Globalizing Nature on the Shakespearean Stage
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University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses March 2019 Globalizing Nature on the Shakespearean Stage William Steffen University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons, and the Theatre History Commons Recommended Citation Steffen, William, "Globalizing Nature on the Shakespearean Stage" (2019). Doctoral Dissertations. 1532. https://doi.org/10.7275/12844672 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/1532 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Globalizing Nature on the Shakespearean Stage A Dissertation Presented by WILLIAM H. STEFFEN Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY February 2019 English © Copyright by William H. Steffen 2019 All Rights Reserved Globalizing Nature on the Shakespearean Stage A Dissertation Presented by WILLIAM H. STEFFEN Approved as to style and content by: Jane Degenhardt, Chair Malcolm Sen, Member Brian Ogilvie, Member Adam Zucker, Member Randall Knoper, Department Head English Department DEDICATION To Anna-Claire, Oscar, and Calliope, my muses, who never let me down. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my advisor, Jane Degenhardt, for her years of dedicated and unwavering support. Jane’s generous feedback, helpful guidance, professional advice, and commitment to my project has been invaluable to me, and I am grateful to have had such an admirable mentor and model instructor steering my dissertation. I would also like to thank my committee members, including Malcolm Sen, without whom this project would not have been possible. Thank you as well to Adam Zucker and Brian Ogilvie for their recommendations and guidance over the past few years. I also need to thank Daniel Sack for his expertise in performance theory, and for his helpful feedback. There are several friends and colleagues to thanks as well, who provided generous feedback either in class and in dissertation group meetings: Neelofer Quadir, Ashley Nadeau, Lauren Silber, Michelle Brooks, David Katz, Sean Gordon, Annaliese Hoehling, Benjamin Zender, Jenny Krichevsky, and Catherine Elliot. I also wish to thank Miles P. Grier, Lisa Barksdale-Shaw, Matthieu Chapman, and other participants on the 2017 SAA panel on “Race and the Materiality of Early Modern Performance,” for their help with providing feedback and encouragement. Thanks as well to Robin Bates, Andrew Bretz, and Charisse Willis for their organization and feedback during the 2018 SAA panel on “Sites of Resistance.” I am also indebted to the anonymous referees for The Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies and Renaissance Drama, who helped to shape parts of this project into something worthy of publication. !v Thank you as well to the Special Collections librarians at the University of Adelaide, Marie Larsen and Cheryl Hoskin, for digitizing Allan Wilkie’s autobiography. Thanks too to Ellen Jane Hollis at the Bermuda National Library for helping me find information on a spectacular performance of The Tempest. I am grateful as well to all of my friends and family who helped me marinate, digest, and regurgitate these ideas. I would not have been able to write a word of this dissertation without the love and support of my loving wife, Anna-Claire, whose own work never ceases to inspire me. Thank you too to my parents, my brothers, to Bob Gruber, Pete and Luke Smith, Cody Tannen-Barrup, Kristin Gengler, and Jamie Moody for the bike rides, small beers, little Joes, and long friendship that have made this a sustainable and worthwhile project for all these years. !vi ABSTRACT GLOBALIZING NATURE ON THE SHAKESPEAREAN STAGE FEBRUARY 2019 WILLIAM H. STEFFEN, B.A., HAMPSHIRE COLLEGE M.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Ph.D. UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Jane Degenhardt As the far-reaching consequences of human-generated climate change continue to threaten the earth, an evaluation of the historical narrative of the Anthropocene has never been more important. Globalizing Nature revises the anthropocentric narrative of early globalization from the perspective of the non-human world on the early modern stage, which showcases Nature’s agency in determining ecological, economic, and colonial outcomes. Overturning the popular narrative that European technology and military might determined the outcome of settler colonialism in ancient Britain and colonial Virginia, John Fletcher’s Bonduca suggests that the floral and microbial grafts attending colonial exchange could make or break an invader’s attempt to plant themselves on foreign soil. I show how the English stage modeled strategies for confronting ecological crises during the supposed final “Age of Man”—strategies which can be useful to modern audiences confronting a changing global environment today. King Lear, for example, demonstrates how a human alliance with Nature’s capacity for balance provides a more equitable model for wealth distribution in a kingdom fraught by economic disparity. The !vii history of Shakespearean performance in the British colonies—where weather events and other unpredictable ecological agents often played a role in a given performance—offers a similar strategy for provincializing the narrative of the Anthropocene. The agency humans now exert on the global climate, this performance history suggests, is not shared equally across the globe. Furthermore, by focusing on the materials of the stage, Globalizing Nature traces the distributive agency of natural commodities from their use in performance to their role in building an empire, or in changing the climate. I show how natural commodities used on stage derived from and facilitated British colonial expansion. Corkwood and galls, for example, which were used as cosmetic ingredients in representing African Moors in plays like Titus Andronicus and Lust’s Dominion, connect an emergent racial discourse to the environmental violence of early English colonialism. During a moment when the effects of human behaviors are blurring the distinction between human and nature, Globalizing Nature seeks to recover an early modern ethos of alliance between humans and nature from an otherwise violent human narrative of ecological imperialism and the Anthropocene. !viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ………………………………………………………… v ABSTRACT ………………………………………………………………………… vii CHAPTER INTRODUCTION: EARLY MODERN DRAMA AND THE ANTHROPOCENE …. 1 1. GRAFTING AND ECOLOGICAL IMPERIALISM IN JOHN FLETCHER’S BONDUCA …………………………………………………………………..…… 35 Grafting and Colonial Incorporation …………………………………………. 42 Horticultural Grafting and English Colonialism ………………………………48 Staging Ecological Consequences …………………………………………… 55 2. HEWERS OF WOOD, DRAWERS OF GALL: THE WOODEN ECONOMIES OF RACE IN TITUS ANDRONICUS AND LUST’S DOMINION …….……… 77 Cork and Moors on the Early Modern Stage ………………………………… 85 “The Best Galls”: Moors, Inkface, and the Manipulation of Print …………… 92 Aaron and Eleazar: Embodying the “Indistinct Human” on the Early Modern Stage ………………………………………….. 110 3. MONKEYS, FLOODS, AND THE “IMMORTAL WILLIAM”: ENDURING NATURE AND PLAYING SHAKESPEARE IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE …… 121 4. STOLEN THUNDER: PERFORMING SHAKESPEAREAN WEATHER EVENTS IN THE ANTHROPOCENE ……………………………………………………. 159 How To Do Things With Storms: A Theater of the Anthropocene …………. 165 Assisting the Storm: Provincializing the Species Narrative of the Anthropocene ………………………………………………………. 181 Stolen Thunder: Performing Weather Events on the Colonial Stage ………. 189 5. SHAKING THE SUPERFLUX: SIN AND REDEMPTION ALONG GEOLOGICAL FAULTS IN KING LEAR ……………………………………………………… 208 “Bond of Childhood”: Lear and Gloucester’s Unbalanced Family Accounts ……………………………………………………………. 214 “O most small fault!”: Economic Imbalances and Geological Redemptions ……………………………………………………….. 217 Gloucester’s Cliff and Lear’s Flood: Nature’s Redemptive Dark Matter ….. 228 “That things might change or cease”: Imagined Futures and Deep Time ….. 240 6. CODA: THE EMPTY DRAINPIPE …………………………………………… 245 7. BIBLIOGRAPHY ……………………………………………………………… 249 !ix INTRODUCTION EARLY MODERN DRAMA AND THE ANTHROPOCENE Last –cene of all: Global Endings, Global Beginnings In 1613, when the Globe Theater caught fire and burned to the ground, the end of the world seemed overdue. Despite England’s nascent efforts to colonize what was still seen as a “new world” across the Atlantic, English culture was steeped in the idea that doomsday was immanent. God had already destroyed the earth with water once; he might easily do it again. The time allotted for the human species on earth was thought to be as finite as life itself, and rapidly approaching its quietus. Each of the popular temporal schemes for imagining the breadth of human history on earth—which were broken into three, four, six, seven, and even twelve distinct “ages”1--placed the early modern present in the final age. In As You Like It (1599), Shakespeare’s somber clown Jaques articulates one such seven-age scheme. Each “age of man” corresponded macrocosmically to a different