Shakespeare and Gardens: Special Issue Introduction

Abstract

Gardens are ideal sites for communing not only with nature but also with the past. Shakespeare’s contemporaries tended to imagine gardens as portals to an Edenic golden age when humans co-existed in harmony with a lush and bountiful environment. In the twenty-first century, Tudor gardens fulfil a similar function, providing access to the vibrant sensory world of Shakespeare and his era and exuding a whiff of the real as powerful as Orsino's odorous violets. Stratford-upon-Avon is positively begemmed with them, from the Birthplace at Henley Street to the knot gardens and mulberry trees of New Place (allegedly descended from a sapling planted by Shakespeare), to the herbaceous borders, willow cabin, and trellis-climbing roses adorning Anne Hathaway’s Cottage. The tally will soon increase by one more. In 2022, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust received a £ 300,000 grant to recreate the herb garden of Shakespeare’s daughter Susanna and her physician husband John Hall at Hall’s Croft. Never mind the fact these replica gardens are idealised confections or, at best, highly embellished restorations. Most of the land abutting the Hathaway house, for example, would have been a working farmyard, complete with hayricks, dunghills, barking dogs, and squawking geese, and only took on its present quaint appearance in the 1920s when the Birthplace Trust hired the renowned horticulturalist Ellen Willmott to relandscape it as a cottage garden in line with Arts & Crafts ideals. That such places continue to enthral even in our brave new digital world is evident from glossy coffeetable books like Jackie Bennett’s Shakespeare’s Gardens and the trending of ‘cottagecore’ on social media. But the proximity of these teeming gardens to Shakespearean houses is also an act of historical interpretation: curating a past defined by its immediacy to the natural world. A similar moral awaits those who wander inside a Shakespeare Garden, which gathers all (or nearly) of the 175 plants mentioned by the playwright into one pleasant place. While researchers have debunked the legend that a misguided ornithologist and Shakespeare enthusiast imported starlings to America