Studies in Shakespeare & the Early Drama (434-0-20)

Topic

Shakespeare's Environmental Theory of Humankind

Instructors

Laurie Shannon
847 4913643
University Hall Room 214

Meeting Info

University Hall 418: Wed 2:00PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

This seminar will work across Shakespeare's genres -- comedies, tragedies, and tragicomic hybrids -- to consider the ways they might all be read as "versions of pastoral." Reading plays that show a preoccupation with our cosmic place and the sense of an often hostile environmental situation for humans, we'll trace Shakespeare's worry that we, alone among all other species, do not "belong" to nature, but stand apart from it (and not in a good way). The critical concept of Shakespearean "green worlds" first arose to describe the retreats into nature and away from society that typically occur in the comedies. A removal to the green world -- getting "back to Nature" -- enables a rebalanced socio-political life to be officially restored. But how well does this traditional sense of a salubrious Nature hold up, especially if we consider comedies and tragedies together? Against what, exactly, is the human social order defined and established, and from what apparently threatening "laws of Nature" is it supposed to defend us? In other words, what might an environmental or even a planetary perspective entail … around 1600?

As we consider a "human epoch" that sweeps from the idea of Eden to the Anthropocene, we find a special torsion in the idea of nature in Shakespeare's era. We will take time to think about the ways Shakespeare's premodern vision of human existence might amplify our thinking about contemporary environmental crises. To provide locales for our focused readings of As You Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream, King Lear, and The Winter's Tale, contextual materials will range among selections from Genesis, Theocritus, Sappho, Plato, Ovid, Pliny, Thomas More, Michel de Montaigne, Edmund Spenser, George Gascoigne, John Gerard, Richard Hooker, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Hobbes, to writing by William Empson, Rachel Carson, Raymond Williams, Amitav Ghosh, Donna Haraway, and Dipesh Chakrabarty.

Enrollment Requirements

Enrollment Requirements: REASON: Pre-registration is not allowed for this class. Please try again during regular registration.
Add Consent: Department Consent Required