A Garland of Shakespeare's Flowers

London: Elliot Stock, 1911. Hardcover. Very good. Hardcover. This 1911 Garland of Shakespeare's Flowers winds together verses from the Bard's great plays and poems with bright full color illustrations of the flora he planted throughout his works. "[T]he poet garnered the beauty of our English flowers, and the rustic lore which had grown up about them....How loving and accurate was his knowledge of plants and flowers we shall never know until we ourselves have come to know and love them. He lies in the spring woods and notes the crimson spots in the golden cups of the cowslips, and, transmuted in his fancy, they become Titania's gorgeous pensioners" of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The red rose that was so famously invoked in Romeo and Juliet appears in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Henry VI and in his sonnets and is here beautifully paired with a vivid watercolor rendering by artist Emily Ledbrook. Here, you'll witness how Hemlock appears in Macbeth and King Lear, glimpse A Midsummer Night's Dream and Much Ado About Nothing share sips of honeysuckle, scent a wift of fragrant rosemary arising in A Winter's Tale, Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet, and sit under willows weeping in Twelfth Night, Hamlet, and Othello. In these pages, you'll see the pansy through the words of both Ophelia and Oberon and the red poppy through Iago's eyes. As Herbert Carr Smith writes in his foreword, this volume of poetry and paintings invites you to follow William Shakespeare into the wildflower meadows of his native England: "This little book will not have been written in vain if it aids the lovers of our great poet to follow him into the woods and fields, to make again the ever new discovery of the beauty and wisdom which the kindly Earth-mother flings so lavishly at our feet..."

7 7/8" X 5 1/4". xi, 104pp. Bound in stem green cloth over boards, with garland of beribboned roses stamped in gilt with decorative title in kind to upper board, with decorative pattern and title in gilt to spine as well. Mild wear to binding, with rubbing to edges and extremities and gentle bumping to corners. Dark green coated endpapers. Previous owner's name to half-title, dated Nov. 24th, 1911. Laid in is a previous owner's own addition on note paper of a beautifully handwritten quote from Shakespeare's Cymbeline. Faint foxing to preliminaries and pages rather musty, else unmarked. Binding is firm and sound. Illustrated in 60 chromolithographic plates reproduced from watercolor paintings by Emily Ledbrook (1858-1935).