English and Film Studies

ENGL 426/635: Shakespeare and Ecological Crisis

This course gives students the opportunity to engage an urgent question for literary studies, with five Shakespeare plays as our starting point: in the face of an ever-increasing global ecological crisis, how does literature help us to understand the causes of and imagine responses to the rapidly growing threat to humanity’s existence that scientists have predicted and warned about for decades? Shakespeare’s work is immensely helpful in this regard. Written on the brink of modernity, Shakespeare’s work reflects developments in Shakespeare’s lifetime that have played a role in shaping our current crisis—or rather the concatenating crises imperilling humanity and myriad other species. At the same time, Shakespeare’s work powerfully exemplifies the immense imaginative capacity that literary writers bring to the problems that humanity has created for itself, the planet’s non-human beings, and the Earth’s elements and atmosphere.

We will study A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, Lear, The Tempest, and Pericles in relation to select secondary readings that help us situate the Shakespearean drama and ecological crisis in relation to historical and contemporary thinking about humanity ‘s relationship with non-human nature.

Keeping in mind the ancient Greek root of the word “ecology,” οἶκος, which means house or dwelling, we will also ask how the Shakespearean drama helps us consider what it takes to maintain a common house or dwelling that sustains Earth’s species, human and non-human, as well as living matter, and what our current “crisis” demands by way of response to ecocidal impulses and forces.

Carolyn Sale