Teaching Shakespeare and Ecocriticism
By: Cameron Hunt McNabb and Mia Henrich
In an oft-quoted passage from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titania describes how Athens’ climate has changed: “thorough this distemperature we see / The seasons alter” such that “the mazèd world / By their increase now knows not which is which” (2.1.109–10, 116–7). Of course, through our own distemperature, our seasons alter too, creating a sense of disorientation to and with the environment much like Titania describes.
Our college, like many others, has responded to the climate crisis by devoting attention — formally and informally — to environmental issues. At our institution, students are required to take one explicitly environment-focused class from any discipline, so this past Spring we piloted a “Shakespeare and the Environment” course as a way to explore both Shakespeare’s “mazèd world” and our own.
Here, we reflect on the theoretical implications of and practical approaches to considering Shakespeare and the environment in the classroom. We suggest that as our “seasons alter,” so should our syllabi. In this time of climate crisis, we feel that ecocritical approaches to Shakespeare offer generative and desperately needed avenues of discussion.
Shakespeare and the Environment
A central tenet of ecocriticism is its examination of what Jennifer Munroe calls the “fractured intimacy” between humans and nonhumans. Munroe notes that part of this fracture stems from the false binary it employs, with the field deconstructing terms like “human” and “nonhuman” in much the same ways feminist or critical race critics do. Ecocriticism responds to these constructs by explicitly seeking “to decenter the human,” in contrast to other critical fields’ emphatic and empathetic attention to the human. However, we suggest that ecocriticism’s exposure of these fractures calls us more broadly to the work of mending the pressing environmental and social issues of our time.
It’s important to note that these fractures are not ours alone. As Sophie Chiari and others observe, “the reason why Shakespeare’s contemporaries were so obsessed with the weather was also due to their having to struggle against the adverse weather conditions characterized by what is now referred to as the ‘Little Ice Age.’” The changing seasons that Titania mentions were not limited to the Globe, but were global. In England, this meant harsher winters, shorter summers, stormier skies, and more failed crops. Such climate anxiety led to the period’s reconsiderations about humanity’s relationship to the environment: What does the cold night turn us all into? Are our faults in the stars or in ourselves?
Fractures grow when unattended, so ecocriticism often guides our attention to render obscured things legible, especially in terms of how resources are exploited to undergird human flourishing. Such impulses are within Shakespeare’s plays themselves. In As You Like It, Duke Senior calls the Forest of Arden another Eden, but Jacques instead weeps over the “poor deer” who “[gave] thy sum of more / To that which had too much” (2.1.49, 50–1). Outside the theater, England’s forests had already given their sum, as the nation experienced a significant lumber shortage. This scarcity framed the Globe itself, as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men built their new theater from the recycled timbers of their old theater (as they ferried them across an unusually icy Thames). And the real Forest of Arden, once extending across the midlands, was disappearing to meet Tudor England’s growing lumber needs. For Shakespeare’s audience, the forest could only be seen played out on a wooden stage, with timbered sides, oaken pillars, and a thatch canopy.
England’s deforestation led some to promote using materials found across the Atlantic, most notably in Virginia, as “both a quick fix to the present scarcity and a long-term solution to the resource crisis.” The 1610 pamphlet A Trve Declaration Of The estate of the Colonie in Virginia argues that though “‘excesse of building, haue already turned our greatest woods into pasture and champion, within these few years; neither the scattered Forests of England, nor the diminished Groues of Ireland, will supply the defect of our Nauy,’” but there is hope: “‘in Virginia there is nothing wanting, but onely mens labours, to furnish both Prince, State and merchant, without charge or difficulty.’” Environmental destruction, spurred by capitalism and nationalism, directly fueled colonial exploitation abroad.
Shakespeare explores the intersections of these forces most notably in The Tempest, which not only stages their material conditions but also the cultural constructs around race and Indigeneity that dictate their exploitation. While The Tempest has often been read in colonial terms, Vin Nardizzi reads the play’s obsession with logs and wood specifically as “eco-fantasies of colonial extraction,” with Caliban’s initial rejection — “There’s wood enough within” (1.2.376) — as a site of resistance. By the end of Shakespeare’s career, capitalism and colonialism were circling the globe (in wooden ships, no less).
Those ships may have changed their shape, but they have yet to stop their course. The more recent argument that the Anthropocene began in 1610 places it firmly in the early modern contexts of “widespread colonialism and slavery: it is a story of how people treat the environment and how people treat each other,” contexts that continue to fuel climate change today. But even this definition obscures the very histories it seeks to expose, as Indigenous scholar Zoe Todd notes that the “Anthropocene” is a Eurocentric “‘charismatic mega-category,’ which sweeps many competing narratives under its roof.” But as Todd argues, “[n]ot all humans are equally implicated in the forces that created the disasters driving contemporary human-environmental crises” and “not all humans are equally invited into the conceptual spaces where these disasters are theorized.” Our environmental fractures are inextricable from our socially constructed ones, and thus ecocriticism intersects with other critical modes of engagement as well (including race and ethnicity, Indigeneity, gender, sexuality, and disability).
Ecocriticism also reminds us that our own fractured classrooms are rooted in these environmental and social contexts no less than Shakespeare’s England was. How often do we attend to the conflict minerals that power our laptops, like those exploited from the DRC? Or the paperbacks in our students’ hands, or the fossil fuels that run our projectors, let alone the communities that have been and continue to be exploited for them? How might we attend to these contexts not in addition to those that shaped early modern England but rather as a direct extension of them?
Fractures, though, can also be mended. Munroe observes that most early modern ecocritical examinations toggle between historicist and presentist concerns, with shared attention to both traditional textual readings and contemporary activism. We echo her call that ecocriticism would “do well to remember its political roots,” as our own teaching and learning participate in our “fractured intimacy.” Thus we not only study Shakespeare and the environment but also Shakespeare in the environment. How can we work towards mending through the practical work of our classrooms?
Shakespeare in the Environment
As part of our course, students were asked to come up with ideas for staging an ecocriticism-informed production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and one student, Cooper Hoeksema, had a particularly compelling suggestion. He read Puck’s near-final lines in the epilogue — “Give me your hands” (5.1.454) — as an opportunity to commit to action rather than a bid for applause, a space where audience members could be invited to pledge support, to “give their hands,” to fight the climate crisis. This reading has made us further consider how teachers and students of Shakespeare can give their hands to environmental activism.
As with any list of suggestions, these are not one-size-fits-all. What works for one campus or class or semester will not work for another, and even within a particular classroom, one approach may not work for everyone. We strongly encourage student input on these options because not every option is accessible to everyone, either financially or physically. Also, some of these ideas are scalable, so they could be done for one class period, one week, or all semester.
- Make the classroom a sustainable zone, such as a “vegetarian/vegan” or “plastic-free” or “only used books” zone, where the entire class commits to a sustainable practice just during class time. This might look like students consuming only vegetarian/vegan snacks and (likely) caffeinated beverages during class time and/or not consuming those in or through plastic. Relying on used books or even library books is a great cost-effective way to be sustainable, and given Shakespeare’s popularity, there are abundant options available.
- Switch everyone’s default browsers to ecosia.org and track how many trees are planted over the semester.
- Grow, tend to, and even bring to class a potted herb (or three!), such as the ones Shakespeare mentions (rosemary and thyme are hearty, hard-to-kill options). If time and space allow, there are lots of good resources out there on botanical Shakespeare (including this and this and this) for further research.
- Plant a tree or shrub on campus near the classroom and use the regularly scheduled class time as a reminder to water and tend it (before, after, or during a break if there is one). Tree planting can be cost- and labor-intensive, so investigate options already in place on your campus, such as coordinating with your natural resources department to assure them that, once it is planted, the class will tend to it for a specific length of time.
- Volunteer one class period at your school’s farm or community garden, if there is one. In our own discussion of As You Like It, we paired Lauren Shook’s “‘I earn that I eat’: Hungry Food Workers in As You Like It” with a volunteer day at our campus community farm. The experience was a small step in making food labor and food practices more legible, both in the play and in our own lives.
- Research contemporary issues facing local Indigenous communities — many of which center on sustainable land practices — and partner with an Indigenous organization in whatever ways they request, such as signing petitions, contacting representatives, etc. This attention to the land and its history is a small inclusive step that fosters respect for the environment. Such an activity would work well with The Tempest, which operates under a familiar erasure of land history: the First Folio’s dramatis personae lists the setting as an “uninhabited island” before it goes on to list its inhabitants, including the Indigenous Ariel.
- If the course is taught in the spring, consider a public humanities project or event that marks the near-convergence of Earth Day (April 22) and Shakespeare’s alleged birthday (April 23). Admittedly, awareness and outreach are often low-impact practices, so we suggest pairing them with other, more direct methods of engagement. In our course, students designed an “Earth Day Birthday” display by the seed library in our campus library that provided information on botanical Shakespeare as well as current opportunities on campus and locally to combat the climate crisis.
While we certainly advocate for environmental practices in general, with or without any connection to Shakespeare, we propose that pairing activism intentionally with Shakespearean text(s) can perform a double labor of fostering meaningful pedagogy about Shakespeare and the environment while contributing to climate solutions in our environment. We invite us all to “give our hands” to work towards climate justice, as, in Titania’s words, of “this same progeny of evils . . . We are their parents and original” (2.1.118, 120). It is past time that we, in Puck’s other suggestive phrase, “make amends” (5.1.451).
Additional Resources for Teaching and Learning
- For a conversation on critical Indigenous studies and early modern critical race theory, including a critique of how ecocriticism’s “ways of thinking and talking about our homelands are used to oppress and eliminate Native Peoples’ definitions of and relationships with our places, our lives, and ways,” see “On Critical Indigenous Studies and Early Modern Critical Race Studies: A Tri-Interview.”
- For additional programming on Shakespeare, Indigeneity, colonialism, and race, see ACMRS’ “Shakespeare and Indigeneity” and “The Bard in the Borderlands.”
- For a collection of resources on ecocriticism and early modern studies, including bibliographies, eco-focused performances, and the recorded programming for Globe4Globe conference, see the EarthShakes Alliance.
- For seven site-specific, environmentally-focused productions of Cymbeline, see “Cymbeline in the Anthropocene.”
Cameron Hunt McNabb (she/her) teaches at Eckerd College and her research focuses on premodern drama and disability studies. She is the Editor for the Medieval Disability Sourcebook: Western Europe, from punctum press, and her current book project Dramatic Prosthesis: Disability and Drama is under contract with the University of Michigan.
Mia Henrich (she/her) is a second-year student at Eckerd College, majoring in Marine Science with a focus in Biology, and minoring in Literature and Environmental Studies.
