SHAKESPEARE’S GARDEN 
* 3 * 
greens most in request for decking houses at 
Christmas : 
Marry, come up, my dish of chastity, with rosemary and 
bays. 
Pericles, IV. vi. 159. 
In Henry VIII ., iv. 2 we get the mention of 
garlands of bay upon the head, and branches of bay 
in the hand. The objections of Ellacombe that the 
bay had been too lately introduced (1561) to be 
known to Shakespeare does not appear to me to 
exclude it from the passages, even if it were not 
actually known here in a living state, which is doubt¬ 
ful. It was well enough known by its classical fame 
and in contemporary medicine, as witness Alexis : 
" Take the rype Berries of a Baye Tree, and pylle 
of the blacke skynne that is uppon them beate them 
in powder wyth a lyttel salte . . . for plague to be 
taken” (Alexis, 37). 
It was also used frequently by the other Eliza¬ 
bethan dramatists. Two examples of their use must, 
however, suffice us here : " Crown me with laurel, as 
they all have done ” (Greene’s " Friar Bacon ”). 
Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight, 
And burned is Apollo’s laurel bough. 
Marlowe : Doctor Faustus. 
We cannot do better than end our account of this 
sweet-scented, popular plant than by giving a 
quotation from Parkinson’s " Garden of Flowers,” 
p. 426: 
"The bay leaves are necessary both for civil use 
and for physic, yea, both for the sick and the sound, 
both for the living and the dead. It serveth to 
adorn the house of God as well as man, to crown 
or encircle, as with a garland, the heads of the 
living, and to sticke and decke forth the bodies of 
9—2 
