The Plant Lore Garden Craft of Shakespeare

and profession, have delighted to claim him as their fellow-labourer. Books have been written at various times by various writers, which have proved (to the complete satisfaction of the writers) that he was a soldier, a sailor, a lawyer, an astronomer, a physician, a divine, a printer,an actor, a courtier, a sportsman, an angler, and I know not what else besides. I also propose to claim him as a fellow-labourer. A lover of flowers and gardening myself, I claim Shakespeare as equally a lover of flowers and gardening; and this I propose to prove by showing how, in all his writings, he exhibits his strong love for flowers, and a very fair, though not perhaps a very deep, knowledge of plants; but I do not intend to go further. That he was a lover of plants I shall have no difficulty in showing; but I do not, therefore, believe that he was a professed gardener, and I am quite sure he can in no sense be claimed as a botanist, in the scientific sense of the term. His knowledge of plants was simply the knowledge that every man may have who goes through the world with his eyes open to the many beauties of Nature that surround him, and who does not content himself with simply looking, and then passing on, but tries to find out something of the inner meaning of the beauties he sees, and to carry away with him some of the lessons which they were doubtless meant to teach. But Shakespeare was able to go further than this. He had the great gift of being able to describe what he saw in a way that few others have arrived at; he could communicate to others the pleasure that he felt himself, not by long descriptions, but by a few simple words, a few natural touches, and a few well-chosen epithets, which bring the plants and flowers before us in the freshest, and often in a most touching way. For this reason the study of the Plant-lore of Shakespeare is a very pleasant study, and there are other things which add to this pleasure. One especial pleasure arises from the thoroughly English character of his descriptions. It has often been observed that wherever the scenes of his plays are laid, and whatever foreign characters he introduces, yet they really are all Englishmen of the time of Elizabeth, and the scenes are all drawn from the England of his day. This is certainly true of the plants and flowers we meet with in the plays; they are thoroughly English plants that (with very few exceptions) he saw in the hedgerows and woods of Warwickshire, or in his own or his friends' gardens. The descriptions are thus thoroughly fresh and real; they tell of the country and of the outdoor life he loved, and they never smell of the study lamp. In this respect he differs largely from Milton, whose descriptions (with very few exceptions) recall the classic and Italian writers. He differs, too, from his contemporary Spenser, who has certainly some very sweet descriptions of flowers, which show that he knew and loved them, but are chiefly allusions to classical flowers, which he names in such a way as to show that he often did not fully know what they were, but named them because it was the right thing for a classical poet so to do. Shakespeare never names a flower or plant unnecessarily; they all come before us, when they do come, in the most natural way, as if the particular flower named was the only one that could be named on that occasion." --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.