Doing Ecocriticism with Shakespeare

Abstract

It has become an increasingly less provocative proposition that ecocriticism might have something to say about Shakespeare, increasingly less with every new conference session, article, and book (there are two) dedicated to the subject. So accepted have the unlikely partners become that by 2006 The World Shakespeare Congress was doing a whole panel on the topic. But one starts to wonder about the actual ecocriticism: does its line get wiped out in the offspring? Is a Shakespearean ecocriticism still unborn? Is it stillborn? Like so many other “political” theories before it, ecocriticism was radical in its embryonic stages but seems to be developing into something else. If we are to do ecocriticism with Shakespeare, then we must accept as a basic premise that such an approach means looking at radical activist possibilities and that what we are doing is not about collecting lists, making concordances of image clusters and themes, and leaving it at that. In applying ecocritical theory to Titus Andronicus and Coriolanus, it becomes clear that there is a need to talk about how contempt for the natural world is a definable and recognizable discourse, one that is integral to the maintenance of patterns of social oppression in early modern texts. We need first, however, new tools for such work, tools that will allow us to see how Titus implicitly raises questions about dietary moralities and how Coriolanus, embroiled in debates about voice, sexuality, and place, posits a crisis of identity as a crisis of environmental embeddedness.