Ecocritical Shakespeare

Lynne Bruckner, Dan Brayton, Lynne Bruckner, Dan Brayton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138254145
• eBook ISBN: 9781317146438
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

PART I
Contexts for reading

Chapter 1
Vermin and Parasites: Shakespeare’s Animal Architectures

Karen Raber

In 2004 a red-tailed hawk named Pale Male, and his mate Lola, became the center of controversy among environmentalists, bird-watchers, socialites and grumpy New Yorkers. Having chosen a particularly ritzy address for his home on a Fifth Avenue co-op, Pale Male found himself evicted after ten years in his home, when his nest was removed due to complaints from co-op owners who found the leavings of his predatory behavior repugnant to their sensibilities. After general public outcry over the action and threats from environmental groups to prosecute, the co-op created a replacement nest for the birds.1

Pale Male’s story is a fascinating example of the kinds of interests that come into conflict over the encroachment of wildlife into urban spaces. The co-op owners were portrayed in the media, whether fairly or unfairly, as brutal barbarians who set cleanliness above the needs of living creatures—the pristine removal from the usual urban effluvia and detritus that their high-rise building provided seemed so central to their self-definition as New York’s elite that anything threatening it needed to be destroyed.2 On the other hand, environmentalists defending the birds were equally derided as tree-hugging idiots who couldn’t differentiate “real” human problems from such trivial distractions. At the center of the battle were the two red-tailed hawks, part of a resettlement of the cityscape by predatory animals that had once been banished by human development; like the hawks, peregrine falcons (put on the endangered species list in the 1970s, but now thriving in many cities, let alone rural areas), coyotes, foxes, raccoons, and other species usually assumed to live outside city limits have invaded urban territory. For most species involved, the attraction seems to be the plentiful food humans generate, from grain and garbage to pigeons, rats, and mice; falcons additionally perceive the artificial canyons and cliffs as ideal living accommodations. In the hawks’ case, the rats and pigeons they consumed resulted in the bits and pieces raining down on the co-op inhabitants or rotting on ledges and windowsills that offended residents.

Stories about urban settlers like these often expose otherwise subterranean tensions of class, wealth, power and identity among human populations. When we build architectural structures, we do so imagining that they will serve, encourage or enforce certain social beliefs: rich people are different; the higher your apartment, the wealthier you are; the more control over your environment you have, the richer you are and the cleaner your environment will be; and since only pets, not wild animals, can be controlled and made cleanly, pets are okay while wild birds are a nuisance. The actual presence of animals, however, subverts or transforms the ideological purposes of human building. The Renaissance is at some level no different from modern New York, although the ideological positioning of both urban development and animals’ place in human-created spaces is historically specific. Yet ecocritics have been traditionally reluctant to engage with animal studies in general, and urban animals in particular, while literary critics of early modern texts like Shakespeare’s plays have tended to work in directions that are more concerned with character-formation or the role of reason in establishing human exceptionalism, rather than with animals’ constitutive role in fashioning the spaces human bodies inhabit. In this essay, I will propose the value of understanding how animals shape both the ideologies and the material experience of internal and external spaces in Shakespeare’s plays and his world.

Recent ecocritical moves into early modern literature and culture have provided informative and politically transformative interpretations that balance the presentism of an earlier generation of ecocritics; however, ecocriticism is still ambivalent about how to read animals into the primarily vegetative and atmospheric manifestations of creation with which it is traditionally associated. Greg Garrard points out that the dividing line of “animate” creation can result both in conflicts and co-operation between ecological goals and the view of those engaged in the study of animals. “Environmentalism and animal liberation,” he notes, “conflict in both theory and practice”—ecocritics “tend to venerate wild animals while treating cattle, sheep and cats as the destructive accomplices of human culture.”3 Yet where farming and livestock are concerned, both groups may have identical political positions on specific cases. Garrard’s account suggests that ecocriticism and animal studies are uncomfortable bedfellows, unsure how to negotiate the boundaries between forms of life in a variety of dimensions. This uncertainty plays out in two recent ecocritical studies of early modern literature and culture published in the same year. Gabriel Egan’s Green Shakespeare “treats … concern for animals as part of a growing coalition of grass-roots politics that unites socialists and anarchists with environmentalists, anti-capitalists, their cousins the anti-globalizationists, and animal rights activists.”4 Egan’s is a capacious tent, indeed. Robert N. Watson’s work, however, while attentive to the animals of As You Like It, enumerates among the many “discomforts” generated by the “greening of the literary-critical field” the doubts raised in making animals a topic of serious critical analysis.5

From the animal studies side of the debate, the picture is no less muddy. Erica Fudge’s work on early modern animals insistently and repeatedly calls critical attention to their definitional, and consequently subversive, character in Renaissance philosophy, science, theology and literature; the more early modern discourses about human identity attempt to establish a clear division of human from beast, the less stable that division becomes. Her work is not specifically concerned with the natural environment seen as the domain of ecocriticism, but in putting pressure on ideas of “nature” she contributes to a wider sense of how early moderns perceived or responded to the continuities and discontinuities of creation as a whole.6 Bruce Boehrer has written extensively about Shakespeare’s use of animal imagery, which he argues is deployed to articulate ideas about character, gender, and other forms of social difference.7 Boehrer makes explicit the potentiality in Fudge’s position; for him, animal studies should properly be understood to be a “subset” of ecocriticism, since “nature and culture are mutually constitutive,” and “the ways in which we think of the natural world are, in a fundamental sense, the ways in which we think of ourselves.”8 Simon C. Estok has also argued for the expansion of an activist ecocriticism that includes observations about Shakespeare’s animal references.9 All this laudable labor does not mean, however, that the place of the animal is either fully charted in current criticism, or that its significance to ecocritical practice is a settled fact. The mutual colonization of ecostudies and animal studies continues to give rise to some entirely predictable frictions—and some highly productive commonalities.

In this essay, I take as a given that animals are part of the physical environment that is represented in Shakespeare’s plays, as well as fundamental to the ideological construction of nearly all conceptual categories that structure the playwright’s world, and the fictional worlds of his plays. As much as animals may function to subvert boundaries between human and non-human, they are also transgressive of physical environmental boundaries. At the most basic level, animals cross lines we usually draw imaginatively between wild or rural places and towns or cities—like Pale Male, they tend to fly where they will, nest where they like, and resist absolute definition.10 A continuum comprised of tame, feral or wild, for instance, does not summarize the existence of actual animals, who blithely move into and out of places as they are able, shifting from one spot to another at will; a rat, a cat, a bird, a dog, a mouse may be fully wild one day, tame another, or revert to feral and back to tame at random as circumstances dictate. Analogously, animals tend to defeat efforts represented by walls, doors, windows, floors, or fences to demarcate types of space, to contain and restrict identity to a fixed location. For the Renaissance, which analogized the human body to the architecture of the city and house, such fluidity is especially important. From the invention of the sentimentalized bourgeois home, to the sense of interiority upon which modern subjectivity depends, animals are often there first, either anticipating arrival of meaning, or establishing the terms in which people can think a thing, a place—or themselves—into existence.

By offering what I hope is a suggestive, if brief, reading of animals in two very familiar plays, Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, I analyze animals’ role in creating both the urban environment, the partitioned exterior spaces of street and building that is portrayed in Romeo and Juliet, and the internal architecture of the human body, upon which rest ideas about human “nature,” in Hamlet. Indeed, I am most interested in how these two dimensions interact to produce animal and human as mutually, materially interdependent, with one another and with the spaces they inhabit.

Urban Vermin

In Romeo and Juliet’s first scene, the language of cats and dogs begins to circulate to implicate the two feuding households in a logic of disorder and incivility:

SAMPSON: A dog of the house of Montague moves me.

GREGORY: To move is to stir, and to be valiant is to stand. Therefore if thou art moved, thou run’st away.

SAMPSON: A dog of that house shall move me to stand. I will take the wall of any man or maid of Montague’s.

GREGORY: That shows thee a weak slave; for the weakest goes to the wall.

SAMPSON: ‘Tis true; and therefore women, being the weaker vessels, are ever thrust to the wall. Therefore I will push Montague’s men from the wall and thrust his maids to the wall. (I, i, 8–18)11

With the entrance of Abram and Balthasar, Sampson and Gregory’s violent punning on the “civility” they will show the Montagues’ maids turns to uncivil insults and finally swordplay; it takes the entrance of Tybalt, “Prince of Cats,” however, to escalate the violence into a full-blown street brawl. Where Sampson challenges the Montagues to “draw if you be men,” Prince Escalus implies that such violent outbursts collapse the distinction between men and animals: “You men, you beasts, / That quench the fire of your pernicious rage / With purple fountains issuing from your veins!” (I, i, 83–5).

Fudge has charted Shakespeare’s use of dogs in Two Gentlemen of Verona to define civility as a specifically human trait. In that play, the clown Launce’s unmanageable cur, Crab, pisses on the floor at the feet of a group of nobles, prompting Launce to quiz him “When didst thou see me heave up my leg and make water against a gentlewoman’s farthingale?” (IV, iv, 36–8). About Crab’s uncivilized behavior, Fudge writes:

What the civilizing process reinforces in humans then is a distinction between reasonable and unreasonable, self-controlled and uncontrolled, civil and savage. It also underlines a conception of the difference between the private and the public: in one, urination is allowed, in the other prohibited. Thus, lacking reason, self-control, and civility, and displaying no concept of the difference between the private and the public, a pissing dog comes to stand for everything that a human is not, and cannot be.12

Fudge agrees, however, with Pr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction: Warbling Invaders
• PART I CONTEXTS FOR READING
• PART II FLORA, FAUNA, WEATHER, WATER
• PART III PRESENTISM AND PEDAGOGY
• Afterword: Ecocriticism on the Lip of a Lion
• Bibliography
• Index