Food insecurity and botanical-political tropes were deeply embedded in the discourses of early modern Britain. Food shortages in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries heightened awareness among the populace of its vulnerability to failing harvests and corrupted food. In the properties and behavior of plants and plant disease, Shakespeare found a complex web of metaphors that he used in his plays of the 1590s and early 1600s to interrogate issues of political legitimacy, treachery, treason, and the relationship between the (gendered) body of the monarch and his or her land. In particular, King Lear 's engagement with such themes enables us to understand how shifts to early agrarian capitalism were accompanied by transformations in contemporary views of ecological relationships. Starting with a new reading of Cordelia's description of her father's crown, made of "darnel" and other plants considered weeds, and insisting on an ecocritical dimension often neglected in historicist criticism, the authors argue that Shakespeare deploys images of crop contamination to register enduring anxieties over relations between court and country, legitimacy and bastardy, elite power and popular resistance. A primary set of meanings in King Lear , encompassing land ownership, management of natural resources, and the relationship between the monarchy and the land, is bound up with the politics of food supply and articulated through recurring botanical tropes of mimicry and subversion.

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The Autumn King : Remembering the Land in King Lear

In Shakespeare’s King Lear, the impact of the storm on the heath on Lear is best explained in light of two obsolescent medieval cultural traditions that found positive value in wild nature, in contrast to the negative views common in early modern England. The forest laws help us understand the heath as a place, as well as the monarch’s relationship to that place. But for understanding the inner change in Lear, which is like that of the knight-hermits in medieval romance, we must turn to the cultural roots of the eremitical tradition in monastic spirituality, which, as Jacques Le Goff has argued, were transplanted from the deserts of Egypt to the forests of France and England. These two medieval cultural traditions, transposed into the play’s ancient pagan setting, provide essential help in understanding why a violent storm in a bleak landscape has such a strong presence in Shakespeare’s great tragedy.

Medieval Wildernesses and King Lear: Heath, Forest, Desert

Shakespeare’s Hamlet

In 1596, Paul Hentzner (1558–1623), a German lawyer, travelled through England as part of his three-year tour of France, Italy and Switzerland. Hentzner’s description of his visit includes important first-hand testimony of the royal palaces, their architecture and treasures, and he is less reticent than English courtiers in giving a frank assessment of the 66-year-old Queen Elizabeth (‘her face oblong, fair, but wrinkled … her nose a little hooked; her lips narrow, and her teeth black’).1 Fortunately for us, Hentzner also recorded some of the customs of the peasantry. In the early evening of 14 September 1598, he approached the outskirts of Windsor:
As we were returning to our inn, we happened to meet some country people celebrating their harvest-home; their last load of corn they crown with flowers, having besides an image richly dressed, by which, perhaps, they would signify Ceres; this they keep moving about, while men and women, men and maid servants, riding through the streets in the cart, shout as loud as they can till they arrive at the barn. The farmers here do not bind up their corn in sheaves, as they do with us, but directly they have reaped or mowed it, put it into carts, and convey it into their barns.2

Frank McCombie

Papers

Garlands in hamlet and king lear