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The seventeenth century saw the erosion of what Foucault called
"the age of resemblance": it was a time when scientists and philosophers
began to remake the natural order, not in terms of "similitudes" to man,
but instead according to classes and structures. The world of plants was
perceived less according to their human analogues and uses and more in
terms of the form of their leaves, fruit, and flowers. But, as Keith
Thomas has noted, discarding systems of "resemblance" and function hardly
meant abandoning the integration of the plant and human world: all the new
systems of classification, he claims, "had inescapably hierarchical
implications, and there was an obvious parallel between the descending
categories of scientific taxonomy and the diminishing units of human
society."
This paper will explore early modern notions of plants' having an
inherent social order and the role that mimetic fictions (in this case,
Shakespeare's plays) had in shaping these ideas. It will begin with a
brief overview of the various ways of classifying plants in early modern
English herbal and gardening books: the methods include alphabetical
listings, ordering according to uses, separation into different "ranks and
tribes," and, in the later seventeenth century, dividing the rare and
valuable from the common and the vulgar plants. This variety of
organization exposed the instability of any "natural" classification.
Further, human interaction with the plant world itself undermined efforts
at ordering in a way that had disturbing implications for any comparison
of the plant and human worlds: the still highly local nature of plant lore
and nomenclature resisted any systemizing; in the burgeoning market in
flowers/plants, plant values changed rapidly according to fashion and
scarcity of supply; and gardeners (often eager to cash in on the market)
often interfered with the social order of plants by transforming a less
valued form of a plant into a rarer one. The act of grafting, in
particular, became a common metaphor for the mixing of classes and for
social transformation (see for example, Henry V, 3.5.1-14; Richard III,
3.7.125-127).
Several of Shakespeare plays both mark this anxiety about the
relationship between the human and natural order and respond to it by
creating a symbolic order of flowers and plants that would appear to
transcend local meaning and market value. The key scenes both involve
young women distributing flowers as an act of social identification:
Ophelia in Hamlet, and Perdita in The Winter's Tale. If Ophelia's
bestowing of flowers is meant to evoke some meaning, it is important to
remember, as Harold Jenkins puts it, that "in this mystic language...the
same flowers do not always signify the same thing." Ophelia's flowers
(like the flowers she gathers before she drowns) can be read in terms of a
medical as well as a social index of meaning, but without consistent
results. The effect of the scene, in the end, is to "mystify" and
generalize the meaning of the flowers: as Jack Goody puts it, "the written
code is largely a literary conceit in which the meanings are shaped or
constructed to fit the poem's form." Perdita's scene much more
explicitly invokes social categories, and the intersection of people and
plants. But her distribution of plants according to the ages of man
creates a new order for plants, while it also intimates a natural
hierarchy (with Florizel as the crown imperial and the flower deluce, as
opposed to the bastard gillyflower). This scene inscribes a natural social
order in both human and plant world, just as the playwright invents a
natural language of flowers. These fictions disguise how "art" itself
orders nature: as Polixenes describes it, "this is an art/which doth mend
Nature--change it rather; but /The art itself is Nature."
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