Environmental Crisis on the Shakespearean Stage

Catalog description

Environmental crisis might seem like a distinctly contemporary phenomenon associated primarily with global warming and biodiversity loss, nuclear meltdowns and oil spills. But unprecedented environmental change also shaped the lives of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. From 1300-1850, England experienced a period of intense cooling known as the Little Ice Age that prompted crop failures, inexplicable flooding, and erratic weather patterns. Anxieties about these environmental problems hastened other socioecological changes, such as the enclosure movement, London’s explosive population growth, and the arrival of Europeans in the Americas. In this seminar, we will explore how and why these environmental problems might have mattered for early modern English playwrights, including William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, John Lyly, and others. To deepen our conversations, we will engage with current scholarship in early modern ecocriticism, a growing critical field that wrestles with the representational problems posed by environmental crisis, the materiality of the "natural" world, and the relationship between premodern literature and twenty first-century conversations about place and planet. As we toggle between the past and the present, we will interrogate Shakespeare's outsized role in calculating what counts as an "environmental crisis," while also considering how the theater, due to its generic variety, its embodied form, and its material dependencies, might be uniquely positioned to model living within and responding to environmental change.