Shakespeare and the Evolution of the Human Umwelt

Adapt, Interpret, Mutate

Timothy Ryan Day, Timothy Day

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367855970
• eBook ISBN: 9781000347661
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Translating & Interpreting
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Shakespeare and the Evolution of the Human Umwelt brings together research on Shakespeare, biosemiotics, ecocriticism, epigenetics and actor network theory as it explores the space between nature and narrative in an effort to understand how human bodies are stories told in the emergent language of evolution, and how those bodies became storytellers themselves.

Chapters consider Shakespeare's plays and contemporary works, such as those of Barbara Kingsolver and Margaret Atwood, or productions for which Shakespeare is a genetic forebear, as evolutionary artefacts which have helped to shape the human umwelt—the species-specific linguistic habitat that humans share in common. The work investigates the juncture where semisphere meets biosphere and illuminates the role that narrative plays in our construction of the world we occupy. The plays of Shakespeare, as works that have had unparalleled cultural diffusion, are uniquely situated to speak to the ways in which ideas and the texts they use as vehicles are always material, always environmental, and always alive. The book discusses Shakespeare's works as vital nodes in our cultural, historical, moral and philosophical networks, but also as environmental actors in and of themselves. Plays are presented alternately as digitally encoded bits of culture awaiting their connection to an analog world, or as bacteria interacting with living organisms in both productive and destructive ways, altering their structure and creating new meaning through movement that is simultaneously biological and poetic.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of ecocriticism looking to model ecocritical readings and bridge gaps between scientific, philosophical and literary thinking.

1 An education in naturecultures

Review of literature on ecocriticism, biosemiotics, and Shakespeare

A hand scrawls chains of text into the living world. A microscopic poet speaks the lines into bodies: a virus, a bacteria, a lizard, a mouse. The syllables and phrases drift, crash, break, bend … After trillions of lines are scribed, the poet reads our bodies aloud. With each syllable we emerge into the world. We play, mime, write lines of our own. We work in the medium of our predecessors and the output is always stream of consciousness, trial and error. Verses stack, clash, and combine, seem and are, define and destroy, and it is never clear if any of it was meant, or if it all just found its way through the mindless filter of the laws that govern movements large and small. But, the bodies came to be, and they speak just like the poet that spoke them.

An education is the result of a complex and emergent metamorphosis of information—often consumed in the form of written text—which crosses generations and centuries as it mutates, incubates, and spreads through the individuals and communities it encounters. An identity as complex as any ecosystem encounters influence, the right ideas, the wrong ones, and the combination begins to ferment into an understanding of the world that should do work. An education is seldom a direct path as it pulls together centuries’ worth of information and filters through an individual consciousness to be shaped and returned to the world. Shakespeare’s scholarly formation has been the subject of much commentary. How was it possible for someone with a mere grade school education, as opposed to one of the University Wits (Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nash, Robert Greene, John Lyly, George Peele, etc.), to have written these timeless works? In The Genius of Shakespeare, Jonathon Bate makes the argument that it was actually because of his humble path that Shakespeare was so much more attuned to the craft. He had to work as an actor, and in so doing he gained a proximity to the work that the others lacked. He was better than they were because he had stewed in the craft, lived with it in both body and mind. He occupied the text in ways that they had not had to. In short, he was present, both physically and mentally, for his education. His life also brought him into close contact with the plague, with the financial and reputational ruin of his father, with an untraditional marriage, with the need to leave his family in order to make his way, with the loss of a child, and with a view of life in the royal courts. He would have understood inheritance not as some abstract political reality, but as the material wealth that escaped him with his father’s fall, the material wealth which he subsequently rebuilt and exceeded as he passed on a fortune built from the London playhouses and smart real estate investments to his daughters. Poetry and verse helped to build that fortune as he trained their lens on the social and political realities of his time. He would have had firsthand knowledge of the almost alchemical ability to turn text into wealth, to turn play into material gain, just as in his plays, a bastard could become noble, or a king a pauper. In short, his informal education was broad and worldly. Just as he lived in the text of the plays in which he first acted and later wrote, he lived in the political, social, medical, and rhetorical terrains of his time. In his formal education, he would have memorized Ovid among other Latin poets, and there we can clearly trace the lines that his imagination drew from the predecessors he encountered in the classroom to the resultant works and beyond. Intertextuality is a type of genealogy. We can draw a line from Ovid’s poetic ruminations on the myths that pervaded his culture to Margaret Atwood and Jeanette Winterson that passes through Shakespeare’s pen, theater, and body. Each of these individuals was a textual incarnation as a being constructed of genetic code, and each of them extended out from their bodies and into a parallel evolution, a cultural evolution unique to humans that is captured and passed on in the written word. The dream of the text as commented on by Puck, the magic of Prospero’s books, the strange relationship between intention and action that the Macbeth’s steep in, the power of words that Cordelia eschews, are each examples of what Shakespeare knew: Material self is a textual thing.

Education, the passage of knowledge both informally and formally across generations, is a central theme in Hamlet. Hamlet returns from the university for his father’s funeral. It is not an incidental but a crucial element of the play that Hamlet is a student at the time that all of this transpires; it lets us know that his formation is in process, that he is not yet a fully integrated intellect, and perhaps his plastic character still requires his father’s guidance. At least part of what Hamlet laments in the loss of his father is the loss of a role model, a figure that will demonstrate what he is supposed to become. The fact that father and son share a name is indicative of the cyclical, genetic process of a younger generation carrying the codes, both the embodied and cultural, forward as they emerge across time. Claudius says to him, “But you must know your father lost a father,/ That father lost, lost his; and the survivor bound/ in filial obligation for some term/ to do obsequious sorrow” (1.2.89–92). This is of course true: Death is part of nature, and a performance of sorrow—and one assumes authentic felt pain as well—is part of the cultural response. Nonetheless, when one is speaking to the child of a recently deceased parent, the commentary is clearly callous at best, eliding the emotion that should accompany the knowledge of these natural processes. Claudius exposes his utilitarian tendencies as he emphasizes the rational processes of nature above the empathetic human response with which it should be integrated. Claudius is purely theoretical, all code and no body. Polonius’ famous “neither a borrower not a lender be” speech is another example of the importance of the parental figure in the education of a young person. Yes, Polonius is something of a blowhard, but his advice is not half bad. A parent, here a father in particular, is a transmitter of text, a pathway for needed information as to how one should behave, and without his, Hamlet is lost. Of course, the parent is also a transmitter of information in another way as they provide the genetic connection to one’s lineage. Inheritance is doubly textual as behaviors and guidance can be modeled through the transmission of text—guidance, advice, education— from one generation to the next, and the biological text, the DNA, is similarly passed down as code from parent to child. Hamlet is obsessed with the coincidence of these two forms of transmission throughout the play. He opines over the tension between a cultural connection to alcohol and a more impulsive one that is connected to nature. He questions the genetic transmission of the divine right of kings. He doubts the substantive reality of an individual identity in the face of an affectless nature that will march on regardless of human intent.

The first time I taught Hamlet, I had just returned to Spain from my own father’s funeral in Oklahoma. It was an abrupt and unexpected illness that led to an intense period in the hospital with my siblings. It had been nearly a decade since we had all been together. It had been more than five years since I had been to Oklahoma or seen my father. After the funeral I jumped on a plane and headed straight from Madrid’s Barajas airport to teach Hamlet to a group of undergraduates. The text took on a weight that is difficult to describe. At times it was hard to continue with the class, though I think I was able to dissimilate. For me, this was a moment of vivid reader response. I was in the surreal state that grief often inspires, and my connection to the text felt incarnate. Shakespeare had known death, had processed it into a textual reflection on the emotional and intellectual connection to our finite lifespans, and now in a moment when it was all a bit too alive for me, my own experience filtered through the text that he had left behind. Just as my father’s genes replicated through my body, Shakespeare’s text spread across my lived experience. It was not possible for me to separate out the cultural from the natural. My father, who died of cirrhosis, was the ghost imbibing from his chalice while Hamlet questioned the extent to which appetites could be controlled by reason. I could no more filter the narratives about my father’s life from the material of the body I had seen laid out before me at the funeral than I could the resonant emotional content of Shakespeare’s play from the atoms of ink that formed the letters on the page in my Complete Works. In the midst of grief, the fabric of reality atomized, the edges blurred, the continuum revealed just a little bit more of itself than usual. Somehow parts became wholes. Somehow instances became lives. Somehow letters, fragments of code, became texts. And also, somehow letters became bodies. In a very important sense, it is this nature–culture divide that Hamlet stews in throughout the play. He cannot fathom that the cold hard skull, removed from all its animated glory, is continuous with the body of culture that pulses through lived experience. He cannot quite integrate a human imagination that extends from the same processes as worms that churn the earth and consume the bodies of the deceased. Hamlet dramatizes the largely failed philosophical project to approach the nature–culture divide and depicts the whole of the educational system as stuck in a juvenile loop around the question of where nature ends and culture begins. Shakespeare shows us the obvious answer: there is no division. There never was.

Most of us are not Shakespeare, but we do all have complex relationship to the networks of information and experience that surround us, not to mention to our own genetic predecessors. My own education was certainly not a direct path, but led through divergent interests, nearly debilitating doubts, lucky encounters with great professors, disappointing encounters with others, acceptance, rejection, travel … The ideas that begin to take form as one develops are the summation of all of it mixing together in one’s consciousness in a process that is often unpredictable and, at least to some degree (to an unfathomably large degree, I suspect), beyond one’s control. Ideas are formed by what one reads, of course, but also what one sees by sheer coincidence of location, whom one meets as one moves through the world, how one’s interpretations of political realities shift with the zeitgeist, and through one’s interactions with the creations of the artists who occupy one’s own time as well as those who have survived from previous eras. There is a strange serendipity that anyone who dedicates themselves to writing and research should be able to understand. When you keep at it, the connections begin to appear, the work—and the world, I suspect—unfolds in a way that can never be described as entirely conscious or intentional, and the end product is almost always something of a discovery. My education departed from a love of literature and a deep-seeded concern for the environment. However, I do not think that I saw how they connected, or even suspected that they could. In fact, I often thought of these two parts of myself as somehow at odds, as if there was no way to bring political and environmental concerns into a relevant, living relationship with literature. That now seems naïve. Ecocriticism taught me that literature can and should be read for its relevance to social justice and environmental issues. Biosemiotics taught me that there is in fact no clean distinction between the living world and what we consider to be textual, that instead they are on a continuum. Shakespeare showed me how great stories can pulse through the human umwelt, staying relevant and giving us the genetic material, the points of reference, that we need to evolve through play and mimicry into telling continuously better stories.

Ecocriticism

As a student, I struggled with the question of how the study of literature was a valid pursuit in a moment of environmental collapse. I knew that I loved literature, and felt the call, but it seemed to me that in the midst of a world marked by rising temperature and declining political will to do anything about it, that it was somehow decadent and aloof to keep one’s nose in the books, like Prospero in his library while his brother plotted his overthrow. In his book Going Away to Think, Scott Slovic meditates on this predicament:

To be a literary scholar operating with an acute awareness of social and environmental concerns means bearing the constant burden (and opportunity) of considering the gravity of the world’s predicaments, while acting through the diffuse, delayed process of teaching and writing, often for relatively small audiences of students and colleagues, most of whom are already in agreement (4).

I must add that ecocriticism was not a possibility that was at all obvious to me when I arrived at Arizona State University to begin a doctoral program in early modern literature. I had spent two years as a graduate student studying literature in Spain followed by a year teaching at Shantou University in China, and I had begun to ask myself how literature could serve as a pathway into the myriad economic and environmental problems I had witnessed as they unfolded. I saw the political and financial fallout from the economic crisis in Spain, one of the world’s most deeply affected countries. I watched the backlash towards the European Union with real fear as to what the future might hold for the union and the volatile political realities of its member states, and what that volatility might mean, in turn, for the environment. I saw the dry riverbeds that crossed Spain’s major cities, and heard their fishermen lament the calamitous state of their historically rich fisheries. I met Europeans in China who operated clothing factories and spoke candidly about the unconscionable work conditions they oversaw. I breathed the air in one of China’s brand new megatropolises, and listened daily as the tops of hills were blasted off in nearby mines. I saw firsthand the opulent wealth that was beginning to take hold in the emerging Chinese bourgeois alongside the abject poverty of the working class. I saw the rapid militarization as the students on campus went through their mandatory military exercises, and experienced class conversations that demonstrated both their profound sense of national pride, and their deep (if cautious) skepticism towards government censorship and the opaque film it lay across any relationship to the reality of the world beyond China’s borders. Above all, I heard students speak desperately about the environment and their own health in relationship to the speed of industrialization. In my own city, Chicago, I had witnessed poverty that matched the worst of what I saw in China. I had seen my region, the Midwest, sink into a drug-addled depression as production left for China. And I had watched over the better part of my life as environmental issues, like most issues, became increasingly partisan as reality metamorphosed into something subjective. If you did not like the facts, you could just change the channel. As myopic as it may sound now, I was not yet aware that one could apply literary criticism to the ends of ecological awareness and environmental activism. I had not yet met Joni Adamson, or read Scott Slovic, but the sentiment in the quote above summarizes nicely the doubts I was experiencing about the path I was on. I was not at all certain that I could dedicate my life to literature, especially early modern literature, and still feel like I was doing something. I was left with the question: How could it possibly make sense to read and teach Shakespeare as corporate interests capitalized on the disappearance of old growth forests, species vanished from the planet, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 An education in naturecultures: Review of literature on ecocriticism, biosemiotics, and Shakespeare
• 2 With parted eye: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Richard Powers’ Orfeo, and Biosemiotics
• 3 Slaughtering the beast: Applause, bullfighting, and fascism in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Richard Wright’s Pagan Spain
• 4 Co-conspirators: Invoking Macbeth in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake
• 5 Migrations: Butterflies and Shakespeare in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior
• 6 Mutations and interpretations: From The Tempest to La Otra Tempestad
• Index