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Some Versions of the Hortus Conclusus in Elizabethan Landscape and Literature
Author(s) -
Jones Mark
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
literature compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.158
H-Index - 4
ISSN - 1741-4113
DOI - 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00609.x
Subject(s) - iconography , the renaissance , character (mathematics) , middle ages , literature , protestantism , art , politics , english literature , history , art history , philosophy , archaeology , religious studies , geometry , mathematics , political science , law
Situating its discussion among recent ecocritical developments in studies of Shakespeare and the literature of the English Renaissance, this essay considers the medieval enclosed garden, or hortus conclusus , as a way of being in the world that was available to the Elizabethan imagination. A concept ultimately derived from Canticles 4.12, the idea of the enclosed garden was read allegorically, if differently, by both Catholic and Protestant exegetes. Enormously productive in the late middle ages, the iconography of the hortus conclusus was appropriated in Elizabethan England by poets and gardeners alike and may be found in plays including Shakespeare's Richard II , Romeo and Juliet , and The Winter's Tale , as well as in actual gardens, among them Theobalds, Kenilworth, Wimbledon, and Nonsuch. While fashioned to embrace theological and political concerns of the late sixteenth century, these late manifestations of the enclosed garden retain a recognizably medieval character.