Study of the sea--both in terms of human interaction with it and its literary representation--has been largely ignored by ecocritics. InShakespeare's Ocean,Dan Brayton foregrounds the maritime ...dimension of a writer whose plays and poems have had an enormous impact on literary notions of nature and, in so doing, plots a new course for ecocritical scholarship.
Shakespeare lived during a time of great expansion of geographical knowledge. The world in which he imagined his plays was newly understood to be a sphere covered with water. In vital readings of works ranging fromThe Comedy of Errorsto the valedictoryThe Tempest,Brayton demonstrates Shakespeare's remarkable conceptual mastery of the early modern maritime world and reveals a powerful benthic imagination at work.
Can reading, writing about, and teaching Shakespeare contribute to the health of the planet? To what degree are Shakespeare's plays anthropocentric or ecocentric? What is the connection between the ...literary and the real when it comes to ecological conduct? This collection, engages with these pressing questions surrounding ecocritical Shakespeare, in order to provide a better understanding of where and how ecocritical readings should be situated. The volume combines multiple critical perspectives, juxtaposing historicism and presentism, as well as considering ecofeminism and pedagogy; and addresses such topics as early modern flora and fauna, and the neglected areas of early modern marine ecology and oceanography. Concluding with an assessment of the challenges-and necessities-of teaching Shakespeare ecocritically, Ecocritical Shakespeare not only broadens the implications of ecocriticism in early modern studies, but represents an important contribution to this growing field.
ENVIRONMENTAL CATASTROPHE HAUNTS THE EARLY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, OUR MENTAL MAPS OF SHRINKING RAINFORESTS MATCHED BY images of melting icecaps and dying polar bear cubs. As the thawing tundra ...releases an amplifying store of methane, the goal of Bill McKibben's
350.org
, to reduce carbon in the earth's atmosphere to 350 parts per million, seems wildly optimistic.
1
So, too, does much of the discourse of sustainability. How can humans depend on the biosphere's capacity to regenerate, having already destroyed entire ecosystems and caused countless extinctions and continuing to do so at an accelerating rate? Isn't it already too late? What tends to get lost in the linked discourses of climate change and sustainability is the rising seawater—salt water, the stuff that covers seventy percent of the planet's surface. If the ocean, as Christopher Connery claims, “has long functioned as Western capitalism's primary myth element” (686), then literary scholarship engaged with the discourse of sustainability should reexamine narratives of oceanic catastrophe.
<!CDATA Study of the sea--both in terms of human interaction with it and its literary representation--has been largely ignored by ecocritics. In Shakespeare’s Ocean, Dan Brayton foregrounds the ...maritime dimension of a writer whose plays and poems have had an enormous impact on literary notions of nature and, in so doing, plots a new course for ecocritical scholarship. Shakespeare lived during a time of great expansion of geographical knowledge. The world in which he imagined his plays was newly understood to be a sphere covered with water. In vital readings of works ranging from The Comedy of Errors to the valedictory The Tempest, Brayton demonstrates Shakespeare’s remarkable conceptual mastery of the early modern maritime world and reveals a powerful benthic imagination at work. >
Shakespeare's vivid evocations of human activity on, in and around the sea are many and memorable. While the sea was without question a source of fascination for Shakespeare throughout his career, ...little has been written on the topic since Alec Falconer's 1964 monograph Shakespeare and the Sea, a neglect that is the more remarkable in light of the preoccupation with contexts that characterises the major schools of early modern scholarship, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. In this article, I argue that Shakespeare found in the sea a boundless source of ideas about epistemology and human existence to which he returned again and again. I offer close readings of scenes from plays ranging from Richard III to The Tempest that demonstrate Shakespeare's remarkable conceptual mastery of the early modern maritime world, and take my cue from Falconer in demonstrating both the accuracy of Shakespeare's nautical vocabulary and the significance of Shakespeare's “benthic imagination”. In doing so, I seek to suggest that recent scholarly interest in the early modern maritime world, and in the literature of the sea in particular, makes the rediscovery of Falconer's work at this time particularly appropriate.
European intellectuals and artists have long employed the metaphor of human life as a sea voyage. Embarkation, passage, and shipwreck have long been popular topoi for the vicissitudes of human ...existence. In the sixteenth century the classical metaphor “the ship of state” gained new currency as the fates of European nation-states turned increasingly on sea power. Five hundred years later the metaphor remains alive. In the second half of the twentieth century the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg argued, perhaps hyperbolically, that “humans live their lives and build their institutions on dry land. Nevertheless, they seek to grasp the movement of
Prospero’s Maps Dan Brayton
Shakespeare's Ocean,
04/2012
Book Chapter
In his articulation of human life as a condition deeply but obscurely connected to the marine environment Shakespeare seems to delight in reminding us of the blue-green immensity of the globe and the ...near impossibility of fathoming its fluid vastness.¹ Are we truly at home on this blue globe? Do we even know what the nature ofherereally is? The very concept of place, rooted in culture, agriculture, the hearth, and the social order, belongs to the land. For centuries the vast watery plain that began at the edge of the shore could only be conceived as a space
Backs to the Sea? Dan Brayton
Shakespeare's Ocean,
04/2012
Book Chapter
These are the best and the worst of times for ecocritics, propelled as we are by a growing sense of professional legitimacy in the face of a looming sense of environmental catastrophe. New signs of ...ecological overload, collapse, and the wrong kinds of regime shifts appear almost daily to remind us that the Earth’s biosphere is in crisis and that this crisis is the result of human activity. The oil that was hemorrhaging into the Gulf of Mexico as I completed the manuscript of this book wreaked, in a matter of months, irreparable harm to the once-rich marine ecosystems of
Introduction Dan Brayton
Shakespeare's Ocean,
04/2012
Book Chapter
This book explores the historical, textual, and material relationship between William Shakespeare and the global ocean. In yoking the name of a poet widely considered the paragon of literary ...achievement to a phrase employed by marine scientists to describe the vast body of salt water covering our planet, I wish to foreground the maritime dimension of the early modern imaginary and symbolic relationship to the biophysical environment. The phrase “global ocean” (or “world ocean’’) is standard in the marine sciences (oceanography, marine ecology, marine biology), signifying the interconnected biotic and physical properties of the great body of salt water that
Tidal Bodies Dan Brayton
Shakespeare's Ocean,
04/2012
Book Chapter
The nature of the material relationship between the human body and the physical universe was a particularly pressing topic for early modern poets. As Philip Hardie notes, “The early seventeenth ...century saw a great output of poetry containing cosmological allusion, but the advances in science which were largely responsible for this interest were also creating the conditions of a division between poetic and scientific discourses that has lasted to the present day.”¹ For Shakespeare, writing at precisely this moment of discursive and epistemological divergence, and often writingagainstsuch a divergence, cosmology—knowledge of the order of the physical universe
