Shakespeare’s Ecology of Natural Resources: Transitions and Transformations

Sophie Chiari analyses how Shakespeare’s plays and poems present the transformation of the early modern natural world through environmental shifts and ecological transformation. Using a range of examples from the Sonnets, Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Tempest, Hamlet and Henry V, Chiari's ecopoetic study of dramatic language explores Shakespeare’s response to the rise of extractive exploitation in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Chiari expands 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. Using examples of water systems, sandscapes, soil and frost alongside the production of glass and salt in Shakespeare, these materials which are currently underrepresented in Shakespearean ecocriticism signal a commitment to expanding the ‘material turn’ in Shakespeare studies. Far from being limited to the present era, this book argues that cultural hegemony and the exploitation of soil, water and ice were increasingly linked in the early modern era, an age of conquest and massive human depredation. By interweaving ecohistoricism, ecopoetics and material studies Shakespeare’s Ecology of Natural Resources shows how an eco-minded approach, focused on the interweaving of trade, territory and extractivism reveals new layers of meaning in Shakespearean poetics and drama.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Introduction: Shakespearean Spaces of Production in the Anthropocene Chapter 1: The Fabric of Life in the Sonnets Good husbandry Black pastoralism Nature’s agency Overgreening the Sonnets Chapter 2: Crossing the Nature/Culture Divide in Love’s Labour’s Lost A locus of empowerment The commodification of Navarre’s green world Imperialism in the King’s estate A cultural nature Chapter 3: Water Industry and Riverine Collapse An instrumentalist approach to rivers Fresh water control and diversion Ditches and drainage issues Fluid dynamics in Shakespeare Chapter 4: From Early Modern Sandscapes to the Making of Glass Early modern sandscapes Transience and mutability The materiality of sand From materiality to ‘bare life’ Chapter 5: Under-ground Shakespeare: Transgressing the Limits and Foraging the Earth The figure of the collier Coal dependency: after wood, mineral fuel Extraction economy: wresting resources from nature Conflict landscapes: a wounded earth At the heart of darkness Chapter 6: Plotting, Digging, Burying, or Soil Issues in Hamlet Land possession Decay and degeneration Subterranean passages Searching for inwardness Chapter 7: Business in the Frost in The Tempest The island’s double climate Land use Imperialism and extraction Extracting… and burying Chapter 8: White Ecology: The Salt of Early Modern Life Salt-making Seasoning and preserving An imperial commodity Preservation and destruction: from natural to commodified white gold Conclusion: Transforming Nature: Life in a Crisis Mode Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Sophie Chiari is Professor of Early Modern English Literature at Université Clermont Auvergne, France, where she is also the Director of the research unit ‘Maison des Sciences de l’Homme’.