Shakespeare’s Ecology of Natural Resources: Transitions and Transformations

Sophie Chiari analyzes how Shakespeare’s plays and poems present the transformation of the early modern natural world through environmental shifts and new ecological issues.
Using a range of examples from the Sonnets, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Hamlet, Timon of Athens and The Tempest, Chiari’s ecopoeticstudy of dramatic language explores Shakespeare’s response tothe rise of extractive exploitation in Elizabethan and JacobeanEngland. Chiari expands our understanding of the environment inShakespeare beyond the so-called ’green’ comedies by charting thetransition from a pre-capitalist world towards a commodity-basedsociety characterized by the enclosure of the commons and the riseof imperialism. This study uses examples of materials which arecurrently underrepresented in Shakespearean ecocriticism includingwater systems, sandscapes and soil alongside the production ofglass and salt in Shakespeare, signalling a commitment to expanding the ’material turn’ in Shakespeare studies.
Far from being limited to a presentist reading, this book argues that cultural hegemony and the exploitation of soil, ore and water were increasingly linked in the early modern era, an age of conquest and massive human depredation. By articulating ecohistoricism with ecopoetics and material studies, Shakespeare’s Ecology of NaturalResources 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.

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’.