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PLANT-LORE OF SHAKESPEARE 
of a very common and conspicuous English plant known only 
or chiefly by its Latin name Anglicized. 
Our common English Poppy, “being of a beautiful and 
gallant red colour,” is certainly one of the handsomest of our 
wild flowers, and a Wheat field with a rich undergrowth of 
scarlet Poppies is a sight very dear to the artist, 1 while the 
weed is not supposed to do much harm to the farmer. But 
this is not the Poppy mentioned by Iago, for its narcotic 
qualities are very small; the Poppy that he alludes to is the 
Opium Poppy (P. soimiifenwi). This Poppy was well known 
and cultivated in England long before Shakespeare’s day, but 
only as a garden ornament; the Opium was then, as now, 
imported from the East. Its deadly qualities were well known. 
Gower describes it—• 
“ There is growend upon the ground 
Popy that bereth the sede of slepe.” 
Conf. Aman. lib. quint. (2, 102. Paulli). 
Spenser speaks of the plant as the “dull Poppy,” and describing 
the Garden of Proserpina, he says— 
“There mournful Cypress grew in greatest store, 
And trees of bitter gall, and Heben sad, 
Dead-sleeping Poppy, and black Hellebore, 
Cold Coloquintida.”— F. Q ., ii. 7, 52. 
And Drayton similarly describes it—- 
“ Here Henbane, Poppy, Hemlock here, 
Procuring deadly sleeping.”— Nymphal, v. 
The name of opium does not seem to have been in general 
use, except among the apothecaries. Chaucer,however,uses it— 
“ A claire made of a certayn wyn, 
With necotykes, and opye of Thebes fyn.” 
The Knightcs Tale. 
1 “ We usually think of the Poppy as a coarse flower; but it is the most 
transparent and delicate of all the blossoms of the field. The rest, nearly 
all of them, depend on the texture of their surface for colour. But the 
Poppy is painted glass ; it never glows so brightly as when the sun shines 
through it. Wherever it is seen, against the light or with the light, always 
it is a flame, and warms the wind like a blown ruby.”— Ruskjn, Proser¬ 
pina, p. 86. 
