“The cowslips tall her pensioners be;
In their gold coats spots you see;
Those be rubies, fairy favours,
In those freckles live their savours.”
And in every cowslip’s ear the fairy hangs a pearl, from her harvest of dew-drops.
Shakespeare’s Warwickshire was rich—and it is so still, although it is a very much more enclosed countryside than in his day—in wild-flowers; the gillyflower, the wallflower that loves the nooks and crannies of ruined walls as much as does the jackdaw; the candy-tuft, the foxglove that still stands like a tall floral sentinel in many a hedgerow around Snitterfield; with many another.
“Here’s flowers for you;
Hot lavender, mints, savory, marjoram,
The marigold, that goes to bed with the sun.”
The “flowers,” however, mentioned in that quotation are, with one exception, herbs. Such as they grace and make fragrant the old gardens of many a cottage the casual tourist never sees. There they have grown for generations, in great clumps and beds; not in meagre and formal patches, as in some “Shakespearean gardens” that could be named. In the byways, in short, where things are not consciously on show, everything is, paradoxically enough, better worth seeing. There the homely virtues of the people are better displayed; the flowers are brighter and their scent sweeter; and there the sun is more mellow. In the byways old mossy walls still stand, russet brown and sere in drought, as though the moss were a dead thing, but green again so soon as ever the rain comes; and old roofs bear the fleshy house-leek in great patches, as though they had burst into some strange vegetable elephantiasis. That is Warwickshire as it is off the beaten track, yonder, at the horizon, where the sky meets the earth: a vague direction, I fancy, but sufficient. We must not divulge all things.
The ragged-robin that blooms later in every hedge; the “crow-flower” as Shakespeare names it; the “long purple,” otherwise the wild arum; pansies—“that’s for thoughts”—some call them “love-in-idleness”; all figure in Hamlet, where you find a good deal of old country folklore in Ophelia’s talk. “Rosemary, that’s for remembrance”; fennel and columbines: “there’s rue for you; and here’s some for me; we may call it herb of grace o’ Sundays;—you may wear your rue with a difference.”
There is sometimes an almost farmer-like practical philosophy underlying his observation, as where Biron says, in Love’s Labour’s Lost: “Allons allons! sow’d cockle reap’d no corn”; and in King Lear, in the reference to—
“Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow
In our sustaining corn.”
The corn-cockle is of course better known as the “cornflower,” whose beautiful blue is so contrasting a colour with the scarlet of the poppies, that equally fail to win the farmer’s admiration.
But the greater the study we give to Shakespeare and his treatment of flowers, the more evident it becomes that his sympathies were all with the earlier, springtime blossoms that dare, not quite with the daffodils, but soon after the roaring ides of March are overpast. Thus, he makes Perdita resume, with—