Shakespeare’s time and gardens
Video Guide transcript
[Shakespeare] Shakespeare’s Time and Gardens. I, Will Shakespeare, and these gardens, the Colorado Shakespeare Gardens, exhibit plants found throughout my plays. We celebrated not birthdays, but I was born in Stratford-upon-Avon about 1564, during the days you call the Renaissance. I’ve maintained both lands and business in Stratford-upon-Avon throughout my life. If you go there today, you can visit both buildings and gardens pertinent to my life and that of my wife, Anne Hathaway.
I am by paternity and instinct a man of the country. You can find my native Warwickshire throughout my writings. I know forests and fens, gardens and grains. The changing seasons express passage of time, story, and mood. From mine own experience I note particulars of many plants: their colors, forms, smells, growths, and decay. I turned this familiarity into poetry, using the qualities and image to interpret human life.
From the late 1580s until 1611 I worked in London. It was a much smaller place than the London you know! When I came, greater London housed some 200,000 people. ’Twas a little grander than the City of Boulder, Colorado, where there now dwell 100,000 or more. Ay, we thought our London huge; and yet all those people lived on but twelve and thirteen hundred acres, about double the land on which this university rests. A busy throng it was, but an hour’s walk at the most brought us well out into the country.
In 1594 I was made member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a playing company which composed and enacted plays at Blackfriars and at the Globe Theater, in the court of Queen Elizabeth as well – Elizabeth the First, as I have learned to call her in your time. In 1603 her successor, King James the First of England and Sixth of Scotland, took us under his royal patronage, and we became the King’s Men.
Of all we wrote in those years, we have in your time but 37 plays, 154 sonnets, and a few longer poems. There were more a-plenty. You have these because John Hemmings and Henry Condell, shareholders in our company, sought profit beyond the playhouse by collecting my plays in print for sale to any who would buy.
Still, these few works you have make reference to some 180 different kinds of plants. A goodly number of them now grow in these Colorado Shakespeare Gardens. I use the way of these plants as similes and metaphors to illuminate the persons and feelings and deeds in the play.
A few examples, if you please:
The flowers bring sweet odors and innocence to mind. You ha’ probably heard Juliet musing:
that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
Yet Lady Macbeth uses that very thing to urge her husband to villainy:
Look like th’ innocent flower, she says, but be the serpent under ’t.
Have you ever gotten the stench of a rotting marsh in your nose? Ay, well, when the citizenry banishes Coriolanus, he replies,
You common cry of curs, whose breath I hate,
as reek of the rotten fens...I banish you!
Or think of the seed-heads of the burdock, so well known for clinging to both our own coats and our dogs’. You can hear the persistent annoyance of these burrs in Midsummer Night’s Dream, when Lysander struggles to be rid of his former love:
Hang off, you cat, you burr! Vile thing, let loose!
In another play, Measure for Measure, Lucio knows well that the friar longs to be rid of him, but pesters him still, saying:
Nay, friar, I am a kind of burr; I shall stick.
Our audience was of all degrees, from nobles, tradesmen in tiered seating, to groundlings paying a penny to stand. Everyone knew plants and their properties. Inhabitants of city, town, and village alike grew plants and gathered herbs from woods and meadows, and understood their uses. Moreover, Queen Elizabeth, like King James after her, encouraged her subjects to plant large gardens, and took interest in the curious, unlikely plants coming to the shores in English ships, the ones that returned from the Indies, the Americas, and other strange and distant lands. Wealthy nobles duly devised great and intricate gardens to plant them lavishly, hoping to win a royal viewing.
In my days, that you call the Renaissance, were a time of eager travel to unknown lands, exchange of plants, writing of Herbals. The style that came to be known as the Tudor Garden mirrored the style of the buildings; the raised beds were made of the same stuff as the buildings. The garden beds here, made of the same native stone as the buildings around them, echo that style. And although the climate differs between Boulder and Stratford-upon-Avon, in both quantity of moisture and quality of light, many of the plants mentioned in the plays are happy to grow here.
I hope your visitation to the Colorado Shakespeare Gardens will make the plants better known to you. There are eight different gardens for your pleasure and learning. Come with me to delight in all, beginning at the Founder’s Garden. Return to the Index and select any garden you choose.