SHAKESPEARE was in love with Nature. When Dr Johnson praised the Bard as ‘the poet of nature’, he meant Shakespeare’s penetration of the human condition, the vaulting ambition of Macbeth and the paranoid insecurity of Hamlet, but the honorific might equally be applied to Shakespeare’s feeling for natural history. After all, this is the playwright who, in Measure for Measure, agonised for the smallest of creatures:
And the poor beetle that we tread upon,
In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great
As when a giant dies.
Nature was his inspiration, because he was born a Nature boy, the grandson of farmers, and he grew up in Stratford-upon-Avon, then a small country town. His knowledge of our wild fauna and flora, from ‘the quarrelous Weasel’ (Cymbeline, Act III, Scene 4) to Romeo’s recommendation of plantain as healing herb (Romeo and Juliet, Act I, Scene 2), is so marked in his apt metaphors, similes and descriptions that it can only have come from personal observation as he played and rambled in the fields, woods and streams of the Midlands. Shakespeare understood insect metamorphosis (Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act V, Scene 2), and the partiality evinced by serpents for basking in the sun:
It is the bright day that brings forth the adder;
And that craves wary walking.
He recognised the functions of various types of larvae, be they silk-moth cocoons (Othello, Act III, Scene 4) or carrion maggots (Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2). And is there a better picture of the interior of a hive than in Henry V?
この記事は Country Life UK の May 24, 2023 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
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この記事は Country Life UK の May 24, 2023 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です? サインイン
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Lights, camera, action!
Three remarkable country houses, two of which have links to the film industry, the other the setting for a top-class croquet tournament, are anything but ordinary
I was on fire for you, where did you go?
In Iceland, a land with no monks or monkeys, our correspondent attempts to master the art of fishing light’ for Salmo salar, by stroking the creases and dimples of the Midfjardara river like the features of a loved one
Bravery bevond belief
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Let's get to the bottom of this
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Sing on, sweet bird
An essential component of our emotional relationship with the landscape, the mellifluous song of a thrush shapes the very foundation of human happiness, notes Mark Cocker, as he takes a closer look at this diverse family of birds
