The winters tale garden

video guide transcript

[Shakespeare]: This full garden is for The Winter’s Tale.

[Interlocutor]: What plants did you use in The Winter’s Tale?

[Shakespeare]: Ivy, flax, cork, and pines; nettles, thorns, and briers; rue, violets, daffodils, lilies, flower-de-luce, crown imperial, primroses, oxlips, and carnations, also called gillyvors; marigold, mints, and marjoram; lavender, savory, rosemary, saffron, ginger, and nutmeg; dates, raisins, prunes, and currants; garlic, rice, and squash (which you would call young peas).

[Interlocutor]: What a profusion of fruits and flowers for “A Winter’s Tale”!

[Shakespeare]: There is much sadness in this tale, and a sad tale’s best for winter. But, spring follows winter and so this story’s tragic beginning   will come round to redemption, restoration, and even resurrection.

[Interlocutor]: What plants represent the tragic beginning?

[Shakespeare]:  King Polixenes of Bohemia spends several months visiting the friend of his childhood, King Leontes of Sicily. Leontes becomes possessed by the belief that the child his innocent wife Hermione is carrying is not his, but Polixenes'. He orders Polixenes killed, but Leontes's counselor Camillo warns Polixenes and escapes from Sicily with him. Leontes descends to the lowest depths of insane jealousy and perverse judgment, saying:

Dost think I am so muddy, so unsettled,
To appoint myself in this vexation, sully
The purity and whiteness of my sheets,
Which to preserve is sleep, which being spotted
Is goads, thorns, nettles, tails of wasps…

Then he insults his blameless queen:

My wife’s a hobby-horse, deserves a name
As rank as any flax-wench that puts to
Before her troth-plight.

And he puts her in jail.

[Interlocutor]: There the queen gives birth to a girl, and Leontes orders the baby killed too. The queen collapses in horror; both Leontes and their young son think she is dead. The little prince dies of grief, and Leontes is left in a winter of remorse and despair. But this tale doesn’t end in the winter, does it?

[Shakespeare]: No. The baby is carried off to Bohemia, where a shepherd finds her and names her Perdita. He raises her without knowing who she is. Leontes spends sixteen years alone. But on the stage in the play the scene shifts immediately. The season is warm, not wintry. Perdita is to be crowned Queen Flora at a sheep-shearing festival. Polixenes’ son Florizel, the Prince of Bohemia, has met Perdita and fallen in love with her.

[Interlocutor]: Polixenes and Camillo disguise themselves and come to the festival, determined to put a stop to Florizel’s love.

[Shakespeare]: Perdita is wise in the ways of herbs and flowers. She first offers her guests rosemary, the emblem of remembrance, and rue, also called herb of grace.

For you there’s rosemary and rue; these keep
Seeming and savor all the winter long:
Grace and remembrance be to you both,
And welcome to our shearing!

[Interlocutor]: She gives them herbs that persist through the winter. That gift contains the seeds of hope: remembrance of what was lost, and grace to be forgiven and begin again. But Polixenes and Camillo take the wintry aspect of those plants in a different sense.

[Shakespeare]: Indeed they do.

Shepherdess,
A fair one are you—well you fit our ages
With flowers of winter.

She courteously contradicts the claim that they are of wintry age. She turns the story away from the long winter of despair and draws it into the bounteous season of the shearing festival, full of prosperous cheer and new life:

Here’s flowers for you;
Hot lavender, mints, savory, marjoram;
The marigold, that goes to bed wi’ th’ sun
And with him rises weeping:

these are flowers
Of middle summer,
and I think they are given
To men of middle age. Y’are very welcome.

[Interlocutor]: She also recalls the hopeful beauty of the spring just past. She would bestow blossoms of spring on the country maids who flock to the festival, and above all on Florizel, for they were in bloom when she met him and they fell in love:

Now, my fair’st friend,
I would I had some flowers o’ th’ spring that might
Become your time of day; and yours, and yours,
That wear upon your virgin branches yet
Your maidenheads growing: O Proserpina,
For the flowers now, that frighted thou let’st fall

From Dis’s wagon! daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes
Or Cytherea’s breath; pale primroses
That die unmarried, ere they can behold
Bright Phoebus in his strength—a malady
Most incident to maids; bold oxlips and
The crown imperial; lilies of all kinds,
The flower-de-luce being one! O, these I lack,
To make you garlands of.

[Shakespeare]: She gives the plants of winter, spring, and summer each to those whom they befit most.

[Interlocutor]: Why does she censure flowers of autumn?

[Shakespeare]: You speak of carnations and gillyvors, which display themselves as summer turns to autumn. They could befit the older Polixenes and Camillo, but Perdita  has none to give them…

[Interlocutor]:  She says:

Sir, the year growing ancient,
Not yet on summer’s death, nor on the birth
Of trembling winter, the fairest flowers o’ th’ season
Are our carnations and streaked gillyvors,
Which some call nature's bastards: of that kind
Our rustic garden's barren; and I care not
To get slips of them.

[Shakespeare]: Gardeners know the ways of the carnations and their kin, crossing and crossing again with one another, bearing all the streaks    and spots and blended colors that come of such fertility. Perdita will have none of their unrestrained and fickle intermingling. Polixenes answers her:

You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race. …
Then make your garden rich in gillyvors,
And do not call them bastards.

But Perdita still refuses to allow such wantonness:

I'll not put
The dibble in earth to set one slip of them.

[Interlocutor]: What excellent use this play makes of plants! With only a few common garden flowers it speaks of the perceived promiscuity, uncertain parentage, and unnatural faithlessness that have led to Perdita’s apparent low station…

[Shakespeare]: And also the seeds of hope that these failings may turn with the turning of the seasons of life, giving rise to something more lovely, more vigorous, more able to persevere. Leontes discovers that Hermione lives, They recover their daughter, and the broken friendship of Leontes and Polixenes  finds new life in the loving marriage of their children to one another.