Bonnie Lander Johnson is Fellow and Associate Professor at Downing College, Cambridge University. Her academic books include Chastity in Early Stuart Literature and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Blood Matters (2018) and The Cambridge Handbook of Literature and Plants (forthcoming). She also writes fiction and non-fiction about early modernity and our changing relationship to the natural world.

'Expertly grafting Shakespeare and critical plant studies, this book establishes that Shakespeare's botanical imagery savoured of the vanishing rural world outside London as well as the burgeoning trade networks of global modernity. Lander Johnson reveals the ubiquitous material presence of plants in early modern households in the form of textiles, dyes, medicines, and food to offer fresh perspectives on four Shakespearean plays, while distilling the rhetorical power of Shakespeare's plants in thorny debates about medical authority, God's immanence in the natural world, and monarchical sovereignty over the realm.' Todd Borlik, Professor of Shakespeare Studies & Renaissance Literature, University of Huddersfield

• Introduction: theatre, nostalgia and the reformation of plants; Part I. Plants: Monarchs, signatures and the recuperation of the 'common': 1. Trees, kings, Christ: almanacs, ballads and the divinity of matter in Richard II; 2. Pansies, queens, midwives: fairy flowers, travellers' tales and domestic practice in a midsummer night's dream; Part II. Places: Domestic and civic: negotiating botanical cultures in the theatre: 3. The theatre as medical marketplace: poison, desire and cultures of diagnosis: Romeo and Juliet; 4. The theatre as bower: botanical tapestries, the passion of Christ and the book of nature in Cymbeline; Conclusion: the mulberry tree; Index.