Violets

In Hamlet, Ophelia “pansies…for thoughts” (4.5), and she would offer violets too but “they withered all when my father died” (4.5).  She seems to offer flowers and hers to her family and community.  At the same time, Rebecca Laroche argues that Ophelia is an herbalist who attempts to cure herself.   Pansies are also called “hearts-ease” and according to Gerard’s Herbal, a syrup made from violets and sugar “is most pleasant and wholesome, especially it comforteth the heart and other inward parts” (Gerard, 702I, quoted Laroche 217).  Laroche explains that in early modern England “to say that all violets have withered is to say more that beauty and faithfulness have died; it says that the opportunity to feel good, to find comfort, has disappeared” (217).  

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream,  Oberon tells Puck to gather the magic love-inspiring flower in a special place, on “a bank where the wild thyme blows,/Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,/Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine,/With sweet muskroses, and with eglantine” (2.1.257).  Also, the magic flower whose juice makes people and fairies fall in love with the next thing they see is “love-in-idleness,” a kind of viola (2.1.174).  In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the magic power of this juice to inspire passionate desire (which turns potential tragedy into comedy within the play) is the result of a white flower being hit by Cupid’s arrow, turning it “purple with love’s wound” (2.1.173).  This story could suggest that the viola is shaped by the activity of the spirit world on physical matter.  Or in another interpretation it could suggest that love, passion, and sexuality are shaped by nature and culture, plant and story.