Fostering critical hope: creative engagements with Shakespeare in times of environmental and political crisis
Contemporary cultural productions adapt, rewrite, and trouble Shakespeare for many reasons. This panel examines cultural productions that turn to Shakespeare as a tool to think through the intersections of environmental crisis, socio-political injustice, war, planetary dispossession, migration, and indigenous knowledges. We examine the interconnections between the “new” realities of environmental, material, and socio-political crisis in late modernity and the early modern concerns that emerge in Shakespeare’s works. We consider how contemporary literary and cultural productions set up a novel dialogue between Shakespeare and present-day audiences, enabling transhistorical perspectives on the present and the imagining of more just futures.
The panel probes the impact of creative practice in bearing witness to the intertwined realities of environmental and political crisis. The works under focus include a range of genres (new stagings of Shakespeare’s plays, innovative adaptations, documentary films, and contemporary fiction that invokes Shakespeare in some way) and a range of political contexts beset by environmental crisis, cultural conflict and political turbulence, including Ukraine and Palestine. Guided by the creative innovations of the works, we seek to explore the parallel stories of anthrocide and ecocide. In what ways might the early modern works offer themselves as a resource for answering questions about the urgent concerns of “late” modernity, as the impact of centuries of extractionist degradation and colonialist exploitation manifests in climate crisis and political turmoil? We consider what Shakespeare might contribute to discussions of environmental crisis, migration, planetary dispossession, climate change, and socio-cultural hierarchies. How do creative practitioners work with Shakespeare to invite audiences and readers to engage with disturbing histories, bear witness to unfolding crises in the present, and imagine together a more just and sustainable future?
Taking our lead from playwright Madeline Sayet who cautions, “Shakespeare … has become weighed down by the baggage of its performance history, instead of the possibility of its performance future,” the panel thus explores how Shakespeare’s works serve not only as historical backdrop to contemporary crises but also as active interlocutors for questions about environmental justice and the ongoing processes of war, dispossession and injustice. Fostering critical hope through creative engagagements with Shakespeare in contemporary culture is one of the ways in which Shakespeare may be conceived of as “planetary” in the twenty-first century.
The panel is organized by Gretchen Minton, Kirsten Sandrock, and Sandy Young.
Gretchen Minton, Montana State University, USA
“Making our Ukraine bleed: Reflections on ecocide and reclamation in contemporary Shakespeare adaptations”
Max Webster’s production of Henry V opened at the Donmar Warehouse shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Webster’s original aim to highlight the links between imperialism, masculinity, and ecocide inherent in Henry V thus gained urgency in the face of the war and its atrocities unfolding in real time. Reports listed not only massive human loss, but thousands of instances of ecosystem damage. Such a bleak picture of the loss of a country due to military destruction is evident in a documentary entitled King Lear: How we looked for love during the war, about a troupe of refugees who staged Lear in Uzhhorod, Ukraine and subsequently in Stratford-upon-Avon in 2024. As the director Viacheslav Yehorov repeatedly emphasized, “Although we are saddened by the events of this real-life tragedy, we have to live in hope, be strong and love.” This paper will look at the ways in which these contemporary adaptations offer parallel stories of anthrocide and ecocide, while also using Shakespeare to reclaim a more just future founded upon a stewardship of “this best garden of the world”.
Kirsten Sandrock, University of Wuerzburg, Germany
“Planetary Crises, Critical Hope: Shakespeare and Contemporary Dystopias”
In an age of planetary crises, Shakespeare features surprisingly frequently as a vehicle to express hope in contemporary dystopias. Recent fiction repeatedly turns to Shakespeare as an interlocutor to negotiate different crises, including climate change, environmental disaster, pandemics, refugee experiences or socio-political hierarchies. This paper discusses how Shakespeare features in Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014), John Lanchester’s The Wall (2019), and Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood (2023) to ask what kinds of dialogue the novels initiate between early and late modernity and how Shakespeare unites dystopian traditions with critical hope. Shakespeare functions not only as a bridge between past and present, but also as an interlocutor to negotiate the complex and frequently uneasy role literature and the arts play in our crisis-ridden culture.
Sandra Young, University of Cape Town, South Africa
“What the land remembers: contemporary encounters with Hamlet from a place of dispossession and outrage”
Contemporary activist creatives continue to turn to Hamlet as a play with which to give expression to outrage and mourning in the wake of political violence. In a paper that reads Isabella Hammad’s novel, Enter Ghost (2023), alongside the documentary, The Village Under the Forest (dir. Heidi Grunebaum, 2013), I reflect on the way in which the novel invokes Shakespeare’s most widely travelled play as part of its work of witness. Inviting readers to imagine a bold staging in the West Bank, the novel draws Hamlet and his discontents into a contemporary Palestinian landscape, reminding readers as it does so that the landscape itself tells a story of dispossession and loss, and that the ecoviolence it is subjected to is intertwined with the dispossession of its people. The paper approaches the Palestinian landscape as a site of memory and forgetting, through an exploration of Hammad’s imaginative rendering of a Palestinian Hamlet and his struggles.