220 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Hence it is that no man, at least no English-speaking man, reads 

 Shakespeare wrong. Everybody understands him. Here is a sort 

 of Anglo-Saxon Bible in which, so far as the world goes, every soul 

 finds himself, with all his hopes, his doubts, his whims, depicted. We 

 are therefore not surprised that everybody claims a share in Shakes- 

 peare; rather claims the poet as his own. The Protestant is sure that 

 Shakespeare despised the hierarchy; the Romanist is quite as cer- 

 tain that he loved the Church. There exists an essay to prove him a 

 Presbyterian; another to show that the great dramatist was a Uni- 

 versalist. A volume has been written to prove the man a soldier; 

 another that he was a lawyer, a printer, a fisherman, a freemason; 

 and here are five or six articles to show that Shakespeare was a 

 gardener.* 



All this simply means that the poet had a marvelous faculty for 

 close observing; that his vision was accurate, his instinct wonderfully 

 true. It may be therefore worth our while to study for a little this 

 remarkable man from the standpoint of a naturalist, to see how he 

 who so vividly paints a passion can paint a flower; how the man who 

 limns a character, till beyond the photograph it starts to actuality, 

 will catch the essential feature of some natural truth. 



We shall nowhere lack for material. The plays are full of refer- 

 ences to plants and flowers of every sort. England in Shakespeare's 

 day, as now, was a land of bloom, and the poet but reflects the love- 

 liness of beauty and color spread about him. But he does something 

 more. He is not content with flashes of color and breathings of odor, 

 he goes into detail and gives us the individual plant unmistakably. 

 In his description he shows an exactitude, a discriminating percep- 

 tion that, had it been turned to Nature's problems seriously at all, 

 must at once have transformed the science of his age. But Shakes- 

 peare was not a man of science; he was a poet. In his views of Na- 

 ture he resembles the great poets of the world, notably Goethe; and, 

 like Goethe, he not infrequently outruns the science of his time, uses 

 his imagination, divining things invisible. Moreover, Shakespeare's 

 plants are living things; they form a garden, not a herbarium. They 

 stand before us in multitudes, so that it is difficult for the present pur- 

 pose to know what to select. We must be content with a few speci- 

 men forms brought out in quotations no more extensive than seems 

 necessary to the argument. Of course, there are many plants to-day 



* In preparation of this article the author has consulted chiefly the following : John 

 Gerarde, The Herball or General Historic of Plants, 1597; Shakspere, Edward Dowden, 

 1872; William Shakespeare, Works, Globe edition, 1867; Natural History of Shakespeare, 

 Bessie Mayou, 1877; Shakespeare's England, William Winter, 1894; The Plant lore and 

 Garden-craft of Shakespeare, H. F. Ellacombe, 1896 ; The Gardener's Chronicle, sundry 

 pamphlets, and shorter articles. 



