Renaissance Ecopolitics From Shakespeare To Bacon

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Rethinking Cosmopolis -- 1 Richard III as Nature's "Black Intelligencer"--2 The Gravid Earth: Exploring the Ecological Imaginary in The Spanish Tragedy and Titus Andronicus -- 3 The Problem of Indistinction in Measure for Measure and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore -- 4 Vanitas and the Ecopolitics of Despair in Macbeth -- 5 "Desolate Strangers": An Ecocritique of Vulnerability in The New Atlantis -- Bibliography -- Index

The work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries has often been the testing-ground for innovations in literary studies, but this has not been true of ecocriticism. This is partly because, until recently, most ecologically minded writers have located the origins of ecological crisis in the Enlightenment, with the legacies of the Cartesian cogito singled out as a particular cause of our current woes. Traditionally, Renaissance writers were tacitly (or, occasionally, overtly) presumed to be oblivious of environmental degradation and unaware that the episteme—the conceptual edifice of their historical moment—was beginning to crack. This perception is beginning to change, and Dr. Guber's work is poised to illuminate the burgeoning number of ecocritical studies devoted to this period, in particular, by showing how the classical concept of the cosmopolis, which posited the harmonious integration of the Order of Nature (cosmos) with the Order of Society (polis), was at once revived and also systematically dismantled in the Renaissance. Renaissance Ecopolitics from Shakespeare to Bacon: Rethinking Cosmopolis demonstrates that the Renaissance is the hinge, the crucial turning point in the human-nature relationship and examines the persisting ecological consequences of the nature-state’s demise.

Featuring over two hundred nature-themed texts spanning the disciplines of literature, science and history, this sourcebook offers an accessible field guide to the environment of Renaissance England, revealing a nation at a crossroads between its pastoral heritage and industrialized future. Carefully selected primary sources, each modernized and prefaced with an introduction, survey an encyclopaedic array of topographies, species, and topics: from astrology to zoology, bear-baiting to bee-keeping, coal-mining to tree-planting, fen-draining to sheep-whispering. The familiar voices of Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Marvell mingle with a diverse chorus of farmers, herbalists, shepherds, hunters, foresters, philosophers, sailors, sky-watchers, and duchesses - as well as ventriloquized beasts, trees, and rivers. Lavishly illustrated, the anthology is supported by a lucid introduction that outlines and intervenes in key debates in Renaissance ecocriticism, a reflective essay on ecocritical editing, a bibliography of further reading, and a timeline of environmental history and legislation drawing on extensive archival research.

While our physical surroundings fashion our identities, we, in turn, fashion the natural elements in which or with which we live. This complex interaction between the human and the non-human already resonated in Shakespeare's plays and poems. As details of the early modern supra- and infra-celestial landscape feature in his works, this dictionary brings to the fore Shakespeare's responsiveness to and acute perception of his 'environment' and it covers the most significant uses of words related to this concept. In doing so, it also examines the epistemological changes that were taking place at the turn of the 17th century in a society which increasingly tried to master nature and its elements. For this reason, the intersections between the natural and the supernatural receive special emphasis. All in all, this dictionary offers a wide variety of resources that takes stock of the 'green criticism' that recently emerged in Shakespeare studies and provides a clear and complete overview of the idea, imagery and language of environment in the canon.

Casual Shakespeare is the first full-length study of the thousands of quotations both in and of Shakespeare's works which represent intertextuality outside of what is conventionally appreciated as literary value. Drawing on the insights gained as a result of a major, ongoing Digital Humanities project, this study posits a historical continuum of casual quotation which informs Shakespeare's own works as well as their afterlives. In this groudbreaking, rigorous analysis, Dr. Regula Trillini offers readers a new approach and understanding of the use and impact quotes like the infamous, 'To be or not to be,' have had througout literary history.

Shakespeare’s Suicides: Dead Bodies That Matter is the first study in Shakespeare criticism to examine the entirety of Shakespeare’s dramatic suicides. It addresses all plays featuring suicides and near-suicides in chronological order from Titus Andronicus to Antony and Cleopatra, thus establishing that suicide becomes increasingly pronounced as a vital means of dramatic characterisation. In particular, the book approaches suicide as a gendered phenomenon. By taking into account parameters such as onstage versus offstage deaths, suicide speeches or the explicit denial of final words, as well as settings and weapons, the study scrutinises the ways in which Shakespeare appropriates the convention of suicide and subverts traditional notions of masculine versus feminine deaths. It shows to what extent a gendered approach towards suicide opens up a more nuanced understanding of the correlation between gender and Shakespeare’s genres and how, eventually, through their dramatisation of suicide the tragedies query normative gender discourse.

Shakespearean Temporalities addresses a critical neglect in Early Modern Performance and Shakespeare Studies, revising widely prevailing and long-standing assumptions about the performance and reception of history on the early modern stage. Demonstrating that theatre, at the turn of the seventeenth century, thrived on an intense fascination with perceived tensions between (medieval) past and (early modern) present, this volume uncovers a dimension of historical drama that has been largely neglected due to a strong focus on nationhood and a predilection for ‘topical’ readings. It moreover reassesses genre conventions by venturing beyond the threshold of the supposed "death of the history play," in 1603. Closely analysing a broad range of Shakespeare’s historical drama, it explores the dramatic techniques that allow the theatre to perform historical distance. An experience of historical contingency through an immersion in a world ontologically related yet temporally removed is thus revealed as a major appeal of historical drama and a striking aspect of Shakespeare’s history plays. With a focus on performance, the experience of playgoers, and the dynamics that resulted from the collective production of dramatic historiography by competing companies, the book offers the first analysis of what can be referred to as Shakespeare’s dramaturgy of historical temporality.

Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference reveals the relationship between racial discrimination and the struggle for upward social mobility in the early modern world. Reading Shakespeare’s plays alongside contemporaneous conduct literature - how-to books on self-improvement - this book demonstrates the ways that the pursuit of personal improvement was accomplished by the simultaneous stigmatization of particular kinds of difference. The widespread belief that one could better, or cultivate, oneself through proper conduct was coupled with an equally widespread belief that certain markers (including but not limited to "blackness"), indicated an inability to conduct oneself properly, laying the foundation for what we now call "racism." A careful reading of Shakespeare’s plays reveals a recurring critique of the conduct system voiced, for example, by malcontents and social climbers like Iago and Caliban, and embodied in the struggles of earnest strivers like Othello, Bottom, Dromio of Ephesus, and Dromio of Syracuse, whose bodies are bruised, pinched, blackened, and otherwise indelibly marked as uncultivatable. By approaching race through the discourse of conduct, this volume not only exposes the epistemic violence toward stigmatized others that lies at the heart of self-cultivation, but also contributes to the broader definition of race that has emerged in recent studies of cross-cultural encounter, colonialism, and the global early modern world.