Ecology and Environment in European Drama

Downing Cless

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136972058
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire en théâtre

Looking at European drama through an ecological lens, this book chronicles nature and the environment as primary topics in major plays from ancient to recent times. Cless focuses on the few, yet well-known plays in which nature is at stake in the action or the environment is a dramatic force. Though theater predominantly explores human and cultural themes, these plays fully display the power of the other-than-human world and its endangerment during the history of Europe. While offering a broad overview, the book features extensive case studies of several playwrights, plays, and eco-theater productions: Aristophanes' The Birds, Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, and Giraudoux's The Madwoman of Chaillot. In each case, Cless connects nature in the play to nature in the life of the playwright based on biographical research into the understanding of natural philosophy and awareness of the immediate environment that influenced the specific play. The book is one of the first of its kind in a growing field of ecocriticism and emerging eco-studies of theater.

1
Introduction

Environmental activist, poet, and farmer Wendell Berry believes that “nature and human culture, wildness and domesticity, are not opposed but are interdependent.”¹ Such is a basic premise of ecology as a science and environmentalism as a movement, yet it is an ideal belied throughout the course of European civilization and the history of its theatre. In short, we (I too) neglect, control, destroy nature in the name of culture. Some playwrights dramatically represent the nature/culture dualism and conflict. Few as they are, such plays are well known, usually canonical, nonetheless never scrutinized in a single scholarly work. I bring together this drama in order to look closely at how nature is at stake in the playwrights’ works, lives, and times. Natural environments become dramatic forces, taking action with agency or reacting as enforced victims, not unlike characters. Although theatre is largely human-centered, the drama that I explore powerfully brings on stage the other-than-human world and its endangerment. My focus is natural entities, occurrences, and settings of consequence in well-known plays. In reading or directing them my mission is to draw out, then highlight the prevalent ecological ideas and environmental imagery.

ECOLOGICAL THEORY, PLUS ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY AND HISTORY

Although it is very debatable whether nature and culture are a universal binary (e.g., postulated by Claude Levi-Strauss, even in his book title, The Raw and the Cooked), there is no question of their substantial importance in European history. With Latin roots, both words have multiple meanings over the centuries. Starting by noting each word’s exceptional complexity, Raymond Williams traces many English definitions in Keywords. My usage centers on nature as non-human, non-built physical phenomena and culture as civilization or customs, though he sees those connotations emerging in the seventeenth century while I take them back to derivation from ancient Greek concepts.² Although culture primordially is separated from nature by inventing (and naming) agriculture, the battle of ideas regarding nature (physis) and culture (nomos) first rages in Athens during the fifth century BCE, and is clearly manifested in Greek tragedy and Aristophanes’ The Birds. Even then, the dualism was deadly, but now it is apocalyptic in scale, I join in saying with environmental philosophers such as Val Plumwood.

In early parts of their global environmental histories, Max Oelschlaeger, J. Donald Hughes, and Clive Ponting trace the nature/culture fissure to the dawn of agriculture and the rise of cities in southwest Asia, including the Greek peninsula, between 10,000 and 3000 BCE, and Joachim Radkau presents evidence that the dualism predates the Neolithic period. The rift gets carried forward as a larger antagonism of environment with new science, industry, and religion during the Late Middle Ages, as forcefully argued in a now-famous article by historian Lynn White, Jr. His focus on plowing inventions and Christian doctrine is supported by medieval drama. Thereafter, Marlowe and Shakespeare explore the nature/culture binary as they negotiate the medieval/modern transition, I argue; they are on the dividing line as mainly animistic nature gives way to scientific objectification and capitalistic commodification. Throughout European history, especially during and after the Renaissance, natural connectedness is opposed by cultural concepts of individuality and independence, according to ecologist Frank B. Golley.³ Ecology emerges as a science at the height of European industrialization and colonial domination. Therefore, I see it as no coincidence that in nineteenth-century drama, Golley’s elaboration of the nature/culture dualism appears in Romantic plays and later in some by Ibsen and Chekhov.

The interdependence that Berry invokes never totally disappears when nature is threatened by human and cultural domination. Even when nearly negated by corporate control and excessive consumption, nature kicks back—witness our era’s worsening droughts, floods, wildfires, and hurricanes, presaged in early modern drama by A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest. Ecologists like Golley define nature as all that is other-than-human and not of human creation, from particular matter such as soil or flowers to large-scale patterns (e.g., hierarchy, adaptation, succession) or gradated ecosystems (e.g., biome or ecoregion, landscape or watershed, or small ecotope such as a pond, meadow, or patch of forest). Nature is actual, no matter how codified by cultural constructs that are actual too. I realize my assertion flies in the face of constructivism in which all realities are linguistically and/or socially derived and some postmodern theories that subsume nature within culture. Both terms are complexly contested with differing definitions and specificity from one historical time and place to another. Nature is especially tricky because it is always both actuality and construct, also ever-changing in the way it is as reality and in the way it is viewed or conceived. Philosopher Neil Evernden cogently deals with the dilemma by tracing how nature as authentic materiality is replaced by “Nature” as construction from the Renaissance forward; he contends that even ecology serves “Nature” (i.e., nature that is humanized) rather than genuine wildness (i.e., nature that is “ultrahuman”). Kate Soper wrestles with a similar distinction between nature as reality and “Nature” as construct, drawing a more even-handed conclusion that both versions of the word are valid and important.⁴

Akin to how Shakespeare embraces Renaissance revisions of concepts of self and other, ecology reconfigures nature as the ultimate other to which all selves are linked. “The self and environment form a whole,” says Golley.⁵ The relationship of humans, animals, plants, or any living organisms with their environment, as well as the connection of one environment to another, is the basis of ecology.⁶ Coining the word in 1866, German zoologist Ernst Haeckel defined it as “the body of knowledge concerning the economy of nature—the investigation of the total relations of the animal both to its inorganic and to its organic environment.”⁷ By changing “animal” to “living entities,” this definition still holds; for instance, in Keywords, ecology is “the study of the relations of plants and animals with each other and with their habitat.” Williams also cites a fascinating inversion of Haeckel’s definition: “In 1931, H.G. Wells saw economics as a ‘branch of ecology … the ecology of the human species’.”⁸ For either word the Greek root oikos means “household” or “home,” thus implying a fundamental concern with a location for living and a way of life—a habitat and what goes on in it. “Thus, ecology is, literally, the study of households, including the plants, animals, microbes, and people that live together as interdependent beings on Spaceship Earth,” observes ecologist Eugene P. Odum.⁹ Not having a word for ecology, Aristotle separately categorized nature and culture within economics (“management of households”), as Hughes remarks:

In the Politics, he makes a distinction between ‘natural economy,’ that is activities such as agriculture, pastoralism, and hunting, which turn resources into products with intrinsic value, and ‘unnatural economy,’ activities using experience and art, such as retail trade, which makes money from exchange…. He commends natural economy and censures its unnatural counterpart.¹⁰

A century before Aristotle, Aeschylus dramatized the legend of Prometheus from whom humans acquired substantial means for “unnatural economy”—that now eclipses the “natural,” I submit.

Environment is all that surrounds or encircles (the Latin root of the word). Golley extends that literal definition: “The environment consists of air, water, energy, matter, other organisms, the built environment, and culture. Although individuals are both unique and free to imagine and act, at the same time we are tightly embedded in an environment and, as humans, a culture.” In the first of these sentences, environment is everything that encompasses a self or singular entity, but in the second it seems to connote nature as distinct from culture. That, I say, is the rub: human expansion of the cultural environment (economy) at the cost of the natural environment (also economy), that in turn alienates self from nature, which even becomes demonized other. Human excess or overreach in the cultural environment causes degradation of the natural environment. Applying a well-known ecological model of population growth, the “carrying capacity” of an environmental system is exceeded, resulting in “overshoot” or “crash” when vital resources are eliminated by over-consumption. Economy trumps ecology that in turn threatens economy. This environmental circle is vicious. With shades of the dramatic worlds of Brecht and Beckett, Golley sharply poses the question in his conclusion, “How does one speak about connection in a culture of separation and isolation?”¹¹

Earlier in his book, Golley puts his finger on the problem: “The success of agriculture has led humans to disturb much of the Earth surface for the production of food and fiber crops…. The consequence of this evolution has been hubris, an attitude that humans are outside of the natural process and that production can go on increasing endlessly.”¹² Hubris, the ancient Greek term for an overabundance of pride or arrogance, is a common affliction of tragic heroes. An expansion of Golley’s definition that I call eco-hubris is manifested fully in Aristophanes’ comic protagonist in The Birds and in some Greek tragedies. Eco-hubris, in addition to Golley’s hubristic attitude, is an excessive zeal to control or dominate nature, acting without limits and with a sense of being above nature as though a god. It takes what is now ordinary alienation from nature to the extreme of total use and abuse, in my formulation. Eco-hubristic endeavors include arrogantly, perhaps tragically false assumptions that nature can be mastered. In Greek environmental history, the stance of the playwrights toward eco-hubris correlates with the increasing separation of nature and culture that resulted from urbanization, warfare (Persian, then Peloponnesian), and increasingly non-local, non-sustainable agriculture. As I will show, eco-hubris connected with environmental history and philosophy recurs on a grand scale in Doctor Faustus and The Madwoman of Chaillot or on a localized yet intensive basis in An Enemy of the People and The Cherry Orchard.

My overall approach is decidedly interdisciplinary, like ecology from which I draw the major theoretical frameworks. Just as the vast scope of ecology encompasses all aspects of nature and thereby intersects a variety of other disciplines (e.g., biology, geology, sociology, economics), my expansive study of nature in European drama brings theatre history together with environmental history and philosophy. As a discipline, ecology is officially only 150 years old, but investigations and ideas about nature continuously occur starting in ancient Greece—over 2500 years of what has been called protoecology, which is a substantial underpinning to my research. In their introduction to The Philosophy of Ecology: From Science to Synthesis, David R. Keller and Frank B. Golley emphasize how ecology can be extremely broad in perspective, such as the whole biosphere, or highly specific, focusing even on one organism and its immediate environment, adding that the discipline fluctuates between evolutionary and systemic concepts.¹³ Accordingly, my book goes back and forth between the wide, long view of European drama’s relation to nature and close, deep investigations of particular plays and playwrights.

At the macro-scale on the evolutionary level, I project the ever-intensifying battle between natural and cultural forces. Even though they have the same root, ecology and economy get farther and farther away from their original meanings of the study and care of “home” in all ramifications from individual house to society to whole earth. The eco-words are pitted against one another in exponentially greater efforts to control and dominate nature. Rampant economic and political expansion cycles with crisis or crash, punctuated by heightened ecological awareness, sometimes in theatre too. In European drama, the multi-phased trajectory starts in Greek tragedy or comedy and heads toward the denatured world of Beckett and others after him. In modernity, the retrieval or protection of nature is largely left to marginalized romantics and activists. Ancient and early modern playwrights devise narratives of protagonists with huge zeal for mastery, attacking natural powers with the full force of their own ecohubris. As nature becomes ever more contained in the modern world, the narratives tend to be less grandiose—a cherry orchard in provincial Russia rather than control of nature as a whole. Nonetheless, some dramatic works trace resistance to the expanding domination of nature—perhaps by Caliban with ill fortune, but then, by the Madwoman successfully. Much postmodern eco-drama has no narrative, but instead direct interaction between nature and the performer(s), often the audience too.

The evolutionary perspective on the control of nature in Western civilization is markedly evident in two recent books by environmental historian Carolyn Merchant. At the top of the introduction to her anthology Ecology: Key Concepts in Critical Theory, she emphasizes the argument of Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno that European domination of and alienation from nature started with Odysseus and “reached a new level in the thought of Francis Bacon” during the early 1600s. In drama the thesis of Horkheimer and Adorno is paralleled within Prometheus Bound and Doctor Faustus, as demonstrated in my study. The two Frankfurt School theorists, comments Merchant, decry the near-total objectification of nature in the modern era, “the break with the enchanted past of myth and mimesis…. participation in nature through identification with it.”¹⁴ Thereby, the reenactment of animals in Greek comedy or animistic spirits in Shakespeare gives way to largely human imitation in modern drama with its overwhelming preponderance of realistic representation of people in unnatural domestic settings. As I see it, European theatre evolves, despite wondrous aberrations, toward an eclipse of nature that corresponds to the rise of science and capitalism.

But, what about plays like The Secret Garden or The Lion King? In Merchant’s book, Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture, she explores an important adjunct to domination, ironically what for her is its driving force: the decline from perfected nature in Paradise (or a Golden Age) resulting in constantly mammoth efforts at the “Recovery of Eden” through “progress” in industry and commodities, even urban beautification or wilderness preservation. In my view, be it Shakespeare “in the park” and “under the stars” or massive reinventions of Eden on indoor stages such as the two aforementioned musicals, modern theatre tends to romanticize nature in the few instances when it is not erased within domestic realism. Edenic tributes to nature are reduced to simulated heterotopias that meld Foucault with Baudrillard à la Disney. Merchant theorizes, “But ‘mastering’ nature to reclaim Eden has nearly destroyed the very nature people have tried to reclaim.”¹⁵ Ibsen’s Stockmann and Brecht’s St. Joan would grasp this terrible irony of the modern ecological world; indeed, they fall prey to hubris in their valiant efforts to combat eco-hubris in their antagonists. In Beckett and beyond, nature is eviscerated. Most postmodernist theatre is post-nature. Lest I be bleak, a very positive goal of contemporary eco-theatre is to help audiences find a genuine garden and actual animals in a world of hyper-simulation.

At the micro-scale on the systemic level, nature is actively contested in particular plays throughout European history. In these cases, from my perspective, the physical environment and ecological entities are very much at stake as agent(s) or reactor(s), overtly acting or being acted upon. Drama, like an ecosystem, is holistic yet able to be analyzed for its components and structures. In that sense, an eco-critical reading of a play has some qualities inherited from Newtonian science. Yet, as ecologist Robert E. Ulanowicz recognizes, an exceptional aspect of his science is a combined focus on content (or structure) and process (or function).¹⁶ Like he does, Golley harkens back to Heraclitus for ideas of process and flux within an ecosystem: “In the Heraclitian interpretation, the real world ‘out there’ actually consists of fields of energy, matter, and information, which we stop in thought and language as if we were taking a snapshot of reality.”¹⁷ In that spirit, I investigate how nature and culture interact, collide, adapt, or succeed one another, producing dramatic outcomes in relation to the environmental conditions and ecological ideas prevalent at the time a play was written. In longer case studies, the playwright’s biography and education is reviewed for what he knew about nature in his time. My systemic approach excludes drama in which natural settings are solely backgrounds for actions that less directly engage or impact nature (e.g., battlefield plays amongst the Greek tragedies and Shakespeare’s histories). Likewise, I deal exclusively with plays in which natural imagery is linked strongly with action or theme, not just supportive or occasional (e.g., garden references in many of Shakespeare’s plays).

The prevailing reduction of nature mainly to image or metaphor within European drama is another outcome of the ever-expanding rift between nature and culture. When the divide first takes hold in ancient Greece, the battle be...