Chapter 8 - Shakespeare’s Plants Then and Now

Summary

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Shakespeare’s plants became the focus of popular printed books. Especially in the post-war period these volumes appear to have fed a thirst for nativist and nationalist consolation. The genre was for many years bound up with the practice – in Britain and America – of planting Shakespeare gardens in civic and public spaces. However, the popular modern culture of Shakespeare’s flowers diverts considerably from the ways in which plants appeared on the Shakespearean stage. In the plays, plants are used to question those social practices assumed to be inherently stable, even part of the natural order: kingship, Englishness, hierarchies of learning, even the very premise that plants (and the people who pick them) as themselves ‘native’. Close attention to Shakespeare’s dramatic use of plants therefore reveals a certain resistance to the very instincts – nationalist and nativist, pastoralist and conservative – for which his plants have been utilised in the last two centuries.