Shakespeare's Fantastic Garlands

A delightful little book on the flowers mentioned in William Shakespeare’s plays is published on the 444th anniversary of the Bard’s birth.

At least a dozen books have been published on the subject of ‘Shakespeare’s Flowers’ since Rev. Ellacombe’s study in 1878 - some large, some small, some heavily illustrated, some quite tedious in their completeness. Finding copies of any of them on the second-hand market today requires persistence.

This little book fills the gap and acts as a fascinating and fully illustrated introduction to some of the ways in which the Bard used floral imagery to enhance his stories.

A rose by any other name, gilding the lily, the primrose path – these flowery Shakespearean phrases have entered the language. Around 180 kinds of flowers, fruits, trees and other plants are mentioned, some of them many times, in the plays. Twenty-nine scenes were set in gardens.

William Shakespeare clearly had a great interest in flowers and plants and mentioned them to set a scene or to identify the season – or for less

obvious reasons. In some cases, associations obvious to Elizabethan audiences are less clear today. Who would realise that roasted crabs meant crab-apples rather than shellfish?

His contemporary John Gerard published the first Herbal in the English language. It seems likely that the two prominent men were acquainted. Thus it is appropriate that several of the illustrations in this book are woodcuts from the Herbal.

In Hamlet, Shakespeare used the expression fantastic garlands to describe the wild flowers gathered by Ophelia before her suicide. Readers of Shakespeare’s Fantastic Garlands will be amazed and fascinated by the stories behind the quotations.

Shakespeare’s Fantastic Garlands by Gerald Ponting

ISBN 978-09517423-2-7 £5.99 (+p&p)

A6 paperback, 64 pages, 28 colour photographs, 12 line illustrations.

Publication date 23rd April 2008

Publisher and distributor -

Millers Dale Publications