ABSTRACT
The term 'flower' in this chapter is used in both its popular and botanic meanings. To those familiar with William 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. The lyrical descriptions of nature so abundant in A Midsummer Night's Dream, a drama about star-crossed love as well are conspicuously absent in Romeo and Juliet. Instead of describing delicately ornate vegetation, Shakespeare uses the image of the flower in Romeo and Juliet as a botanical metaphor to explore the 'contingent and constructed nature of 'normal" bodies, specifically the normative life cycle of female and male reproduction. To elucidate this correspondence, it is helpful to consider the relationship between sixteenth-century botanical illustrations of flowering plants and representations of flowers in Shakespeare's tragedy.
