294 
PLANT-LORE OF SHAKESPEARE 
Senna. 
What Rhubarb, Senna, or what purgative drug 
Would scour these English hence? 1 —Macbet/i, v. 3, 55. 
Even in the time of Shakespeare several attempts were made 
to grow the Senna in England, but without success; so that 
he probably only knew it as an important “purgative drug.” 
The Senna of commerce is made from the leaves of Cassia 
lanceolata and Cassia Senna , both natives of Africa, and so 
unfitted for open-air cultivation in England. The Cassias are 
a large family, mostly with handsome yellow flowers, some of 
which are very ornamental greenhouse plants; and one from 
North America, Cassia Marylandica , may be considered hardy 
in the South of England. 
Speargrass. 
Pdo. He persuaded us to do the like. 
Bardolph . Yea, and to tickle our noses wilh Speargrass to make them 
bleed, and then to beslubber our garments with it and swear it was 
the blood of true men.— 1st Henry IV, ii. 4, 339. 
Except in this passage I can only find Speargrass mentioned 
in Lupton’s “Notable Things,” and there without any descrip¬ 
tion, only as part of a medical recipe : “ Whosoever is tormented 
with sciatica or the hip gout, let them take an herb called 
Speargrass, and stamp it and lay a little thereof upon the 
grief.” The plant is not mentioned by Lyte, Gerard, Parkinson, 
or the other old herbalists, and so it is somewhat of a puzzle. 
Steevens quotes from an old play, “Victories of Henry the 
Fifth”: “ Every day I went into the field, I would take a straw 
1 In this passage the old reading for “Senna” is “Cyme,” and this 
is the reading of the Globe Shakespeare ; but I quote the passage with 
“ Senna” because it is so printed in many editions. 
