NAMES OF PLANTS.
| Juliet. | What's in a name? That which we call a Rose By any other name would smell as sweet. | |
| Romeo and Juliet, act ii, sc. 2. | ||
NAMES OF PLANTS.
FINDING that many are interested in the old names of the plants named by Shakespeare, I give in this appendix the names of the plants, showing at one view how they were written and explained by different writers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The list might have been very largely increased, especially by giving the forms used at an earlier date, but my object is to show the forms of the names in which they were (or might have been) familiar to Shakespeare. The authors quoted are these:
| 1440. "Promptorium Parvulorum." |
| 1483. "Catholicon Anglicum." |
| 1548. Turner's "Names of Herbes," and "Herbal," 1568. |
| 1597. Gerard's "Herbal." |
| 1611. Cotgrave's "Dictionarie."[393:1] |