The Othello Garden

Video guide transcript

[Shakespeare]: Here is the Othello Garden.

[Interlocutor]: Which plants come into use for you, Will Shakespeare, in Othello?

[Shakespeare]: There are many, some of which you know: Oak, Willow, Poppy, Strawberries, Rose, Rush, Lettuce, Nettle, Thyme, Sugar, Fig, Grapes. You may know less of Hyssop, a most important herb, and Mandragora, Sycamore and Coloquintida.

[Interlocutor]: And yet there are no gardens or forests in this play. So how do these plants fit in?

[Shakespeare]: Iago is the only personage to use plant imagery in the first part of the play, the parts you call Acts 1, 2, and 3. When the amorous Roderigo declares that he lacks the virtue needed to stop loving Desdemona, Iago scorns the notion that he is so helpless.

Virtue? A fig! ‘Tis in ourselves that we are thus or
thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our
wills are gardeners; So that if we plant nettles,
or sow lettuce, Set hyssop, and weed-up thyme,
Supply it with one gender of herbs or distract it
with many, Either to have it sterile with idleness, or
manured with industry, why the power and corrigible
authority of this lies in our wills.

[Interlocutor]: Iago says:

we have reason to cool our raging
motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts…

[Shakespeare]: Yes. He tells us what will happen with Othello, who is all sensuality, not reason: “the blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us to most prepost’rous conclusions.” And he infects Othello by accusing Desdemona of loving others.

Have you not sometimes seen a handkerchief
Spotted with strawberries in your wife’s hand?”

Iago asks.

Driven by his nature, sensuality without reason, Othello believes him. Iago says:

The food that to him now is as luscious as locusts
shall be to him shortly as bitter as colquintida.

A colquintida is an extremely bitter fruit, a gourd, about the size of an orange, that we called a bitter apple.

[Interlocutor]: Later in the play, the other characters begin to use plant imagery also. Desdemona seems to associate with the willow. She yields, she bends, it’s as if she’s infected by the inability to reason, or at least reason with Othello.

[Shakespeare]: Yes. She sings:

The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree.
Sing all a green willow.
Her hand on her bosom,
Her head on her knee,
sing willow, willow, willow. (...)
Sing all a green willow must be my garland.
Let nobody blame him, his scorn I approve.”

And then Emila …

I will play the swan and die in music:
(sings) Willow, willow, willow.

And finally Othello himself speaks of Desdemona as a rose…

When I have pluck’d the rose, I cannot give it vital growth again,
It needs must wither.

[Interlocutor]: Was there no hope for any of them?

[Shakespeare]: Nettles. In his speech about gardening, Iago talks of planting nettles. He means the stinging nettles a common plant that grows everywhere. It is a plant of much virtue. It can amend many diseases and is very good for purifying the blood. But its stalk has many sharp spines, each with a little pouch of burning venom at its base, stinging the unwary hand that merely brushes it. Indeed, the name of the plant, netel, means needle. Othello’s every brush with what Iago tells him adds to his agony. But those who gather nettle quickly learn: the more firmly the hand grasps the nettle, the less it feels the prickles. Othello feels the venom but, warrior though he is, he can not take firm hold of what might heal him.

[Interlocutor]: Perhaps the more firmly you hold to reason and truth, the less they sting?

[Shakespeare]: Perhaps!