Shakespeare's Transplant Poetics: Vegetable Blazons and the Seasons of Pyramus's Face

Abstract

Abstract:This essay places into conversation early modern trans studies and critical plant studies. It theorizes a transplant poetics that accompanies and expands upon the tranimal in trans studies. It identifies as vegetable blazons early modern poems that employ plant figures to depict the human form. It further explores those traditions in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and in the portraits of Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Both examples of transplant poetics cross human flesh with vegetable figure; they unsettle typical coordinates of gender presentation; and they put a halt to the cyclicality of the seasons by arranging the produce of all four seasons simultaneously. Transplant poetics thus expresses these faces of trans embodiment as still life.