As the blooms begin to pop out but most of us are still stuck in, many may be feeling a need to at least poetic about our freed flowery friends.
Luckily for those of us for whom the hedge trimmer may be mightier than the pen, there is someone who has done most of the heavy literary lifting for us. And not just someone- but one of the greatest writers in the English language (and one of his biggest fans)!
In Botanical Shakespeare, soap star-turned-NYT writer and noted expert on the Bard and the blooms Gerit Quealy offers an alphabetical-by-type compendium of Shakespeare’s many mentions of flowers that also includes helpful definitions of what each flower represented in his time and ours.
In addition to demonstrating Shakespeare’s appreciation for and command of the literal and metaphorical language of flowers (and of flowers themselves), the book also hints at his love of his queen and patron and also at his ties to the realms of medicine (a.k.a., “physick”) , romance (a.k.a., sex), and Elizabethan locavorism (a.k.a., standard practice). Unlike Shakespeare himself, Quealy fully credits and thanks her predecessors and even allows a woman (no less than Dame Helen Mirren!) to offer the introduction. Even so, it is his words that shine most brightly, even among the dunnest buds and shrubberies.
Though that which we call a rose by any other name might indeed smell as sweet (as Juliet is so oft quoted as claiming), but the myriad meanings revealed among the fair flower’s its nearly 70 citations (and the fact that a war was allegedly fought over them during Shakespeare’s age) surely requires further exploration and elucidation- both of which Qualey offers in this beautifully-illustrated and lovingly-rendered tome.
– Matt Robinson
