence, Ritual, and the Execution of Time in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta.” Cahiers Élisabéthains 58 (2000): 15–29. Buonanno, Roberto. The Stars of Galileo Galilei and the Universal Knowledge of Athanasius Kircher, trans. Roberto Buonanno and Giuliana Giobbi, Cham: Springer, 2014. Cohen, Adam Max. Technology and the Early Modern Self. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

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Crosby, Alfred W. The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Dohrn-van Rossum, Gerhard. History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders, trans. Thomas Dunlap. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Donald, Moira. “‘The Greatest Necessity for Every Rank of Men:’ Gender, Clocks and Watches.” In Gender and Material Culture in Historical Perspective, edited by Moira Donald and Linda Hurcombe, 54–75. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Faraday, Christina Juliet. “Tudor Time Machines: Clocks and Watches in English Portraits c.1530–c.1630.” Renaissance Studies 33, no. 2 (2019): 239–66. Feerick, Jean. “Botanical Shakespeares: The Racial Logic of Plant Life in Titus Andronicus.” South Central Review 26, no. 1/2 (2009): 82–102. Findlen, Paula. “Introduction.” Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything, edited by Paula Findlen, 1–6. New York: Routledge, 2004. Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Hankins, Thomas L., and Robert J. Silverman. Instruments and the Imagination. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Kinney, Arthur F. Shakespeare’s Webs: Networks of Meaning in Renaissance Drama. New York: Routledge, 2004. Laroche, Rebecca, and Jennifer Munroe. “On a Bank of Rue; Or Material Ecofeminist Inquiry and the Garden of Richard II.” Shakespeare Studies 42 (2014): 42–50. Mersmann, Jasmin. “Moving Shadows, Moving Sun: Early Modern Sundials Restaging Miracles.” Nuncius 30 (2015): 96–123. Nardizzi, Vin. Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theaters and England’s Trees. Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Quinones, Ricardo J. The Renaissance Discovery of Time. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972. Redding, Adrienne. “Liminal Gardens: Edenic Iconography and the Disruption of Sexual Difference in Tragedy.” Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 46 (2015): 141–69. Ryan, Elise Lonich. “Gardens of Grief: Lucy Hutchinson’s ‘Elegies,’ the Garden of Gethsemane, and Formal Uses of Betrayal.” Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 28, no. 3 (2016): 212–29. Stern, Tiffany, “Time for Shakespeare: Hourglasses, Sundials, Clocks, and Early Modern Theatre.” Journal of the British Academy 3 (2015): 1–33. Solomon, Deborah. “‘All in a Garden Green’: Shakespeare’s Staging of Garden Imagery.” The Ben Jonson Journal 26, no. 2 (2019): 227–52. Tigner, Amy. “The Winter’s Tale: Gardens and the Marvels of Transformation.” English Literary Renaissance 36, no. 1 (2006): 114–34.

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Tomasi, Lucia Tongiorgi. An Oak Spring Flora: Flower Illustration from the Fifteenth Century to the Present Time, A Selection of the Rare Books, Manuscripts and Works of Art in the Collection of Rachel Lambert Mellon. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. Vermeir, Koen. “‘Bent and Directed Toward Him’: A Stylistic Analysis of Kircher’s Sunflower Clock.” In Science in the Age of Baroque, edited by Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris, 47–75. New York: Springer, 2013. Wersan, Kate. “The Early Modern Melon and the Mechanical Gardener: Toward an Environmental History of Timekeeping in the Long Eighteenth Century.” Environmental History 22, no. 2 (2017): 282–310. Wilson, Miranda. “Bastard Grafts, Crafted Fruits: Shakespeare’s Planted Families.” In The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, edited by Jean E. Feerick and Vin Nardizzi, 103–117. New York: Palgrave, 2012. Wilson, Miranda. “Gifts of Imperfection: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Timepieces.” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 46 (2020): 44–56. Wilson, Miranda. Poison’s Dark Works in Renaissance England. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2014.

About the Author Miranda Wilson, an Associate Professor of Renaissance Literature at the University of Delaware, has published on horticultural grafting, bodies and timekeeping, horological gifts in Elizabeth I’s court, and how early modern fears of poison prompted new ways of imagining the world. Her current book project focuses on technology and queenship.

9. The Verdant Imagination in Shakespeare’s Sonnets Elizabeth D. Gruber

Abstract This ecocritical analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnets addresses the poems’ engagement with fundamental questions of organismic life. Approached as an ecosystem, the Sonnets predicate a new version of the relationship between self and world. Their interdependence is conveyed via Shakespeare’s reliance on botanical tropes and images, though these are provocatively reimagined. Tracking such moments of iconoclasm yields an updated conception of “art” and “nature” and generates fresh insights about “zoe” and “bios” (concepts important in ecocritical work). The omnipresent antinomies of “art/nature” and “zoe/bios” underscore the Sonnets’ quest for permanence, serving as a reminder that the ecological cannot be considered in isolation from the psychological. Ultimately, Shakespeare appropriates to the lyric mode the eternizing properties conventionally ascribed to the botanical world. Keywords: ecocriticism, evolutionary aesthetics, time, death, art/nature, permanence

Poetry has long been assumed to mediate the relationship between humans and the natural world. To Ovid, for example, poetry subdues, bringing nature’s awesome power under control.1 By contrast, Philip Sidney evidently believed that poetry needed a champion, someone to retrieve it from the shoals of irrelevance. Much of his defense of this literary mode hinges on poetry’s ability to lift humans above the debasement of the material 1 See, for example, Book X of the Metamorphoses, when the lyric gifts of Orpheus calm the arboreal world.

Staub, S.C. (ed.), Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463721332_ch09

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world.2 Not incidentally, in our own era, it seems that aggressor and victim, vis-à-vis the unfolding story of humans and nature, have swapped positions: now, poetry is being asked to rescue nature from humans’ ruinous assaults on it.3 An updated defense of poetry (that is, a theory of its prime usages) is provided by poet Glyn Maxwell. He emphasizes the elemental functions of the ancient but ever-relevant mode, concluding: “Poems are responses to needs, urges, hungers, thirsts.”4 Maxwell construes poetry as an intense form of chiaroscuro, one whose patterning displays of black ink against swaths of whiteness—the artfully devised arrangements of lines and line-breaks—can thus be understood as attempts to cope with the passage of time, or the daunting prospect of being banished from its sequential movements. All of these perspectives on poetry attest to its unique significance for ecocriticism. Ecocriticism encompasses a diverse array of approaches, but they might be conveniently distilled to their shared emphasis on examining relationships between humans and the natural world. In keeping with major trends in ecocriticism, many of the essays in this volume skillfully bring out homologies between the human and the botanic. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, however, invite a different assessment, as they evince a deep strain of uneasiness about humans’ affinities with the vegetative world. Many of the poems conf irm Rebecca Bushnell’s observation that “literary texts compared people to plants in their common experience of growing, flourishing, and fading.”5 Across the Sonnets, this likeness compels a reckoning with mortality, which took on acute significance in light of the era’s evolving apprehensions of death. With this in mind, my essay contributes to the volume by elucidating Shakespeare’s challenge to the customary, solacing understanding of kinship between human and floral forms. In brief, the cycle pursues a fade-resistant aesthetic, posited as an alternative to nature’s otherwise relentless rhythms. Rereading Shakespeare’s Sonnets from an ecocritical perspective permits fresh engagement with the tension between “art” and “nature,” concepts frequently in oppositional play in Renaissance texts.6 The goal is to elicit 2 Sidney, The Defence of Poesy. 3 This plea unifies the anthology Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems, edited by John Felstiner. 4 Maxwell, On Poetry, 23. 5 Bushnell, Green Desire, 136. 6 Ecocritics have illuminated contradictory Renaissance attitudes toward the natural world. For example, Simon C. Estok has helped to promote awareness of an abiding hostility toward nature, apparent in many Renaissance texts; see Ecocriticism and Shakespeare. Conversely,

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new possibilities from the familiar thematic matrix, the clustering relations of Time, Nature, Art, and Death. In effect, the Sonnets are approached as an ecosystem, an arrangement of interdependent parts.7 In my view, the Sonnets’ deepest satisfactions derive from following through-lines that traverse multiple poems and create an overarching effect. For example, several poems wrestle with the seeming inevitability of ending as worm-food, a possibility phrased in mournfully interrogative fashion in Sonnet 146, which asks, “Shall worms, inheritors of this excess, / Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body’s end?”8 This metamorphosis also earns mention in three other poems (Sonnets 6, 71, and 74). The annelid-theme running through the Sonnets amplifies the importance of the botanical or horticultural, given these animals’ close association with the earth from which florae spring. In his ecocritical study of Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra, Randall Martin summarizes Darwin’s analysis of the vital work performed by earthworms, noting, “earthworms work the earth to an average depth of seven to eight feet, sifting and digesting an astonishing ten tons of organic and mineral matter per acre per year, which they recycle to the surface as fertile soil, or vegetable mould, as it was called in Darwin’s day.”9 Martin suggests that understanding how worms optimize the soil’s potential (as, for example, Hamlet appears to do) leads to an ecological awareness, a democratized vision of the relationship between humans and other animals. Yet, while the worm-ridden sonnets (and indeed Hamlet) confirm the interconnectivity of all life, a point reinforced via the pervasive analogizing of human and botanical forms, this generates malaise rather than comfort.

Robert N. Watson discerns a longing for nature, powered by an awareness of humans’ progressive removal from it, in Back to Nature. 7 A different ecocritical interpretation of the Sonnets is advanced by Joshua Calhoun in his article “Ecosystemic Shakespeare: Vegetable Memorabilia in the Sonnets.” He focuses on the material processes involved in the production of Renaissance texts, whereas “ecosystem,” as I use it here, refers to properties inhering in the poems. 8 Shakespeare, Sonnet 146, 7–8. Quotations from the Sonnets are from Stephen Booth’s edition. Throughout the essay, I refer to the commonly accepted sequence. Thus, I accept that poems 1–126 are addressed to a young man, whereas 127–152 are addressed to the “dark lady,” an appellation that itself arises via critical interpretation; the f inal two poems, commonly referred to as Anacreontic, stand apart from the two sequences. The challenges of establishing an “authoritative” arrangement for the cycle are cogently addressed by Heather Dubrow’s essay, “‘Incertainties now crown themselves assur’d’: The Politics of Plotting Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” Also instructive is Margreta de Grazia’s Shakespeare Verbatim. 9 Martin, Shakespeare & Ecology, 139.

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If the Sonnets confirm the non-negotiable facts of organismic life, they also voice a surpassing desire for meaning and purpose. That they do so within a form which everywhere imposes limits on meaning, and expression is key to their revelatory power. As philosopher Ian Bogost observes: “Constraints suggest a context. They set the terms for the experiences that take place within them.”10 Subjugating need to the formal dictates of the sonnet, as Shakespeare does throughout the cycle, provides a way to explore and come to grips with vulnerability. In this way, the Sonnets can claim a transformational potency, even if most will not concede that poetry is the “monarch” of all knowledge, as Sidney thought. Sidney was wrong on one point: poetry matters not because it elevates us from our “clay lodgings” as he imagined, but because it struggles (not always successfully) to make us at home there.11 Is it too much to claim that the afterlife of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, their odd, eerie relevance, is perennially assured, because in them we glimpse the mysterious conjunction of two orders, the organic and the symbolic? My essay addresses just this question. The botanical tropes and images that pervade the cycle are central to my analysis, as they draw attention to the alternately competing or complementary demands of organismic life and artistic expression. While sonnets are among the most predictable of literary forms, I want to show how Shakespeare’s Sonnets engage in iconoclasm, upending a powerful, centuries-old association of vegetative life with eternal renewal, ultimately yielding a new ecopolitics of regeneration. In brief, Shakespeare appropriates to the lyric the eternizing properties conventionally ascribed to botanical forms. The verdant imagination in the Sonnets encompasses the cycle’s rich supply of botanical imagery and its devotional attention to an active inner life. The latter emphasis points to a version of selfhood that was just emerging in the Renaissance. Perhaps, then, Shakespeare’s complex use of botanical tropes and images derives from a tacit awareness that the “human” was being reconstituted.12 10 Bogost, Play Anything, 179. He briefly mentions the sonnet form when discussing the pleasures generated by working within limits. 11 Sidney’s arguments are included in his Defence of Poesy (1595), 219. 12 A groundbreaking book by evolutionary psychologist Joseph Henrich illuminates the emergence of a new subset of the human in the Renaissance, one defined by “dispositionalism,” or the “tendency to see people’s behavior anchored in personal traits” (33). Henrich identifies the notable uptick in literacy as a crucial catalyst of this personhood, so the readerly self that materializes in the Sonnets calls attention to this seismic shift. See The WEIRDest People in the World.

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The Botanical in Historical Context In the Renaissance, the curious legend of the mandrake suggests affinities between human and botanical worlds. Specifically, the root of the mandrake was perceived as a homunculus; when picked, so the story went, the plant screamed its displeasure.13 Shakespeare summons this motif in Romeo and Juliet, with a reference to the “shrieks like mandrakes torn out of the earth.”14 This apprehension ascribed vitality, even a kind of self-awareness, to a plant. In sum, the mandrake was deemed capable of protesting its own demise. At some point, the story of the screaming mandrake dropped out of popular usage. This date cannot be precisely identified, but the legend must have been a casualty of the new knowledge that was emerging in the late sixteenth century. While the enhanced study of the botanical world obviously generated important insights about plants and trees, in some respects, it depleted the symbolic register available to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Pace the biblical connotations of knowing, knowledge can preempt rather than enable intimate or affective relations. The (modern) discipline of botany was incipient by the late sixteenth century, part of the burgeoning science that prioritized close study, dissection, and labeling.15 Gardens were essential to this emergent branch of learning, functioning as crucial sites of epistemological advancement. In a study of Renaissance contributions to natural history, including the development of botany, Brian W. Ogilvie identifies a widening rift between experts and laypeople. He suggests, “The experience of a naturalist who recognized a type of wild rose as peculiar to a small region was qualitatively different from that of a local who had never known another kind.” Ogilvie emphasizes the transformed significance of gardens, which were at once “places of repose, visual delight, and social exchange” and crucial sites for formalized study.16 Thus, gardens functioned as spaces of unique energy 13 The humanoid mandrake is discussed by Larry Silver and Pamela H. Smith in “‘Splendor in the Grass’.” 14 Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, 4.3.36. For an analysis of ecopolitics in this play, see Bonnie Lander Johnson’s “Blood, Milk, Poison.” 15 The origins of botany are typically traced back to Aristotle’s student Theophrastus. The collection Colonial Botany, edited by Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, assesses the political contexts in which the discipline of botany was enmeshed. Leah Knight’s monograph, Of Books and Botany, examines the intersections of print culture and apprehensions of / approaches to the botanical world. Also see Locus Amoenus: Gardens and Horticulture in the Renaissance, edited by Alexander Samson, for insightful essays on evolving attitudes towards the natural world, and gardens’ centrality to them. 16 Ogilvie, The Science of Describing, 15, 160.

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and flexibility, in which social roles could be confirmed or challenged.17 Gardens also took on expressly political functions, such as when ostensibly “alien” landscapes were “civilized” through the establishment of English gardens, or in the counter-move, whereby plants harvested in the “New World” were cultivated in England.18 At once tangible and rife with sociopolitical meanings, gardens capture the movement between organic life and symbolic processes. If Shakespeare’s Sonnets do not necessarily advance scientific knowledge of plants, they do demonstrate how images and tropes drawn from the botanical world are instrumental in depicting humanness. Sonnet 16 encapsulates this theme. Here the speaker advises his addressee: “Now stand you on the top of happy hours, / And many maiden gardens yet unset, / With virtuous wish would bear your living flowers” (5–7). This image of the awaiting female body pretties up the speaker’s earlier reference to an “uneared womb” in Sonnet 3, the hapless condition of which would prompt any woman, even the fairest, to welcome impregnation from the young addressee (5). Such metaphors reinforce gender roles, with planting/sowing/ reaping imagined as masculine activities, and the female body a fertile, pliant ground in which to work. In this way, agricultural motifs confirm the meanings associated with male and female experience.19

Shakespearean Iconoclasm: Chasing Permanence Shakespeare’s reliance on botanical tropes and images reprises a longstanding poetic tradition. Among the ancients, as Lewis Hyde explains, “Vegetation” was “taken as a sign of indestructible life, and the vegetable gods of antiquity were its personification.”20 To illuminate this property, Hyde calls our attention to compelling evidence, the ruins of an ancient theater overtaken by vegetative growth; as the building crumbles into dust, it feeds the thriving plants that return each season.21 Initially, it might 17 God Speed the Plough by Andrew McRae and Gender and the Garden by Jennifer Munroe elucidate gardens as spaces of social activity and contestation. 18 See Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology and also, his Song of the Earth, for additional analyses of gardens’ sociopolitical dimensions. 19 In Making Sex, Thomas Walter Laqueur analyzes distinctions between the one-sex model, dating back to Galen, and the two-sex model established in the eighteenth century. 20 Hyde, The Gift, 234. 21 Hyde discusses the image, an anecdote recounted by Kerényi; perhaps because the former is a poet, however, his account is the more compelling of the two. See Hyde, The Gift, 41.

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seem that Shakespeare’s Sonnets confirm the equivalence of plant life with eternal being. Specifically, across the young man’s sequence, the speaker repeatedly employs botanical images to point up the necessity of producing a child. For instance, in the opening appeal to narcissistic self-preservation, coming in the first two lines of Sonnet 1, the speaker advises that a child will ensure the continuance of “beauty’s rose” (2). While the exquisite flower could convey the indestructibility of the vegetative world, in Shakespeare’s treatment the rose frequently connotes ephemerality. Along these lines, six of the eleven uses of “rose” evoke negative qualities, such as the reminder that roses have “thorns” (35.2), or that a rose might be spoiled by an insidious “canker,” a blemish heralding decay (95.2). Another pointed demonstration of Shakespearean iconoclasm arrives in Sonnet 68, which begins: “Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn, / When beauty lived and died as flow’rs do now” (1–2). A propensity to decay and die aff irms correspondences between human and floral forms. In these examples, Shakespeare unmakes the ancient mythic pattern that associated vegetative life with infinite possibility. The eternizing properties of vegetation call up the ancient Greek distinction between “zoe” and “bios,” both of which denoted life. Historian Carl Kerényi provides useful definitions of the concepts, writing: “The signif icance of zoë is life in general, without further characterization. When the word bios is uttered, something else resounds: the contours, as it were, the characteristics of a specified life, the outlines that distinguish one living thing from another.”22 Building on this work, Hyde observes: “Zoe is the life that endures; it is the thread that runs through bios-life and is not broken when the particular perishes,” adding, “In this century we call it the ‘gene pool’.” Hyde also uses the term “species-essence” to get at the regenerative power of zoe, the way it wends ceaselessly through generations.23 For both Kerényi and Hyde, the transgenerational features of zoe infuse it with spiritual meaning, by which they seem to invoke a kind of permanence. A different calibration of zoe and bios is presented by Giorgio Agamben. As many ecocritics have noted, with varying degrees of displeasure, Agamben denigrates zoe, which he summarizes as “bare life,” precisely because it emphasizes the physiological needs that humans share with all other organisms. From his perspective, bios is preferable, as it encompasses the purpose-built world that affirms human creativity and ingenuity and endures beyond a single lifetime or, more dramatically, 22 Kerényi, Dionysos, xxxii. 23 Hyde, The Gift, 41.

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outlasts succeeding generations.24 Notably, both responses to the zoe / bios distinction prioritize the concept that seems best equipped to confer permanence; the divergent conclusions might derive from the respective emphases on vegetative life (à la Kerényi and Hyde) as opposed to animal life (Agamben’s focus). Permanence likewise constitutes the elusive goal pursued in the opening subsequence of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The speaker repeatedly urges a burdensome prolepsis on the young man, so that he will imagine his future self, furrowed and marred by age, nostalgic for vanished beauty. Sonnet 2 warns of inevitable enfeeblement and decay and appears to offer a palliative, the filial facsimile capable of ensuring that the no-longer-young man will be “new made,” so that his “blood” will “warm” when he “feel’st it cold” (13, 14). The projected condition and promised remedy seem eerily akin to zombification, as if the youth of the future reanimates his all-but-dead father. Commenting on the perversity of this sonnet, Stephen Burt and David Mikics observe, “The stunning f inal image of Sonnet 2 is that of the young man grown old …. The son’s vivid warmth tells the father of his impending death.”25 Oddly, therefore, this poem presents the child of the future as a memento mori. Through a reverse alchemy, youthfulness and beauty conjure death. In repudiating the solacing comforts of progeny—of the younger generation itself—Sonnet 2 subverts the logic of the procreation poems. In numerous poems addressed to the young man, the speaker generates a paradoxical hostility toward the future by obsessing over his banishment from it. This point is made with incisive eloquence in Sonnet 60, in the speaker’s observation: “So do our minutes hasten to their end,” which immediately follows the poem’s opening simile: “Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore” (2, 1). This poem showcases the limits of analogizing humans and the natural world: unlike the perpetual motion of the waves, which is (so far as we know) forever assured, humans confront a non-negotiable end. Which is to say: at some specific point, the future fails to include each human. Given the Sonnets’ obsessive focus on this prospect, it is worth noting that “future” (i.e., the word itself) is not given a single specific mention in any of the 154 poems. Similarly, “posterity” only shows up twice (in Sonnets 3 and 55), while “increase” fares slightly better, with four appearances. By contrast, “death” garners twenty mentions, although 24 Agamben, Homo Sacer. Cary Wolfe focuses on the speciesism that he believes corrupts Western ontology. For Wolfe’s challenge to Agamben, see Before the Law. 25 Burt and Mikics, The Art of the Sonnet, 63.

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this is far short of the seventy-two references to “time,” all of which occur in the young man’s sequence.26 It is perhaps easy to gloss over the destructiveness associated with time, the way it so quickly emerges as a villainous threat to beauty, love, or life itself. Likewise, we might be accustomed to the sometimes overwhelming effects of contemplating personal cessation. For philosopher Justin E. H. Smith, our distinctive mental habits (e.g., contemplations of a future from which we will be excluded) ensure that we must, ultimately, locate meaning and value outside of ourselves.27 This is precisely the realization so often on display throughout the procreation poems, when the addressee is preemptively reminded of his own decay and instructed to compensate by creating a time-defeating replica-child. As commonplace as this all seems, we should note that Shakespeare was writing amid a profound transformation, whereby apprehensions of mortality shifted. In short, death became feral, as the older conception of it as a state of dormancy akin to sleep was sapped of explanatory power.28 Shakespeare seems to be acknowledging this significant shift in Sonnet 146, a poem whose complex examination of “body” and “soul” evinces Platonic and Pauline influences.29 Sonnet 146 ascribes a curiously vampiric quality to the soul, which renders it a fitting adversary of death. Their shared ferocity materializes in the following address to the soul: “So shalt thou feed on death, that feeds on men, / And death once dead, there’s no more dying then” (lines 13–14). Across Shakespeare’s sonnet cycle, the frequent invocations of “death” (and its handmaiden, “time”) could tilt the cycle to the melancholic or morbid, but their effects are overmatched by the poems’ 164 references to “love.” These linguistic phenomena convey the Sonnets’ orientation to fundamental questions of life. After all, as a character from the quietly lyrical novel Idaho muses: “An I-am is a pair of syllables. The first one soft, the second loud. It’s the rhythm of the human heart, which is also the natural rhythm of human speech.”30 This mistake, the transliteration of “iamb,” an 26 In a book published nearly fifty years ago, Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Self, Love, and Art (1972), Philip Martin confronts the promise as well as the limits of “poetic immortality” as it figures in Shakespeare’s sonnet cycle (see especially 150–58). 27 Smith, Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason, 256. 28 This new apprehension, the rewilding of death, is chronicled at length by Philippe Ariès in The Hour of Our Death. Also instructive on the relevant attitudes is William E. Engel’s Mapping Mortality. 29 Stephen Booth’s long note on Sonnet 146 remains a vital resource for engaging the poem’s complexities, particularly its ability to inhabit contrariety. 30 Emily Ruskovich, Idaho, 103.

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aspect of prosody, into the homophonic two-word assertion of being, “I am,” captures the way in which literary conventions pulse with organic life, or at least preserve residual traces of it. Following Maxwell, these emphatic declarations of being materialize against whiteness, so they confront the oblivion that forever threatens. Precisely because oblivion’s initial target is the frail body, so lamentably prone to debilitation and collapse, countering it requires seeking meaning apart from, or in addition to, the limits imposed on all organismic life. Such efforts likely seem anathematic to ecocriticism, with its prevailing allegiance to materialism. Often the stated or implied goal of this scholarship is to challenge distinctions between humans and all other organisms.31 Shakespeare’s Sonnet 1 anticipates this democratized biosphere, in the couplet’s concession that eventually our debt to nature must be paid, since all comprise “the world’s due” (14).32 But this sonnet (along with the others sharing its thematic concerns) does not exactly celebrate humans’ participation in the cycling rhythms of the natural world. Indeed, the inaugural poem intimates the problem of relying on the botanical to proffer a stable version of beauty or being, as we see in the speaker’s concession that “the riper” will, inevitably, “by time decease” (4). Furthermore, the recalcitrant addressee stubbornly makes his youthful promise, or “bud,” an early grave (11). This and other poems rich in botanical images thus concede the dark power of the eco-imaginary, a repository of tropes and images highlighting humans’ inevitable transformation into humus, that loamy essence that hosts vegetative life.

Aesthetics and Ecopolitics While various Sonnets confirm the utility of the corpse, which provides alimentary satisfaction to worms or other organisms, they also indicate that this version of continuance fails to comfort. Accordingly, Shakespeare tests the memorializing properties of artistic expression. Rather than leading away from considerations of the human/nature relationship, however, this focus renews their significance. Whereas originality often seems the metric by which aesthetic grandeur is judged in the twenty-first century, for 31 Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, consolidates scholarship on the materialist turn in ecocriticism and its intersections with feminist theory. 32 For a positive treatment of humans’ indistinguishability from the rest of the natural world, see The Indistinct Human, edited by Jean E. Feerick and Vin Nardizzi.

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Shakespeare and his contemporaries, imitation governed creative efforts. Both the natural world and classical works were sources of inspiration, models to be emulated, among Renaissance writers and artists. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann points out that this enabled the arts and sciences to work in tandem, though they would be decoupled in the seventeenth century.33 Reflecting on the interrelationship of art and nature, Derek Attridge illuminates the Renaissance interest in “instinct” versus “artifice.” He suggests: “Human beings behave naturally by following instinct and artificially by learning and following the rules of the art in question.”34 Renaissance texts, including Sidney’s Defence of Poesy, often prioritize “artificial” learning. From this perspective, adherence to aesthetic principles either effects or permits some distance from nature, which encompasses instinctive responses. Art historian Mary D. Garrard considers how artistic ventures convey differing attitudes toward the natural world. To give one example from the many she cites: “Landscape [painting] developed when nature was demoted from a power to an environment.” In this sense, art records—perhaps even enforces—human dominion over nature. Garrard argues that humans gained mastery over the physical environment as a result of “[t]he transition within the Renaissance from organic to scientific consciousness.”35 Garrard focuses mainly on painting and sculpture, but the evolution she describes is also conveyed through shifting poetic conventions and tropes. Eventually, the agricultural metaphors so prominently on display in the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries would be drained of meaning.36 Shakespeare’s Sonnets variously reimagine the relationship between art and nature. A cluster of activities, encompassing the domains of horticulture, biological regeneration, and writing, alternately converge and divide throughout the cycle. Botanical images prove especially important, as they complicate any tidy distinction between “natural” and “constructed” worlds. As Vin Nardizzi observes, “The practice of plant grafting … was regarded 33 Kaufmann, The Mastery of Nature, see especially the discussion on pp. 3–6. 34 Attridge, Peculiar Language, 24. This work updates Edward William Tayler’s Nature and Art in Renaissance Literature. 35 Garrard, Brunelleschi’s Egg, 1, 4. As Garrard acknowledges, her argument is indebted to Carolyn Merchant’s influential Death of Nature. 36 See Laqueur, Making Sex, for an analysis of how agricultural metaphors were a casualty of the epistemological revolutions that dominated the eighteenth century. Although outside the scope of my analysis here, it is worth briefly mentioning that we seem to have entered the “atomic age,” whereby humans’ dominant traits are figured in terms of divisibility and dispersibility. A harbinger of this mindset would be the “atomic poetry” of Margaret Cavendish.

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in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English gardening manuals as both an analogue to procreation and a form of writing.”37 In Sonnets 15 and 17, at the end of the procreation subsequence, the speaker introduces the regenerative properties of art, imagined as alternative or counterpart to biological or botanic generation. In Sonnet 15, for example, the speaker describes himself as a combatant of “Time,” a role necessitated by his “love” for the young man, and in the final line promises: “As he takes from you I engraft you new” (13–14). In this poem, the Speaker enforces likeness between the human and the botanical, but their congruity derives from shared vulnerability. That is, “men as plants increase,” but they likewise experience commensurate decay (5). In Sonnet 17, the botanical virtually disappears, except for the remnants of it suggested in “papers (yellowed with their age),” so the poem builds on Sonnet 15’s botanical theme. Sonnet 17 concludes with a statement of art and biological reproduction as collaborators, mutual guarantors of the young man’s survival. In terms of appearance, “art” and “nature” are about even in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, with, respectively, 13 and 15 mentions. Surprisingly, the two appear jointly in a single poem, Sonnet 127. Here acrimony taints their relations, as suggested in the speaker’s complaint about the “hand” that usurps “nature’s power,” thereby “[f]airing the foul with art’s false borrowed face” (5, 6). In this inaugural poem of the dark lady’s sequence, beauty has undergone a metamorphosis, one premised on the revaluation of fairness and blackness so that the latter term is privileged. This reversal, as the poem insists, arises from the inherently corrupting effects of artifice, whereby “beauty” had been “slandered with a bastard shame” (127.4).38 Of course, the medium undercuts the message: by using a highly stylized poetic form to argue against “artifice,” the speaker ironizes his own point.39 Often, the juxtaposition of art and nature in Renaissance texts plays to the assumption that the former entails corruption or at least artifice, whereas the latter enjoys an untouched quality, a purity, unavailable in the purpose-built world. As Nardizzi reminds us, however, the practice of plant grafting, an obvious intervention in the natural functions of the botanical 37 See Nardizzi’s “Shakespeare’s Penknife,” 83. Nardizzi offers an intriguing reading of Sonnet 15, though my aims and conclusions differ from his. 38 A similar point is made by Aaron, in Titus Andronicus. Following the birth of his son, Aaron celebrates blackness on the grounds that it is more authentic, less damningly mutable, than whiteness, 4.2.100–104. 39 Booth examines depictions of blackness and whiteness in Sonnet 127 as volatile disruptors of longstanding aesthetic traditions. Also instructive on the issue of race, aesthetics, and form is Kim F. Hall’s Things of Darkness.

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world, affords a crucial subtext for understanding tropes of regeneration in the Sonnets. He notes, “plant grafting provides an altogether different model of generation,” one that might yield “a queerer version of generational and genealogical history, both sexual and textual.”40 Nardizzi’s observation implicitly warns against facile invocations of nature. After all, cultural and ideological assumptions inevitably mediate our perceptions and definitions of human and non-human worlds alike. On the other hand, in the subfield of evolutionary aesthetics, a different iteration of the relationship between art and nature is underway. 41 This scholarship challenges the notion that beauty is culture-bound or subject to ideological or political judgments. For instance, Christa Sütterlin writes: “There is a large layer of shared experiences on aesthetic agreement in art worldwide,” and she cites the global appeal of various art exhibitions, ranging from “the Gold of the Pharaohs” to “the late work of Titian,” as evidence of this universalist aesthetic. 42 Viewed in this light, organic processes govern aesthetic pleasures. In a way, this strikes me as an utterly appealing notion: notwithstanding decades of important scholarship on the contingency of all human experience, certain perceptual preferences and accompanying aesthetic forms establish a truly universal community. And yet, beauty cannot be neatly extracted from ideological or political judgments. As Randy Thornhill suggests, “The naturalist fallacy, applied to human physical attractiveness, has repeatedly led to oppressive and inhuman social policies, including the human breeding programs widely implemented under Nazism.” Furthermore, he continues: “The many eugenic programs of history have defined human beauty in ways that meet the political aspirations of the powerful.”43 With Thornhill’s arguments in mind, probably we cannot evade the possibility that a proto-eugenics materializes in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. After all, the opening line of the first poem celebrates a racialized fecundity, as it reads: “From fairest creatures we desire increase” (1). Albeit with a touch of stylistic elegance, this poem insists not simply on procreation but on the replication of whiteness. The technical virtuosity often on display in the cycle should not preclude recognition of the political consequences entangled with aesthetic judgments. Though 40 Nardizzi, “Shakespeare’s Penknife,” 99. 41 An overview of the salient issues in evolutionary aesthetics is provided by Brett Cooke’s “Biopoetics: The New Synthesis,” appearing in Biopoetics: Evolutionary Explorations. 42 See Sütterlin’s essay, “From Sign and Schema to Iconic Representation,” 167. Another perspective on this relationship is provided in Ellen Dissanayake’s article, “‘Making Special’: An Undescribed Human Universal.” 43 Thornhill, “Darwinian Aesthetics,” 23, 24.

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“race” did not have the same meaning in the Renaissance as it does for us, Shakespeare’s Sonnets nonetheless invoke corporeal differences to establish discrete categories of identity, labels (then as now) rife with political significance. 44 Read against their incipient discourse of race, the Sonnets’ ubiquitous appeals to the botanical world as a source of perfect, if fleeting, beauty take on more significance. Claire Duncan adroitly summarizes the issue, observing, “early modern England uses shared rhetoric to describe horticultural generation and human generation.”45 She builds on Nardizzi’s arguments about the importance of plant grafting, highlighting the violence of the relevant techniques. In this light, the lexical and metaphorical possibilities of the botanic world yield contrariety. In the Sonnets, this means that floral forms variously connote permanence / immutability and confirm nature’s susceptibility to human interventions. The practice of plant grafting evinces a desire for control, one matched by the exigent tone of the procreation Sonnets. Margreta de Grazia suggests that these poems “have an open and explicit social function: to reproduce, like an Althusserian state apparatus, the status quo by reproducing a fair young man.” Thus, she argues, to Renaissance audiences the dark lady’s sequence would have seemed the more transgressive, as it conjured “the patriarchal nightmare of a social melting pot.”46 This position reads the lady’s darkness as emblematic of her otherness, so that her intimate relationship with the speaker assumes a transgressive power. Yet procreation drops out of sight in the dark lady’s sequence. Lust announces these poems, as in Sonnet 129, which imagines desire as relentless, a compulsion so intense, so irrepressible, that it deactivates reason. These temporary indulgences are, evidently, alarmingly brief, and incapable of providing any lasting pleasure. But the opening line of 129, the invocation of lust as “[t]he expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” divides passion from propagation, particularly in the graphic image of “spirit” or liquid being “wasted,” as if spilled, and thus diverted from its reproductive function (1). Accordingly, the non-tributes

44 Contemporary versions of white supremacy reinforce the complex entwining of putatively biological differences and the cultural norms and institutions annexed to, or underlying, them. For an intriguing discussion of this issue, see Smith, Irrationality Reason, especially 14–15. 45 Duncan, “‘Nature’s Bastards’: Grafting and Generation,” 123. Duncan continues her argument in her essay in this collection. 46 De Grazia’s analysis of transgressive desire is presented in “The Scandal of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” 102, 106. A different reading of the opening subsequence, particularly the imperative to reproduce, is presented by Peter C. Herman, in “What’s the Use?”

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to the dark lady militate against the cycle’s earlier appeals to the fecundity of the botanical realm. It might be tempting to find in the dark lady’s sequence the glimmers of a modernity that advocates for pleasure. 47 Viewed in these terms, the Renaissance entailed recovery of the bliss accompanying fleshly experience. But it is probably more appropriate—if less exhilarating—to concede Peter Stallybrass’s point: “The Sonnets … became a crucial site on which ‘sexual identity’ was invented and contested,” and the contentious history of their interpretation prompts us “to understand how the imaginary terrain of our own bodies came into being.”48 In this light, criticism of the poems exposes (or guarantees) our entrapment within the symbolic order, a zone of endless signif ications. 49 From an ecocritical perspective, such approaches are infelicitous because, in emphasizing the mediation of all human experience, they screen us from the organic realm. We should not be surprised at the solid purchase deconstruction finds in the ground of Shakespeare’s Sonnets given the poems’ propensity for linguistic play, especially their tendency to implode binary oppositions. As Vendler observes, “blackness turns fair, and loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.”50 This rhetorical pattern, the movement of a thing into its opposite, prevails across the entire sonnet cycle. If such a phenomenon seems a marked retreat from the organic, indicative of a wish to isolate us within the symbolic order, we should consider that the commingling of opposites resides at the very core of existence, not in an esoteric or flashily deconstructive way, but in resolutely materialist terms. As Robert P. Harrison reminds us, “our planet as a whole, like all solid bodies in the universe, is a species of what is dead”; and the “biosphere,” which is “host to such an abundance of life,” is “necrogenic.”51 In this sense, the barrier between the quick and the dead has always been chimerical. But it is likewise a necessity, the precondition for assembling a meaningful life. Shakespeare’s Sonnets attempt the sort of magic Harrison ascribes to architecture, the transformation of “matter into meaning.”52 This dynamic 47 See Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve, for a lyrical examination of pleasure as a founding condition of modernity. 48 Stallybrass, “Editing as Cultural Formation,” 86. In the same collection, see Rebecca Laroche’s essay, “The Sonnets on Trial,” for another view of sexual politics. 49 John Kerrigan addresses the shift from “autobiographical” interpretations to those influenced by formalism and deconstruction in On Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature. 50 Helen Vendler, The Music of What Happens, 242. 51 Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead, 1. 52 Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead, 3.

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lends purpose to Sonnet 20, a poem nourished by the abiding Renaissance interest in nature and art. Here the speaker offers a mythopoeic account of his addressee, asserting: “And for a woman wert thou first created, / Till nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting, / And by addition me of thee defeated, / By adding one thing to my purpose nothing” (20. 9–12). Evoking the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, Sonnet 20 is playfully self-aware, attuned to readers’ interest in the speaker’s relationship with his addressee. For all its self-conscious linguistic play, Sonnet 20 fixates on corporeality. To Renaissance readers still influenced by the one-sex model, there must have been an additional charge accompanying the prospect of a woman suddenly transformed into a man. In addition to playing on the “anatomical isomorphism” between genders,53 Sonnet 20 imagines a new synthesis of art and nature: the latter takes on the pleasurable work of the former. This depiction of nature as an artist who falls in love with her subject is something of a departure from its customary handling in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. We have some basis for comparison, given the fifteen appearances “nature” makes (with two of these coming in Sonnet 20). Several times, nature is depicted as a cache of gifts that may be offered or withheld. For example, in Sonnet 4, “nature gives nothing but doth lend” (11); in Sonnet 11, nature reserves some “for stores,” while others must “barrenly perish” (9). Sonnet 60 strikes a predictable note, with “nature’s rarities” a feast for ever-gluttonous time (11). In Sonnet 126, nature is imagined as the “sovereign mistress over wrack,” thus intensifying Sonnet 18’s milder iteration of the destruction theme: “every fair from fair sometimes declines, / By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed” (7–8). In three poems (Sonnets 109, 111, and 122), “nature” connotes an aspect of human identity, so these usages stand apart from the others. Considered alongside the other iterations, Sonnet 20’s presentation of nature as a creating-goddess accrues significance. Whereas this poem seems to confer power on the natural world, in truth it recreates nature in humans’ image. This is because, as Vendler writes of Sonnet 20: “This little myth of origins arises, probably, from the idea (in Sonnets 11 and 19), that Nature, as sculptor or artist, conceives a mental pattern from which she then prints or models her creatures.”54 The process ably summed up by Vendler models human cognitive and creative efforts. 53 The phrase “anatomical isomorphism” is used throughout Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex; his analysis of the one-sex model’s enduring influence on Renaissance writers shapes my reading of gender distinctions in Sonnet 20 and elsewhere in the cycle. 54 Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 128.

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In current ecological discourse, research generated within various disciplines emphasizes or celebrates non-human forms of knowing; typically, this work focuses on other varieties of animal intelligence, such as echolocation, or it attempts to show that various species possess reason or even participate in semiotic economies.55 Neuro-botanist Stefano Mancuso, on the other hand, urges us to study the intelligence unique to plant life, which he believes superior to ours.56 Rather than asserting affinities between human and vegetative life, Mancuso proposes that we comprehend difference in felicitous terms, as something from which we can learn, indeed, a set of possibilities to be emulated. Convincing most people to accept this proposition seems a Herculean challenge; after all, even contemporary theories of reason that insist upon other animals’ cognitive abilities tend to use the botanical world as a foil.57 Still, with enviable optimism for the future, Mancuso speculates that imitating the vegetative world would enable durable (if not exactly permanent) structures. In a way, he appropriates to bios the ancient belief in the eternalizing properties of vegetative life.

Memory and Oblivion Whereas the Sonnets chase eternity, or at least a kind of earthy permanence, in certain contexts memory debilitates. For personal, collective, or overtly political reasons, forgetting is sometimes a necessity.58 The imperative to forget likely seems out of tune with Shakespeare’s Sonnets, as they so often dwell on mnemonic strategies. Of course, Sonnet 71 does exhort the addressee: “No longer mourn for me when I am dead / Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell / Give warning to the world that I am fled” (1–3). A subsequent line in the poem instructs: “let your love ev’n with my life decay” (71.12). Possibly the poem works a self-implosive magic, with each line subverting the injunction to forget.59 Interestingly, research on cognition suggests that it is exceedingly difficult to make oneself forget. 55 For an overview of diverse forms of knowing across the animal world, I recommend The Enigma of Reason by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber. 56 Mancuso lays out his case for the intelligence of plant life in The Revolutionary Genius of Plants. 57 Although The Enigma of Reason, by Mercier and Sperber, often challenges human exceptionalism, they distinguish organisms who reason (i.e., animals) from vegetative life. 58 Lewis Hyde makes an eloquent case for “necessary forgetting” in A Primer on Forgetting. 59 This interpretive trend is acknowledged but repudiated by Vendler in The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

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This is because of the brain’s tendency to monitor itself; specifically, when the brain “checks in” to confirm the forgetting, the banished thought is once again called to mind.60 In any case, Sonnet 71 brings into view the morbid threat looming over much of the cycle, the prospect of being ousted “[f]rom this vile world” and sent “with vildest worms to dwell” (4). This line, which is echoed in the other three Sonnets featuring “worms,” puts a new spin on Sidney’s “clay lodgings,” calling attention to humans’ ineluctable chthonian habitation, with annelids our only companions. Such moments unravel the Great Chain of Being, predicating an egalitarian biosphere that admits of no distinctions. The dread generated by this prospect suggests that ecological discourse must attend to the unique psychological needs of humans, particularly those generated by contemplating the literal meaning of posthumous, which conveys our transformation into the loamy soil sustaining the botanical world. The end of the opening subsequence formalizes art’s wrangle with mortality. Up to this point, the speaker had asserted the preservative magic of a biological heir, employing persuasive tactics that ranged between the minatory and the apotropaic. In Sonnet 18, however, the speaker concedes: “every fair from fair sometimes declines, / By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed” (7–8). This sets up his self-serving consolation to the addressee: “Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade, / When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st” (11–12). Here, time’s sinister properties are transmuted: proliferating years enhance the value of cherished aesthetic objects, in explicit contrast to the corrosive effects experienced by aged (or aging) organisms. As is well understood—indeed, readers’ familiarity with Sonnet 18 makes the prospect of writing about it a daunting one—the real power on display is that claimed by the poet, who creates “eternal lines” through his verse. Not incidentally, this depends on the efforts of succeeding generations of readers: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee” (13–14). By this logic, readers resurrect the poem, which in turn renews its honored subject. Perhaps the most important aspect of Sonnet 18 is its curious vacancy: the poem’s addressee, ostensibly its heralded subject, fails to materialize. The sequence of flattering comparisons provides no details about the young 60 Cognitive psychologist Jonathan Haidt presents a lucid account of how the brain works in The Happiness Hypothesis. He writes of the self as “one of the great paradoxes of evolution,” a blessing and a curse (206). This flexible definition, a skillful harmonizing of opposites, such as the biological/cultural, or the individual/collective, strikes me as particularly relevant to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, as the poems likewise find ways to bring seeming polarities into balance.

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man, so we are left with the oxymoronic assurance that he surpasses perfection, given the proverbial sentiments associated with a “summer’s day.” Ultimately, Sonnet 18’s evasiveness guarantees its renewability, suiting it to each new era’s lovers. This flexibility is lyric’s special gift, an invitation to become the “I” who speaks.61 Yet doing so is at once an assertion of selfhood and the mark of its erasure. To state the point another way, taking up the subject position offered by a sonnet demonstrates that the self is publicly constituted, a phenomenon created through mimicry (of linguistic patterns) and appropriation (of behaviors and attitudes). In collating speakers from diverse eras, the Sonnets borrow the asterisked permanence of the botanical world, wherein decay and disappearance are ameliorated by the promise of eventual return. This dynamic is deftly outlined in an essay by Ann Patchett, which includes the following observation: “Plant life, like all life, is the subject of constant revision: one tree is hit by lightning, another is upended in a storm …. Even if this expanse of green is composed of different constituents over time, the land still pumps out plants faster than anyone can count them.”62 The same applies to human communities: they remain a constant presence across the Earth, though their inhabitants perpetually change.63 The ceaseless play of the Sonnets, perennially occupied by fresh crops of readers, models this process. In this way, the lyric mode appropriates to itself—and possibly amplifies—the ancient promise of vegetative life. Thus, rather than presuming an absolute separation between aesthetics and organic life, we might be better served by pursuing their congruities. Admittedly, doing so requires a careful negotiation, so that artistic works are not flattened into cartoonish versions of mimesis, but they nonetheless are presumed to comment meaningfully on fundamental questions of humanness, such as (for example) coping with death. Shakespeare’s Sonnets obviously cannot solve the problem of mortality, there being no way to alter this absolute horizon of existence. But their choric insistence on being—on mattering, that is—affirms the neediness at the core of life. The compulsion to feel or to claim an individuated existence is not necessarily an outcropping of human hubris. On this point Mary Oliver is compelling. She launches a collection of essays with this series of observations: “One tree is like another tree, but not too much. One tulip is 61 See Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye and a book deliberately styled as its counterpart, Christopher Martin’s Policy in Love, for rich discussions of interiority in the Sonnets. 62 Patchett, “Tennessee,” 106. 63 Biologist E. O. Wilson celebrates this dynamic, touting the potential “immortality” of social collectives, in Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies, 60.

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like the next tulip, but not altogether. More or less like people—a general outline, then the stunning individual strokes.”64 The challenge, then, is not discerning the forest amid an assemblage of trees but, rather, giving each tree (or tulip, or rose, or worm, or person) its due. Precisely because the Sonnets value the specificity of life, they brim with salutary ecological potential.

Bibliography Primary Sources Cavendish, Margaret. Poems and Fancies, with The Animal Parliament, edited by Brandie R. Siegfried. Toronto: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2018. Cicero. De Oratore. Translated by E. W. Hutton. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942. Oliver, Mary. Upstream: Selected Essays. New York: Penguin Press, 2016. Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated by Rolfe Humphries. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983. Patchett, Ann. “Tennessee.” In This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, 101–08. New York: Harper Perennial, 2014. Ruskovich, Emily. Idaho. New York: Random House, 2017. Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. In The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, 7th ed., edited by David Bevington, 1150–1200. New York: Pearson, 2014. Shakespeare, William. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Edited by Stephen Booth. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1977. Shakespeare, William. Titus Andronicus. In The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, 7th ed., edited by David Bevington, 966–1004. New York: Pearson, 2014. Sidney, Philip. “The Defence of Poesy.” In Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works, edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.

Secondary Sources Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan Hekman, eds. Material Feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.

64 Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays, 3.

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Ariès, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes toward Death Over the Last One Thousand Years. 2nd edition, translated by Helen Weaver. New York: Vintage Books, 2008. Attridge, Derek. Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. Bate, Jonathan. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition. London: Routledge, 1991. Bate, Jonathan. The Song of the Earth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Bogost, Ian. Play Anything: The Limits of Play, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games. New York: Basic Books, 2016. Burt, Stephan, and David Mikics. The Art of the Sonnet. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 2010. Bushnell, Rebecca. Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Calhoun, Joshua. “Ecosystemic Shakespeare: Vegetable Memorabilia in the Sonnets.” Shakespeare Studies 39 (2011): 64–73. Cooke, Brett. “Biopoetics: The New Synthesis.” In Biopoetics: Evolutionary Explorations in the Arts, edited by Brett Cooke and Frederick Turner, 3–25. Lexington, KY: ICUS Books, 1999. de Grazia, Margreta. “The Scandal of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” In Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, edited by James Schiffer, 89–112. Garland Publishing Inc., 2000. de Grazia, Margreta. Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press,1991. Dissanayake, Ellen. “‘Making Special’: An Undescribed Human Universal and the Core of a Behavior of Art.” In Biopoetics: Evolutionary Explorations in the Arts, edited by Brett Cooke and Frederick Turner, 27–46. Lexington, KY: ICUS Books, 1999. Dubrow, Heather. “‘Incertainties now crown themselves assur’d’: The Politics of Plotting Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” In Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, edited by James Schiffer, 113–34. New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 2000. Duncan, Claire. “‘Nature’s Bastards’: Grafting and Generation in Early Modern England.” Renaissance and Reformation 38, no. 2 (2015): 121–47. Engel, William E. Mapping Mortality: The Persistence of Memory and Melancholy in Early Modern England. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. Estok, Simon C. Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Feerick, Jean E., and Vin Nardizzi, eds. The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

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Felstiner, John. Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Fineman, Joel. Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Garrard, Mary D. Brunelleschi’s Egg: Nature, Art, and Gender in Renaissance Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Greenblatt, Stephen. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011. Haidt, Jonathan. The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. New York: Basic Books, 2006. Hall, Kim F. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. Harrison, Robert Pogue. The Dominion of the Dead. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Henrich, Joseph. The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. Herman, Peter C. “What’s the Use? Or, the Problematic Economy in Shakespeare’s Procreation Sonnets.” In Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, edited by James Schiffer, 263–83. New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 2000. Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. New York: Vintage Books, 2007. Hyde, Lewis. A Primer on Forgetting: Getting Past the Past. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019. Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta. The Mastery of Nature: Aspects of Art, Science, and the Humanities in the Renaissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Kerényi, Carl. Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life. Translated by Ralph Manheim. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976. Kerrigan, John. On Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature: Essays. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001. Knight, Leah. Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England: Sixteenth-Century Plants and Print Culture. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. Lander Johnson, Bonnie. “Blood, Milk, Poison: Romeo and Juliet’s Tragedy of ‘Green’ Desire and Corrupted Blood.” In Blood Matters: Studies in European Literature and Thought, 1400–1700, edited by Bonnie Lander Johnson and Eleanor Decamp, 134–48. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Laqueur, Thomas Walter. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. Laroche, Rebecca. “The Sonnets on Trial: Reconsidering the Portrait of Mr. W.H.” In Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, edited by James Schiffer, 391–409. Garland Publishing Inc., 2000.

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Mancuso, Stefano. The Revolutionary Genius of Plants: A New Understanding of Plant Intelligence and Behavior. Translated by Vanessa Di Stefano, New York: Atria Books, 2018. Martin, Christopher. Policy in Love: Lyric and Public in Ovid, Petrarch, and Shakespeare. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1994. Martin, Philip. Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Self, Love and Art. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1972. Martin, Randall. Shakespeare & Ecology. Oxford University Press, 2015. Maslow, Abraham. A Theory of Human Motivation. Mansfield Center, CT: Martino Publishing, 2013. Maxwell, Glyn. On Poetry. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. McRae, Andrew. God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. 1980. Harper One, 1989. Mercier, Hugo, and Dan Sperber. The Enigma of Reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Munroe, Jennifer. Gender and the Garden in Early Modern English Literature. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008. Nardizzi, Vin. “Shakespeare’s Penknife: Grafting and Seedless Generation in the Procreation Sonnets.” Renaissance and Reformation 32, no. 1 (2009): 83–100. Ogilvie, Brian W. The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006. Samson, Alexander, ed. Locus Amoenus: Gardens and Horticulture in the Renaissance. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Schiebinger, Londa, and Claudia Swan, eds. Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Schiffer, James. “Reading New Life into Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Survey of Criticism.” In Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, edited by James Schiffer, 3–71. New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 2000. Silver, Larry, and Pamela H. Smith. “Splendor in the Grass: The Powers of Nature in the Age of Durer.” In Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe, edited by Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, 29–62. London: Routledge, 2002. Smith, Justin E. H. Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. Stallybrass, Peter. “Editing as Cultural Formation: The Sexing of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” In Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, edited by James Schiffer, 75–88. New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1999.

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Sütterlin, Christa. “From Sign and Schema to Iconic Representation: Evolutionary Aesthetics of Pictorial Art.” In Evolutionary Aesthetics, edited by Eckart Voland and Karl Grammer, 131–70. New York: Springer, 2003. Tayler, Edward William. Nature and Art in Renaissance Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1964. Thornhill, Randy. “Darwinian Aesthetics Informs Traditional Aesthetics.” In Evolutionary Aesthetics, edited by Eckart Voland and Karl Grammer, 9–30. New York: Springer, 2003. Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1999. Vendler, Helen. The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Watson, Robert N. Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Wilson, Edward O. Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2019. Wolfe, Cary. Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

About the Author Elizabeth D. Gruber is a Professor of English at Lock Haven University. Her current scholarship focuses on the productive conjunctions of early modern studies and ecocriticism. Recent publications include a monograph, Renaissance Ecopolitics from Shakespeare to Bacon: Rethinking Cosmopolis (Routledge, 2017), and she is working on a second ecocritical book.

10. The Botanical Revisions of 3 Henry VI Jason Hogue Abstract This analysis investigates the differences in botanical representation between the version of 3 Henry VI printed in the 1623 First Folio and the earliest printed version of the play, the 1595 octavo The True Tragedy. This comparison of textual variants demonstrates that the botanical stylings of the folio text are considerably more extensive and elaborate than those of the octavo. These changes range from added passages to single-word variants, suggesting a comprehensive program of revision aimed toward expanding the botanical register of the play. Botanical revisions to the text also point toward an attempt at harmonizing the play with others in the first history tetralogy, giving it a more serial and connected character when grouped among other history plays in the First Folio. Keywords: textual criticism, textual variants, history play, botanical imagery, critical plant studies

As Caroline Spurgeon observed nearly a century ago, Shakespeare’s early histories are filled with botanical imagery, the growth and decay of plants being “the most constant running metaphor and picture in Shakespeare’s mind in the early historical plays as a whole.”1 More recently, Jean Feerick has returned to this terrain, drawing attention to the way that many Elizabethan plays associate English soil with the flesh of noble bodies, often depicted vegetally as they are rhetorically uprooted, plucked, pruned, and weeded.2 Not yet having received sustained attention for its elaborate botanical imaginings, however, is the third play of Shakespeare’s first history tetralogy, 3 Henry VI.3 Like the other plays in the tetralogy, 3 Henry 1 Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery, 216. 2 Feerick, “Groveling with Earth.” Feerick focuses on 2 Henry VI, Richard II, and The Spanish Tragedy. 3 The “first” tetralogy refers to the plays 1 Henry VI, 2 Henry VI, 3 Henry VI, and Richard III. The third part of Henry VI was composed sometime around 1592, the earliest known date of its performance (see Arden edition, eds., Cox and Rasmussen, 5–7). Though depicting chronologically earlier events, the “second” history tetralogy was composed later and includes Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Henry V.

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VI dramatically portrays the years-long affair of the so-called Wars of the Roses, the third part focusing on the shifting tides of power between the houses of York (emblem: white rose) and Lancaster (emblem: red rose). The Yorkists are led by the Duke of York (Richard Plantagenet) and his sons, including Richard, Duke of Gloucester (who will become King Richard III). The house of Lancaster is ostensibly led by King Henry VI, though in practice it is Queen Margaret who commands the Lancastrian army. In addition to featuring characters physically wearing white and red roses, the play makes numerous botanical references.4 From the elaborate conceit of a throne-impeding “thorny wood” in Gloucester’s famous soliloquy, to the slain Duke of York being compared to a fallen oak tree, 3 Henry VI deploys such images cannily and consistently. Intriguingly, however, while these two particular botanical images both appear in the 1623 folio text of The third Part of Henry the Sixt, with the death of the Duke of Yorke (hereafter, F), they do not appear in the 1595 octavo text The true Tragedie of Richard, Duke of York, and the death of good King Henrie the Sixt (hereafter, O), a variant of 3 Henry VI, and the first printed version of the play. In this essay, I investigate the differences in botanical representation between these two textual variants to demonstrate that the botanical stylings of F are considerably more extensive and elaborate than those of O. While some of the lines of botanical figuration in F and O are exactly the same, F has three substantial passages not found in O (including the two referenced above), as well as a number of short and single-word variations that add to an overall register of vegetality in F that is not nearly as emphasized in O. Admittedly, O is approximately one thousand lines shorter than F, and it might be argued that this increased attention to the botanical world in F can be explained simply by its greater length. This explanation does not hold up, however, when one also considers the single-word variants that F vegetalizes and O does not, for example F’s 4 The stage directions in O explicitly state that the Yorkists enter “with white Roses in their hats” (4) and the Lancastrians “with red Roses in their hats” (57). These stage directions are absent in F, but in F, Richard, Duke of Gloucester later refers explicitly to “the White Rose that I weare” (346). The line in O is simply “this white rose” (737). Throughout this essay, I quote from the Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE) of O and F, which transcribe directly from the 1595 octavo and the 1623 folio texts and retain original spellings except for the long “s.” Following the ISE, I provide the TLNs (Through Line Numbers), lines recorded from the beginning of the play without starting over at new scenes, taken from the 1623 First Folio. In most cases, ISE’s line numbers of O and F agree. Some of O’s lines are unique, however, or do not have TLNs that correspond precisely with those of F, and the editors of ISE skip or leave off some line numbers in O to attempt to use F’s TLNs alongside O; I indicate any such discrepancies in my notes. I also cite the ISE folio versions and TLNs of Richard III, Measure for Measure, and 1 Henry VI.

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preference for the vegetally inflected word “pluck” over O’s “pull” in three separate instances (F also adds one “pluck” that has no correspondence in O). Thus, in conjunction with the three elaborate botanical metaphors F constructs that embellish the parallel, non-vegetal sequences in O, the single-word variants add to the overall sum of the play’s foliage. Perhaps indicative of Shakespeare’s rural upbringing and apparent love for forest settings, displayed in plays like As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, this preference for vegetal imagery in F makes the folio text of 3 Henry VI just as much a site of botanical representation as Shakespeare’s forest comedies. Through the years, as is the case with other multiple-text Shakespeare plays, the critical consensus on the relationship between 3 Henry VI in F and its earlier printed variants has shifted variously between the view that O represents some degree of corruption of F (whether through “memorial reconstruction” and/or some form of piracy), and the alternate view that places the date of O’s composition before F’s, holding it to be an earlier or rough draft of the longer and more polished version finally published in the First Folio.5 Although the extended botanical sequences in F do not necessarily suggest revision of an earlier draft—a revision trying to reduce the length, for whatever reason, may have abridged such embellishment—the shorter, more subtle vegetal variants are more difficult to explain in the context of abridgement or memorial reconstruction. Why go to the trouble of intentionally scrubbing botanical terms for non-botanical ones? Equally implausible is the idea of a consistent misremembering of these terms that unintentionally translated them into non-botanical registers. As Alvin Kernan points out, the memorial reconstruction theory faces a challenge in having to believe that actors “systematically forgot” important patterns of imagery.6 What seems more likely is that the addition in F of extended botanical sequences throughout the play was accompanied around the same 5 Cox and Rasmussen provide a concise overview of the textual history of the play in their introduction to the Arden Shakespeare edition (Third Series) of 3 Henry VI, 148–176. The 1595 octavo was followed by a quarto edition in 1600 and then another quarto edition in 1619 before the First Folio edition of 1623. These two quartos of the play are not significantly different from O, though they do contain a few minor alterations. For a critique of Peter Alexander’s influential work on the “memorial reconstruction” theory, see Urkowitz, “If I Mistake in Those Foundations.” See also Martin, “Report and Revision,” for a more recent take on this controversy. 6 Kernan, “A Comparison of Imagery,” 442. Oddly, in his drive to prove the “sea-wind-tide” imagery as the predominant image in the play, Kernan claimed that the “garden imagery” is not substantially different between F and O, when in fact the same kind of reduction and/or elaboration with respect to the botanical imagery exists across the texts with respect to its oceanic images.

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time by smaller botanical reworkings, which support in fine the grander gestures of vegetal imagery. What was planted in O, in other words, sprouts and flourishes in F. Randall Martin, who has edited an edition of the play, believes there is evidence of “non-authorial agencies” (such as the unreliable memories of actors) present in O, but he simultaneously avers that O is “an early version of 3 Henry VI, almost certainly by Shakespeare.”7 My contention is that the botanical amplifications and additions in F work to strengthen the claim that F is indeed a revision of O. The changes in F develop a consistent botanical key, present though undeveloped in O, that suggests a controlling hand (or hands) of revision, whether Shakespeare’s hand was involved or not. One possible reason for this thoroughgoing vegetal reworking can be gleaned from the title page of the First Folio, which lists the “histories” in chronological order of the historical events depicted therein, implying a coherent plan of organization based on the successive reigns of English monarchs. Probably this organizational scheme was retroactively applied at some stage of the revision and production of F, attempting to give order to single, discrete plays that were not necessarily composed or performed in that order or even thought of as being related to one another in genre, series, trilogy, or tetralogy. The botanical embellishments of F work in tandem with the First Folio’s overall organizational scheme to portray coherence and consistency across the early history plays. F’s added botanical imagery is especially dense in Richard, Duke of Gloucester’s soliloquy, an important scene that establishes Richard’s motivation and Machiavellian character, likely revised and expanded in order to harmonize with his idiosyncratic portrayal in Richard III.8 The added vegetal images and phrases throughout F draw upon and highlight the iconography of the Wars of the Roses, often playing and punning on the “plant” in the family name “Plantagenet,” the constant images of the plucking of planted bodies echoing the plucking of red and white roses in the Temple Garden scene of 1 Henry VI. In sum, the botanical revisions to 3 Henry VI, large and small, not only reinforce consistency across the play itself but also contribute to the retroactive placement of it within the first series of Shakespeare’s history tetralogies.9 At a time when scholarly attention is focused more on the material culture of “the book” and its development during the rise of print culture, 7 The Oxford Shakespeare Henry VI, Part Three, Randall Martin, ed., 10. 8 On F’s anticipation of Richard’s characterization in Richard III, see Greer, “The Relation.” 9 On the possibility that the plays were originally written and performed as a series, in sequence, see Grene, Shakespeare’s Serial History Plays, 7–30.

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my textual approach to the nature of Shakespeare’s botanical revisions may seem somewhat out of fashion, but this chapter does in fact contribute to Leah Knight’s idea that “in the fields of botany and books, one material was knowable in terms of the other because one was so often and so thoroughly embedded in the other.”10 Both O and F are, of course, printed books, the first published in the late sixteenth century and the second published well into the seventeenth; thus, the proliferation of botanical changes that were made between the appearance of O and what would appear in F parallels the intertwined blossoming of Renaissance books about plants and the general increase of literacy in England at the end of the sixteenth century, with the height of popularity of the printed poetic anthologies converging with that of English botanical literature, both at their most prolific in the 1590’s. As Knight argues, “Plants and texts both belonged to a broader culture of collecting in the period,”11 and, as such, the revised 3 Henry VI represents its own textual site of botanical “collecting,” having amassed significant vegetal “bio-mass” sometime between the years of 1595 and 1623. What is more, this accumulation of vegetal “material” also coincides with the accumulation of physical plant material composing the very pages on which it was printed, belonging to what Joshua Calhoun calls an “ecology of texts.”12 Through its proliferation of textual vegetation within this doubly botanical (inter) textual ecosystem, the revised F veritably testifies to the Renaissance’s increasing fervor for both plants and books.

Planting and Plucking Plantagenets In both texts, botanical imagery appears in the very first scene of the play, with a line spoken by the Earl of Warwick: (O) (F) Ile plant Plantagenet: and root him out who Ile plant Plantagenet, root him vp who dares? dares: (54) (54)

10 Knight, Of Books and Botany, 12. 11 Knight, Of Books and Botany, 8, 4. 12 Calhoun, The Nature of the Page. Calhoun uses the term throughout his book, introducing the concept as “a necessary and timely extension of McKenzie’s sociology of texts,” 16. As Calhoun discusses, the paper from this time period was made from plant materials such as flax, recycled from rags, as opposed to the wood pulp generally used to make paper today.

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“Root out” versus “root up” is not a significant difference, but it is worth noting as a subtle vegetal variance. One might argue that “rooting up” visually signals the image of a plant being uprooted from the soil more so than “rooting out” does, but either way, Warwick’s statement in both texts contrasts the “planting” of a noble body—metaphorically constructing it as vegetal— with the destruction of that noble body, thus setting up the play’s recurring image of “plant-bodies” that are vulnerable to uprooting, plucking, and felling.13 A few lines later, F again subtly alters a line, this time spoken by the Earl of Westmorland, to give it a vegetal inflection not present in O: (O) (F) What? Shall we suffer this, lets pull him What, shall we suffer this? lets pluck him downe. down, (68) (68)

Historically known as the “kingmaker,” Warwick “plants” the Duke of York by goading him to claim the throne. Moreover, Warwick is later described in F as “plucker down of Kings,” whereas in O, he is a “puller downe of kings” (1097). In this first scene, Warwick gestures toward the empty throne in Henry VI’s palace, and York’s action of sitting upon it coincides with Warwick’s threat to his enemies to root him up/out if they dare, visually conveying the “planting” of his body in its descent. With Henry and the Lancastrians’ entrance into the scene, F’s revision of “pull” to “pluck” reinforces this botanical figuration, both verbally and visually, as Henry speculates that York means “[t]o aspire unto the Crowne” (61). That Westmorland in O wants to “pull” York down from the throne communicates the association of power with height, a king literally reigning over his subjects below, but the desire to “pluck” him down, in F, resonates with Warwick’s earlier statement about “planting” this Plantagenet as well; it communicates both the visual emphasis of impressive height, via the image of a fruit plucked from a tall tree, and the formerly expressed idea of noble bodies likened to vegetal bodies. These early modern botanical metaphors can shift abruptly in their presentation, in evidence here, as York’s body becomes first a transplanted plant and then a fruit on that plant. In both of these moments of botanical representation, however, an image of vertical movement downward suggests a shift in power, York’s body lowered into the chair of state when Warwick “plants” him there, and then potentially or figuratively lowered again by Westmorland’s rhetorical desire to pluck him down from his airy purchase, near the heavens, and back down to earth. This 13 See Feerick, “Groveling with Earth,” 233–34.

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image of pulling down—and especially plucking down—royal vegetal bodies anticipates important imagery in Richard, Duke of Gloucester’s soliloquy that highlights his motivation for the throne, setting up his own eponymous play. All three instances in which F changes “pull” to “pluck” are significant in similar ways, related to visualizing the shifting tides of power in a botanical key. The first two, associated with Warwick and his influence over who sits on the throne, anticipate the third instance, which occurs meaningfully at the end of Richard’s soliloquy, of which F extends O’s thirty lines to seventy-one lines. The soliloquy in O is completely devoid of botanical imagery. In F’s version of the soliloquy, however, the vegetal makes a striking appearance, with Richard representing his own body parts as being botanically composed, calling his arm a “wither’d Shrub” (1680) and referring to his body as a “mis-shap’d Trunke” (1694), while, moments later, he imagines himself surrounded by the threatening presence of a “Thornie Wood” (1698), from which he must “hew my way out with a bloody Axe” (1705). The words “shrub” and “trunk” do not appear in O’s soliloquy, and the “thorny wood” section is completely absent. Rather than “wither’d Shrub,” O uses “withered shrimpe,” emphasizing the apparently small size of Richard’s arm, but the revision in F accomplishes the portrayal of smallness while vegetalizing it at the same time. The change from “shrimpe” to “Shrub” also harmonizes with Richard’s very similar self-characterization in Richard III, when he refers to his arm as a “blasted Sapling, wither’d vp” (2040), suggestive of revision in the service of series coherence. It also harmonizes internally with another change in F, a slight revision of a speech by King Henry that uses “wither” twice in two lines rather than only once in O, choosing to emphasize the botanical word—and the Wars of the Roses theme—over a neat end rhyme. (O) Wither one rose, and let the other flourish, For if you striue, ten thousand liues must perish. (1239–40)

(F) Wither one Rose, and let the other flourish: If you contend, a thousand liues must wither. (1239–40)

While both “flourish” and “wither” signify vegetal registers, the doubling of “wither” in F further suggests a connection to and emphasis on Richard, Duke of Gloucester and his withered arm, a deformity which informs his malevolent intentions that are fleshed out further in Richard III. This change also blurs the distinction between human and vegetal “lives.” O’s version clearly moves away from metaphor in its second line, whereas F preserves

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a continuity between the roses themselves and the men who wear them, who, like the rose, wither when they die.14 The “thorny wood” passage within the soliloquy that F adds is worth quoting in full: Ile make my Heauen, to dreame vpon the Crowne, And whiles I liue, t’account this World but Hell, Vntill my mis-shap’d Trunke, that beares this Head, Be round impaled with a glorious Crowne. And yet I know not how to get the Crowne, For many Liues stand betweene me and home: And I, like one lost in a Thornie Wood, That rents the Thornes, and is rent with the Thornes, Seeking a way, and straying from the way, Not knowing how to finde the open Ayre, But toyling desperately to finde it out, Torment my selfe, to catch the English Crowne: And from that torment I will free my selfe, Or hew my way out with a bloody Axe. (1692–1705)

The extended metaphor of the thorny wood that F adds to the end of the soliloquy depicts Richard’s already self-vegetalized body, with withered shrub-arm, as even more vegetal, now taking on the “mis-shap’d Trunke.”15 Although “trunk” appears frequently in early modern texts to refer simply to a person’s body, Shakespeare consciously employs the double-meaning to play on botanical connotations, here and elsewhere. For example, in Measure for Measure, Isabella describes Claudio’s body in similar botanical terms: “Would barke your honor from that trunke you beare, / And leaue you naked” (1284–85).16 Richard imagines his struggle for the crown with these intersecting botanical images, his own vegetalized body “toyling 14 This association of men with roses represents an alternative to the more common trope in the period of comparing women with flowers, discussed in this collection in particular in the essays by Duncan and Hopkins. 15 The word “trunk” has referred from 1490 to “the main part of something as distinguished from its appendages … The main stem of a tree, as distinct from the roots and branches; the bole or stock” (OED, “trunk, n.,” I, 1). The OED records the first witness of “trunk” in Caxton’s translation of the Boke if Eneydos: “How Eneas … hewe the troncke of a tree, oute of the whiche yssued bloode.” Thus, from the fifteenth century, the verb “trunk” signified a cutting off of parts, a “truncating.” 16 The verb “to bark” at this time referred to a process of stripping off a tree’s bark, “to cut off a complete circle of bark from [a tree], so as to kill it” (OED, “bark, v.,” 2, 3, a).

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desperately” to cut his way out of this “wood” of thorny obstacles, namely the “many Liues” that “stand between” him and the crown, which he hopes to “catch” as though it resides up in the air, identified with heaven, as well as being near the “crowns” of trees in the wood. The repetition of “crown” and “thorns” of course also firmly identifies Richard as an anti-Christ figure.17 Richard’s soliloquy ends with the statement: (O) Can I doe this, and cannot get the crowne? Tush were it ten times higher, Ile pull it downe. (1718-19)

(F) Can I doe this, and cannot get a Crowne? Tut, were it farther off, Ile plucke it downe. (1718-19)

The “plucking” of the crown in F, as opposed to the less botanical “pulling” down of it in O, suggests the image of Richard plucking illicit fruit from the heights of a tree, simultaneously reinforcing Richard’s fiendishness as one who takes forbidden fruit, equating his immoral drive for usurpation with the original sin in the Garden of Eden. The verb “plucke” also harmonizes with F’s added imagery of the heavens and trees. Furthermore, the “plucking” of a crown occurs in Warwick’s rhetoric a few scenes earlier, in the one instance where O agrees botanically with F, when he tells Richard, Duke of York: “For thou shalt know this strong right hand of mine, / Can plucke the Diadem from faint Henries head” (811). Thus, the single plucking of a diadem, briefly mentioned in O, flourishes in F into Gloucester’s elaborate diabolical imaginings of usurpation. Admittedly, this figurative “thorny wood” is present in O, although not until near the end of the play. Prince Edward uses the phrase to describe the Yorkist army, although with a slight variation between F and O, which again suggests attention to botanical detail during revision: (O) See brothers, yonder stands the thornie wood, Which by Gods assistance and your prowesse, Shall with our swords yer night be cleane cut downe. (2954–56) 17 See Garber, Shakespeare After All, 120.

(F) Braue followers, yonder stands the thornie Wood, Which by the Heauens assistance, and your strength, Must by the Roots be hew’ne vp yet ere Night. (2954–56)

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The changes from “God” to “Heaven” and “cut downe” to “hew’ne up” more closely align this later passage with the additions to Richard’s soliloquy earlier in the play, signaling a revision strategy that moved back and forth across the text to shore up internal consistencies. The addition of the thorny wood to the earlier soliloquy also greatly strengthens the thorny wood reference here, with Richard’s thorny wood of subjective turmoil turned back on him as Edward now figures the Yorkist army as that thorny wood, in need of more than mere pruning. F goes even further still with this revisionary strategy, by adding another “thorn” reference about Prince Edward as well, since he is the one who evokes Richard’s thorny wood. When the prince enters the Yorkist camp, his older namesake, Edward Plantagenet (King Edward IV), mocks him thus: “Bring forth the Gallant, let vs heare him speake. / What? can so young a Thorne begin to prick?” (2986–87). This added jab not only gives consistency to the whole of 3 Henry VI but also harkens back again to the Temple Garden scene of 1 Henry VI, as when Somerset proclaims, “Prick not your finger as you pluck it off, / Least bleeding, you doe paint the white Rose red” (978–79).

Hewing and Harvesting Plantagenets The hewing of Richard’s way out of the thorny wood “with a bloody axe,” added in F, resonates with a consistent pattern of imagery in the play that sees the bodies of slain nobles as trees that have been hewn or cut down, especially in the midst of battle. Probably not a coincidence, this imagery is almost always associated with the Yorkists, reinforcing the wordplay on the “planting” of Plantagenets. I first discuss two such passages in F and O that are basically identical, with only slight orthographical differences and a minor rephrasing here and there. In the first of these, George, Duke of Clarence, tells Prince Edward (quoted from F): But when we saw, our Sunshine made thy Spring, And that thy Summer bred vs no increase, We set the Axe to thy vsurping Roote: And though the edge hath something hit our selues, Yet know thou, since we haue begun to strike, Wee’l neuer leaue, till we haue hewne thee downe, Or bath’d thy growing, with our heated bloods. (1040–46)

The intensity in this passage of the violent hewing of human bodies, as one might hack through tree trunks, matches the added thorny wood passage in

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Richard’s soliloquy. Clarence calls into question Henry VI’s legitimacy to the throne by referencing his “vsurping Roote,” that is, his grandfather Henry IV, Henry Bolingbroke, who deposed Richard II under dubious circumstances. While this passage in F and O is nearly identical, one variation that occurs in the first line is of note, as O reads, “But when we saw our summer brought the gaine,” rather than “our Sunshine made thy Spring” in F. This change in F emphasizes slightly more than O the ecological, the fact that sunlight accompanies and produces the vegetation of spring and summer. The addition of the word “spring” also resonates with the word “spring” that appears elsewhere in botanical passages added to F, used for a total of six times, but not at all in O. Another similar botanical figuring appears in both O and F, this one late in the play in a battlefield scene in which a dying Warwick portrays his own death as the fall of a great cedar tree:18 (O) Why aske I that? my mangled bodie shewes, That I must yeeld my bodie to the earth. And by my fall the conquest to my foes, Thus yeelds the Cedar to the axes edge, Whose armes gaue shelter to the princelie Eagle, Vnder whose shade the ramping Lion slept, Whose top branch ouerpeerd Ioues spreading tree. (2808-15)

(F) Why aske I that? my mangled body shewes My blood, my want of strength, my sicke heart shewes, That I must yield my body to the Earth, And by my fall, the conquest to my foe. Thus yeelds the Cedar to the Axes edge, Whose Armes gaue shelter to the Princely Eagle, Vnder whose shade the ramping Lyon sleep, Whose top-branch ouer-peer’d Ioves spreading Tree, And kept low Shrubs from Winters pow’rfull Winde. (2808-16)

Once again, the passages are nearly identical, but here F adds two lines, the last of which further imagines the ecology of this particular metaphor, including “low Shrubs” as part of the domain under which Warwick’s “spreading Tree” once afforded protection. Additionally, the mention of low or diminutive shrubs resonates with Richard’s figuring of his “withered” arm in this way in F. 18 In O, the lines jump from 2808 to 2810, to correspond with F, which has an added line between them.

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In the next example, we can observe an instance in which F substantially expands a nonbotanical passage by adding botanical imagery. Mirroring the fall of Warwick at the end of the play, F alters the reported death of York, which occurs early in the play, to imagine the duke in botanical form as well. The unlucky messenger bearing the news describes the duke’s death to his sons Edward and Richard:19 (O) When as the noble Duke was put to flight, And then pursu’de by Clifford and the Queen, And manie souldiers moe, who all at once Let driue at him and forst the Duke to yeeld: (706-15)

(F) Environed he was with many foes And stood against them, as the hope of Troy Against the Greeks that would have entered Troy. But Hercules himself must yields to odds: And many strokes, though with a little axe, Hews down and fells the hardest-timbered oak. By many hands your father was subdued, But only slaughtered by the ireful arm Of unrelenting Clifford and the Queen, (706-14)

F embellishes these lines significantly, adding not only the botanical conceit but also classical allusions. O’s general comment that it is only the combined force of Clifford, Queen, and “manie souldiers moe” that ultimately brought about the Duke’s demise becomes first classically epic in tenor and then takes on a botanical key, shifting from the image of mighty Hercules defending Troy to the hewing of a mighty oak tree. The “manie souldiers” of O pale in comparison to these massive figures, their weapons diminished into tiny axes that require “many strokes” by “many hands,” which even then, are only able to subdue this colossal figure as a result of the “unrelenting” attack of Clifford and the Queen.20 In addition to resonating with Warwick’s and York’s botanical deaths, F’s added hewing of Richard’s way out of the thorny wood “with a bloody axe” connects with another added botanical flourish, two scenes before the 19 In O, the lines jump from 706 to 714. 20 On the use of “environ” as different parts of speech in early modern drama, see Nardizzi, “Environ.” Intriguingly, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, part 1, uses the verb “environ” in the same way it is used here, involving the menacing circling of soldiers around their enemies, their sharp weapons compared to a “thorny wood” (187).

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soliloquy, with the “hewing” of the Plantagenets’ youngest brother Rutland by the Lancastrian Clifford, as described by Richard, Duke of Gloucester. Upon discovering the identity of the slain Clifford in battle, Richard refuses Edward’s suggestion to let this particular body “be gently used” (1328): (O) Reuerse that doome of mercie, for tis Clifford, Who kild our tender brother Rutland, And stabd our princelie father Duke of Yorke. (1329-31)

(F) Reuoke that doome of mercy, for ‘tis Clifford, Who not contented that he lopp’d the Branch In hewing Rutland, when his leaues put forth, But set his murth’ring knife vnto the Roote, From whence that tender spray did sweetly spring, I meane our Princely Father, Duke of Yorke. (1329-43)

O’s compact phrase “kild our tender brother” expands into an extended metaphor that imagines Rutland as a “tender spray,” complete with roots, branches, and leaves. In O, Clifford “kild” Rutland and “stabd” the Duke of York, but in F, both Rutland and York become vegetal, figured as part of the same family tree, the “tender spray” that was Rutland originating from “the Roote” that was the duke, his father.21 The scene that Richard paints in F is a gory dismemberment of a tree, one that sees Clifford “lopping” and “hewing” Rutland as “branch” as well as “spray,” just at the moment when young Rutland had “his leaues put forth.” The first and last lines of this speech are almost identical in O and F, but the middle line of O becomes the four expanded lines of F, revising the killing and stabbing of humans into the lopping and hewing of plants. Throughout the play, children are often represented as either “sprays,” “saplings,” or “fruit,” especially if they have been killed or are in threat of being “untimely” killed or “harvested.” Thus, in addition to the illicit plucking of fruits implied in Richard’s soliloquy, 3 Henry VI represents the vegetal life cycle culminating in fruit in various other ways (the word “fruit” appearing six times in F and four 21 From the thirteenth century, “spray” could refer collectively to “small or slender twigs of trees or shrubs, either as still growing or as cut off and used for fuel, etc.; fine brushwood” (OED, “spray, n.1,” 1, a).

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times in O), as well as both good and bad forms of harvest. At the end of both O and F, the final two scenes contain several examples of this kind of botanical representation. For example, King Edward IV, when he retakes the throne in the final scene, proclaims in F, “What valiant Foe-men, like to Autumnes Corne, / Haue we mow’d downe in tops of all their pride?” (3174–75). The phrasing is identical in O, with only slight orthographical differences. Another identical phrasing occurs in this scene with a bitter aside by Richard, following Edward’s opening speech, that draws on botanical imagery to imagine Edward’s eventual ruin: “Ile blast his Haruest, if your head were laid, / For yet I am not look’d on in the world” (3192–93).22 The “harvest” that Richard will “blast” is the infant son of Edward and Lady Grey, yet another prince Edward. While these two harvest examples are consistent across F and O, subtle variations in this category of botanical imagery also exist, as well as some added lines in F. For example, Queen Margaret’s mournful speech after the death of her Prince Edward, whom she calls affectionately “Ned,” contains a vegetal metaphor present in F but not in O: (O) You haue no children Deuils, if you had, The thought of them would then haue stopt your rage, But if you euer hope to haue a sonne, Looke in his youth to haue him so cut off, As Traitors you haue doone this sweet young prince. (3043–47)

(F) Butchers and Villaines, bloudy Caniballes, How sweet a Plant haue you vntimely cropt: You haue no children (Butchers) if you had, The thought of them would haue stirr’d vp remorse, But if you euer chance to haue a Childe, Looke in his youth to haue him so cut off. As deathsmen you haue rid this sweet yong Prince. (3041-47)

F’s passage contains many single-word variants, as well as wholesale additions—in particular, the vegetal imagery. Queen Margaret is more profuse in her grief in F than in O, multiplying her epithets and insults. Some of these variations are as insignificant as exchanging “Childe” for “sonne” or 22 Feerick notes the association of the word “blasted” with blighted vegetation, becoming withered or shriveled in the process (248, n.13). See also Archer, Turley, and Thomas, “The Autumn King,” 534–35; and see Staub’s essay in the present collection for an alternative reading to that of Archer, Turley, and Thomas, regarding the appearance of weeds in King Lear, interpreting the weeds in the play in a more positive light.

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“chance” for “hope.” However, while F’s phrase “stirr’d vp remorse” only subtly alters O’s variant “stopt your rage,” the emphasis on remorse, rather than rage, gives her melodramatic speech a tone more compatible with F’s emphasis on the queen’s grief. Significantly, the introduction of the untimely “cropping” of her Ned as a “sweet” plant is F’s alone, likely drawing on the concept of youth being “cut off” in O and extending that idea in a vegetal sense, to resonate with similar botanical imagery elsewhere in the play, particularly the “hewing” of the “tender” and “sweetly” springing Rutland. To take another example, in the final scene of the play F subtly changes the dialogue that Richard offers when he disingenuously kisses the infant prince: (O) And that I loue the fruit from whence thou Sprangst, witnesse the louing kisse I giue the child. (3202-03)

(F) And that I loue the tree frõ whence y u sprang’st: Witnesse the louing kisse I giue the Fruite, (3202-03)

In F, “child” becomes “Fruite.” This variant seems like a change intended to correct the passage’s logic, since fruit springs from a tree, rather than children springing from a fruit, as O would seem to imply. This change also reflects the metaphor established earlier that figures York as a tree, from which “springs” new(er) life, particularly royal, noble lives. Inseparable from the play’s preoccupation with Edward IV’s becoming monarch is the question of who will become his childbearing queen, with botanical metaphors of regeneration and fruiting making significant appearances. In the beginning of Richard’s expansive soliloquy, for example, Richard mocks Edward’s allegedly lustful stance toward women and wishes ruin upon his procreative chances: (O) I, Edward will vse women honourablie, Would he were wasted marrow, bones and all, That from his loines no issue might succeed To hinder me from the golden time I looke for, (1648-51)

(F) Ay, Edward will use women honourably. Would he were wasted, marrow, bones and all, That from his loins no hopeful branch may spring To cross me from the golden time I look for. (1648-51)

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F changes the nondescript “issue” of O to the image of spontaneous botanical growth and generation in the “hopeful branches” that “may spring” out from their parent plant. Once again, the subtle alteration in Richard’s dialogue helps to set up the vegetal additions to the soliloquy coming up later in the scene, juxtaposing his “hopes” for Edward against his own hopes for the throne, barred from him by the “thorny wood.” In the scene that follows, Edward attempts to secure the hand of Lady Bona by sending Warwick to the court of France as his silver-tongued liaison. Unbeknownst to Warwick, however, back in England Edward dotes upon and coerces the lower ranking Lady Grey into becoming his queen, and this union results in her conception. Before she bears this child at the end of the play, both she and Edward refer to the pregnancy in botanical terms. In general, the child is thought of as fruit, or in particular, the “fruits of love,” a phrase that F adds in two consecutive lines:23 King. But stay thee, ’tis the fruits of loue I meane. Wid. The fruits of Loue, I meane, my louing Liege. (1571–72)

In this exchange, Edward has not yet broken the will of Lady Grey, recently widowed because of the war. She mistakenly expects her king to be honorable, thinking that Edward’s request that she “love” him entails only the love that subjects should have for their king. Edward does not mean this kind of love, and he eventually comes straight out with his intentions: “To tell thee plaine, I ayme to lye with thee” (1581). Thus, Edward’s seeming platitude requesting Lady Grey to love her king if she wants to receive her late husband’s lands turns into something more sinister when he corrects himself with the botanical metaphor. When he interjects “the fruits of loue I meane,” Edward’s idea of such “fruits” is the sexual intercourse that follows from sexual love or attraction (despite Lady Grey’s protestations). The implication of childbirth proceeding from this intercourse is also intended, the “fruits” of sexual love therefore representing a series of results or consequences springing from an initial action or choice (even if coerced), 23 Interestingly, O is the more vegetal of the two a few lines later, when Richard laments that Clarence, Henry, and Henry’s son Edward all stand in his way to the throne. F reads, “And all the vnlook’d-for Issue of their Bodies, / To take their Roomes, ere I can place my selfe” (1655–56). In O, Richard says, “ere I can plant my selfe.” For some reason, F reverses the change it effects with Warwick’s planting of York on the throne; perhaps Shakespeare did not want to overdo it, considering how much other botanical imagery F adds to the soliloquy, so he decided to cut that particular one. Perhaps giving Warwick the role of “planting” a king in the earlier scene conveys “planting” as an act one performs on another, not on oneself, and therefore, Richard wishes to “place” himself on the throne or at least position himself nearer to it.

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similar to the use of botanical metaphors to encapsulate family lineage over multiple generations. Moreover, the addition of the phrase “fruits of love” in F explicitly echoes a similar phrase in 1 Henry VI, spoken by Henry VI to his counselors about his hope to wed Margaret: So am I driuen by breath of her Renowne, Either to suffer Shipwracke, or arriue Where I may haue fruition of her Loue. (2828–30)

In 3 Henry VI, once Lady Grey has conceived, she again picks up on the “fruiting” metaphor, in the more explicit sense of procreation and birth. Here F makes slight revisions and moves some of the phrasings around, almost experimentally, as “There to preserue the fruit within my wombe” in O becomes “For loue of Edwards Off-spring in my wombe” in F (2322), going against the trend of F’s more vegetal language. However, “K. Edwards seed true heire to Englands crowne” in O becomes “King Edwards Fruite, true heyre to th’ English Crowne” in F (2328), regaining the lost “fruit.” The first change emphasizes the “love” that Lady Grey has for the king’s offspring, continuing the theme that F develops by adding “fruits of love” earlier in the play. The second change substitutes one vegetal form for another, preferring “fruit” over “seed,” possibly to reinforce continuity in the overall register of botanical language throughout the text, considering that “seed” is never used elsewhere, in F or O.

Conclusion: “X” Marks the Spot I end my analysis with a single-word variant that differs between the texts by only one letter—“x.” This variation occurs in a botanical passage that is otherwise essentially identical in the two texts. When he is sent to France to speak on behalf of King Edward IV, Warwick figures the supposed love of the king for the Lady Bona as an “externall plant,” rooted in “virtue’s ground.” However, “eternal,” rather than “external,” is the word that readers will find in most modern editions of 3 Henry VI, an emendation of F’s “externall plant,” based on the apparently more sensible “eternall plant” that appears in O.24 The two passages are displayed below, with the variant in bold: 24 “[E]ternall” was also printed in the quarto versions of the play in 1600 and 1619, following O. Some examples of modern editions that emend the text in this way are the Norton, Arden, Riverside, Folger, and Cambridge editions.

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(O) Such it seemes As maie beseeme a monarke like himselfe. My selfe haue often heard him saie and sweare, That this his loue was an eternall plant, The root whereof was fixt in vertues ground, The leaues and fruite maintainde with beauties sun, Exempt from enuie, but not from disdaine, Vnlesse the ladie Bona quite his paine. (1860-67)

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(F) Such it seemes, As may beseeme a Monarch like himselfe. My selfe haue often heard him say, and sweare, That this his Loue was an externall Plant, Whereof the Root was fixt in Vertues ground, The Leaues and Fruit maintain’d with Beauties Sunne, Exempt from Enuy, but not from Disdaine, Vnlesse the Lady Bona quit his paine. (1860-67)

Although “eternal plant” is the editorial preference du jour, plausible explanations exist for both “eternal” and “external,” depending on how one interprets the passage. The “eternal” emendation has a long pedigree, having been printed as such since at least the early nineteenth century, in accordance with the remarks of several prominent Shakespeareans of the time. An 1803 edition, printed in London for J. Johnson et al., for example, provides in the footnotes no less than three, though different, justifications for replacing “external” with “eternal.” Warburton claimed, “The old quarto reads rightly eternal; alluding to the plants of Paradise.” Steevens, on the other hand, asserted, “In the language of Shakespeare’s time, by an eternal plant was meant what we now call a perennial one,” a statement for which I can find no corroborating evidence in contemporary botanical literature. Malone, famed for beginning the tradition of viewing F as a later draft of O, looked outside of the text for an explanation: “The folio reads—an external plant; but as that word seems to afford no meaning, and as Shakespeare has adopted every other part of this speech as he found it in the old play, without alteration, I suppose external was a mistake of the transcriber or printer.”25 On the other hand, a century later, an edition of the play edited by Charlotte Porter, which retains original spellings from F, prints “externall,” albeit with a note acknowledging it as a probable misprint. However, Porter allows for the possibility of retaining “external,” speculating that “the inner connection of the thought justifies the unusual adjective.” She supports this reading by opposing the externality of 25 Johnson and Steevens, eds., The Plays of William Shakspeare [sic], 124.

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King Edward’s “confessed love,” which shows like a plant outwardly, that is, above ground, opposed to the invisible, or internal, root fixed in “Vertues ground” (1864).26 The leaves and fruit showing above ground are said to be, in F’s spelling, “maintain’d with Beauties Sunne” (1865). In Porter’s reading, the external part of King Edward’s “love-plant” supposedly engages Lady Bona on a physical level, while its virtuous depth is like a root, unseen but firm and fixed, supporting the whims of physical attraction with a deeper kind of love. Of course, this love is a complete sham, and Warwick’s efforts humorously contrast with what the audience already knows about Edward’s lust for Lady Grey from the previous scene. In the context of F’s substantial botanical revisions, it is worth reconsidering this common emendation. Looking at the passages side by side, we can see first that Malone is not entirely correct that “Shakespeare has adopted every other part of this speech as he found it in the old play, without alteration,” for the syntax of the line following the emended line is slightly different as well, suggesting that this pair of lines may have been subtly revised at the same time, in the midst of other botanical revisions such as the small-scale changes of “pull” to “pluck.” The accepted emendation of this plant metaphor also provides an opportunity to think about the emerging field of critical plant studies as a scholarly arena that might profitably interact with the field of Shakespearean textual criticism, as two perspectives that share an interest in openness and proliferation as opposed to reduction and finality. For example, Karen Bjelland’s deconstructive strategy of recovering textual multiplicity refuses to settle on an authoritative text. Bjelland emphasizes that “choosing one variant over another is not an appropriate editorial strategy for two-text plays; in every case, the variants tap into different epistemological categories and thus point to each text having been written in and for its own cultural time and space.”27 A deconstructive reading across O and F shows that the modern editions of 3 Henry VI marginalize the “external” plant of F for the preferred interpretation of O’s “eternal” plant, that is, an image of love that is both growing and everlasting, seeming like an obvious choice. The preference for the botanical in F, however, suggests that, on all things vegetal, there is reason to cater to what is printed in F rather than in O, especially given the many other single-word vegetal variants. O’s ideal of an unending, “eternal” love marginalizes F’s metaphor that makes use of the physical phenomenon of vegetal amphibiousness, 26 Porter, ed., The Third Part of Henry the Sixt, 162, n. 144. Michael Hattaway, editor of the 1993 New Cambridge edition of the play, prints “eternal,” glossing it as meaning “heavenly,” but he also admits that “F’s ‘external’ may stand—if we take it to mean ‘visible’ (OED sv 2),” 146. 27 Bjelland, “Variants as Epistemological Shifts,” 65.

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that is, plants’ ability to live simultaneously in two worlds, above and below ground, internal and external in their appearance to humans.28 Perhaps rather than choosing “eternal” or “external,” though, we can think of the ways that plants in Shakespeare’s drama can be both at the same time. One avenue for Shakespearean textual criticism, post-poststructuralism, would be to begin to think of texts themselves in a botanical sense, that there is a proliferation of “texts,” and a revision of an earlier text can be thought of as a kind of proliferation of ideas, which flourish variously depending on the given textual “environment.” Sometimes revision involves pruning or cutting, and F does excise some parts of O; other times, revision involves addition or amplification, which, as this essay demonstrates, happens often in F. Modern editing practices such as emendation function too as a kind of revision, and thus the “x” removed from the word “externall” in F, to accommodate the “eternal” plant of O, can and should be read back into the “text,” or “texts,” of 3 Henry VI, in service of honoring both textual and vegetal proliferation. The letter “x” is an appropriate figure for thinking about not only editorial erasure, or the crossing out of words, but also of the possibilities of reading “across” textual variants, not in the sense of a “conflated” reading that reads the texts against each other to find a balance or to find the “true” or “original” meaning, but in reading the texts in an intertextual way, both as texts that differ from one another but also that inform and change the other as a result of their proximity to one another. In the textual environment of the First Folio, the early histories are proximate by virtue of their placement in the collection, as a book, different from that of a single printed text or a performed play. Michael Marder, cited by several contributors within this collection, has already laid the groundwork for linking up deconstructive textual studies and critical plant studies, as his theorization of “plant-thinking” calls for “further investigation into how plants quietly subvert classical philosophical hierarchies and afford us a glimpse into a lived (and growing) destruction of Western metaphysics.”29 Marder explains how the plant, in all of its components and functioning, tends toward “the side of exteriority” but then goes on to deconstruct vegetal exteriority as a fiction of metaphysics, 28 On the unusual concept of the amphibiousness of plants, see Koller, The Restless Plant. He opens the book by stating, “Animals classified as amphibians are able to exist in water and on land, and they spend their lives shuffling between these two environments. In this respect, all but very few plants are obligate amphibians, with part of their body permanently in the aerial environment and the remaining part within the soil,” 1. 29 Marder, Plant-Thinking, 53. In the present collection, see especially Crachiolo, whose essay addresses Marder’s ideas about plant temporality; and Bushnell, who challenges Marder on overlooking specifically early modern approaches to “plant thinking.”

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the perceived “deficit of interiority in the vegetal world” resulting from our refusal to acknowledge “on the one hand, the unique subjectivity of plants and, on the other, the noninterior, extended facets of a human subjectivity.”30 The plant, thus, is good for “thinking with” from a deconstructive point of view, since its essential ontological characteristics defy the very premises of “self” and “other,” “inner” and “outer,” a theme that resonates well with the characterization of the chameleon-like Richard in 3 Henry VI as well as Richard III. The proliferative life of plants allows us to think about plants as having an “eternal” component as well. As Marder phrases it, “the continuous striving of the plant to its other without return to itself, the as-yet unexplored possibilities of the vegetal soul and its countless permutations in all living beings—these are but a few indications of the essential incompletion (and, hence, the vivacity, unrest, and the non-identity) of a life compatible with plant-thinking.”31 Part of what deconstructive textual studies allows us, especially if we pair it with botanical insights, is a proliferation of meaning that highlights the “external” quality of texts, the meaning apparent only insofar as one regards their “surface.” There is no “true” or “correct” text, no meaning “behind” texts, no intention that might be sought or discovered. Rather, we have the possibility of both an “eternal” and an “external” plant, as we read across O and F, both “planted” in these textual variants for absolutely unknown reasons, yet here they are, and the nature of their relation continues to grow.

Bibliography Primary Sources Shakespeare, William. Henry VI, Part 1 (Folio 1, 1623). Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria, last modified February 18, 2016. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/1H6_F1/index.html. Shakespeare, William. Henry VI, Part 3 (Folio 1, 1623). Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria, last modified February 18, 2016. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/3H6_F1/index.html. Shakespeare, William. Henry VI, Part 3 (Octavo 1, 1595). Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria, last modified February 18, 2016. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/3H6_O1/index.html. 30 Irigaray and Marder, Through Vegetal Being, 164. 31 Marder, Plant-Thinking, 187.

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Shakespeare, William. King Henry VI, Part 3, edited by John D. Cox and Eric Rasmussen. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001. Shakespeare, William. Measure for Measure (Folio, 1623). Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria, last modified February 18, 2016. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/MM_F1/index.html. Shakespeare, William. The Plays of William Shakspeare: With the Corrections and Illustrations of Various Commentators, to which are Added Notes, Volume 14, edited by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens. London: J. Plymsell, 1803. Shakespeare, William. Richard the Third (Folio 1, 1623). Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria, last modified February 18, 2016. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/R3_F1/index.html. Shakespeare, William. The Third Part of Henry the Sixt (First Folio Edition), edited by Charlotte Porter. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co. Publishers, 1912. Shakespeare, William. The Third Part of King Henry VI, edited by Michael Hattaway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Secondary Sources Archer, Jayne Elisabeth, Richard Marggraf Turley, and Howard Thomas. “The Autumn King: Remembering the Land in King Lear.” Shakespeare Quarterly 63, no. 4 (2012): 518–43. Bjelland, Karen T. “Variants as Epistemological Shifts: A Proposed Methodology for Recovering the Two Texts of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 88, no. 1 (1994): 53–78. Calhoun, Joshua. The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking, and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. Feerick, Jean E. “Groveling with Earth in Kyd and Shakespeare’s Historical Tragedies.” In The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, edited by Jean E. Feerick and Vin Nardizzi, 231–52. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Garber, Marjorie. Shakespeare After All. New York: Anchor Books, 2004. Greer, Clayton A. “The Relation of Richard III to The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York and The Third Part of Henry VI.” Studies in Philology 29, no. 4 (1932): 543–50. Grene, Nicholas. Shakespeare’s Serial History Plays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Irigaray, Luce, and Michael Marder. Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Kernan, Alvin B. “A Comparison of the Imagery in 3 Henry VI and The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of York.” Studies in Philology 51, no. 3 (1954): 431–42.

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Knight, Leah. Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England: Sixteenth-Century Plants and Print Culture. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. Koller, Dov. The Restless Plant. Edited by Elizabeth Van Volkenburgh. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. Marder, Michael. Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Martin, Randall. “The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York and 3 Henry VI: Report and Revision.” The Review of English Studies 53, no. 209 (2002): 8–30. Nardizzi, Vin. “Environ.” In Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert, 183–195. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Spurgeon, Caroline F. E. Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935. Urkowitz, Steven. ‘“If I Mistake in Those Foundations Which I Build Upon’: Peter Alexander’s Textual Analysis of Henry VI Parts 2 and 3.” English Literary Renaissance 18, no. 2 (1988): 230–56.

About the Author Jason Hogue is a Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he recently received his PhD. His dissertation, Leaf, Bark, Thorn, Root: Arboreal Ecocriticism and Shakespearean Drama, investigates the intersection of trees and pain in five Shakespeare plays.

11. Botanomorphism and Temporality: Imagining Humans as Plants in Two Shakespeare Plays Elizabeth Crachiolo

Abstract This essay examines instances in two plays by Shakespeare, Richard II and The Winter’s Tale, in which characters are given the qualities of plants. This is not anthropomorphism, but what I call “botanomorphism.” Inspired by Michael Marder’s exposition of “plant-thinking,” I focus on how botanomorphism influences time in the plays. In Richard II, different characters are imbued with lives that are longer or shorter, depending on the plants with which they are associated. In The Winter’s Tale, Hermione takes on the life cycle of a perennial plant that goes dormant and then returns to life, seemingly miraculously. In both, I argue that a limited human view is eschewed for the botanomorphic perspective of plants, lending a wider, more ecological vision of the events. Keywords: plant-thinking, vegetal time, plant ontology, politics, critical plant studies

Plants, for early modern people, were a locus of meaning and knowledge production that provoked some of their most profound questions about embodiment, the ontological permeability and limits of human bodies, and the diffusion of sentience in the natural world. The many appearances plants make in the literature and science of the period often complicate the Aristotelian hierarchy of human-animal-plant. In this essay I posit a practice in early modern literature, not of anthropomorphism (a charge that could be, and has been, levelled at Shakespeare, whose plays I consider) but of botanomorphism, according to which humans or human characters

Staub, S.C. (ed.), Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463721332_ch11

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are endowed with the characteristics, physical and ontological, of plants, in a kind of extreme metaphor.1 I focus on Richard II but turn briefly to The Winter’s Tale, examining metaphors that suggest deep relations between human and vegetable. In both plays, the characters take on qualities of vegetable life, as imagined in a necessarily limited human way. Early moderns understood human ontology to be comprised of or to intersect at least partly with vegetable ontology, arguably making plants fundamental to human identity. I submit that these plays are partly about what it means to be a plant. Metaphor was understood not only as an artificial or discursive construct, but also, at times, as an indicator of material reality. We can see this in Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, in which he describes the plantiness of humans, emphasizing the material truth of this idea: “‘All flesh is grasse’,” he says, “is not onely metaphorically, but literally, true; for all those creatures we behold, are but the hearbs of the field, digested into flesh in them, or more remotely carnified in our selves.”2 Here Browne is drawing a distinction between the physical body and spiritual soul. Yet his passage shows how far the metaphorical language likening humans to plants can be taken, as in the plays examined here, in which the characters take on a plant-like consciousness of time. A phenomenology of vegetal time is a component of a series of characteristics that Michael Marder calls “plant-thinking.” For Marder, “plant-thinking” refers simultaneously to “thinking proper to plants”; “human thinking about plants”; the way human thinking is transformed and made plant-like through encounters with plants; and “the ongoing symbiotic relation between this transfigured thinking and the existence of plants.”3 I draw on his notion of vegetal subjectivities, as well as his sense that encounters between plants and humans can, to a degree, alter human subjectivities. Plant-thinking is particularly useful when looking at early modern literature, as the many “botanomorphized” human characters reveal writers grappling with a human idea of what plants experience. I focus on vegetal experiences of time as a salient aspect of plant-thinking in the plays I consider. Marder’s list of qualities of plant-time includes characteristics such as “hetero-temporality” (in which plant time is dependent on outside factors like sunlight and 1 For anthropomorphism in Shakespeare, see Boehrer, Shakespeare among the Animals, where he focuses on the attitudes of “absolute anthropocentrism,” “relative anthropocentrism,” and “anthropomorphism” (6). The original mention of “botanomorphism” as a term can be found in Sommer, “The Personality of Vegetables.” 2 Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, 107. 3 Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking, 10.

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mechanical interventions by humans); “the infinite temporality of growth,” that nevertheless includes interruptions in that growth; and “the cyclical temporality of iteration, repetition, and reproduction.”4 Inspired by this list, I find temporalities in Richard II and The Winter’s Tale that are botanical rather than human. Botanomorphism, the practice of reading plant phenomenology as part of a character, provides early moderns with an organizing principle for unruly, nonlinear experiences of time (what we might even be able to call, along with Carla Freccero, “queer time”).5 That is, botanical imagery provides a more nuanced, phenomenological description of not only characters’ ways of experiencing time within a play, but also their robustness in relationship to other characters, their likelihood of living a long or short life, and qualities of their character. Botanomorphizing suggests a sort of radical empathy that extends not only to so-called “charismatic” animals but also to life forms that in modernity we have tended to dismiss—wrongly, it turns out—as inanimate.6 Reading the plantlike humans in the plays not only analogically but also phenomenologically reveals the characters performing their own empathetic interpretive practices, imagining themselves and others as members of another species. For some readers of the plays, it may be a challenge to imagine such overlapping subjectivities. A modern understanding of distinct species and 4 Marder, Plant-Thinking, 9. Marder’s “hetero-temporality” is not the same as the “heterotemporality” that has been theorized as a counterpoint to queer theory’s “homohistory.” See Marder, Plant-Thinking, 93–117 for a full account. Plants’ temporality cannot be separated from their radically slow movements (at least as they appear to us), a phenomenon that has been speculated about from the time of Aristotle (Gagliano, “Seeing Green,” 20). A broad look at theories about plant temporality and movement would have to include Darwin’s experiments drawing the position of leaves by hand to make a kind of analogue time-lapse photography with which to view plants’ movements. Darwin famously concluded that “it is impossible not to be struck with the resemblance between the foregoing movements of plants and many of the actions performed unconsciously by the lower animals” (The Power of Movement in Plants, 571). 5 See Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern, 5. Theories of queer temporality have been strongly influential in early modern studies, with an unresolved tension between chronological accounts of history and what has been termed by Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon “homohistory,” a practice that encourages anachronism as a way to attend to similarities throughout time. See Goldberg and Menon, “Queering History”; and, for a counterargument, Traub, “The New Unhistoricism.” 6 Vera Coleman, “Becoming a Fish,” argues that “Comprehending alterity beyond the scope of the human poses one of the most pressing challenges for philosophy, literature, and art in the age of the Anthropocene and necessarily entails the reconfiguration of anthropos itself” (694). However, she limits her discussion to animals. For science on plant senses, see Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows and Mancuso and Viola, Brilliant Green.

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discrete bodies—though this understanding is shifting now—may cause us to misunderstand earlier conceptions of environmental enmeshment. Jean Feerick has persuasively argued that modern assumptions about body/ environment interactions are too limited to fully account for early modern thought, which was more complex than frequently acknowledged: Renaissance writers … insist on connections and overlaps between all life forms, perceiving the human body as materially and symbolically continuous with the surrounding world. When we downplay the force such homologies carry for early modernity, we inadvertently limit the archive that shapes our inquiry and the kinds of interpretation available to us.7

Therefore, I argue that the metaphors often found in early modern literature linking botanical life to human life carry weight also as connectors of different life forms, as understood in that time. Charlotte Otten, writing in 1984, observes about early modern plant writing, [B]otanists and poets … were not in bondage to absolute distinctions between metaphor and actuality. For [both], the eyes of a plant were as actual as the eyes of a human; the hair, joints, ears, blood, even posture of the plant, showed metaphor enlivening actuality, actuality validating metaphor, and the two conjoining to restore an old reality and to create a new one. The “human” parts of plants were not only an inexhaustible source for poets but were the mirror of reality for poets and botanists as well.8

Although Otten speaks about specific genres (poetry and botany, rather than drama), it’s important that her point is equally true for imaginative literary works and natural history, pointing to an early modern view of plant-human relations as one of intermingling, a view that is reflected in literary forms just as much as scientific. She also concentrates on the opposite of what I look at in Shakespeare’s play: while she finds anthropomorphized plants, I find botanomorphized humans. Yet the underlying reasons for both rely on the same history of ideas that, at first glance, seems to insist on strict ontological separations, yet ultimately reveals a sense that life on earth is much more entangled. It would have made sense for early modern writers to imagine vegetal experiences, partly because vegetal and human were not understood as completely separate. 7 Feerick, “The Imperial Graft,” 212. 8 Otten, Environ’d With Eternity, 88–89.

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Both Richard II and The Winter’s Tale resist a final closure, instead leaving things open-ended, a feature that I attribute partly to the plantiness of the characters. In Richard II, the characters themselves recognize their own and others’ plantlike qualities, which finally allows them to come to an uneasy resolution that is by no means final at the end of the play—their vegetality is too invested in recurring seasons, perennial vegetative lives, and rootedness to the land to allow one human conflict to decide the outcome.9 Because monarchial politics is conceived of as a relentlessly changing garden, the vast historical perspective is emphasized, reducing the viewer or reader’s investment in one particular outcome. Botanomorphizing decenters the human in the drama taking place, supplementing it instead with the vegetative, and with qualities the vegetative was known for, such as unchecked growth, weedy usurpation, and the ability to seasonally resurrect. In both plays, characters “read” the events of the play from a nonhuman, nonanimal position, from which the events are resolved in a way that minimizes the importance of human dramas and places them in the context of vast natural cycles. These events are on some level ecological events, the way any succession of plant communities (in a modern understanding) is ecological. Both plays put forth a view in which human experience is a function of, or intertwined with, plant experience, so much so that the two cannot really be thought of as distinct. Reading for botanomorphism offers insight into early modern approaches to temporality, revealing a (human) view of what it might feel like to be a plant. This means that, in a sense, both plays encourage their audiences to see themselves as members of a vast, lively world in which the significance of human events is subsumed. A botanomorphic reading practice, then, can be considered an ecological reading practice in that it acknowledges an imaginative identification with and consideration of the existence of other life forms. In Richard II, a play in which the characters are depicted as kinds of vegetation in the larger garden of England, specific types of plants and parts of plants are figured as gendered signifiers of kinds of time. Flower imagery is ubiquitous.10 Although it is commonly assumed that women were the ones primarily associated with and figured as flowers in this period, in 9 See Tigner, who notes the “synthesis of the human and the botanical” in the play’s Edenic imagery, which she correlates with medieval traditions of “the long human narrative that stems from Eden and eventually arrives at Christ’s redemption of the world,” Literature and the Renaissance Garden, 79. 10 For a sampling of critical work on flowers in early modern literature in general, see Fleming, “Changed Opinion as to Flowers”; François, “Flower Fisting”; Hedrick, “Flower Power”; and Taussig, “The Language of Flowers.”

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fact men often were too.11 To be more specific, flowers are associated with women, young women in particular, and they are also applied to men who are weak or effeminate. Richard is repeatedly described in terms of decay and fragility, qualities that are linked to a short and finite temporality; he is botanomorphized as a flower. The queen, for instance, calls him a withered rose after his power has clearly waned (5.1.8). John of Gaunt, who dies of illness while Henry is in exile, describes himself in a similar way, as a “too-long withered flower” (2.1.134). Both of these characters embody autumnal time periods and physical weakness as ephemeral flowers past their prime. Such botanomorphic imagery, with its implications for the differing temporalities accorded the play’s characters, I will argue, contributes to a sense that the play resists closure. It is a critical commonplace that the play resists fully siding with Henry, that there is an element of ambiguity present. In my reading, the vegetal imagery, which hints at past and future events, sows seeds of dissent even while seeming to authorize Henry’s coup. The botanical temporalities in Richard II could be understood as indicating merely the waning of Richard’s power and the burgeoning of the new power of the rebels. Yet there are suggestions of ambivalence embedded in the imagery. The rebels are described as freshly sprouting “spring violets” (5.2.46–47). This is appropriate, as violets can be weedy, growing in the wild where they’re not planted, and yet aren’t always considered undesirable. They may be weeds to some, but not to others. Yet spring violets are not long-lasting, indicating that the rebels’ heyday may be short-lived. On the other hand, the wilting rose, to which Richard is likened, suggests not only the flower itself but also the entire bush on which it grows. The flower itself may be short-lasting, but the bush is woody, sturdy, thorny, and perennial. More flowers are forthcoming, and after that, fruit. Richard himself wilts, but there’s a larger structure, the system of monarchical inheritance, suggesting that Richard has been wrongfully usurped, that is in no danger of wilting or dying. The play does not clearly support either monarch, and Richard is not totally eradicated. This shrub-like structure may be capable of growing into the future and pricking those who try to harm it: indeed, the Bishop of 11 For the idea that it was mainly women depicted as plantlike, see Levin, “Flower Maidens.” See Kuffner, Crachiolo, and Taff, “Time, Gender, and Nonhuman Worlds,” for a consideration of how plant parts are gendered and brandished rhetorically. See Heinemann for the homophobic link between the supposed effeminacy of one particular flower with queerness: “The pansy has remained a staple in anti-queer lexicon since the last century, the humble violet symbolizing weakness, effeminacy, all things effete, wimpy, and generally flowery” (“Fucking Pansies,” n. pag.). See Hedrick, “Flower Power,” for the sexualization of flowers by Shakespeare and his editors.

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Carlisle, lamenting Bolingbroke’s plan to depose Richard and assume the throne himself, remarks that “The woe’s to come, the children yet unborn / Shall feel this day as sharp to them as thorn” (4.1.312–13), an allusion to the coming Wars of the Roses. The various coexisting temporalities, then, work to suggest hidden possibilities for the future. If flowers are short-lived and fragile, trees are robust and long-lasting.12 Douglas Trevor references a “poetic tradition that figures humans and flowers as fragile and self-occupied and trees as stable and mindlessly placid.”13 Yet even as a tree Richard is weak. In the play the gardener compares Richard to a ruined tree in a precarious position, saying, He that hath suffered this disordered spring Hath now himself met with the fall of leaf. The weeds which his broad spreading leaves did shelter, That seemed in eating him to hold him up, Are plucked up, root and all, by Bolingbroke. (3.4.49–53)

Richard is faced with a conundrum, “seeming” to be held up by the weeds that consume him (presumably the fawning courtiers who corrupt his rule), yet their removal may occasion his downfall, as little may be left of him. In contrast, Edward III’s tree is venerable and has produced various viable limbs. Although many of the limbs have over time dried up or fallen prey to attackers, the tree itself lives.14 The play also envisions politics as a fundamentally vegetal endeavor. Early modern politics broadly speaking—in both political and literary writing—is often described in terms of vegetation, and this association is sometimes taken further, to imagine political agents as plants. One example occurs in Ben Jonson’s poem “To the Right Honorable Hierome, Lord Weston,” where Weston is figured as a “graft” of Charles I’s “hand,” a graft which will prove a credit to Charles when he witnesses it “shoot up an olive, fruitful, fair, / To be a shadow to his heir, / And both a strength and beauty to his land!” (27–30). In this poem vegetation is integral to the performance and experience of politics, as the richly blooming flowers herald Weston’s return and bear fruit in the wake of his “blooming wit,” which accords “honor” to 12 For trees as long-lived, see Siewers, “Trees,” which discusses the yew; and Mabey, who discusses the history in England of long-lived trees in The Cabaret of Plants. See the section, “Wooden Manikins: The Cults of Trees,” 41–107. 13 Trevor, “The Private Lives of Trees,” 120. 14 The family tree metaphor is very old. Tigner emphasizes the connections between the Tree of Jesse and the Garden of Eden traditions, Literature and the Renaissance Garden, 74.

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“the king and state” (22–24). Moreover, in the lines “And every plant the sense surprise, / Because the order of the whole is fair!” (11–12), the prolific blooming, it is implied, is so beautiful and abundant partly because of how well-ordered and well-tended the land is.15 In a similarly royalist poem by Abraham Cowley depicting the complicity of plant life in aiding Charles I (albeit after his ignominious death), Charles and trees are so linked that he is imagined as a kind of tree spirit.16 Images in Richard II connecting politics to plants emphasize the Aristotelian vegetative function of growth as well as the state of being rooted. Furthermore, figuring the state as a garden and characters as plants introduces blurred lines between the allegedly human realm of politics and the allegedly nonhuman realm of vegetation and soil.17 In reading the garden imagery and its connection to politics, Heidi Scott sees the play as presenting a “truly ecological representation of political conflict.”18 These elements in the play set up a situation in which various plantlike characters vie for the privileges of being deeply rooted in the land of England and growing vigorously in its garden, which amounts to a hegemonic political position. In his political treatise, titled A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique, Edward Forset compares the monarchy to an Aristotelian soul, with a vegetable component, when he says, [I]t belongeth to the office of Soueraignitie, to prouide for the nourishing and mainteining of the state with necessaries, to amplifie the dominions thereof, … in the nature of generating or propagating, … to graunt to [the subjects] places of Mart and Market for the digesting of the same vnto all parts of the Realme, and so to change forme and assimulate them to their most behoofe: to giue order for … the expelling … of the hurtfull overcharge, as the vnprofitable excrements of the weale publique[.]

Forset, in other words, finds the traditional Aristotelian qualities of the vegetative soul (growth, reproduction, and nourishment) to be inherent to governing bodies. He “compares” them, suggesting a metaphorical link, and 15 Jonson, “To the Right Honorable Hierome, Lord Weston.” 16 Cowley, Plantarum Libri Sex, lines 15–25. Moul notes that Charles supposedly hid in a tree in real life (n. 21), which may have provided the basis for the image. 17 See Tigner, Literature and the Renaissance Garden, 84–86, for links in religious and political works between ethical and moral considerations and the imagery of weeds, and her chapter 1, titled “The Political Garden: Horticultural Courtship,” for further discussion of the connection between plants and politics, particularly in relation to Elizabeth I. 18 Scott, “Ecological Microcosms,” 268.

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yet articulates their “alike forces of vegetation,” suggesting a more literal view of the vegetative functions of monarchy. For Forset, monarchy is not just like the vegetative, but it embodies its activities and functions in a material way. One of the crucial responsibilities of monarchy that Forset lists is “expelling … of the hurtfull overcharge, as the unprofitable excrements of the weale publique.”19 Part of Richard’s role, then, or that of any monarch, is to remove the harmful elements of realm. In Richard II, the monarch is said to be a gardener who must expel the weeds. A stewardship or gardening role might seem to separate Richard from the botanomorphological perspective of a plant in the garden. He has, however, failed in this function. The play’s rhetoric positions Richard as a plant in the garden—that is, as a subject of the gardener or landlord, allowing him nevertheless to retain a kind of vegetal agency. The transferal of power from Richard, who has been “planted many years” (4.1.118), to Henry Bolingbroke involves severing Richard’s special connection to the land. In his address to the land of England, Richard invokes it as an aid in the struggle against the rebels, asking it to “Feed not thy sovereign’s foe, my gentle earth, / Nor with thy sweets comfort his ravenous sense,” etc. (3.2.12–15) and insisting that “This earth shall have a feeling” (3.2.24). He believes the earth and God are on his side, that, Not all the water in the rough rude sea Can wash the balm from an anointed king. The breath of worldly men cannot depose The deputy elected by the Lord. (3.2.50–53)

Once he is deposed, he accuses Northumberland, Bolingbroke’s friend, of being adept at “planting” “unrightful kings,” and warns Northumberland that King Henry might fear he will “pluck” Henry “headlong from the usurpèd throne” (5.1.63–65). Richard is thus conf ident in his rootedness on the throne of England, but also conceives of kingship in general as a function of, or bestower of, rootedness in the land. In using the language of planting to describe Henry’s assumption of the throne, he tacitly acknowledges the potential for him to root in the soil as well. Bolingbroke, for his part, shares Richard’s confidence and feels equally entitled to the throne based on his native belonging as a member of England’s garden. Upon being banished, he addresses the earth and figures himself as a plant in the soil, when he says, “Sweet soil, adieu, / My mother and my 19 Forset, A Comparative Discourse, 13–14.

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nurse that bears me yet!” (1.3.269–70). Bolingbroke is nurtured by the earth as its child, whereas, in his address to the land, Richard figures himself in relation to it “As a long-parted mother with her child” (3.2.8). These differences might originate in Richard’s responsibilities as king, functioning as England’s gardener and responsible for pruning its weeds, fighting pests, and generally keeping it in good order. He must tend the land as a parent tends to a child, while Henry has had no such responsibilities thus far, only accepting the nourishment his native country has supplied. Richard is not a particularly effective gardener, however, as his policies allow the inexorable growth of threatening weeds.20 We have seen from Forset that weeding is a crucial function of monarchy. This is shown as well in Thomas Fuller’s Antheologia, which portrays a senate of flowers debating within a commonwealth garden that is ultimately destroyed. A Wall-Gillyflower says to an invading boar, “[may] shame light on that negligent Gardner, whose care it was to fence the same, by whose negligence and oversight, you have gotten an entrance into this Academy of Flowers and Herbs.”21 In the case of Richard II, he has been such an ineffective gardener that John of Gaunt says to him, “Landlord of England art thou now, not king” (2.1.113). Gaunt means that Richard presides over the land as its keeper in a sense, but has relinquished the crucial duties of pruning, weeding, and carefully tending. Bolingbroke, on the other hand, begins to assume the gardening duties as his ambition grows. He calls Richard’s associates “The caterpillars of the commonwealth, / Which I have sworn to weed and pluck away” (2.3.165–66).22 It is no coincidence that two of Richard’s henchmen are named Bushy and Green, or that it is these two whom Henry executes. 20 The Queen, upon learning from the gardener that Richard will be deposed, curses his plants, saying, “for telling me these news of woe, / Pray God the plants thou graft’st may never grow” (3.4.101–102). He replies, “Poor queen! so that thy state might be no worse, / I would my skill were subject to thy curse” (3.4.103–104), suggesting that the plants really cannot be stopped. 21 Fuller, Antheologia, 53–54. In Fuller’s text, the agent of destruction is a boar, but the fault, as in Shakespeare’s play, is ultimately ascribed to the gardener: “in one place [the garden] it is fenced with a Hedge only, wherein, through the neglect of the Gardiner, (whose care it ought to be to secure the same) there is a hole left in such capacity, as will yeeld you [the boar] an easie entrance thereinto” (36). 22 For an explanation of the “caterpillars” metaphor, see Severi, “Shakespearean Caterpillars.” The Duchess of Malfi also contains a reference to caterpillars in a political context, when Bosola says the Cardinal and Ferdinand “are like plum trees that grow crooked over standing pools; they are rich and o’erladen with fruit, but none but crows, pies, and caterpillars feed on them” (1.1.49–52). The OED notes the etymological connection with both “piller,” as in pillager, and pillar (these were interchangeable early modern spellings), which together suggest the imagery used in Richard II, though in the original play texts the word was spelled “caterpillar,” “caterpillar, n.,” 2.

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They also happen to be the two who are accused of having “made a divorce betwixt his [Richard’s] queen and him” (3.1.12) by having sex with Richard, perhaps a kind of weedy intrusion into what should be a properly managed “royal bed” (3.1.13)—bed being a word also denoting a place where plants grow in a garden, as Claire Duncan also explains in her essay on Measure for Measure in this collection. Even before this, however, in the very f irst scene, Bolingbroke demonstrates a feeling of responsibility for the garden of England. Accusing Mowbray of murdering Bolingbroke’s uncle Gloucester, Bolingbroke says, That ever was surveyed by English eye, That all the treasons for these eighteen years Complotted and contrivèd in this land Fetch from false Mowbray their first head and spring. (1.1.92–97)

More explicitly, “he did plot the Duke of Gloucester’s death” (1.1.100). The word “plot” could mean, of course, a scheme, but it could also mean a parcel of land, and as Martin Brückner and Kristen Poole have demonstrated, there was no shortage of puns making use of these two meanings in addition to the idea of a narrative plot—which, for Brückner and Poole, is comprised of “literal and figurative charts of a story line.”23 “Complot” is a synonym for plot in the first sense—a conspiracy—and the combination of these two words in close succession calls attention to the pun. Mowbray, as the plots’ “first head and spring,” brings conspiracy to the land. Of course, Richard is suspected to have ordered Gloucester’s murder, and if true, his gardening is even worse than most characters suspect. Richard’s claims that he is uniquely suited to govern England, then, are called into question. Yet there is no suggestion that Henry is perfectly suited to the task, either. Richard eventually realizes the earth of England is going to be connected to him only in the sense of housing his uprooted dead body (3.2.145), and says, “That power I have, discharge, and let them go / To ear the land that hath some hope to grow; / For I have none” (3.2.207–209). Then he says he’d rather surrender peacefully than cause “the flower of England’s face” to become bloody (3.3.96). King Henry, on the other hand, 23 Brückner and Poole, “The Plot Thickens,” 618. However, see Turner, “Plotting Early Modernity,” 87, who points out that the meaning of plot as a scheme or conspiracy or intrigue is not the same as the literary definition of plot that we are now familiar with: “in the sixteenth century its meaning is far more specialized and as yet … almost without exception closely associated with the fields of surveying, military engineering, and the operation of a technical intelligence.” Brückner and Poole cover some of the same ground (so to speak).

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likens himself to a plant once again after his coup has been successful, and laments, “I protest my soul is full of woe / That blood should sprinkle me to make me grow” (5.6.45–46). The juxtaposition of these two statements, in which Henry can be seen to be the more willing to cause bloodshed—even though he “protests” his preference not to—casts doubt on his superior suitability to govern. It isn’t absolutely clear which king the audience is supposed to side with—both kings are flawed, and despite Richard’s substantial failings, he is made sympathetic. Because of this ambiguity and perhaps, on the audience’s part, a waffling of loyalties, the transformation of the throne is both drastic and minimal. The characters, even those who had sided with Richard, come to accept the new king’s rule. Aumerle, a former opponent of Henry, begs his forgiveness by assuming the posture of a growing plant. “For ever may my knees grow to the earth,” he says, “My tongue cleave to the roof within my mouth, / Unless a pardon ere I rise or speak” (5.3.29–31). This is both threatening and deferential, in the way that plants in this period can be seen as passive and also implicitly menacing. He uses an aggressive kind of passivity, in other words, to try to force a conclusion. His mother, the Duchess of York, parallels this when she begs on Aumerle’s behalf, saying, “Our knees shall kneel till to the ground they grow” (5.3.104). This imagery is also present in Twelfth Night, in which Orsino instructs Viola/Cesario to “Be not denied access, stand at her doors / And tell them, there thy fixed foot shall grow / Till thou have audience” (1.4.16–19). Both “knee” and “foot,” in contemporary usage, indicated parts of both animal and plant bodies. A foot or footstalk was a technical term referring to a sort of stem—it could, however, also refer to connective parts of animal bodies—while a knee, aside from the obvious meaning, also denoted plants bent into a knee-like shape.24 These doubly resonant words show that humans and plants were linked etymologically as well as ontologically in this period, making these comparisons function as metaphors that suggest material truth. While under Richard the rebels grew like weeds, here a potential rebel shows his willingness to grow and root as a cultivated garden denizen. This is not merely a quick change of mind, it’s a matter of survival: Aumerle, as a would-be weed, must conform to the new order of the garden unless he wants to be plucked out. Because the events of the play are situated in a longer history of transformation, we can see in Aumerle the changeability and impermanence of a garden—these particular characters’ dramas are decentered and placed in a larger natural system of growth, decay, and 24 See OED, “footstalk, n.,” 2 and “knee, n.,” II, 9, a.

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seasonality. Botanomorphism provides a temporal logic, according to which certain characters flourish and others fade, and situates the characters as plants in a larger ecology. This gives the play, its viewers, and potentially also its characters, a view that is much longer than the duration of the events—a specifically historical view. To briefly consider another play’s use of botanomorphism, what if we were to think of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale not as a sculpture or an automaton, but as a perennial plant, long dormant?25 There’s justification for this, as the play is strewn with botanical references, figuring characters as living embodied plant lives in various ways. Like Richard II, The Winter’s Tale thus explores overlapping human and plant subjectivities, imagining a way of experiencing that blends characteristics of both and imbues the play with a vegetal temporality. Right away, the play establishes its grounding in not only seasonal change, but the lives of plants over time. The text is peppered with references to the features and processes of plants, such as when Leontes calls Camillo “A servant grafted in my serious trust” (1.2.245) which Norton (1.2.305) glosses as “a servant who has grown into my confidence as a cutting is grafted onto a plant.” When Antigonus calls baby Perdita “blossom,” he may be indicating something more than his bittersweet affection for a potentially doomed infant. A blossom was distinct from a bloom or a flower in that it was considered mostly a harbinger of fruit, rather than appreciated merely on its own merits.26 It seems he hopes, or fears, that Perdita will, through her life and possibly her immediate death, bring about or signify culminating events yet to happen, the way a blossom on a fruit tree calls to mind the succeeding fruit. In reaction to Camillo’s plan, Florizel says, “There is some sap in this” (4.4.545). Florizel at another time laments, “But oh, the thorns we stand upon!” (4.4.565). “Welcome hither, / As is the spring to th’earth,” Leontes says to Florizel and Perdita (5.1.152). What these comments have in common is a structuring of the events of the play in terms of references to plants. Plots grow, characters are grafted to other characters, they encounter thorns and blossoms and sap, and they herald spring. The Winter’s Tale, like Richard II, figures certain characters as embodied plants. Hermione almost immediately locates herself in the garden, where she takes Polixenes: “If you would seek us, / We are yours i’ th’ garden” 25 For views that Hermione is a sculpture, see Barkan, “Living Sculptures”; Enterline, “You Speak a Language”; Gurr, “The Bear, the Statue, and Hysteria”; Knapp, “Visual and Ethical Truth”; and Smith, “Sermons in Stones.” See Tigner, 126, for the view that she’s an automaton. 26 See OED, “blossom, n.,” 1.

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(1.2.178). She “rounds apace” (2.1.22), which is both an accurate description of her late pregnancy and also suggestive of a seed capsule or fruit, an image reinforced by Leontes’s description of Mamillius as “this kernel, / This squash, this gentleman” (1.2.200–201). “Kernel” is both a synonym for seed and a grotesque bodily inflammation, linking Mamillius to his prior existence as a fetus swelling Hermione’s abdomen and figuring her, again, both as a ripe fruit herself and as a producer of fruit—which Hermione calls Mamillius when she refers to him as “My second joy / And first fruits of my body” (3.2.94).27 The grotesqueness of the second connotation of “kernel” may also reiterate Leontes’s disgust at his supposition that Hermione is pregnant with Polixenes’s child. His list of descriptors for Mamillius suggests a trajectory from seed to fully grown “gentleman,” a trajectory that he and Polixenes have also taken, as they “were trained together in their childhoods, and there rooted betwixt them then such an affection which cannot choose but to branch now” (1.1.23–25). The language of cultivation, fruiting, and rooting suggests selves grounded in the vegetal, with a life cycle similar to that of plants. Even the “affection” between Leontes and Polixenes is experienced as a tree or other plant that will “branch,” inexorably grows and grows, in fact “cannot choose” but to keep growing and forming new branches. These new branches, though, constitute splits as well, new directions of growth that divide the plant, hinting at the rift about to take place (“now”) between the two men. Perdita’s embodiment as a flower begins as early as her birth, shortly after which Antigonus addresses her as “Blossom” (3.3.45). But Perdita is also figured as a book—an object that is both commonly metaphorized as and made of plants—as when Paulina uses printmaking language to describe Perdita’s resemblance to Leontes: “Although the print be little, the whole matter / And copy of the father … The very mold and frame of hand, nail, finger” (2.3.99–103).28 She is like a compendium of herbs that Leontes must correctly “read” to discover the truth of her parentage. Perdita dresses as Flora for the sheepshearing festival, assuming a queen-like identity about which she is self-conscious, believing she is a lowly shepherdess. Ironically, she is actually fit to be the “mistress o’th’feast” (4.4.68) as Leontes’s daughter; and the robe fits in another way as well. Perdita says, “Sure this robe of mine / Does change my disposition” (4.4.134–35). Wearing the clothing of Flora makes Perdita improperly bold, even amorous, the way blooming 27 See OED, “Kernel, n.1,” 1 and n.1, 4. 28 See Knight, Of Books and Botany, 8–11, for a detailed list of the ways books and plants were etymologically, materially, and theoretically linked in this period.

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flowers are often perceived. The robe itself could be made at least partially of flowers, but in any case, it accords Perdita hints of her “true” identity: noble, and botanical. Hermione’s resurrection, however, is the most significant example of botanomorphism in the play. Taking on a plant perspective has allowed her to “preserve” herself in dormancy for sixteen years in order to see her daughter again. Time explains to the audience, “I turn my glass and give my scene such growing / As you had slept between” (4.1.16–17). The scene itself is figured as something growing, and the audience experiences the same sleeping dormancy that Hermione has, as if it too were a plant gone dormant. Breaking the classical rules of playwriting therefore allows Shakespeare to impart a nonhuman experience to his character and his audience. He adapts the everyday magic of a perennial plant that can seemingly disappear for whole seasons, only to emerge later with a fresh flush of growth, as if it had been resurrected. In both The Winter’s Tale and Richard II, such botanical temporalities allow the characters and audience to experience beyond a limited human perspective. Plants, with their inexorable growth, periodic dormancy, and, in the case of some, their very long life span, confer a historical, distanced view of human events when mapped botanomorphically onto human characters. This view decenters human dramas in favor of a long ecological perspective, making stories of the human past reflect profound relations with other life forms. The story of Richard II’s abdication is also a story of ecological reorganization; the story of Hermione’s miraculous self-preservation is also a story of the everyday magic of the creatures among whom we dwell, which may be lurking in us as well. The rhetoric of these plays, binding the human to the botanical, is representative of an entirely different way of knowing, one anchored in earlier eras but coming to fruition in modern times, in which the “human” cannot be parceled out.

Bibliography Primary Sources Browne, Sir Thomas. Religio Medici. In The Major Works, edited by C.A. Patrides, 57–161. New York: Penguin Classics, 1977. Cowley, Abraham. Plantarum Libri Sex. 1662. Edited and translated by Victoria Moul. Neo-Latin Anthology, Society for Neo-Latin Studies, 2015, https://warwick. ac.uk/fac/arts/ren/snls/snls_teaching_anthology/abraham_cowley.pdf.

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Darwin, Charles (assisted by Francis Darwin). The Power of Movement in Plants. D. Appleton and Co., 1897. Forset, Edward. A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique. London, 1606. Fuller, Thomas. Antheologia: or The Speech of Flowers. London, 1655. Jonson, Ben. “To the Right Honorable Hierome, Lord Weston.” Luminarium, http:// www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/jonson/underwoodsmisc92.htm. Shakespeare, William. Richard II. In The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd ed., edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus, 973–1043. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008. Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night. In The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd ed., edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus, 1793–1846. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008. Shakespeare, William. The Winter’s Tale: Texts and Contexts. Edited by Mario DiGangi. New York: Bedford, 2008. Webster, John. The Duchess of Malfi. In English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology, edited by David Bevington, 1755–1832. New York: Norton & Company, 2002.

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Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race, edited by Valerie Traub, 211–27. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Fleming, Juliet. “Changed Opinion as to Flowers.” In Renaissance Paratexts, edited by Helen Smith and Louise Wilson, 48–64. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. François, Anne-Lise. “Flower Fisting.” Postmodern Culture, 22, no. 1, 2011. http:// www.pomoculture.org/2013/05/11/flower-fisting/. Freccero, Carla. Queer/Early/Modern. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Gagliano, Monica. “Seeing Green: The Re-Discovery of Plants and Nature’s Wisdom.” In The Green Thread: Dialogues with the Vegetal World, edited by Patrícia Vieira, Monica Gagliano, and John Ryan, 19–35. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016. Goldberg, Jonathan, and Madhavi Menon. “Queering History.” PMLA 120, no. 5 (2005): 1608–17. Gurr, Andrew. “The Bear, the Statue, and Hysteria in The Winter’s Tale.” Shakespeare Quarterly 34, no. 4 (1983): 420–25. Hedrick, Donald. “Flower Power: Shakespearean Deep Bawdy and the Botanical Perverse.” In The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism, and the Public Sphere, edited by Richard Burt, 83–105. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Heinemann, Caspar. “Fucking Pansies: Queer Poetics, Plant Reproduction, Plant Poetics, Queer Reproduction.” Ecocore, June 14, 2017, http://blog.ecocore.co/ post/161819858724/fucking-pansies. Knapp, James A. “Visual and Ethical Truth in The Winter’s Tale.” Shakespeare Quarterly 55, no. 3 (2004): 253–78. Knight, Leah. Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England: Sixteenth-Century Plants and Print Culture. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2009. Kuffner, Emily, Elizabeth Crachiolo, and Dyani Johns Taff. “Time, Gender, and Nonhuman Worlds.” In Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World, edited by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, 69–92. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018. Levin, Richard. “Flower Maidens, Wise Women, Witches and the Gendering of Knowledge in English Renaissance Drama.” In Shakespeare’s Universe: Renaissance Ideas and Conventions, edited by John M. Mucciolo, 95–107. Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1996. Mabey, Richard. The Cabaret of Plants: Forty Thousand Years of Plant Life and the Human Imagination. New York: Norton, 2016. Mancuso, Stefano, and Alessandra Viola. Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence. Translated by Joan Benham. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2015.

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Marder, Michael. Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Otten, Charlotte F. Environ’d with Eternity: God, Poems, and Plants in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England. Lawrence, KS: Coronado Press, 1985. Scott, Heidi. “Ecological Microcosms Envisioned in Shakespeare’s Richard II.” The Explicator 67, no. 4 (2009): 267–71. Severi, Rita. “Shakespearean Caterpillars.” Quaderni di lingue e letterature 18 (1993): 649–53. Siewers, Alfred Kentigern. “Trees.” In Inhuman Nature, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 101–13. Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books, 2014. Smith, Bruce R. “Sermons in Stones: Shakespeare and Renaissance Sculpture.” Shakespeare Studies 17 (1985): 1–23. Sommer, Robert. “The Personality of Vegetables: Botanical Metaphors for Human Characteristics.” Journal of Personality 56, no. 4 (1988): 665–83. Sutherland, Anne. “Mapping Regeneration in The Winter’s Tale.” In Science, Literature, and Rhetoric in Early Modern England, edited by Juliet Cummins and David Burchell, 37–51. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. Taussig, Michael. “The Language of Flowers.” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 1 (2003): 98–131. Tigner, Amy L. Literature and the Renaissance Garden from Elizabeth I to Charles II: England’s Paradise. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. Traub, Valerie. “The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies.” PMLA 128, no. 1 (2013): 21–39. Trevor, Douglas. “The Private Lives of Trees and Flowers.” In The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies, Volume II. Edited by Paul Cefalu, Gary Kuchar, and Bryan Reynolds, 117–39. New York: Palgrave, 2014. Turner, Henry S. “Plotting Early Modernity.” The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England, edited by Henry S. Turner, 85–127. New York: Routledge, 2002.

About the Author Elizabeth Crachiolo received her PhD from UC Davis in 2019. Her dissertation examined representations of sentient plants in literature and science, both early modern and modern. She is also the author of an award-winning article, published in The Sixteenth Century Journal, about gender dynamics in an early modern beekeeping treatise.

Afterword Vin Nardizzi It “is almost the anniversary of their son’s death.”1 Hamnet died in 1596. His parents, Agnes and Will, are literally estranged in their grief; they have had a silent, but heated, argument earlier that day. The husband tries to show an active interest in his wife, who is now gathering flowers. “Comfrey?” he says. She cannot think what he means, what he is talking about. How dare he come here and speak to her of flowers? Take your ignorance, she wants to say to him, and your bracelets and your shining, fancy boots back to London and stay there. Never come back. He is gesturing, now, at the flowers in her basket, asking are they comfrey, are they violas, are they— “Chamomile,” she manages to say, and her voice, to her ears, sounds dull and heavy. “Ah. Of course. Those are comfrey are they not?” He points at a clump of feverfew. She shakes her head and she is struck by how dizzy it makes her feel, as if the slight movement might topple her over into the grass. “No,” she gestures with fingers stained a greenish-yellow, “those.” He nods vigorously, seizes a spear of lavender in his fingers, rubs it, then lifts his hand to his nose, making exaggerated appreciation noises. (261)

Will mistakes comfrey for chamomile and then misidentifies it as feverfew. When Agnes finally points out the comfrey (“those” in the basket), he picks up some lavender. We can presume that he knows what herb he snatches, since there’s no miscommunication about its name. And yet the “noises” of “exaggerated appreciation” that he makes while smelling it ring hollow. Its 1 Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet, 259. Further references noted parenthetically. In one case below, I interpolate a page number for a verso leaf because on all such leaves in my edition the title of the novel appears instead of a page number.

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scent may not be to his liking, but the excess of his response also suggests how hard he is trying to ingratiate himself. He fails miserably, just as he did when he gifted Agnes a bracelet, the cause of the argument earlier in the day. On a friend’s recommendation, I read Hamnet, the novel in which this scene of marital disharmony occurs. Knowingly, she told me to begin with its “Acknowledgements,” which are located at the end of my paperback edition. There, Maggie O’Farrell records debts to those “books [that] were invaluable during the writing of this novel” (n.p.). Nine are listed; the lion’s share constitutes biographies of Shakespeare and studies of his time. Of interest to me, my friend assured, would be the first book, “The Herball, or General Historie of Plantes by John Gerard, 1597 (arranged by Marcus Woodward, Bodley Head, 1927).” My interest was also piqued by the third title in the list, “A Shakespeare Botanical [sic] by Margaret Willes (Bodleian Library, 2015).” When I arrived to the scene quoted above, I recalled the value that O’Farrell accords to these books. Surely, they informed her botanical imagination. Agnes, for instance, clearly knows what she’s picking in the fields. For Will though, it’s a different story: he asks after comfrey three times, but plainly does not know what it looks like. Against centuries of criticism to the contrary, which includes, of course, this collection of essays, Hamnet casts Shakespeare as ignorant in the art of plant identification. Is it possible that Shakespeare’s long-celebrated knowledge of plants is really smaller than his Latin and lesser than his Greek? An affirmative response to this question amounts to an act of scholarly and popular iconoclasm. In an effort to measure how botanically radical O’Farrell’s novel might be, I thought it best to consult her prized books. I own a copy of Margaret Willes’s A Shakespearean Botanical, which I purchased in the gift shop of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is generously illustrated with reproductions of hand-colored woodcuts from a copy of Gerard’s 1597 Herball that is housed at the Bodleian Library. Willes also uses excerpts of text from Gerard’s Herball to explicate passages featuring plants from Shakespeare’s plays and narrative poems. As she observes, “Shakespeare must have taken much of his wide knowledge of plants from books.”2 “After 1597,” she continues, he would have obtained “detailed botanical information” from “the massive herbal of John Gerard” (11). We can better see how A Shakespearean Botanical places Gerard and Shakespeare in close conversation by looking at the first plant that Will misidentifies as comfrey. Willes’s entry on “Camomile” spotlights as an epigraph a proverbial quip by Falstaff about chamomile’s status as 2

Margaret Willes, A Shakespearean Botanical, 8. Further references noted parenthetically.

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generative groundcover (“the more it is trodden on the faster it grows,” 55). It also includes from Gerard a list of the plant’s medicinal applications: it is good “against colic and the stone and encourag[es] urine. It could be mixed in wine to get rid of wind and belchings, boiled in a posset to help children with ague. The oil from the leaves could ease aches and pains, bruises, ‘shrinking of sinewes, and colde swellings’” (56). Agnes could be picking chamomile for any of these reasons, but it is not what Will is asking after. It’s hard to know if his insistent call for comfrey is meaningful, perhaps an attempt to self-medicate, or only an occasion to prove that he knows something, indeed anything, about plants. A Shakespearean Botanical can assist us no further in this line of inquiry because it has no entry for comfrey. In pursuit of Hamnet’s comfrey, I picked up what I think is my copy of the first “invaluable” book that O’Farrell mentions. My partner bought me a copy of Marcus Woodward’s Gerard’s Herball when he realized that the gift he really wanted to give—a copy of the 1597 folio Herball—was too costly. I hesitate to say that O’Farrell and I consulted copies of the same early-twentieth-century book because the full title of mine reads: “Gerard’s Herball, The Essence thereof distilled by Marcus Woodward from the Edition of Th. Johnson, 1636.” (Using several search engines, I could not find the title that O’Farrell acknowledges.) My Woodward turns a folio into a quarto, distilling into its “Essence” Gerard’s Herball as Thomas Johnson had heavily revised it for publication in 1633; this edition was reprinted in 1636. Woodward observes that “Gerard’s [herbal], in its original form [by which he seems to mean the 1636 edition], is hardly suitable for present-day publication. Four-fifths of it would be regarded as tedious, such as the long descriptions of many forgotten varieties of plants, or laborious arguments and quotations about the names and identities.” For this reason, “all that is tedious or gross has been omitted,” while “all that is most precious” has been “preserve[d]”: “most chapters have been shortened,” and the illustrations accompanying them have been selected from the 1636 edition.3 This book, which greatly attenuates the 1636 reprint of Johnson’s revision, preserves the essence of three plants in Agnes’s basket: feverfew, which appears under the name “Fetherfew”; lavender spike; and chamomile, which is mentioned in the context of its botanical relative, blue chamomile. There is no chapter in this epitome on comfrey. 4 3 Marcus Woodward, “Introduction,” in Gerard’s Herball: The Essence thereof distilled, xviii, xix. Further references noted parenthetically. 4 The entry called “Bugle, or middle Comfrey” in Woodward, though intriguing in connection to O’Farrell’s novel, lists no medicinal properties (143–44).

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All is not lost, of course. There is a text that stands behind all these others, The Herball as it was printed in 1597. There, we learn that comfrey is a plant whose roots could be used in recipes for lessening physical pain, for “heal[ing] all inward wounds and burstings,” and for “heal[ing] all fresh and greene woundes.”5 In returning to the scene in O’Farrell’s novel with this period botanical information in mind, the detail of Agnes’s fingers as she points at the comfrey in her basket comes sharply into view. They are “stained a greenish-yellow.” It is as if the novel—perhaps knowingly—builds a relation between the condition of her laboring fingers and the application for which comfrey would be advisable: greenness uncannily echoes across the texts, and there is no doubt that the day’s tense encounters with Will has deeply wounded Agnes. If the proposition of link between the plants in the basket and the symptoms that Agnes feels in the scene seems farfetched, then look again at what happens when Will points to the feverfew. Here, Agnes “is struck by how dizzy [shaking her head] makes her feel, as if the slight movement might topple her over into the grass.” As O’Farrell knows from reading a copy of Woodward, feverfew “is very good for them that are giddie in the head, or which have the turning called Vertigo, that is, a swimming and turning in the head” (150–51). Agnes could use feverfew right now, or even lavender, the “distilled water” of which is “refreshing to them that,” among other ailments, “have a light migram [migraine]” (132). A similar logic holds for chamomile, as Gerard describes its effects in 1597. As Agnes speaks, “her voice, to her ears, sounds dull and heavy.” Employed “in bathes,” chamomile “prouoketh sweate, rarifieth the skin, and openeth the pores … and wasteth awaie rawe and vndigested humours”; the oil of its flowers “is a remedie against all wearisomnesse, and is with good successe mixed with all those things that are applied to mitigate paine” (617). Any of this medicine could purge Agnes of her head symptoms, but she cannot avail herself of it, since Will is in her way, asking after comfrey, trying—and failing—to identify which one it is in the basket. It is possible that Will knows how comfrey could benefit him and Agnes, even if he does not know what it looks like. This possibility perhaps mitigates the scene’s iconoclastic re-imagining of Shakespeare as not having, in Willes’s words, “wide knowledge of plants.” More broadly, O’Farrell’s novel richly embroiders Agnes’s botanical imagination, but not Will’s. She even employs a book about Shakespeare’s botanical knowledge as a resource for imagining 5 John Gerard, The Herball, 661. I employ STC 11750, copy 6, which is housed at The Folger Shakespeare Library. If Agnes thinks that Will has had extramarital sex, then she (or he) might want comfrey for use in a recipe for gonorrhea.

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the scope of Agnes’s. Such recentering should not surprise us, since in the pages of Hamnet, you will nowhere find the name “William Shakespeare.” What can a contemporary historical novel teach scholars interested in Shakespeare’s botanical imagination about our own methods and sources? How different from how we tend to write about the plants in Shakespeare’s plays and poems is how I write about the plants that Agnes picks in Hamnet? When we study a series of lines featuring specific plants in a Shakespearean play, is our analysis in some register also a form of historical fiction? Finally, and easier to answer, what do we mean by “Gerard” when we employ The Herball to annotate Shakespeare? Scholars of Shakespeare’s botanical imagination tend to be contextualists. We consult a range of texts to explicate figures of plants in the plays and poems. Rebecca Totaro and Hillary Nunn each turn to the archives of period recipes, in print in Totaro’s chapter and in manuscript in Nunn’s, to make vivid for readers cultural practices whose ubiquity has receded from view: herb grace could be used in nosegays to ward off the plague, while barberry roots were employed in dyes for lightening hair color. The preponderance of texts consulted in this volume, though, are published books. Rebecca Bushnell and Claire Duncan both turn to key English herbals (William Turner, John Gerard [1597 for Duncan, 1633 for Bushnell], and John Parkinson); Duncan also engages gardening and garden-adjacent books (Thomas Hill, William Lawson, Gervase Markham, and Ralph Austen) as well as gynecological texts in her account of Measure for Measure. Similarly, Lisa Hopkins looks beyond the horizon of botanical texts, in the narrowest sense, to discuss A Midsummer Night’s Dream. If, as she contends, “the naturalist John Gerard is one of the play’s godfathers, the historian and antiquary William Camden is the other, since there is a potential parallel between the way plants are figured in the play and Camden’s interest in plants connected with Roman remains.” To provide documentation of Gerard’s god-parentage, Hopkins cites the 1636 edition of Gerard’s Herball and Willes’s A Shakespearean Botanical. This latter text, whose typical contents are described above, is cousin to another source that scholars (Hopkins, Susan C. Staub, and Jeffrey Theis) cite across these pages, Vivian Thomas and Nicki Faircloth’s Shakespeare’s Plants and Gardens: A Dictionary (2014 and revised in 2016). Surprisingly, the scholar most interested in the textual history of Shakespeare’s plays (Jason Hogue) is one of the least reliant of the lot on botanical texts, from manuscript recipes, to period herbals and their revisions, and to later reference texts derived from these herbals and their revisions. For Hogue, the “preference for vegetal imagery” in the Folio version of 3 Henry VI is “perhaps indicative of Shakespeare’s rural upbringing.”

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Persuasive in its close comparison of play texts, Hogue nevertheless presents a Shakespeare as far away from O’Farrell’s Will as could be. The aim of this accounting is precisely not to issue a call for standardization. We should not all be citing the 1597 edition of The Herball, not least because public access to it is limited, although not entirely restrictive. As a text, it is also a bibliographic nightmare: one copy of it is not necessarily the same as another, especially in terms of chapter ordering and pagination. Further, as Theis posits in a discussion of Cymbeline, a play that actually post-dates The Herball’s first printing, it is not evident that “Shakespeare is aware of Gerard’s text.” The most—and best—that we can do is elaborate in our scholarship the fiction that he might have consulted the book and “allud[ed]” to some details in its contents. (For comparison’s sake, look at Willes’s modal verbs of inevitability: “Shakespeare must have taken much of his wide knowledge of plants from books” and Shakespeare “must have appreciated that here [in Gerard] he had a master of prose” [15–16]).6 We could, though, all be better at describing, or at least spotlighting, some of the more granular details of the botanical sources that we employ, especially if our go-to reference is some book called Gerard’s Herball. There are often marked differences between entries in The Herball in 1597 and 1633. We could attend to them. Does knowledge about a particular plant figured in Shakespeare change between 1597 and 1633? If so, do we lose a measurable sense of Elizabethanness when we cite seventeenth-century editions? If the object of our study is a figure of a plant in a late-Elizabethan or early Jacobean play and there has been some change to the entry on the plant between editions of Gerard, then couldn’t our reading of the play also be affected? Conversely, if there has been no measurable revision from 1597 to 1633 in an entry for a particular Shakespearean plant, then does it matter which edition of The Herball we cite? Shouldn’t we explain our recourse to this or that herbal (1597, 1633, or 1636)? In all cases, the object that we employ to contextualize Shakespeare’s literary works may become for us an object of fascination. I would encourage us all to be more curious about the period and non-period sources that we use to study Shakespeare’s botanical imagination. In the 1597 of Hamnet, neither Agnes nor Will owns a copy of Gerard’s Herball. After their awkward exchange over comfrey and other medicinal plants, maybe Will will return to London and find one to buy, loan, or just 6 To be fair, Willes also writes, “we know that [Shakespeare] was born in Stratford-upon-Avon and must have had the opportunity to roam the Warwickshire countryside” (8).

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look at. For her part, Agnes already owns an herbal. We learn this fact on her wedding night. It was left to her “by a neighbour when she died.” That neighbor’s husband was an “apothecary,” and she and Agnes’s “mother used to consult it together” (115). Will picks it up. It is written in Latin. He scans its words: “It’s about plants. Their uses. How to recognise them. How they heal certain illnesses and distempers.” Agnes cannot read the words, but she attends to the images: “She looks over his shoulder. She sees a picture of a plant with tear-shaped petals and a long, dark tangle of roots, an illustration of a bough with heavy berries” (116). Agnes can identify the plant from its visual representation, although she does not name it. She asks her new husband to read the words to her; he agrees, but just not on this night. I fancy that, like her mother before her, Agnes consults this book for her herborizing, and that this book has been hand-annotated with a range of marks and notes by these women for posterity’s sake. I also like to imagine that Agnes’s herbal is one by Rembert Dodoens, a sixteenth-century herbal writer on the continent whose later writing on plants is a direct source for Gerard’s 1597 Herball.7 Even if it is not this precise book, the presence of Agnes’s herbal in the novel nonetheless proves a salutary reminder for those of us who study the botanical imagination of Shakespeare’s time. That imagination is as much visual as it is verbal. Look again at how carefully O’Farrell re-describes the image of this plant. You can read—and learn from—any image in an herbal. We could all be better at engaging the multi-modal nature of the botanical sources that we marshal as evidence in our readings of Shakespeare. In their chapters Claire Duncan and Miranda Wilson lead the way. They helpfully focus our attention on an herbal’s titlepage and a garden-adjacent book’s frontispiece, both of which, of course, contain image and text: Duncan showcases the brick walls in Austen (1653) to evoke a sense of what the “circummured” garden in Measure for Measure could look like, and Wilson spotlights a fantasy visualization of Eden in Parkinson (1629) to meditate on the temporality of plants. The care that we show to these (admittedly) detail-heavy images could also be shown to the humbler images of plants, like the “picture” of one that Agnes views in Hamnet. We could, for instance, more frequently re-describe with words what the plant that we’re studying looks like, feels like, smells like.8 Where 7 For an accessible overview of the complex problems surrounding the authorship of the 1597 Herball, see chapter 1 of Deborah E. Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 8 This proposal accords with the material ecofeminism of Rebecca Laroche and Jennifer Munroe, Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory. It is also a call to engage art historians, such as Sachiko Kusukawa, Picturing the Book of Nature, and Florike Egmond, Eye for Detail.

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feasible, we could also include more images. We tend to assume that our audience knows cedars from oaks, pansies from gillyflowers, and laurel from box shrubs. It’s possible that members of it don’t, or that they’re visual learners. In reading text and image together, the goal is not only to generate reader-friendliness, but also to promote plant awareness. I’m not sure that I could identify what comfrey looks like in real life, much less herb grace, barberry, or much of the vegetation in the chapters by Hopkins and Elizabeth D. Gruber. As I did with O’Farrell’s novel, so too did I with the chapters in Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination: I went back to my books to learn even more. And I’m grateful for that prompting. By way of closing, I note that, when scholars in this volume are not reading Shakespeare, period herbals, and gardening texts, they are most likely to be found engaging the field of critical plants studies. The figurehead in this field is the philosopher Michael Marder. Bushnell, for instance, begins her chapter with Marder’s philosophy about plant-thinking to challenge it for overlooking the “concepts of plant power intrinsic to premodern natural history and herbal medicine, which attribute ‘virtues’ to plants.” Hogue, by contrast, concludes his chapter on the botanical revisions of 3 Henry VI by naming Marder’s deconstructive philosophy a guide to follow. The scholar who most closely engages with Marder’s full range of philosophical writing is Elizabeth Crachiolo. Her chapter is perhaps the least like the others in this volume. True, Crachiolo, like Wilson, is interested in plant temporality in Shakespeare. Her ideas about “botanomorphism,” however, don’t contextualize (and so historicize) Shakespeare’s plant figures so much as use Marder to theorize how “humans … are endowed with the characteristics, physical and ontological, of plants, in a kind of extreme metaphor.” It is a rewarding move. All three scholars thus offer distinct, though not necessarily complementary, models for future studies in Shakespeare’s botanical imagination.

Bibliography Primary Sources Gerard, John. The Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes. London, 1597. Gerard’s Herball: The Essence thereof distilled. Edited by Marcus Woodward. London: Gerald Howe, 1927. O’Farrell, Maggie. Hamnet. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2021.

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Secondary Sources Egmond, Florike. Eye for Detail: Images of Plants and Animals in Art and Science, 1500–1630. London: Reaktion Books, 2017. Harkness, Deborah E. The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Kusukawa, Sachiko. Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text, and Argument in Sixteenth-Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Laroche, Rebecca, and Jennifer Munroe. Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Willes, Margaret. A Shakespearean Botanical. Oxford: The Bodleian Library, 2015.

About the Author Vin Nardizzi is Associate Professor in The Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia. He has written Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees (Toronto 2013) and has coedited several collections of essays on topics ranging from queerness to ecocriticism. He is completing a book manuscript on plants and poetry in the English Renaissance.

Index Page numbers in italics refer to images. Adam and Eve 71, 201, 202, 204 Adelman, Janet 16, 128n3 Agamben, Giorgio 225–26 Alaimo, Stacy 20, 29, 150, 153, 228 See also, trans-corporeality Al-Azami, Lubaaba 187 All’s Well That Ends Well 28, 50, 106, 108, 111, 113–14, 117, 155, 158 animal studies 16, 17–18, 21 animals 15, 16, 18–19, 28, 45, 88, 149, 150–52, 153, 161, 164, 221, 235, 269 plants compared to 18, 19, 28, 207, 208, 209, 212, 269n4 anthropocentrism 18, 23, 27, 31, 268 anthropomorphism 24, 65, 267–68, 270 Antonini, Giovanni 23n46 Antony and Cleopatra 55, 221 Archer, Elisabeth Jayne 71–72, 76n59, 76n60, 78n67, 256n22 Arcimboldo, Giuseppe 174 Aristotle 18, 21, 46, 206, 207 hierarchy of human-animal-plant 18, 21, 31, 208, 212, 267 History of Animals 208 tripartite soul 18–19, 133, 150, 207, 209 See also, vegetative soul art and nature 21, 133–34, 194, 220–21, 229–31, 234 As You Like It 200, 245 Austen, Ralph 214, 289 The Spirituall Use of an Orchard 210, 212 A Treatise of Fruit Trees 134, 135, 291 Bacon, Francis 179, 184 Barbary, place, Africa 26, 87, 88, 89, 92–93, 95, 98, 99 race and 91, 95, 97, 98, 99 wordplay and 88–90, 93, 100 See also, puns and punning See also, Othello, Barbary; plants, named: barberry Barker, Frances 66 bastardy 65, 67, 73, 76 See also, plants, bastard beauty 26, 49, 50, 123, 183, 209, 225, 226, 227, 228, 230–32, 273 female, English and European standards 26, 88, 89, 92, 93, 94, 97, 99 race and 91, 93, 96, 97, 98–99 bed trick 29, 108, 109, 128, 129, 143 flower-bed trick 143–44 Bennett, Jane 18, 20, 72, 151 “vibrant matter” 26, 31, 72

See also, vitalism Berry, Phillipa 68, 69 Bible, biblical ideas 71, 74, 75–76, 129, 163, 165, 166, 223 Genesis 67, 71, 201, 204, 208, 210 Job 213 “Parable of the Tares” 72, 75–76 See also, plants, named: darnel Psalms 213 Song of Songs 129–30, 135 bios 219, 225–26, 235 Bjelland, Karen 261 blazon 22, 28, 117, 143, 163, 174, 183 blossom 27, 196, 202, 279, 280 Boehrer, Bruce Thomas 17, 18, 268 Bogost, Ian 222 botanical grace 29, 106, 117, 122–23 botanical rhetoric 20, 31, 45, 65, 128, 156, 205, 232, 281 gender and 29, 70, 71 human bodies and 27, 131–32, 142, 279 political rhetoric and 20, 243, 247–53, 271, 273, 274–76 social structures and 20, 20–21n38, 65, 76 botanical transformations See metamorphosis and transformations, human-plant botanical tributes, funerary and memorial 28, 29, 106, 107–108, 109, 110–11, 113, 121–22, 163–64 botanomorphism 33, 267–70, 271–72, 275, 279, 281 boundaries and borders 21, 31, 65, 66, 73, 88, 172 female body and containment 128, 130–32, 135, 138, 139, 140–41, 143 garden 138–39, 184, 206 See also, hortus conclusus human and nonhuman, blurring 14, 17–18, 19, 20, 45, 132, 142, 150 See also, indistinction, human human and plant, blurring 18–19, 21, 27, 128–29, 132, 142, 143, 150, 249–50, 270, 274 See also, fences; garden, gates and doors; and garden, walls branches 151, 154, 155, 164–65, 166, 253, 255, 257–58, 280 Brayton, Dan 66 Britain 159–60, 164, 165–66, 177, 185 Brits, Baylee 18 Browne, Thomas, Religio Medici 268

296  Brückner, Martin 277 Buds and budding 28, 58, 143, 149, 156, 166–67, 173, 183, 228, 233 See also, virginity Burt, Stephen 226 Bushnell, Rebecca W. 17, 19, 20n38, 27–28, 31, 128n.4, 133, 179, 186, 220 Butler, F.G. 77 n.61, 78 n.68 Calhoun, Joshua 221n7, 247 Callaghan, Dympna 118n24 Camden, William, Britannia 172, 176–77, 289 canker 54, 55, 57, 58, 184, 211, 225, 233 Carey, Elizabeth 176 Carey, Robert, Sir 176 Chamberlain, Stephanie 64, 66 Chamberlayne, Thomas, The Compleat Midwifes Practice 143 Chamberlen, Peter, Dr. Chamberlain’s Midwifes Practice 142 Charles I, King of England 137, 273–74 Chute, Anthony, Tabacco 185 clocks and timepieces 32, 193–99, 200, 212, 213 human bodies as 31, 196, 198, 212, 214 plants as 193–96, 200, 202, 209–10, 212, 214 sundials 193, 197, 199, 210, 213 watches 31, 197, 197n11, 197n13, 198, 199, 213 See also, time Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome 24, 25, 26 Connolly, Annaliese 181 Coriolanus 55 cornfield 26, 63, 64, 69–70, 81 cosmetics 26, 89, 94, 96, 100 Cowley, Abraham, Plantarum Libri Sex 274 Cressy, David 115 critical plant studies 15–17, 28, 33, 34, 261, 262, 292 See also, Marder, Michael Crocker, Holly A. 25, 46, 49n16, 50, 56n30 crown 26, 76n60, 79, 198, 250–51, 259 of flowers 116, 121, 182, 183 of thorns 251, 76n60 of weeds 26, 52–53, 63, 69n29, 72, 76–77, 78, 80 Culpeper, Nicholas A Directory for Midwives 143 The English Physitian 91, 93–94 cultivation 20, 68, 69, 70, 73, 137, 163, 224, 280 Cymbeline 28, 29–30, 52, 113–17, 149–50, 151–69, 194n3, 290 Cymbeline 152, 154, 155–56, 159, 162, 165 Innogen/Imogen 28, 52, 106, 113–14, 115, 116, 119, 149, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156–57, 159, 161, 162–63, 164, 166–67, 168–69 Posthumus 29, 114, 149, 151–53, 154, 156–57, 159, 161–67, 168–69 Queen 30, 52, 53, 59, 149, 152, 153, 154, 156, 157–60, 161, 162, 164, 165–66, 169

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de Grazia, Margreta 56n29, 58n33, 232 De Mairan, Jean–Jacques d’Ortous 196 death and mortality 14, 32, 52, 54–55, 59, 67, 77, 80–81, 94–95, 107–08, 111–12, 113–16, 118–20, 121–23, 161, 163–64, 166, 172, 180, 198, 202, 211, 212, 220–21, 226–27, 236–37, 253–54, 256 decay 19, 31, 32, 55, 78, 154, 206, 212, 225–27, 230, 235, 237, 243, 272, 278 deflowering 29, 128, 129, 142, 143 Derrida, Jacques 121 Descartes, Réne 24n49, 193, 197 disease 55, 57–59, 92, 100, 165–66, 211 See also, canker; plague doctrine of signatures 23–24, 47, 74 Dollimore, Jonathan 128n3 Doty, Jeffrey 111 Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger 64–65 Drouet, Pascale 67 Du Bartas, Guillaume, La Sepmaine ou Creation du Monde 44–45, 202, 204 Duncan, Claire 71n40, 232 Duncan-Jones, Katherine 118 earth 16, 43, 50, 53, 66, 67, 70, 71, 74, 79, 80, 134, 194, 195, 221, 270, 275–76, 277 maternal 54, 80, 133 as tomb 54 as womb 54, 68, 133 See also, Mother Earth ecocriticism 15n9, 16, 19, 32, 34, 151–52, 157, 160, 168, 220–22, 225–26, 228, 233 ecofeminism 15n9, 17, 79n70, 79–80, 128, 158, 291n8 ecological awareness 18, 19, 33, 79, 156, 160, 162, 164, 168, 221, 235, 236, 271, 281 ecopolitics 32, 222, 223n14, 228 ecoregionalism 160–62 ecosystem 65n12, 153, 155n10, 160, 168, 221, 221n7, 247 Sonnets as 219, 221 Edwards, Nina 64n6, 73 Efferth, Thomas 23n48 Egan, Gabriel 15n9, 17n20, 122 Ellacombe, Henry, Plant-Lore and Garden-Craft of Shakespeare 14, 14n8 Ellerbeck, Erin 155 Elizabeth I, Queen of England 142n33, 174, 176, 183–84 England 89, 91, 121, 151, 160, 163, 165, 176, 178, 181, 184, 186, 200, 201, 224, 247, 258, 271, 274, 275–77 Erasmus 75 Estienne, Charles 92 evolutionary aesthetics 231 fair, beauty 224, 232, 234, 236, 274 complexion 26, 88, 89, 90–91, 92, 93, 96, 97, 98–99, 100, 230, 231, 232, 233

Index

virtue 95–96, 97 Faircloth, Nicki 14–15n8, 21, 69, 159, 162n21, 163, 165, 171n1, 173, 178n26, 181, 182, 183, 186, 289 fairies and fairylore 48, 172, 173, 175, 178, 181 Feerick, Jean 17, 18, 24, 27, 45, 65, 69n31, 114n18, 155, 156n12, 168, 208, 228n32, 243, 248n13, 256n22, 270 feme covert (coverture) 130, 141 fences 137, 138, 174, 276 fertility 18, 29, 64, 65, 66, 67, 77, 78, 80, 81, 129, 131, 132, 133, 134, 136, 138, 182, 221, 233 destructive 59, 68, 69, 77, 134 of female body 29, 66, 71, 77, 129, 131–32, 138, 140, 224 Fiedler, Leslie 87–88 field, arable 65, 68, 69 flowers 55, 56, 271 decay and death 212, 225, 272–73 men, analogized as 54, 272 Queen Elizabeth I and 183 women, analogized as 28, 29, 30, 54, 142, 182, 183, 224, 271–72 Floyd-Wilson, Mary 19, 20n33, 48n14 folklore 20, 23, 30, 172–73, 175, 176, 187 food insecurity 71–72 Forset, Edward, A Comparable Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique 274–75, 276 Francis, Jill 184 Freccero, Carla 269 fruit, metaphor 27, 166, 205, 248, 251, 255, 258–59, 280 Fuller, Thomas, Antheologia 276 funeral rituals 106, 107–108, 115n20, 121 See also, botanical tributes and memorials Galen 18, 47, 72, 98 garden 52, 72, 73, 77, 89, 128n4, 156, 157, 181, 182, 184, 201, 204, 223, 279 enclosed spaces 29, 128, 129, 131, 132, 136–38, 142 See also, fences; hedges; and hortus conclusus England as 271, 275, 277 female bodies as 29, 58, 70, 128, 129, 131, 132, 133, 135, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 204, 224 gates and doors 139, 140, 141 keys to 139, 140, 141 human bodies as 28, 31, 206 medicinal 162 political function 70, 111, 224, 271, 273, 274, 276 time and 202, 205–6, 207, 209, 210, 212, 278 walls 134–38, 139, 140 Garden of Eden 131, 131n11, 165n25, 201, 202, 202n27, 204, 208, 210, 251, 271n9, 273n14, 291 gardener 52, 70, 110–11, 129, 133, 134, 155, 156, 162, 204, 207, 210, 273 husband as 70, 141

297 monarch as 32, 70, 80, 154, 275, 276, 277 gardening manuals 14, 29, 32, 129, 133–38, 139, 141, 143, 165, 289 garland 56, 115, 115n20, 116, 121 Garrard, Mary D. 23, 229 Geisweidt, Edward J. 27, 98 generation 18, 19, 26, 106, 129, 133 human 68, 68n23, 79, 134, 141, 206, 232 plant 49, 69, 70, 230, 232, 258 See also, procreation and reproduction Gerard, John 13n3, 165, 172, 175, 289, 290 Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes 11, 12, 14, 22, 23, 27, 29, 47–48, 78, 89, 91, 92, 93, 143, 165, 173, 174, 178–79, 185, 201–202, 286, 287, 288 Gerstell, Emily 111 Gibson, Prudence 18 Goody, Jack 45n5, 56n29, 106n2, 142n33 grafts and grafting 14, 20–21n38, 58, 133, 155, 168, 179, 229–31 analogies with human concepts 155, 155n8, 155n10, 156, 164–65, 165n23, 168, 232, 273, 276 Great Chain of Being 17, 17n20, 236 Green Man 78 Greten, Henry J. 23n48 Griffiths, Mark 11–12 Habib, Imtiaz 95 Hadrian’s Wall 176, 177 hair 26, 96, 96n32 beauty standards 26, 89, 91, 93, 94, 96 plant 27, 98, 100, 270 See also, beauty Hakluyt, Richard, Elder 178, 184 Hall, Kim F. 88, 97, 97n37, 175–76, 230n39 Hall, Matthew 15n11 Hamlet 26, 28, 34, 46, 52, 55–59, 70, 120–22, 221 Hamlet 34, 57–59, 196, 221 Ophelia 27, 28, 29, 34, 52, 55–56, 57, 58, 106, 115–16n20, 120–23, 202 Harkness, Deborah 112, 292n7 Harrison, Robert P. 233 harvest 33, 72, 154, 156, 166, 167, 200, 224, 255–56 hedges 89, 138, 174, 204, 276n21 Henry IV, Part 1 199n17, 200, 243n3 Henry IV, Part 2 45n6, 176, 199n17, 243n3 Henry V 69, 74, 205 Henry VI, Part 2 201 Henry VI, Part 3 32, 243–45 First Folio and 1595 octavo, compared 246–63 herbal medicine 23, 44, 46–47, 50, 56, 110, 164, 175, 292 herbals 14, 14n6, 21–22, 24, 25, 27, 30, 34, 46, 65, 74, 77, 143, 289, 292

298  hierarchies 16, 20, 21, 64, 65, 152, 153, 159, 208 social 65, 153, 160, 168, 169 See also, Aristotle, hierarchy of human-animal-plant Hill, Thomas 133, 136, 137, 289 The gardeners labyrinth 136, 138, 141 A most briefe and pleasaunte treatise 133 history play, as genre 32–33 horticultural and agricultural manuals 29, 30, 70, 73, 132–33, 136, 137n25, 155 horticulture/husbandry 15n9, 20n38, 69, 71, 132n13, 141, 155, 156, 167, 175, 200, 210, 229 analogy with female bodies 29, 70, 71, 129, 133, 141, 143–44, 224 hortus conclusus 29, 128–30, 131–32, 132n12, 136n22, 137, 139, 140, 141–42 Hughes, William 207, 209 The Compleat Vineyard 207–8 human exceptionalism 18, 25, 27, 64, 128, 150, 151, 152–53, 166 humus 32, 228 Hunter, Lynette 54–55, 55n28 Hutchinson, Lucy 206 Huxtable, Ryan J. 56 hybrid 19, 78, 204 Hyde, Lewis 224, 225, 226, 235n58 hymen 139, 140, 143 indistinction, human 18, 24, 27, 32, 48, 210, 228, 236, 249 Ives, Rachel 106n2 James, King of England and Scotland 70, 137, 175, 176, 180 Johnson, Samuel, “Preface to Shakespeare” 13n5 Jonson, Ben 112 The Alchemist 112n12 “To the Right Honorable Hierome, Lord Weston” 274 Kaufmann, Thomas DeCosta 229 Kearney, James 121 Kennedy, Colleen 67, 77 Kennedy, Joy 78 Kerényi, Carl 224n21, 225, 226 Kernan, Alvin 245, 245n6 King Lear 26, 29, 52–53, 63–64, 66–69, 71–72, 76–81 Cordelia 52–53, 63, 65, 66, 72, 76, 77, 79–80, 81 Edmund 65, 73, 76 King Lear 53, 63–64, 66–69, 72 ,76, 77, 78–79, 80, 81 Kinney, Arthur F. 200 Kircher, Athanasius 31, 193–96, 200, 205, 214 Magnes siue de arte magnetica 194, 195 Knight, Leah 13n4, 14, 14n6, 20, 23, 90n7, 223n15, 247

Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination

Kordecki, Lesley 79n70 Korhonen, Anu 96 Koskinen, Karla 79n70 land 63, 66, 69, 73, 79, 81, 277 and female bodies 26, 29, 64, 66, 69–70, 80, 224, 276 See also, garden, female bodies as monarch’s responsibility for 66, 70–71, 70n34, 273–74, 275–76 Lander Johnson, Bonnie 116, 223n14 Laroche, Rebecca 15n9, 22, 34, 52n24, 56, 64, 79–80, 79n70, 128n4, 158, 291n8 Lawrence, Anna M. 24 Lawson, William 133, 289 A New Orchard and Garden 133–34, 138, 207n38, 209 Linnaeus, Carl 13n4, 22, 196 London Bills of Mortality 111–13, 114 Loomis, Catherine 176 Love’s Labour’s Lost 196–97 Lupton, Julia 46, 49, 50, 53 Lyte, Henry, A Niewe Herbal or Historie of Plantes 14, 14n6 Mabey, Richard 73, 77, 81, 182, 273n12 Macbeth 51, 55, 176, 212 magic 21, 23, 23n45, 25, 30, 47–48, 56, 173, 175, 177, 185–86, 187 Mancall, Peter C. 185 Mancuso, Stefano 235 Marcus, Leah S. 20, 80, 81 Marder, Michael 16, 17, 17n18, 18, 24, 33, 34, 43, 262, 263, 268–69, 269n4, 292 See also, critical plant studies; plant-thinking Markham, Gervase 289 The English Husbandman 70, 134 Farewell to Husbandry 68n27 Marlowe, Christopher 254n20 Dido, Queen of Carthage 181 marriage 30, 51, 52, 58, 79, 87, 93, 108, 129, 130–31, 140, 142n31, 144, 156–57, 167, 182, 183 Martin, Randall 80, 156n11, 160, 168, 221, 246 Martyn, Trea 175, 183 Marvell, Andrew 46 Mascall, Leonard, A Book of the Arte and maner how to Plant and Graffe all sortes of Trees 133 Maxwell, Glyn 220, 228 May, Steven 176 McWilliams, James E. 75n57 Measure for Measure 29, 49, 71, 127–32, 135–36, 137–38, 139–44, 250, 277, 289, 291 Angelo 29, 128, 129, 131–32, 136, 137–41, 142, 143, 144 Isabella 29, 128, 129–32, 135, 138–40, 141, 142–44 Mariana 29, 129, 130, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144

Index

memento mori 212, 226 Mentz, Steve 65n12, 79n71 Mersmann, Jasmin 213–14 metamorphosis and transformation 28, 30, 164, 180, 209, 221, 228, 230, 236 human-plant 28–29, 32, 105–8, 111, 113, 117–18, 120, 122, 128, 142–43, 166, 186–87 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 30, 48, 171–87, 245, 289 Mikics, David 226 Millais, John Everett, Ophelia 122 Milton, John 18–19, 46, 201 Paradise Lost 18–19, 165n25, 201 misogyny 66, 67, 79, 81, 157, 166, 169 Moffat, Alastair 176 Moor 89, 90, 92, 92n23, 95, 97, 98, 99 Morris, Rosie 115n20, 115–16 Morrison, Toni, Desdemona 99 Morton, Timothy 19 Mother Earth 133, 140, 209, 276 See also, earth Much Ado About Nothing 51, 201 Munkhoff, Richelle 112, 113 Munroe, Jennifer 15n9, 22, 64, 79–80, 79n70, 128, 158, 224n17, 291n8 Myers, Katherine 76, 179 Nardizzi, Vin 15n9, 17, 18, 22n42, 27, 45, 165n23, 228n32, 229–30, 230–31, 232, 254n20 nativism 156, 159, 160, 168 nature, human connection to 19, 24, 26, 29, 64, 78–79, 81, 150, 152, 153, 164, 169, 220, 270 See also, networks, of nature human detachment from 23, 32, 79, 151, 153, 229 and human identity 149, 152, 157, 161–62, 168–169, 234 human intrusions upon 14, 69, 73, 158 human need to control 22, 29, 30, 73, 129, 132–36, 137, 149, 152, 153, 159, 197, 229, 232 Nealon, Jeffrey T. 15 Neill, Michael 107, 121 networks, of nature 16, 20, 24, 26, 29, 45, 80 nonhuman world 64, 79–80, 149, 150–51, 153, 164 North Africa 98, 99, 100, 184 Nunn, Hillary 150 obstetrical and gynecological manuals 68n23, 71, 139–40, 142, 143, 289 O’Farrell, Maggie, Hamnet. 33–34, 285–89, 290–91 Ogilvie, Brian W. 223 Oldenburg, Scott 112 Oliver, Mary 237–38 “Ophelia, not yet” (NHK) 122–23 oppression 106–07, 108, 113, 114, 117, 123 Ostovich, Helen 130n7, 132n12

299 Othello 26, 55, 70, 87–88, 89, 93, 95–100, 206 Barbary 87, 88, 91, 94–96, 97, 98, 99 See also, Barbary, place; plants, named, barberry; and puns and punning Desdemona 27, 70, 87, 88, 89, 90, 93, 94, 95–99 Emilia 87, 90, 93, 95, 96, 97 Iago 88, 206, 207 Othello 70, 87, 88, 92, 95, 98, 100 Otten, Charlotte 270 Ovid 28, 72, 219 Metamorphoses 30, 105–7, 118, 120, 180 See also, metamorphosis and transformation Painter, Robert 56 Parker, Brian 56 Parker, Martin, “Take Time, While Time Is” 212, 213 Parker, Patricia 88–89, 90, 93, 95, 100 Parkinson, John 34, 75, 137, 204, 205, 289, 291 Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris 48– 50, 51, 74, 137, 143, 144, 202, 202n27, 203, 204 Theatrum Botanicum: The Theatre of Plantes 34 Paster, Gail Kern 19 Patchett, Ann 237 patriarchy 64, 79, 129, 131, 144, 152, 232 Pericles 53, 167 Petrarchan tradition 22, 142 place and environment, importance of 22, 26, 32, 75, 76, 98, 153, 154–55, 157, 162, 165 plague and plague–time 28, 29, 107–8, 109–10, 111, 112n12, 118, 122, 163, 289 See also, London Bills of Mortality plant blindness 16, 17, 34 plant-thinking 17, 18, 20, 33, 262–63, 268–69, 292 See also, Marder, Michael plantanimals 19 vegetable lamb 19, 202–03, 204 plants, bastard 27, 76 analogies with humans 24, 27, 32, 33, 45, 47, 65, 70, 74, 75, 98, 151, 154, 156–57, 165–66, 167, 221, 252, 255, 257, 270 as deficient 16, 17, 18, 43 embodiment and 27, 31, 33, 45, 47, 248–49, 250, 267, 278, 279–81 female 29, 57, 58–59, 80, 129, 132, 133, 134, 143, 142–43, 144, 224, 258 eternalizing power of 32, 222, 224–25, 236 as food 16, 69, 77, 81, 91–92, 210 growth 18, 19, 46, 59, 73, 98, 119, 129, 153, 164, 166, 167, 168, 200, 204, 206, 207, 243, 258, 269, 271, 274, 278, 280, 281 healing power 23, 44, 47, 50, 52, 54, 77, 78, 109, 110, 111, 158, 163, 164, 165, 175, 288, 291

300  human affinities and interconnections with 19, 23, 27, 32, 45, 47, 154, 196, 220, 223, 224, 230, 250, 270 human identity and 17, 29, 149–51, 154, 156, 161, 166, 167–68, 268, 281 immigrants 177–78 medicine and 20, 44, 46–47, 50–53, 56, 77–78, 92, 108, 158, 162, 176–77 native 91, 98, 144n38, 154, 165, 178, 186 ontology 16, 17, 28, 33, 263, 267–68, 270, 292 perennial 224, 260, 271, 272, 279, 281 poison 44, 45, 52, 54, 56–57, 59, 75, 76, 78, 115, 116, 157–158, 161, 162, 194, 211 power and agency 25, 26, 30, 44, 46, 48, 49, 50, 53, 54, 56, 59, 74, 80, 89, 91–92, 93, 95, 98, 106, 185, 187, 194, 211, 292 transplants 29, 157, 162, 167, 179, 248 time, as markers of 19, 31, 32, 271–72 See also, temporality, plant; time, plant virtue, see virtue, plant plants, named, aconite (wolfsbane) 44–45 acorn 171n1, 182 apricot 171n1, 178, 181 aspen 27 barberry 26, 88–89, 91–94, 95–98, 99, 100, 289, 292 basil 47 burdock 76, 77, 159 cedar 149, 151, 154, 155, 164–66, 253, 292 chamomile 285, 287, 288 cherry 174, 177, 184 comfrey 285, 286, 287, 288, 290, 292 corn 11n1, 13, 13n2, 53, 64, 68, 69, 70, 72, 75, 76, 256 cowslip 22, 157, 162,171n1,174, 175, 183 crow-flowers 56, 120 cuckooflowers/lady’s smock 52, 78, 78n67 daffodil 76n59 daphne 171n1,186 darnel 53, 64, 65n10, 69, 72, 75, 76, 78 dewberry 171n1, 181 eglantine 114, 164, 171n1, 178, 184 elder tree 163 elm 65n10, 163, 171n1, 174, 184 eyebright 23, 47 feverfew 285, 287, 288 fig 110, 181 foxglove 175, 177 fritillary 11n1, 13, 13n2 fumitory 52, 63, 69, 76, 77 garlic 171n1, 173 gillyflowers 143, 179,183, 202n27, 292 grapes 171n1, 181, 202 grass 49, 68n27, 72, 75, 205, 212 harebell 114, 164 hawthorn 171n1, 173 hebona 56

Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination

hemlock 52, 56, 69, 76, 77, 78 henbane 56 Herb Paris 172 honeysuckle 171n1, 173, 174, 178, 183, 184 ivy 65n10, 171n1, 174 juniper 110 knot-grass 171n1 laurel 13, 27, 30, 105, 106, 186, 292 lavender 205, 285, 287, 288 leeks 171n1, 174 lily 27, 49, 142, 171n1, 174, 202, 202n27 linseed 174 long purples 56, 120 mandrake 19, 23n45, 223 marigold 48, 204 marjoram 28, 109 moss 114, 115, 164 mugwort 185 mulberry 30, 90, 91, 95, 99, 171n1, 179, 180, 181 nettles 52, 56, 64, 74, 76, 77, 78, 120, 172, 206 oak 159, 165, 165n25, 244, 254, 292 onion 171n1, 173 pansy/ love-in-idleness 48, 171n1, 177, 179, 180, 185, 272n11 patience 163 peascod 171n1 primrose 114, 157, 164, 171n1, 173 rhubarb 51, 163 Roman wall plant 172, 177 rose 27, 30, 47, 58, 116, 142, 143, 171, 171n1, 178, 179n31, 183, 184, 202, 223, 225, 238, 244, 246, 249, 250, 250n14, 252, 272, rue/herb of grace 28, 51, 52, 58, 109, 110, 111, 121, 154, 202, 289, 292 St. John’s wort 175 squash 171n1, 280 strawberry 74, 90n12, 202, 202n27, 205 thistle 71, 133, 171n1 thyme 171n1, 178–79, 180, 181, 206 tobacco 56, 184–85 violet 142, 157, 161, 162, 171n1, 178, 179, 196, 212, 272, 272n11 walnut 110 wheat 72, 75, 76, 171n1, 173 willow 94, 95, 120-21 woodbine 171n1, 174, 178, 184 wormwood 109, 110 yew 56, 272n12 Pliny 21, 72, 177, 178, 179 political rhetoric See botanical rhetoric, political rhetoric and Pollan, Michael 16, 72n45, 73 Pollard, Tanya 44, 52n25, 56n31 Poole, Kristen 277 posthumanism 15, 18 print culture, rise of 223n15, 246–47 procreation and reproduction 18–19, 25, 64, 66, 78, 155, 226, 227, 230, 231, 257, 259, 269, 274 See also, generation

Index

pruning 14, 27, 70, 133, 165, 206, 243, 252, 276 Pseudo-Aristotle, De Plantis 207 puns and punning 26, 33, 77, 88, 88n3, 90, 90n7, 91, 94, 95, 141n29, 246, 277 race/racial difference 26, 91, 96, 96n33, 97, 98, 232 See also, Barbary, place, race; and beauty, race Rape of Lucrece, The 155 Rea, John, Flora 137 recipes and recipe books 26, 34, 89, 91, 92, 93, 109–10, 288, 289 regeneration 32, 64, 116, 206, 222, 225, 229, 230, 231, 257 Reynolds, Lou Agnes 172–73, 175, 187 Richard II 32, 33, 52, 70, 110–11, 132n12, 160, 197–98, 201, 268, 269, 271–74, 275–79 Richard III 51n23, 246, 249, 263 romance, genre 30, 53, 153, 167 Romeo and Juliet 53-55, 74, 158, 172, 210, 223 roots 19, 22, 47, 91, 92, 93, 149, 154, 166, 173, 179, 194, 223, 255, 260–61, 273, 275, 288, 289, 291 Rosa, Gloria Grazia 23n45 Rosenberg, Jessica 31, 32, 46n8, 55n28 Rydén, Mats 14n6, 14n7, 17, 21 Sandilands, Catriona 16n15 Sawyer, Paul 172–73, 175, 187 scala naturae 19, 208 scientific thought 13n4, 14, 21–23, 172, 223–24, 229, 270 Scotland 175–77 Scott, Charlotte 20n38 Scott, Heidi 274 seasons 14, 22, 30, 33, 164, 167, 175, 182, 183, 197, 202, 207, 212, 214, 224, 271, 279, 281 Secrets of Albertus Magnus, The 48 seed 18, 59, 68, 70, 70n34, 72, 75, 76, 77, 81, 117, 193, 194, 210, 259, 280 sexuality, female 26, 48, 58n33, 64, 67, 70, 74, 77–78, 80, 100, 128n3, 140–41, 142 Shannon, Laurie 24, 64n5, 66n17, 150 shrubs 26, 27, 88, 89, 91, 99, 249, 250, 253, 272 Sidney, Philip 219 Defence of Poesy 222, 229, 236 Smith, Ian 90 Smith, Justin E. H. 227 Snook, Edith 93, 97 soil 16, 57, 70, 73, 74, 81, 98, 156, 157, 162, 221, 236, 243, 248, 274, 275 Solomon, Deborah 201 Sonnets 32, 167, 212, 220–22, 224-38 death in 226, 227 procreation 226, 227, 232, 236 time in 209–10, 212, 227, 228, 230, 234 See also, time See also, art and nature Spurgeon, Caroline 27, 243

301 Stark, Hannah 16 Stern, Tiffany 198 supernatural 30, 119, 187 Sullivan, Garrett 20n33 Sütterlin, Christa 231 Switzer, Christopher, Paradisi in Sole Terrestris titlepage 202, 203, 204 sympathies and antipathies 19, 23, 47, 80, 182 Tarlow, Sarah 107–108 Taylor, Neil 121 Tempest, The 175 temporality 26, 200, 269n5, 271–72 plant 30–31, 33, 167–68, 194, 262n29, 268–69, 269n4, 279, 291, 292 See also, time textual criticism 32, 34, 244-63 and critical plant studies 262-63 Theophrastus 21, 223n15 thresholds 139, 140, 141n29, 172, 173, 175, 181 plants 174, 184, 185n48 Thomas, Howard 71–72, 76n59, 76n60, 78n67, 256n22 Thomas, Vivian 14–15n8, 21, 69, 159, 162n21, 163, 165, 171n1, 173, 178n26, 181, 182, 183, 186, 289 Thompson, Ann 121 Thorne, William 114, 116 Thornhill, Randy 231 Tigner, Amy L. 15n9, 70, 77, 129n5, 131n11, 134n19, 143n36, 206n35, 271n9, 273n14, 274n17, 279n25 time 21, 28, 30–33, 153, 167, 175, 194–200 cyclic 22, 33, 206, 269 destructiveness of 227, 230, 234 divine 32, 194, 214 ecological and environmental 167, 201, 212, 279, 281 mechanical 193, 196, 197, 198–99, 210, 212, 213 organic 200, 212, 213, 278 perspectival 200, 201 plant 22, 30, 31, 153, 156, 173, 175, 196, 200, 201, 204, 205, 207–208, 212, 214, 255, 268–69, 269n4, 272–73, 279, 280 prelapsarian/postlapsarian 202, 204, 205, 208 queer 269, 269n5 solar 194, 197, 212 See also, temporality Time, as figure 212-13, 281 timekeeping 31, 196–97, 200, 213–14 Titus Andronicus 13n2, 27, 70, 208, 230n38 tragedy, genre 68, 80, 107, 114 trans-corporeality 20, 29, 79n70, 107, 109, 114, 117, 121, 150, 151, 152– 53, 157, 160, 162, 168, 169 See also, Alaimo, Stacy Travis, Peter 105–106

302  tree imagery 19, 154, 167, 179–80, 257 and human bodies 27, 151–52, 164, 165, 166, 252, 253, 254, 255, 279, 280 and kingship 28, 244, 248, 251, 273, 274 Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil 204, 208 Tree of Life 46, 208 Trevor, Douglas 273 Turley, Richard Marggraf 71–72, 76n59, 76n60, 78n67, 256n22 Turner, William 75, 289 A New Herbal 14, 47, 75n54 Twelfth Night 278 vegetative soul 18, 19, 25, 133, 263, 274 See also, Aristotle, tripartite soul Vendler, Helen 233, 234 Venus and Adonis 13n2, 117–120 vines 65n10, 149, 163, 166–67, 208 Virgin Mary 116, 129–30, 131, 140, 141, 142 virginity 30, 90, 129, 130, 132, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 183 virtue, 25–26, 44–46, 167 human 25, 45, 54, 55, 57–58, 65n10, 79, 89, 167 instability of 53–55, 57 as life force 25, 57 moral 25, 53, 55, 57 plant 17, 22, 25, 34, 44, 46–50, 51–53, 56, 59, 65, 74, 80, 292 as potential 50, 49-50, 53–54, 59 women’s 50, 57, 58, 97 vitalism 16, 19–20, 23, 28, 50n17, 64 Vlasopolos, Anca 185 von Uthmann, Jorg 99

Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination

Waage, Frederick O. 80 walls, See garden, walls Watson, Robert N. 17n20, 174, 220–21n6 Wayne, Valerie 28n65, 159n14 Webster, John, Duchess of Malfi 155, 276n22 weeds and weeding 26, 53, 54, 64–65, 72–74, 79, 81, 194, 206, 274n17 analogies with humans 27, 51n23, 55, 59, 64, 65, 66, 272, 278 female sexuality 70, 71, 78 and fertility 68, 68n23, 68n24, 77, 81,134 political connotations 63, 69, 70, 72, 205, 273, 275–276, 278 religious significance 67, 71, 74, 75–76 Wells, Stanley 11n1, 68 Wersan, Kate 200, 202, 212 Wiesner–Hanks, Mary 30 Willes, Margaret, A Shakespearean Botanical 286, 288, 289, 290 Wilson, Miranda 155, 211n55 Winter’s Tale, The 33, 56n29, 155, 167, 204, 268, 269, 271, 279–81 Wolveridge, James, Speculum Matricis Hybernicum 139–40 Woodbridge, Linda 68 Woodcock, Matthew 172 Woodward, Marcus 286, 287, 288 women domestic and herbal knowledge 26, 56, 80, 89, 92, 129, 157–58 and nature 80, 132n13 See also, fertility; garden; sexuality, female; and weeds and weeding worms 153, 221, 228, 236, 238 zoe 225–26