The Serpent and the Flower in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55
The Serpent and the Flower in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55
Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Scene II, Line 77
JUL: O serpent heart, hid with a flowering face!
Macbeth, Act I, Scene V, Line 63
LADYMACB: Look like the innocent flower, But be the serpent under ’t.
Pericles: Son of Tyre, Act I , Scene I, Line 127
PER.: And both like serpents are, who though they feed
On sweetest flowers, yet they poison breed.
The serpent’s trickery of mortals is a theme which echoes tirelessly in the art, literature, and theology of both the Judaeo-Christian and Eastern philosophies. The instinctive illustration of the image of the serpent as a symbol of deceit for Western interpreters is the biblical (Genesis) creation story--putting forth a falsely kind face in order to urge a hero(ine) toward the loss of innocence--and the message is retained that the serpent will employ sweet-seeming logic that is, in truth, unsound and wield assurances which will ultimately be proven empty. Similarly, in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh has returned from a journey to the bottom of a deep well and plucked from there a magic plant of knowledge with which he plans to return to his people. Taking a rest beside this pool, he falls asleep. A serpent slithers out from beneath a flower beside the pool and eats the magic plant, in some translations biting Gilgamesh as well. Here we see that, again, the serpent wishes to rob mortals of the power of knowledge(and the closeness to the Creator(s) in their theology that is implicit in that knowledge), this time by physically hiding itself beneath beauty. A case may be made that the serpent/flower imagery which Shakespeare uses to such extent in his plays comes both from the Christian creation story, in keeping with the faith of the Elizabethan era, but draws also from the Gilgamesh myth. The latter may seem less credible than the former to a modern reader, but Elizabethan scholars had far more extensive familiarity with classics in literature than is called for in present curricula. It is interesting that the Bard “recycled” this imagery with such repetition, when one considers that Shakespeare himself wrote in a flowery style that often packed an unexpected bite. A true master of the double entendre, and highly skilled at creating devilish puns--these facets of his writing are never so blatantly displayed as in...