Hamlet Kitchen Garden Symbolism

Gardens and plants have been a constant of human life for quite a long time. Ancient society started to move away from hunting-gathering when people started settling to grow food in fertile areas. From these settlements cities and towns started growing, paving the way for modern life. In Elizabethan England “Most households cultivated a kitchen garden” where they grew food, in addition to plants with medical, cosmetic, and daily household use (Newton and Owens 6). Given how ubiquitous gardens and plants were in society it is unsurprising that many works of literature and art. use them as symbols. William Shakespeare is one of many authors who found inspiration in their backyard flower bed. In Hamlet garden and plant-based imagery communicates information about the state of characters and the country they inhabit.

One character who is very strongly tied to plant symbolism is Ophelia. In act four scene five the reader finds Ophelia, clearly now a full-time resident of cloud-cuckoo land, passing out flowers and herbs. Each of these flowers communicates ideas. In Tudor era England it was not uncommon to communicate using plants. People would send each other bouquets filled with flowers that told the recipient how they felt about the

Denmark is compared to a neglected garden. In Elizabethan England, the view was that God gave humanity the world to tend to like a garden and “Human efforts on the land worked to bring order out of a chaotic wilderness.”(Grinnil 99). Denmark is obviously in a state of chaos: the king just died, Norway is gearing up for war, and the prince is acting like a bratty teenager. With all the weeds growing it gets difficult to know where to prune. The garden imagery also harkens to the biblical garden of Eden. The garden was paradise until Eve committed a sin. A similar statement could be made about Denmark. Trouble starts when someone (Claudius) commits a sin