Purple Coneflower

Its shape is daisy-like and there are many daisies in Shakespeare, some associated with troubled emotional states, others with lightheartedness.   

Daisies may suggest springtime joy, as “daisies pied, and violets blue…/do paint the meadows with delight” [Love’s Labours Lost]), or youthful freshness and innocence. Daisies are included in Ophelia’s language of flowers (in Hamlet), where they are commonly seen as referring to “self-sacrifice for love,” as well as “dissembling love and the folly of believing such deceits” (Painter and Parker).  They are associated with the ancient Greek story of Alcestis, a sacrificial wife who agrees to die in place of her husband and then returns from the land of the dead.  In Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, a wife symbolically returns from the dead.

Purple is a colour associated in Shakespeare with spirituality and with blood, sometimes with mourning or with empathy or with feeling.