The Much Ado About Nothing garden

video guide transcript

[Shakespeare]: Here is the Much Ado About Nothing Garden.

I[nterlocutor]: Which plants did you, Will Shakespeare, include while writing Much Ado About Nothing?

[Shakespeare]: In this play we have roses and oranges, woodbine and honeysuckle, oak and willow, sedges and the herb Carduus Benedictus, or holy-thistle.

[Interlocutor]: I remember that there is a lot of spying and eavesdropping in this play, mostly in gardens.

[Shakespeare]: Yes. In this play Beatrice and Benedick resist the very idea that they might fall in love, but their friends encourage it to happen all unwittingly. Claudio, Benedick’s friend, is already in love with Beatrice’s cousin Hero; but Benedick mocks at love and impatient with its follies. So when he sees Claudio and their commander Don Pedro approaching in the garden, he hides himself in an arbor. They see him hide, but he does not know that. So when they tell tales to one another of how Beatrice loves him, he takes their words to be sober truth. Likewise Hero and Ursula play the same trick on Beatrice. They send Hero’s waiting-woman, Margaret, to draw Beatrice into the garden in order that she may overhear them pity Benedick for his supposed hopeless love of her. They tell Margaret to

bid her steal into the pleached bower
Where honeysuckles, ripened by the sun
Forbid the sun to enter, like favorites
Made proud by princes, that advance their pride
Against the power that bred it: there will she hide her,
To listen our purpose.

The honeysuckle in this Garden (Hall’s honeysuckle, Lonicera japonica ‘Halliana’) resembles the honeysuckle I knew, as sweetly fragrant as I remember. But do you hear this description of a prince’s favorite who does not show the prince due service and gratitude? Our Queen Elizabeth often spoke of herself as a ‘prince’, and at about the time when I wrote this play, her favorite the Earl of Essex was … hem … showing a great deal of presumption. A few years later, he rebelled in earnest, and lost his head for his pains. But it was not safe to speak of such matters in the theater. This brief mention is as close to comment upon affairs of state as a play dared to come in my time, even softened and disguised thus as a mere description of a honeysuckle plant in an Italian bower.

[Interlocutor]: Hm. You mentioned oranges in this play. Is that the same sort of thing? Do oranges really stand for something else? Do oranges even grow in England?

[Shakespeare]: Not of themselves. It was after my time that the English began to build special glass houses for growing such plants. In my time, oranges were rare in England. They grew around the Mediterranean, and by the time they reached our island they were very costly indeed. We called them Seville oranges, for they often came to us from Spain. That is their name in England to this day.

The orange you see in this garden is a modern sweet orange (Citrus x sinensis) rather than a Seville orange. Seville oranges are a sour fruit, much too sour to eat directly from the tree. Rather the kitchens of the wealthy made use of oranges in their cookery. Even today, preserves of Seville oranges -- what you call marmalade -- are widely favored in England.

This Seville orange is the orange that Beatrice mentions in the play. She brings Count Claudio to his commander Don Pedro, when Claudio wrongly thinks that Don Pedro has wooed his beloved Hero away from him. Don Pedro asks what troubles him -- sadness? sickness? -- and Claudio makes but short replies that are barely courteous. It is Beatrice who explains, by comparing Claudio to a “civil” orange:

The count is neither sad, nor sick, nor merry, nor well; but civil count, civil as an orange, and something of that jealous complexion. [Much Ado About Nothing II i]

[Interlocutor]: One more question: What about that Carduus Benedictus you mentioned? Is that related to the character Benedick?

[Shakespeare]: Indeed it is. Many said that Carduus Benedictus, or holy-thistle, could cure anything. The day after Hero and Ursula trick Beatrice into believing that Benedick pines for love of her, Beatrice professes herself ill. Margaret, Hero’s waiting-woman, being in the secret, prescribes for Beatrice:

MARGARET: Get you some of this distilled Carduus Benedictus,
and lay it to your heart: it is the only thing
for a qualm.

HERO: There thou prickest her with a thistle.

BEATRICE: Benedictus! why Benedictus? you have some
moral in this Benedictus.

MARGARET: Moral! no, by my troth, I have no moral
meaning; I meant, plain holy-thistle.

Of course Beatrice’s suspicion is just; Margaret does mean Benedick. And she is right. Beatrice is not yet ready to say so, but before the play is done she will indeed lay Benedick to her heart.