Paradise Now: Desiring English Eden in Shakespearean Gardens and Early Modern Horticultural Books

ABSTRACT This essay contends that Shakespeare locates paradise squarely in the here and now. In this, his speakers’ language resembles that of the garden books and husbandry manuals that have engaged a number of recent studies. Rather than a lost ideal or a conventional commonplace, Eden is an object of present desire, an object that is potentially attainable. However, the plays’ language of desire is also the language of conquest. Paradise is nigh, but it belongs to someone else. In plays as disparate as Richard II and The Tempest, the paradisal garden is reimagined and redeployed for the purposes of the characters at hand. Such transformations of the idea of paradise to meet local circumstances and serve present needs echo nationalist discourses of Eden found in contemporary horticultural publications. Behind the practical instructions lie dreams shared by the dramatic characters: to seek and claim paradise close at hand. Sometimes the books seem as ambitious as any claimant to the English throne; at others they acknowledge the material limitations they face at the hands of weather, climate, and fortune. Underlying this singular focus on paradise is the threat that an Eden so obtained may no longer be Edenic.