Rue with a difference

"There's rue for you, and here's some for me:
we may call it herb of grace o' Sundays: O
you must wear your rue with a difference.
There's a daisy: I would give you some violets,
but they withered all when my father died....."

                                                             Hamlet      (IV, v)

Ophelia, in her madness at the sudden loss of her father, hands out flowers as she descends into a whirling world of her own making. Contemporary audiences might watch the play without realizing that during the Elizabethan age and long after, specific flowers had specific symbolic meaning that can lend insight into Ophelia's thoughts and feelings toward the characters that join her in the scene: her tempestuous  brother Laertes, the perfidious usurper King Claudius, the weak-willed Queen Gertrude.

To complicate matters a bit, Shakespeare leaves no specific stage directions as to which characters receive which flowers, so there's been a great deal of conjecture in that regard. What is more certain is that Elizabethan playgoers would have been less likely to overlook the significance of Ophelia's floral gift-giving.

Predictably, scholars are not in unanimous agreement as to the meaning of each flower or to their most likely recipients in Hamlet. But there is a reasonable consensus of opinion that Ophelia's rue symbolized repentance and sorrow, and that she shared it with her brother Laertes. Violets symbolized faithfulness; which Ophelia found withered in the people around her. She also handed out fennel, symbolizing marital infidelity, most probably to Gertrude or Claudius. Daisies were known to stand for forsaken love, which Ophelia had in abundance. Her columbines stood for insincerity; there was plenty of that to go around, driving Ophelia to her flower-strewn, watery end.

The rue pictured above was photographed in Agecroft Hall's herb garden, where a great variety of plants well known during the Elizabethan and Stuart periods can be found.