Shakespeare's Ocean

An Ecocritical Exploration

Dan Brayton

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780813941240
• eBook ISBN: 9780813932279
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

1

Backs to the Sea?

THE TERRESTRIAL BIAS

How inappropriate to call this planet “Earth” when clearly it is “Ocean.”

ARTHUR C. CLARKE

These are the best and the worst of times for ecocritics, propelled as we are by a growing sense of professional legitimacy in the face of a looming sense of environmental catastrophe. New signs of ecological overload, collapse, and the wrong kinds of regime shifts appear almost daily to remind us that the Earth’s biosphere is in crisis and that this crisis is the result of human activity. The oil that was hemorrhaging into the Gulf of Mexico as I completed the manuscript of this book wreaked, in a matter of months, irreparable harm to the once-rich marine ecosystems of the region and to formerly thriving fishing and beach communities, demonstrating yet again how much humanity desperately needs to rethink its energy use, development patterns, food systems, and methods of waste disposal. While the present study was begun long before the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig that killed eleven oil workers and countless sea turtles, fish, seabirds, and shorebirds, that event brought renewed attention to the general crisis of the marine environment. Even as the very problem that motivates many of us, the unsustainable human “footprint” on the natural world, broadens and deepens around the globe, our work becomes more relevant.

As the overheated global ocean produces major cyclonic storms with increasing frequency (witness Hurricanes Katrina and Rita), vividly demonstrating the stakes of expanding the human footprint on this planet, the new millennium has produced a perfect storm of environmental literary scholarship, with a growing body of anthologies, overviews, and critical studies all aimed at expanding, critiquing, and diversifying ecocriticism, which in the twenty-first century constitutes not so much a subfield as a metafield of literary scholarship, a commitment not limited to traditional historical periods and genres.¹ Its practitioners nearly always aim at two audiences, those in our particular subfields of literary study (such as Shakespeare, Victorian literature, or the novel) and those who identify themselves primarily as ecocritics.² Two developments have converged to align the perspectives of significant sections of the fields (meta- and sub-) of ecocriticism. First, growing public awareness about the causes and effects of global climate change—and the attendant “debate” over the “theory” of global warming in the international media—imparts an increasing tone of urgency to the work of scholars seeking a greater engagement with social justice (as environmental justice), environmental ethics, and activism than the academy has hitherto tended to support.³ Scholars interested in rethinking, historicizing, and theorizing contemporary notions of what constitutes nature and the environment are producing a burgeoning body of ecocritical scholarship. This confluence of forces has produced widespread interest in ecopoetics and ecopolitics throughout academia, particularly in the Anglophone academy. As a result, ecocritical scholarship is increasingly impelled beyond its traditional boundaries, American Nature Writing and British Romanticism, to fresh fields and pastures new—a centrifugal movement that I wholeheartedly endorse. Yet this expansion has yet to take ecocriticism to sea.

I see nothing wrong with a love of the land (which I share), but its deep encoding in the terminology and conceptual categories that define ecocritical inquiry profoundly limits our object of study and keeps us from reaching beneath the surface of what the poet Mary Oliver describes as the “green and black cobbled coat” of the sea.⁴ Viewed from afar this planet is mostly blue, yet the extent of its oceanic blues is hidden beneath a land-loving mentality that can be difficult to displace. By acknowledging the rich literary presence of the ocean in Anglophone literature (particularly in the works of a celebrated writer whom many of us imagine we have read carefully) and incorporating the interdisciplinary potential of the marine sciences, ecocriticism can expand its scope and reclaim bygone models for conceptualizing the human relationship to the biophysical environment, which may well be more helpful than the prevalent post-Romantic ones we now espouse.

Part of what makes the term ecocriticism meaningful is the metonymic chain of related signifiers that articulate the commitments, achievements, and scholarly horizons of its practitioners, terms such as ecology, environment, green, and the land. Every subfield (and metafield) of literary scholarship produces its own terminology. Keywords and phrases tend to multiply with the expansion of the subfield (or metafield); working within the discipline begins with making basic distinctions. Consider how productive have been some of the distinctions made in literary study: those between metaphor and metonymy, imperialism and orientalism, georgic and pastoral, sex and gender, epic and romance. Some of these distinctions pertain to different subfields; others pertain to all of literary study and begin to appear self-evident after years of use. Like any other scholarly idiolect, ecocriticism employs a host of key terms and phrases that might seem from afar to overlap but which, on close inspection, mark crucial distinctions.⁵ Similes abound, such as “environmental criticism, literary-environmental studies, literary ecology, literary environmentalism, [and] green cultural studies.”⁶ Lawrence Buell has claimed that this approach (however labeled), “implies a … methodological holism” that is, as Sharon O’Dair and others have argued, largely chimerical.⁷ As ecocriticism has grown more theoretically and methodologically self-conscious, scholars have begun to critique the undertheorized conceptual categories that form a kind of terminological substratum that undergirds, and undermines, the work of ecocritics.

The term nature, for example, offers slippery conceptual footing, as Dana Phillips argues in his rather brutal critique of ecocritical terminology and methodology. For Phillips, ecocritics are not genuinely interdisciplinary but hampered by an endemic tendency to employ scientific concepts merely as metaphors:

The infamous gaps between the arts and the sciences … are apt to be papered over rhetorically. All too often, little or no effort is made to confront these gaps directly and to bridge them argumentatively, where that is plausible (sometimes, of course, the gaps are simply unbridgeable, and the disciplines may have little, if anything, to say to one another). The inevitable result is that basic errors of fact and interpretation, especially of the latter, are perpetuated under the banner of interdisciplinarity.⁸

I am much less skeptical of the claims and procedures of scholars who draw ideas and inspiration from ecology than is Phillips (I am also less confident than he in his own ability to adjudicate what he considers “errors of fact and interpretation”). Nonetheless, this chapter attempts to bridge one of the “gaps” he posits—that between literary scholarship and the marine sciences. This gap is created, as I shall demonstrate, in the discursive production of what I shall call the terrestrial bias, a tendency to locate the subject of ecocritical inquiry in a green and landlocked space.

It is not the term nature that I find troubling, although, as Timothy Morton has recently argued, it is often employed with imprecision by well-meaning yet scientifically hazy literature professors.⁹ The term is too pervasive and useful to be expunged from the critical vocabulary and too contested to drop from view. Yet of all the terms that help us to do the kind of conceptual anchoring on which scholarship can be built, the idea of the land—generally used as a transhistorical, universal ground of meaning—strikes me as the most pervasive and worthy of scrutiny. Unlike nature and ecology, both of which have been subjected to rigorous theoretical scrutiny, the land remains largely unexamined in ecocritical discourse, and its ubiquity in current scholarship both delimits and limits the scope of our work. Even as it expands centrifugally across the subfields, ecocritical scholarship is held inward by a centripetal force, a core commitment to all that is green and lives on terra firma. The fetishization of the land as a conceptual foundation or primitive term has limited the scope of ecocritical inquiry to terrestrial topics—the American West, Wordsworthian pastoral, Milton’s and Shakespeare’s woods and meadows. Terrestrial terminology (ground is also ubiquitous in ecocriticism) and imagery remain largely unexamined in spite of the polysemy of the term land (which can denote one’s native country, dirt, or the physical landscape, just for starters), as well as its ubiquity in current scholarship. While an appeal to the land is useful shorthand for invoking the terminologically ephemeral ground of meaning of ecocritical inquiry (be it nature or the biophysical environment), this terrestrial bias also situates environmental scholarship and the subject of ecocritical inquiry on shore, banishing from view the sea and its intimate connection to terrestrial phenomena.

Almost entirely lacking from ecocritical scholarship is a critical approach to the global ocean—that immense, life-creating and biosphere-sustaining body of salt water in which all life came to be, to which some (marine mammals) returned after an evolutionary sojourn on dry land, and into which we continue to pour the detritus of our civilization and our lives: garbage, toxic waste, excreta, and sins of all kinds. While the rapid growth of ecocriticism beyond the confines of its traditional homes has led to a vast amount of new work, recuperative, revisionist, reactionary, progressive, critical, and experimental, the global ocean—and the work of marine scientists and marine environmental historians—has to date had no role in the scholarship. The best introduction to ecocriticism contains barely a mention of the sea or its denizens.¹⁰ By splashing blue water onto literary scholarship, I would like to suggest that ecocriticism would do well to rethink its “primitive” terms and the preconceptions about the physical environment that accompany them.¹¹ Incorporating the literary history of the sea and the perspective of the marine sciences can greatly expand the horizons for ecocritical scholarship.

A glance at the major surveys and edited volumes confirms the ubiquity of the terrestrial bias in ecocritical scholarship. The land is at the heart of the matter, and it is everywhere. From scholarly monographs to emergent journals, articles, poems, essays in creative nonfiction, title after title refers to the land as a means of characterizing a scholarship that attempts to balance the aesthetic and the ethical.¹² Essay collections routinely invoke the land as a self-evident conceptual category serving as a presumably firm ground (if you will) of meaning. An appeal to the noun (land) or the noun phrase (the land) signals a set of values and concerns presumably shared by scholars committed to the study of environmental literature. Consider, for instance, the introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader, in which Cheryl Glotfelty notes that “ecocriticism takes as its subject the interconnections between nature and culture, specifically the cultural artifacts of language and literature. As a critical stance, it has one foot in literature and the other on land” (emphasis added).¹³ For Glotfelty, announcing ecocriticism’s coming of age in 1996, the land is shorthand for a host of environmental topics—and for the disposition of a new scholarship.

Not all invocations of the land are so casual. In the powerful and influential discussion of the land ethic with which he concludes his magnum opus, A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold uses the term with considerable rigor. Leopold was primarily concerned with ecological balance; in his words, “Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.”¹⁴ His groundbreaking theorization of a land ethic was partly motivated by his personal regret for having contributed, when he was a young man, to wolf-extermination programs in the mistaken belief that such killing would be good for deer populations. His life’s work was to rethink terrestrial ecosystems in holistic and systematic ways, moving, in the words of his biographer Curt Meine, “toward a biotic view of the land.”¹⁵ As Meine points out, “Leopold’s approach to education was closely tied to his broadening conception of ‘land’ in the late 1930s.”¹⁶ Leopold’s famous theorization of the land ethic redefined the land as a much more complex substratum than any merely intuitive definition of the term, one based on his many years of experience as a field scientist. As he wrote, “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively, the land.”¹⁷ A more encompassing formulation would be difficult to imagine; a more influential one has never been penned.

In light of my argument about the (thoroughly unintentional) terrestrial bias of ecocritical discourse, two features of Leopold’s formulations are especially worthy of note: first, humanity is signified by “men,” which establishes a (thoroughly unintentional) gender normativity; second, the “waters” of the Earth are encompassed by the category of “the land.” Perhaps because he was a scientist (not a word-obsessed student of language and literature) Leopold did not feel the need to scrutinize the basic terms of his discussion too closely.¹⁸ They worked for him, just as they have worked for countless others whose work is inspired by Leopold’s writings. Yet in the same way he uses man and men as normative terms for human beings, so too is land used to mean the natural environment. In the same way that we would, today, prefer a gender-neutral term to men, it seems apparent that the biophysical environment would be preferable to land. While I do not wish to take Leopold too sternly to task for employing terminology that held largely unchallenged normative significance in his lifetime, it would be a mistake to overlook their resonances, for built into Leopold’s account of the land ethic (one that I find indispensible and inspiring) is an undeniable terrestrial bias, a privileging of terrestrial ecosystems that relegates the global ocean to a kind of conceptual netherworld. Leopold’s definition of the land ethic as encompassing “waters” inverts biblical and classical cosmogony, in which the firmament and the oikumene are surrounded by “the deep,” in one case, and Okeanos, in the other. In his view, water is secondary to land as well as part and parcel of it; nowhere is the specificity of the marine environment acknowledged.

It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of Leopold’s writings on the discourse of ecocriticism, and it would be a terrible mistake to take an overly critical stance toward them. Yet in adhering to the letter more than the spirit of the land ethic, ecocritics have almost entirely overlooked how literally blue our planet is, as well as just how metaphorically blue it is becoming.¹⁹ A truly encompassing land ethic would involve a perspectival shift in the conceptual cat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Shakespeare and the Global Ocean
• 1. Backs to the Sea? The Terrestrial Bias
• 2. Consider the Crab
• 3. Shakespeare’s Benthic Imagination
• 4. Tidal Bodies
• 5. Royal Fish: Shakespeare’s Princely Whales
• 6. Shakespeare among the Fishmongers
• 7. Prospero’s Maps
• Coda: Toward a Terraqueous Ecocriticism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index