Evelyn: Welcome to another episode of Eating the Past series on herbs, spices, and flavorings. I'm Evelyn Funda, and this is part three of my interview with Shakespeare scholar Professor Phebe Jensen.
Today, we're talking about the herbal subtexts, or beliefs, that Shakespeare's audience might have already known as they experienced a performance of his plays.
So, Phebe, you were giving me a great example earlier of Romeo and the use of herbs with Romeo. Can you tell us about that?
Phebe: Sure. And this is from a scene that includes the friar. It's a long monolog that is the most developed explanation of this idea of the importance of plants. He's kind of a natural magician. He's well educated. He knows all the secret properties of plants and herbs.
And in this scene, he is out at dawn, right before the sun rises, gathering baleful weeds and precious juiced flowers in his willow basket. And then he has this wonderful speech where he talks about the virtues of the plants that are used for maintaining diet and medical health.
Oh, Mickel, oh great Mickle is the powerful grace that lies in plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities, qualities, as we would say, but it rhymes in the early modern period. “For not so vile that on the earth doth live, but to the earth some special good doth give, nor not aught so good, but strained from that fair use revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse.”
So, at this point he holds up a flower, there's an embedded stage direction, and at the same time Romeo walks into the scene. So as the friar continues, he says “within the infant rind of this weak flower,” it's the flower he's holding in his hand, “poison hath residence and medicine power. For this the flower being smelt with the smell with that part cheers each part of a human being,” it smells very good for you, their perfume “being tasted stays all senses with the heart.”
So, the principle is that all flowers have good and bad dimensions and that you need to be learned like the friar to be able to safely use them, or you can be informed like a housewife to know exactly what it is that you're giving your family.
So, he then turns to apply this principle to human beings, and now he's really referring to Romeo on stage. “Two such opposed kings encamp them still in man, as well as herbs, grace, and rude will, and where the worser is predominant, full soon the cankered death eats up that plant.”
So, this is a prefiguring of what's actually going to happen with Romeo and Juliet and their ultimate poisoning.
Evelyn: So, what you're saying is that both the plant and the person in Shakespeare have simultaneously virtues and vices.
Phebe: Yes, that's true, and the particular virtues of particular plants or spices would have been known to at least some of the audience, and that creates a subtext in which sometimes the virtue or the poison in a plant tells us something important about the scene.
So, one example of this is in King Lear. It's a later part of the play when Lear is completely mad. He's sort-of wandering about, he's in tatters, he's wearing flowers, he's talking to mice. He's just gone completely mad.
And Edgar, who is one of the good characters in the play, encounters him, and he's devastated by the sight. He says, ‘Oh, thou side-piercing sight.” And then Lear, who is kind of raving, talks to him as if he's somebody he isn't, and then finally says, “You need a password to get by here.”
It's nuts, it doesn't make any sense, and the password that Edgar gives him is Sweet Marjoram, and then Lear says, “That's fine, yes, you may pass.”
So, the thing is that marjoram, which is an herb associated with the planet Mercury, which governs intellect, is the planet that involves the brain, and it is used to cure diseases of the brain, including madness. So, it gives a kind of subtext to the audience. How we are going to heal this king, and the healing is actually about to start.
Evelyn: My thanks to Professor Jensen for another fun look at early modern spices. Join me next week for our final episode with Phebe, as we focus on Shakespeare's women.
That's Sundays at noon, right before the splendid table on your UPR station.
