Shakespeare : PLants and Flowers

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford, a humble countryside town on the River Avon in England. Yet when we examine the flowers and plants in Shakespeare's plays and the myriad meanings he bestowed upon them, it is easy to imagine that this place, brimming with rural charm, was the very muse that inspired the Bard's botanical writings. Shakespeare was also a frequent visitor to Queen Elizabeth's gardens, and when later scholars could not definitively identify which specific flowers or fruits Shakespeare was referring to in his works, the royal gardens—containing abundant vegetables, fruits, and herbs—became an excellent resource for understanding the Bard's sensibilities.

The use of plants in the text held profound significance for sixteenth-century audiences watching Shakespeare's plays, particularly given that people's lives were inseparable from flowers and plants in that era. They inherited ancestral knowledge of medicine, absorbed mythological tales of flora through osmosis, and continued to develop related uses based on this foundation. Thus, species that seem distant and obscure to modern eyes actually resonated deeply with audiences of that time.

Yet the most celebrated and has endured across more than 400 years to connect with us today is the rose in Romeo and Juliet, along with Juliet's sigh: "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."

The rose symbolizes love traditionally, perhaps because the rose, like love itself, is beautiful, painful, and fleeting. For this pair of lovers, the beloved is a forbidden fruit that may bring more hatred and trouble, and the rose thus represents the dual nature of beautiful dreams and danger. Beyond this layer of meaning, the rose was also the representative flower of the Tudor dynasty. In works written after the Wars of the Roses ended in 1485, Shakespeare allusively references the white rose representing the House of York and the red rose representing the House of Lancaster, affirming the union of red and white roses, and lamenting through his characters the loss of promising young men in war.

Shakespeare and Perfume

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, due to people's concerns about water quality and fear that harmful substances might contact the body through water, bathing was highly irregular and sanitary conditions were extremely poor. Perfume was commonly used to cover the body odor, conveniently solving the dilemma of aristocrats who feared bathing yet desired to maintain their image. Wearing perfume at that time was a luxury item, belonging only to those who could afford it—royalty, nobility, and the like.

Perfumes imported during the Tudor era came mainly from Italy, with primary ingredients being balls of ambergris and musk. Exotic fragrances such as Chypre or Rondeletia were the favorites among English people of the time. Italy was particularly skilled and advanced in perfume composition and manufacture.

In 1508, a group of monks devoted to the Santa Maria Novella faith in Florence established a laboratory with their own distillation equipment, cultivated aromatic plants, and produced spirits and perfumes there. These traditional distillation techniques have continued to the present day. The papal-blessed "Golden Rose" would also be anointed with perfume before being distributed each year.

Perfumes of that era were contained in small glass bottles with a scent ball inside, which people called a "pomme d'ambre" (amber apple). Sometimes a single bottle would contain scent balls of different fragrances. Common fragrance materials included nutmeg, cloves, and cumin, or more readily available flower petals or herbs. Ordinary households and the royal court used large quantities of aromatic plants as bedding, scattering herbs and fresh flowers throughout spaces to allow fragrances to slowly diffuse and fill entire rooms. In an era when sanitary facilities were not yet well-developed, the presence of flowers and plants further helped maintain basic hygiene levels. Every castle or country villa also had a separate small room where people could make perfumes, fragrances, medicinal wines, mead, and other spirits.

Shakespeare and Liquors

In sixteenth-century England, drinking water was potentially a "fatal" matter, and liquors became the primary source through which the general population and royalty ingest hydration. Regardless of age, the entire nation had liquors available from breakfast time to rinse the mouth, and afternoon drinking sessions were provided after work for rest and socializing. In the seventeenth century, someone claimed that William Shakespeare died following a late-night drinking bout with his poet friend Ben Jonson. While we cannot know whether his death was caused by alcohol poisoning or other combined factors, what we can be certain of is that Shakespeare was indeed a connoisseur of liquors in the Elizabethan age, and Shakespeare's plays naturally contain various appearances and rich meanings of alcoholic drinks.

In Shakespeare's tragic works, wine often carries profound insights and reflections on human life:

In Hamlet, wine carries death, and the conclusion that defines its tragic position is strung together by a cup of poisoned wine. Contrasted with Hamlet's complex psychology regarding wine (death), it is all the more thought-provoking. In Macbeth, wine becomes entangled with power and women, forming a bewitching poison intertwined with human ugliness. Lady Macbeth's obsessive praise in Act Two of alcohol's potency is a classic passage that Shakespeare fans repeatedly savor.

Wine in comedies often reveals observations and humor about people and life:

In The Merry Wives of Windsor, the absurdities and eccentricities of people under the influence of alcohol are written with delightful wit, making Windsor and wine truly inseparable. The text is full of amusing anecdotes about drunkenness, drinking, and carousing—it is arguably the Shakespeare play most fond of discussing wine and drunken foolishness. In As You Like It, Rosalind disguises herself as the male character Ganymede, challenging the audience's stereotypical assumptions about female weakness and passivity. When the shepherdess Phebe "falls in love with" Ganymede, Ganymede gently retorts: "Don't be silly, I am more false than a drunken vow." This vivid portrayal allows the pastoral charm naturally flowing through this romantic comedy to become even more delicate and tender.

References:

• https://sites.google.com/site/englishmajorportfolio/plants-in-romeo-and-juliet
• https://www.kew.org/read-and-watch/plants-in-shakespeare
• https://extension.oregonstate.edu/news/shakespeare-uses-power-plants-tell-his-tales
• https://ifaroma.org/es_ES/home/blog/perfumes-through-the-ages
• https://bardgarden.blogspot.com/2014/04/shakespeare-fragrances.html
• https://royalcentral.co.uk/features/taking-a-look-at-tudor-perfume-128052/
• https://www.diffordsguide.com/people/52058/celebrity-drinker/william-shakespeare
• https://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.d1789.full

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