ORANGE

10th December 2023

You know neither me, yourselves, nor anything. You are ambitious for poor knaves’ caps and legs. You wear out a good wholesome forenoon in hearing a cause between an orange-wife and a forset-seller, and then rejoin the controversy of threepence to a second day of audience.

MENENIUS: Coriolanus, Act 2, Scene 1

ORANGE (Citrus x aurantium f. aurantium/Citrus sinesis)

Oranges are used 5 times in Shakespeare, twice to describe colour, once to refer directly to the fruit, and twice as a description or insult. Orange selling seems to be a familiar occupation for his audience if Shakespeare can use it to mean an everyday, commonplace activity. Nell Gwynn, future mistress of Charles II, was famously an orange seller working in the London theatres of the 1660s.

Oranges are a one of a range of Citrus species and hybrids. They are native to parts of China, parts of East and South East Asia but have been domesticated for several thousand years. Southern Spain including Seville have been associated with Orange growing from the Islamic period onwards.

Oranges are reported as growing in Italy, Spain and parts of France by Turner in 1548 and Gerard in 1597. Gerard gives a range of uses for Oranges including “a dozen of Orenges cut in slices and put into a gallon of water, adding thereto an ounce of Mercury sublimate, and boiled to the consumption of the halfe, cureth the itch and manginess of the body.” (Don’t try this at home…) He also says that the “sweet and odoriferous floures of Orenges be used of the perfumers in their sweet smelling ointments.”

More Information

John Gerard (1597 first edition), The Herball or Historie of Plantes (access the 1636 edition via Archive.org)

Kew Plants of the World Online: Citrus x aurantium f. aurantium

William Turner, 1548, The Names of Herbes (access via Archive.org)

Xu et al, 2013, Draft Genome of Sweet Orange Citrus sinesis. Nature Genetics