Anyone with an interest in history and literature will love this book, a detailed insight into the gardens William Shakespeare would have spent time in throughout his life, as well as a study of gardening in the Elizabethan age.
Even if you only have a passing knowledge of Shakespeare’s plays, it’s well-known that the Stratford-born playwright had an active interest in horticulture, weaving references to plants and flowers throughout his work.
Was it memories of roses in his mother, Mary Arden’s cottage that inspired the famous ‘that which we call a rose By any other word would smell as sweet’ line in Romeo and Juliet?
Or was he looking at climbers growing at his wife, Anne Hathaway’s Cottage when he quilled Oberon’s description of the plants at Titania’s night-time bower: wild thyme, oxlips, nodding violets, luscious woodbine, sweet musk-roses and eglantine.
It’s a tantalising thought, and one that makes this book such a fascinating exploration of how the gardens in Shakespeare’s life informed his body of work.
Interesting asides throughout the book delve into the gardening fashions of the time and the plants that were nurtured – the craze for mulberries, medicinal herbs.
A helpful chronology of plays at the back helps the reader work out what was written where, in all giving a real sense of a family man at home, perhaps pottering outside in the garden, when he wasn’t busy with his quill.
Shakespeare’s Gardens
By Jackie Bennett
Frances Lincoln £25
Review by The English Garden editor Clare Foggett
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