Botanical Culture and Popular Belief in Shakespeare's England

Examining the long-overlooked illiterate arts, this is a rich study of practices surrounding plants and their role in Shakespeare's plays.

Bonnie Lander Johnson (Author)

9781009396523, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 9 January 2025

206 pages
23.5 x 16 x 1.6 cm, 0.436 kg

'Drawing on an abundance of rich material and insightful analysis, Lander Johnson breaks new ground in the growing body of research around the culture of botany, plants, and horticulture in early modern England. The book stands out for its focus on the profound religious and popular beliefs associated with the plants evoked in Shakespeare's plays, beliefs that are now lost in time.' Rebecca Bushnell, School of Arts and Sciences Board of Advisors Emerita Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

The Shakespearean stage offered London playgoers a glimpse of the illiterate and rural plant cultures rapidly disappearing from their increasingly urban and sophisticated lives. The same cultures also circulated in popular texts offstage: bawdy tree ballads, botanical tales, almanacs and accounts of kitchen physic. Here Bonnie Lander Johnson argues that, while Shakespeare's plants offered audiences a nostalgic vision of childhood, domestic education and rural pastimes, this was in fact done with an ironic gesture that claimed for illiterate culture an intellectual relevance ignored by the learned and largely Protestant realm of print. Addressing a long-standing imbalance in early modern scholarship, she reveals how Shakespeare's plays – and the popular, low botanical beliefs they represent – engaged with questions usually deemed high, literate and elite: theological and liturgical controversies, the politics of state, England's role in Elizabethan naval conflict and the increasingly learned realm of medical authority.

Introduction: theatre, nostalgia and the reformation of plants
Part I. Plants: Monarchs, signatures and the recuperation of the 'common': 1. Trees, kings, Christ: almanacs, ballads and the divinity of matter in Richard II
2. Pansies, queens, midwives: fairy flowers, travellers' tales and domestic practice in a midsummer night's dream
Part II. Places: Domestic and civic: negotiating botanical cultures in the theatre: 3. The theatre as medical marketplace: poison, desire and cultures of diagnosis: Romeo and Juliet
4. The theatre as bower: botanical tapestries, the passion of Christ and the book of nature in Cymbeline
Conclusion: the mulberry tree
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]