A Midsummer Night’s Dream abounds in plant life. It refers to between thirty and forty separate plants or flowers, and it has characters named Peaseblossom, Mustardseed and Quince. There is a modern rose called A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and one of the plants in the play has become so famous that it has acquired virtually a life of its own: on February 14, 2002 The Daily Telegraph ran an article explaining that the plant-based love potion used by Oberon on Titania, Lysander, and Demetrius wouldn’t actually work, as if anyone had ever seriously supposed that it might. In this essay I argue that just as the wood outside Athens demarcates a border between the city and fairyland, so the plants found in the wood also belong in two spheres, the scientific one of botany and the mystical one of fairylore; if the naturalist John Gerard is one of the play’s godfathers, the historian and antiquary William Camden is the other, since there is a potential parallel between the way plants are figured in the play and Camden’s interest in plants connected with Roman remains such as the Roman nettle and the Roman Wall plant.

Dr Johnson said that a pun was Shakespeare’s fatal Cleopatra. I want to argue that puns are, appropriately enough, at work with particular vigour in a play about one of Cleopatra’s lovers. Julius Caesar features a series of puns very early on, starting with the Cobbler’s ‘[a] trade, sir, that I hope I may use with a safe conscience, which is indeed, sir, a mender of bad soles’ (1.1.13–14),2 and followed by his retort to Flavius – ‘[n]ay I beseech you, sir, be not out with me: yet if you be out, sir, I can mend you’ (1.1.16–17) – and finally by ‘[t]ruly, sir, all that I live by, is with the awl’ (1.1.22).

In the Blackadder II episode ‘Bells’, Elizabeth I's nurse offers a comment on the way sex and gender affected women in early modern Europe that, for all its ostensible naïveté, is in fact surprisingly astute:

Elizabeth was the child of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, and was thus royal and eligible to succeed according to English law, but for the absence of a ‘winkle’, her ability to rule—based on her perceived sex—was questioned, and potentially even negated. The point ended up being rather moot: both Elizabeth and her half-sister Mary ruled England as female kings, which has the effect of making Nursie's observation all the more humorous.

As this short interaction demonstrates, gender was a site of contest and anxiety in early modern England, and early modern Europe more broadly.

Lady Arbella Stuart (1575–1615) sat on the edge of two thrones, though in the end she inherited neither. As the daughter of Charles Stuart, Earl of Lennox, the younger brother of James VI's father Lord Darnley, Arbella could trace her ancestry back through her paternal grandmother Margaret Douglas to a royal great-grandmother, Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII, sister of Henry VIII, and wife of James IV of Scots. Before James VI married and had children, Arbella was arguably his closest heir; even after that, she retained a very credible claim to be considered as the successor of Elizabeth I, since she shared James's Tudor blood but not his disadvantage of having been born outside the realm. In this chapter, I consider both what Arbella was, and what she might have been, and how her actual and potential identities were shaped and represented by both herself and others.

While her maternal grandmother, Bess of Hardwick, sewed the self and built the self, Arbella Stuart wrote the self. Sara Jayne Steen notes that ‘At court, she was acknowledged to be a fine writer, one whose words were read aloud in the king's Privy Council and commended’. She may have written poetry: Aemilia Lanyer seems to have thought so, and Steen notes that ‘Bathsua Makin in 1673 commended Stuart's “great faculty in Poetry” and several later writers echoed this point’, though no verse by her has ever been identified.