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Description
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
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
Product details
| Published | 13 Nov 2025 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 256 |
| ISBN | 9781350559073 |
| Imprint | The Arden Shakespeare |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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