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LEAF, BARK, THORN, ROOT: ARBOREAL ECOCRITICISM AND SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA by Jason Charles Hogue DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at The University of Texas at Arlington May, 2019 Arlington, Texas Supervising Committee: Amy L. Tigner, Supervising Professor Stacy Alaimo Jacqueline Fay ABSTRACT Leaf, Bark, Thorn, Root: Arboreal Ecocriticism and Shakespearean Drama Jason Charles Hogue, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Arlington, 2019 Supervising Professor: Amy L. Tigner Leaf, Bark, Thorn, Root traces the appearance of trees and their constituent parts in five Shakespearean plays: Macbeth, The Tempest, 3 Henry VI, Richard III, and As You Like It. The dissertation shows how these plays reveal arboreal agencies intra-acting with the characters of the play-texts by assessing the mergings of human and arboreal bodies, as well as instances of hacking and hewing inflicted across these bodies. Taking a posthumanist approach informed by ecomaterialism, critical plant studies, and affect theory, I argue that these sites of painful human- arboreal encounter in Shakespeare’s plays initiate potentials for thinking-with and feeling-with, across not only species (in the spirit of Donna Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto) but also across biological kingdoms. Throughout the dissertation, I complicate philosopher Michael Marder’s theories of plant-thinking via these early modern depictions of and relations to trees, whose complex existences inform the texts in multiple registers. The trees of Shakespeare offer ways into theorizing plant-being that not only reflect early modern preoccupations but also resonate across the centuries, potentially serving as a bridge between historicist and presentist methodological concerns, a useful nexus for facing looming ecological issues like climate change, the effects of which long-lived trees bear bodily witness in their annual growth rings and in the shifting of leaf longevity. Using a version of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert’s ii “veer ecology,” the chapters of the dissertation represent both arboreal body parts and action verbs (leaf, bark, thorn, root), and illuminate a number of “arborealizations.” Four conceptual tools that I develop from these Shakespearean arborealizations are deciduous-sense, inter- missing time, thornition, and queer rhizosphere. In a coda, I apply these four theoretical eco-tools in a brief reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to assess speculative possibilities of vegetal pleasure and desire. iii Copyright © by Jason Charles Hogue 2019 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am very grateful for having had the opportunity to work with the three individuals on my dissertation committee, all of whom have impacted my academic life far beyond the classroom space. My primary supervisor, Amy Tigner, has been a steady guide and mentor to me from my first semester at the University of Texas-Arlington. Throughout the writing process, I felt supremely lucky to receive her generous feedback and overwhelming support. I am inspired by her wit and insight, and I greatly enjoyed and benefited from our coffee bistro discussions at when I was in some of the deeper trenches of researching and thinking about this project. My debt to Stacy Alaimo is evident from the first pages of the dissertation, the seeds of this project having been sown while I was in her graduate seminar titled “Thinking with Plants, Animals, and Materialities” in the spring of 2015. I cannot stress enough how much I value her unwavering advocacy for graduate students and her commitment to the development of scholarly community. Jackie Fay has been a great help and supportive colleague to me as well, particularly in the emerging field of critical plant studies, and especially in our sharing of work in the English Department’s Posthumanist Research Cluster. Her exciting research in medieval plant studies and her keen eye have contributed significantly to the shape of my work. I also want to thank the other members of the Posthumanist Research Cluster who gave me feedback on portions of the dissertation: Erin Murrah-Mandril, Neill Matheson, and Ned Schaumberg. Last, but definitely not least, I am grateful for the camaraderie and support of the friends, colleagues, professors, and informal mentors I have been privileged to know at UTA these past few years, without whom I would not even have been able to begin this undertaking: Tanya Anderson, Mike Brittain, Paul Conrad, Kevin Gustafson, Justin Lerberg, Bruce Krajewski, Peggy Kulesz, Steve Lipnicky, Gyde Martin, Hope McCarthy, Christina Montgomery, Tim Morris, Stephanie Peebles-Tavera, Lauren Phelps, Kevin Porter, Ken Roemer, Rod Sachs, Sarah Shelton, Joul Smith, Vince Sosko, Tony Sortore, Connor Stratman, Jim Warren, Kathryn Warren, and John Watkins, among many others. To Jeff Marchand, I owe special thanks. As he knows, this dissertation is in large part a product of our many spirited conversations. I also thank Mimi Rowntree, my office mate and fellow traveler in the highs and lows of dissertating, for her solidarity and encouragement. We got this! vi DEDICATION I dedicate this dissertation to my parents, James and Julia Hogue. Their love and long- suffering support have allowed me to invest the necessary time and resources required for this kind of research. My dad’s theatrical recitations of poetry for my brother and me has stuck with me through the years and definitely steered me in the direction of writing projects such as this one. My mother’s unceasing prayers for me have equally propelled me in my scholarly endeavors. I love you, Mom and Dad. I also want to acknowledge Chelsea Dye, another long-sufferer who has been on this journey with me. I thank her for her love, support, and sacrifices, as well as her willingness to listen to early drafts of chapters with interest and give invaluable feedback. Finally, it seems appropriate that my project on trees should acknowledge the pecan, sweetgum, and linden trees that looked in on my work from three respective bedroom windows over the course of the dissertation’s composition. They are silently present in the pages that follow. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS v DEDICATION vii INTRODUCTION: ARBOREALIZATIONS 1 Toward a Critical Plant Studies in Posthumanist Renaissance Scholarship 7 Arboreal Veering 20 CHAPTER ONE: LEAF MAKING DECIDUOUS SENSE OF MACBETH 25 Folio-Macbeth vs. Agro-Banquo 34 “Into the Sere, the Yellow Leaf” 41 Foliar (Sur)face Reading 49 Sensing Deciduous-sense 60 Leavings 69 CHAPTER TWO: BARK TOWARD ARBOREALIZED TEMPORALITIES IN THE TEMPEST 74 (Vegetal) Time and The Tempest 82 (Dis)em-barkment 91 Ariel’s Arboreal Anguish 106 Doing (Inter-missing) Time 115 CHAPTER THREE: THORN PLANTAGENETS AND PLANT AGENCY IN 3 HENRY VI AND RICHARD III 119 Te(X)ternalties (An Aside) 127 The Thorny Wood 130 Richard’s Vegetal Body 137 viii Plant-agents: Men, Women, and Children 150 Rose-Actors: The Vegetal Materiality of Performance 165 CHAPTER FOUR: ROOT THE QUEER RHIZOSPHERE OF AS YOU LIKE IT 171 Ekphrastic Expositions 179 Pollen(eyes) 188 Acorns and Antiquity 195 Sleeping with Mother Earth 201 CODA: VEGETAL DREAMSCAPES 207 BIBLIOGRAPHY 214 ix INTRODUCTION: ARBOREALIZATIONS What might a responsible ‘sharing of suffering’ look like in historically situated practices? … Sharing pain promises disclosure, promises becoming. – Donna Haraway, When Species Meet1 The life of plants is situated on the brink of death, in the zone of indeterminacy between the living and the dead. Those who share in its anarchic principle will not escape this predicament of being on the verge, suspended between life and death, the predicament common to all living beings. – Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking2 Donna Haraway’s concept of “sharing pain” is, from an animal rights perspective, troubling at best.3 She does not disavow the unequal instrumental relationships that often exist between humans and animals, her primary example being the relationship between researchers and laboratory animals, suggesting that “Staying with the complexities … [means] learning to live and think in practical opening to shared pain and mortality and learning what that living and thinking teach.”4 While I find some of Haraway’s conclusions on the issue of animal experimentation problematic, her notion of “staying with the trouble,” as her more recent book phrases it, opens the door to thoughtful and speculative engagements with questions related to sentience and the experiential quality of pain in more-than-human settings.5 Indeed, the basic human experience of pain and its apparent analogue in the animal world prompt further investigation into the extent to which humans and nonhuman others already “share pain,” in a fundamental, biological sense. By mere virtue of having a body, the sensible being moves in the 1 Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 72, 84. 2 Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 53. 3 The modern-day animal rights activist movement owes its existence largely to Peter Singer’s foundational study, Animal Liberation (New York: HarperCollins, 2001 [1975]). See also Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkley: University of California Press, 1983); Melanie Joy, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism (San Francisco: Conari Press, 2010); and Tobias Menely, The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015). 4 Haraway, When Species Meet, 83. 5 Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). 1 world with respect to a myriad of potential pleasures and pains. Furthermore, if Michael Marder is correct that “being on the verge” of life and death is a common orientation for “all living beings,” then we should begin to think of plants too as having bodies that share with humans and animals sensibilities, aversions, affects, even pain. This dissertation begins with an assumption that the plants of Shakespearean drama, namely its trees, can contribute to recent ecocritical, philosophical, and botanical discussions about vegetal ontology.