Shakespeare’s plays and poems offer us bountiful possibilities for encountering the early modern natural world. Some of these possibilities are literary, such as the Ovidian and Virgilian images of people turning into trees, plants, and animals. Some are religious and scriptural: the garden as the lover’s body or the location of the Fall. Some were traditional or ‘folk’: fairies, magical plants, woodland hideaways. The medical use of plants was also clearly of interest to Shakespeare, from the diabolical flower-potions of Cymbeline’s evil Queen to the Nurse’s weaning of baby Juliet with wormwood and Falstaff’s belief in the aphrodisiacal power of potatoes. But scholars are also showing how we can encounter Shakespeare’s views on the natural world through ecological issues more familiar to us today: deforestation, endangered species, and climate change were also early modern concerns.
While offering an overview of the key ecological issues in Shakespeare’s England, this course will focus in particular on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Merry Wives of Windsor, Romeo and Juliet, and Cymbeline. We will explore the pleasures and dangers of green spaces, ‘kitchen physic’, fairy worlds, and horticultural skills such as transplantation. Some key questions we will raise are: How did Shakespeare’s England imagine the role human beings played in nature? How did the turbulence of nature influence Shakespeare’s thinking about the various generic patterns of drama: tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy? How did early moderns distinguish the difference between ‘folk’ methods for encountering nature and more sophisticated or learned methods?
