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Jennifer MunroeUNC Charlotte
Abstract:Driven by some of the same motivations as feminism and race studies, and an offshoot of the environmental (and environmental justice) movement of the 1970s and 1980s, ecocriticism was motivated by some of the same destabilizingimpulses as feminism, gender studies, and race studies, but with an emphasis on the constructedness of human and nonhuman categories alike. In this way, ecocriticism draws on the postmodern interest in interrogating the constructed qualities of the “subject,” but ecocritics extend such construction to consider how the very category of the “human” is itself also a construction, understood in binary relationship to the nonhuman. Early modern ecocriticism, especially in Shakespeare studies, has become a steadily growing field over the past decade. But early modern ecocritics’ focus on the “nonhuman” tends to be more focusedthan that category might suggest, ranging from (nonhuman) animals, to plants, to minerals—challenging the distinction between animate and inanimate as well as asking us to rethink the integrity (let alone the exceptionalism) of the category of the human. This essay reviews the state of the field of Shakespeare and ecocriticism and offers a pathway for its future development, especially to suggest that it retain its political roots and focus on the implications of the material interactions between humans and nonhumans related to gender, race, and class both in early modern England and today.
Shakespeare and Ecocriticism Reconsider ed
Driven by some of the same motivations as feminism and race
studies, and an offshoot of the environmental (and
environmental justice) movement of the 1970s and 1980s,
ecocriticism’s stated modus operandi has often been
articulated as the study of the physical environment in
literature1; ecocriticism was motivated by some of the same
destabilizing impulses as feminism, gender studies, and race
studies, but with an emphasis on the constructedness of
human and nonhuman categories alike. In this way,
ecocriticism draws on the postmodern interest in
interrogating the constructed qualities of the “subject,”
but ecocritics extend such construction to consider how the
very category of the “human” is itself also a construction,
understood in binary relationship to the nonhuman. Hence,
many ecocritics today cite a political dimension to the
field, bringing concerns of the past and present together
and interrogating the relationship between such things as
environmental degradation, misogyny, racism, homophobia, and
speciesism. Therefore, the same impulses that unite
ecocriticism with other fields move ecocritics to question
not just the damaging hierarchical relationships between
humans and other humans, but also those that implicate
humans in general as would-be dominators over other living
things.
Early modern ecocriticism, especially in Shakespeare
studies, has become a steadily growing field over the past
decade. Its success is evidenced in part at least by the
increasing number of panels, seminars, and workshops on the
topic at such high profile conferences as the Shakespeare
Association of America, Modern Language Association, the
World Shakespeare Congress, ASLE, and others; and
publications over the past decade of book chapters, journal
articles, and monographs have continued to multiply. While a
focused search for monographs with “Shakespeare” and “Green”
or “Ecocriticism” or “Nature” in their title will bring a
disappointingly few number of hits (only Egan’s 2006 Green
Shakespeare and Estok’s 2011 Shakespeare and Ecocriticism), that
number is not representative of the work being done in the
field. The total number of scholarly works that demonstrate
a commitment to the aims of ecocriticism and Shakespeare
studies has increased substantially, especially over the
past five years. And at the time of this writing, at least
two more monographs on the topic are under contract.2
Because this essay’s subject is “Shakespeare” and
ecocriticism, though, I must necessarily (though
reluctantly) exclude what is also an excellent and growing
body of work in early modern ecostudies more broadly and
limit my discussion to work that is focused either
exclusively or substantially on Shakespeare; and because the
volume of work on Shakespeare and ecocriticism that has
appeared over the past decade exceeds what I can possibly
detail in the space I have here, I will limit my discussion
to work by scholars who declare themselves ecocritics, that
is more widely regarded as “ecocritical,” and that has
appreciably shaped the ongoing dialogue in the field.
But what differentiates “ecocriticism” from other work
about “nature”? Or what distinguishes scholars who consider
the relationship between humans and other animals, plants,
and objects from ecocritics in the proper sense that I
include here? To ask this question requires us to
interrogate what the difference is between Nature and
“Nature” (in quotes to suggest its use as metaphor) and
evokes an important distinction that many ecocritics make in
their work, as I do here. It is the distinction between
discussion of the physical properties of and material
interactions between humans and nonhumans versus the
representations of them as metaphors. That is, the
difference between considering the import of actual trees in
early modern London and, say, analyzing their application as
metaphors for human industry. Because the fundamental aim of
ecocritics is to decenter the human, and therefore to move
away from imagined versions of the nonhuman world and to
concentrate on its material qualities and relations, I
include in this discussion work that leans more toward the
former than the latter. Of course, it is impossible to
recuperate entirely the thing (human or nonhman) itself and,
especially when talking about human/nonhuman relations in
the past, we necessarily always rely on representations of
it—whether that is in the historical record, literary text,
or other written or visual account—but I narrow the field of
“ecocriticism” to include scholarship that moves self-
consciously toward such recuperation and endeavors to
trouble the notion of human exceptionalism. But early modern
ecocritics’ focus on the “nonhuman” tends to be more focused
than that category might suggest, ranging from (nonhuman)
animals, to plants, to minerals—challenging the distinction
between animate and inanimate as well as asking us to
rethink the integrity (let alone the exceptionalism) of the
category of the human. Early modern ecocriticism has leaned
toward a more topical organization, with particular traction
in such areas as animal studies, plant studies, blue studies
(that is, ocean ecosystems), and “thing” studies (stemming
from Posthumanism), as they inform our understanding of the
early modern period in general and Shakespearean texts in
particular.
One of the prevailing theoretical debates within early
modern ecocriticism has been between “presentism” and
“historicism,” although scholars do not necessarily declare
themselves firmly (or solely) in one camp or the other.
Sharon O’Dair has been one of the most vocal scholars
immersed in this debate, and her “Is It Ecocriticism If It
Is Not Presentist?” approaches the question head on. So too
does the forthcoming essay collection, Ecological Approaches to
Early Modern Texts (Munroe, Geisweidt, and Bruckner, ed.), which
dedicates an entire section to it. Many have commented on
the way that ecocritical studies—much like feminist, race,
postcolonial, and others—stems at least in part from
activist impulses. The presentist/historicist debate within
ecocriticism engages these impulses and might generally be
characterized as follows: the presentist would emphasize how
asking such questions about texts from the past must inform
our response to environmental concerns now; and historicists
would argue that simply applying contemporary concerns to
texts of the past is anachronistic, that we must instead
examine the specifics of historical moments in their own
right, insisting on close reading of texts and the cultural
and material moment in which they exist. This debate is, not
surprisingly, lively and as yet unresolved. But scholarship
in the field illustrates that these categories
(presentism/historicism) are not mutually exclusive. In
fact, most scholars of Shakespeare and ecocriticism fall
somewhere in the middle, neither entirely presentist nor
historicist and committed to textual and historical readings
with varying degrees of activist agendas.
Some of the most recent monographs in early modern
ecocriticism also illustrate this debate. Gabriel Egan’s
Green Shakespeare (2006) retains a firm focus on what we would
call a “presentist” agenda, insisting that the “ecopolitics”
of Shakespeare’s day should necessarily inform our
approaches to twenty-first century environmental crises.
Todd Borlik more recently issues a call to activist arms in
his Ecocriticism and Early Modern English Literature: Green Pastures (2011),
in which he compellingly argues that writers of that period,
including Shakespeare, had a profound and ongoing concern
with the sort of environmental ethics that underlie our own
today. And in Ecocriticism and Shakespeare (2011), Simon Estok
employs his familiar term “ecophobia” to insist that humans
have now and have long had (dating, as he writes, to the
early modern period) a fear of the environment that we must
redress if we are to solve our current environmental crises.
While Robert Watson is invested in addressing such current
topics as climate change, his commitment to historicizing
Shakespeare’s plays is unmistakable, as his was the first
book that integrated extensive close readings of texts
(Shakespearean and other) and offered a sustained argument
about how early modern (in this case, male) writers
concerned themselves with what it meant to live with/in the
nonhuman world.
Three important essay collections published over the
last decade, all since 2008, have shaped the field
immeasurably and in broad ways both in terms of its theory
and practice.3 These collections take up the
presentist/historicist debate in different ways, but they
also frame another, that which wrestles with the extent to
which we understand the relationship between nature and
culture. Edited by Ivo Kamps, Karen Raber, and Thomas
Hallock, Early Modern Ecostudies: From the Florentine Codex to Shakespeare
offers a comprehensive account of the state of early modern
ecostudies circa 2008. That collection meditates on how
“nature” is a “cultural category” that at once demonstrates
human understanding of that which is not human and that at
the same time “implies a concreteness beyond the reach of
historical or human influence” (1). As the first such
collection of essays by many of the same scholars who appear
frequently over the decade as a whole in the field, it set
the tone and the terms in many ways for the debates that
ecocritics continue to hash out today. Ecocritical Shakespeare
(2011), edited by Lynne Bruckner and Dan Brayton, followed
three years later and is still the only collection devoted
exclusively to the study of Shakespeare’s writings from an
ecocritical perspective and engages with the
historicist/presentist conversation to position both as
equally viable models for study of Shakespeare and
ecocriticism. The recent collection, The Indistinct Human In
Renaissance Literature (2012) articulates another aspect of these
lingering debates, especially as the editors and
contributors interrogate the blurred lines between human and
nonhuman in light of work by Jane Bennett and Bruno Latour,
which looks for the “coextensive nature of human and
nonhuman living things” (The Indistinct Human 5) inherent to the
sort of Posthumanist work that I will discuss more at length
later.
One of the fastest growing areas of ecocriticism within
Shakespeare studies examines just such a “coextensive
nature,” in this case of humans and nonhuman animals. Led by
such high profile scholars as Karen Raber, Laurie Shannon,
Andreas Hoëfele, Erica Fudge, and Bruce Boehrer, this work
incorporates cutting-edge work in the field of animal rights
with readings of Shakespeare. Raber’s Animal Bodies, Renaissance
Culture challenges the notion of human exceptionalism—
especially the binary of reason/body upon which human
exceptionalism depends—by looking at how the inception of
humanism changed the way early moderns understood the
“razor-fine line between sensory knowledge, combined with
experience” and cognition, considered a uniquely human
quality (3) that underpins the equally “razor-thin” line, as
it turns out, between human and animal. While Raber’s book
does not focus exclusively on Shakespeare’s writings, it
does offer readings of some of his texts. And Shannon’s The
Accommodated Animal likewise includes but does not focus
strictly on Shakespeare as it considers how thinking the
animal/human divide is more modern than early modern; as
Shannon writes, “early modern thinkers routinely understood
a condition of membership and mutual participation to hold
across species instead of simply stressing the ‘divide’ our
vocabularies reenact so reflexively” (2).
Looking for the origins of this “divide,” Boehrer’s
work on animals also isolates how the “notion of character
develops in English writing as an early effort to evade this
very philosophical crisis: as a means of manufacturing and
perpetuating the distinction between people and animals”
(Animal Characters, 2010, 5). Hoëfele analyzes “Shakespeare’s
explorations into the nature and workings of humanness as a
psychological, ethical and political category” that reveals
the “human” to be as much a construction as the “animal,”
dependent on confluences of practice and representation
alike (2). And Erica Fudge, whose work tends more broadly
toward early modern literature rather than strictly on
Shakespeare, has been an influential figure in animal
studies and Shakespeare as she questions the
anthropocentrism inherent to such barbaric activities as
bear baiting and such philosophical enterprises as the
assertion of human rationality over “beastly” passions.
While the “beasts” of early modern England have tended to be
of interest to scholars thus far, and we are beginning to
see more work on bees and insects4, there is still much to
be done to rethink the way we understand the relationship
between humans and other animals, including birds.
In the area of plant studies we find monographs by
Jeffrey Theis and Vin Nardizzi, whose work has changed the
way we understand everything from the import of trees to the
playhouse to the relationship between deforestation and
nation building and the development of pastoral literature.
That is, ecocritical work on plants has emphasized the
practical relationship between humans and flora to show how
they are far more integrated than it might at first appear.
Nardizzi’s Wooden O’s (2013) reminds us that Shakespeare’s
theatrical space was teeming with trees, not just the
imagined forest spaces in productions, but the rafters, the
seats, the stage itself were made of wood that came from
England’s forests. As Nardizzi explains, what was imagined
on stage and the actual uses of wood were connected in the
way they materially and culturally “reinforced the
infrastructure of an early modern England whose population
was rapidly increasing and was putting an intense strain on
existing institutions and resources” (7). In Writing the Forest
(2009), Theis insists that trees, for Shakespeare’s
audience, helped realize a vision of human domination in the
context of ship (and nation) building or imagine it in
pastoral literature, but deforestation inevitably
underscored human vulnerability as well. And Amy Tigner’s
Literature and the Renaissance Garden from Elizabeth I to Charles II (2012)
considers the relationship between the garden as conceptual
or ideological to practical—the specific plants it includes
that are used (as ink, for instance) or consumed (as both
food and medicine).
Like Tigner’s monograph, much of the work in plant
studies in recent years has looked at the practical
relationship between humans and plants in a specifically
domestic context, especially the gendered implications of
how the housewife’s role as cook and healer situated her in
a unique position vis-à-vis flora and fauna. Such
ecofeminist work draws on archival research, especially
manuscripts but also printed husbandry manuals, to show how
the human/nonhuman relationship is informed by gender.
Rebecca Laroche’s book chapter on Ophelia’s flowers asks us
to rethink the scene where Ophelia distributes flowers as
evidence not of her madness but of her knowledge about the
curative properties of medicinal plants and herbs expressed
by women in their manuscript receipt books. And my piece on
The Winter’s Tale reorients the art/Nature debate in the play
(and in early modern scholarship) to rethinking the co-
agency of plants and women in the context of housewifery
found in printed manuals. Finally, Hillary Nunn’s work on
greensickness takes visual and literary representations of
women’s reproductive bodies as her topic and considers the
precarious relationship between plant and woman, as the
greensick woman (like the disease that seemingly defined
her) “occupied the vegetable and human realms
simultaneously” (171). All of this and other work like it
has aimed to decenter the human/nonhuman binary by
simultaneously decentering the gendered binary with which it
is so often aligned: human (male)/nonhuman (female).
It is not surprising that similar interests (and some
of the same scholars) emerge in a parallel area related to
early modern/Shakespearean ecocriticism that thinks about
the relationship between humans and nonhuman animals and
plants: food studies. Dedicated entirely to the topic of
food studies, the special forum of Shakespeare Studies (“Diet
and Identity in Shakespeare’s England,” edited by Kimberly
Anne Coles and Gitanjali Shahani), while not “ecocritical”
in the strictest sense that I named earlier, offers a wide
array of essays that meditate on the adage “we are what we
eat” (22). That is, we might understand the human body and
material it consumes as integrated parts of one whole.
First, Hillary Ecklund’s “Revolting Diets” looks at how
“hunger” relates the political interdependence of leader and
populace to the intrinsic dependence on the human body and
food in 2 Henry VI. The essay I co-authored with Rebecca
Laroche in that same issue, “On a Bank of Rue,” reevaluates
the importance of the Queen and the gardener in
Shakespeare’s Richard II by decentering dominant ideas about
husbandry (and dominance over the earth) in the context of
women’s medicinal uses of plants. And by considering both
“food and feeding” and the role of Galenic humoral medicine
(and the “mixing” it emphasized), Joan Fitzpatrick’s Food In
Shakesspeare (2007) has implications for ecocritics’
interests in resisting anthropocentrism and seeing humans
instead as just one of many integral parts of a larger
system. Work on food, like work more broadly on plants,
exposes the porous boundaries of the human body, the limits
of how that body might be understood as “human” in the first
place. It shows the co-agentic qualities of the integration
of human and nonhuman through consumption and biological
(even microbiological) processes that reveal how the
“human,” as Michael Pollan has also argued, is more nonhuman
than we might realize.5
The field of ecocriticism and Shakespeare has recently
(and increasingly) included work that considers the nonhuman
in the context of what Steve Mentz terms “blue ecology” and
beyond, from the oceans to atmospheric conditions to the
oozy sea bottom. It draws attention, one might say, the very
elements themselves, that which we might otherwise think of
as inanimate and so often eludes the seeming dominance of
the human eye. Steve Mentz and Dan Brayton in particular
have shaped the way we think about Shakespeare in the
context of nautical traditions and oceanic exploration in
the period. Covering such plays as King Lear, The Tempest,
Pericles, Othello, and Timon of Athens, Mentz’s numerous articles and
book chapters about the topic as well as his 2009 monograph,
At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean, offer what he calls a “poetic
history of the oceans” that Shakespeare’s work illuminates
(At the Bottom ix). Or, as Mentz argues, “Shakespeare’s plays
write the sea as opaque, inhospitable, and alluring, a
dynamic reservoir of estrangement and enchantment” (ix).
Motivated explicitly by an interest in today’s climate
crises and precarious global oceanic composition, Brayton’s
Shakespeare’s Ocean understands the “maritime dimension of the
early modern imaginary and symbolic relationship to the
biophysical environment” that might “offer a model of
environmental writing and a model for environmental
criticism” that extends beyond Shakespeare and/or early
modern studies to other periods and literatures (3). Robert
Markley’s “Summer’s Lease: Shakespeare in the Little Ice
Age” asks us to think anew about Shakespeare’s work in the
context of climate change—in the early modern period. That
is, Markley shows how the issue of climate change is not
unique to us, even if its particulars (and catalysts) may
be. And Lowell Duckert, whose work ranges from glaciers to
oceans to stones in Shakespeare and early modern literature,
has begun to demonstrate what we might find if we consider
agentic qualities of water and minerals at both the macro-
and micro-levels.
One of the most recent areas of what I include in
Shakespeare and ecocriticism is Posthumanism, whose interest
is “matter,” though certainly not all of its practitioners
would label themselves ecocritics. Often drawing from the
work of Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett, among others,
scholars working in this field aim to decenter the human by
paring down all humans and nonhumans alike into
interconnected and equally co-agentic “things” or “matter.”
The special issue of Shakespeare Studies titled, “Shakespeare
and Ecology,” for instance, evokes such questions as the
editors cite in their Introduction the democratizing
possibilities inherent to seeing “things” and matter in ways
that we might call “agentic.”6
Such work on “matter” represents but one strand of the
persistent debates within ecocriticism that question the
relational qualities of the material and the symbolic,
between practice and metaphor. When we interrogate the
relationship between humans and nonhumans in literature,
that is, we necessarily rely on textual representation—words
that mark human perception and whose meaning is, if we have
learned anything from postmodernism, inherently imperfect
and unstable. We are always speaking for “nature.” If this
is so, then are we not always encumbered by the symbolic
order of language, even when we say that we attempt, as
Posthumanism (and one of its articulations, Object Oriented
Ontology) has done quite self-consciously of late, to
recover the “thingness” of matter itself? Most ecocritics
accept that this is to some extent unavoidable, even if one
of the central tenets of ecocrticism is to decenter the
human (and human voice), whose primary perception is
therefore an inevitable consequence of the attempt to
destabilize it.
And this brings me to avenues of study that I propose
scholars of Shakespeare and ecocriticism continue to grapple
with in coming years. The question of the material versus
symbolic will remain an important one, perhaps the most
important one we will ask as the field develops further.
Rather than eliding or even ignoring it, which might be
tempting, we need to address it directly; to assume that our
speaking for the nonhuman world is without implications and
does not at least to some extent reify the
human-dominant/nonhuman-subordinate binary would be
irresponsible as well as deluded. Likewise, though, to
resign ourselves to the impossibility of recovering with any
purpose examples of that which resides outside of human
culture, “material” in some purest (even if perhaps only
imagined) sense, would be allowing human exceptionalism to
prevail without even a fight. The work of Posthumanism holds
great promise in redressing some of these questions, as its
practitioners rightly remind us that we are all,
fundamentally, “matter,” not just cultural products. That is
a useful premise.
But we cannot deny that we are also products of
culture. And to ignore the material cultural practices that
not only define our “human” experience but that also mediate
any interaction we have with nonhuman things is equally
dangerous. That is, this notion of co-agentic matter may in
theory reorient our attention away from people to things
(and to people as things like any other), but it is
impossible to do so without creating new (human) narratives
about that matter—new stories and representations about
those things, as the things cannot literally narrate for
themselves.7 To study things, matter, even if co-agentic, is
nevertheless to apprehend them by way of human perception,
experience, and practice. As such, the impulse toward
“matter” as a method of decentering the human ironically
brings with it the potential to ignore the very social,
gender, and class inequalities that in part drive
ecocritics’ desire to decenter the human/nonhuman and other
related binaries in the first place. To reduce all things,
human and nonhuman, in other words, to mere (even if
wonderful, co-agentic) “matter” might decenter the human in
a way, but it ultimately also either ignores the import of,
and/or potentially universalizes, experience. To evoke
Latour here, it is useful to remember that “chemical
reactions and political reactions” are, always have been,
and always will be messily entangled (We Have Never Been Modern
1).
As Shakespearean ecocriticism moves forward, it will
behoove us to remember this messiness. Part of doing so will
necessarily require ecocriticism to orient itself
differently to other “eco” fields that are as yet too often
understood merely as subsets (and hierarchical inferiors) of
its eco-whole. These include, but are not limited to,
ecofeminism, queer ecocriticism, and postcolonial
ecocriticism, all of which similarly aim to decenter the
human at the same time interrogate the material practices
that are mired in the political, the intersection of
“culture” and “nature”—or, to use Donna Haraway’s term,
“naturecultures”—if you will. To pen a piece on “Shakespeare
and Ecocriticism Revisited” to some extent reifies the sort
of marginalization that such fields as ecofeminism, queer
ecocriticism, and postcolonial ecocriticism have experienced
in the last decade and arguably before. That is, these
parallel fields are implicitly understood as simply part of
the larger (umbrella) field of ecocriticism, when each also
has its own trajectory, its own history and is a field in
its own right. And this marginalization appears not entirely
accidental. Especially with the move away from material
practice and toward “matter” in the Posthumanist sense, such
fields will continue to be marginalized. To do so, though,
will also mean marginalizing the political dimensions of the
human/nonhuman relationship that are so often aligned with
other binary relationships that play out in everyday life in
unmistakable ways.
Ecocriticism, that is, should remember its political
roots. As Gabriel Egan evokes in his inaugural issue of
Literature Compass and his 2003 assessment of the field as it
was just beginning to come into its own: “The application of
eco-politics in the world of literary criticism” is at the
heart of the very definition of ecocriticism (2). I would
argue that these eco-politics are hardly unique to
ecocriticism, but that to neglect the way that such “eco-
politics” is fundamentally shaped by gender, race, class,
and other factors is to allow that politics to be defined by
dominant, white, and male perspectives. That is,
ecocriticism risks universalizing the “eco” in such a way
that reproduces some of the same dominant/oppressive
structures operating in the human/nonhuman binary that its
practitioners claim they desire to deconstruct.
If we are to take seriously these political roots,
then, we need to value analysis of the relationship between
humans and nonhumans in the context of historical context
and material practice and not just theorized matter. And we
must go beyond simply equating ecopolitics with climate
change, even though that is undeniably a pressing issue we
face. We need to broaden our notion of ecopolitics to
include race, gender, and class. To suggest, for instance,
that women’s relationship with co-agentic nonhuman things in
their domestic work might resonate differently from men’s in
the scientific laboratory is not to evoke an essentialized
connection between women and “nature,” as some have
asserted. Such an argument has encountered an intelligent
and compelling rebuttal, for instance, by Lynne Bruckner in
“N/nature and the Difference ‘She’ Makes.” Bruckner offers
an “ecofeminist reclamation of Nature” that “reclaim[s] and
transform[s] the historical alignment of women and nature”
(17) such that we consider avenues of agency that women
appropriated while operating within arguably essentialized
structures. We would, for instance, also benefit from an
ecocritical reading that considers the implications of the
different relationship Prospero-as-colonizer and Caliban-as-
colonial “Other” have with the island they jointly inhabit
in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which we might well do without
simply reifying romantic notions of native peoples as
inherently closer to the land. In fact, if we fail to
consider these particulars, the way nondominant men and
women interact and are co-agents with the nonhuman animals,
plants, and others with whom they interact becomes
characterizable in only the most general, the most dominant
way yet again. We risk, that is, silencing some of the very
voices we purport to be listening to.
And so, what is on the horizon for Shakespeare and
ecocriticism? The field will need to work out what remains
an at-times uneasy relationship between its fundamental
impulses: the desire to decenter the human and the need to
reconcile that desire with the way that we as humans will
always be the ones to do this decentering. It needs to
remember its political roots, too, which is not to say that
all ecocritical work must prioritize the presentist agendas
I discussed earlier. With the very real threats posed by
human-induced climate change and our continued (and
unfortunate) prioritization of economic over environmental
and social solutions—the renewed commitment to fracking and
the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline, for example, both of
which have quantifiable and devastating implications for the
environment as well as for many disenfranchised people and
nonhumans who will be affected by them—we must, of course,
to be mindful about why we care to ask these questions of
the past in the first place. But to say we ought to remember
ecocriticism’s political roots means also that should be
mindful about the way men and women from a variety of
backgrounds, as well as nonhuman animals, plants, and
things, co-exist in ways that are complicated by the
particulars of material practice as well as are products of
representation. The recent controversial grand jury
decisions and subsequent protests in Ferguson, MO, New York,
and elsewhere highlight how the relationship between humans
and environments is not the same for all humans, even in
ostensibly the same environment. Race (in that case), as
well as gender, class, and other factors influence how, why,
and for what purposes one co-exists in an environment just
as those factors mediate our relationship with the nonhuman
and human things that inhabit them. And so, if we really
want to decenter the human, we should also remember to ask
which humans we mean and how local practices matter too.
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Botelho, Keith. “The Beasts of Belmont and Venice.” Ecological Approaches to Early Modern Texts: A Field Guide to Reading and Teaching. Eds.Jennifer Munroe, Edward J. Geisweidt, and Lynne Bruckner. Forthcoming. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015.
_______. “Thinking With Hives.” Object Oriented Environs. Eds. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Julian Yates. Forthcoming. New York: Punctum Books, 2014.
Brayton, Daniel. Shakespeare’s Ocean: An Ecocritical Exploration. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012.
Bruckner, Lynne. “N/nature and the Difference ‘She’ Makes.” 15-36. In Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity. Ed. Jennifer Munroe and Rebecca Laroche. New York: Palgrave, 2011.
_______ and Dan Brayton, ed. Ecocritical Shakespeare. Burlington:Ashgate, 2011.
Calhoun, Joshua. “Ecosystemic Shakespeare: Vegetable Memorabilia in the Sonnets.” Shakespeare Studies 39 (2011): 64-73.
Coles, Kimberly E. and Gitanjali Shahani, ed. Introduction to Special Forum: “Diet and Identity in Shakespeare’s England.” Shakespeare Studies 42.
Duckert, Lowell. “Exit, Pursued by a Polar Bear (More to Follow).” Upstart: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies.
_______. Glacier” in postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 4(1): 68-79.
Ecklund, Hillary. “Revolting Diets: Jack Cade’s ‘Sallet’ andthe Politics of Hunger in 2 Henry VI.” 52-62. In In Special Forum: “Diet and Identity in Shakespeare’s England.” Shakespeare Studies 42: 51-62.
Egan, Gabriel. Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism. New York: Routledge, 2006.
_______. Shakespeare and Ecocritical Theory. Forthcoming. Arden, 2015.
_______. “Shakespeare and Ecocriticism: The Unexpected Return of the Elizabethan World Picture.” Literature Compass 1 (2003): 1-13.
Estok, Simon. Shakespeare and Ecocriticism: Reading Ecophobia. New York: Palgrave, 2011.
Feerick, Jean E. and Vin Nardizzi, ed. The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature. New York: Palgrave, 2012.
Fitzpatrick, Joan. Food in Shakespeare: Early Modern Dietaries and the Plays. Burlington: Ashgate, 2007.
Fudge, Erica. Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in EarlyModern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006.
_______. Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002.
Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism: The New Critical Idiom. New York: Routledge, 2011.
Geisweidt, Edward J. “‘The Nobleness of Life’: Spontaneous Generation and Excremental Life in Antony and Cleopatra.” 89-104. In Ecocritical Shakespeare. Eds. Lynne Bruckner and Daniel Brayton. Ashgate, 2011.
Glotfelty, Cheryl and Harold Fromm, ed. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996.
Goldstein, David. Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013.
Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. U of Chicago, 2003.
Hiltner, Ken. What Else is Pastoral?: Renaissance Literature and the Environment. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011.
Hoëfele, Andreas. Stage, Stake, and Scaffold: Humans and Animals in Shakespeare’s Theatre. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Laroche, Rebecca. “Ophelia’s Plants and the Death of Violets.” 211-222. In Ecocritical Shakespeare. Ed. Lynne Brucknerand Dan Brayton. Burlington: Ashgate, 2011.
_______ and Jennifer Munroe. “On a Bank of Rue: Or Material Ecofeminist Inquiry and the Garden of Richard II.” In Special Forum: “Diet and Identity in Shakespeare’s England.” Shakespeare Studies 42: 42-50.
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Human. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1993.
_______. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Markley, Robert. “Summer’s Lease: Shakespeare in the Little Ice Age.” 131-42. In Early Modern Ecostudies: From the Florentine Codex to Shakespeare. Ed. Ivo Kamps, Karen Raber, and Thomas Hallock. New York: Palgrave, 2008. Mentz, Steven. At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean. Harrisburg: Continuum, 2009.
_______. “Strange Weather in King Lear.” Shakespeare 6:2 (2010): 139-52.
_______. “Shipwreck and Ecology: Toward a Unifying Theory ofShakespeare and Romance.” International Shakespeare Yearbook 8 (2008) 165-82.
Munroe, Jennifer. “It’s all about the gillyvors: EngenderingArt and Nature in The Winter’s Tale.” 139-54. In Ecocritical Shakespeare. Ed. Lynne Bruckner and Dan Brayton. Burlington: Ashgate, 2011.
_______, Lynne Bruckner, and Edward J. Geisweidt, eds. Ecological Approaches to Early Modern Texts (forthcoming, Ashgate)
_______ and Rebecca Laroche. Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory. Forthcoming. Arden, 2016.
Nardizzi, Vin. Wooden O’s: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013.
Nunn, Hillary M. “On Vegetating Virgins: Greensickness and the Plant Realm in Early Modern Literature.” 159-71. In The Indistinct Human in Early Modern Literature. Ed. Jean Feerick and Vin Nardizzi. New York: Palgrave, 2012.
O’Dair, Sharon. “Is It Shakespearean Ecocriticism if It Isn’t Presentist?” 71-88. In Ecocritical Shakespeare. Ed. Lynne Bruckner and Dan Brayton. Burlington: Ashgate Press, 2011.
_______. “To fright the animals and kill them up.” Shakespeare Studies 39 (2011): 74-83.
Pollan, Michael. “Some of My Best Friends Are Germs.” New York Times Magazine. May 15, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/magazine/say-hello-to-the-100-trillion-bacteria-that-make-up-your-microbiome.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
Raber, Karen. Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.
_______. “Recent Ecocritical Studies of English Renaissance Literature.” English Literary Renaissance 37.1(2007): 151-71.
_______, Ivo Kamps, and Thomas Hallock, ed. Early Modern Ecostudies: From the Florentine Codex to Shakespeare. New York: Palgrave, 2008.
Sebek, Barbara. “’More natural to the nation’: Situating Shakespeare in the ‘Querelle de Canary’.” In Special Forum: “Diet and Identity in Shakespeare’s England.” Shakespeare Studies 42: 106-21.
Shannon, Laurie. The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Sullivan, Garrett and Julian Yates. Introduction to Special Forum: “Shakespeare and Ecology.” Shakespeare Studies 39 (2011).
Theis, Jeffrey. Writing the Forest in Early Modern England: A Sylvan Pastoral Nation. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2010.
Tigner, Amy. Literature and the Renaissance Garden from Elizabeth I to Charles II. Burlington: Ashgate, 2012.
Watson, Robert. Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.
1 See, for instance, Glotfelty and Fromm, ed.; and Garrard.2 See Egan, Shakespeare and Ecocritical Theory and Laroche and Munroe, Shakespeare andEcofeminist Theory, both under contract with Arden to be part of the “Shakespeare and Theory” series. There may well be other monographs too.3 An additional essay collection is forthcoming: Jennifer Munroe, Edward j.Geisweidt, and Lynne Bruckner, ed. Ecological Approaches to Early Modern Texts: A Field Guide For Reading and Teaching (Forthcoming. Ashgate, 2015). This collection intentionally includes a tripartite organization that offers chapters on theory, reading, and pedagogy in one volume.4 See, for example, Botelho.5 See Pollan, where he concludes that we are ultimately only 10% human.6 See Sullivan and Yates, “Introduction,” in which they cite Latour’scall for a “Parliament of Things.”7 See, for instance, Latour, Politics of Nature (35).
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