The hamlet garden

Video guide transcript

[Shakespeare]: Here is the Hamlet Garden.

[Interlocutor]: What are the plants in Hamlet, Will Shakespeare? Ophelia’s famous garlands come to mind.

[Shakespeare]: ’Tis a long list: primroses, pansies, violets, columbines, hebenon, nuts, plums, sugar, grass, and wormwood, fennel, flax, grass, rosemary, herb o’ grace (this is rue), Crow-flowers, Daisies, Long purples, nettles, willow, palm, wheat, and thorn.

[Interlocutor]: Many of those names are familiar, but not hebenon.

[Shakespeare]: The ghost of Hamlet’s father speaks of it:

Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole,
With juice of cursed hebenon in a vial,
And in the porches of my ears did pour
The leperous distilment; whose effect
Holds such an enmity with blood of man
That swift as quicksilver it courses through
The gates and alleys of the body,
With a sudden vigor it doth posset
And curd, like eager droppings into milk,
The thin and wholesome blood; so did it mine;
And a most instant tetter barked about,
Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust,
All my smooth body.

[Interlocutor]: That’s a full description of a dreadful poison! But the plant is…?

[Shakespeare]: Heben is another word for yew.

[Interlocutor]: Hm. So the ghost tells Hamlet that )Hamlet’s) father, the king, was cruelly murdered by his (the king’s) own brother, Claudius.

[Shakespeare]: Yes, and then hard upon that Claudius married Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, and became King himself. Hamlet is much preoccupied with thoughts of revenge for his father.

[Interlocutor]: But also he is in love with Ophelia, the daughter of the king’s counselor Polonius.

[Shakespeare]: Ophelia’s brother, Laertes, does not trust that love. He warns Ophelia to hold it but a passing thing:

A violet in the youth of primy nature,
Forward but permanent, sweet, not lasting,
The perfume and suppliance of a minute,
No more.

[Interlocutor]: So the violet is a flower quick to bloom and as quick to fade?

[Shakespeare]: It is. But perchance Ophelia knows that it is also a flower of faithfulness, and continues unsure of what Hamlet truly feels.

[Interlocutor]: Ophelia replies to Laertes’ warning with a flowery warning of her own:

Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,
Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven
While, like a puffed and reckless libertine,
Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads.

[Shakespeare]: Later, when Hamlet unknowingly kills her father, Ophelia goes mad with grief and horror of it. She wanders into the court in her madness, still knowing well the flowers and their meanings.

[Interlocutor]: Yes, Laertes cries out on seeing her:

O rose of May!
Dear maid, kind sister, sweet Ophelia!

But she seems not to know who he is.

[Shakespeare]: It seems so. Yet every flower she bestows in her madness is well suited. To Laertes she says:

There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance.
Pray you, love, remember. And here is pansies,
that’s for thoughts.

[Interlocutor]: Oh, then she says to Claudius:

There’s fennel for you, and columbines.

[Shakespeare]: Fennel is an emblem of falsehood and flattery. Columbines stand for faithfulness in wedlock; but also at times its shape recalls the horns of a cuckold. Ophelia speaks the language of flowers subtly. These flowers paired speak of the falsehood and flattery whereby Claudius took Gertrude’s love from her first husband.

[Interlocutor]: And is Ophelia equally wise in the flowers she gives to Gertrude? She says:

There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me.
We may call it herb o’ grace o’ Sundays.
O, you must wear your rue with a difference.

Shakespeare: Ay, that she is. Rue is a herb bitter on the tongue, an herb of regret and repentance. Ophelia and Gertrude both have reason to rue what has passed; but Gertrude must come this regret with a difference. Ophelia is wholly innocent, while Gertrude is both wife of the murderer Claudius and the mother of Hamlet, whose sword has killed Ophelia’s father.

[Interlocutor]: Last of all Ophelia holds a daisy, and wishes for violets.

[Shakespeare]: The daisy is an emblem of innocence. The fleeting violets, the brief time of her happiness, are no more to be found.

[Interlocutor]: So she keeps the daisy for herself.

[Shakespeare]: That and other flowers. Later, Gertrude tells Laertes how Ophelia has drowned:

There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows her hoar leaves to 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 her cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them:
Then, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook.

At her burial, the fleeting violets appear once again. Laertes says:

Lay her i’the earth,
And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
May violets spring!

[Interlocutor]: Her drowning is followed by many more deaths.

[Shakespeare]: The play is a tragedy. Almost everyone dies. Laertes, bent upon revenge against Hamlet, challenges him to a bout of swordplay and smears his own foil with poison so deadly that, he says,

no cataclysm so rare,
Collected from all simples that have virtue
Under the moon, can save the thing from death
That is but scratched withal.

[Interlocutor]: O yes! And Claudius too plants poison for Hamlet, in a cup of wine.

[Shakespeare]: But Gertrude drinks that poison. Laertes scratches Hamlet with the poisoned blade, and then is scratched with it himself.

[Interlocutor]: And Hamlet, knowing that he is already dead, forces both the poisoned blade and the poisoned cup on Claudius.

[Shakespeare]: They all die. The royal house of Denmark is gone, true to the form of a tragedy. Fortinbras, a gallant soldier and the prince of neighboring Norway, arrives. Hamlet,last to die, bequeaths the Danish throne on Fortinbras. The prince perhaps may reign in peace; but his task as the play ends is to give the order for due honors to the dead, saying:

Take up the bodies: such a sight as this
Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.