The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Thirty-Six Of weeds and the original Ophelia

I want to say a word about Shakespeare and weeds. Not the word WEEDS, mind you. When the poet uses that it is nearly always in some negative moral context - talking of evil as weeds, of weeds as faults in human character, of souls or gardens choked with weeds, and so forth.

No, I mean Shakespeare's liking for certain wild or at any rate out-of-garden plants that few others either note or celebrate. Not the word but the things, sir, that's what I mean.

Many poets tell you plenty about flowers. Mr Shakespeare does too. And unlike some poets what he tells you is usually true. When he mentions a flower you know that he has seen it often, growing. He makes you feel that he has plucked it with his own fingers and stroked it across his face. He was, after all, a country boy before he became a great poet. He knows every mark and spot and stamen of whatever he's talking about.

Contrast his flowers with John Milton's, gentle reader, and you'll see what I mean. I respect Mr Milton, of course, but I can't say I love him. He will bid you bring the rathe primrose, the tufted crow-toe and pale jessamine, the white pink and the pansy freaked with jet, the glowing violet, the musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine, with cowslips wan that hang the pensive head, to strew the laureat hearse where Lycid lies, and all that. But apart from the fact that they couldn't all have been in flower at the same time of year, doesn't it sound rather as if he is giving poetical orders to his gardener? His epithets aren't too good, either, when you think about it. Violets don't glow. Honeysuckle is more untidy than well-attired. Madam, have you ever seen a cowslip looking pensive? As to amaranthus, I doubt if Milton ever saw one in his life. It is not so much a flower as a lovely quadrisyllable.

With Shakespeare, it is quite a different matter. He never drags in any flower just because of its name, and what he says about the look or the scent of it will always prove true. At his best in this matter, he doesn't even describe the flower at all; instead, he presents you with the essence of its nature. For example, Perdita in The Winter's Tale conjuring up daffodils and what they do in just sixteen simple words, not one of which is in any way remarkable, but the whole is breath-taking:

golden daffodils,

That come before the swallow dares, and take

The winds of March with beauty.

And then, to give one other example, camomile. He only mentions once this creeping herb. It has downy leaves and flowers that are white in the ray and yellow in the disk. But none of that's to Mr Shakespeare's purpose. I'm sure he knew exactly what camomile looked like, but like any true countryman (not to speak of true poets) he knew also that what counts about this humble plant is its perseverance, its obstinacy, its prolifical keeping-on no matter what. So he has Falstaff say, when speaking to Prince Hal in the style of his father, the King: 'Harry, I do not only marvel where thou spendest thy time, but also how thou art accompanied: for though the camomile, the more it is trodden on, the faster it grows, yet youth, the more it is wasted, the sooner it wears.' That seems to me, in its truth not just to nature but the heart, about the opposite of the way that flowers are used in Milton.

But it's Shakespeare's knowledge of weeds that I want to stress. It's something peculiar to him. It's right at the core of his spirit. It's vital to his genius, I think. No other poet I know is so curious of weeds or so familiar with them. A man might learn the names of flowers from an after-dinner stroll in his lady's garden. Weeds he learns otherwise, and bitterly, and not because he wants to, nor because there's any profit in it. Weeds a man learns from intimate acquaintance with wild places, from walking abroad in the sun and the wind and the rain, from personal experience of ploughing land, from lying in a ditch after a hard night's drinking.

Whether Shakespeare ever ploughed I would not know. But I know he knows his weeds like no one else. Take, for example, that moment when Cordelia meets mad Lear:

Crowned with rank fumiter and furrow-weeds,

With hardokes, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers,

Darnel and all the idle weeds that grow

In our sustaining corn.

(You'll find it in Act IV, the fourth scene, sir, right at the start, if memory serves me right.) Or take, again, the Duke of Burgundy in Henry V, bemoaning the sorry war-torn state of the French countryside, and seeing:

her hedges even-pleach'd,

Like prisoners wildly overgrown with hair,

Put forth disorder'd twigs; her fallow leas

The darnel, hemlock and rank fumitory

Doth root upon, while that the coulter rusts

That should deracinate such savagery;

The even mead, that erst brought sweetly forth

The freckled cowslip, burnet, and green clover,

Wanting the scythe, all uncorrected, rank,

Conceives by idleness, and nothing teems

But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burrs ...

(Yes, madam, I confess I had to look that up in my faithful Folio: Act V, Scene 2, lines 42 to 52.)

You won't find any KECKSIES in the works of Mr John Milton. They're the dry and hollow stalks of cow parsnips or wild chervil.

Pickleherring's point, sir? (How kind of you to presume I may even have one!) Pickleherring's point is that no one but a country boy could have written that. Yes, and one who had probably held a pruning hook in his hand and pleached a hedge.

Don't forget that gardener, either, who knows all about the ways of weeds and caterpillars in King Richard II. And (my trump card, this) there's Imogen proving the things had equal honour in our poet's mind by strewing the supposed grave of her Posthumus 'with wild wood-leaves and weeds'.

Pickleherring's point (and it is not just the point of this chapter, come to that) - Pickleherring's point is that the late Mr Shakespeare not only knew the names and the nick-names and the dirty names of all the things that grew in Mary Arden's garden by design. The late Mr Shakespeare knew just as much if not more about the plants and shrubs and flowers that grew unwanted there. And about whatever grows wild outside all our garden walls. In a word, weeds. And he knew your honest weed is not the worst thing in the world. Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds, remember?

It was either my dear Jane or the playwright John Webster who once remarked that the death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world. I think that it was probably Mr Webster. He was much possessed by death. (In view of how things turned out, it would have been strange if it was Jane.)

Whatever, whichever, whomever, there were two deaths of females in Stratford-upon-Avon while William Shakespeare was young which, I have reason to believe, haunted him at some deep level at least until they found outlet in his work.

The first occurred, in fact, in the year he was born, so that it was only by repute that he could ever have heard of it. But the sad tale was current in Stratford for many years after, and in its horror seems just the sort of nightmare that would make Will's blood run cold.

What happened was this. In the early summer of 1564 there was a sudden outbreak of plague in Stratford. ('Hic incepit pestis,' scribbled Bretchgirdle in the parish register - and I don't think he was talking about the birth of baby S.) Corpses get buried hurriedly and without fuss at such times, and a young girl who was believed to be dead was buried so. But when the family vault was opened again later for the coffin of another victim, the body of the unfortunate girl was found on the floor with her shroud torn off. She had been buried alive, come to her senses in her coffin, then crawled from it and scratched vainly at the door of the vault before she perished.

It is this that Mr Shakespeare was remembering, in my opinion, when he has Juliet cry, before venturing into the tomb of her ancestors:

Shall I not then be stifled in the vault,

To whose foul mouth no healthsome air breathes in,

And there die strangled ere my Romeo comes? ...

O, if I wake, shall I not be distraught,

Environed with all these hideous fears?

And madly play with my forefathers' joints?

And pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud?

And, in this rage, with some great kinsman's bone,

As with a club, dash out my desperate brains?*

This particular nightmare vexed the boy William all his childhood time in Stratford, I suspect, and fed into his fears of the charnel house.

The second death was the death of Katharine Hamlett. This took place in February of 1580, when Shakespeare was not quite sixteen. The girl was found drowned in the Avon, at a spot where the roots of a great willow tree dam up the current and make a deep pool in the river bed.

Katharine Hamlett's death was the subject of a coroner's inquest. The jury was inclined to believe that it was a case of suicide. The girl's family, asking for Christian burial, claimed that her death had been accidental, and that Katharine had slipped when leaning over the bank to moisten her flowers. The inquest went on for eight weeks before a verdict of accidental death was brought in. But people still talked. And Shakespeare listened.

He was always a very good listener, Mr S.

At all events, madam, you will recall what he made of this when he came to write Hamlet, where he has Queen Gertrude thus describe the sad death of Ophelia:

There is a willow grows aslant a brook,

That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;

There with fantastic garlands did she come,

Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,

That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,

But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them;

There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds

Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke,

When down her weedy trophies and herself

Fell in the weeping brook.

(It's in the seventh scene of Act IV, of course. By the way, 'long purples' probably refers to purple cuckoo-pint or pintle rather than purple loose-strife. I never heard of loose-strife having a grosser name, while cuckoo-pintle is so called because it looks like a little prick in a state of erection.)

The death of poor Katharine Hamlett seems to have provided Mr Shakespeare not only with that passage about the death of Ophelia, but also with much of the lugubrious conversation among the gravediggers about the right of a suicide to rest in consecrated ground. That was precisely the topic which exercised the wits and wagging tongues of Stratford for eight weeks.

Consider. Here is a poor girl probably drowned by mischance as she dips her flowers into Avon pool where Tiddington brook flows in. Up jumps vicar Heicroft (Bretchgirdle's dead) and refuses her body burial. The laymen then decide to try to fine the corpse for felony. Her family's grief is compounded by all this debate. It's the town scandal until - with a touch of true Christian charity - the coroner elects to suppose that Katharine Hamlett never meant to drown, that her death is and must for ever remain a mystery, 'per infortium et non aliter nec allio modo ad mortem suam devenit', as it kindly says in his report.

This, sir, is that I mean by country history. An item in the chronicles of local gossip, madam, a tale told over the punch-bowl by a roaring fire.

Perhaps it is not so surprising that Mr Shakespeare remembered Katharine Hamlett when he came to kill off poor Ophelia. Her name would have floated back into his mind with his play's title. And a boy of fifteen could not have been indifferent to a young girl's drowning in that river that flowed right through his own mind.

What is surprising is the way the talk of those gravediggers in Hamlet echoes the words of the inquest. I have put them side by side. The resemblance is remarkable.

Only a laureate of weeds does something like that.

* Romeo and Juliet, Act IV, Scene 3.