‘I wish you joy of the worm’: Evolutionary ecology in Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra

Disaffected from the court and shaken out of conventional assumptions about human nature by the Ghost’s revelations, Hamlet begins to think of comparisons with non-human life, beginning with his father as ‘old mole’ (1.5.170). Later he turns to worms, and his attention suggests a willed strategy of existential and ecological discovery, since worms occupied a place diametrically opposite to humans in the traditional hierarchy of life. Renaissance Humanists often used the perceived inferiority of worms and other animals to define human uniqueness. Their gradations of being, by extension, justified human mastery of the earth represented in Hamlet by Claudius’s modernizing transformation of Denmark into a military-industrial state. Adopting a worm-oriented perspective (wryly imagined by conservation ecologist André Voisin in my epigraph), Hamlet begins to question his own conventional Humanist reflexes, such as those on display in his opening soliloquy (e.g. ‘O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason /Would have mourned longer’ [1.2.150–51]). Recent critics have shown how analogies between social behaviour and animals in Hamlet and other Shakespeare plays reflect the rediscovery of classical scepticism towards human superiority by Humanists such as Michel de Montaigne, before René Descartes and other Enlightenment philosophers elevated mind and soul into essential qualities of human nature. As in other areas of ecology and environmentalism discussed in this book, early modern reflections such as Hamlet’s look forward to today’s post-Cartesian and post-human enquiries into human, animal, and cyborgian crossovers. In this chapter I want to align these pre-modern and present-day horizons with the scientific revolution that links them: evolutionary biology’s tracing of human origins to the shared creaturely and genetic life of the planet. Worms will be my trope for Hamlet’s attention to what Giorgio Agamben calls a ‘zone of indeterminacy’ between human and animal life, and what Andreas Höfele identifies as the complex doubleness of similarity and difference that runs through all of Shakespeare’s animal–human relations, beginning with the comic dialogues of Crab and Lance in The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Land-Uses and Convertible Husbandry in As You Like It

Having made jibes at Orlando’s love-verses and drawn defensive reactions from Rosalind, Touchstone gently reproves her by appealing to nature as a third party: ‘You have said; but whether wisely or no, let the forest judge’ (3.2.117–18). Thinking ecocritically, we might hear in his advice an anticipation of Aldo Leopold’s landmark book, A Sand County Almanac (1949). Leopold redefined ecological ethics by reading his local Wisconsin landscape for signs of its biodiversity, whose value he asserted independent of its economic and social utility. He also encouraged readers to think about reciprocity and fairness in their dealings with the environments and resources they share with non-human life. Jaques’s viewpoint in As You Like It is hardly as self-disinterested as that of a forest. Yet he captures the essence of Leopold’s biocentric principles by reminding Oliver that the trees into which he has thoughtlessly, if romantically, carved his verses are entitled to their own physical integrity (3.2.251–52). Leopold’s outlook inspired the later movement, bioregionalism, which looks to identification with a landscape’s terrain, climate, and biota, or collective plant and animal life, as the basis for resistance to environmental damage caused by distant political authorities and transnational economies. In conceiving environments as ‘life-territories’ with natural rights that extend beyond those of human culture, Leopold invited people to imagine cooperative attachments to regional modes of subsistence and dwelling. Arden and surrounding Warwickshire were the life-territory where Shakespeare learned to think bioregionally. Whereas his knowledge of Windsor in Merry Wives came from passing acquaintance, his sensitivity to Arden’s place-attachments was both deeply personal and critically detached, and he integrated both perspectives into As You Like It. Topographic and social contouring of Warwickshire’s historically changing terrains dramatically heightens the visibility of Arden’s early modern bio-relations. I’ll begin exploring these by considering how Shakespeare gave his dramatic adaptation of Thomas Lodge’s prose romance Rosalynde (1590) a distinctive environmental profile. In doing so, Shakespeare created an ecological meta-commentary on Lodge’s popular forest romance.

Biospheric Ecologies in Cymbeline

Cymbeline makes a theatrical virtue of continually echoing dialogue and scenarios from Shakespeare’s previous plays. Earlier critics were doubtful about this recycling, wondering whether Shakespeare was not falling back on re-runs to make up for failing inventiveness towards the end of his career. These opinions tended to overlook his return to writers such as Boccaccio and Holinshed for fresh material, as well as his projection of personal conflict into new geographic contexts, in the manner of All’s Well That Ends Well and his other late romances. Modern stage productions have capitalized on these signs of imaginative vigour, however, by embracing Cymbeline’s retrospective recreation as cheeky, knowing humour, particularly in the final scene of over-packed revelations and entwining narratives. Cymbeline’s multiple storylines create a polygeneric experience characteristic of Shakespeare’s plays in general and his romances in particular. Steve Mentz has observed that Cymbeline and other ‘polyglot’ romances are well suited to staging modern narratives about the natural world’s tendencies to interdependence, adaptation, and biodiversity. Every main character in Cymbeline has his or her own environmental attachments (e.g. Innogen and Britain, Giacomo and Italy, Lucius and the Roman empire, Cymbeline and ‘Lud’s Town’, Belarius, Arviragus, Guiderius and Wales, Posthumus and Milford Haven). Each of these place-identities represents a different physical and cultural worldview, so when they shift and/or interweave, they suggest dynamic networks operating at multiple levels of planetary space and time. These webbed relations raise modern questions of environmental ethics and practice. Which plane of ecological relations suggests the best way of dwelling responsibly in the world? Which life-challenge might analogize a resolve to reduce excessive consumption and reverse human harm? (e.g. cultivating the local allotment garden? travelling to fewer conferences? preserving boreal forests?). Following trends in postmodern and postcolonial studies, ecotheorists observe that environmentalism has tended to privilege local attachments and modes of dwelling as the common ground for resistance to degrading forces of economic globalization. Pioneering ecocritic Jonathan Bate, for example, celebrated regional and village-focused writers such as William Wordsworth and John Clare.

Localism, Deforestation, and Environmental Activism in The Merry Wives of Windsor

Poisoned towns and rivers, species extinctions, and now climate change have confirmed many times over how modern dreams of limitless growth combined with relentless technological exploitation have compromised planetary life at every level. In response to such degradation, the integrity of local place has been a major orientation for environmental ethics and criticism. The origins of localism are conventionally traced to late-eighteenth-and nineteenth-century critiques of urban industrialization, and Romanticism’s corresponding veneration for rural authenticity and wilderness spaces. Mid-twentieth-century environmentalism revived this ‘ethic of proximity’ in denouncing the release of pollutants and carcinogens into local soils, waters, and atmospheres by civil offshoots of military manufacturing and industrial agriculture. Those releases did not stay local, but soon penetrated regional water systems and wind patterns to become worldwide problems. Such networks of devastation continue to grow, especially in developing countries eager to mimic the worst aspects of Western consumer culture. In response to these developments, ecotheorists have partially revised locally focused models of environmental protection. Planetary threats such as rising global temperatures, melting polar ice sheets, and more intense storms have made it imperative to update the famous Sierra Club slogan and to act globally as well as locally. Localism has also been reshaped by conservation biology’s new recognition that geophysical disturbances and organic change are structural features of all healthy ecosystems. Within these more complicated ecological paradigms, the cultivation of relatively balanced and genuinely sustainable local relationships nonetheless remains an important conservationist worldview. In early modern England it was the leading life experience out of which responses to new environmental dangers were conceived. In this chapter I shall discuss Shakespeare’s representations of one of the three most significant of these threats—deforestation—in The Merry Wives of Windsor. (The other two, exploitative land-uses and gunpowder militarization, will be the subjects of Chapters 2 and 3 respectively). Early modern English writers and governments treated deforestation as a national problem, even though its impacts were concentrated mainly in the Midlands and the south-east.

Ecological Modernity in Shakespeare: an overview

The story of how The Globe (1599) was rebuilt from the reused oak timbers of The Theatre (1576) is well known. Less familiar is the environmental crisis that prompted this thrifty recycling. Shakespeare’s company, the Chamberlain’s Men, were in danger of losing The Theatre because the lease had expired. The landlord, Giles Allen, was threatening to pull down the playhouse and put its wood and timber to other uses. The leaseholders, Richard and Cuthbert Burbage, got there before him because a clause in the original agreement made them owners of the building on Allen’s land. In the lead-up to their stealthy dismantling of The Theatre on the icy morning of 28 December 1598, when Allen was away celebrating Christmas in the country, each side had been eyeing the valuable timber and wood. Its reuse was the lynchpin of a deal between the Burbages and five actor-sharers of the Chamberlain’s Men, including Shakespeare, for building The Globe: the brothers offered to supply the main materials if the sharers contributed to the lesser expenses of construction and maintenance. The Burbages had spent their savings on building an indoor theatre at Blackfriars two years before. Although it had begun to pay them rent, they could not afford to buy new materials because the price of wood and timber had risen 96 per cent over the quarter century since The Theatre had been built. This inflation was the result of southern English woodlands being deforested. Ancient English woodland and forests had been shrinking throughout the middle ages. By Henry VIII’s time the pace began to accelerate. Worried about timber supplies for shipbuilding, the government took the first steps—largely ineffective—to manage depletions. Climactic and demographic pressures aggravated overexploitation, and by the 1590s caused a fuel crisis in south-east England and the country’s first major environmental controversy. Similar to the threat of warming global temperatures today, the stresses on southern English woodland—at that time the country’s most essential but finite natural resource—reached an ecological turning point. A solution was in the offing, but it was a highly ambivalent one.

Gunpowder, Militarization, and Threshold Ecologies in Henry IV Part Two and Macbeth

The disputed land-uses and cultivation practices represented in As You Like It responded to unprecedented changes in Elizabethan climate, population, and economic relations. Traditional modes of rural dwelling were no longer protected by virtue of their rural isolation or autonomy, but were becoming inescapably tied to national and global orders of competitive growth and resource exploitation. Perhaps the most disruptive of these modernizing turns was the development of gunpowder technologies and the armament industry. As in other western European countries, military culture became ubiquitous in England by the late sixteenth century as a result of innovations in gunpowder weapons and the formation of national armies. During the Middle Ages, low-tech weaponry and feudal mobilization had limited the social and environmental impacts of war. This situation began to change from the fifteenth century onwards with the development of far more deadly cannons, mines, and firearms. Influenced partly by the Erasmian ethics of his Humanist education (like Queen Elizabeth and King James in their attitudes to war), Shakespeare drew attention to gunpowder’s devastating effects on human and non-human animals and their environments in virtually all his history plays and several of his tragedies, even thoughmost of these references were anachronistic. By layering historical and contemporary viewpoints he registered changing material realities and cultural assumptions about the ecology of war: from self-regulating cycles of martial destruction and agrarian regeneration, to incremental technological mastery reliant on ever-increasing resource consumption. Traditional ideas about redeeming war through cultivation are captured by the Virgilian image of beating swords into ploughshares. It suggests that peacetime cultivation will heal wartime damage, and that periods of war and peace routinely alternate. The swordsinto-ploughshares trope also encodes temporal assumptions that the arc of catastrophe, in its political, ecological, and dramatic senses, is limited in scope and ultimately reversible. In this chapter I want to examine the emerging gunpowder regime putting pressure on this paradigm, and replacing it with modern structures of recoiling environmental risk and planetary push-back, represented in Henry IV Part Two and Macbeth respectively.