‘The Sweet Marjoram of the Salad’: Abortifacient Plants and the Shakespearean Bed Trick

Abstract

Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, in which Helena uses a resurrection, a bed trick, and a pregnancy announcement to furnish her unwilling husband’s fidelity, has long troubled critics because Bertram’s faithless act of sleeping with a woman he thinks is not his wife seems like a poor foundation for a happy marriage. However, Helena’s knowledge of botanical pharmacology has been overlooked as a subversive solution to the play’s problematic ending. What if Helena’s pregnancy announcement is false, or prelude to an abortion? Helena’s extensive knowledge of plants and their medicinal uses (including abortifacients such as iris, rue, sweet marjoram) could procure what she really wants: financial stability through social mobility. This essay proposes that Helena has not only good reasons (plague and war) to want to avoid pregnancy with Bertram, but also the means of accessing birth control and abortifacient medicine through her knowledge of plants and their medicinal qualities. Helena’s real trick is to achieve financial security within a patriarchal framework where she may enjoy sex without the obligation of procreation. I trace Shakespeare’s bed trick from its origins in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where bed tricks are also fashioned as pragmatic and educational narratives about plants useful in reproductive health care. This connection between the problems caused by bed tricks and the potential solutions afforded by abortifacient plants also has potential for further exploration in other popular bed trick plays of the period, including Measure for Measure