Shakespeare's Botanical Imagination

"Writing on the cusp of modern botany and during the heyday of English herbals and garden manuals, Shakespeare references at least 180 plants in his works and makes countless allusions to horticultural and botanical practices. Shakespeare's Botanical Imagination moves plants to the foreground of analysis and brings together some of the rich and innovative ways that scholars are expanding the discussion of plants and botany in Shakespeare's writings. The essays gathered here all emphasize the interdependence and entanglement of plants with humans and human life, whether culturally, socially, or materially, and vividly illustrate the fundamental role plants play in human identity. As they attend to the affinities and shared materiality between plants and humans in Shakespeare's works, these essays complicate the comfortable Aristotelian hierarchy of human-animal-plant. And as they do, they often challenge the privileged position of humans in relation to non-human life."-- Back cover Table of Contents 5 List of Figures 7 Acknowledgments 9 Introduction 11 Part 1. Plant Power and Agency 43 1. Vegetable Virtues 43 2. The “idle weeds that grow in the sustaining corn”: Generating Plants in King Lear 63 3. Botanical Barbary: Punning, Race, and Plant Life in Othello 4.3 87 Part 2. Human-Vegetable Affinities and Transformations 105 4. Shakespeare’s Botanical Grace 105 5. “Circummured” Plants and Women in Measure for Measure 127 6. Cymbeline’s Plant People 149 7. ‘Thou art translated’: Plants of Passage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 171 Part 3. Plants and Temporalities 193 8. Clockwork Plants and Shakespeare’s Overlapping Notions of Time 193 9. The Verdant Imagination in Shakespeare’s Sonnets 219 10. The Botanical Revisions of 3 Henry VI 243 11. Botanomorphism and Temporality: Imagining Humans as Plants in Two Shakespeare Plays 267 Afterword 285 Index 295