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.

Bibliography

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Boehrer, Bruce. Animal Characters: Nonhuman Beings in Early Modern Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.

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Borlik, Todd. Ecocriticism and Early Modern English Literature: Green Pastures. New York: Routledge, 2011.

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).