PLANT-LORE OF SHAKESPEARE 
9 
“ In which with cunning hand was pourtrahed 
The love of Venus and her Paramoure, 
The fayre Adonis, turned to a flowre.”— F. < 2 ., iii. L 34 * 
£< When she saw no help might him restore 
Him to a dainty flowre she did transmew.” 
F. Q., iii. I, 38. 
Ben Jonson similarly speaks of it as “Adonis’ flower” (Pan’s 
Anniversary), but with Shakespeare it is different; he de¬ 
scribes the flower minutely, and as if it were a well-known 
flower, “purple chequered with white,” and considering that 
in his day Anemone was supposed to be Adonis’ flower (as it 
was described in 1647 by Alexander Ross in his “ Mystagogus 
Poeticus,”who says that Adonis “was by Venus turned into a 
red flower called Anemone ”), and as I wish, if possible, to 
link the description to some special flower, I conclude that 
the evidence is in favour of the Anemone. Gerard’s Anemone 
was certainly the same as ours, and the “purple” colour is no 
objection, for “ purple ” in Shakespeare’s time had a very wide 
signification, meaning almost any bright colour, just as pur- 
piireus had in Latin, 1 which had so wide a range that it was 
used on the one hand as the epithet of the blood and the 
poppy, and on the other as the epithet of the swan (“ pur- 
pureis ales oloribus,” Horace) and of a woman’s white arms 
(“brachia purpurea candidiora nive,” Albinovanus). Nor was 
“chequered” confined to square divisions, as it usually is now, 
but included spots of any size or shape. 
We have transferred the Greek name of Anemone to the 
English language, and we have further kept the Greek idea in 
the English form of “ wind-flower.” The name is explained 
by Pliny: “ The flower hath the propertie to open but when 
the wind doth blow, wherefore it took the name Anemone in 
1 In the “ Nineteenth Century ” for October 1877, is an interesting 
article by Mr. Gladstone on the “ colour-sense ” in Homer, proving that 
Homer, and all nations in the earlier stages of their existence, have a very 
limited perception of colour, and a very limited and loosely applied nomen¬ 
clature of colours. The same remark would certainly apply to the early 
English writers, not excluding Shakespeare. 
