Thinking Like a Planet – Shakespeare’s New/Old Ecologies
This panel assembles three unfamiliar pathways into understanding core ecological questions (around quotidian rhythms, renewable energy, exploitation and use). These “Shakes-planetary” points of view invert what so many describe as the human-centered designation of “Anthropocene” – turning our attention (eyes, ears, hands) towards macrocosms and microcosms not scaled to human use. The era, these papers find, offers vast imaginative resources for formulating alternatives to destructive/extractive eco-modernities as well as early modern alternatives to the presentist nature of most energy and environmental humanities scholarship. These essays try to think like a planet, which is to say they offer “planetary” points of view: points of view inverting what so many describe as the human-centered designation of “Anthropocene.” Indeed, so many critiques of the Anthropocene preserve the logic of its designation by preserving its core structure of causality but substituting a different culprit (Plantationocene, Capitalocene, Wasteocene) or backdating the start date (1945, 1769, 1610, the invention of agriculture) without allowing those earlier histories to alter the logic of the Anthropocene.
To paraphrase Vinciane Despret, “What would the planet say if we asked the right questions?” In trying to ask the planet the right questions, we draw on a range of interlocutors. We invoke “natural history,” despite its sometimes imperial legacies, to seek in early modern thought a “planetary” sensibility. What if “natural” histories (of tides and earthly rotation, of use, of the sun) might help reframe later and darker environmental eventualities? We place a range of later thinkers in dialogue with Shakespeare, be it Lamarck for his pioneering theories of evolution (especially including questions of “use”) or influential environmentalist Rachel Carson, whose lesser-read reflections on tides and oceans offer new pathways. These papers work to transform recent environmental criticism, with its highly presentist focus, not only by revisiting figures like Lamark and Carson but also by offering longer genealogies of critical concepts in energy and the environment.
This panel proposes to bridge the gap between environmental work centered in the present and the rich environmental terrain within Shakespeare studies by marking longer arcs that might connect them. Shakespeareans have been and remain central to the development of eco-critical approaches refined through interpretations of the plays and poems, analyses of critical environmental histories in an era of political transformation and early globalization, and accounts of the relationship between these plays and early modern theatrical practice and the complex instabilities of the little Ice Age. In fact, the iconicity and canonicity of Shakespeare the “man of all seasons” and expert on nature, allows critical leverage on an “all–too-human” Anthropocene.
Our panel is structured with three papers addressing core questions in energy and environmental humanities through Shakespeare’s works and worlds. Given the logistics and timing, we were not able to secure greater international participation by the deadline for submissions. Our intention, should the panel be accepted, is to bring on a fourth panelist who would serve as a chair and respondent to the panel and who would enhance the international diversity of the panel.
Joseph Campana, Rice University
Solar Shakespeare
This paper approaches what Michael Marder might call the “energy dream” of solar energy in the works of Shakespeare. This paper places a decade of fascinating if presentist energy humanities scholarship in conversation with Shakespeare’s solar moments (Timon of Athens, King Lear) and other early modern reflections on the sun that provide alternatives to present day global energy crises. What was solar before it was renewable and apart from human worlds? Must “energy” be party to disaster and tragedy? What can Shakespeareans learn from the energy humanities? What can energy humanities learn from the pre-fossil fuel energy regimes of early modernity?
Jessica Rosenberg, Cornell University
“The Natural History of Use on Planet Shakespeare”
This paper takes Shakespearean drama as an inflection point in longer natural histories of use and utility, in order to ask: What do we understand about the ethics of using nature and one another when we begin to see utility on the planetary scale towards which Shakespeare points us? Its argument tracks accounts of “use” as a category beyond (and even indifferent to) the human, through accounts of plant and animal habit, cunning, and instinct in early modern nature writing and in Shakespeare’s plays, before tracking these concepts forward into Lamarck’s Law of Use and Disuse and contemporary theory.
Laurie Shannon, Northwestern University
“The Quotidian Cosmos: Girdling the Globe, from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Day to Rachel Carson’s Tides”
Midsummer’s notorious sublunary matters make inconstancy fundamental to humankind. But have we fully fathomed the play’s cosmic affordances? What else might it say about our planetary place, speaking from a time when sensibilities about cosmic scale made a more quotidian mark? Midsummer’s lunar phases and diurnal earthly rotation establish a nonhuman calibration of time and an ultra-global sense of our earthly standing as minor (even puny). Using Rachel Carson’s 20thC rediscovery of a world without us, this paper considers how her oceanic writings about tidal forms suggest new perspectives on Shakespeare’s prescient capacity to conjure a planet without us.