Political gardens in early modern English drama

In May 2015, Country Life magazine—“the voice of the countryside,” according to its advertising blurb—published an article claiming that the title page of Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes (1597), a botany book authored by the Elizabethan gardener John Gerard, features an image of William Shakespeare. While these claims are spurious, they suggest something about Shakespeare’s weird cultural prominence, and they bring to light an interesting connection between Shakespeare (who biographers like to picture as an earthy Warwickshire lad) and the natural environment. This chapter considers some of the ways in which Shakespeare represents gardens in his plays, but it also attends to the plays of his contemporaries and successors (too long obscured by the cultural obsession with Shakespeare). In doing so, it shows how the garden worlds of early modern plays are, like the gardens of early modern life, part of a wider political landscape. The figure on the Herball title page may not be Shakespeare, but the book, dedicated to its patron, William Cecil, the Lord High Treasurer, nonetheless attests to the deep-rooted connections between politics and gardening. These connections are, in turn, regularly exposed by the politicized gardens of the early modern stage.