SHAKESPEARE was in love with Nature. When Dr Johnson praised the Bard as ‘the poet of nature’, he meant Shakespeare’s penetration of the human condition, the vaulting ambition of Macbeth and the paranoid insecurity of Hamlet, but the honorific might equally be applied to Shakespeare’s feeling for natural history. After all, this is the playwright who, in Measure for Measure, agonised for the smallest of creatures:
And the poor beetle that we tread upon, In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great As when a giant dies.
The young Will, we may surmise, had a hands-on closeness to Nature. Legend accords him the role of deer-robber
Nature was his inspiration, because he was born a Nature boy, the grandson of farmers, and he grew up in Stratford-upon-Avon, then a small country town. His knowledge of our wild fauna and flora, from ‘the quarrelous Weasel’, Act III, Scene 4) to Romeo’s recommendation of plantain as healing herb (, Act I, Scene 2), is so marked in his apt metaphors, similes and descriptions that it can only have come from personal observation as he played and rambled in the fields, woods and streams of the Midlands. Shakespeare understood insect metamorphosis (, Act V, Scene 2), and the partiality evinced by serpents for basking in the sun:
