Shakespeare's Flowers and Everyday Life

Abstract

Shakespeare used the wild flowers which he met in the fields and by the river in his hometown, where he returned and spent his last years with flowers in the new house. What is the real nature of flowers of herbs and weeds? Shakespeare says that even the small flower has the power of poison and medicine just like human beings. People in Shakespeare's day were full of fears about disease because there was little medicine. So they had herbs hung in the house for flavor and medicine. In a word, flowers in Shakespeare were not materials for his plays but material basis for everyday life. The structures of everyday life are based on the material world where all kinds of flowers blossom and fall. As every name of flowers does not retain the fragrance of its own, so flowers in Shakespeare are always related to material life. Shakespeare used the images of flowers to illustrate his ideas about characters, actions, and even nations, and the paraphrase of ‘to hold the mirror up to nature by playing’ would be ‘to hold the mirror to nature by flowers.’ Shakespeare's wild flowers were plucked to be used in everyday life while nowadays we purchase flowers of imitation and hybrid to enjoy various kinds of color. It seems that in our time people come to lose the fragrance of flowers because they prefer appearance to reality. But Shakespeare's flowers grow in the field and have their own fragrance and they do not wither away in the mind with the magic which make us see everything like flowers.