Shakespeare’s Time & Gardens
Shakespeare mentions about 180 different plants across his 37 plays. That's not decoration—that's a working vocabulary. In his time, everyone knew plants. City dwellers and country folk alike grew herbs, gathered them from woods and meadows, used them for medicine, cooking, dyeing fabric, making perfume. When Shakespeare said "rue" or "rosemary" or "burdock," his audience immediately understood what he meant—not just the plant, but what it symbolized, how it grew, what it was used for.
He uses that knowledge everywhere. When Juliet says
that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet
the audience knows roses—the scent, the thorns, the fact that they bloom once and fade fast. When Lady Macbeth tells her husband to
Look like th' innocent flower,
but be the serpent under't,
they know what hides under flowers: snakes, yes, but also rot, insects, poison. When Lysander in Midsummer Night's Dream yells
Hang off, you cat, you burr! Vile
thing, let loose!
everyone's had burdock seedheads stuck to their clothes. They know exactly how annoying and persistent burrs are.
Shakespeare was born around 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon—country boy, farmer's son, knew forests and fields. He worked in London from the late 1580s until 1611, writing for the Lord Chamberlain's Men (later the King's Men after James I took the throne). London was small then—about 200,000 people on 1,200 acres, roughly double the size of CU Boulder's campus. An hour's walk got you out into countryside.
This was the Renaissance: eager travel to unknown lands, new plants arriving on ships from the Indies and Americas, wealthy nobles competing to build elaborate gardens hoping Queen Elizabeth might visit. The "Tudor Garden" style mirrored Tudor buildings—raised beds made of the same materials as the architecture around them. That's what you see here: stone beds echoing the stone buildings, plants that grew in Shakespeare's England now growing in Boulder's very different climate and light.
The plants aren't museum pieces. They're a language Shakespeare and his audience both spoke fluently. When you know the plants, you hear the plays differently. A rose isn't just pretty—it's fragile, thorny, brief. Rue isn't just an herb—it's regret, bitterness, grace. The garden gives you the vocabulary. The plays give you the poetry.