“The expectancy and rose of the fair state.”
In days gone by the rose entered largely into the customs and superstitions of most nations, and even nowadays there is an extensive folk-lore associated with it.
It appears that, in Shakespeare’s time, one of the fashions of the day was the wearing of enormous roses on the shoes, of which full-length portraits afford striking examples.[548] Hamlet (iii. 2) speaks of “two Provincial roses on my razed shoes;” meaning, no doubt, rosettes of ribbon in the shape of roses of Provins or Provence. Douce favors the former, Warton the latter locality. In either case, it was a large rose. The Provence, or damask rose, was probably the better known. Gerarde, in his “Herbal,” says that the damask rose is called by some Rosa Provincialis.[549] Mr. Fairholt[550] quotes, from “Friar Bacon’s Prophecy” (1604), the following, in allusion to this fashion:
“When roses in the gardens grew,
And not in ribbons on a shoe:
Now ribbon roses take such place
That garden roses want their grace.”
Again, in “King John” (i. 1), where the Bastard alludes to the three-farthing silver pieces of Queen Elizabeth, which were extremely thin, and had the profile of the sovereign, with a rose on the back of her head, there doubtless is a fuller reference to the court fashion of sticking roses in the ear:[551]
“my face so thin,
That in mine ear I durst not stick a rose,
Lest men should say, ‘Look, where three-farthings goes.’”
Shakespeare also mentions the use of the rose in rose-cakes and rose-water, the former in “Romeo and Juliet” (v. 1), where Romeo speaks of “old cakes of roses,” the latter in “Taming of the Shrew” (Induction, 1):
“Let one attend him with a silver basin
Full of rose-water and bestrew’d with flowers.”
Referring to its historical lore, we may mention its famous connection with the Wars of the Roses. In the fatal dispute in the Temple Gardens, Somerset, on the part of Lancaster, says (“1 Henry VI.” ii. 4):
“Let him that is no coward, nor no flatterer,
But dare maintain the party of the truth,
Pluck a red rose from off this thorn with me.”