Shakespeare’s Ecology of Natural Resources

Résumé

Shakespeare’s Ecology of Natural Resources analyses the early modern responses to the rise of extractive exploitation in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. It aims to expand our understanding of the environment in Shakespeare beyond the so-called ’green’ comedies by charting the transition from a pre-capitalist world towards a commodity-based society ruined by the enclosure of the commons. The book discusses a number of plays (from Love’s Labour’s Lost to The Tempest) and poems (mostly the Sonnets), and relies on Shakespearean examples of water systems, sandscapes, and soil impoverishment alongside the production of coal, glass and salt. While they remain underrepresented in Shakespeare scholarship, these materials are here explored in detail. This study thus signals a strong commitment to expanding the ’material turn’ in early modern studies, and shows how England’s cultural hegemony was then correlated to the exploitation of natural resources in an age of conquest and massive human depredation. By interweaving ecohistoricism, ecopoetics and material studies, the book suggests that an eco-minded approach, focused on such strategic issues as trade, territory and extractivism, can still reveal new layers of meaning in Shakespearean poetics and drama.

Table des matières

Introduction. Shakespearean areas of production the Anthropocene

1. The fabric of life in the Sonnets
2. Crossing the nature/culture divide in Love’s Labour’s Lost
3. Water industry and riverine collapse
4. From early modern landscapes to the making of glass
5. Underground Shakespeare : transgressing the limits and foraging the earth
6. Plotting, digging, burying and soil issues in Hamlet
7. Business in the frost in The Tempest
8. White ecology : the salt of early modern life

Conclusion. Transforming nature : life in a crisis mode

Consulter le premier chapitre et l’index de l’ouvrage : https://bloomsburycp3.codemantra.com/viewer/69246bf0713c0900010ef896