Statue, bear or rogue : ecological objects in Shakespeare and Jonson

Recent trends in literary ecocriticism have led to explicit politicized readings of historical texts and theatrical performances, including dramas by early modern playwrights William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Often imposing a contemporary ecological framework on the works in question, such “presentist” readings tend towards anachronism. While the current global environmental crisis gives such readings their urgency, it would be helpful that we develop a more historically and theoretically nuanced understanding of early modern ecologies. An approach that embraces both environmental and art histories can help illuminate the plays to this end. In particular, a renewed focus on the intersections among character, theatrical space, sculpture, painting, architecture, and animal ecologies can provide a fuller understanding of an early modern “green” consciousness. In this way, we may come to an accurate understanding of ecological ideas that circulated in the time of Shakespeare and Jonson—without politicizing our analyses to accord with a current agenda. A close examination of Elizabethan and Jacobean characters from a perspective that sees them as integrated human and non-human entities, or what I call ecological objects, can teach us a great deal about the early modern “environment.” As agentic beings situated in “nature” defined as a hybrid entity of wild and manufactured elements, characters embody facets of an early modern fascination with the organic and the aesthetic: nature and culture combined. In the philosophical language of today, this bridging of contradictory phenomena has been described as “dark ecology.” Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and Winter’s Tale, along with Jonson’s Masque of Oberon the Fairy Prince and Bartholomew Fair, provide evidence of such an historical eco-consciousness that has reverberations in the contemporary world. Understanding theatrical characters as depictions of historical ecologies can elicit in spectators a renewed sense of praxis (e.g., as thinking and/or feeling) and, ultimately, stewardship of Planet Earth.