Ep 165: The Broom Besom with Wendy Wall

That Shakespeare Life

It seems even William Shakespeare had household floors to keep clean. While it likely wouldn’t have been the actual William doing the majority of the sweeping in his household, one item the bard seems to have been familiar with through his nineteen uses of the word “sweep” and one use of the word “besom” across his works is the household broom used for sweeping floors. The bard uses “broom” at least 3 times in his plays, mentioning once a broom-staff, and in The Tempest, Shakespeare calls attention to a “broom-grove” suggesting there was a particular plant or tree used for growing the material to make brooms in the 16th century. Here today to help us explore the people who made brooms, exactly who was doing the sweeping in Shakespeare’s lifetime, as well as the folklore surrounding the broom also called broom-besom, is our guest and author of “Why does Puck Sweep?” the article examining the household cleaning scene of one of Shakespeare’s most famous characters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Please welcome our guest, Wendy Wall.

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