“Good morrow, gallants! want ye corn for bread?
I think the Duke of Burgundy will fast,
Before he’ll buy again at such a rate:
’Twas full of darnel: do you like the taste?”
Date. This fruit of the palm-tree was once a common ingredient in all kinds of pastry, and some other dishes, and often supplied a pun for comedy, as, for example, in “All’s Well That Ends Well” (i. 1), where Parolles says: “Your date is better in your pie and your porridge, than in your cheek.” And in “Troilus and Cressida” (i. 2): “Ay, a minced man; and then to be baked with no date in the pie; for then the man’s date’s out.”
Ebony. The wood of this tree was regarded as the typical emblem of darkness; the tree itself, however, was unknown in this country in Shakespeare’s time. It is mentioned in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (iv. 3):
“King. By heaven, thy love is black as ebony.
Biron. Is ebony like her? O wood divine!
A wife of such wood were felicity.”
In the same play we read of “the ebon-coloured ink” (i. 1), and in “Venus and Adonis” (948) of “Death’s ebon dart.”
Elder. This plant, while surrounded by an extensive folk-lore, has from time immemorial possessed an evil reputation, and been regarded as one of bad omen. According to a popular tradition “Judas was hanged on an elder,” a superstition mentioned by Biron in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2); and also by Ben Jonson in “Every Man Out of His Humour” (iv. 4): “He shall be your Judas, and you shall be his elder-tree to hang on.” In “Piers Plowman’s Vision” (ll. 593-596) we are told how
“Judas, he japed
With jewen silver,
And sithen on an eller
Hanged hymselve.”
So firmly rooted was this belief in days gone by that Sir John Mandeville tells us in his Travels, which he wrote in 1364, that he was actually shown the identical tree at Jerusalem, “And faste by is zit, the tree of Elder that Judas henge himself upon, for despeyr that he hadde when he solde and betrayed oure Lord.” This tradition no doubt, in a great measure, helped to give it its bad fame, causing it to be spoken of as “the stinking elder.” Shakespeare makes it an emblem of grief. In “Cymbeline” (iv. 2) Arviragus says:
“Grow, patience!
And let the stinking elder, grief, untwine
His perishing root with the increasing vine!”