Shakespeare- 
The Poet’s 
Worlds 
In 1592 the playwright Robert Greene, dying in 
miserable squalor, lashed out, in his Groatsworth of Wit, 
Bought with a Million of Repentance , at a successful 
professional rival who — lacking even a university 
degree! — had the impudence to fancy himself “the only 
Shake-scene in a country.’’ This is our first record of 
Shakespeare in London. He was then twenty-eight and 
had been in the capital long enough to establish himself 
and attract envious notice. Some years earlier, then, he 
had boldly set out from Stratford-upon-Avon on the high 
road to London, a hundred miles distant. 
What had possessed him to pull up stakes and leave 
behind — for the time — his wife and three small children? 
In an early play. The Taming of the Shrew , Petrucchio 
speaks of “such wind as scatters young men through the 
world /To seek their fortunes further than at home,/ 
Where small experience grows.” Some such wind carried 
Shakespeare from the little Warwickshire town of his 
origins to a London overflowing the ancient city walls: a 
magnet for foreign visitors, hub of the publishing trade, 
and — above all, for him — the center of theater. But 
Stratford had nurtured him, and unlike some of his 
literary colleagues, he never severed his provincial ties. 
As a child plying his textbooks through the 
unmercifully long Elizabethan school day, he must have 
turned whenever possible to another, more seductive 
book. This was the book of nature open to him in the 
gardens, orchards, and hedgerows of leafy Stratford, 
along the Avon’s banks, and in the beckoning fields and 
woodlands just outside. “Flowers I noted,” the poet says 
in Sonnet 99, and in fourteen brief lines, the forward 
violet, the lily, the buds of marjoram, and the roses 
standing fearfully on thorns all find their place. 
Shakespeare’s works constitute a brilliantly colored 
garden in which flowers, wild and cultivated, blossom 
side by side. 
Along the river’s bank the young Shakespeare would 
have noticed sedge, rushes (used to strew the floors of 
Tudor houses), and the tall reeds that thatched the roofs 
of humble cottages. In the stream the green leaves of the 
vagabond flags swayed to and fro in “the varying tide,” 
while the willow trees growing along the water’s edge 
cast their gray reflection. Traditionally, the willow 
symbolized forsaken love. Desdemona sings a song of 
willow before she dies, and in perhaps the most famous 
floral passage in Shakespeare, willow frames the scene of 
Ophelia’s drowning. 
If Shakespeare’s works are a scented garden that invite 
the horticulturist’s interest, they hold, too, the pleasures 
by S. Schoenbaum 
All illustrations from the Folger Shakespeare Library 
54 
