PLANT-LORE OF SHAKESPEARE 
162 
Thou Mandrake.— 2 nd Henry IV, i. 2, 16. 
They called him Mandrake.— Ibid., iii. 2, 338. 
Would curses kill, as doth the Mandrake’s groan. 
2 nd Henry VI, iii. 2, 310. 
And shrieks like Mandrakes’ torn out of the earth, 
That living mortals, hearing them, run mad. 
Romeo andJuliet, iv. 3, 47. 
There is, perhaps, no plant on which so many books and 
treatises (containing for the most part much sad nonsense) 
have been written as the Mandrake, and there is certainly no 
plant round which so much superstition has gathered, all of 
which is more or less silly and foolish, and a great deal that is 
worse than silly. This, no doubt, arose from its first mention 
in connection with Leah and Rachel, and then in the Canticles, 
which, perhaps, shows that even in those days some strange 
qualities were attributed to the plant; but how from that 
beginning such, and such wide-spread, superstitions could have 
arisen, it is hard to say. I can scarcely tell these superstitious 
fables in better words than Gerard described them: “ There 
hath been many ridiculous tales brought up of this plant, 
whether of old wives or some runagate surgeons or physicke- 
mongers I know not. . . . They adde that it is never or 
very seldome to be found growing naturally but under a 
gallowes, where the matter that has fallen from a dead body 
hath given it the shape of a man, and the matter of a woman 
the substance of a female plant, with many other such doltish 
dreams. They fable further, and affirme that he who would 
take up a plant thereof must tie a dog thereunto to pull it up, 
which will give a great shreeke at the digging up, otherwise, if 
a man should do it, he should surely die in a short space after.” 
This, with the addition that the plant is decidedly narcotic, will 
sufficiently explain all Shakespeare’s references. Gerard, how¬ 
ever, omits to notice one thing which, in justice to our fore¬ 
fathers, should not be omitted. These fables on the Mandrake 
are by no means English mediaeval fables, but they were of 
foreign extraction, and of very ancient date. Josephus tells the 
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