WORMWOOD

24th January 2024

Photo Credit: emer1940 (Getty Images), CANVA

QUOTATION

Oft have I heard of you, my Lord Berowne,

Before I saw you; and the world’s large tongue

Proclaims you for a man replete with mocks,

Full of comparisons and wounding flouts,

Which you on all estates will execute

That lie within the mercy of your wit.

To weed this wormwood from your fruitful brain,

And therewithal to win me, if you please,

Without the which I am not to be won.

ROSALINE: Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act 5, Scene 2

WORMWOOD (Artemisia absinthium)

Wormwood is a herb used in food, medicine and also a poison, with a distinctive bitter taste. Shakespeare refers to Wormwood several times as a metaphor for bitterness, and as an aid to weaning in Romeo and Juliet. Wormwood also appears in the Geneva Bible as a metaphor for bitterness and as the star that will fill the waters of the earth with bitterness at the end of days in Revelation (8:11). Hamlet’s outburst during his mousetrap play to expose his uncle’s crimes ‘that’s wormwood’ (Act 3, Scene 2) echoes the Biblical language of bitterness and falsehood made visible: ‘They have spoken words, swearing falsely in making a covenant: thus judgement groweth as wormwood in the furrows of the field.’ (Hosea 10:4)

Shakespeare uses the name ‘Dian’s bud’ for the antidote to the love potion made of Pansy or Love-In-Idleness in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Artemisia is the scientific name of Wormwood named for its connection to the goddess Artemis or her Roman equivalent Diana.

John Gerard (1597) devotes 10 page to the description and uses of different Wormwoods or Artemisia species. Wormwood’s medicinal uses include stomach complaints, treatment of fevers, getting rid of stomach worms, curing bad breath, as an insect repellant, keeping moths away from clothes and also ‘it helpeth them that are strangled with the eating of mushrooms, or toad stools, if it be drunke with vinegar’. Pliny the Elder writes in the first century C.E. of the many medicinal and cultural values of Wormwood in the Roman world.

Wormwood is native to many parts of Europe and east to Siberia as well as the Mediterranean. It is cultivated and naturalised in many countries. Wormwood was recorded as cultivated in Britain from at least the medieval period. There are other closely related Artemisia species which also have medicinal and cultural significance including Mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris) and Sweet Wormwood (Artemisia annua). The BSBI Plant Atlas 2020 records 12 species of Artemisia native or naturalised in Britain.

More Information

BSBI (Botanical Society of the British Isles) Plant Atlas 2020: Artemisia absinthium

Folger Shakespeare Library: Search Shakespeare’s Works

Geneva Bible 1599 edition: accessed via Bible Gateway

John Gerard, 1597 The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes (accessed via archive.org)

Kew Plants of the World Online: Artemisia absinthium

Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book 27, Chapter 28, ‘Absinthium or Wormwood’: accessed via Perseus Digital Library