The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare Part 3

The storehouse of our ancestors' pagan mythology was in Ovid, and his well-known lines are--

"c.u.m flos e sanguine concolor ortus Qualem, quae; lento celant sub cortice granum Punica ferre solent; brevis est tamen usus in illis, Namque male haerentem, et nimia brevitate caduc.u.m Excutiunt idem qui praestant nomina, venti,"--

Thus translated by Golding in 1567, from whom it is very probable that Shakespeare obtained his information--

"Of all one colour with the bloud, a flower she there did find, Even like the flower of that same tree, whose fruit in tender rind Have pleasant graines enclosede--howbeit the use of them is short, For why, the leaves do hang so loose through lightnesse in such sort, As that the windes that all things pierce[15:1] with everie little blast Do shake them off and shed them so as long they cannot last."[15:2]

I feel sure that Shakespeare had some particular flower in view. Spenser only speaks of it as a flower, and gives no description--

"In which with cunning hand was pourtrahed The love of Venus and her Paramoure, The fayre Adonis, turned to a flowre."

_F. Q._, iii, 1, 34.

"When she saw no help might him restore Him to a dainty flowre she did transmew."

_F. Q._, iii, 1, 38.

Ben Jonson similarly speaks of it as "Adonis' flower" (Pan's Anniversary), but with Shakespeare it is different; he describes the flower minutely, and as if it were a well-known flower, "purple chequered with white," and considering that in his day Anemone was supposed to be Adonis' flower (as it was described in 1647 by Alexander Ross in his "Mystagogus Poeticus," who says that Adonis "was by Venus turned into a red flower called Anemone"), and as I wish, if possible, to link the description to some special flower, I conclude that the evidence is in favour of the Anemone. Gerard's Anemone was certainly the same as ours, and the "purple" colour is no objection, for "purple" in Shakespeare's time had a very wide signification, meaning almost any bright colour, just as _purpureus_ had in Latin,[16:1] which had so wide a range that it was used on the one hand as the epithet of the blood and the poppy, and on the other as the epithet of the swan ("purpureis ales oloribus," Horace) and of a woman's white arms ("brachia purpurea candidiora nive," Albinova.n.u.s). Nor was "chequered" confined to square divisions, as it usually is now, but included spots of any size or shape.

We have transferred the Greek name of Anemone to the English language, and we have further kept the Greek idea in the English form of "wind-flower." The name is explained by Pliny: "The flower hath the propertie to open but when the wind doth blow, wherefore it took the name Anemone in Greeke" ("Nat. Hist." xxi. 11, Holland's translation).

This, however, is not the character of the Anemone as grown in English gardens; and so it is probable that the name has been transferred to a different plant than the cla.s.sical one, and I think no suggestion more probable than Dr. Prior's that the cla.s.sical Anemone was the Cistus, a shrub that is very abundant in the South of Europe; that certainly opens its flowers at other times than when the wind blows, and so will not well answer to Pliny's description, but of which the flowers are bright-coloured and most fugacious, and so will answer to Ovid's description. This fugacious character of the Anemone is perpetuated in Sir William Jones' lines ("Poet. Works," i, 254, ed. 1810)--

"Youth, like a thin Anemone, displays His silken leaf, and in a morn decays;"

but the lines, though cla.s.sical, are not true of the Anemone, though they would well apply to the Cistus.[17:1]

Our English Anemones belong to a large family inhabiting cold and temperate regions, and numbering seventy species, of which three are British.[17:2] These are A. Nemorosa, the common wood Anemone, the brightest spring ornament of our woods; A. Apennina, abundant in the South of Europe, and a doubtful British plant; and A. pulsatilla, the Pa.s.se, or Pasque flower, _i.e._, the flower of Easter, one of the most beautiful of our British flowers, but only to be found on the chalk formation.

FOOTNOTES:

[15:1] Golding evidently adopted the reading "qui perflant omnia,"

instead of the reading now generally received, "qui praestant nomina."

[15:2] Gerard thought that Ovid's Anemone was the Venice Mallow--_Hibiscus trionum_--a handsome annual from the South of Europe.

[16:1] In the "Nineteenth Century" for October, 1877, is an interesting article by Mr. Gladstone on the "colour-sense" in Homer, proving that Homer, and all nations in the earlier stages of their existence, have a very limited perception of colour, and a very limited and loosely applied nomenclature of colours. The same remark would certainly apply to the early English writers, not excluding Shakespeare.

[17:1] Mr. Leo Grindon also identifies the cla.s.sical Anemone with the Cistus. See a good account of it in "Gardener's Chronicle," June 3, 1876.

[17:2] The small yellow A. ranunculoides has been sometimes included among the British Anemones, but is now excluded. It is a rare plant, and an alien.

APPLE.

(1) _Sebastian._

I think he will carry this island home and give it his son for an Apple.

_Tempest_, act ii, sc. 1 (91).

(2) _Malvolio._

Not yet old enough for a man, nor young enough for a boy; as a Squash is before 'tis a Peascod, or a Codling when 'tis almost an Apple.

_Twelfth Night_, act i, sc. 5 (165).

(3) _Antonio._

An Apple, cleft in two, is not more twin Than these two creatures.

_Ibid._, act 5, sc. 1 (230).

(4) _Antonio._

An evil soul producing holy witness Is like a villain with a smiling cheek, A goodly Apple rotten at the heart.

_Merchant of Venice_, act i, sc. 3 (100).

(5) _Tranio._

He in countenance somewhat doth resemble you.

_Biondello._

As much as an Apple doth an oyster, and all one.

_Taming of the Shrew_, act iv, sc. 2 (100).

(6) _Orleans._

Foolish curs, that run winking into the mouth of a Russian bear, and have their heads crushed like rotten Apples.

_Henry V_, act iii, sc. 7 (153).

(7) _Hortensio._

Faith, as you say, there's small choice in rotten Apples.