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Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism
By Gabriel Egan
Routledge
£18.99
Dateline: 19th May, 2006
The latest addition to Routledge's Accents on Shakespeare series
sheds new light on the playwright's innumerable references to the natural
world. Even before the birth of Bardolatry Shakespeare was renowned
for his vivid descriptions of animal life, plants, landscape and the
weather; no nature-loving person with access to a copy of the Complete
Works needed to look far for a pithy quotation. There may seem to be
a huge ideological chasm between Shakespeare's pre-industrial, pre-scientific
world and our present day concerns about pollution and climate change,
but Gabriel Egan points out that "In curious ways, the new ideas
about nature and animals have analogues in old ideas expressed in Shakespeare's
plays."
The old ideas that spring immediately to mind are the Great Chain of
Being, popularised by E M W Tillyard's The Elizabethan World Picture,
and the microcosm/macrocosm concept. Many recent commentators have rejected
claims that Shakespeare and his contemporaries accepted this world-view
as a matter of course, but Egan argues that such concepts are not necessarily
simplistic or reactionary. New ideas - the Gaia hypothesis, cellular
structures, analogies between natural and social order - would not have
been entirely alien to Shakespeare's first audiences.
Egan devotes three chapters to different aspects of Shakespeare's treatment
of the natural world. Nature and human society concentrates on
Menenius' Fable of the Belly in Coriolanus, Canterbury's Commonwealth
of Bees speech in Henry V and the apparent link between human
evil and "unnatural" weather and animal behaviour in Macbeth.
Food and biological nature looks at the treatment of human/animal
relationships in As You Like It, overtones of incest (and its
connection with eating) in the Late Plays, and the many images of fertility
and asexual reproduction in Antony and Cleopatra. In Supernature
and the weather Egan examines Shakespeare's use of storms in King
Lear and The Tempest.
Green Shakespeare is full of surprising insights. The hunted
stag described by Jacques in As You Like It, for example, was
not only the source of venison - a meat commonly believed to cause melancholy
- but the tears streaming down its face were thought to be a cure for
an excess of that particular humour. Egan also draws attention to the
fact that although Antony and Cleopatra is full of references
to Egypt's fertile soil, there is a strange aura of sterility surrounding
the lovers themselves. Their children are mentioned several times but
never appear on stage. Antony is compared to the phoenix - a bird born
asexually from its own ashes - and Cleopatra is associated with the
snake, which like Lepidus' crocodile was thought to be the product of
spontaneous generation.
Green Shakespeare, like its predecessors in this series, is
aimed at an undergraduate readership but written in a lively and accessible
style that will appeal to Shakespeare lovers in general. Egan's enthusiasm
for his subject is infectious, and although there are times when it
leads him "to consider too curiously" - ie the somewhat strained
resemblance between the benzene ring and 18th century conjecture about
the shape of the original Globe Theatre - this intriguing book offers
more proof, if any were needed, of Shakespeare's continuing relevance
in the 21st century.
J D Atkinson
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