Most mornings one of my early activities is to read the newspaper. I’m an old-fashioned guy and I like the paper in my hands, not online and definitely reported and edited by a reliable source. I’m well aware that Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and Truth Social are not credible purveyors of facts.
This particular morning the article I was reading mentioned someone going down a “Primrose Path.” That’s not a term we read or hear much anymore as metaphors drift in and out of our slanguage.
It piqued (and peaked) my curiosity so the Graduate Intern and I decided to chase it — as she spooks rabbits in The Village — to its origin.
I would not have guessed but probably shouldn’t have been surprised to discover its first mention was in “Hamlet.”
Yes, Will wrote it in 1601 or 1602; he couldn’t remember exactly. When you write that many plays and sonnets they blur in memory.
Britons around that time would have been familiar with the idea that if you want to go to Heaven the path is steep and narrow with a thorny uphill climb but the road to Hell is pleasant, easy, wide and downhill all the way. Those sermons came from the Gospel of Matthew 7:13: “Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat.”
The foliage around Stratford on Avon at that time probably yielded flowers such as primroses so on the surface it’s a flowery road. In his plays it’s a metaphor with reference to the Road to Hell.
In “Hamlet,” Ophelia is lectured by her brother, Laertes, as to how she should behave while he is away at university in Paris, She takes no guff from him and states: “I shall the effect of this good lesson keep, As watchman to my heart. But, good my brother, Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, Show me the steep and thorny way to Heaven; Whiles, like a puff’d and reckless libertine, Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads, And recks not his own rede.”
Even in those times college kids had a reputation and this was before keggers and panty raids.
Shakespeare liked that whole “road to Hell” thing because he used it again in “Macbeth” where the Porter says: “I had thought to have let in some of all professions that go the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire.” He is not talking about making S’Mores here.
When Will writes, people read. Thus his “Primrose Path” became the title of novels by: Bram Stoker, Joyce Thies and Carol Matas. And filmmakers took note with four American movies: “The Primrose Path” starring Clara Bow (The “It Girl”), a silent film in 1925 — I’m guessing audio wasn’t needed to get the point across; “Primrose Path” (1931); “Primrose Path” (1940) starring Joel McCrea and Ginger Rogers, a rather dark depiction in which Ginger Rogers doesn’t dance and takes up a different profession if you know what I mean.
Then it became album titles for several groups including Dream State. I heard “Primrose Lane” — just off the path — by Jerry Wallace on juke boxes in 1959 in our college cafeteria. The lyrics don’t suggest the end predicted by Matthew or Shakespeare:
“Primrose Lane, life’s a holiday on Primrose Lane/ Just a holiday on Primrose Lane with you/ Can’t explain when we’re walkin’ down Primrose Lane/ Even roses bloomin’ in the rain with you.”
Either the songwriters never read Matthew or Shakespeare or they decided a lane was not exactly a path.
The song hit the charts for Jerry; most people would prefer a pleasant road to Hell than a tough thorny route to Heaven.
A botanical curiosity — not covered in my 12 boring hours of botany in college — is that the little green thing is not a rose nor is it one of the first flowers of spring. It got its name due to a “popular blunder.”
There is a restaurant in Steamboat Springs named The Primrose Path. It’s probably easy to find. I don’t know about the prices.
