Title Page [Plate 1]

From W. Crane, 'Flowers from Shakespeare's garden: A posy from the plays' (London: Cassell & Co, 1906).

Shakespeare's plays include references to over fifty different types of flower, including garden plants, wild flowers and herbs. They've inspired phrases such as 'gilding the lily' and 'a rose by any other name', and appeared in paintings such as those of Ophelia, the tragic heroine in Hamlet who drowned herself surrounded by garlands of wild flowers.

Depicting and identifying 'Shakespeare's flowers' in book form was particularly popular throughout the nineteenth century. The genre was still going strong in the early twentieth century, with Walter Crane's 'Flowers from Shakespeare's Garden: A Posy from the Plays (1906') depicting a succession of 'flowers in human garb', or 'human beings garbed as flowers' and glossed by quotes from Shakespeare's plays.