Pages worth drying out

"...............I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book."

                                                       The Tempest    (V, i)


Shakespeare's Prospero is calling it quits: he has decided that it's time to set aside his magic, his spells, his conjurations, his books. His masterful knowledge of the otherworldly arts certainly came in handy: not just any crackpot could brew up a raging sea storm, drag a passing ship and its hapless passengers ashore to his island, and eventually make fools of long-time adversaries that had conspired to usurp his dukedom of Milan.

Not bad for a day's work.

Shakespeare makes much of Prospero's absorption in books, the predilection of many an acolyte of the European Renaissance. In The Tempest, books and the knowledge they contain are depicted as the source of Prospero's power, much as  Christopher Marlowe shows us a man nose-deep in necromantic literature in his London stage hit The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus. Books offer the input of the ages, both playwrights seem to be saying. But overindulge at your own risk.

Pictured above, from the collection of Agecroft Hall, is a 1597 copy of John Gerard's classic Historie of Plants. When it was published, William Shakespeare was 33 and had yet to write Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, The Tempest. His rival playwright Christopher Marlowe had been dead four years, stabbed during an argument over a tavern bill in Deptford, downriver from London. Neither man would likely have scoffed at the publishing success of Gerard's work, dubbed the Herball. With his encyclopedic knowledge of the botanical world, Gerard had a winner on his hands.

As an English herbalist and surgeon, Gerard became superintendent of the gardens of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who was Queen Elizabeth's chief secretary of state. In later years, Gerard was herbalist to King James I. One reason that Gerard's work was so well received lies in the importance that people attached to plant lore and its medicinal uses in daily life during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Plant-based concoctions were used, with variable results, as a means to cure just about every ailment one could imagine.

Herbs were known as "simples," and Gerard maintains that the "art of Simpling" was "neither base nor contemptible" as it might seem - rather it was a kingly art practiced in Eden "where Adam was set to be the Herbalist." It should be pointed out that Adam's talents as an herbalist went largely unappreciated.

The binding of Agecroft's Herball is brown calfskin with gilt borders that include a central panel. The spine bands are gilt-tooled, also with panels. The flyleaf includes a bucolic scene with gardeners, tools, and plants. It was popular subject matter in Shakespeare's day, as it is now, so it is hardly surprising that Gerard's volume is so lushly illustrated and grandly produced.