Schubert's Onion

Allium schubertii is one of several alliums in the garden.  Allliums (a grouping that includes garlics, leeks, and onions) are mentioned in various Shakespeare plays.  We particularly associate this one with fairies, beyond-human powers, and starlight. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a night in the forest, influenced by the fairies, allows the story to reach a comic rather than a tragic conclusion.  The fairies are nature spirits and divine or more-than-human beings who spend time in the “farthest steppe of India” (2.1) and “the spiced Indian air” (2.1).  They observe goings on in the world, such as when a mermaid sang and “certain stars shot madly from their spheres, /To hear the sea-maid’s music” (2.1).  

The artisanal actor characters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream also mention alliums both for practical, bodily reasons and in metaphor.  Bottom, the weaver and comic human actor, is transformed with a Donkey’s head and becomes the lover of the Fairy Queen–the only human who connects directly during the play with a divine or spirit being.  He mentions onions and garlic.  After he is transformed back into his regular human shape, he talks about his experience in language the mixes up the senses and articulates limitations of everyday human perception, saying ” The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was” (4.2).  One scene later, preparing with his fellow actors to perform for the Duke, he tells his fellow performers “eat no onions and garlic, for we must utter sweet breath; and I do not doubt but to hear them say, it is a sweet comedy” (4.2).    Within that comedy, Bottom, playing Pyramus, dies.  Thisbe, his betrothed, laments him, saying “his eyes were green as leeks” (5.1).  The actor’s body is a real body, alive with the audience in real time, and also a sign of other meanings.  The lively, pungent qualities of allium connect Bottom the actor to the earth and the senses as well as the spirit world.