When we moved to North Carolina from a landlocked state, my husband and I were advised to take note of hurricane season. We were instructed to collect jugs of water and to hold very loosely to the idea of electricity in our home from August to October while tropical storms spun up and ransacked the coast. As someone who thoroughly enjoys storms, this was all very thrilling. Nor were the warnings in vain, as a week without power in the August heat quickly taught us.
In the midst of hurricane season, one of my professors complained, “It’s a recent invention that the idea of ‘supernatural’ necessitates a deviation from the natural world. The natural world used to be considered divine enough.” His statement was intended to clarify for us that while in the contemporary genre of supernatural media, books and movies must include distinctly unnatural beings and activities, historically humans considered the natural world rife with divinity. Hurricane season would be plenty cosmic. But I rolled his words around in my head as I watched headlines detail the newest casualties of coastal storms. What benefits might there be to re-enchanting the natural world in our spiritual lives? Certainly we can dismiss the historical act-consequence perspective of divine activity in nature—a bad harvest does not indicate a sinful farmer—but what might ecology have to say about God and about us? How does it, like the Psalms, lend us language to wonder, cry out, and praise?
Nature motifs riddle Western art and literature as we wrestle with the intangible and mysterious, but historically nature played a larger role in cultural hermeneutics, functioning more literally than metaphorically in our perusal of the divine. Western tradition has condemned using nature as a superstitious foil for filling scientific gaps, instead choosing to organize via division and hierarchy: known over unknown, light over dark, and male over female. And while with many shifts in thought it is hard to pinpoint the precise point of change, the Enlightenment offers a rather definitive moment of transitioning from mystery to reason and instinct to intellect. For example, we could cite René Descartes’ 1637 declaration: “I think therefore I am.”1
Standing in the threshold between the medieval world of dark wonder and the Enlightenment era’s crisp science, there’s a playground for divine curiosity that is rampant with faeries and tempests, and his name is Shakespeare. One of the louder voices in Western literature, Shakespeare offers surprisingly fertile ground for dissolving this invented division between the natural and supernatural. In probing Shakespeare’s use of botany in his dramatic literature, I notice that rather than reverting to ignorance, preserving the feral whimsy of nature forwards our theological imagination, giving us language for understanding how deeply entangled we are with the earth and its Creator.
Like all children in 16th century Stratford-upon-Avon, young William Shakespeare would have been exposed to various kitchen gardens, herbal apothecaries, and botanical folklore. Beyond his childhood, Shakespeare would have had access to various sources of plant knowledge, in addition to medicinal and life experience.2
As such, nature does a lot of talking in Shakespeare. Even while his characters muse and banter aloud, botany and weather provide a lively silent subtext to the plot. For example, in Hamlet he uses flower language to advance character development and speak to the underlying attitudes in his script. He does this with Ophelia’s descent into madness. Driven to insanity with grief following her father’s death, Ophelia gathers flowers which she distributes to various characters in a morose and incoherent fashion:
Ophelia: There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray, love, remember; and there is pansies, that’s for thoughts. Laertes: A document in madness, thoughts and remembrance fitted. Ophelia: There’s fennel for you, and columbines; there’s rue for you; and here’s some for me; we may call it herb of grace o’ Sundays. O! You must wear your rue with a difference. There’s a daisy; I would give you some violets but they wither- ed all when my father died…”
Shakespeare uses flower language here to communicate Ophelia’s emotions. Ophelia herself denotes that rosemary symbolizes remembrance and pansy thoughts, but fennel, columbines, rue, daisies, and violets all also carry meaning. Rue, in addition to being a pun in this passage, is considered a holy plant, hence the reference to Sundays. Fennel is a healing herb associated with death, as are violets and columbines. Violets specifically reference death of the young, and columbines mean worthlessness. Ophelia has crafted a bouquet of angry grief. Whether these funeral blooms mourn her father, condemn those around her for their mistreatment of her, or herald her own impending death, Shakespeare leaves the audience to decide. The transient flowers convey her truest state.
However, Shakespeare’s botanical symbolism moves beyond flower language to more anthropomorphic subtext. The macabre Titus Adronicus continually speaks of bodies like plants even as it progressively violates and destroys them. Arms are limbs to be chopped off, bodies can blossom, wither, or rot, and reproduction is inherently earthy. “Lily hands” tremble like “aspen leaves” in fear. Particularly, women are framed in wild organic light: the fertile female body is a field to be tilled and the maternal female body is vengefully reproductive. Act II, Scene 3 provides an excellent example of Shakespeare’s negative comparison of femininity to plants in order to cultivate horror:
Tamora: Have I not reason, think you, to look pale? These two have ticed me hither to this place, A barren, detested vale you see it is; The trees, though summer, yet forlorn and lean, Overcome with moss and baleful mistletoe. Here never shines the sun, here nothing breeds
This passage showcases Tamora’s bloodthirsty lust, the cruelty of her sons, and the impending assault of Lavinia–a truly gruesome collection highlighted by the plants mentioned. Three plants mentioned specifically in this scene contribute to this: Elizabethan culture often compared moss to femininity in literature, as something dark and soft in contrast to the clean bright rationality of masculinity. Yew trees symbolize death. Parasitic mistletoe was considered both sacred and poisonous, much like historic artistic portrayals of women. Shakespearean audiences would note that the landscape is described as barren, implying curses and women stripped of their societal purpose as Lavinia soon would be.
As the originally picturesque landscape of Titus Adronicus shifts to a malevolently overgrown backdrop for relational violence, so do the plant descriptions shift to symbolize vengeance. Tamora’s violent energy seems to spill out into nature itself, and Lavinia’s death only furthers the rage-filled grief of the natural environment. Botany offers both introspection and exposition within Titus Adronicus, providing a means of “groans that words cannot express” for the depth of wrongdoing humans enact upon one another.3
One last example of a play laced with ecological imagery is A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Not only does the play take place in a tumultuous summer forest, but Shakespeare describes the characters in floral imagery and riddles their dialogue with references to various plants. Several times musk roses are mentioned, a soft white Mediterranean variety with a deep scent: “Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine / with sweet musk roses and with eglantine” and “Stick musk roses in thy sweet smooth head”.4 Fitting with the vibes of the play, if you will, musk roses signify capricious beauty.
Not only does the script feature numerous references to meaningful plants, but the overarching ecology of the story holds importance for the plot. Much of the well-being of the characters depends on the stability of the natural environment and the summer woods are an active participant in the development of the story. Poor meteorological conditions—the rain and chill—evoke sympathy and therefore a deeper investment in the characters. The nighttime landscape ironically illuminates more than the day; the darkness of the deep wet forest is a transformational space for love and supernatural politics. In fact, Elizabethan audiences believed that gathering herbs and flowers at night heightened any macabre symbolism they might already hold, adding unsettling connotations to plays like this and Macbeth.
Shakespeare uses faeries much the same way he uses nature; to bridge the gap between reality and the intangible. As an article I once read points out, “Shakespeare seems to have taken this familiar folklore concerning the magic power of plants as a meeting point between the supernatural and the natural worlds.”5 Faeries drive the action of the events in the midsummer forest; they incite infatuation and mischief by spinning a web of botanical folklore that undergirds the plot of the play. Titania’s attendants Peaseblossom, Moth, Cobweb, and Mustardseed are named after household remedies to reflect their earthy servant nature. The script is riddled with reference to folk medicine and herbal remedies to amuse the audience, while also using overarching ecological motifs to shape the mood of his spectators.
Nature is this metamorphic, liminal space in Shakespearean literature. It disturbs, progresses, beautifies, probes, and deepens the movements of his characters. But we are neither characters nor a Renaissance playwright, so what does nature have to offer us today? I’ll propose three brief answers:
It reenchants the world around us. If the forest floor disguises the mischievous politics of fern leaves and violets or if summer tempests embody the grief of a bereaved mother, there is suddenly much more to listen to. We are reawakened to the heavens declaring the glory of God, day and night pouring forth speech in the form of lichen unfurling and tigers prowling. We are given new ways to grieve, praise, and question. We are curved towards worship as we notice, care for, and preserve the earth.
It invokes a reverence for tangibility. If hurricanes, eyelashes, and palm fronds become a means of conversation between us and God, their value is affirmed beyond aesthetics or productivity. It is as if we have only had consonants and are suddenly given vowels in order to articulate ourselves and God. Anne of Green Gables once stumbled across a sun-dappled pond and declared it a poem—in adopting a Shakespearean vision of the earth we learn to do the same.
It promotes a theology of earthly restoration rather than escape. Redefining supernatural as included within the natural rather than triumphing over it removes any theologically-backed subordination of the body or the earth. We are invited to a model of creation care that seeks to restore rather than use or abandon.
In engaging with Shakespeare’s texts, we determine that leaning into the mysticism of the environment allows us to reclaim aspects of the imago Dei that are only accessed through remythologizing the natural world rather than domesticating it. Nature offers a dynamic exposition on the human experience and the divine, a tangible means of describing and depicting that which is wild, unforged, and Edenic left in ourselves.
René Descartes, The Search for Truth by Natural Light.
Several anthologies of herbs and flowers circulated at the time, including Pliny’s Natural Historie, which Shakespeare could have read in Latin until it was translated into English by Philemon Holland in 1601. Perhaps the most popular botanical encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s time was John Gerard’s Gerard’s Herball, published in 1597, which contained an illustrated catalog of all known flowers and herbs alongside their purposes. Some evidence suggests that Shakespeare and Gerard knew each other personally; from 1598-1604 they were neighbors, and Gerard worked across the street from Shakespeare’s home at the time. Perhaps this proximity contributes to why Hamlet, published during this period, includes an almost disproportionate amount of flower and plant symbolism. Shakespeare going about his business in London would have passed the herbalist’s garden often, as well as encountering gardens and agriculture in his occasional visits home to the country.
Romans 8:26, GNT.
For access to Shakespeare’s scripts as well as various other sources from the early modern period, look up the Folger Shakespeare Library. Many of these resources are free.
Lou Agnes Reynolds and Paul Sawyer. “Folk Medicine and the Four Fairies of A Midsummer-Night’s Dream.”