ABSTRACT
To those familiar with Shakespeare as the poet of Nature, a writer who describes in richly-jeweled detail the contours of the natural world, Shakespeare’s widespread inclusion of flower imagery in his narrative and dramatic works is well known. Early studies of flora in Shakespeare include those of Sidney Beisly (1864), J. Harvey Bloom (1903), Henry N. Ellacombe (1884), Leo H. Grindon (1883), Esther Singleton (1933), and Eleanour Sinclair Rohde (1935). Yet that Shakespeare uses the word “flower” and its grammatical forms (flowers, flowered, flowering) more times in Romeo and Juliet than in any other play or poem is, however, less commonly appreciated. The only other work to equal Romeo and Juliet in the number of incidences in which the generic term “flower” or the derivate terms “flowerets” or “flowery” appear is, not surprisingly, A Midsummer Night’s Dream: a play where the lush flora of the Athenian green world, including the magical love-in-idleness pansy, embellishes the landscape of the setting.
