Grounding Shakespeare, Responding to Ecological Crisis: Land, Soil, and the Inappropriable
How do we marshal Shakespeare to make his work available as a resource for helping humanity address our current state of deepening ecological crisis worldwide? To think in terms of the “planetary” as scholars of Shakespeare is to think of how we might interrogate the various cultural legacies that have played a part in creating a global state of ecological crisis—not just for humanity but for non-human nature. At the same time, it is to engage the question “what can be done?” as we face the impending and rapidly escalating threats of the climate emergency. How does our work with Shakespeare assist with this? How might our readings of the Shakespearean drama and other early modern literature help us address the crisis? What sort of approaches and methods might enable new ecocritical readings of literary texts that illuminate the long struggle to shield the Earth from harm and build a shared sociality supportive of more just orientations toward both human and non-human natures? How can our work as teachers and scholars help to shape a governing ethos for humanity and specific practices and institutions that may drive responses adequate to the scale of humanity’s concatenating crises?
This panel seeks to ground our understandings of Shakespeare in new or newly urgent ways by showcasing the Shakespearean drama’s orientation to land, soil, and an ethos of the inappropriable. How does the Shakespearean drama and other early modern literature represent and confront the material conditions and social developments in England during Shakespeare’s lifetime that have contributed to our contemporary global ecological crisis? How does this work diagnose the problems, and how does it orient us to prospective solutions? Where might historical ways of thinking or historical ideas orient us, urgently and positively, to present concerns? How might a consideration of “the commons” in tension with exploitative individuality and private property help us now as we confront neoliberal power and its ecocidal economy?
The three talks engage with the important creative and critical opportunities that scholarship on Shakespeare brings to the urgent need for planetary responsibility and investigate some of the ideational obstacles, historic and current, that stand in the way of collective action to protect our planet. Daniel Vitkus will offer a paper about how Shakespeare’s purchase of land in Stratford-upon-Avon, his leasing of tithes, and his activity as a “grain badger” provide a window into the early history of the commodification of the land and the exploitation of labor that have culminated today in a world of agribusiness and food scarcity. Liz Oakley-Brown’s talk argues that Shakespeare studies (broadly defined) have a key role in the difficult task of “communicating the crucial importance of soils to the public” today. And Carolyn Sale’s talk on As You Like It will argue for the imperative of a new legal order of the inappropriable. In tandem, the panel’s papers activate a dialectical synthesis of early modern contexts and present crises in order to propose radical reorientations to life on our planet.
Daniel Vitkus, University of California San Diego, USA
Leasing the Land: Shakespeare, Property, Commodity
With the wealth he accumulated as a sharer in the Globe Theater, Shakespeare purchased land in Stratford-upon-Avon, leased a right to collect local tithes there, and stockpiled large amounts of grain during times of scarcity. The archival record of these financial transactions provides a window into the early history of the commodification of the land and the exploitation of agrarian labor under early capitalism. The paper concludes by developing some fruitful connections between these transactions and the language used by Shakespeare to describe the land and the ways it was controlled and commodified by the landowning class that Shakespeare joined.
Liz Oakley-Brown, Lancaster University, UK
Shakespeare’s Soil and Marlowe’s Muck: Timon of Athens, All Ovid’s Elegies and Safeguarding Planetary Surfaces
As William Rueckert’s ‘first Law of Ecology’ puts it, ‘Everything is connected to everything else’ (‘Literature and Ecology : Experiment in Ecocriticism’, 1978). With this principle in mind, my short comparative talk suggests that Shakespeare’s play and Marlowe’s poems are key texts for raising awareness of and acting against the global soil crisis. In so doing, ‘Shakespeare’s Soil and Marlowe’s Muck’ shows how Shakespeare Studies has a key role in the difficult task of ‘communicating the crucial importance of soils to the public’ today (Thinking with Soils: Material Politics and Social Theory, Granjou, Kearnes, Krzywoszynska, and M. Tironi (eds) 2020).
Carolyn Sale, University of Alberta, Canada
As You Like It, Ecological Crisis, and the Inappropriable
This talk will focus on what is most optimistic about representations of the ecological in Shakespeare’s drama. While much of the drama critically represents the problems of developments in the sixteenth century which permitted the expropriation of life-sustaining resources into fewer and fewer hands, As You Like It, especially through its melancholic Jaques, promotes, in a hopeful register, an ideology of the common, and, more specifically, the imperative of humanity’s orientation to an ethos of non-appropriation or a logic of the inappropriable. Global orientation to this ethos will be essential to extricating humanity from our planetary state of ecological crisis.