1. Introduction
[1.1] In early seventeenth-century Stratford-upon-Avon, William Shakespeare allegedly planted a single mulberry tree in his garden at New Place, where it stood for about a century and a half, outliving his entire family line. This mulberry is a peculiar site in which the fields of ecocriticism and fan studies collide, providing a unique opportunity to explore the intricate relationships between literature, the environment, and fan culture. This transdisciplinary collision resonates from the early development of Bardolatry (note 1) in the mid-eighteenth century during which actor David Garrick visited Stratford-upon-Avon to explore the place in which Shakespeare lived and worked. During one of these pilgrimages in 1742, Garrick was introduced to Shakespeare's mulberry by then owner Hugh Clopton (Borlik 2015). As Garrick and other fans repeatedly returned to the garden to gaze at the mulberry, the tree became a sort of arboreal effigy of the Bard with which fans could commune and connect. Though it was felled in an act of retaliation against interloping fans in 1756 by Reverend Francis Gastrell (to whom New Place belonged after Clopton's death in 1751), relics made from the timber seemed to carry enough of Shakespeare's remaining vitality to be coveted by his admirers. These relics were particularly popular souvenirs during Garrick's 1769 Shakespeare Jubilee, and a few can still be found today displayed in the Folger Shakespeare Library and sold at auctions for tens of thousands of dollars (Borlik 2015).
[1.2] But when Shakespeare's fans of past and present commune with the mulberry and its relics, what role does nature play? Since fandom and landscape are often intricately intertwined through an engagement of the body with the world—an engagement that, as Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt and colleagues posit, "produces spaces and places" (2004, 2)—the touristic and fanatic coproduction of meaning through the mulberry as a Shakespearean relic is complicated by the tree's animacy and mortality. Is the mulberry a particularly significant relic, or souvenir, because it is part of a landscape that is additionally inscribed not only with its own body/land relationship but also with its cultural significance as a symbol of memory and perpetuation outside of its association with the Bard? The slippages between human and nonhuman that happen when fans "mudd[y] the distinction…between the tree and the person who planted it" (Borlik 2015, 134) end up grafting person to plant, souvenir to landscape, and fandom to environment. Bardolatry, then, is sustained by—and, through antifandom, threatens—the landscape that embodies and is embodied by Shakespeare's fans.
2. Planting the mulberry
[2.1] The history of Shakespeare's mulberry tree, while difficult to verify and filled with educated guesswork, is generally agreed upon by Shakespeare scholars to begin during the massive importation of mulberry trees by King James—hoping to enrich England with a sericulture boom—in the early years of the seventeenth century (Borlik 2015; Stott 2019). Todd Borlik suggests that Shakespeare may have received the mulberry sapling planted at New Place in 1609 as a gift from the king, who was his patron at the time. However, while Shakespeare's plays and poems contain hints of the author's understanding of sericulture (and its impact on the textiles industry) as an important part of English national—or, perhaps more precisely, royal—identity, it would be difficult to argue that he planted the mulberry as a purely economic venture (note 2). As Shakespeare's garden was home to only the single mulberry tree, his intentions when planting the mulberry seem to not have been particularly economic nor even ecological; rather, as Borlik notes, the cultivation of the sapling points to a more metaphorical or symbolic significance of "tree planting as a means of supporting one's posterity" (123). Indeed, considering that Shakespeare's first granddaughter had been born in 1608, a year before the alleged planting of the mulberry, the playwright would certainly have had the proper motivation to ensure the well-being of his posterity. If this intergenerational potential is indeed what Shakespeare had in mind for the mulberry sapling, it is a small tragedy that the tree—even with its own life cut abruptly short in 1756—outlived Shakespeare's entire family.
[2.2] Using the mulberry as a representation of intergenerational subjectivity would be quite conventional in early modern culture, in which trees were regarded as "tangible, often deeply emotive evidence of the past in the landscape" (Whyte 2013, 499). Early modern arboreal motifs are rooted in the ancient and prolific symbol of the Tree of Life, which primarily conveys themes of immortality and cyclicality (Bladen 2022). When Christianity subsumed the traditional pagan symbol, the Tree of Life became entangled with descriptions and depictions of Christian Paradise and the Garden of Eden, retaining its emblematic expression of everlasting life but removed from its pagan associations. During the early modern period, this arboreal promise of eternity took on a life of its own beyond the biblical to "express political, social and familial relationships and to craft personal and public identities" (Bladen 2022, 2). The stability of particularly old trees, for example, lends landscapes permanent natural landmarks, making them useful in marking boundaries or designating special places. As such, trees in the early modern period often became integrated into particular social identities, as communities created meaning through their individual and shared bodily experiences and observations of these "material markers" (Whyte 2013, 510–11). In his ecocritical reading of Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion, Borlik suggests that if a landscape remains unchanged over centuries, outlasting human individuals and entire families, then trees can sustain or jeopardize national identities. This certainly would have been at the forefront of English minds during the early modern period as England began massive deforestation projects, felling "organic monuments" and threatening the nation's connection to the past and stability of its future (2015, 124).
[2.3] It is their tangibility that makes trees such curious repositories of communal identity and cultural memory, particularly in the context of Shakespeare's developing fandom in the eighteenth century. Borlik recognizes the important metaphorical dyad of a tree as "both a material embodiment of an intergenerational bond and a figurative emblem of that bond" (2015, 126), and it is this duality that intensifies the mulberry's power as a fan relic. As material evidence of Shakespeare's presence and influence, it is not surprising that fans latch onto the mulberry as a receptacle of Shakespeare's spirit or genius, as they look for ways to be touched by the intergenerational bond that was not necessarily meant for them but that they feel drawn to through the mulberry anyway. Perhaps fans even feel entitled to the idle emblem of Shakespeare's intergenerational subjectivity given the death of the playwright's familial line, leaving no descendants to claim ownership of (or benefit from) the arboreal bond. Thus, instead of preserving intergenerational posterity as intended by Shakespeare, his mulberry instead became an organic literary monument (Borlik 2015). While Shakespeare may have planted his mulberry as a means of projecting himself into his family's future, fans of the Bard would later come to use that same tree as a "portal into [Shakespeare's] past" (Borlik 2015, 134), hoping to be met with any remaining vestiges of their fan object that reached into the future through the mulberry.
3. Understanding the mulberry in Shakespeare's fandom
[3.1] Shakespeare's mulberry became a "thick and intervolving landmark" during the century and a half it stood in Stratford-upon-Avon (Stott 2019, 32), serving as a beacon for tourists visiting the town to commune with Shakespeare's legacy. Fans like Garrick often traveled to Stratford-upon-Avon to simply stand in the shade of the tree at New Place, while others would eat its fruit or take clippings and branches to preserve or plant in their own gardens (Stott 2019; Pope 2020). As an important natural feature in the Shakespearean tourism imaginary, the mulberry came to have an incredible influence on the identities of Shakespeare's fans in the eighteenth century (note 3). In their discussion of the production of tourist spaces, Bærenholdt and colleagues argue that "the human body engages with the natural world and hence produces spaces and places, rather than simply being located within them, or having them inscribed on its surface" (2004, 2, emphasis in original). Bodily engagement with the environment—and the production of a communal or social narrative through that engagement—is vital to our understanding of how the mulberry became a complex site through which Shakespeare's fans felt connected to his legacy in an incredibly tangible way. Since one's identity as a fan is both actively and communally shaped (Pope 2020), the act of experiencing a place that is so intricately tied to a fan object is at once influencing the identity of fan and place.
[3.2] When Shakespeare's fans visit Stratford-upon-Avon to commune with Shakespeare through his mulberry, they are intentionally weaving the landscape into the production of the Shakespearean fandom. This phenomenon was particularly evident during Garrick's Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769, during which people traveled to Stratford-upon-Avon to partake in "good eating and drinking to the memory of Shakespeare" (Gentleman 1769, 3). Many writers employed their pens in celebrating and critiquing the Jubilee, some composing poems and plays set during the event and others publishing anonymous reviews in periodicals (note 4). Despite having been felled over a decade prior to the event, the mulberry was a recurring focal point for those writing about and attending the Jubilee. In George Coleman's Man and Wife; or the Shakespeare Jubilee, for example, a character laments that he has "heard nothing but jubilees, and Shakespeares, and mulberry trees, for these three months" (1770, 6). Moreover, Mr. Weston in Francis Gentleman's The Stratford Jubilee describes how he "drank too—and now I a poet may be— / From a charming fine cup of the mulberry tree" (1769, ii). The omnipresent mulberry in Jubilee-centric literature and the transformation of Mr. Weston (whether genuine or tongue in cheek) is indicative of the body/place—or in this case fan/place—relationship that scholars speak to in their discussions of tourist landscapes. In Shakespeare's fandom, the landscape is produced through an engagement (or bridging) between human and nonhuman bodies (Chronis 2012; Bærenholdt et al. 2004). This engagement is often both physical and metaphorical, as in the case of Mr. Weston's poetic inspiration brought on by his sensory encounter with a mulberry relic.
[3.3] Shakespeare's fans are of course physically changing the landscape as they engage with the mulberry tree, whether that is in the form of taking its sprigs and thus geographically extending its arboreal reach or using the tree's timber to make drinking vessels and other relics. But because the tree had been transformed into a "metonymy for Shakespeare himself" by Garrick and the rest of the Shakespeare fandom, essentially imbuing the spirit of the Bard into the wood, the mulberry also shapes the identity of the fans who encounter it (Borlik 2015, 133). The effect of the mulberry on the fandom even carried overtones of religious zeal, as noted by Andrew McConnell Stott: "no one present at the Rotunda [during the Jubilee] as Lord Grosvenor reverentially raised a mulberry cup, treating the 'blest relic' as if it were a chalice filled with communion wine, would have failed to appreciate the parallel between this and Catholic rituals, especially Mass. It was also well-known that Eva Garrick was a practicing Catholic who attended Mass her entire life, and for those who sought to ridicule her 'mitred' husband as 'Saint Mulberry's Priest,' serious questions remained" (Stott 2019, 134). Garrick himself seems to lean into this sacrilegious sacralization of the mulberry as he urges Shakespeare's fans to join him in "yield[ing] to the mulberry tree," to "bend" or kneel in front of the tree that, to Garrick, is imbued with the Bard's spirit in an imitation of the way bread and wine during a Catholic communion become imbued with the body and blood of Christ (1769, 5–7). Garrick's veneration of Shakespeare through the mulberry overtly mimics prayer in such a way that garnered accusations of idolatry quite ubiquitously in critiques of Garrick and his Jubilee (Stott 2019; Pope 2020). This religious concern over misguided zealotry works to show just how thoroughly Shakespeare became grafted to the mulberry.
[3.4] Given that both religious and secular engagements with the mulberry are understood to have some transformative power over fans and their identities, it is useful to understand the tree both pre- and post-felling as a unique kind of souvenir. Beverly Gordon states that a souvenir's physicality "concretizes or makes tangible what was otherwise only an intangible state" (1986, 135). In this sense, Shakespeare's mulberry is a particularly powerful souvenir because of the symbolic strength of trees as repositories of intergenerational memory and subjectivity; however, the mulberry is also exceptional because it is a facet of a landscape that, as discussed previously, also relies on an engagement between humans and nonhumans for meaning production—particularly so in the case of Shakespeare's fandom marking New Place as an important site that embodies a communal fan identity. Souvenirs function only through "the exchange of experience and information and emotional response" (Hume 2013, 4); that is, both the fan and the souvenir are inscribing and being inscribed with memories of a particular place. As such, the coproduction of meaning through collective experience works the same for souvenirs and landscapes. If Shakespeare's mulberry is, as Borlik understands, an interspecies splicing of playwright and tree (2015), how does this grafting of person to plant impact the way Shakespeare's fans engage with the tree as a souvenir, already encoded with its own cultural, political, and symbolic particularities as part of a landscape that has undergone meaning production through decades (and now centuries) of fan engagement?
[3.5] The answer lies in the combined power and ability of the body, landscape, and souvenir to create and embody memory. Maggie L. Popkin argues that "it is people's sensory interactions with the physical object that makes souvenirs such powerful generators of memory" (2017, 46). Popkin's emphasis on the importance of sensory interactions between body and souvenir to generate meaning and memory is supported by Bærenholdt and colleagues' assertion that the human body is similarly primed for memory generation and embodiment through its obligatory sensory engagement with the world (2004). As argued previously, landscapes are also adept at memory preservation, especially in their ability to dissolve temporal barriers between fans and tourists and the memories embodied by place (note 5). In his research on the tourist landscape at Gettysburg, Chronis notes that the "experience of being-there seems to partially dissolve the dimension of time and to accord place with the power to bring forth a powerful emotionality" (2012, 1806, emphasis in original). The "being-there"—or the sensory engagement—that is so crucial to experiencing the narrative of a particular landscape points to the inherent relationship between body and place that is also afforded power in the cultural studies of Borlik, Popkin, Hume, Gordon, and Bærenholdt and colleagues. Representing the "productive relationship between body, space, and narrative" (Chronis 2012, 1808), the mulberry tree is able to embody and conjure Shakespeare so effectively because the engagement of body, land, and souvenir intricately sediments multiple layers of meaning and memory making.
[3.6] It is not surprising that, as a complexly important emblem of Shakespeare's legacy and fandom, the mulberry tree also became a target for the frustration and anger of an already developing antifandom in the eighteenth century. As Shakespeare's family line died out, New Place changed hands a few times before falling into the ownership of Reverend Francis Gastrell in the 1750s, who became so embittered by swarms of Shakespeare's fans intruding on his property to see the famous mulberry that the Reverend had it chopped down and the timber sold to various buyers in 1756. The iconoclasm so angered Shakespeare's fans and Stratford-upon-Avon residents that they effectively stormed the grounds of New Place, vandalizing Gastrell's home and eventually running him out of town altogether (Stott 2019). The kind of antifandom expressed by Gastrell can perhaps best be categorized as "anti fans" antifandom, described by Jonathan Gray as an antifandom "that is directed towards fans of the nominal anti-fan object, rather than to the object" (2019, 32, emphasis in original). Though Gray's analysis of antifans antifandom speaks to a text's perceived lack of importance by the antifandom, the antifandom targeting Shakespeare's fans seems instead to suggest that an over-the-top idolization of the Bard prevents fans from properly appreciating Shakespeare's works in the objective and scholarly way they are ostensibly meant to be approached. Despite this key difference, the purpose of this form of antifandom seems to be the same: the antifan antifandom works to distinguish themselves from those they believe are the wrong kind of fans. Indeed, Garrick himself was criticized for his "uncritical" Shakespeare obsession, his zealotry characterized as "immature [and] feminine"—language that is still employed in our contemporary encounters with antifan sentiments (Pope 2020, 56).
[3.7] The (perhaps violent) removal of Shakespeare's mulberry from New Place's garden and the exploitation of its timber by Shakespeare's fans' antifandom is a clear-cut example of how the environment can become implicated in expressions of antifandom. While the most vocal antifans during Garrick's Jubilee seemed to focus on the irrational zeal of Shakespeare's fans, the mulberry still became an avenue through which antifans aired their grievances (note 6). Stott notes that "for the Jubilee's detractors, the mulberry offered a perfect metaphor for the overheated absurdity of Shakespeare mania" (2019, 131). Pieces of the mulberry were made into various souvenirs primarily by Thomas Sharpe, who bought a section of timber after it was felled; however, it soon became glaringly obvious that the number of relics purported to be made from the mulberry's timber far exceeded what could actually be produced from the limited supply of wood (Pope 2020). The exploitability of fans buying fake relics became a favored talking point for people who looked down on those buying into the fanaticism that surrounded Garrick's Jubilee. What's more, several works criticizing the Jubilee personified the mulberry itself to condemn the perceived fanaticism of those attending. In these anthropomorphic denunciations of Shakespeare's fans, the mulberry voices its dissatisfaction, anger, and disgust at the humiliation of being wrought into what it thought were useless or even embarrassing knickknacks and tools. In one such publication thought to be written by George Steevens, the mulberry laments being "prostituted," "ravaged," and "hollowed" (Stott 2019, 132) for simple keepsakes. Here, the spirit of the tree takes precedence over the spirit of Shakespeare that, in the eyes of the antifandom, has been merely projected onto the mulberry rather than imbued within it.
4. Conclusion
[4.1] In the context of Shakespeare's fans (and antifans) and their fixation on the mulberry, preserving the embodied memories of Shakespeare's legacy and the narrative of his fandom at New Place is arboreally encoded in the landscape. Embodied by this single tree in Stratford-upon-Avon is the emblematic tradition of trees in English cultural history, the political and environmental record of mulberries in the early seventeenth century, as well as Shakespeare's fame, legacy, and his fandom in the past, present, and future. The mulberry is encoded not only with Shakespeare's unknown reasons for planting and raising the tree (and our educated guesses) and, by extension, the projection of himself and his family into the future, but it is also later encoded with fan perceptions of Shakespeare, their stories about him, his work, and his legacy. The mulberry also becomes implicated in the ire of the antifandom that developed in the mid-eighteenth century, as it is felled in direct response to Gastrell's frustration with Shakespeare's fans and is later posthumously used to criticize fans of the Bard who were viewed to be so desperate to obtain a piece of his legacy that they allowed themselves to exploit the dead wood and be exploited by fake relics. This sedimentation of meaning in Stratford-upon-Avon is as tangible and inseparable from the mulberry as the inner rings that document its growth and experiences. The sedimented meaning encoded through the process of the fandom's embodiment of the mulberry effectively grafts Shakespeare (the person and the legacy) onto the landscape in such a way that the land becomes inherently implicated by both fandom and antifandom.