Shakespeare and Ecological Crisis (Interventions in the Face of Climate Emergency)

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.