Shakespeare and eco-criticism: the unexpected return of the Elizabethan world picture

In the early 1970s the Gaia hypothesis of James E. Lovelock and Lynn Margulis proposed that self-regulating processes of homeostasis have locked together the obviously living biosphere and the apparently dead environment so that one might usefully think of the whole Earth as a single organism. Although Lovelock and Margulis came from strictly scientific fields it is easy to see the appeal of their hypothesis for ‘alternative’ Western cultures of the New Age movement, complementary medicine, and holistic spiritualism, all of which have links with the broader anarchist and animal rights movements and with the emerging theory and practice of ecocriticism. At its best, ecocriticism builds upon post-structuralism’s rejection of the imaginary unified human subject previously dominant in literary studies to consider how Nature too is constructed as well as depicted in literary works. At the other extreme, however, ecocriticism shades off into a neo-Romantic spiritualism that merely asserts the healing power of living in the countryside or vicariously enjoying it through literature about rural idylls. This essay considers the materialist basis of the Gaia hypothesis, comparing it to ways of thinking about the world that were available to Shakespeare’s audiences and in particular its surprising parallels with the much-reviled Elizabethan World Picture described by E. M. W. Tillyard

Ride me as you would be rid: the horse in Brome and Heywood's 'The Witches of Lancashire'

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Review of Nicholas Grene, 'Shakespeare's serial history plays' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)

Review of Nicholas Grene, 'Shakespeare's serial history plays' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002

Where was the Lords room in the Shakespearian playhouse?

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Review of Roslyn Lander Knutson, 'Playing companies and commerce in Shakespeare's time' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)

Review of Roslyn Lander Knutson, 'Playing companies and commerce in Shakespeare's time' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001

The book as object in Ray Galton and Alan Simpson's Hancock Half Hour episode 'The Missing Page'

In their scripts for the television and radio shows of Hancock's Half Hour, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson (G+S) formulaically employed prolepsis to enable rapid composition of an ironic twist for each episode's ending. G+S were alert to the potentialities and limitations of the media in which they worked (first radio, then television) and their script for the episode The Missing Page explores the relationship between the plot of a cliff-hanging murder mystery and its physical embodiment in a book whose solution is on the last page. The murder mystery book entails no surprise (the villain will be unmasked) but pleasurably places the reader in the same position of incomplete knowledge as the detective, and all the more so when Hancock reads a mutilated copy lacking its last page. For G+S the relation between an idealized text and an imperfect physical embodiment of it finds an analogue in the relationship between Hancock's idealization of his world and the mundane reality to which he must always bathetically descend. In this, G+S anticipated recent anti-idealist scholarship on the ineluctable materiality of literary and dramatic works which can exist only as textualizations

The first 5 years of the Arden Shakespeare: 8 plays, 1899-1903

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Review of Robert N. Watson, ‘Back to nature: the green and the real in the late renaissance’ (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006)

Review of Robert N. Watson, ‘Back to nature: the green and the real in the late renaissance’ (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006

Review of Martin Wiggins, 'Shakespeare and the drama of his time' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)

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