But surely there must have been many opportunities for such things to present themselves to Shakespeare’s observation or imagination, by the time that he was forty-four years old.
Again Malone found a reference to James’s proclamation in favour of breeding silk-worms and the importation of young mulberry trees during 1609, in the expression:
Now humble as the ripest mulberry
That will not hold the handling.
(III. ii. 79.)
But even in Venus and Adonis Shakespeare had told how, in admiration of the youth’s beauty, the birds
Would bring him mulberries and ripe-red cherries; (1103.)
and in Midsummer-Night’s Dream, Titania orders the fairies to feed Bottom
With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries.
(III. i. 170.)