The twelfth night garden

video guide transcript

[Shakespeare]: Here is the Twelfth Night Garden.

[Interlocutor]: What plants do your characters talk about, Will Shakespeare, in Twelfth Night?

[Shakespeare]: The flowers are violets and roses. The other plants are apple, squash, peascod, nettle, flax, and also ginger and pepper. And there are plenty of trees and bushes: willow, box, cypress, yew, ebony, and olive.

[Interlocutor]: Olive? Is that like the olive branch that’s supposed to be a symbol of peace?

[Shakespeare]: Yes, indeed. It was a well-known symbol in my time as it is in yours. Viola, in her guise as Duke Orsino’s page Cesario, uses it to assure Olivia of her good intent. When she comes a-wooing in her master’s name, she says:

I bring no overture
of war, no taxation of homage: I hold the olive
in my hand.

You are in the right to call it a symbol. It is a threadbare phrase that smacks of courtly speech much more than a real branch with leaves and bark. Many mentions of plants in this play are like that. Orsino, in speaking of his love for Olivia, does not talk about her, the lady herself, so much as his own experience. He celebrates his love by listening to music, and says:

O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour!

Later he calls for a song about dying for love, filled with all the usual symbols, cypress, yew, and flowers strewn upon a black coffin, and rather than grieving he tells Cesario that song

dallies with the innocence of love

It is not hard to see that the Duke is less in love with Olivia than with the courtly experience of being in love.

Away before me to sweet beds of flowers:
Love-thoughts lie rich when canopied with bowers.

Olivia is not much different from him. She is mourning for her brother, but is not much engaged in a struggle to heal grief. Rather she is, as ’twere, in love with mourning itself. She takes to herself that same symbolic cypress of the song, saying to Viola (whom she thinks to be a young man, and one she could love):

A cypress, not a bosom
Hideth my heart.

There is a kind of cypress tree in the courtyard here, but it is a Bald Cypress, native to this continent, and not much like the cypress trees of my home.

[Interlocutor]: So, in this play, plants aren’t quite real, but just conventional terms for talking about emotions?

[Shakespeare]: Not for everyone. Orsino and Olivia talk that way, but Viola’s language has a different voice. Orsino speaks to her in the language of courtly love:

women are roses, whose fair flower,
Being once display'd, shall fall that very hour.

But Viola is not a courtly lover. She shares the name of the demure violet, which we can see in this garden, but not its nature. She is bold enough to don a man’s attire and make her own way in an unknown shore. Her predicament is that she truly loves Orsino, but cannot speak without betraying her disguise as Cesario. She tells him instead of an imaginary sister, painting a pitiful picture of a damask-rose bud that, because of an insect eating its heart, will never bloom:

She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm in the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek.

[Interlocutor]: But are all the plants all just for love talk in this play?

[Shakespeare]: No, indeed. When Viola comes to seek Olivia, Olivia asks her steward Malvolio to describe this new visitor, and he replies in homely terms:

Not yet old enough for a man, nor young
enough for a boy; as a squash is before ’tis a
peascod, or a codling when ’tis almost an apple.

There is an apple tree in the next garden to this, the Taming of the Shrew garden. At the very end of the play, Viola once more appears in the nature of an apple. Their friends stare at the improbable sight of her beside her twin brother Sebastian:

How have you made division of yourself?
An apple, cleft in two, is not more twin
Than these two creatures. Which is Sebastian?

Consider too the scene wherein Olivia’s steward Malvolio strives to silence the riotous noise that her uncle Toby and his companions make in the middle of the night. They only laugh at his rebukes:

TOBY: Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous,
there shall be no more cakes and ale?
FOOL: Yes, by Saint Anne, and ginger shall be hot in the
mouth too.

You can see ginger growing in this garden. Not all the courtly phrases and dangerous rebukes in the world can quell the heat of ginger in the mouth.