The Kitchen Garden

Video guide transcript

[Shakespeare]: The Kitchen Garden. I, Will Shakespeare, am with you in the Kitchen Garden to the northeast, against the west wall of the Hellems Building. Plants were important to every Elizabethan household. Gardens for pleasure were the province of the landed gentry and the nobility, but every house, no matter how poor, grew what it could. These plants provided savor and helped to preserve our food; we settled our queasy stomachs, soothed our aches, eased our cramps, lessened our fevers, bound our wounds. We used them in making perfumes, salves, and sweet balms, and protecting our garments and bedding from vermin and rot.

We also put together nosegays of sweet-smelling flowers—tussie-mussies, we call them—to put to our noses when we must venture into the stench of the streets; for in our time, folks disposed of unwanted trash by throwing it into the street: dirty water, kitchen garbage, bedroom slops, the refuse from slaughtering and cleaning meat and fish, all. In times of plague, even the bodies of the dead were piled in the street. We hoped that a good tussie-mussie would protect us not only from the smell, but also the plague that lingered about the corpses.

We planted house leeks and hens-and-chickens on rooftops as protection against lightning and fire. We strewed the floors of homes and churches with rushes mingled with marjoram, rue, rosemary—several different herbs with sweet or sharp odors—which helped to clean the place and also to keep off insects and disease. Here in this garden you can see Winter savory, another strewing herb. Rue you can find in the Wars of the Roses Garden, and marjoram in the Canon Garden for Winter’s Tale or Lear. In the play All’s Well That Ends Well, the clown Lavatch calleth Helena, the heroine:

the sweet marjoram of the sallet

Sweet marjoram was akin to the herb you call oregano; and “sallet” was our term for greens and flowers eaten raw, much like your word “salad”. We ate over fifty kinds of leafy plants, but usually we cooked them. We grew and ate cabbage, onions, leeks, turnips, peas, and beans.

In the Introduction of Taming of the Shrew, a Lord commends the use of onions to dissemble weeping:

To rain a shower of commanded tears,
The onion will do well for such a shift,
Which in a napkin being held conveyed
Shall in despite enforce a watery eye.

We lived in a time of discovery. Our ships traveled the world. On each such journey the travelers drew pictures of what they saw and collected plants from the places they visited. We encountered for the first time the plant called “corn” -- a word we used for grains of every kind. New foods like squashes and tomatoes entered our gardens from the Americas. We thought tomato was poisonous; it was a member of the deadly nightshade family, and we thought the leaves poisonous, so we were suspicious of the bright fruit, even though it was decorative.

Larger gardens often had fruit trees, such as the apricot tree,which brings to my mind the gardener in Richard II who compares its fruited branches to children who drag down the father struggling to maintain them:

Go, bind thou up yon dangling apricocks,
Which, like unruly children, make their sire
Stoop with oppression of their prodigal weight:
Give some supportance to the bending twigs.

In that scene, the gardener and his servants go on to compare this and other gardening work to the government of the realm. Our gardens also mirrored the affairs of state in other ways. You might know already that King Henry VIII, the father of Queen Elizabeth, broke with the Pope in Rome, became Supreme Head of the Church of England, and married the Queen’s mother, Anne Bullen or, as I have learned to call her, Anne Boleyn. Soon afterwards, he ordered the dissolution of hundreds of monasteries. The monks had supplied the town and country with their bold compounds, and now they were gone. There were apothecaries in London and other large towns, but in general people had become dependent upon their own kitchen gardens and still rooms. We distilled many of the plants we grew for many purposes. Almost every household possessed a still. Large houses had whole still rooms and even still houses.

But not all our fruit grew on trees. There were berries of many kinds in the kitchen gardens. We ate bilberries, currants, dewberries, gooseberries, mulberries, and strawberries.

“When I was last in Holborn,” says Richard in Richard III,

I saw good strawberries in your garden there.
I do beseech you to send for some of them.

And in the first act of Henry V, the Bishop of Ely praises the fine qualities that have ripened in the new-crowned king despite all the time he spent in the company of Sir John Falstaff by saying:

The strawberry grows underneath the nettle
And wholesome berries thrive and ripen best
Neighbour'd by fruit of baser quality:
And so the prince obscured his contemplation
Under the veil of wildness.

We also grew whole hedges of blackberries. In Henry IV Part 1, that same Falstaff compulsion:

Give you a reason on compulsion!
If reasons were as plentiful as blackberries,
I would give no man a reason upon compulsion.

Now, this is a jest we understood better than you do now. You say REE-z’n for the reason in the mind, and RAY-z’n for the dried grape. But in my day, both words sounded the same: REH-z’n. Falstaff slyly refuses not only to explain -- to give a reason -- but also to give up so much as a single dried grape, even were such raisins as easy to come by as blackberries. The gardeners have quietly continued this jest across the way in As You Like It, in that garden, where you can find a blackberry growing together with a wild vine.

Our audience took much pleasure in Falstaff, and so we brought them just one more play, Merry Wives of Windsor. Plants of the kitchen garden abound in the tongues of the people in this play. We are what you call the “middle class”: the gentry, neither nobles nor peasants -- people of my own degree, who had good kitchen gardens and knew them well. They speak of bilberries, balm, walnuts, plums, prunes, pears, and pippins (pippin is a kind of apple); of cabbage and turnips and pumpion, a name for a large squash or a fruit of a ground vine. And when Falstaff exults to meet Mistress Ford under an oak tree, he says:

Let the sky rain potatoes;
let it thunder to the tune of Greensleeves,
hail kissing-comfits and snow eringoes.

The potatoes we knew you now call sweet potatoes; their shape gave rise to many a ribald jest.We candied the eringo root and believed it to strengthen our amorous powers, as kissing-comfits sweetened the breath. And Greensleeves is a love song. So you can see that everything that Falstaff mentions in that meeting serves his purpose for Mistress Ford.