Shakespeare and Ecological CrisisInterventions in the Face of Climate Emergency

Advances a new agenda for Shakespeare studies by mobilising historicist, presentist and future-oriented readings of Shakespeare’s drama for the urgent ecological concerns of the twenty-first century

• Demonstrates the diagnostic power and visionary perspectives of the Shakespearean drama for both historic and contemporary ecological thinking in relation to issues of class, race, gender, colonialism, technology and human relations with non-human nature
• Provides models for teaching Shakespeare in the face of climate emergency and public-facing uses of Shakespeare’s ecological thinking including in performance
• Exemplifies literary criticism oriented to ecological crisis as a model for scholarship on other authors and across national literatures

In new readings of Shakespeare’s plays and accounts of experimental public-facing uses of his work, contributors to Shakespeare and Ecological Crisis open up the urgent political stakes for Shakespearean drama in the face of a multifaceted ecological crisis not limited to human-caused climate breakdown. They demonstrate the diagnostic power and enduring poetic visions of Shakespeare’s drama for understanding the causes of these crises and articulating possible solutions to humanity’s abuses of human and non-human nature. Historicist, presentist and future-oriented, the essays wrestle with the problems of gendered and racialised cosmologies and the destructiveness of economic ideologies and practices that fail to sustain life on Earth. Oriented to issues such as colonialism, food production, hunger, new technologies and Indigenous ways of knowing and being, the discussions show how the ecological thinking of Shakespeare’s plays imagine not-yet-realised transformations of humanity’s relationship to non-human nature and the promise of new human socialities.