This paper applies the concept of sustainability to humanities research and assessment, extending Donald Stokes’s model of “Pasteur’s Quadrant” to suggest a place for humanities- and arts-based scholarship and to identify humanistic practices and methods through which we might “assess” them. It concludes with a reading that deploys the scholarly method I outline to uncover a new interpretation of the disposition and purpose of the flowers distributed by Shakespeare’s heroine Ophelia in _Hamlet_.