Shakespeare Grounded: Ecocritical Approaches to Shakespearean Drama The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Grossman, Joanna Rebecah. 2014. Shakespeare Grounded: Ecocritical Approaches to Shakespearean Drama. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:13064927 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Shakespeare Grounded: Ecocritical Approaches to Shakespearean Drama A dissertation presented by Joanna Rebecah Grossman to The Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of English Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts August 2014 © 2014 – Joanna Rebecah Grossman All rights reserved. Professor Stephen Greenblatt Joanna Rebecah Grossman Shakespeare Grounded: Ecocritical Approaches to Shakespearean Drama Abstract Using the “Great Chain of Being” – which was integral to the Elizabethan understanding of the world – as a starting point, this dissertation examines the sometimes startling ways in which Shakespeare’s plays invert this all-encompassing hierarchy. At times, plants come to the forefront as the essential life form that others should emulate to achieve a kind of utopian ideal. Still other times, the soil and rocks themselves become the logical extension of a desire to remove man from the pinnacle of earthly creation. Over the course of this project, I explore plays that emphasize a) alternative, non-mammalian modes of propagation, b) the desire to sink the human body into the earth (or, at a minimum, man’s closeness to the ground), and c) the imagined lives of flora and fauna, while underscoring man’s kinship with myriad organisms. In many of the works explored, a modern vision of materiality comes to the forefront, presenting a stark contrast to the deeply held religious views of the day. In flipping the ladder upside down, Shakespeare entices his reader to confront inherent weaknesses in human and animal biology, and ultimately to question why man cannot seek a better model from the lowly ground upon which he treads. iii Table of Contents List of Figures……………………………………………………………………………………..v Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………….vi Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………..……1 Chapter One……………………………………………………………………………………...47 People as Plants in The Winter’s Tale Chapter Two……………………………………………………………………………………...72 Timon of Ashes Chapter Three…………………………………………………………………………………...100 Undoing the Unnatural in Macbeth Chapter Four…………………………………………………………………………………....127 “Jove’s stout oak”: Trees and Power in The Tempest Chapter Five…………………………………………………………………………….………169 “Of his bones are coral made”: The Ocean’s Organic Remains in The Tempest Chapter Six……………………………………………………………………………………...200 Love, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Game in As You Like It Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………237 iv List of Figures 1. Seventeenth century tulip watercolor illustrations 2. Illustrations of male and female mandrake roots, Hortus Sanitatis (1491) 3. Dish with a coiled snake, attributed to Bernard Palissy (c. 1550) 4. Medieval Green Man in Nottinghamshire cathedral 5. Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Vertumnus (c. 1590) 6. The Tree of Political Hierarchy from Rhetorica Christiana (1579) 7. Half man, half dog from the Hortus Sanitatis 8. The Great Chain of Being from Rhetorica Christiana 9. Frontispiece to A New Orchard and Garden (1623) 10. Monstrous child in The Works of that Famous Chirurgeon Ambrose Parey (1634) 11. Engraving from The Forester’s Guide and Profitable Planter (1824) 12. Genealogy of Edward IV from the Typological life and genealogy of Edward IV (c. 1470) 13. Portrait of Petrarchan mistress in The Extravagant Shepherd (1654) 14. Coral, mugwort, and wormwood from the sixth century Vienna Dioscurides 15. Giuseppe Arcimboldo, The Librarian (c. 1566) 16. Cross-sections of pearl and tree trunk 17. Days one through four of creation in the late fifteenth century Book of Chronicles 18. Geocentric celestial spheres from Cosmographia (1539) 19. “Integra Natura” from Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia (1617-18) 20. Roosters from the thirteenth century Theological Miscellany of Peraldus and Imaginacion de vraye noblesse (c. 1500) 21. Nicholaes de Bruyn, Orpheus Playing to the Animals (c. 1600) v Acknowledgements This dissertation would not be what it is without the guidance of my remarkable advisors: Stephen Greenblatt, Marc Shell, and Daniel Albright. Their brilliance astounds me on a daily basis and their insightful readings and comments continuously steered me in the right direction and helped me find my footing in the course of developing this project. I have been so fortunate to have Stephen Greenblatt as my primary advisor. Without his careful direction, this dissertation would have been an aimless endeavor. It is hard to imagine someone more conscientious and who cares as much about helping his students succeed. His patience and sharp observations throughout this process have meant the world to me. I want to thank Marc Shell for his warmth and humor, and for inspiring me to think outside the box when interpreting texts. Our discussions always left me energized and eager to pursue new ideas. Indeed, the seed of this project sprouted in his seminar on kinship during my first semester of graduate school. I also want to thank Daniel Albright for being incredibly generous with his time, for being the wealth of knowledge that he is, and for his uncanny ability to perceive hidden connections and illuminate allusions in the blink of an eye. I am grateful to my parents, Howard and Virginia, for their love and support every step of the way. Their encouragement set me on the path to pursuing my love for literature, and for Shakespeare in particular. Most of all, I want to thank my husband and soulmate, Brad Grossman, for everything – for being the most kindhearted, wise, and compassionate person I know; for sitting with me through countless Shakespeare plays as part of my “research”; for carefully reading my drafts; and for helping me to stay sane and grounded through it all. You give my life new meaning each and every day, and I dedicate this dissertation to you. vi Introduction “I wonder if it wouldn’t have been better if the Almighty had created us all as - well - as sort of plants. You know, firmly embedded in the soil. Then none of this rot about wars and boundaries would have come up in the first place…Can you imagine it…all of us rooted in the soil? Just imagine it!” –Kazuo Ishiguro There has long been a tradition of publishing books that catalogue the flowers mentioned in Shakespeare’s works (see Shakespeare’s Fantastic Garlands , A Gathering of Flowers from Shakespeare , Flowers from Shakespeare’s Garden , and Shakespeare’s Flowers , for a sampling). 1 This fascination and veritable potpourri of information has led to the cultivation of numerous “Shakespeare gardens” across the world. To be sure, such collections (whether printed or planted) usually underscore more of a layman’s pastime than a serious scholarly pursuit. Nevertheless, I find it curious that such widespread interest in Shakespeare’s use of plants has not led to greater headway on this particular subject within the burgeoning field of ecocriticism. While locating studies that focus on the fauna in Shakespeare or other Renaissance texts is not difficult (see Bruce Boehrer’s Shakespeare Among the Animals (2002) or Erica Fudge’s Animals, Rationality, And Humanity in Early Modern England (2006) for two fairly recent book-length studies), plant life and the soil from which plants sprout have received comparatively short shrift. In truth, remarkably little ecocritical scholarship has been devoted exclusively to Shakespeare’s plays and poems; to date, only four books have attempted to stake out this ground: Green Shakespeare (2006), Ecocriticsm and Shakespeare (2011), Ecocritical Shakespeare 1 A list of this nature could become absurdly long if one expanded it to include all plants. A small sample follows: The plant-lore and garden-craft of Shakespeare , Shakespeare gardens: Design, Plants, and Flower lore , Shakespeare’s Garden: With Reference to Over a Hundred Plants , Shakespeare’s Plants and Gardens: A Dictionary , The Botany of Shakespeare . Suffice it to say, Shakespeare had extensive knowledge of plants and used them freely in his works. 1 (2011), and Shakespeare’s Ocean (2012). 2 Of course, a great deal has already been written about the natural world in Shakespeare. But ecocriticism aims to distinguish itself from the “old thematicism and nature studies” in a number of ways (Hallock 80). As Dan Brayton and Lynne Bruckner explain in their introduction to Ecocritical Shakespeare , ecocriticism diverges from prior research in its “attention to anthropocentrism, ecocentrism, living systems, environmental degradation, ecological and scientific literacy, and an investment in expunging the notion that humans exist apart from other life forms” (Bruckner 3). For the purposes of my dissertation, I am most interested in the last meaning – that is to say, the blurring of the boundaries among life forms. As Sir Thomas Browne put it in his Religio Medici (1642), “to call our selves