Hedge your bets ... a scene from Much Ado About Nothing at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
"There is a man haunts the forest," says Rosalind in As You Like It. Lately that man has been me. Without quite meaning to, I've wandered into Shakespeare gardens on opposite ends of America recently. In San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, an orderly arcade of trees leads to a wall lined with bronze plaques, on which are inscribed dozens of botanical quotes from his plays. (Coleridge said watching Edmund Kean act was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning; thanks to dry weather, visiting the Golden Gate Park means reading him between bursts of sprinkler fire.) In New York's Central Park, the Shakespeare garden meanders up a hillside, with quotes mounted on little plaques here and there.
Which prevails? The East Coast gets points for the high quality of the quoted passages, like starting the path with a perfect choice: Juliet's "This bud of love, by summer's ripening breath, / May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet." But the West Coast ties the score through the zeal of its patrons. A bust of Shakespeare stands at the centre of the wall, secured behind twin metal shutters - one of which has been bent down by somebody eager for a glimpse of the Bard. In San Francisco, even the vandals are highbrow.
Walking through these gardens now, you certainly get the intended response: awe of Shakespeare and delight in the floral imagery that he wove into his plays. But they also seem a memorial to an entire era of playwriting, now closed. This is not a complaint that 21st-century writers are hacks compared to the Elizabethans; it's a lament that a broad shift in taste, a compression of style, has led us away from the kinds of plays that yield the kinds of passages that people erect gardens to celebrate.
Look at the foremost living playwrights: Pinter, Mamet, Albee, Churchill, Kushner (to name a few). All write with intelligence and force, and show varying degrees of flair with language. But who among them employs the kind of luxurious metaphor, the rich description, that people will cast on bronze plaques in a 100 years' time - and where would they go?
I could imagine choice lines from Stoppard, maybe, immortalised on a series of placards around some university library, so 22nd-century undergrads could thrill to highlights from Jumpers and Arcadia.
A more viable choice might be the late August Wilson, an unabashed lover of language, who wrote 10 plays about the 20th-century African-American experience, all overwritten beautifully. (Canewell's recipe for greens from Seven Guitars, a marvelous instance of everyday conversation blossoming into something like blank verse, could be up in kitchens now.)
You may have favorites of your own - writers who, in exploiting the language of flowers (or some other corner of our world), end up enriching it. Faint murmurs among some up-and-coming playwrights lately suggests that such language may be inching back into fashion. In the meantime, the realism of modern drama, its emphasis on plain prose, makes the language of the stage seem even drier than California in June.
