Shakespeare and Eco-Romance
This panel will explore the ecological affordances of romance from creative and critical perspectives. At a historical moment when we are trying to come to terms with the catastrophic effects of climate change, patterns of tragedy on an apocalyptic scale have become pervasive in creative practice, cultural analysis and eco-theory. Accordingly, Bruno Latour has suggested that climate change ‘has not only become a piece of news, not only a story, not only a drama, but also the plot of a tragedy […] so much more tragic than all the earlier plays’ (‘Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene’, 12–13) and Timothy Morton has observed that ‘[r]ight now, ecological awareness presents itself as tragedy’ (All Art is Ecological, 27). More recently, however, scholars and artists have emphasized that despair in the face of loss is an unhelpful, even paralyzing response to climate change: it usually does not inspire action and can instead induce passive suffering. We propose that when it comes to the most versatile genre for addressing environmental crisis is the tragicomic romance so beautifully articulated in Shakespeare’s late plays. Romances stage loss and yet end in hopeful, if often fragile, reconciliation of a community, thus offering productively hopeful models of restoration, collaboration, and solidarty.
On page, stage and screen, Shakespearean eco-romances are also effective for informing, moving, and motivating audiences because of their evocations of various ecosystems like forests and oceans; their portrayal of many kinds of love including intergenerational, romantic, social, and inter-species; their processing of eco-grief, eco-anxiety, pre-traumatic stress disorder and solastalgia; and their evocation of hope, forgiveness, and community repair. This panel, featuring both scholars and scholar-artists, will offer three case studies of Shakespearean eco-romance in the 2020s to open up a more general discussion about the epistemic, experiential and activist potential of planetary romance.
Questions to be addressed in the panel include, but are not limited to the following:
—As a way of conveying both the tragedy of environmental catastrophes and the reconciliatory efforts needed to mitigate and make more just such crises, what advantages does Shakespearean romance have over tragedy, comedy, or history? What are its limitations?
–How does the experience of eco-romance via the theatre or film differ from that of reading in terms of impact and effectiveness as environmental communication?
—What particular plays–including both Shakespeare’s late plays and earlier plays that can be adapted to fit or emphasize a tragicomic narrative arc–lend themselves best to eco-romance?
Elizabeth Freestone, Royal Shakespeare Company and Shakespeare Institute (U. Birmingham), UK
‘Mine would, were I human’: Intergenerational and Interspecies Healing through Acts of Witness, Time and Care in Cymbeline and The Tempest
To consider eco-romance within the current outlook of mass extinction and climate chaos is to recall the trauma of living through what may prove to be the end times. In the context of such ‘ecological grief‘ socio-environmental connectivities between individuals, communities, and more-than-human neighbours rupture. It is within this space and temporality that Shakespeare’s romances enact the careful attention of witness and the patient act of repair; the dual energies required to embark on the process of what Derrida calls ‘successful mourning‘. Through stories that span years, against backdrops of environmental change, the late plays model intergenerational and interspecies healing, platforming the possibility of forgiveness. Jo Confino suggests that failing to recognize the collective pain of ecological grief ‘block[s] us from reaching out for the solutions that can help us find another direction‘ (2014). Through an exploration of The Tempest and Cymbeline, this paper suggests that acknowledging past hurts is the first step towards an improved ability to enter empathetically into the existence of others, and therefore to care better for our shared oikos.
Katherine Steele Brokaw, University of California Merced
Endangered Forests and Cautious Forgiveness in the 2025 Shakespeare in Yosemite As You Like It
The conditions of outdoor Shakespearean theatre lend themselves particularly well to providing audiences with affective, informative, and galvanizing experiences of eco-romances. Shakespeare in Yosemite, which performs free productions of Shakespeare’s work every April for Earth Day, adapts Shakespeare’s plays to speak to the Sierra Nevada’s ecosystems, environmental challenges, and both ancient and modern solutions to these challenges; leverages the audience’s experience of being in Yosemite National Park; and re-scripts the play’s narrative arcs into the shape of romance. For example, Romeo and Juliet in Yosemite (2023) featured one tragic death (Benvolio’s) and the catastrophic wildfire, but ended with the community coming together in solidarity to help reintroduce the red-legged frog to the local ecosystem, and Midsummer Yosemite’s Dream (2024) staged eco-grief and the irrevocable destruction of 20% of the world’s sequoias in the dark center of the play. This paper will discuss the 2025 production of As You Like It, still under development, describing its depiction of worldwide losses of the world’s Ardens and intergenerational, community-based efforts that lead to the preservation and restoration of wild spaces.
Christina Wald, University of Konstanz, Germany
Foe as Post-Apocalyptic Tempest Adaptation: Romance as Renewable Resource
How can we use romance as a renewable resource to come to terms with climate change and resource depletion? Is the portrayal of romantic love an escape from planetary questions, an inadequate indulging in the private concerns of the couple (or throuple) – or do the genre patterns of love romance have their own ecological affordances? How can love melancholia and eco-grief be thought together in the Anthropocene? Addressing these questions, this talk will discuss the film Foe (2023), starring Saoirse Ronan, Paul Mescal and Aaron Pierre, as an unmarked Tempest adaptation. Translocating the romance of Miranda and Ferdinand to a post-apocalyptic future where AI, robotics and human colonies in space promise brave new worlds, Foe intertwines the study of a failing marriage with the ecological ruin of climate change. Yet, true to Shakespearean romance, it also offers ways of thinking towards hope and restoration on a personal and planetary scale