Shakespeare and Wildlife was the perhaps improbable title for Professor Stefan Buczacki’s talk to the Friends of Shakespeare’s Church at Holy Trinity on Monday. Professor Buczacki vindicated his title, however, and entertained a large audience, by conducting his personal safari through Shakespeare’s imagination with the wit of a seasoned raconteur and the fluency of one long experienced in unscripted radio performance. Professor Buczacki’s quest combined scholarship in Shakespeare’s language with the knowledge he has gleaned over many years as a professional botanist and internationally famous gardener.  Things change but things remain the same.  We may think we know what Shakespeare means when he refers in Hamlet to a handsaw, but in fact he has in mind the heron or heronshaw, a favourite quarry of aristocratic sportsmen, indistinguishable from their hawks against the sun while flying in a north-north-west wind, but clearly visible when the wind is southerly. 

Equally, in the same play, the divinity that shapes our ends is metaphorically engaged in the same rural activity as workers trimming hedges in Warwickshire, and using the same language, several hundred years later. Why are there no bed bugs in Shakespeare’s plays?  What about cockroaches?  Where are the potatoes and the tobacco?  Has Shakespeare anything to say (unflatteringly perhaps) about rabbits, when the native species is the hare?  What is he thinking of when he imagines that impossibly various bank, in horticultural terms, where the wild thyme grows in A Midsummer Night’s Dream?  And what is wild thyme anyway? These and dozens of other intriguing questions were answered in a talk which combined improvisation with research.  We have to thank Professor Buczacki for adding to the pleasures of Stratford life and learning, and the Friends of Shakespeare’s Church for making his talk available. 

Ronnie Mulryne
- Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, 29th April, 2004