1. This is the first collection dedicated solely to an examination of botany and plants in Shakespeare that considers both the materiality of plants and their cultural and ideological work; 2. it draws together a variety of methodologies, most notably ecocritical and ecofeminist, in its examination of Shakespeare's plant knowledge; 3. it explores the moment in time before science solidified the human-nonhuman binary and thus offers an interrogation of what it is to be human, an interrogation that seems of particular import to our own times. Writing on the cusp of modern botany and during the heyday of English herbals and garden manuals, Shakespeare references at least 180 plants in his works and makes countless allusions to horticultural and botanical practices. Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination moves plants to the foreground of analysis and brings together some of the rich and innovative ways that scholars are expanding the discussion of plants and botany in Shakespeare’s writings. The essays gathered here all emphasize the interdependence and entanglement of plants with humans and human life, whether culturally, socially, or materially, and vividly illustrate the fundamental role plants play in human identity. As they attend to the affinities and shared materiality between plants and humans in Shakespeare’s works, these essays complicate the comfortable Aristotelian hierarchy of human-animal-plant. And as they do, they often challenge the privileged position of humans in relation to non-human life.
