Ecocriticism, a theoretical movement examining cultural constructions of Nature in their social and political contexts, is making an increasingly important contribution to our understanding of Shakespeare’s plays. Gabriel Egan's Green Shakespeare presents: an overview of the concept of ecocriticism detailed ecocritical readings of Henry V, Macbeth, As You Like It, Antony & Cleopatra, King Lear, Coriolanus, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest analysis of themes such as nature and human society; food and biological nature; the supernatural and the weather a bold argument for a contemporary ‘EcoShakespeare’, taking into account the environmental and political implications of globalization and intellectual property laws. Crossing the boundaries of literary and cultural studies to draw in politics, philosophy and ecology, this volume not only introduces one of the most lively areas of contemporary Shakespeare studies, but also puts forward a convincing case for Shakespeare’s continuing relevance to contemporary theory.

This book offers the term 'ecophobia' as a way of understanding and organizing representations of contempt for the natural world. Estok argues that this vocabulary is both necessary to the developing area of ecocritical studies and for our understandings of the representations of 'Nature' in Shakespeare.

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.

The Shakespearean Forest, Anne Barton's final book, uncovers the pervasive presence of woodland in early modern drama, revealing its persistent imaginative power. The collection is representative of the startling breadth of Barton's scholarship: ranging across plays by Shakespeare (including Titus Andronicus, As You Like It, Macbeth, The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Timon of Athens) and his contemporaries (including Jonson, Dekker, Lyly, Massinger and Greene), it also considers court pageants, treatises on forestry and chronicle history. Barton's incisive literary analysis characteristically pays careful attention to the practicalities of performance, and is supplemented by numerous illustrations and a bibliographical essay exploring recent scholarship in the field. Prepared for publication by Hester Lees-Jeffries, featuring a Foreword by Adrian Poole and an Afterword by Peter Holland, the book explores the forest as a source of cultural and psychological fascination, embracing and illuminating its mysteriousness.

Shakespeare and Ecology is the first book to explore the topical contexts that shaped the environmental knowledge and politics of Shakespeare and his audiences. Early modern England experienced unprecedented environmental challenges including climate change, population growth, resource shortfalls, and habitat destruction which anticipate today's globally magnified crises. Shakespeare wove these events into the poetic textures and embodied action of his drama, contributing to the formation of a public ecological consciousness, while opening creative pathways for re-imagining future human relationships with the natural world and non-human life. This book begins with an overview of ecological modernity across Shakespeare's work before focusing on three major environmental controversies in particular plays: deforestation in The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Tempest; profit-driven agriculture in As You Like It; and gunpowder warfare and remedial cultivation in Henry IV Parts One and Two, Henry V, and Macbeth. A fourth chapter examines the interdependency of local and global eco-relations in Cymbeline, and the final chapter explores Darwinian micro-ecologies in Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra. An epilogue suggests that Shakespeare's greatest potential for mobilizing modern ecological ideas and practices lies in contemporary performance. Shakespeare and Ecology illuminates the historical antecedents of modern ecological knowledge and activism, and explores Shakespeare's capacity for generating imaginative and performative responses to today's environmental challenges.

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.

In this timely new study, Borlik reveals the surprisingly rich potential for the emergent "green" criticism to yield fresh insights into early modern English literature. Deftly avoiding the anachronistic casting of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors as modern environmentalists, he argues that environmental issues, such as nature’s personhood, deforestation, energy use, air quality, climate change, and animal sentience, are formative concerns in many early modern texts. The readings infuse a new urgency in familiar works by Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Ralegh, Jonson, Donne, and Milton. At the same time, the book forecasts how ecocriticism will bolster the reputation of less canonical authors like Drayton, Wroth, Bruno, Gascoigne, and Cavendish. Its chapters trace provocative affinities between topics such as Pythagorean ecology and the Gaia hypothesis, Ovidian tropes and green phenomenology, the disenchantment of Nature and the Little Ice Age, and early modern pastoral poetry and modern environmental ethics. It also examines the ecological onus of Renaissance poetics, while showcasing how the Elizabethans’ sense of a sophisticated interplay between nature and art can provide a precedent for ecocriticism’s current understanding of the relationship between nature and culture as "mutually constructive." Situating plays and poems alongside an eclectic array of secondary sources, including herbals, forestry laws, husbandry manuals, almanacs, and philosophical treatises on politics and ethics, Borlik demonstrates that Elizabethan and Jacobean authors were very much aware of, and concerned about, the impact of human beings on their natural surroundings.

The essays in this volume interrogate the unique and often problematic relationship between early modern cultural studies and ecocriticism, providing theoretical insights and models for a future practice that successfully wed the two disciplines.

Combining the latest scientific and philosophical understanding of humankind's place in the world with interpretative methods derived from other politically inflected literary criticism, ecocriticism is providing new insights into literary works both ancient and modern. With case-study analyses of the tragedies, comedies, histories and late romances, this book is a wide-ranging introduction to reading Shakespeare in the light of contemporary ecocritical theory.

Using clear, accessible language throughout, this easy-to-use companion provides an A-Z section covering the main theorists and concepts, with concise definitions/descriptions. It also contains 11 essays presenting more detailed discussion, analysis and contextual material on central topics.