Doubtful it stood;
As two spent swimmers, that do cling together
And choke their art.
I don't claim he could swim like a fish like Ariel. But I was with him one night by the Thames when he tore off his clothes. 'Be contented,' I told him. 'It's a naughty night to swim in.' He liked that well enough to put it straight into the storm scene in King Lear.
Chapter Thirty-Six Of weeds and the original Ophelia
I want to say a word about Shakespeare and weeds. Not the word WEEDS, mind you. When the poet uses that it is nearly always in some negative moral context - talking of evil as weeds, of weeds as faults in human character, of souls or gardens choked with weeds, and so forth.
No, I mean Shakespeare's liking for certain wild or at any rate out-of-garden plants that few others either note or celebrate. Not the word but the things, sir, that's what I mean.
Many poets tell you plenty about flowers. Mr Shakespeare does too. And unlike some poets what he tells you is usually true. When he mentions a flower you know that he has seen it often, growing. He makes you feel that he has plucked it with his own fingers and stroked it across his face. He was, after all, a country boy before he became a great poet. He knows every mark and spot and stamen of whatever he's talking about.
Contrast his flowers with John Milton's, gentle reader, and you'll see what I mean. I respect Mr Milton, of course, but I can't say I love him. He will bid you bring the rathe primrose, the tufted crow-toe and pale jessamine, the white pink and the pansy freaked with jet, the glowing violet, the musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine, with cowslips wan that hang the pensive head, to strew the laureat hearse where Lycid lies, and all that. But apart from the fact that they couldn't all have been in flower at the same time of year, doesn't it sound rather as if he is giving poetical orders to his gardener? His epithets aren't too good, either, when you think about it. Violets don't glow. Honeysuckle is more untidy than well-attired. Madam, have you ever seen a cowslip looking pensive? As to amaranthus, I doubt if Milton ever saw one in his life. It is not so much a flower as a lovely quadrisyllable.
With Shakespeare, it is quite a different matter. He never drags in any flower just because of its name, and what he says about the look or the scent of it will always prove true. At his best in this matter, he doesn't even describe the flower at all; instead, he presents you with the essence of its nature. For example, Perdita in The Winter's Tale conjuring up daffodils and what they do in just sixteen simple words, not one of which is in any way remarkable, but the whole is breath-taking:
golden daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty.
And then, to give one other example, camomile. He only mentions once this creeping herb. It has downy leaves and flowers that are white in the ray and yellow in the disk. But none of that's to Mr Shakespeare's purpose. I'm sure he knew exactly what camomile looked like, but like any true countryman (not to speak of true poets) he knew also that what counts about this humble plant is its perseverance, its obstinacy, its prolifical keeping-on no matter what. So he has Falstaff say, when speaking to Prince Hal in the style of his father, the King: 'Harry, I do not only marvel where thou spendest thy time, but also how thou art accompanied: for though the camomile, the more it is trodden on, the faster it grows, yet youth, the more it is wasted, the sooner it wears.' That seems to me, in its truth not just to nature but the heart, about the opposite of the way that flowers are used in Milton.
But it's Shakespeare's knowledge of weeds that I want to stress. It's something peculiar to him. It's right at the core of his spirit. It's vital to his genius, I think. No other poet I know is so curious of weeds or so familiar with them. A man might learn the names of flowers from an after-dinner stroll in his lady's garden. Weeds he learns otherwise, and bitterly, and not because he wants to, nor because there's any profit in it. Weeds a man learns from intimate acquaintance with wild places, from walking abroad in the sun and the wind and the rain, from personal experience of ploughing land, from lying in a ditch after a hard night's drinking.
Whether Shakespeare ever ploughed I would not know. But I know he knows his weeds like no one else. Take, for example, that moment when Cordelia meets mad Lear:
Crowned with rank fumiter and furrow-weeds,
With hardokes, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers,
Darnel and all the idle weeds that grow
In our sustaining corn.
(You'll find it in Act IV, the fourth scene, sir, right at the start, if memory serves me right.) Or take, again, the Duke of Burgundy in Henry V, bemoaning the sorry war-torn state of the French countryside, and seeing:
her hedges even-pleach'd,
Like prisoners wildly overgrown with hair,
Put forth disorder'd twigs; her fallow leas
The darnel, hemlock and rank fumitory
Doth root upon, while that the coulter rusts
That should deracinate such savagery;
The even mead, that erst brought sweetly forth
The freckled cowslip, burnet, and green clover,
Wanting the scythe, all uncorrected, rank,
Conceives by idleness, and nothing teems
But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burrs ...
(Yes, madam, I confess I had to look that up in my faithful Folio: Act V, Scene 2, lines 42 to 52.)
You won't find any KECKSIES in the works of Mr John Milton. They're the dry and hollow stalks of cow parsnips or wild chervil.
Pickleherring's point, sir? (How kind of you to presume I may even have one!) Pickleherring's point is that no one but a country boy could have written that. Yes, and one who had probably held a pruning hook in his hand and pleached a hedge.
Don't forget that gardener, either, who knows all about the ways of weeds and caterpillars in King Richard II. And (my trump card, this) there's Imogen proving the things had equal honour in our poet's mind by strewing the supposed grave of her Posthumus 'with wild wood-leaves and weeds'.
Pickleherring's point (and it is not just the point of this chapter, come to that) - Pickleherring's point is that the late Mr Shakespeare not only knew the names and the nick-names and the dirty names of all the things that grew in Mary Arden's garden by design. The late Mr Shakespeare knew just as much if not more about the plants and shrubs and flowers that grew unwanted there. And about whatever grows wild outside all our garden walls. In a word, weeds. And he knew your honest weed is not the worst thing in the world. Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds, remember?
It was either my dear Jane or the playwright John Webster who once remarked that the death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world. I think that it was probably Mr Webster. He was much possessed by death. (In view of how things turned out, it would have been strange if it was Jane.)