The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespear, Henry Nicholson Ellacombe [read with me .TXT] 📗
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Nor praise the deep vermilion of the Rose. Ibid. xcviii. (51) The Roses fearfully in thorns did stand,
One blushing shame, another white despair;
A third, nor red nor white, had stol'n of both
And to his robbery had annex'd thy breath. Ibid. xcix. (52) I have seen Roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such Roses see I in her cheeks. Ibid. cxxx. (53) More white and red than dove and Roses are. Venus and Adonis (10). (54) What though the Rose has prickles? yet 'tis plucked. Ibid. (574). (55) Who, when he lived, his breath and beauty set
Gloss on the Rose, smell to the Violet. Ibid. (935). (56) Their silent war of Lilies and of Roses. Lucrece (71). (57) O how her fear did make her colour rise,
First red as Roses that on lawn we lay,
Then white as lawn, the Roses took away. Ibid. (257). (58) That even for anger makes the Lily pale,
And the red Rose blush at her own disgrace. Ibid. (477). (59) I know what Thorns the growing Rose defends. Ibid. (492). (60) Rose-cheeked Adonis hied him to the chase. Venus and Adonis. (3). (61) A sudden pale,
Like lawn being spread upon the blushing Rose,
Usurps her cheek. Ibid. (589). (62) That beauty's Rose might never die. Sonnet i. (63) Nothing this wide universe I call Save thou, my Rose; in it thou art my all. Ibid. cix. (64) Rosy lips and cheeks
Within time's bending sickle's compass come. Ibid. cxvi. (65) Sweet Rose, fair flower, untimely pluck'd, soon vaded,
Pluck'd in the bud, and vaded in the spring! The Passionate Pilgrim (131).
In addition to these many passages, there are perhaps thirty more in which the Rose is mentioned with reference to the Red and White Roses of the houses of York and Lancaster. To quote these it would be necessary to extract an entire act, which is very graphic, but too long. I must, therefore, content myself with the beginning and the end of the chief scene, and refer the reader who desires to see it in extenso to "1st Henry VI.," act ii, sc. 4. The scene is in the Temple Gardens, and Plantagenet and Somerset thus begin the fatal quarrel—
Plantagenet. Let him that is a true-born gentlemanAnd stands upon the honour of his birth,
If he suppose that I have pleaded truth,
From off this Brier pluck a White Rose with me. Somerset. Let him that is no coward nor no flatterer,
But dare maintain the party of the truth,
Pluck a Red Rose from off this Thorn with me.
And Warwick's wise conclusion on the whole matter is—
Grown to this faction in the Temple Garden,
Shall send, between the Red Rose and the White,
A thousand souls to death and deadly night.
There are further allusions to the same Red and White Roses in "3rd Henry VI.," act i, sc. 1 and 2, act ii, sc. 5, and act v, sc. 1; "1st Henry VI.," act iv, sc. 1; and "Richard III.," act v, sc. 4.
There is no flower so often mentioned by Shakespeare as the Rose, and he would probably consider it the queen of flowers, for it was so deemed in his time. "The Rose doth deserve the cheefest and most principall place among all flowers whatsoever, being not onely esteemed for his beautie, vertues, and his fragrant and odoriferous smell, but also because it is the honore and ornament of our English Scepter."—Gerard. Yet the kingdom of the Rose even then was not undisputed; the Lily was always its rival (see Lily), for thus sang Walter de Biblesworth in the thirteenth century—
Des queus issunt les doux odours (swote smel)
Les herbes ausi pur medicine
La flur de Rose, la flur de Liz (lilie)
Liz vaut per royne, Rose pur piz."
But a little later the great Scotch poet Dunbar, who lived from 1460 to 1520, that is, a century before Shakespeare, asserted the dignity of the Rose as even superior to the Thistle of Scotland.
As the fresh Rose of colour red and white;
For if thou dost, hurt is thine honesty,
Considering that no flower is so perfite,
So full of virtue, pleasaunce, and delight,
So full of blissful angelic beauty,
Imperial birth, honour, and dignity."
Volumes have been written, and many more may still be written, on the delights of the Rose, but my present business is only with the Roses of Shakespeare. In many of the above passages the Rose is simply the emblem of all that is loveliest and brightest and most beautiful upon earth, yet always with the underlying sentiment that even the brightest has its dark side, as the Rose has its thorns; that the worthiest objects of our earthly love are at the very best but short-lived; that the most beautiful has on it the doom of decay and death. These were the lessons which even the heathen writers learned from their favourite Roses, and which Christian writers of all ages loved to learn also, not from the heathen writers, but from the beautiful flowers themselves. "The Rose is a beautiful flower," said St. Basil, "but it always fills me with sorrow by reminding me of my sins, for which the earth was doomed to bear thorns." And it would be easy to fill a volume, and it would not be a cheerless volume, with beautiful and expressive passages from poets, preachers, and other authors, who have taken the Rose to point the moral of the fleeting nature of all earthly things. Herrick in four lines tells the whole—
Old time is still a-flying,
And the same flower that smiles to-day,
To-morrow will be dying."
But Shakespeare's notices of the Rose are not all emblematical and allegorical. He mentions these distinct sorts of Roses—the Red Rose, the White Rose, the Musk Rose, the Provençal Rose, the Damask Rose, the Variegated Rose, the Canker Rose, and the Sweet Briar.
The Canker Rose is the wild Dog Rose, and the name is sometimes applied to the common Red Poppy.
The Red Rose and the Provençal Rose (No. 13) are no doubt the same, and are what we now call R. centifolia, or the Cabbage Rose; a Rose that has been supposed to be a native of the South of Europe, but Dr. Lindley preferred "to place its native country in Asia, because it has been found wild by Bieberstein with double flowers, on the eastern side of Mount Caucasus, whither it is not likely to have escaped from a garden."[250:1] We do not know when it was introduced into England, but it was familiar to Chaucer—
Me smote right to the herté rote,
As I hadde alle embawmed be.
So faire were never in Rone."
i.e., in Provence, at the mouth of the Rhone. For beauty in shape and exquisite fragrance, I consider this Rose to be still unrivalled; but it is not a fashionable Rose, and is usually found in cottage gardens, or perhaps in some neglected part of gardens of more pretensions. I believe it is considered too loose in shape to satisfy the floral critics of exhibition flowers, and it is only a summer Rose, and so contrasts unfavourably with the Hybrid Perpetuals. Still, it is a delightful Rose, delightful to the eye, delightful for its fragrance, and most delightful from its associations.
The White Rose of York (No. 20) has never been satisfactorily identified. It was clearly a cultivated Rose, and by some is supposed to have been only the wild White Rose (R. arvensis) grown in a garden. But it is very likely to have been the Rosa alba, which was a favourite in English gardens in Shakespeare's time, and was very probably introduced long before his time, for it is the double variety of the wild White Rose, and Gerard says of it: "The double White Rose doth grow wilde in many hedges of Lancashire in great abundance, even as Briers do with us in these southerly parts, especially in a place of the countrey called Leyland, and in a place called Roughford, not far from Latham." It was, therefore, not a new gardener's plant in his time, as has been often stated. I have little doubt that this is the White Rose of York; it is not the R. alba of Dr. Lindley's monograph, but the double variety of the British R. arvensis.
The White Rose has a very ancient interest for Englishmen, for "long before the brawl in the Temple Gardens, the flower had been connected with one of the most ancient names of our island. The elder Pliny, in discussing the etymology of the word Albion, suggests that the land may have been so named from the White Roses which abounded in it—'Albion insula sic dicta ab albis rupibus, quas mare alluit, vel ob rosas albas quibus abundat.' Whatever we may think of the etymological skill displayed in the suggestion . . . we look with almost a new pleasure on the Roses of our own hedgerows, when regarding them as descended in a straight line from the 'rosas albas' of those far-off summers."—Quarterly Review, vol. cxiv.
The Damask Rose (No. 5) remains to us under the same name, telling its own history. There can be little doubt that the Rose came from Damascus, probably introduced into Europe by the Crusaders or some of the early travellers in the East, who speak in glowing terms of the beauties of the gardens of Damascus. So Sir John Mandeville describes the city—"In that Cytee of Damasce, there is gret plentee of Welles, and with in the Cytee and with oute, ben many fayre Gardynes and of dyverse frutes. Non other Cytee is not lyche in comparison to it, of fayre Gardynes, and of fayre desportes."—Voiage and Travaile, cap. xi. And in our own day the author of "Eöthen" described the same gardens as he saw them: "High, high above your head, and on every side all down to the ground, the thicket is hemmed in and choked up by the interlacing boughs that droop with the weight of Roses, and load the slow air with their damask breath. There are no other flowers. The Rose trees which I saw were all of the kind we call 'damask;' they grow to an immense height and size."—Eöthen, ch. xxvii. It was not till long after the Crusades that the Damask Rose was introduced into England, for Hakluyt in 1582 says: "In time of memory many things have been brought in that were not here before, as the Damaske Rose by Doctour Linaker, King Henry the Seventh and King Henrie the Eight's Physician."—Voiages, vol. ii.[252:1]
As an ornamental Rose the Damask Rose is still a favourite, though probably the real typical Rosa Damascena is very seldom seen—but it has been the parent of a large number of hybrid Roses, which the most critical Rosarian does not reject. The whole family are very sweet-scented, so that "sweet as Damask Roses" was a proverb, and Gerard describes the common Damaske as "in other respects like the White Rose; the especiale difference consisteth in the colour and smell of the floures, for these are of a pale red colour and of a
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