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Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination

Environmental Humanities
in Pre-modern Cultures
This series in environmental humanities offers approaches to medieval, early
modern, and global pre-industrial cultures from interdisciplinary environmental
perspectives. We invite submissions (both monographs and edited collections)
in the fields of ecocriticism, specifically ecofeminism and new ecocritical
analyses of under-represented literatures; queer ecologies; posthumanism;
waste studies; environmental history; environmental archaeology; animal
studies and zooarchaeology; landscape studies; ‘blue humanities’, and studies
of environmental/natural disasters and change and their effects on pre-modern
cultures.
Series Editor
Heide Estes, University of Cambridge and Monmouth University
Editorial Board
Steven Mentz, St. John’s University
Gillian Overing, Wake Forest University
Philip Slavin, University of Kent

Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination
Edited by
Susan C. Staub
Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Crane, Walter. “Eglantine.” Flowers from Shakespeare’s garden. [London]:
Cassell & Co., Ltd, https://library.si.edu/digital-library/book/flowersfromshak00cran.
Courtesy of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives.
Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden
Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout
isbn
978 94 6372 133 2
e-isbn 978 90 4855 110 1
doi 10.5117/9789463721332
nur 685
© The authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2023 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of
this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise)
without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.
Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations
reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is
advised to contact the publisher.

T
List of Figures 7
Acknowledgments 9
Introduction 11
Susan C. Staub
Part 1 P
1. V 43
Rebecca Bushnell
2. T: Generating
Plants in King Lear 63
Susan C. Staub
3. B: Punning, Race, and Plant Life in Othello 4.3 87
Hillary M. Nunn
Part 2 H
Transformations
4.
S 105
Rebecca Totaro
5. “Measure for Measure 127
Claire Duncan
6. C ’s Plant People 149
Jeffrey Theis
7. ‘: Plants of Passage in A Midsummer Night’s
Dream 171
Lisa Hopkins

Part 3 P
8. C
Notions of Time 193
Miranda Wilson
9. T 219
Elizabeth D. Gruber
10. T3 Henry VI 243
Jason Hogue
11. B: Imagining Humans as
Plants in Two Shakespeare Plays 267
Elizabeth Crachiolo
Afterword 285
Vin Nardizzi
Index 295

L
Figure 1 TThe Herball or Generall Historie
of Plantes, by John Norton, London, 1597. Special Collec-
tions, Getty Research Institute, J. Paul Getty Trust, Los
Angeles. Courtesy of HathiTrust. 12
Figure 2 FA Treatise of Fruit Trees
(Oxford, 1653). This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
135
Figure 3 AMagnes
siue de arte magnetica opvs tripartitvm. Rome: 1641.
Photo courtesy of Special Collections, The University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press, Newark, Delaware.
195
Figure 4 “
dial and a sundial (1550–1570). From the workshop of Christoph Schissler. Courtesy of The Walters Art
Museum, Baltimore.
199
Figure 5 T Paradisi in
Sole. Woodcut by Christopher Switzer. Photo courtesy
of Special Collections, The University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press, Newark, Delaware.
203
Figure 6 F
Martin Parker, “Take Time , While Time Is,” first
printed in the last years of James I and reprinted in 1638. © British Library Board, The Roxburghe Ballads Collection, C.20.f.7.398–399.
213

Acknowledgments
As I began developing this collection, I approached both established and
emerging scholars whose work I admired and whom I wanted to put in
conversation. Although I knew their scholarship, some of them I had never
met. I thank my contributors for trusting me and the project and for sticking
with it through all the turmoil of the pandemic—and for their lovely essays.
My editor, Erika Gaffney, has been invaluable in guiding me through this
process and patiently answering my endless questions. My thanks as well
to Chantal Nicolaes, the project manager at Amsterdam, whose care and
diligence I greatly appreciated as the book moved toward production. I
am also grateful to the reviewers whose suggestions made this a better
collection. I thank Vin Nardizzi for his wisdom and generosity, as well as
Rebecca Bushnell, Lisa Hopkins, and Rebecca Totaro for their advice. I also
want to express my appreciation to Shawn Whitener and Ellen Burnette in
Information Technology Services at my university, who were extraordinarily
helpful in sorting through some knotty formatting issues. Last, but not least,
I am grateful to my “ever faithful research assistant,” Steven H. Smith, who is
not an academic, but who learned how to use all the databases—including
EEBO—in order to help me check the footnotes and bibliographic entries.
His meticulous work and keen eye saved me a lot of grief.

Introduction
Susan C. Staub
Abstract
This introduction summarizes some of the different ways that plants are
enmeshed in all aspects of human life in the early modern period and in
Shakespeare’s works. It points to the many ways that plants in the period
are vital and active, part of a network of meaning that belies our own sense
of the word “vegetable.” These various interpretations of plants provide
context for the essays gathered in this volume. Essays in this collection
show the power plants have to interact with and affect humans; how the
boundary between plant and human is often blurred; and how considering
temporality in conjunction with plants forces a reconsideration both of
time and of human life.
Keywords: vitalism, trans-corporeality, indistinction, critical plant studies,
ecocriticism
In May 2015, botanist Mark Griffiths ignited a firestorm among Shakespeare
scholars with his identification of one of the male figures on the 1597 title
page of John Gerard’s Herball , or Generall Historie of Plantes as Shakespeare.
Hailing it as the “literary discovery of the century,” the editor of Country Life,
where Griffiths detailed his rationale for the identification, proclaimed the
image “the only known and demonstrably authentic portrait of the world’s
greatest writer made in his lifetime.” “This is Shakespeare in his pomp with
a film star’s good looks, sharing the company of Lord Burghley, the most
powerful man in the land. It changes a great deal of what we know about
the Bard,” the editor crowed.
1
Claiming to have “cracked the Tudor code,”
1
M
tweetstorm. In reaction, Stanley Wells tweeted, “So apparently Shakespeare went around in fancy
dress holding a fritillary in one hand and a cob of corn in the other.” Shakespeare Magazine@
UKShakespeare tweeted an image of the Incredible Hulk in a ruff with the caption, “Incredibly,
Staub, S.C. (ed.), Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2023
doi 10.5117/9789463721332_intro

12 Susan C. Staub
Figure 1: Griffiths’ hypothetical Shakespeare figure, circled. Title page. John Gerard, The Herball or
Generall Historie of Plantes, by John Norton, 1597. Special Collections, Getty Research Institute, J.
Paul Getty Trust, Los Angeles. Courtesy of HathiTrust.

Introdction 13
Griffiths examined the elements of the image, in particular, the laurel on
the man’s head, the snake’s head fritillary in his right hand and the ear of
corn in his left, and the symbol on the plinth underneath the figure, to prove
his claim.
2
News of Griffiths’ “discovery” quickly spread across the world
with headlines heralding the find: “‘True face of Shakespeare’ appears in
botany book,” the BBC declared; “William Shakespeare: Newly-discovered
image revealed,” asserted The Telegraph matter-of-factly. A headline in
The Washington Post was a bit cheekier: “Is this 400-year-old portrait of a
hunky corn enthusiast really Shakespeare’s ‘true face’?” it asked.
3
Although
Griffiths’ identification has been contested, it is not hard to see why such a
claim might be appealing, especially to scholars interested in Shakespeare’s
botanical knowledge.
4
Shakespeare has long been praised as the poet of nature—a “natural”
genius inspired by the nonhuman world around him and of which he
seemed to have intimate knowledge.
5
His plays teem with various kinds of
fauna—with lions, and tigers, and bears; with maggots, flies, and worms.
Buffeted by storms, devoured by animals, defined by the ebb and flow of
this genuine portrait of William Shakespeare has been hiding in plain sight for four centuries
…,” to cite just two among other snarky tweets that erupted with the publication of The Country
Life article.
2
G
the flower into which Adonis is transformed in Venus and Adonis , the corn, Marcus’s call for
Rome to gather “this scatter’d corn into one mutual sheaf” in Titus Andronicus . But as scholars
have pointed out, there is disagreement about what flower Adonis’s blood generates and the
corn referenced in Titus is grain rather than maize. After scholars disputed his identification,
Griffiths followed up with “Why the fourth man can’t be anybody but Shakespeare.”
3 Tim Masters, “‘True Face of Shakespeare’,” BBC News; Anita Singh, “William Shakespeare:
Newly-Discovered,” The Telegraph; Abby Ohlheiser, “Is This 400-Year-Old Portrait,” Washington
Post. Some scholars have suggested Shakespeare knew Gerard; others that he had a hand in
writing Gerard’s Herbal.
4
A
century with Carl Linnaeus’ Systemae Naturae (1735), we can certainly see the beginnings of
botany in Shakespeare’s time. Leah Knight classifies the use of the word “botany” in the period
as a “harmless anachronism” (“Botany,” 276). In this volume, I use the word botany broadly
to cover anything plant related, including horticultural, gardening, and herbal medical and
domestic practices.
5 S
1067. By “nature” Johnson meant human life more generally, but this phrase has since been used
to suggest Shakespeare’s keen interest in the organic world as well. And as Johnson articulates
his defense of Shakespeare’s less learned writing as compared to other authors, he uses botanical
analogies: Shakespeare’s plays, he explains, are “a forest, in which oaks extend their branches, and pines tower in the air, interspersed sometimes with weeds and brambles, and sometimes giving shelter to myrtles and roses” (1076).

14 Susan C. Staub
the Nile River, Shakespeare’s characters often seem profoundly aware of
the natural realm—not simply of the changing seasons and weather and
the natural cycles of life and death they reflect, but also of the disturbances
wrought by human intrusions upon that world. And his plays are filled
with the language of plants. Writing on the cusp of modern botany and
also during the heyday of English herbals and garden manuals in what
Leah Knight characterizes as “an English botanical renaissance”
6
(the first
original English herbal, William Turner’s A New Herbal was in progress the
year Shakespeare was born, the third volume published in 1568; Henry Lyte’s
A Niewe Herball or Historie of Plantes in 1578; Gerard’s enormously influential
Herball in 1597), Shakespeare references at least 180 plants in his works
7
as
well as makes numerous allusions to horticultural and botanical practices
such as grafting, pruning, weeding, and coppicing. As he does so, he suggests
the intimate interconnectedness between plant and human life that seems
to be severed when the human/nonhuman binary is reified concurrent with
more scientific studies of the botanical world in the eighteenth century.
Plants have been of interest to Shakespeare scholars at least since the
nineteenth century, resulting in a subgenre of collections of Shakespeare’s
plant references that continues to this day. Studies such as Henry Ella-
combe’s Plant-Lore and Garden-Craft of Shakespeare (1878) and Leopold
Harley Grindon’s The Shakespeare Flora (1883) tended to be encyclopedic
in scope, cataloging the plants in alphabetical order, identifying them, and
pointing to their specific occurrences in Shakespeare’s works or listing
and describing them play by play.
8
One need only look at the number of
6 Knight, Of Books and Botany, 6. As Knight points out elsewhere, “Shakespeare’s life happened
to span one of the most productive historical periods in the accumulation of basic botanical
knowledge, if not its systemization” (“Botany,” 281). A New Herbal was published in three installa -
tions, in 1551, 1562, and 1568. Earlier herbals, such as Lyte’s Niewe Herbal , were largely translations.
Turner’s work differed in that it sought to name and define English plants accurately and to
describe them from personal observation (Rydén, Shakespearean Plant Names , 15). Although he
has often been accused of being a self-aggrandizing plagiarist, Gerard’s influence in the period
is indisputable. Knight offers an interesting refutation of the claims made against Gerard, Of
Books and Botany, 78–83. See also, Sarah Neville, Early Modern Herbals and the Book Trade ,
244–62.
7 Scholars differ on the exact count. Rydén counts 190 (Shakespeare’s Plant Names, 20).
8
Ellacombe, Plant-Lore and the Garden-Craft of Shakespeare (1878 ); Grindon, The Shakespeare
Flora (1883). Other earlier studies include Sidney Beisly, Shakspere’s Garden (1864); J. H. Bloom,
Shakespeare’s Garden (1903); Esther Singleton, The Shakespeare Garden (1922); Frederick Savage,
The Flora and Folklore of Shakespeare (1923); and Eleanour Rohde, Shakespeare’s Wild Flowers:
Fairy Lore, Garden (1935). Ellacombe’s study remains one of the most thorough and useful of
these early works. The later twentieth century saw the publication of Jessica Kerr, Shakespeare’s
Flowers (1969) and Mats Rydén, Shakespearean Plant Names: Identifications and Interpretations

Introdction 15
Shakespeare gardens the world over for proof of the historic fascination with
Shakespeare’s plants even beyond scholarship. Nonetheless, only recently,
influenced by ecocritical studies, as well as related critical methodologies
such as ecofeminism, posthumanism, and new materialism have scholars
broadened and complicated the analysis of Shakespeare’s botanizing. This
recent work has elucidated the cultural, ideological, and material importance
of Shakespeare’s plant life.
9
In the last ten years or so, the more general field of Environmental Hu-
manities has likewise witnessed an intensifying interest in plants, what
scholars refer to as a “vegetal turn.” According to Jeffrey T. Nealon, plants
“are becoming the new animals.”
10
Many of the debates in contemporary
scholarship have been important to the newer field of critical plant studies
(CPS) as well. CPS seeks to remedy the Western tendency to devalue plants as
merely utilitarian and separate from humans apart from their use value.
11
In
(1978). More recent compilations include Vivian Thomas and Nicki Faircloth, Shakespeare’s
Plants and Gardens: A Dictionary (2014); Margaret Willes, A Shakespearean Botanical (2015);
and Gerit Quealy, Botanical Shakespeare (2017).
9 A
plants are growing. Early ecocritical work on Shakespeare such as Todd Borlik’s Ecocriticism and
Early Modern English Literature and Gabriel Egan’s Green Shakespeare both touch on plants: Borlik
on the effects of climate change and Egan on plant-human analogies in several of Shakespeare’s
plays. In Wooden Os Vin Nardizzi considers the material presence of trees in Shakespearean
theater and culture; similarly, Jeffrey Theis posits the interplay between deforestation, nation
building, and pastoral in several chapters in Writing the Forest in Early Modern England . Charlotte
Scott’s Shakespeare’s Nature: From Cultivation to Culture offers a fascinating examination of the
implications of the language and practice of husbandry in the plays. While not strictly about
Shakespeare, Amy Tigner’s Literature and the Renaissance Garden from Elizabeth I to Charles I
considers the varied aspects of the garden, particularly its political meanings in several plays.
Victoria Bladen’s recent book, The Tree of Life and Arboreal Aesthetics in Early Modern Literature,
likewise includes a chapter on Shakespeare. Rebecca Laroche and Jennifer Munroe have been at
the forefront of recovering women’s domestic engagement with plants in the period, and their
book Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory includes a provocative section on Shakespeare’s plants
that reconfigures women and plants as “active, co-creative subjects, not passive objects for male
(and ‘human’ as an extension of dominant male) consumption” (120). Two book length studies
are in progress at the time I write: Jessica Rosenberg’s book Botanical Poetics, forthcoming in
2022, and Bonnie Lander Johnson, Shakespeare’s Plants: Botany and Belief in Elizabethan London.
Other important work on Shakespeare’s botany has been published in individual essays in
journals and collections too numerous to recount here. In putting together this volume, I’ve
come to recognize the broad, rich, and active scholarly work both in terms of methodology and
international range being done on early modern plants that extends far beyond what this volume
can cover. Much of that scholarship influences this introduction and the essays gathered here.
10
Nealon, Plant Theory, xiv.
11
MPlants as Persons , 8. See also, Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking , one of the
most influential texts in critical plant studies.

16 Susan C. Staub
Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, a work that has become one of the
seminal texts of critical plant studies and that makes several appearances in
this collection, Michael Marder laments the marginal status often accorded
to plants, noting that although they are all around us and we depend upon
them for survival—for food, clothing, shelter, pleasure—plants tend to
exist only in the background for most humans. He contends, “Plants are
the weeds of metaphysics: devalued, unwanted in its carefully cultivated
garden, yet growing in-between the classical categories of the thing, the
animal, and the human.”
12
Similarly, Michael Pollan depicts plants as “the
mute, immobile furniture of our world—useful enough, and generally
attractive, but obviously second-class citizens in the republic of life on
Earth.”
13
Characterizing plant-life as a blind spot in metaphysics, Marder
calls for a reevaluation of plant ontology. Such a rethinking, he argues, would
reconfigure the traditional hierarchies of Western thought, a goal articulated
by several of the essays in Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination as well.
As Hannah Stark explains, “The last few years has seen the eruption
of a vigorous and intensifying debate about the place of plants in human
systems of meaning, including their cultural life, their discursive framing in
academic and popular understandings, and their philosophical meaning.”
14

Like animal studies, critical plant studies contests the privileged place of
human over nonhuman life as it examines that relationship using a variety
of disciplinary lenses. In this scholarship, plants are recognized as having
agency, sentience, and even desire, interestingly, harking back to the early
modern vitalist beliefs that I will discuss below and that several essays in
this collection consider. These arguments seek to counter the long-held
interpretation of plants as deficient, an assessment prominent in classical
Greek philosophy and developed by Christian philosophers. Critical plant
studies scholars are especially interested in the historical and continuing
connection of plants with biopolitics.
15
Of particular importance is the
emphasis CPS places on the heteronomy of plants, their dependence on soil,
sun, climate, animals, humans, etc. for their existence, allowing studies of
plants to probe the nested aspect of all of nature, human and nonhuman,
that ecocriticism has long emphasized. Furthermore, as it endeavors to bring
plants “back into history” and to imagine “a vegetal subjectivity … defined
… by collectivity rather than individuality,” critical plant studies articulates
12
M Plant-Thinking, 90.
13 Pollan, “Foreword,” Brilliant Green, xi.
14 Stark, “Deleuze and Critical Plant Studies,” 180.
15 Catriona Sandilands, “Plants,” 157.

Introdction 17
a goal similar to that of ecofeminism: to speak “for all marginalized beings
as it speaks for plants.”
16
Essays in this collection engage with this scholarship by emphasizing
the interdependence and entanglement of plants with humans and human
life in Shakespeare’s works. As Mats Rydén asserts, “With their virtues and
properties (real or imagined) plants were, to an extent unknown today, in
the centre of everyone’s life.”
17
Similarly, as Rebecca Bushnell notes in this
collection, discussions of plant blindness often fail to take early modern
plant-thinking into account. Further, while contemporary culture tends
to consider plants as passive, sessile, and senseless, using the adjectives
“vegetative” and “plant-like” to connote privation and stasis, early modern
notions of plants imagine something significantly more vital.
18
Obviously,
plants are fundamental to human survival, but Shakespeare’s varied use of
them suggests that they represent an essential part of human identity. In our
interest in engaging with plants in ways that show their interconnection with
human identity as well as in their participation in “networks of meaning that
are ‘simultaneously real, social and narrated,’” we at least partially diverge
from Marder, who posits the absolute ontological otherness of plants.
19
It is to this network of meanings that Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagina -
tion attends, analyzing both the material, literal plants as well as their
symbolic functions in Shakespeare’s writings. And as it does so, it takes
its cue partly from Feerick and Nardizzi’s The Indistinct Human in Renais-
sance Literature, among other scholarship, as it seeks to call attention to
the “soft boundary” between the human and nonhuman and to add a few
kinks to the Great Chain of Being.
20
Taken together, these essays extend the
challenge increasingly being made by animal studies, critical plant studies,
16 N
human autonomy, see Marder, Plant-Thinking , 67–74. Curiously, Marder sees freedom in plant
dependency.
17 Rydén, Shakespearean Plant Names, 17.
18
P
concedes, 21; their roots spread, their branches and stems reach upwards; their flowers and
leaves turn toward the sun; their seeds scatter; and, as anyone who gardens can attest, they
jump all over the landscape. More recent studies have shown that they also react emotionally,
such as in distress when insects nibble on their leaves.
19
Boehrer, Animal Characters, 186. Boehrer is here answering Erika Fudge’s insistence that
animals be read as animals rather than symbols.
20 JThe Indistinct Human , 3. Once disparaged
as too simplistic in its assessment of the hierarchy of nature, E. M. W. Tillyard’s Great Chain
of Being has been recuperated. See, for instance, Robert N. Watson, “The Ecology of Self in
Midsummer Night’s Dream” and Gabriel Egan, “Gaia and the Great Chain of Being.”

18 Susan C. Staub
and posthumanism about the privileged position of humans in relation
to non-human life, a consideration critical to confronting the ecological
crises of the Anthropocene. While animals have dominated discussions of
the nonhuman, a focus on plants allows us to further recognize the ethical
implications of the shared materiality of all animate and inanimate things
that Jane Bennett theorizes in her book Vibrant Matter.
21
We expand not
just the anthropocentric but the zoocentic to include plants, thus further
complicating the binary between human-nonhuman creation and interrogat-
ing both what it is to be human and narratives of human exceptionalism. This
collection, then, develops the kind of “plant thinking” that Brits and Gibson
characterize as “an exploration of the paradoxes of human exceptionalism”
by refocusing on plants “as more than a backdrop to human action.”
22
Marder points to Aristotle’s typology of the tripartite soul (vegetative,
sensitive, and intellectual) as the originary source for the denigration of
plants as a lesser creation. Since Aristotle, he maintains, plants have been
perceived as deficient—lacking eyes, reason, speech, desire; in other words,
plants lack agency.
23
Historically, Aristotle’s system has been read hierarchi-
cally, placing plants at the bottom, above minerals, but below sensitive
animals and rational humans. In this schema, however, the plant-soul is
characterized by its impulse toward generation, nutrition, and growth,
activities that all living creatures have in common. Although humans may
claim superiority, or at least uniqueness, because they are animated by all
three souls, “all matter is ensouled,” as Feerick and Nardizzi emphasize. The
higher souls build on each lower one, resulting in what Renaissance natural
philosophy dubs “indistinction.”

Even early modern thinkers who assert
humankind’s privileged position nonetheless recognize it as contingent and
tenuous, particularly in regards to the “‘lower’ faculties” such as fertility and
reproduction.
24
For Galen plants are foundational: “the first principle of all
things is that of a plant, which produces artery and vein and nerve, bone
also, not from blood, but from seed itself.”
25
We might even argue that they
are “prehuman,” a level of existence that seems to fascinate Shakespeare
and that we see in his concern with the boundaries separating human and
nonhuman, according to Boehrer.
26
Milton will later take this continuum
to its logical conclusion with his suggestion that all of creation derives from
21
Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 12–13.
22 Baylee Brits and Prudence Gibson, “Introduction,” Covert Plants , 16.
23 Marder, Plant-Thinking, 20–23.
24 Feerick and Nardizzi, The Indistinct Human , 2–4.
25 Galen, De Semine, quoted in Linda Deer Richardson, Academic Theories of Generation , 65.
26 Boehrer, “Shakespeare and the Character of Sheep,” 58.

Introdction 19
the same matter, “one first matter all” (5.471). In Book 5 of Paradise Lost
when Raphael depicts the human ascent to spirituality as a tree, the roots
growing into the lighter “green stalk, from thence the leaves / More aery,
last the bright consummate flow’r / Spirits odorous breathes,” he makes
this slippage explicit (5.481–82).
27
The three-part soul schema can thus be
reinterpreted as a continuum of lifeforms, a non-binary schema in which
humans share characteristics not just with animals but with botanical life,
resulting in a disquieting blurring of categories in the scala naturae in the
period.
28
One need only consider speculation about hybrid plant life forms,
what Jean Bodin names “plantanimals,” to get a sense of this fluidity.
29

(The vegetable lamb, the barnacle goose, and even the infamous mandrake
provide examples of such hybrid forms.) Aristotle’s schema of the tripartite
soul hovers in the background of several of these essays not only because it
points to the permeable boundaries between human and vegetable, but also
because plant-soul functions emphasize reproduction, growth, and decay,
a focus that at once connects plant life to human generation (discussed in
my essay and Claire Duncan’s) and that also emphasizes plants as markers
of time, an aspect of plant life touched upon by Theis and Hopkins and
developed most fully in the essays in Part 3: “Plants and Temporalities.”
Discussing nature more generally, early modern ecocritical scholars have
long noted the “sprawling mesh of interconnection without a definite center
or edge” that Timothy Morton argues is necessary to ecological thought.
30
Gail
Kern Paster’s important work on the humors has elucidated the reciprocal
and hence the ecological nature of embodiment in the period in her analyses
of the various exchanges between the body and the world.
31
Mary Floyd-
Wilson similarly argues that early modern people lived their lives “with the
conviction that their emotions, behavior and practices were affected by and
dependent on, secret sympathies and antipathies that coursed through the
natural world,” a system that calls humankind’s place in it into question.
32

All matter was vital, animated by a kind of spirit that coursed throughout
27
M Paradise Lost, edited by Merritt Y. Hughes.
28 See Bushnell, The Marvels of the World , 73–74. See also, Edward J. Geisweidt, “Horticulture
of the Head,” para. 4–6.
29
F
not,” known for its sensitivity to any kind of touch as an example of plantanimal (394). On the
barnacle goose tree and the vegetable lamb, see Whitney Anne Trettien, “Plant→Animal→Book.”
30 Morton, The Ecological Thought, 8.
31 See, for example, Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body .
32
Floyd-Wilson, Occult Knowledge, 1. See also, Tom MacFaul, Shakespeare and the Natural
World, 1.

20 Susan C. Staub
the universe. Such vitalist ideas posit a reciprocity among things, “an ebb
and flow of exchange” between human bodies and environment where
both transform and shape the other.
33
As Leah S. Marcus explains, early
modern vitalists believed “in some type of invisible, immanent force or
network of forces, whether material or immaterial, that operates within
and between things, linking them and determining their relations with
each other.”
34
Once dismissed as superstition, contemporary scholars such
as Jane Bennett have recovered aspects of early modern vitalist thought
(now sometimes referred to as neo or new vitalism) as a way to contend with
current environmental concerns. The recuperation of vitalist ideas is crucial
to contemporary efforts to redefine our relationship with the nonhuman
because as Bennett explains, it flattens hierarchical notions of the world
and as it does, “the implicit moral imperative of Western thought—‘Thou
shall identify and defend what is special about Man’—loses some of its
salience.”
35
Stacy Alaimo’s concept of trans-corporeality—the idea that “all
creatures, as embodied beings, are intermeshed with the dynamic, material
world, which crosses through them, transforms them, and is transformed
by them”—conveys a similar relationship and provides a useful tool for
investigating aspects of Shakespeare’s plant thinking.
36
Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination considers various aspects of Shake -
speare’s plants: the literal plants in all their materiality; the symbolic mean-
ings of plants; and the ways the rhetoric of plants elucidates human life and
social structures. As Leah Knight explains, in Shakespeare and elsewhere
in early modern culture, plants were not simply a part of everyday life; they
“offered a lexical field to which Shakespeare and his contemporaries knew
they could appeal and be largely understood.”
37
These essays illustrate how
plants are interwoven into all aspects of early modern life—in medicine
and domestic life; in folklore; in configurations of class, race, and gender; in
monarchical and political rhetoric. Botanical discourse in the period was
social discourse; the cultivation of plants was analogous to the cultivation
of people. As several recent scholars have shown, botanic language is deeply
encoded into the very structures of Renaissance life.
38
In their dictionary
33
MEnvironment and Embodiment , 4.
34 Marcus, “Why the ‘Pathetic Fallacy’ Isn’t One,” 13.
35
Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 112. On the recovery of vitalist thought, see Marcus, “Why the
‘Pathetic Fallacy’ Isn’t One,” 13.
36 Alaimo, “Trans-corporeality,” 435.
37 Knight, “Botany,” 281.
38
CShakespeare’s Nature .
Looking at the rhetoric of gardening and horticultural manuals, Rebecca Bushnell similarly

Introdction 21
of Shakespeare’s plant lore, Vivian Thomas and Nicki Faircloth provide an
apt summary: “Plants were freighted with meaning, spiritual, emotional,
and medicinal: they possessed a voice which could be simple and direct,
or multivalent and perplexing.”
39
It is those multiple plant voices that this
collection contemplates.
The thread that runs throughout this collection is the blurring of bounda-
ries—between human and plant, cultivated and wild, magic and science, art
and nature; between life and death and between various constructs of time.
All of the essays in this collection engage in some way with two overlap-
ping questions central to much current scholarship: what is humankind’s
relationship to the nonhuman? And, concomitantly, what does it mean to
be human? Early modern animal studies scholars have been at the forefront
of these conversations for some twenty years now, but only recently have
scholars started thinking in similar ways regarding plants. This collection
has two main goals: to move plants to the foreground, showing how they
are dynamic and vital actors on Shakespeare’s stage and to point to the
intimate interconnection between humans and plants. Many of these essays
also complicate the traditional hierarchy of human-animal-plant.
What makes Shakespeare’s moment in botanical history so interesting is
its intermingling of older ideas about vegetal life with the nascent scientific
interests evident in various botanical writings in the period. Although
the focus remained largely medicinal and agricultural (and sometimes
economic), attempts to categorize plants systematically and to move beyond
classical authorities such as Aristotle, Pliny, and Theophrastus through
empirical study and first-hand observation of plants in their habitats point
to a growing scientific bent that began in earnest in the sixteenth century.
40

The concern with naming plants and chronicling their usefulness to human
bodies that the popularity of herbals indicates suggests the tension inherent
in humankind’s relationship to plants. While cataloguing and standard-
izing the names of plants was an essential goal of herbals, they also sought
to describe each plant, setting forth its medicinal and other effects on
argues that “the self could be imagined as cultured or cultivated,” A Culture of Teaching , 81. The
growing number of essays on Shakespeare’s plays that investigate grafting and its connection
to gender, marriage, and race attests to this use of botanical discourse. As Bushnell points out,
debates over plant cultivation “were often coded debates about the natural order of human
society,” The Marvels of the World, 74.
39
Thomas and Faircloth, Shakespeare’s Plants and Gardens , 1.
40
MShakespearean Plant Names, 13. Peter Harrison suggests that this turn toward
more direct engagement with nature was motivated by “a general impulse to reform the spheres
of religion and learning,” “Natural History,” 123.

22 Susan C. Staub
human bodies, but also indicating how and where each plant grows and in
which season. In addition to their “affects and effects,” what they refer to as
“virtues,” herbals chronicle the lifecycles—the seasons and growth patterns
as well as the places and environments—the ecoclimates—where certain
plants grow, thus creating a temporal and geographic record of vegetal life
that offers parallels and tropes with which to interpret human life. Gerard,
for instance, always enumerates where each plant grows, when it is in season
or when it will flower, speaking in terms of “flourishing and fading.” He
notes of cowslips, for example, that “they ioie in moist and dankish places,”
even locating them precisely in “a woode called Clapdale, three miles from
a towne in Yorkeshire called Settle.” He continues by explaining that they
“flourish from Aprill to the end of May, and some one or other of them do
flower all the winterlong.”
41
He depicts a plant time that is cyclic—recurring
and regenerating—and plants that are abounding—spreading roots and
growing upwards and outwards.
The descriptions and woodcut illustrations that accompany the plants
often anatomize them into parts—leaves, stems, flowers, fruits, roots—in
ways that mimic early modern anatomy manuals and thus connect with
other scientific endeavors from the period. This blazoning of plant parts in
some ways replicates the blazoning of the sonnet lady and to similar effect:
dismembering, fragmenting, and potentially silencing its subject.
42
On the
one hand, then, Gerard’s entries point to a desire to know and control plant
growth; on the other, they suggest how embedded plants are both with
humans and with their environments. The woodcut images have a curious
isolating effect, giving the individual plants status and importance, while
simultaneously removing them from their environments. As Laroche and
Munroe emphasize, relationships between humans and plants are “at once
symbiotic and in tension.”
43
This double effect hints at the increasingly
vexed relationship between people and plants in the period that becomes
exacerbated with the discovery of previously unknown plants in the New
World and with other scientific advances such as the Linnaean schema for
categorizing plants.
44
41
Gerard, The Herball, 637.
42 N
148–49. On the effect of the blazon in sonnet sequences, see Nancy Vickers’ classic essay, “Diana
Described.”
43 Rebecca Laroche and Jennifer Munroe, Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory, xv.
44
O -
ingly values plants for their own sake, see Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 72–78,
178–79.

Introdction 23
Curiously, the scientific understanding of plants suggested by the interest
in pharmacology and plant morphology coexisted alongside magic and
folklore.
45
In his Herball, Gerard inadvertently confirms this duality with
his insistence on eschewing superstition, what he calls “foolish fansie,”
while simultaneously recounting the “fiction he denounces,” a move Leah
Knight describes as “hav[ing] his ‘fansie’ and mock[ing] it too.”
46
The study
of botany during Shakespeare’s lifetime thus bears witness to Mary D.
Garrard’s assessment of the period as a moment of transition from an organic
perspective “in which humans felt at home and participated affectively
in the ‘enchanted’ world of nature” to “a scientific consciousness, which
perceives humans as detached from nature.”
47
We can find hints of this
tension in various kinds of botanical writing in the period as well as in
Shakespeare’s works.
One of the places where the interconnectedness of human and vegetal
bodies is most explicit in the period is in the doctrine of signatures, a plant
cosmology that originated with the Greeks and that was still operative in
various early modern natural histories. Often simplified as the premise that
a plant’s physical resemblance to human body parts indicates its therapeutic
value (so for instance, bloodroot with its vivid red sap remedies circulatory
problems, eyebright with its resemblance to the eye cures vision problems),
it was actually more complex. Plants were also thought to correspond to
planets, elements, and humors and to coexist in sympathetic relationship
not just with humans but with the macrocosm. These correspondences
indicate a plant’s curative effects, but also suggest more intricate connec-
tions among all living things.
48
Discerning a plant’s signatures required
examining its taste, smell, and tactile elements (thorniness or stickiness,
for example), and demanded human sensory awareness of plant attributes
beyond simple appearance. These intimate interactions between plants
and humans are largely lost with the decline of vitalist beliefs. While the
system of signatures is predicated on individual plants’ usefulness to humans
and is therefore largely anthropocentric, it nonetheless posits a profound
kinship between both human and botanical bodies, and both, in turn,
45
I
Shakespeare’s changing interpretation of mandrakes, arguing that earlier allusions tended
to be connected to magic, whereas allusions in the later plays tended to be pharmacological,
suggesting a shift to more scientific thinking.
46 Knight, Of Books and Botany, 104.
47 Garrard, Brunelleschi’s Egg, 2.
48 Thomas Efferth and Henry J. Greten, “Doctrine of Signatures.” This essay provides a good
overview of the doctrine of signatures. See also, Matthew Wood, “The Doctrine of Signatures.”

24 Susan C. Staub
with the entire cosmos. More than simply analogical, systems such as the
doctrine of signatures point to the “plenary participation in everything
else” that Laurie Shannon finds characteristic of humans in the period.
49

These resemblances are developed in herbals and husbandry manuals,
where human anatomy provides analogues for various plant parts. These
texts extend the correspondences to social and political structures as well,
as Jean Feerick cogently explains in her essay “Botanical Shakespeares.”
50
This vegetalizing of humans and human concepts hardly seems a de-
centering of the human world but rather a kind of narcissism, as Michael
Marder legitimately contends. Other scholars, however, argue that such
anthropomorphism might be viewed as “multidirectional,” having the
potential effect of reconfiguring human/plant relationships in ways that
actually revalue plant life. Speaking, for example, of “mother trees” and their
“children” serves to “re-place” humans “within nature,” Anna M. Lawrence
posits, thus conceivably countering “claims to human exceptionalism”
because it indicates a willingness “to attach ourselves to the things which
plants care about, and which in the end, humans must care about too if we
are to build a more sustainable relation to our planet.”
51
While the vegetable-
human homologies examined in this collection may not always obliterate
human distinction, they do point to “an intertwined environmentality”
and suggest how complicated attempts to segregate “human and inhuman,
culture and nature” actually are, as Cohen asserts.
52
These various interpretations of plants provide context for the essays
gathered here. The collection is divided into three overlapping sections that
consider important ways that Shakespeare imagines vegetable life: “Plant
Power and Agency”; “Human-Vegetable Affinities and Transformations”;
and “Plants and Temporalities”.
49 S
As Foucault points out in The Order of Things , plant naming before Descartes made use not
just of resemblances and virtues, but of all “the legends and stories with which [the plant] had
been involved, its place in heraldry, the medicaments that were concocted from its substance,
the foods it provided, what the ancients recorded of it, and what travellers might have said of
it. The history of a living being was that being itself, within the whole semantic network that
connected it to the world” (140).
50
F
plant analogies interrogate social hierarchies and racial difference.
51 L
makes in Finding the Mother Tree. Lawrence suggests that rather than recognizing human
affinities in plants, we might instead recognize “Them in Us” (636), an idea that Elizabeth
Crachiolo similarly considers in her essay in this volume. 52
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Introduction: Ecostitial,” iv.

Introdction 25
Part 1: Plant Power and Agency
Essays in the first section all discuss plant power (material or metaphoric),
what herbals refer to as “virtue,” the distinctive effects of a particular plant
on the human body. But as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen defines it, virtue is “the
substance of the world,” the fundamental property of all living things,
human and nonhuman. Most basically, virtue is the power to act. Cohen
characterizes it as the “most inhumanly powerful word in medieval English,”
positing that “vertu resides in the substance of the world,” with meanings
as varied as “energy, might and vitality to potential, magic and force.”
53
As
Holly A. Crocker puts it, “From heads to hands, and from rocks to plants,
virtues suffused all material bodies in premodern England.”
54
Plant virtue
is also connected to vegetative soul functions, as Cohen suggests when he
defines it as “life force: reproduction and vitality, affect and health, that
which moves the flesh,” thereby suggesting innate capacities experienced by
all living beings.
55
Plants, then, act—on human bodies, on the environment,
and on the world at large. And they in turn are acted upon. As Cohen sums
it up, “humans are merely some actors among many, none of which are
exceptional or a priori privileged.”
56
As essays in this section illustrate, in
the early modern period the word “vegetable” signifies vitality rather than
the passivity that it frequently connotes now.
The inaugural essay in the volume, Rebecca Bushnell’s “Vegetable Virtues,”
sets the stage for the essays that follow and engages with all three of the foci
of this collection, teasing out how plant virtue is entangled with human
virtue in Shakespeare’s plays. Beginning with an examination of virtue
as it pertains to plants, Bushnell emphasizes its instability and volatility,
possessing positive and negative potential (both curative and deadly) only
realized when it is “brought to bear on a body or the world.” Bushnell names
this characteristic “vegetable virtue,” noting that the word “vegetable” con-
notes action rather than inertia in Shakespeare’s imagination. Building on
the dual definitions of virtue as both the inherent power in plants but also as
“positive moral qualities” in humans, Bushnell shows how the etymological
connection between plant and human virtue complicates both concepts. “[I]n
both people and plants, vegetable virtue is never still,” but is growing and
53
Cvertu as easily as knights, horses and clerics.
Humans may ally themselves with the vertu of gems or herbs to accomplish through mineral
and vegetal friendship feats otherwise impossible,” “An Abecedarium for the Elements,” 292.
54 Crocker, The Matter of Virtue, 2.
55 Cohen, “An Abecedarium for the Elements,” 292.
56 Cohen, “Introduction: Ecostitial,” v.

26 Susan C. Staub
ever changing, a characteristic that points both to the generative power and
temporality that are explored in other essays in this volume. Shakespeare’s
plays use the ambivalence of plant virtue to confound notions of human
virtue, particularly in tragedies such as Hamlet, Bushnell illustrates.
My essay, “The ‘idle weeds that grow in the sustaining corn’: Generating
Plants in King Lear ,” continues the examination of plant power by examining
the rampantly growing, weedy cornfield of Act 4, a space connected with
female bodies in the play. In an example of what Cohen calls the “marvelously
disruptive emergence … of nonhuman agency,”
57
the weeds in the play seem to
have an almost preternatural impulse to grow despite human desires. They,
along with the storm, become one of the more potent signs of life and vitality
in the play. As such, they offer a striking example of Bennett’s “vibrant
matter”: “the capacity of things—edibles, commodities, storms, metals—not
only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as
quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their
own.”
58
Looking at philosophical, religious, and political interpretations of
weeds, I seek to reconfigure Lear’s crown as emblematic of his connection
with his daughters, his kingdom, and with nonhuman nature.
The final essay in this section, Hillary M. Nunn’s “Botanical Barbary:
Punning, Race and Plant Life in Othello 4.3,” turns to the material effects
of plants by looking at women’s domestic knowledge of the properties of
barberries and their everyday uses in culinary and cosmetic recipes. In her
analysis of the undressing scene in Othello, Nunn points to the linguistic
connections and orthographic echoes between the character Barbary and
both the geographic place and the common English barberry shrub. Noted
specifically for their ability to bleach hair, barberries evoke the period’s ideal
of beauty, a beauty that is fair and blonde, and thus with their verbal echo
of the place Barbary, they problematize the play’s geographical and racial
classifications. Nunn’s essay explores barberries as a way of showing how
domestic plant knowledge complicates the cultural geography of Othello ,
shedding new light on the play’s anxieties regarding racial categorizations
and their connection to female sexuality.
Although this section highlights plant power, all three essays also il-
lustrate the various ways that plants were connected to human concepts in
the early modern period—in terms of morality, gender and class, and race
and ethnicity; essays in the second section, “Human-Vegetable Affinities
and Transformations,” interact with this section in their consideration of the
57
C v.
58 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, viii.

Introdction 27
interconnections between plant and human life, but they do so by imagining
a more direct embeddedness between plants and humans, showing still
other ways that plants blur boundaries.
Part 2: Human-Vegetable Affinities and Transformations
While the previous section examined the vital effects of plants on humans,
most of the essays in this section point to the creaturely “indistinction”
developed in Feerick and Nardizzi’s collection, thus challenging “absolute
anthropocentrism,” the belief that “human beings are radically … different
from all other life on earth” and “that this difference renders humankind
superior to the rest of earthly creation.”
59
We do not have to look through
many of Shakespeare’s plays to find instances where humans are likened
to plants, as I have already pointed out: Perdita is a blossom, Desdemona
is a weed, Titus a shrub, Ophelia a rose of May, to cite just a few examples.
In her study of Shakespeare’s imagery, Caroline Spurgeon long ago noted
that Shakespeare “visualizes human beings as plants and trees, choked with
weeds, or well pruned and trained and bearing ripe fruits, sweet smelling
as a rose or noxious as a weed.”
60
Plants are likewise everywhere invested
with human characteristics in early modern husbandry manuals and herbals
where apples are amorous and mad, wild flowers and uncultivated plants
are frequently labeled bastards, sap is blood, trees have heads, arms, even
feelings. In his essay, “Daphne Described,” Vin Nardizzi even imagines
human hands lurking in the illustration for laurel in Gerard’s Herball.
61

As Jean Feerick explains in her important essay “Botanical Shakespeares,”
the human and botanical coalesce in botanical literature and throughout
Shakespeare’s plays. Hands become lilies and tremble like aspen leaves;
babies are blossoms. Skin is bark; arms are branches; hands are withered
herbs “meet for plucking up” (Titus Andronicus, 3.1.178).
62
Similarly, in his
analysis of hair, Edward J. Geisweidt argues that “vegetable and human are
sympathetically inter-fashioned” in Shakespeare’s plays, concluding that
“the early modern English were more aware of their vegetable affinities than
we have realized.”
63
Rebecca Bushnell explains a similar correspondence
59
BShakespeare among the Animals , 6.
60 Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery, 19.
61 Vin Nardizzi, “Daphne Described,” 151.
62 Feerick, “Botanical Shakespeares,” 84–86. Bruno Latour characterizes this melding of the
natural and human worlds as a particularly premodern sensibility, as Feerick notes.
63 Geisweidt, “Horticulture of the Head,” para. 20, 24.

28 Susan C. Staub
between gardens and the human mind in humanist pedagogy: “gardens
and schoolrooms overlapped most clearly where the human body and mind
were understood to emulate or even share a plant’s nature.”
64
This section
considers this murky, often liminal interrelationship between humans
and plants.
All of the essays in Part 2 consider some kind of transformation: from hu-
man to plant, from place to place, from one time to another, to varying effect.
Several essays pick up on the long tradition of human-plant metamorphosis
that Shakespeare inherited from Ovid, thus continuing the debates about the
ontological otherness of plants compared to humans/animals that concern
critical plant studies scholars and that we see complicated in early modern
notions of vitalism in the previous section. In these moments of transforma-
tion, Shakespeare dissolves the human in favor of something wondrous,
resistant, even more than human. Human-plant metamorphosis not only
suggests the instability of the human-plant divide, it actually replicates
plant life. Unlike animals, plants are characterized by metamorphosis:
cotyledons transform into true leaves, buds become flowers, flowers become
fruit. Others essays in this section explore the floral analogies traditionally
associated with women and the arboreal analogies often connected with
kingship and familial relationships.
In the first essay in this section, “Shakespeare’s Botanical Grace,” Rebecca
Totaro contemplates Shakespeare’s manipulation of Ovidian human-plant
metamorphoses. Looking at those places where verbal botanical tributes
substitute for the material flowers that historically have been used to
memorialize the dead and give comfort to those who remain, she calls at-
tention to the plague-time context often in the background of Shakespeare’s
works. These moments, which Totaro characterizes as “pronouncements of
botanical excess,” occur mostly when other characters eulogize the dead
(or perceived dead) as plants: “the sweet marjoram … or rather the herb of
grace” that memorializes Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well ; the various
flowers that blazon Innogen
65
in Cymbeline; or Ophelia’s transformation into
a “metaphorical bouquet” by Gertrude in Hamlet , for example. Paradoxically,
these transformations of characters into metaphoric plants revalue the indi-
vidual human lives that have been devalued in the plays, and interestingly,
64 Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching, 90.
65 T
in her edition of the play Valerie Wayne prefers “Innogen,” positing that “Imogen” was a minim
error in which “nn” was mistaken for “m” (Arden 3
rd
series, 71). In this collection the spelling
varies based on the edition of the play that the contributor used.

Introdction 29
become a compensatory response to human diminishment, the kind of
reductive dehumanization Totaro argues happens in plague accounts in
the period where humans become mere numbers. Among these tributes,
Ophelia’s is unique, powerfully exceeding the others Totaro considers,
and becomes a moment of “botanical grace,” a spontaneous, life affirming
moment of recompense—a gift to the audience.
In her essay, Claire Duncan speculates on the unintended effects of
analogizing fertile female bodies as flowers. Starting with the premise
that Angelo’s “garden circummured with bricks” in Measure for Measure
is the thematic and spatial center of the play’s attempts to restrain the
fertility of the female body, Duncan examines the garden location of the
bed trick in “‘Circummured’ Plants and Women in Measure for Measure.”
Duncan shows how this garden space is constructed as a hortus conclusus ,
an enclosed, protected site that functions as a kind of fantasy trope for the
simultaneously fertile yet impermeable virginal female body. Using early
modern horticultural and gardening manuals, Duncan demonstrates that,
like the play, these texts conflate the fertile land with the fertile female body,
both of which must be managed and checked, a contention that parallels
my argument about land in King Lear . Examining the play through the lens
of early modern gardening manuals illustrates “the material ways that the
early moderns attempted to circumscribe the growth of Nature through
enclosed gardens.” Ultimately, however, the botanical rhetoric joins with
“the floral metaphor of deflowered maid” to create “a slippage between
the two virginal bodies in the play and the plant matter that makes up the
garden.” The transformation of Isabella and Mariana into flowers at once
reconstructs the bed trick into a flower-bed trick, and, Duncan concludes,
opens up the opportunity for the female-horticultural body to become a
site of resistance to the masculine imperative to control fertility.
In “Cymbeline’s Plant People,” Jeffrey Theis examines the intersection of
plant and human in order to illustrate the ways that identity formation, both
national and individual, is enmeshed with non-human nature in general
and with plants in particular in Cymbeline . Reading the characters as plants,
Theis evokes Stacy Alaimo’s concept of trans-corporeality, showing how
the characters’ plant affinities reflect the instability of identity in the play.
Rather than being distinct individuals, each character is “part of a natural
world independent from human systems” while also interdependent on
each other—a kind of assemblage that is geographically and temporally
influenced (in a way that I would argue interestingly replicates the plants
Gerard describes in his Herball ). Posthumus and the kidnapped princes
are transplants that flourish or languish in their respective environments.

30 Susan C. Staub
Plants are connected with humans in other ways as well, where the villainous
characters, such as the Queen, are not analogized to plants but instead use
plants to assert mastery over nature and other humans. Interestingly, in both
Totaro’s and Theis’s arguments, plants become the measure of the human,
rather than the other way around. The romance genre is plant-based as
well, Theis argues, where plant time coincides with the long span of time
characteristic of romances. In his analysis of the temporal frame of the play,
Theis looks forward to the essays in Part 3.
In “‘Thou art translated’: Plants of Passage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream ,”
Lisa Hopkins is also concerned with the transformative power of plants,
but her focus is on the multiple ways that the many plants in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream facilitate transitions of all sorts—from one time or season to
another, from one place to another, from one life stage to another, from one
color to another, even from one state of mind to another. Shakespeare figures
plants as agents of transition and crossover between different domains,
Hopkins argues, noting how in perhaps Shakespeare’s most magical play, the
botanical and folkloric ideas associated with the various plants become a
gateway to the realm of magic. Like Totaro, Hopkins is interested in Ovidian
transformations as well, particularly when the mulberry turns black in
reaction to Pyramus’s death and when Daphne is metamorphosed into a
laurel tree. Pointing to the traditional association of women and flowers
that Claire Duncan also explores in her essay, Hopkins notes how flowers,
particularly the rose, mark the passage between virginity and marriage, a
passage that supports the play’s marriage theme. While the familiar folklore
Shakespeare utilizes in the play creates a point of intersection between the
supernatural and the natural, Hopkins asserts that it also serves “to figure
plants … as agents of change, transition, and mobility,” a point that effectively
transitions us to Part 3 and its consideration of plant temporalities.
Part 3: Plants and Temporalities
All of creation is affected by time, and yet, as scholars have shown, time is
complex. As Mary Wiesner-Hanks argues, “time is an embodied aspect of
human existence, but also mediated by culture; experiences and understand-
ings of time change, and the early modern period may have been an era when
they changed significantly, with the introduction of new vocabularies and
technologies of time.”
66
As we have seen, herbals and horticultural manuals are
66
Wiesner-Hanks, Gendered Temporalities, 9.

Introdction 31
concerned with temporality, and they seem to encode the vicissitudes of plant
time into their texts. In what Jessica Rosenberg characterizes as a “rhetoric of
anticipation,” these manuals fold readers “into the inhuman rhythms of plant
time” by teaching that planting is “an environment of risk, promise, investment,
disappointment, [and] decay.”
67
As Rebecca Bushnell explains in her book Green
Desire, literary texts as well as garden writings “compared people to plants in
their common experience of growing, flourishing, and fading,” the unavoidable
markers of time.
68
The essays in this section examine various temporal con-
structs in relation to plant life. They point to the multiplicities of time and show
how considering temporality in conjunction with plants (literal or metaphoric)
forces a reconsideration both of time and of human life—blurring boundaries
of past, present, and future; pointing to other temporal structures—historic,
macrocosmic, divine, and ecological; and in places, challenging anthropocentric
understandings of time. Thinking through time returns us to the questions
posed earlier in Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination —what happens when
we side-step the comfortable Aristotelian divisions of plant-animal-human,
and instead consider Bennett’s vibrant materiality as expansive and capacious,
including us as well as the plants of the “lower” orders? What happens to our
sense of the human when we attend to the affinities between how plants, as
well as people, body forth time’s progress?
In the first essay in this section, Miranda Wilson ponders the mechanical
and the natural as she contemplates “clockwork plants” and other constructs
of time in the early modern period in “Clockwork Plants and Shakespeare’s
Overlapping Notions of Time.” Noting the period’s sense of the human body
as a clock, Wilson shows how timekeeping in Shakespeare allows for an
overlap between mechanical technology, the human body, and plant time
(the passage of time as understood and experienced through the vegetative
world). Starting with Athanasius Kircher’s fascinating experiments with
his sunflower clock, Wilson points to the varied ways that early modern
thinkers imagined organic lifeforms, including plants, as translators of time,
thus again, highlighting the shared experience between human and plant:
“men as plants increase,” as Shakespeare reminds us in Sonnet 15. And as
Wilson puts it, “the temporal processes that we observe in plants also drive
our animal lives.” The human body, then, becomes a site where multiple
forms of time telling converge, again disrupting the comfortable separation
of the living and non-living, plant and animal. But unlike mechanical time
telling, the watches and clocks that seem to click off the inexorable moments
67 R
68 Bushnell, Green Desire, 136.

32 Susan C. Staub
towards decay and death, “plants reveal the connections between matter
and place, as well as the forces that shape them both.” Wilson concludes
that the human experience of plant time in Shakespeare creates a “temporal
communion” that moves our awareness from the “microcosm of the lost
minute” to “the macrocosm of divine and universal patterns.”
In “The Verdant Imagination in Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” Elizabeth D.
Gruber likewise considers the temporal materiality of plants and their
engagement with time and death, but unlike Wilson, she finds the Sonnets’
evocation of plant time alienating. In her ecocritical reading of the Sonnets,
Gruber examines the conjunction of the organic and the symbolic in order
to show how Shakespeare transfers the traditional vegetative powers of
regeneration and growth from plants to poetry, “ultimately yielding a new
ecopolitics of regeneration.” Providing a counterargument to this collection’s
other discussions of the affinities between botanical and human bodies,
she posits that human-plant indistinction does not represent a consoling
egalitarianism but rather ignores the unique psychological needs of humans.
Whereas Totaro and Theis discover something positive, even comforting, in
the botanic transformations often depicted in Shakespeare’s works, Gruber
finds little solace in the plant analogies in the Sonnets, where, she argues,
an awareness of the eventual breakdown of human to humus evokes dread.
Perhaps Shakespeare’s shift away from the age-old trope of the “eternizing
properties of vegetation” reflects his awareness that “the ‘human’ was being
reconstituted” in the period, she suggests. Gruber argues that the botanical
language of Shakespeare’s sonnets actually anticipates a change in Renais-
sance thought, a change marked by a shift from an agrarian reciprocity of
humans and nature to an atomic view characterized by mechanism and
human isolation from the environment.
Given the importance of time and the cycles of history, we might expect
that Shakespeare would appropriate botanical imagery in his history plays.
Indeed, one of his most famous plant analogies occurs in Richard II where he
likens the king to a negligent gardener. History plays are Janus-faced, looking
backward to the past and forward to Shakespeare’s time simultaneously.
The “dynamic mixture of temporalities” that Jessica Rosenberg finds in
gardening manuals, “futurological, nostalgic, memorial, recursive, cyclical,”
seem precisely those of the history play.
69
In “The Botanical Revisions of 3
Henry VI,” Jason Hogue provides a detailed textual analysis of the variants in
the First Folio version of 3 Henry VI and the first printed version of the play,
the 1595 octavo The True Tragedy , illustrating how even single word changes
69 R

Introdction 33
heighten the botanical registers of the play and provide evidence that the
Folio version is a careful botanical revision of the octavo. These emendations
are important not just for the ways that they seem to pun on Plantagenet and
“highlight the iconography of the War of the Roses,” but for the intertextual
relationship they develop with the other plays in Shakespeare’s first tetralogy
by creating a kind of retroactive chronological coherence in the Folio. As he
compares the botanical discourse in each, Hogue illustrates that the Folio
text expands the vegetal imagery in ways that develop the concerns of the
history play as genre as well as the specific focus of this particular history
cycle. The botanical emendations Hogue scrutinizes point to the temporal
concerns of the genre in its obsession with succession and the long and
vexed march of monarchical and providential time in which the fruiting,
harvest, and the felling of trees parallel the rise and fall of kings. Hogue ends
with a fascinating explication of the “external/eternal” variant in the two
versions of the play, but rather than privilege one play text over the other,
he concludes by borrowing a notion from critical plant studies and calls for
a celebration of multiplicity and proliferation—of both texts and plants.
The final essay might be read as a kind of coda to the volume as it looks
forward to future critical plant studies readings of Shakespeare’s plays.
Although other essays have nodded toward some of the concerns of critical
plant studies, Crachiolo engages more fully with Michael Marder’s notion of
“plant-thinking,” specifically in relationship to plant temporality. In “Botano-
morphism and Temporality,” Elizabeth Crachiolo shifts the terms of analysis
to what she calls “botanomorphism,” the ways that human characters “are
endowed with the characteristics, physical and ontological, of plants, in a
kind of extreme metaphor.” Rather than positing how plants probe what it
is to be human as other essayists do in this collection, Crachiolo explores
“what it means to be a plant.” Looking at Richard II and The Winter’s Tale,
Crachiolo finds that botanical temporalities in the plays—temporalities
that are cyclic, repetitive, and reproductive—resist closure. In Richard II ,
where politics is “a fundamentally vegetal endeavor,” she argues that the
characters’ “plantiness” resituates the human in the larger perspective of
history and nation. Since The Winter’s Tale is structured around seasonal
change and concomitantly, the “lives of plants over time,” this play, too,
figures characters as embodied plants. This mapping of plant temporality
onto the characters in both plays decenters the human in favor of a long
ecological perspective rather than a purely human one.
In his “Afterword,” Vin Nardizzi moves us to the present as he reflects on
Maggie O’Farrell’s reimagining of Shakespeare’s botanical knowledge in her
recent novel Hamnet . In O’Farrell’s fictional account of Shakespeare (who

34 Susan C. Staub
is never actually named in the novel), Shakespeare is guilty of the kind of
plant blindness that Marder and others decry as so endemic to contemporary
culture. As Nardizzi notes, such a move—while interesting to contemplate,
especially since it highlights women’s very real involvement in botanical
endeavors in the period—seems almost anathema to Shakespeare scholars.
While many readers and viewers today, like Agnes’s unnamed husband in
Hamnet, might not recognize the variety of flora surrounding us, no one could
ever accuse Shakespeare of plant blindness, as these essays prove. Nardizzi
also points to the difficulties and complexities involved in recovering the
sources of Shakespeare’s “botanical imagination,” noting the various ways
essays in this collection seek to elucidate the plants Shakespeare includes—
perusing printed and manuscript materials such as herbals, histories, and
recipe books; through careful textual analysis; by engaging with various
images; and even moving beyond historicist contextualization to the more
philosophical concerns of critical plant studies. The possibilities are vast.
When some twenty-four years after Shakespeare’s death, John Parkinson
titled the volume meant to be his magnum opus Theatrum Botanicum:
The Theatre of Plantes, he alluded to plants as actors on the stage of the
natural world. Parkinson’s title might accurately describe Shakespeare’s
botanizing.
70
Although most of the plants named in Shakespeare’s plays
are not physically present on the stage, they are nonetheless performers, as
these essays show. In “Ophelia’s Plants and the Death of Violets,” Rebecca
Laroche illustrates how the presence of the actual plants and flowers on
stage in Ophelia’s mad scene has the potential to decenter the play away
from Hamlet, providing “two alternative views within the play”: “a space
that is not corrupted by human presence and a character’s action that is
not determined by Hamlet. In this way, the ecocritical call for attention to
the nonhuman coincides with the feminist reworkings of history to include
previously underdeveloped perspectives,” Laroche concludes.
71
The material
plants are not often depicted on the stage in performance, but perhaps
they should be, as Laroche argues. Focusing on the plants of Shakespeare’s
botanical imagination in our analyses of the plays and poetry offers similar
potential for reconfiguring the world of Shakespeare. Their virtues can act
on us as viewers and readers if we attend to them—moving us, shaping
70
T
theater mundi. For a thorough discussion of all the texts constructed as theaters, see Ann Blair,
The Theater of Nature, especially chapter 5.
71 LKing Lear in this
collection, I consider the effect of various stagings of actual weeds in Lear’s crown.

Introdction 35
us, and perhaps altering not just our interpretations of his works, but our
notions of our place and responsibilities as humans on the stage of our world.
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38 Susan C. Staub
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Introdction 39
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Signatures.html.

40 Susan C. Staub
About the Author
Susan C. Staub is Professor of English at Appalachian State University. Her
publications include Nature’s Cruel Stepdames: Representations of Women
and Crime in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and The Liter-
ary Mother, as well as numerous essays on Early Modern prose fiction,
Shakespeare, and Spenser. Her current book project focuses on Shakespeare
and botany.

Part 1
Plant Power and Agency

1. V
Rebecca Bushnell
Abstract
Herbal medicine attributes to plants “virtues,” understood as their effects
on animal bodies. In early modern English the meaning of the word
virtue encompasses positive moral qualities, but also efficacy; in plants
that agency may be both deadly and beneficial. This essay reviews how
early modern botanical discourse uses virtue to signal plants’ power to
influence the world. It then examines how that attribution intersects
with a discourse of dynamic human virtue in Shakespeare, including his
references to herbal cures as well as explicit references to plant virtues
in King Lear, Cymbeline, and Pericles. The final section turns to the more
complex relationship of botanical and human virtue in Romeo and Juliet
and Hamlet.
Keywords: virtue, plant power, botanical discourse, instability, potential,
medicine
In Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, Michael Marder asks how we
can encounter plants as other than human: can we find a way to understand
that plants “are capable, in their own fashion, of accessing, influencing,
and being influenced by a world that does not overlap the human Lebens -
welt but that corresponds to the vegetal modes of dwelling on and in the
earth?” He grapples with how plants might escape “the objectifying grasp
of metaphysics and its political-economic avatars,” which deny them “the
core values of autonomy, individualization, self-identity, originality, and
essentiality.”
1
That said, as Marder himself recognizes, limiting oneself to
Western metaphysics (as he does) excludes alternative modes of conceiving
vegetal life. In particular, Marder does not engage with concepts of plant
1
Marder, P lant-Thinking, 8, 55.
Staub, S.C. (ed.), Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2023
doi 10.5117/9789463721332_ch01

44 Rebecca Bushnell
power intrinsic to premodern natural history and herbal medicine, which
attribute “virtues” to plants.
“Virtue” is a complex word, encompassing the more familiar meaning of
positive moral qualities, but also the sense of efficacy, both “a power inherent
in a thing” or “a capacity for producing a certain effect.” When it comes to
connecting virtue to plants, the Oxford English Dictionary narrows the
scope to “power to affect the body in a beneficial manner; strengthening,
sustaining, or healing power.”
2
However, the OED has missed those texts
that tell us that plant “virtue” may be deadly as well as beneficial. Tanya
Pollard reminds us that in their uses in early herbal medicine good herbs
and drugs “could bring about serious, even lethal, damage, while the most
toxic substances could, paradoxically, have medicinal value.”
3
Virtue in
plants may thus be good or bad, or good and bad simultaneously; on its
own, plant virtue is power without value until brought to bear on a body
or in the world.
In La Sepmaine ou Creation du Monde (translated by Josuah Sylvester as
Divine Weeks and Works), Guillaume Du Bartas celebrates the potent sway
of plant virtues over every aspect of Creation:
Nor (powerfull Hearbs) do we alonely finde
Your vertues working in frail humane kinde;
But you can force the fiercest Animals,
The fellest Fiends, the firmest Mineralls,
Yea, fairest Planets (if Antiquitie
Have not bely’d the Haggs of Thessalie ).
4
Du Bartas thus imagines plants expanding their influence beyond people
to the entire world. In his catalogue of remarkable plants Du Bartas pays
special attention to aconite or wolfsbane, a powerful neurotoxin, as a kind
of individual agent:
O valiant Venome! O courageous Plant!
Disdainfull Poyson! noble combatant!
That scorneth aid, and loves alone to fight,
2
O “virtue, n.,” II, 8, d.
3 Pollard, Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England, 4. Pollard notes that the word “phar-
macy” “stems from the Greek pharmakon , meaning poison, remedy, and love potion; both poison
and potion come from the Latin potio , or drink; venom,” 4.
4
Du Bartas, Bartas: His Deuine Weekes and Workes, 78.

Vegetable Virtues 45
That none partake the glory of his might:
For, if he finde our bodies fore-possest
With other Poyson, then he lets vs rest,
And with his Rivall enters secret Duel,
One to one, strong to strong, cruel to cruel,
Still fighting fierce, and never over-giue
Till they both dying, give Man leave to live. (80)
As the passage from Du Bartas suggests, at this time it was common to
compare people with plants, as well as plants with people. Plants echoed
the features of the human body, while people were also imagined to grow
like plants, and overall plant life functioned symbolically in every aspect
of culture. As Vin Nardizzi and Jean E. Feerick have written, because of
their shared materiality and modes of existence, the boundaries among
humans, animals, and plants were often “soft” or confused.
5
Du Bartas
here figures aconite as a valiant fighter when locked in mortal combat
with another poison, where the human body is merely a passive field of
battle. In turn, aconite itself assumes the guise of a human agent, where the
text attributes to it human virtues—courage, valor, and nobility—while
also characterizing it as cruel and ambitious. That is, the plant’s virtue is
reimagined as a martial virtue in action, with all its moral ambivalence.
6

In this sense, the duality of this powerful plant, both deadly and beneficial,
parallels the complexity of warlike virtue, where the positive effects of a
lust for glory can slide into unchecked ambition and scorn, and courage in
battle may lead to savagery.
This essay uncovers the ways in which the early modern botanical
discourse of virtue was thus entangled with concepts of human virtue, as
particularly evident in Shakespeare’s plays where virtue seen abstractly is
not a fixed value. The topic of virtue’s meaning in early modern England
is, of course, a vastly complex subject, whether considered more broadly
in the history of philosophy or in the context of the discourse of virtue
in Shakespeare’s plays. One approach has been to follow the categories
of Christian “virtues” inherited from medieval philosophy and theology
(understood as the cardinal and theological virtues). Another critical strand
5
FThe Indistinct Human , 1–9. See also Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching ,
chapter 3, on analogies between horticulture and education; Goody, Culture of Flowers , on flower
symbolism.
6 Shakespeare mentions aconite in 2 Henry IV , 4. 4.48, comparing its strength and violence
with that of gunpowder. All quotes are from the Riverside Shakespeare (1974 edition). See Pollard
on aconite, 30.

46 Rebecca Bushnell
has framed the study of virtue in Shakespeare through “virtue ethics,” an
approach based on Aristotelean philosophy that focuses on how virtues such
as prudence or temperance are embedded in human character and realized
in action.
7
This essay comes at the question of virtue in Shakespeare’s
plays from another direction by rooting the concept in the associations
of virtue with plants. In this, my own approach is closer to that of Julia
Lupton in Thinking with Shakespeare, as well as Holly Crocker in her The
Matter of Virtue: Women’s Ethical Action from Chaucer to Shakespeare, who
examines what she calls the material virtues, whereby “Virtues did things
in the world, uniting body and soul through a system of everyday ethics in
premodern England.”
8
Here I mostly focus on how, in this period, aligning
ideas of plant virtue as a form of power with human virtue could undermine
a sense of moral fixity.
I begin by briefly surveying the attribution of virtues to plants, extending
from their uses in humoral medical practice to their supposed transformative
powers in nature. I then turn to consider the ways in which concepts of plant
power intersect with a discourse of dynamic and unstable human virtue
in some of Shakespeare’s plays. Several plays feature examples of herbal
medical practice neatly aligned with human virtue, sometimes moving
beyond pharmacology; in Hamlet , most tellingly, imagery of dangerous
and volatile plant life evokes the instability of that virtue. This essay is thus
entitled “vegetable virtue” to capture that sense of the adjective “vegetable”
where Andrew Marvell invokes “vegetable love” in “To His Coy Mistress”
and John Milton describes “vegetable gold” on the Tree of Life; in both cases
“vegetable” connotes growth and movement, not stasis. So, too, in both
people and plants, vegetable virtue is never still, whether for good or ill.
Plant Power in Early Modern Medicine and Magic
In early modern England, knowledge of herbal virtues stemmed both from
folk practice and a long tradition of written herbals dating back to antiquity.
9

7 SVirtue’s Own Feature: Shakespeare and the Virtue Ethics Tradition; also,
Lupton and Sherman, eds., Shakespeare and Virtue. On virtue ethics more generally, see Daniel
C. Russell, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Virtue Ethics .
8 Crocker, The Matter of Virtue, 9. After I completed this essay, I also had a chance to read
Jessica Rosenberg’s Botanical Poetics , which offers an in-depth consideration of the concept of
plant virtue. See also Rosenberg, “Stewardship and Resilience.”
9
SMedieval and Early Renaissance Medicine , on how “sharp taste, pungent
aroma, and unusual texture as well as readily perceptible action of some kind (for example,

Vegetable Virtues 47
Most often herbal treatment was based on Galenic medicine, whereby the
qualities of a plant—defined as hot or cold, dry or wet—counteracted a
patient’s humoral imbalance. Thus, for example, in this typical description,
in his New Herbal William Turner observed that:
Chamomille is hote and drye in the fyrste degre. Chamomyle in subtilnes
is lyke the rose but in heate it draweth more nere the qualite of oyle whyche
is verye agreynge vnto the nature of man and temperate. Therefore it is
good agaynst werynes, it swageth ake, and vnbindeth and louseth it y
t

is stretched oute softeneth it that is but measurably harde and setteth it
abroad that was narrowly thrust together.
10
Here the plant’s “heat” is described as moderate but still effective in both
stimulating the body and softening its tense or hardened parts, restoring that
human body to its “nature.” In this kind of account, the plant’s materiality
meshes with humans’: in the end they are made of the same kind of matter.
Beyond the effects of shared materiality, a plant’s virtue could be inferred
from homologies of form, echoing beliefs in the sympathies and antipathies
that animate all the natural world. Some theories of plant effectiveness
were based on the doctrine of signatures, whereby the effectiveness of a
plant was derived from its resemblance to a part of the human body: for
example, the daisy plant eyebright, with its circular center, was used to
treat the eyes. But the interpretations were not limited to analogies with
the human body. For example, an ancient tradition associated sweet basil
with protection against snakes, a notion that likely originated in observing
the snakelike shape of its roots. One medieval herbal states that “if anyone
has this plant with him, none of the following kinds of snakes can harm
him”: the “basil plant has all of their strength, and if any person has the
plant with him, that person will be strong against all kinds of snakes.”
11
The
plant thus does not have to resemble or enter into a person’s body to work;
rather, its power is independent of that body, having “all the strength” of
the snake that is its antagonist.
Even without such homologies, some people believed ordinary plants
capable of magical effects. John Gerard may begin his description of the
as a laxative or opiate) were all properties that might lead to the classification of a plant as
medicinal” (141). On herbal medicine see also Anderson, An Illustrated History of the Herbals ;
Arber, Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution; Rohde, The Old English Herbals; Stannard, Herbs
and Herbalism in the Middle Ages and Renaissance; and Kerwin, Beyond the Body , chapter 2.
10
Turner, The First and Second Parts of the Herbal of William Turner, 48.
11 Van Arsdall, Medieval Herbal Remedies , 204–5.

48 Rebecca Bushnell
virtues of the marigold more practically in stating that “it is thought to
strengthen and comfort the heart very much, and also to withstand poyson,
as also to be good against pestilent Agues, being taken any way.”
12
However,
other writers went much further, attributing marvelous powers to this
common flower. That extraordinary compilation of “secrets,” The Secrets
of Albertus Magnus (falsely attributed to the medieval natural philosopher
Albertus Magnus), observes of the marigold that
The vertue of this herbe is maruelous: for if it be gathered, the Sunne beyng
in the signe Leo, in August, and be wrapped in the leafe of a Laurell, or
baye tree, & a wolues tooth to the be added therto, no mā shalbe able to
haue a word to speake against the bearer therof, but woordes of peace.
And yf any thing be stolen, if the bearer of the thinges before named, lay
them vnder hys head in y
e
nyght, he shall see the thefe, & all hys cōnditiōs.
And moreouer, yt the forsayd herbe be put in any church, where women
be, whyche haue broken Matrymonye on theyr parte, they shall neuer
be able to go forthe of the churche, excepte it be put awaye. And thys last
poynte hath bene proued, and is very true.
13
The plant’s potency thus exceeds even its material nature or form; it is as
mysterious as it is “marvelous.” Such effects call to mind the pansy, called
“love-in-idleness” in A Midsummer’s Night Dream , which “will make or man
or woman madly dote / Upon the next live creature that it sees” (2.1.171–172).
Here the pansy is both enchanted and ordinary, native to both fairyland and
this world.
14
Like “love-in-idleness,” the Secrets ’ marigold’s powers influence
human behavior, functioning in this case to aid in social control, whether
it be of language, criminality, or sexuality. Plant virtues can thus expose
the qualities of human virtue—or vice.
Plant and Human Virtues
In early modernity the distinction between human and plant virtue could
indeed often be muddled. The epistle to the reader in John Parkinson’s
Paradisi in Sole begins with a paean to herbs and flowers that celebrates their
“virtues and properties” by comparing those vegetal virtues to human ones:
12 Ge The Herball, 741. This is just the beginning of the medical benefits of the marigold.
13 The Boke of the Secretes of Albertus Magnus, sig. Aiiiv–iiii.
14 See Mary Floyd-Wilson, “Potions, Passion, and Fairy Knowledge,” 187.

Vegetable Virtues 49
That as many herbes and flowers with their fragrant sweete smels doe
comfort, and as it were reuiue the spirits, and perfume a whole house;
euen so such men as liue vertuously, labouring to doe good, and profit
the Church of God and the Common wealth by their paines or penne, doe
as it were send forth a pleasing savour of sweet instructions, not only to
that time wherein they liue, and are fresh, but being drye, withered and
dead, cease not in all after ages to doe as much or more. Many herbes
and flowers that haue small beautie or savour to commend them, haue
much more good vse and vertue: so many men of excellent rare parts and
good qualities doe lye hid vnknown and not respected, untill time and
vse of them doe set forth their properties. Againe, many flowers haue a
glorious shew of beauty and brauery, yet stinking in smell, or else of no
other vse: so many doe make a glorious ostentation, and flourish in the
world, when as if they stinke not horribly before God, and all good men,
yet surely they haue no other vertue then their outside to commend them,
or leave behind them. Some also rise vp and appear like a Lilly among
Thornes, or as a goodly Flower among many Weedes or Grasse, eyther by
their honourable authoritie, or eminence of learning or riches, whereby
they excell others, and thereby may doe good to many.
15
Here Parkinson does assume that virtue is generally a positive value, but he
observes that it manifests variously according to the type of person or plant.
Whether in a plant or person, virtue is not always static. Some people and
plants may appear virtuous, but it is only a sham, while in others, virtues
“rise up.” Some virtues are evident, while others may be overlooked at
first but are then seen in action.
16
In both plants and people, virtue is thus
complicated and multilayered; it may be hidden or even deceptive.
In her discussion of virtue in Thinking with Shakespeare , by emphasizing
potentiality, Julia Lupton constructs an analogy between human and “thingly
virtues,” or the generative power that can be attributed to non-human
entities, such as plants and stones:
Such thingly virtues are ever ready to flower into use, yet themselves
participate in a dormancy that keeps its own measure in the order of
being, the “blossoming time / that from the seedness the bare fallow
brings / to teeming foison” (Measure for Measure, 1.4.41–43). Political
15
Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole, “Epistle to the Reader,” n.p.
16 See Crocker, 14–17, on the ways in which virtue was understood to be deceptive, or to turn
to vice, especially in women.

50 Rebecca Bushnell
virtues are fundamentally active, existing only in their practice, while
vital virtues subsist as latencies and tendencies with the power to burst
into flower, or die stillborn.
17
This view of virtue as potential corresponds with Parkinson’s sense that in
“many herbes and flowers that haue small beautie or savour to commend
them, haue much more good vse and vertue: so many men of excellent rare
parts and good qualities doe lye hid vnknown and not respected, untill time
and use of them doe set forth their properties.” In making her own analogy,
Lupton points to Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well , who “brings together the
traditional attributes of feminine virtue with the pharmacist’s knowledge
of the virtues of things in order to identify the practice of virtue more
broadly with the self-realizing interests of the new professional classes.”
18

As Holly Crocker has noted, this kind of premodern thinking about virtue
could be particularly productive for constructing a form of positive virtue
for women in embodied action, in contrast to a dominant narrative that
conveyed distrust of feminine virtue.
19
Although All’s Well never specifies
the composition of the prescription “of rare and prov’d effects” (1.3.223) that
Helena uses to heal the King’s fistula, a reader or spectator would surely
imagine a mixture of plants, minerals, or animal parts. Helena suggests that
the compound’s powers go beyond the ordinary practice of physic, being
“sanctified / By th’ luckiest stars in heaven” (245–46). As Lupton suggests, in
so doing, Shakespeare gestures here at a kind of mystical connection between
Helena’s “youth, beauty, wisdom, and courage” (2.1.181) and the virtues of
her “receipt.” In this play, as elsewhere in Shakespeare’s works, virtue is
potential—and potent—in both people and the things of the earth.
20
Plant Virtues in Shakespeare
Given how important herbs were in early modern medicine, it is not sur-
prising that Shakespeare’s plays refer frequently to plant power, whether
explicitly in scenes involving medical practice or indirectly in figurative
17
Lupton, T hinking with Shakespeare, 10. Here Lupton draws on the work of Jane Bennett in
Vibrant Matter, and of other scholars who promulgate the “new vitalism” or object-oriented
ontology. See also Rosenberg, Botanical Poetics , chapter 2.
18 Lupton, Thinking with Shakespeare, 10.
19 Crocker, The Matter of Virtue, “Introduction.”
20 See also Lupton’s lecture on “Shakespeare’s Virtues,” focusing on Twelfth Night .

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Na z’n woede aldus gekoeld te hebben, stapte de olifant ’t bos in, gevolgd
door de overige van de troep en waren ze alle spoedig uit ’t gezicht.
Schelling bleef nog enige tijd in de boom zitten om te zien of de dieren niet
zouden terugkomen, doch toen dit niet geschiedde en alles stil bleef, klom
hij uit de boom, nam z’n geweer op en stapte naar de plaats waar ’t lijk van
Hogesaad lag. Hij nam ook diens geweer en begaf zich daarop zo snel
mogelik naar de tent terug.
Na dit rampspoedig voorval waagde niemand ’t meer om op de jacht te
gaan.
We zouden een onwaarheid vertellen, als we beweerden, dat de Eerste
stuurman diep betreurd werd door zijn metgezellen. Slechts MacIntosh
mompelde, toen hij ’t verhaal gehoord had, de woorden “poor fellow”.
Twee dagen daarna werden de schipbreukelingen niet weinig verrast door
de aankomst van ongeveer twintig kaffers, die met assegaaien en
knopkieries gewapend waren, maar die blijkbaar geen kwaad in hun schild
voerden, en met vriendschappelike gebaren de tent naderden.
Geen der blanken kon ’n woord van hun taal verstaan, maar door gebaren
en door hen wat spijkers en bouten en ook ’n paar koperen ringen te wijzen,
die uit ’t wrak waren aangespoeld, deed men hen ten slotte verstaan, dat zij
die ten geschenke zouden krijgen, wanneer ze enig voedsel brachten.
De kaffers gingen daarop terug, en kwamen de volgende dag in groter getal
opnieuw ’n bezoek brengen, en brachten toen ’n dozijn hoenders, ’n platte
mand gevuld met kafferkorenmeel, en ’n kleine wilde bok mede.
Er begon nu ’n handel die meer dan ’n uur duurde, en waarbij van beide
kanten getracht werd een zo voordelig mogelike koop te sluiten. De blanken
slaagden er ten slotte in al de meegebrachte eetwaren te verkrijgen voor 12
grote bouten, 20 spijkers en 1 koperen ring, en gaven de kaffers te kennen,
dat zij nog meer eetwaren moesten brengen.

Werkelik werden dan ook gedurende vier dagen de bezoeken herhaald,
zodat de schipbreukelingen een nog al aanzienlike hoeveelheid eetwaren
machtig werden, schoon dit veroorzaakte, dat driemaal ’n tocht naar ’t wrak
moest worden gedaan, om de nodige ijzerwaren voor ruiling te bekomen.
Op de vijfde dag echter toonden de kaffers dat zij niet tot de domste
behoorden. Ze brachten deze keer geen proviand met zich, kwamen ook niet
bij de tent, maar begaven zich rechtstreeks naar ’t wrak, dat zij zonder
blijkbare moeite bereikten en waaruit ze zich spoedig door middel van hun
strijdbijlen in ’t bezit stelden van ’n aantal bouten en spijkers.
Dit was een hele teleurstelling voor de schipbreukelingen, die nu niet in
staat waren om op deze goedkope wijze aan kost te komen, want hoezeer
men ook door gebaren de kaffers trachtte te doen verstaan dat zij meer
voedsel moesten brengen, en men de prijs daarvoor te geven meer dan
verdubbelde, schudden de zwartjes slechts ’t hoofd en kwamen elke dag
naar ’t wrak terug, totdat zij alle te bemachtigen ijzer er uit hadden
weggevoerd.
Nu scheen de toestand van de blanken hopeloos en inderdaad gaven
sommigen zich geheel aan de wanhoop over.
Katrijn en Hartog, zowel als de bootsman, bleken echter onversaagd en
legden lange afstanden aan ’t strand af om mosselen en oesters te vergaren,
doch op dit armoedig voedsel konden de schipbreukelingen niet lang leven,
en de dood scheen al nader en nader te komen.

HOOFDSTUK VII.

Er komt hulé.
Het was op de morgen van de 2de April 1686 dat Katrijn Knijf, die
gewoonlik vroeg opstond, uit de tent van de schipbreukelingen kwam en
naar buiten staarde. Het eens zo krachtige meisje zag er nu vervallen en
vermagerd uit, en haar vroeger schitterende ogen waren nu dof en
weemoedig. Zij zuchtte op treurige wijze, terwijl ze naar de bossen keek,
die zich ver landwaarts uitstrekten.
Plotseling verhelderde haar gezicht, want ze zag in de verte iets aankomen.
Snel liep ze de tent binnen en haalde bij haar vader de verrekijker, om die te
richten op hetgeen zij ginds zag bewegen.
Zij tuurde lang voordat zij kon uitmaken dat het mensen waren, en blijkbaar
blanken, want ze waren in Europese klederdracht.
Zodra zij hiervan overtuigd was, riep ’t meisje in de richting van de tent:
“kom uit, kom uit, er komen blanke mensen aan!”
Allen, behalve de drie zieken, holden op dit geroep de tent uit en de
verrekijker ging van hand tot hand, totdat er geen twijfel meer bestond of de
aankomende personen waren blanken.
Geen half uur later kwamen twee mannen, ongetwijfeld van Europese
afkomst, op de schipbreukelingen af, en een van die twee riep in ’t Engels
uit: “Verstaan jullie Engels?”
“O yes, O yes!” riepen Katrijn en stuurman MacIntosh als uit één mond.
“Mijn naam is John Kingston en die van mijn maat is William Christian,”
zei een der beide vreemdelingen. “Wij zijn schipbreukelingen van de “Good
Hope”, die verleden jaar bij de Baai van Natal gestrand is. Vier-en-twintig
van ons bereikten levend ’t land; we hebben toen ’n boot gebouwd en de

Kapitein en negen man zijn daarin naar Mozambique gegaan. Later zijn vier
anderen met ’n klein Engels scheepje vertrokken, terwijl vijf van ons aan
buikloop zijn gestorven, zodat er nu nog vijf in Natal zijn. Verleden week
hebben we gehoord dat er zuidelik en niet ver van ons ’n schip was vergaan
en daarop besloten wij tweeën te gaan zien of we jullie niet konden helpen.
Jullie zien er uit alsof je niet te veel te eten hebt.”
MacIntosh en Katrijn vertelden toen aan de twee Engelsen alles wat er
gebeurd was en gaven hun te kennen, dat ze bijna verhongerd waren en
geen raad wisten hoe aan voedsel te komen.
“O,” zei Christian, “dat zullen we gauw verhelpen,” en na ’n paar woorden
in kaffertaal met z’n maat gesproken te hebben, namen ze afscheid en
beloofden in de middag terug te zullen komen.
De schipbreukelingen wisten niet waarheen de Engelsen gegaan waren en
wat hun doel was, zodat de Kapitein z’n vrees uitsprak, dat ze wellicht
verraders waren, die de kaffers zouden aansporen de blanken te overvallen,
doch MacIntosh sprak dit met kracht tegen en ook Katrijn was van mening,
dat de Engelsen het goed met hen meenden, want waarom zouden ze anders
de 70 mijl afgelegd hebben om hen te bezoeken?
Het was even over twaalven toen men de Engelsen weder zag aankomen,
gevolgd door omtrent 25 kaffers.
Toen dit troepje bij de tent kwam, bleek ’t dat de twee Engelsen voedsel
waren gaan halen voor de schipbreukelingen, want Christian had in ’n zak
die hij op z’n rug droeg, heel wat gekleurde kralen van allerlei soort en ook
koperen ringen, beide artikelen die als ruilmiddelen zeer bij de kaffers in
trek waren.
Er was heel wat door de kaffers meegebracht, o. a. 1 jonge os, 4 bokken, 20
hoenders, 5 grote manden met kafferkorenmeel, 6 manden met kafferkoren
en ook enige kannen met kafferbier, benevens ’n mand met veldvruchten,
en enige eetbare bolgewassen.

Katrijn nam ’t voedsel in ontvangst. De bokken werden vastgemaakt, maar
de os werd dadelik geslacht en spoedig genoten de schipbreukelingen de
aangename en voor hen ongewone geur van bradend vlees.
“Vrienden,” zei Christian, “eet nu zoveel ge wilt, en als jullie magen gevuld
zijn, zullen we raad houden, en zien wat ons te doen staat.”
Daarop wenkte hij de kaffers naar huis toe te gaan, waarop Katrijn op
stukken platte klip ’t voedsel uitdeelde, dat gretig door de anderen
verslonden werd.
Een van de kaffers had ’n klein mandje met zout meegebracht, en daar de
schipbreukelingen in meer dan ’n maand geen zout hadden geproefd, was
dit hen zeer welkom, terwijl het verse kafferbier ’n uitmuntende
verfrissende drank uitmaakte.
Toen ’t maal geëindigd was, kwamen allen bij elkaar en nu begon Kingston
de vergadering toe te spreken in ’t Engels, dat door MacIntosh vertolkt
werd.
“Vrienden,” zei hij, “ge begrijpt dat ’t onmogelik is voor jullie om hier
alleen te blijven. Ik geloof niet dat de kaffers jullie kwaad zullen doen, maar
daar ge geen ruilmiddelen hebt, zullen ze jullie ook geen voedsel verkopen,
en ge zoudt dus ten slotte van honger omkomen. We zijn met ons vijven aan
de Baai van Natal en hebben genoeg kralen, koperen ringen, en andere
ruilmiddelen, om gedurende 50 jaar voedsel voor ons allen te kopen en
behalve dat, hebben we omtrent 8000 pond ivoor, dat we bij de schepen die
in de Baai komen, kunnen verruilen voor levensmiddelen. Ge zult welkom
zijn om alles met ons te delen, we wonen in kafferhutten en leven op
kafferwijze; drie van ons hebben zelfs kaffervrouwen en we leiden ’n
gemakkelik leven.
“We zijn goed gewapend, hebben geweren, kruit en lood in overvloed, en
ook twee koperen kanonnen die we uit ons schip gered hebben. Een groot
deel van ’t schip ligt nog op ’t strand, en bevat nog veel dat we gebruiken
kunnen.

“Ik stel dus voor, dat ge zo snel mogelik met ons vertrekt naar de Baai van
Natal. De afstand is maar 70 mijl, of niet meer dan drie dagen. Er is ’n
voetpad, want onze kaffers bezoeken dikwels de stam die hier woont, en
ook wij blanken zijn verscheidene malen hier geweest om handel te drijven.
Jullie goederen en de nodige proviand kunnen door kaffers hiervandaan tot
de Baai worden gedragen, want ’t zal ons min moeite kosten om de nodige
dragers te krijgen. Zijn we eenmaal aan de Baai, dan kunnen we daar
verdere plannen maken.”
Het spreekt vanzelf dat dit edelmoedige voorstel zonder de minste aarzeling
aangenomen werd, en men kwam overeen, dat de tocht de volgende middag
zou beginnen.
Er was slechts één moeilikheid, namelik wat men met de drie zieken moest
doen. Kingston zei, dat de kaffers zich niet zouden laten overhalen om hen
te dragen.
Daarom besloot men ten laatste, dat Kingston bij de zieken in de tent zou
blijven, niet alleen om voor hun voedsel te zorgen, maar ook om hen te
beschermen en dat Christian met de overigen naar Natal zou gaan.
Toen dit alles afgesproken was, vertrokken de twee Engelsen naar ’t
omtrent 6 mijl verwijderde kafferdorp, waar ze de nacht zouden
doorbrengen en dan de volgende dag terug komen met de nodige dragers en
proviand voor de reis.
De schipbreukelingen waren natuurlik hoogst verheugd over deze redding
uit de nood en zelfs de Kapitein kon op dit punt niets vinden om over te
klagen.
Allen brachten ’n rustige nacht door, maar waren reeds voor dag en voor
dauw op de been, en na ’n haastig maal van kafferkorenpap en gebraden
vlees, hielp iedereen mee om al hun bezittingen te pakken in bundels van
omtrent 40 tot 60 pond gewicht, zoals Christian dit voorgeschreven had.
Zulk ’n bundel, had hij gezegd, zou ’n kaffer vandaar naar de Baai dragen
voor ’n koperen ring ter waarde van sixpence.

De zon stond nog niet op midderhoogte, toen de twee Engelsen bij de tent
terug kwamen met omtrent 30 kaffers. Snel werd aan elke drager z’n pakje
toegewezen, terwijl de vier matrozen ieder ’n bok aan ’n touw meenamen,
of beter gezegd meesleepten, en de overigen van ’t gezelschap ieder ’n paar
hoenders onder de arm droegen.
Nadat men Kingston en de drie zieken gegroet had, begon men de reis.

HOOFDSTUK VIII.

De reis naar de Baai en de aankomst aldaar.
Het was een aardig gezicht, dat deze uittocht aanbood. Christian liep voorop
met een lange, zware kafferkierie in de hand; dan kwamen een voor een in
een ganzerij, de Kapitein, diens dochter, de offisieren en onderoffisieren,
vervolgens de manschappen en ten slotte de dragers.
Dezen schenen goed gehumeurd, want onder ’n enigszins eentonig, maar
niet onaangenaam gezang, hielden zij de maat in hun gang, en elke paar
minuten hieven zij een luid hu! hu! of au! au! aan, waarbij zij dan een soort
van bokkesprong maakten.
Katrijn wilde ook wat leven onder de blanken brengen en begon ’n vrolik
en welbekend zeemansliedje te zingen, waarbij de anderen als een koor
invielen. Slechts de Kapitein bleef somber en stil, totdat zijn dochter hem
met ’n stok die ze droeg, begon te plagen, door hem in de rug te porren,
natuurlik tot groot vermaak van de anderen.
Het voetpad dat niet breder dan omtrent 18 duim was, slingerde zich nu
eens door ’n dik bos, dan weer over ’n schone grasvlakte, of over ’n rijk
begroeide en met bloemen bedekte hoogte. Hoge bergen of rotsgevaarten
vond men er niet.
Er waren niet lang geleden regens gevallen, zodat ’t veld er prachtig uitzag,
en hier en daar ’t gras aan de kanten wel 4 of 5 voet hoog stond. Niet zelden
zag men in de verte op de velden, aanzienlike troepen wilde bokken, en nu
en dan sprong ’n duiker of een bosbok in de nabijheid van Christian op, die
zich echter niet de moeite getroostte er op te schieten.
Toen men omtrent 2½ uur gelopen had, kwam men bij ’n helder stroompje,
waar Christian bevel gaf halt te houden, en waar men wat beschuit van
kaffermeel gebruikte, waarvan sommige dragers ’n aanzienlike hoeveelheid
bij zich hadden.

Na ’n uur rusten, ging men weer op weg, en kwam eerst in ’n groot dik bos,
waarin verscheidene bomen ’n hoogte van over de 100 voet hadden.
Christian liet nu de mannen die geweren bij zich hadden, deze evenals hij
zelf deed, gereed houden, want er waren, naar hij zei, nog olifanten in ’t
bos.
Gelukkig echter ontmoette men geen enkele van deze reuzen van ’t woud en
na 2 uur gelopen te hebben, was men ’t bos uit. De zon begon reeds sterk
naar ’t westen te dalen, en toen men nog ’n uur verder was, kwam men
opnieuw bij ’n riviertje, waar de Engelsman voorstelde te overnachten.
Daar er aan de oever van de rivier ’n aantal bomen stonden, kapte men
spoedig ’n hoeveelheid grote takken af, waarmede men ’n soort van lager
vormde. Daarin zouden de blanken slapen, terwijl de dragers de nacht er
buiten doorbrachten.
Plotseling hoorde Christian ’t eigenaardige geluid dat de tarantalen maken;
hij riep ’n paar van hen die geweren hadden, men sloop behoedzaam onder
de bomen door en kwam weldra in ’t lager terug met meer dan twintig van
de smakelike vogels.
Katrijn liet ze door de manschappen en zelfs door de offisieren zo snel
mogelik plukken, en toen ze op braadspitten gaar gemaakt waren, had men
er met warme koeken van kafferkorenmeel ’n smakelike maaltijd van.
Onder het nuttigen van dit maal vroeg MacIntosh aan Christian, of er ook
leeuwen of andere wilde dieren in deze streken waren, waarop deze
antwoordde, dat dit deel van ’t land dicht bevolkt was met kaffers, die uit
zelfbehoud de leeuwen hadden uitgeroeid. Wel waren er nog tigers en
luipaarden, doch die hielden zich meest in ’t gebergte op, en vielen slechts
zeer zelden de mens aan.
De nacht ging zonder enige stoornis voorbij en toen de volgende morgen de
zon opkwam, zette men met frisse moed de reis voort.

Na ’n wandeling van drie uur kwam men op ’n steile rand, aan welks voet
’n grote rivier liep. Op die rand stond ’n kafferkraal of dorp, bestaande uit
over de 200 ronde hutten; Christian leidde z’n reisgenoten rechtuit naar de
kraal, waar hij als ’n oude bekende begroet werd. Hij liet de blanken en de
dragers omtrent ’n honderd tree van de kraal wachten, en nadat hij z’n
geweer aan Kapitein Knijf had overhandigd, stapte hij alleen ’t dorp binnen
om de hoofdman ervan te bezoeken, want hij wist dat dit kaffergebruik was.
Na ’n half uur kwam hij terug en deelde mede dat ze er ’n weinig zouden
uitrusten.
Niet lang daarna kwamen enige kaffervrouwen die gekookt geitevlees,
kafferkoren, boontjes en ook ’n twaalftal kalabassen met kafferbier
brachten. Zij zeiden dat dit ’n geschenk van de induna was.
Men liet zich alles goed smaken en toen ’t maal afgelopen was, ging
Christian weder naar de hoofdman om hem te bedanken en tevens te
beloven, dat hij, zodra hij kon, hem ’n tegengeschenk zou zenden.
Na een goed uur gerust te hebben, trok men verder en ging de rivier door op
’n doorwaadbare plaats, waar ’t water echter een voet diep was, zodat de
blanken toch hun schoenen moesten uittrekken om er doorheen te komen.
De doortocht geschiedde niet zonder ’n lachwekkend toneel, want de
zeilmaker gleed uit op ’n gladde klip, viel in ’t water, dat juist daar iets
dieper was en werd natuurlik papnat op ’t droge gesleept. De arme kerel,
die bibberde van ’t koude bad dat hij gehad had, kreeg van Christian de
troost, dat de zon warm was en hij wel gauw zou opdrogen.
Zonder verdere wederwaardigheden bereikte men die avond ’n tweede
aanzienlike rivier en overnachtte aldaar.
Voor ’t geheel donker was, verliet Christian ’t kamp, doch kwam binnen ’n
half uur terug met ’n bosbok en twee duikers, die hij nauweliks dragen kon,
zodat er toen weder voldoende vlees was, zowel voor de avond als voor de
volgende morgen.

Men had die dag ’n flinke afstand afgelegd en allen waren moe en stijf,
zodat ’n ieder blij was om na het maal zo spoedig mogelik zijn slaapplek op
te zoeken.
De volgende dag kwam men weder bij ’n kraal en werd ook daar goed
ontvangen en onthaald.
Eén uur voor zonsondergang, kwamen de blauwe wateren van de Indiese
Oceaan in ’t gezicht, en de zon was juist aan ’t verdwijnen toen men bij ’n
kleine kraal kwam, waarin zes kafferhutten stonden, die omringd waren
door ’n tamelik hoge aarden wal.
“Zo,” zei Christian, “nu zijn we thuis,” en gevolgd door de anderen, stapte
hij de kraal binnen, waar hij spoedig zijn metgezellen voorstelde aan de drie
achtergebleven Engelsen, die de nieuw aangekomenen hartelik
verwelkomden.
Men wees Kapitein Knijf en z’n dochter ’n lege kafferhut aan, die er zeer
eenvoudig doch zindelik uitzag; de anderen moesten de eerste dagen nog
maar buiten slapen, totdat er nieuwe hutten voor hen opgericht waren.
De dragers legden hun vrachten neder, waarop Christian hen ieder ’n grote
koperen ring en ’n handvol blauwe kralen als hun betaling gaf.
Daarop gingen ze vergenoegd heen, naar de grote kraal van de Abambo’s,
die zoals Christian zei, ’n half uur te voet aan de andere kant van de heuvel
of ’t kopje lag.

HOOFDSTUK IX.

Vier maanden een lekker lui leven.
Toen de schipbreukelingen de volgende morgen na ’n geruste slaap
opstonden, was de zon reeds ’n half uur op, en vertoonde zich aan hen een
schoon toneel.
De kraal van de Engelsen was gebouwd op de helling van ’n heuvel, die
men tans de Berea noemt.
Vóór hen strekte zich de Baai van Natal uit, met z’n blauwe wateren, die
zachtjes tegen ’t zonnige strand bruisten.
Rechts van de Baai verhief zich de steile Kaap, die gewoonlik bekend is als
“de Bluff” en waar tegenwoordig de vuurtoren staat.
Tussen de kraal en de zee was de grond bedekt met weelderig gras en lage
bloeiende struiken, terwijl links en rechts ’t geboomte geleidelik hoger werd
en eindelik in ’n dicht bos overging.
Al was men reeds in de tweede wintermaand, toch was de zon nog warm en
de lucht zoel.
Ging men de heuvelrand over, dan zag men aan de voet ervan de talrijke
hutten van de Abambo-kraal, links waarvan op ’n uitgestrekte gras vlakte
duizenden koeien en ossen rustig weidden, want de Abambo’s waren een
rijk en welvarend volk.
Met groot welgevallen zagen de schipbreukelingen dan ook dit prachtige
land aan, en MacIntosh zei, dat hij hier wel z’n hele leven zou willen
blijven.
Inderdaad volgde er ’n zeer aangename tijd voor de schipbreukelingen van
de Stavenisse.

In de eerste dagen was men de Engelsen behulpzaam met ’t oprichten van
vier grote ronde hutten, die elk als slaapplek voor drie man konden gebruikt
worden, zodat er nu ruimte genoeg voor allen was.
William Christian bracht de Kapitein en z’n dochter naar ’n grote hut, die
niet ver van de wal achter de verblijfplaats van de Engelsen stond.
Deze hut was ’n soort van pakhuis, waarin verscheidene kisten en balen
stonden, waarvan sommige reeds geopend waren.
De inhoud van de geopende kisten bestond uit kralen van allerlei kleuren,
koperen ringen, stukken ruw linnen, enz., en uit snuisterijen, alles afkomstig
van de Good Hope, en geschikt voor ruiling met de inboorlingen, want de
Good Hope had handel gedreven op de Oostkust van Afrika en zelfs op
Madagascar, niet alleen in produkten, maar ook in slaven.
Het merkwaardigste in de hut was ’n grote hoop olifantstanden, waarvan er
sommige zeker 80 pond wogen; in ’n hoek stonden zowat ’n twintigtal
geweren van ’n beter maaksel dan dat waaraan de schipbreukelingen
gewoon waren.
Vier of vijf van die geweren waren prachtig versierd en ingelegd met ivoor
en zilver, en toen de Kapitein aan Christian vroeg, hoe hij aan die mooie
wapenen kwam, antwoordde deze, dat zij ze gevonden hadden op ’n
Arabiese Dhow, die zij ten noorden van Mozambique hadden veroverd.
Katrijn beschouwde al deze merkwaardigheden met aandacht en zei toen tot
William Christian: “Ik zie, meneer Christian, dat ge niet te veel gezegd
hebt, toen u ons vertelde, dat u bij de Baai genoeg goed had om voedsel
voor 50 jaar te kopen.”
“Ja,” zei Christian, “er is genoeg goed en men kan er heel wat voor kopen,
maar ’t ongeluk is dat ’t volk hier te slim begint te worden en steeds meer
begint te vragen voor z’n produkten. Vroeger kreeg ik voor ’n koperen
armband ’n dozijn hoenders, nu kan ik er slechts vier krijgen, en als ik mijn
waren tegen ’n hoge prijs van de hand wil zetten, moet ik nu al ver ’t
binnenland in, soms bij volken die nog nooit ’n witte man hebben gezien.

Die tochten zijn gevaarlik, want men weet nooit hoe ’n vreemd volk je
ontvangen en behandelen zal, en vooral de stammen die in aanraking
geweest zijn met de Arabieren zijn dikwels zeer gevaarlik.”
Drie van de Engelsen leefden met kaffervrouwen uit de stam van de
Abambo’s, maar deden nog niet aan veelwijverij, zodat er slechts drie
vrouwen in de kraal waren, die ieder ’n zuigeling in de arm hadden.
Katrijn had eerst ’n afkeer van die wezens, doch langzamerhand raakte zij
met hen bekend, en vond zij ze beter dan ze gedacht had. Ze hielden hun
hutten ordelik en zindelik en waren bezig van de morgen tot de avond,
hetzij met ’t koken van kost, of ’t werken in de kleine tuinen, die buiten de
kraal op de helling van de heuvel aangelegd waren en waarin kafferkoren,
zoet riet, pompoenen en boontjes weelderig groeiden.
Er was zelfs een stuk grond met maïs of mielies bezaaid, ’n plant toen nog
niet algemeen bekend in Zuid-Afrika, maar in die streken door de
Portugezen ingevoerd; deze mieliepitten had de bemanning van de Good
Hope in Sofala gekregen.
Toen Katrijn deze plant, die ze dikwels in Indië gezien had, opmerkte,
vroeg ze aan Christian of men ze hier at. De Engelsman antwoordde, dat
men ze zeer goed kon eten, maar de opbrengst van ’t kleine lapje dat hij
had, wilde hij gebruiken om ze te verkopen of te verruilen. Hij had ’t vorige
jaar ’n handjevol pitten ten geschenke gegeven aan de Koning van de
Abambo’s en deze had heel wat koppen daarvan gewonnen, en nu wilde het
volk van de Abambo’s ook van ’t nieuwe voedsel hebben; hij hoopte
zodoende heel wat voordeel uit dat stukje grond te maken. Was dit ’t geval
dan zou hij ’t volgende jaar ’n groter stuk land er mee beplanten.
Nadat ’t meisje haar eerste afkeer van de kleurlingvrouwen overwonnen
had, bracht zij ze meermalen ’n bezoek en schoon ze hun taal niet kon
praten, wist men door gebaren elkander op ’n manier te begrijpen.
Langzamerhand leerde Katrijn echter heel wat uitdrukkingen in de taal van
de Abambo’s, die niet veel verschilde van de tegenwoordige taal der Zulu’s.

Overigens leidde Katrijn ook geen ledig leven. Zij moest voor de kost
zorgen en voor de gemakken van haar vader.
Nog altijd was de Kapitein in droevige gedachten verzonken en gewoonlik
zat hij stil en eenzaam in de schaduw van ’n boom of bosje naar de zee te
turen, terwijl hij onophoudelik rookte. Dit roken was voor hem, zowel als
voor de andere zeelieden ’n waar genot, want al hadden sommigen nog wel
’n pijp gehad, sinds de schipbreuk waren ze zonder tabak geweest.
De Abambo’s echter kenden ’t gebruik van tabak en verbouwden ’n soort
van die plant, welke in sommige delen van Zuid-Afrika in ’t wild groeit. Ze
droogden de blaren en maakten er kleine rollen van, evenals de Pondo’s dit
tans nog doen. Die tabak had geen slechte smaak, maar was verbazend
sterk, doch de zeelieden waren aan sterke tabak gewoon. Zij die geen pijpen
hadden, kregen die òf van de kaffers, òf maakten ze zelf uit ’t hout van ’n
zekere boom, dat daartoe zeer geschikt was.
Nadat de hutten gereed waren, hadden de mannen weinig of niets te doen.
Soms gingen ze ’s morgens naar ’t strand, waar ze zich eerst baadden, en
zich dan vermaakten met ’t vangen van vis en niet zelden ’n rijke buit
meebrachten.
Nu en dan vergezelden ze Christian of een der andere Engelsen naar de
hoofdkraal van de Abambo’s; bij andere gelegenheden gingen ze met de
nieuwe vrienden op de jacht.
Over ’t algemeen leidden ze ’n aangenaam en zorgeloos leven. Wild, vis,
kafferkoren en ander voedsel was er volop, en ze hadden zich over niets te
bekommeren.
Om echter een van de kaffermeiden tot vrouw te nemen, zoals de drie
Engelsen hadden gedaan, dat stuitte zelfs de anders niet kieskeurige
Hollandse zeelui tegen de borst.
Nadat ze omtrent drie weken nabij de Baai van Natal waren geweest, kwam
Kingston aanzetten met twee van de drie achtergebleven zieken, die tans

hersteld waren. De derde was intussen overleden. Nu was het oude
gezelschap weer zo goed als voltallig.
Kort na hun aankomst zeiden Christian en Kingston, dat ze van plan waren
’n eind ver ’t binnenland in te gaan, ten einde olifanten te jagen en handel te
drijven met de inboorlingen, en ze stelden aan de Hollanders voor met hen
samen te gaan, ’t geen dan ook aangenomen werd.
Slechts Hartog en de oude Kapitein en diens dochter bleven thuis, met de
andere drie Engelsen.
De twee herstelde zieken wilde Christian eerst niet meenemen, want hij
vreesde, dat ze nog niet sterk genoeg zouden zijn om de ongemakken van
de reis te verdragen, doch ze drongen zo bij hem aan, dat hij ten slotte er in
toestemde.
Al de blanken werden met geweren en de nodige ammunitie gewapend.
Men had geen andere vracht te dragen, dan z’n eigen kombaars en genoeg
proviand voor ’n dag.
Veertig dragers, ieder met twee assegaaien gewapend, werden met de
handelswaren en genoeg kafferkoren voor de reis beladen; vlees kon men
langs de weg krijgen in de vorm van wild.
Evenals op de reis van ’t wrak liep men langs ’n voetpad, de een achter de
ander, doch na verloop van drie dagen eindigde het voetpad bij ’n zekere
kraal en moest men met behulp van ’n kompas, dat Christian bij zich had,
de weg zoeken door de bossen en over de grasvlakten.
We zullen de tocht niet beschrijven, maar slechts melden dat deze
uitmuntend afliep.
De twee Engelsen, die natuurlik het leeuwe-aandeel in de jacht hadden,
schoten over de twintig olifanten, waarvan sommige heel wat ivoor
opleverden.

De handel slaagde eveneens uitstekend en de dragers hadden werk om de
zware pakken naar de baai terug te brengen. Ook bracht men ’n achttal
beesten en 25 geiten met zich mede.
Driemaal werden in vier maanden tijd zulke reizen gemaakt, alle met even
groot sukses. Slechts op de laatste reis, waarop men in aanraking kwam met
’n vreemde stam, die zich niet al te vriendschappelik betoonde, liep men
groot gevaar om vermoord te worden en ’t was slechts aan de takt van de
twee Engelsen te danken, dat men heelhuids uit die streek terugkwam.
Omstreeks ’t einde van 1686, kwamen plotseling acht mannen en een
jongen uit ’t Noorden bij de Baai van Natal aan, en verhaalden dat zij de
bemanning waren van ’n klein Engels schip, de Bona Ventura, dat bij de St.
Lucia Baai vergaan was, en dat zij nu op weg waren naar de Kaap de Goede
Hoop.
Zij waren allen Engelsen, en toen zij nu in de Baai waren aangekomen,
maakten de andere daar reeds wonende Engelsen het hun duidelik, dat het
dwaasheid was om te trachten de Kaap de Goede Hoop te voet te bereiken.
Ze moesten liever in Natal blijven en men was geheel bereid om alles met
hen te delen, mits zij hun aandeel namen in ’t werk dat men te doen had.
Wat dat werk was, zullen we in ’n later hoofdstuk verhalen.

HOOFDSTUK X.

Een zeeman tegen wil en dank.
Gedurende de tijd, dat de anderen op expeditie waren, leidden de drie
achtergebleven Engelsen, de Kapitein, zijn dochter en Abraham Hartog ’n
rustig leven.
De drie Engelsen waren dikwels afwezig en bij de grote kraal van de
Abambo’s; er was dan voor de schipbreukelingen meestal geen ander
gezelschap dan dat van de drie kaffermeiden.
Met hen was Katrijn nu op goede voet en dit kwam haar in menig opzicht
best te pas.
De manskleren waarin zij geland was, hadden reeds zoveel geleden, dat ze
bijna onbruikbaar waren, en Katrijn moest op de een of andere manier ’n
plan maken, om nieuwe kleren in handen te krijgen.
Wat haar onderkleren betrof, had zij geen moeite want op haar verzoek gaf
Kingston haar wat zij nodig had van katoen of linnen, maar iets dat kon
dienen voor bovenkleren, had hij niet in z’n bezit.
De kaffermeiden waren gekleed met rokken van zeer fijn gelooid, dun leer,
meestal dat van geiten of wilde bokken, en ze waren niet ongewillig om ’t
blanke meisje te wijzen, hoe die vellen gelooid en voor dragen gereed
gemaakt werden.
Kingston voorzag Katrijn daartoe gaarne van de nodige vellen, enige dikke
naalden, en ook van uit de darmen van verschillende dieren vervaardigde
draden of pezen, waarmede de kaffers gewoon waren de bereide vellen aan
elkaar te werken.
Nadat zij de vellen op kafferwijze had gelooid en deze mooi zacht waren
—’n werk dat heel wat moeite en tijd kostte—vervaardigde zij er ’n rok

van, en ook een lijfje, dat zij met gekleurde kralen versierde, zodat toen
alles klaar was, zij er heel netjes uitzag.
Laat in de namiddag, als ’t meisje met haar werk klaar was, kwam Abraham
Hartog haar en haar vader meestal ’n bezoek brengen.
Hij trachtte dan de oude man wat op te vroliken en onderhield zich op
aangename wijze met Katrijn.
Daardoor raakten de twee jongelieden goed bekend met elkander, en hoe
meer dit geschiedde des te beter leken ze mekaar, zodat zij na verloop van
enige maanden op vertrouwelike voet stonden.
Op zekere middag toen de oude Kapitein zich niet heel wel gevoelde, en in
zijn hut was gaan liggen, zaten Hartog en Katrijn op ’n bankje buiten de
hut. Reeds menigmaal had Katrijn gedacht dat Hartog van betere familie
was, dan men wel op ’t eerste gezicht zou menen, en dat ’t zeemansberoep
hem eigenlik niet paste. Die middag waagde zij het om daarover een
opmerking aan Hartog te maken.
De jonge stuurman zweeg enige ogenblikken en zei toen: “Wel, juffer, u
heeft gelijk, voor zeeman ben ik niet in de wieg gelegd, en ’t is dan ook wel
m’n eigen schuld, dat ik hier nu in ’n woest land heb schipbreuk geleden.
Als ik u niet verveel, ben ik niet ongewillig om u te vertellen, hoe dit alles
gekomen is.”
Katrijn antwoordde, dat niets haar meer genoegen zou doen dan dat verhaal
aan te horen, waarop Hartog begon:
“Ik ben in Rotterdam geboren, en verloor mijn moeder, toen ik nauweliks
twee jaar oud was. Mijn vader had als koopman ’n grote zaak, vooral in
goederen die uit de Levant kwamen, en reeds bij mijn geboorte was hij ’n
wel-af man en wegens zijn eerlikheid, algemeen onder de kooplui gezien.
“Schoon hij zelf geen hoge opvoeding genoten had, wilde hij dat ik, z’n
enige zoon, zou gaan studeren, en met dat doel werd ik op m’n dertiende
jaar naar ’t gymnasium te Rotterdam gezonden. Maar dat eeuwige zitten

over boeken, en dat gedurig leren van Latijn en Grieks, beviel me volstrekt
niet, en ik wenste soldaat te worden, en ’n leven van avonturen te leiden.
“Mijn vader was niet hertrouwd en na de dood van mijn moeder, had zijn
oudste zuster die ongehuwd was, ’t bestuur van zijn huishouden op zich
genomen.
“Tante Anna was geen slechte vrouw en zorgde goed voor ons, maar ze had
’n grote vrees voor mijn vader en keurde daarom alles goed wat deze zei of
deed.
“Toen ik ’t gymnasium doorlopen had, wilde mijn vader mij als student
naar Leiden sturen, maar ik verzette me daar hevig tegen en verklaarde hem
ronduit, dat ik geen lust had in studeren, en dat ik soldaat wilde worden.
“Er had toen ’n vrij heftig toneel tussen mij en de oude heer plaats, en ’t
einde er van was dat hij zeide: ‘Abraham, met mijn verlof zal je nooit
soldaat worden, want in mijn oog is ’t ’n gemeen en laag baantje. Als je niet
studeren wilt, zal ik je op m’n kantoor nemen, je ’t koopmansvak leren, en
dan kan je later als ik oud ben, de zaak overnemen.’
“Maar om de hele dag aan een lessenaar te zitten, kolommen cijfers op te
tellen en eentonige handelsbrieven te schrijven, had ik ook geen lust.
“Die laatste weigering van mij, maakte mijn vader woedend en hij
antwoordde: ‘Ik zal je twee dagen tijd geven om je te bedenken, wat je gaat
doen; of je naar Leiden zal gaan, of op m’n kantoor zal komen. Als je geen
van beide aanneemt, dan ga je mijn huis uit en dan kan je zien hoe je in de
wereld klaar komt, maar dan wil ik ook niets meer met je te doen hebben.’
“Die twee dagen waren voor mij dagen van inwendige strijd, maar ten slotte
besloot ik mijn eigen hoofd te volgen, zelfs op gevaar van aan de toorn van
m’n vader overgeleverd te zijn.
“Tante Anna, die natuurlik ’t plan van mijn vader goedkeurde, trachtte
tevergeefs mij op mijn voorgenomen besluit te doen terugkomen en aan de
wens van mijn vader te voldoen; toen de derde dag daar was, en mijn vader

mij vroeg wat ik zou doen, zei ik dat ik noch naar Leiden zou gaan, noch op
zijn kantoor komen.
“Ik zag dat mijn vader boos werd, doch hij bedwong zich en zei zo kalm
mogelik: ‘dan moet je om 12 uur maar bij mij op kantoor komen.’
“Dat deed ik, en toen ik z’n kantoor was binnengetreden, sloot hij de deur
en zei: ‘Je bent oud genoeg om te weten wat je doet. Je weigert om aan de
wensen van je vader te voldoen en je wilt de wijde wereld ingaan, zonder
dat je ’t minste begrip hebt van de behandeling, die je daar zal ondervinden,
want je hebt wel wat geleerd op ’t gymnasium, maar bent onervaren en hebt
geen praktiese kennis van de wereld. Ik heb je reeds gezegd, dat als je mijn
beide voorstellen weigert, ik niets meer met je te doen wil hebben, en je
moet niet verwachten dat ik je hulp zal verlenen, als je ooit in moeilikheid
mocht komen. Ik wil je echter niet als ’n bedelaar de wereld insturen. Hier
is 2000 gulden, begin daarmee de strijd om ’t bestaan, maar is je geld op,
denk dan niet dat je weer bij mij behoeft te komen aankloppen.’
“Daarop haalde mijn vader vier rolletjes goud uit z’n lessenaar en
overhandigde die aan mij.
“Zonder ze te tellen stak ik ze in m’n zak, waarop de oude heer zonder enig
verder liefdesbewijs en blijkbaar zonder aandoening mij de hand gaf en
slechts zei: ‘Goeden dag, Abraham.’
“Voor ’n ogenblik voelde ik ’n heftige aandrang om voor mijn vader op de
knieën te vallen, hem om vergiffenis te vragen, en te zeggen dat ik aan zijn
wensen zou voldoen, doch mijn hoogmoed en eigenzinnigheid beletten mij
aan die roepstem gehoor te geven, en met ’n ‘Goeden dag, Vader’, stapte ik
de kamer uit.
“Ik ging rechtuit naar huis, pakte mijn kleren en andere bezittingen in ’n
grote kist en liet die door de knecht naar ’n kleine herberg aan de Maaskant
brengen.
“Ik wilde tante Anna nog groeten, doch bevond dat ze uitgegaan was en
zonder dralen verliet ik ’t huis en begaf me naar de herberg.

“Die nacht dekte de slaap mijn ogen niet, want mijn gedachten waren
gedurig bezig met wat ik zou beginnen.
“Ik had die avond in de herberg enige soldaten ontmoet en aan hen mijn
plan medegedeeld om ook dienst te nemen, maar ze raadden mij dit sterk af,
omdat ’t ’n hondeleven was en je meer straf kreeg dan kost; zij waren zelf
ten minste van plan ’t Staatsleger te verlaten, en zich in dienst van de Oost
Indiese Kompanjie te begeven. Ze haalden verscheidene voorbeelden aan
van mannen, die als soldaat bij de Kompanjie waren begonnen en nu hoge
betrekkingen bekleedden en schatrijk waren geworden.
“Natuurlik vertelde ik hun niet dat ik in ’t bezit van 2000 gulden was.
“Na lang ’t voor en tegen overwogen te hebben, kwam ik, toen de
morgenstond aanbrak, tot ’t besluit, dat ik ’t voorbeeld van de soldaten zou
volgen en dienst nemen bij de Oost Indiese Kompanjie.
“Ik was pas 17 jaar, maar krachtig, en flink opgegroeid, want ik had toen
reeds ’n lengte van over de vijf en ’n halve voet.
“Ik bood me dus aan voor dienst bij de Kompanjie, werd dadelik
aangenomen en moest me reeds drie dagen daarna aanmelden bij zekere
Kapitein Reiniers, die met ’n detachement soldaten naar Indië zou
vertrekken met het schip “de Draak”.
“Ik was op tijd aan boord en de volgende dag vertrok ’t schip.
“Toen we bij de Kaap aankwamen, was er juist ’n tekort bij ’t garnizoen
aldaar en werd de helft van ons detachement, waaronder ook ik, door de
Goeverneur gelast er te blijven; we kregen onze intrek in het Kasteel.
“Een jaar lang ging ’t vrij goed, maar de gewenste bevordering, waarvan
men mij zoveel gesproken had, bleef uit en ’t soldateleven beviel me ook
volstrekt niet, te meer daar destijds in de Kaap de soldaten voor allerlei
werkzaamheden gebruikt werden, en zelfs naar de bossen werden gestuurd
om bomen te kappen.

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Shakespeares Botanical Imagination Susan C Staub Editor

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