Tulipa Praestans

We don’t think Shakespeare actually mentions tulips directly.  Tulips are native to the mountains where China, Tibet, Russia, and Afghanistan meet;  cultivated in Turkey, they became associated in Europe with the wealth and beauty of the Ottoman Empire (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-tulip-fever-180964915/) and were also called “Turk’s cap” and “Dalmatian cap.”   In Chapter 87 of his influential Herball or Generall History of Plants (1633),  after cataloguing 30 types of tulips, John Gerard  says that trying to describe all the variety of tulips would be “like trying to roll Sisiphus’s stone” (https://www.trinhall.cam.ac.uk/library/tiptoe-through-the-tulips-john-gerards-herball/).    In 1630s Holland, tulips became the focus of a financial bubble, though not to the degree that is sometimes believed (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-tulip-fever-180964915/).  Tulip bulbs are edible if prepared correctly, and were promoted as food during the Second World War in Holland (https://bloomeffects.com/blogs/bloomeffects/the-history-of-eating-tulips).  A Shakespeare connection might be made to Twelfth Night, set in Illyria on the Dalmatian coast.  Trying to encourage the lady Olivia to recover from mourning her brother, the wise doll Feste reminds her that “beauty’s a flower”(1.5).  We think that this flower’s a beauty! and are always so glad to see it in the spring.