An Ecocritics Macbeth

An Ecocritic’s Macbeth
Richard Kerridge
1. Ecocriticism, Shakespeare and Presentism
The expertise I bring to this article is in ecocriticism rather than Shakespeare or Early
Modern literature. That statement doesn’t quite encompass what I want to say. Like all
teachers of English Literature who had their schooling in Britain, and many who had it
elsewhere, I was first given a Shakespeare play as a set text in my early teens. This was
Shakespeare. Reading him would be the definitive business: one’s great discovery of
what literature could be, and the test and discovery of one’s own intelligence as a reader.
Everyone had to read Shakespeare, and whatever one’s interests might be, something in
Shakespeare would respond to them and draw them on. Engaging with these texts, more
than any others, would be the making of one’s literary intelligence.
This view of Shakespeare, which I later learned to associate with ‘liberal
humanism’, was a standard, background assumption when I took my undergraduate
course; implicit in the way that even the most anti-traditional critics, such as Marxists and
feminists, often chose Shakespeare as their ground of contention. Radical and
experimental new theatre groups, too, often chose to realise their ideas by performing
him. In seizing him, they were seizing the centre, the most prestigious territory – and
perhaps acknowledging that this was also the richest territory intrinsically. When I started
my first university job in 1990, all first year students took a Shakespeare course, and all
the members of the English department, whatever their specialist fields, were expected to
1
teach it. Everyone who had any sort of literary expertise had to have something to say
about Shakespeare. This assumption is not to be encountered so often in literature
departments now, I guess. Historicism has been a dominant mode since then, and in
Britain the state funding of departments through the Research Assessment Exercise has
led to a much greater emphasis on specialist publication as the defining credential of the
university English teacher. Nevertheless, the position of Shakespeare in the national
school curriculum, in most undergraduate programmes of study, and in the wider public
culture, continues to reproduce the assumption.
I start with all this partly to justify myself in writing about Shakespeare, and
partly to provide a context for the ecocritical reading of Macbeth that will be the main
work of this essay. But most importantly it is to answer the questions about urgency and
priority that bear down on ecocriticism more than any other political criticism. Gabriel
Egan begins his Green Shakespeare, the first book-length ecocritical study of
Shakespeare, with a brief account of our present emergency, the ‘impending ecological
disaster facing humankind’1. He compares the threat from global warming to that of
nuclear war, and then picks up an example that campaigning environmentalists have often
used for evocative effect. ‘For some creatures it is too late’, Egan says. ‘The polar bears,
for example, have no long-term future: we have passed the point where their habitats on
arctic ice floes might be saved’2. He then makes a digressive and very slight connection
with Shakespeare, pointing out that at the time The Winter’s Tale was first performed,
white bears are known to have been used in some other court productions. This enables
him to speculate that the bear used as Antigonus’s pursuer may also have been white,
1
Gabriel Egan, Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism (Abingdon, 2006), p.1.
2
Egan, Green Shakespeare, p. 2.
2
before returning to our contemporary bears and the connection between their fate and
ours:
As the polar bears start to make their exit from historical reality, we must consider
the distinct possibility that humankind will shortly after follow them offstage.3
It’s an elegantly made link, but Egan’s dark irony cannot rescue the Shakespeare
reference from seeming oddly exposed. An apocalyptic future faces us all, and here is this
scholarly footnote. What sort of context can be gathered around it? Why is it worth our
attention at this juncture?
Egan’s declared purpose is ‘to show that our understanding of Shakespeare and
our understanding of Green politics have overlapping concerns and can be mutually
sustaining’4. But there is a ticking clock. We are being told that we have only a very
short time to make astonishingly transformative material and cultural changes, if we are
to have any hope of avoiding runaway climate change, with average global temperatures
rising by at least two and possibly six degrees. Sir David King, the former chief science
adviser to the British government, said (in 2008) that we have fifteen years5, while
Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation put it (in August 2008) at one hundred
months6. In such a state of emergency, the question is not merely whether two areas of
understanding overlap, but whether they are proportionate to each other, and of sufficient
importance at the critical moment. Ecocriticism’s vocation is to analyze culture from an
3
4
5
Gabrielle Walker and Sir David King, The Hot Topic: How to Tackle Global Warming and Still Keep the
Lights On (London, 2008), p. 162.
6
Andrew Simms, “The Final Countdown”. The Guardian, 1 August 2008.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/aug/01/climatechange.carbonemissions
3
environmentalist viewpoint, and to recognize and help bring about the cultural changes
that must accompany and make possible the changes of behaviour that we need. Egan
fully accepts this ambitious and political account of that vocation, rejecting Jonathan
Bate’s wish, in The Song of the Earth, to separate ecopoetics from ecopolitics (though not
doing justice to Bate’s recognition that this is an impossible wish)7. In identifying Green
politics and Shakespeare studies as mutually sustaining activities, therefore, he is
asserting that the pursuit of ecocritical readings of Shakespeare is a valuable contribution
to the emergency effort, compared with other cultural work such as the ecocritical
analysis of contemporary writing, film, television and other aspects of culture. Implicit in
this is the idea of Shakespeare as ‘cultural capital’. Egan’s claim for the value of Green
readings of Shakespeare must rest upon the importance and centrality of Shakespeare as
cultural territory: the centrality that is maintained by Shakespeare’s pre-eminent place in
the school curriculum. Whether this centrality is merited by Shakespeare’s pre-eminent
literary qualities of unequalled richness and ‘universality’ is, for these purposes, almost
beside the point – except insofar as the ecocritical reading will not work unless readers, in
their encounter with the texts, really find the promised rewards.
Ecocritical interpretations of Shakespeare, associated with the broad ecocritical
vocation as I have described it, are as ‘presentist’ as any readings could be, since the
global ecological crisis we now face is unprecedented in human history. Many features
combine to make it so: its terrifying scale, its urgency, its status as the accidental result of
deliberate human policies, and the pressurised position we are in of knowing how
concerted global action on an unprecedented scale could yet avert catastrophe. Our
7
See Egan, Green Shakespeare, pp. 41-50, and Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (London, 2000), pp.
266-273.
4
environmental crisis is the product of a long passage of human history, but the danger
into which that history has brought us has only been perceptible in the last thirty to forty
years. If we are thinking of global warming alone, the period is shorter still. This danger
is perceptible by means of recently developed technologies and scientific methods, and
the sense of emergency with which ecocritics must read belongs peculiarly to our own
time. Their awareness of that ticking clock changes the priorities of reading. To read
ecocritically is therefore to read from an extremely specific present. In this sense,
ecocritical reading is as far from reading in search of timeless truths and values as one
could get, though it is in part a search for global truths and values.
Sharon O’Dair, surveying Shakespearean ecocriticism as an especially
provocative case for ‘our recent and continuing methodological debate about the
hegemony of historicism’8, says that ‘presentism is, if you will, especially presentist in its
ecocritical form’9. That is true, for the reasons given above, but it is necessary to proceed
to the differences between presentist strategies. Two are especially worth considering in
this context, as they lead us to different ecocritical priorities.
Michael Bristol takes a cautious step in the direction of universality, when he says
that ‘presentism is a commitment to the possibility of making general interpretations
about the way people think and act that would be valid in different historical contexts’10.
He cites classroom responses to King Lear from a group of students who account for their
reactions by making anecdotal comparisons between events in the play and things that
8
Sharon O’Dair, ‘The state of the green: a review essay on Shakespearean ecocriticism’ , Shakespeare, Vol.
4, Issue 4, December 2008, pp. 475-493, p. 477.
9
O’Dair, ‘The state of the green’, p. 478.
10
Michael Bristol, ‘… And I’m the King of France’ , in Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes, Presentist
Shakespeares (Abingdon, 2007), pp. 46-63, p. 47.
5
have happened in their own families. Bristol takes these responses very seriously. As well
as the anachronism, he is prepared to risk the bathos that sometimes results, for the sake
of the engagement of the reader’s full emotional, embodied response.
And bathos is not the inevitable consequence of this kind of connection-making.
A reader whose eyes fill with tears when Cordelia reveals her forgiveness of Lear with
the words ‘No cause, no cause’11, for example, is weeping at what, exactly? Is it the
specific fictional event? Or is it a fantasy of being forgiven that comes out of the reader’s
own life, perhaps bound up with other causes of tension? Perhaps what we should focus
on, then, is the physical release brought about by the dramatic timing. Recurring phrases,
ideas and images contribute to this effect, structuring the play as an emotional experience.
Cordelia’s ‘No cause’ recalls and redeems her ‘Nothing’ from the first scene. These are
all factors, but is the most important thing here the principle of forgiveness and
redemption, powerfully moving because it is mediated by a symbolic event capable of
drawing up the personal case into the general idea? That drawing up of the reader’s
personal emotion out of its personal context may itself be the gesture that moves and
disarms, suggestive as it is of recognition of the reader’s feelings, and thus of the fragile
possibility of a shared, communal spirit of forgiveness. In that case, do emotions
connected with Christian or other religious and mythic narratives and symbols play a
part? It is impossible to distinguish any one of these things as the prime mover. All may
be involved. In combination, the different elements enrich each other. That they are a
fluctuating, variable mixture is the whole point. A holistic account of reading does not
neglect any of them.
11
King Lear, IV, vii, 77.
6
Bristol makes it clear that he is looking for this sort of account, and that it is to be
contrasted with an exclusively historicist approach:
Historicism is a tacit insistence on impersonal and intellectually detached forms
of reading and in this sense it can be both arbitrary and quite alienating. But why
not just flip over the truism of historical scholarship and say that we’re not really
reading Shakespeare unless we’re taking it personally. Presentism wants to lift the
constraint on the present and to enable readers to use all of their available
resources to help them understand what they’re reading. And presentism
encourages readers to take things more personally, and to recognize their own
feelings as the point of departure for the exploration of a complex, emotionally
demanding text like King Lear.12
His comments chime with a strong theme in ecocriticism: its critique of the Cartesian
tradition of mind/body dualism that enthrones detached, impersonal, disembodied
rationality as the faculty that legitimates mastery. With mind/body dualism goes a
separation of rational responses, which deserve the position of mastery, from emotional
responses, which are to be mastered and confined to appropriate forms and places of
expression. In the Cartesian tradition, as it feeds into the ideologies of various powerful
groups, this detached rationality that qualifies people to be masters is the defining
property of men as opposed to women, of Western colonialists as opposed to indigenous
peoples, and of humanity as opposed to non-human nature. For many ecocritics, this is
the ideological dualism that has legitimated the ruthless exploitation of the natural world.
The anti-Cartesian theme in ecocriticism is sometimes associated with Deep Ecology, and
sometimes with Heideggerean ideas of authentic dwelling, in which the moment-by-

12
Bristol, ‘… And I’m the King of France’, p. 54.
7
moment encounter with one’s physical surroundings is pre-empted as little as possible by
abstract or metaphysical definitions. Ecocritics of these persuasions see the Cartesian
mind/body dualism as associated with the mind/nature dualism that reduces non-human
nature to the status of mechanism, lacking in agency and possessing no interests, its
meaning imposed by an external human viewpoint. Emotion and the body, the others to
the detached rational mind, are identified with nature, and thus also exposed to this
Cartesian reduction. So too are women, the others to masculine rationality; so too are
colonised peoples, the others to Western rationality.
The late Val Plumwood, the ecofeminist philosopher, describes the link-step
operation of this ideology:
The effect is to enforce a strict and total division, not only between mental and
bodily activity, but between mind and nature and between human and animal. As
mind becomes pure thought – pure res cogitans or thinking substance – mental,
incorporeal, without location, bodiless – body as its dualised other becomes pure
matter, pure res extensa, materiality as lack. As mind and nature become
substances utterly different in kind and mutually exclusive, the dualist division of
realms is accomplished and the possibility of continuity is destroyed from both
ends. The intentional, psychological level of description is thus stripped from the
body and strictly isolated in a separate mechanism of the mind. (…) The body and
nature become the dualised other of the mind.13
Separating rationality from emotion means separating mind from body, which means
separating the mind’s implied viewpoint from the material place in which the body is
located. Place considered in ecological terms is ‘ecosystem’: the unceasing flow of

13
Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London, 1993), p. 115.
8
material exchange that constitutes the body. To detach the mind’s viewpoint from place is
therefore to detach it from its ecological being. That is, its context, its continual exchange
with its contiguous environment, its continuities of space and time. Ecocritics are
predisposed to be wary of this. The attempt at such detachment constitutes a denial of
ecological relations. Ecology, as a scientific discipline, developed as a reaction against
the practise of isolating specimens in the laboratory for intensive study. From the
ecological point of view, such practises of separation prevent us from attending to life as
a process of continuous, fluctuating relations that in their locality constitute an ecosystem
and in their entirety constitute the biosphere. This is why the idea of ‘embodied’ and
‘embedded’ reading – a narrative of reading that pays attention to emotional and bodily
reactions – is attractive in ecocritical terms.
What complicates this approach is the global scale and long-term, futuristic nature
of the climate change crisis. Whilst we need, from the ecocritical point of view, a
heightened awareness of immediate ecological relations, this must not preclude a
similarly intense and urgent awareness of more distant relations, spatial and temporal.
Local awareness and long-range awareness must be combined, and, since they are
connected, must stimulate each other. That is the specifically ecocritical need to be, at
once, presentist and more than presentist. Ecocritics are searching for forms of literary
representation, and ways of reading, that combine these aims.
The other ‘presentist’ approach I want to consider, one with a different appeal to
ecocritics, is described by Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes as a Shakespeare criticism
that ‘will deliberately begin with the material present and allow that to set its
interrogative agenda’:
9
Such a criticism’s engagement with the text will take place precisely in terms of
those dimensions of the present that most ringingly chime – perhaps as ends to its
beginnings – with the events of the past. Deliberately employing crucial aspects
of the present as a trigger for its investigations, its centre of gravity will
accordingly be ‘now’, rather than ‘then’. Perhaps this simply makes overt what
covertly happens anyway.14
This account gives us the basic methodology of historicist ecocriticism. The agenda is set
by present needs and preoccupations, but the search remains historical. Two big questions
lead this search. How did we ever come to allow ourselves to get into such a perilous
environmental predicament: what are its historical roots? And, if we are to extricate
ourselves, must we examine those roots, searching for the fundamental ideological
turning-point, the one we have to expose and understand in order to make a new turn?
Carolyn Merchant, for example, in The Death of Nature, one of the first works of
historicist ecofeminism, locates the turning-point in a profound displacement, across
Western culture, of the idea of nature as organism by that of nature as mechanism. This is
the anti-Cartesian ecocritical theme already mentioned, but Merchant pursues it further
back into history, placing this conceptual and cultural shift on a timeline running from
1484 to 171615. The book follows the development of the new ideas and the decline of the
old along that timeline. It is Merchant’s feminism that has opened up the whole subject,
for one of the most common and influential forms given to the pre-modern conception of
nature was the allegorical and metaphorical trope of the earth as nurturing mother. For
Merchant, this is the sign that presides over the idea of organic nature. As the shift she
14
Grady and Hawkes, Presentist Shakespeares, p. 4.
15
Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (New York,
1980), pp. x-xi.
10
identifies gathers force, that trope loses authority. Its influence diminishes. The other way
of aligning woman with nature now becomes more powerful:
But another opposing image of nature as female was also prevalent: wild and
uncontrollable nature that could render violence, storms, droughts and general
chaos. (…) The second image, nature as disorder, called forth an important
modern idea, that of power over nature. Two new ideas, those of mechanism and
of the domination and mastery of nature, became core concepts of the modern
world.16
That modern world is our world. For Merchant, the historical change of attitudes she
describes is the turning-point that set us on the way to our present environmental
predicament. This even longer timeline emerges in her introduction, when she refers to
environmentalism and the women’s movement as bringing about a new cultural shift that
will lead us to ‘discover values associated with the premodern world that may be worthy
of transformation and regeneration’ 17, and her closing pages, where she mentions The
Endangered Species Act and Three-Mile Island. In 1990, she added a new preface
suggesting that the mechanistic idea of nature was now being undermined by process
physics and chaos theory. The book ends with the timeline going into the future: ‘a
restructuring of priorities may be crucial if people and nature are to survive’.18
Merchant, avowedly, is an ecocritical historian who set out in search of the origins
of our present crisis. She was looking for the beginnings to which we are the ends, and
for a big cultural mistake to put right. Egan doesn’t declare that purpose so overtly, but he
16
Merchant, The Death of Nature, p. 2.
17
Merchant, The Death of Nature, p. xxiii.
18
Merchant, The Death of Nature, p. 295.
11
too is a presentist of that type: one whose agenda is set by present concerns but whose
quest is still primarily historical. It is hard to imagine him welcoming the embodied,
holistic reading sought by Bristol, in which emotional responses have an honoured place.
‘Sentimental’ is a term of disdain that comes too readily to him, as Robert N. Watson
observes in a review19. A reference by Bate to ‘a voice like that of our primal mother’ –
the trope central to Merchant’s argument - is casually dismissed by Egan as an example
of the ‘risible sentimentality’ to which he thinks the ecocritical study of nature writing is
prone, though he is not in principle against loosely psychoanalytical reading for sub-texts.
In the next breath he resorts eagerly to a post-Freudian knowingness in order to belittle
the ‘unencumbered’ literalism of Bate’s reading of a John Clare poem20. Sub-texts that
make phallic desire and its vulnerability the pervasive, unspoken presence are fine,
apparently, but sub-texts that do the same for maternal nurturing are sentimental.
Despite this unease at the idea of the maternal archetype, Egan’s broad thesis is
consistent with Merchant’s. He too is arguing that our present environmental predicament
should prompt us to re-evaluate some pre-modern assumptions about the cosmos, and
retrieve them as forms of proto-ecological understanding wrongly suppressed by
enlightenment rationality. Both writers point to recent developments in science as giving
some vindication to these pre-modern ideas – Merchant to process physics and chaos
theory, Egan to genetics, cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence. Egan puts forward for
consideration essentially the same conceptual and cultural shift as Merchant: ‘the
replacement of a vitalistic model [of nature] with a mechanistic model’21, and suggests
19
Watson and Egan, the authors of the two most substantial ecocritical explorations of Shakespeare so far,
reviewed each other’s books in Review of English Studies, Vol. 57, No. 228, 2006, pp. 817-822. For Sharon
O’Dair’s discussion of their exchange, see O’Dair, ‘The state of the green’, p. 484.
20
Egan, Green Shakespeare, pp. 41-42.
21
12
that the new sciences he mentions, and James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis in ecology,
make vitalism a very suggestive idea for our own times. Systems theory, biosemiotics and
Artificial Intelligence have problematised the clear distinction between organism and
mechanism that made vitalism seem obsolete. So he reads Shakespeare looking for
vitalism and its human implications - which are somewhat at odds, as I have suggested,
with the attitudes Egan strikes in his scornful controversialist persona, but the readings
are richly illuminating, bringing the plays to present-day life without departing from the
historicist task of elucidating their historical meaning.
Moreover, Egan’s presentist historicism is layered. He seeks to retrieve not only
ideas and beliefs from Shakespeare’s time, but certain aesthetic and ethical principles
from the Shakespeare criticism of intervening historical moments: specifically, the idea of
macrocosm/microcosm correspondence to be found in E. M.W. Tillyard’s account of the
Elizabethan cosmos, and the idea, to be found in the New Criticism of L.C. Knights,
Cleanth Brooks and William Empson, of the work of art as an organic whole, in which
the large-scale pattern is reproduced in small-scale instances and images. An
ecologically-informed view of nature, and our urgent need now to take account of inter-
connections and interdependencies, give us new reasons for valuing the idea of the work
of literature as an organic whole:
I wish to argue that the abandonment of ‘organic unity as an aesthetic value’ is a
mistake and that ecopolitics shows why. Insisting on the value of various kinds of
unity can be a powerful solvent of the fracturing impulses of late industrial
capitalism, not least of all in the case of the unitary Earth.22
22
13
Macrocosm produces microcosm: the need to consider the biosphere as a single system,
constituted by its various life-forms in co-evolution with it and with each other, becomes
the imperative to find an aesthetic reflecting this idea. Such an aesthetic might give us the
unity of the work of art again, at least in the form of an imperative to track the relations
between the different parts. This enables us to appreciate the proto-ecological virtues of
pre-modern perceptions of cosmic order, without having to accept the ideas of hierarchy
that were integral to those perceptions. Positive and negative feedback loops in systems
theory and ecology give us one model of how the part relates to the whole: a non-
hierarchical model. This model can also show us something about literary texts as
systems: how an image, in a Shakespearean speech, for example, reinforces or
counteracts a larger flow of meaning.
But that is quite a comparison: the work of literature and the biosphere. Isn’t the
disproportion an overwhelming one, as seemed to be the danger with the scholarly
snippet about the bear in Egan’s opening pages? And in the passage quoted above, is
Egan really saying that the literary aesthetic he is proposing can counter the large-scale
cultural consequences of late industrial capitalism, rather than becoming another
commodity that harmlessly occupies the cultural niche in which that system places it?
Egan is generally willing to willing to risk such apparent disproportions, and the bathos
they threaten to bring. Robert N. Watson rebukes him, for example, for the ‘facile’
suggestion that there may have been a connection between the trauma experienced by the
generation who fought in the trenches and the literary-critical fashion in the ensuing
decades for artistic wholeness23. Watson is asking for scholarly slowness, and a choice of
more limited ground that can be covered with proper thoroughness. Many more pauses,
23
Review of English Studies, Vol. 57, No. 228, 2006, p. 820.
14
he suggests, should be taken between foreground and horizon. The contrast between this
procedure and Egan’s ‘hectic pace’ and habit of ‘taking off after whatever catches his
interest or rouses his ire’ becomes, in Watson’s review, the basis of a distinction – he
doesn’t exactly say a hierarchical distinction, but it is hard not to feel that he means this -
between works of scholarship and ‘handbooks’ (‘such a short book’). Once that
distinction has been made, it is possible to concede that there is a need for both, and
Egan’s book can then be praised. But that it had to be made suggests that, for Watson,
Egan’s book was troublingly blurring the distinction.
There are broader questions here about the relationships between specialist
scholarship, teaching, creativity and academic participation in public controversy. New
Historicism, too, is well known for audacious leaps between the very particular case and
the very general proposition, combining intimacy of touch with argumentative sweep.
And the tradition, in literary studies, of Practical Criticism and close reading already
complicates the distinction between works of scholarship and mediating ‘handbooks’ that
Watson wants to preserve. That tradition is rooted in a teaching practice rather than a
mode of scholarly enquiry, and its goal is always a ‘reading’, temporal, contingent and
constrained by the pace of reading and the time available.
These questions reach beyond the case of ecocriticism, but it raises them in an
unusually pressing way. Green campaigning is full of troubling disproportions. We
contemplate apocalyptic global scenarios and vow to change our lightbulbs. Inadequate
as this response is, we at least have a starting move, one step beyond helplessness. The
problem then becomes the practical one of how to make our effort grow, since its
smallness rebukes us; how to begin to close that distance between small-scale and large-
15
scale. A central paradox in environmentalism revolves around speed. Many of the
solutions seem to involve slowing down – consuming less, travelling less, walking or
cycling rather than driving, making things last, acquainting oneself with them more
deeply rather than moving on, immersing oneself in the local environment, growing one’s
food, taking time to learn difficult skills rather than buying new products, and taking time
to understand the intricacy of ecological relations. Yet there is that ticking clock. Unless
we make these changes rapidly, they will not be enough. The paradox is one of spatial
distance, also. All these changes involve hunkering down to attend to what is near at
hand, which could mean shutting out the world – but we need to know that others, all
around us, are doing it too; it won’t work if only we are doing it. The ecological crisis
requires of us a new consciousness of our global position, and the far-off consequences of
our actions, in the places Val Plumwood called our ‘shadow places’, the ones we damage
without seeing it. 24
Ursula K. Heise’s recent book Sense of Place and Sense of Planet explores these
paradoxes, particularly with reference to space.25 She is looking for forms of literary and
artistic representation of the global scope of environmental problems, and of the
relationship between local and global. One of the examples she examines is the use in
science fiction of the Modernist narrative techniques of collage and cut-up; another is the
popular web package Google Earth, which, with its facility for zooming in and out,
enables a rapid perceptual switching between global and local. Heise’s interest in these
examples shows that disproportion, and the abrupt movement between extremes of scale,
24
See Val Plumwood, ‘Shadow Places and the Politics of Dwelling’. Australian Humanities Review. Issue
44, March 2008. http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-March-2008/plumwood.html
25
Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (New
York, 2008).
16
are necessary effects in the cultural representation of our contemporary environmental
crisis. Questions of time and speed constitute a major dilemma for environmentalists: we
need deep adaptations of human impulse and rapid emergency measures. Egan takes
licence from ‘the new perspectives provided by holograms, fractals and genetics’26 to
return to Tillyard’s exploration of the microcosm/macrocosm relationship as it appears in
Shakespeare, and to re-examine the way small details in a play contribute to its
continuities and wholeness. In doing so, he joins Heise in her search.
2. Shakespeare and Neo-indigeneity
My own approach, in the reading of Macbeth I am about to offer, is closer to Bristol than
to Merchant or Egan, and this is clearly because I am not a scholar of the literature of
Shakespeare’s period. I am someone with a general training in literary criticism who has
become a specialist scholar of ecocriticism. What I want to do is read Macbeth from an
ecocritical viewpoint, not in order to identify the historical cultural origins of our modern
reckless behaviour so much as to see what the play can do now, as a moving and
imaginatively rewarding text, as well as one with great cultural capital, to appeal to, and
help create, a ‘green’ sensibility. Such a sensibility I take to be indispensable. If we are to
have any chance of mobilising our efforts to avert catastrophic climate change, that
sensibility will have to become the mainstream, right across culture. In turn, if it does
show signs of becoming mainstream, that may be an indication that we have a chance.
26
17
However, there is a historical angle. I want to approach the Shakespeare text as a
container in which something has been preserved that has otherwise been effaced nearly
everywhere. The uniquely high status the plays have been given over several centuries
has kept them current, part of the general literary and journalistic culture as it has
renewed itself over that time. Acquiring new meanings for new generations, they have
never dropped out of that process of renewal, and in the form of well known quotations
they have dispersed their influence across the linguistic culture, working their way into
all sorts of places. This has made Shakespeare’s works into a special cultural niche.
Cultural elements carried in the plays retain, in this niche, a life of circulation and
renewal that these elements may have lost nearly everywhere else, and that keeps them
from being merely historical. One element is of particular ecocritical interest.
I mean the natural practice, passed on through generations, of interpreting
experience in terms of the ecological environment one lives in, so that animals, plants,
weather and seasons, as well as traditional human labour in the midst of that
environment, are a constant source of metaphors, analogues and symbols to make sense
of all kinds of experience. This is what it is to have an indigenous culture, in the sense
that is important to ecocritics: a culture that does not alienate you from the natural
processes of the ecosystem you inhabit, but keeps you aware of them, connecting them
with your whole cultural and emotional life. I want to read Shakespeare as, in this sense,
an indigenous writer, whose work offers a model of what a revived form of this
indigeneity might feel like. Modernity destroyed and marginalised this relationship by
moving most people into urban environments and forms of industrial and technological
18
labour that did not bring them into practical daily contact with natural seasonal cycles or
plants and animals.
Already, in Shakespeare’s time, the relationship was sometimes perceived as lost
or threatened. Robert N. Watson’s historicist ecocriticism is an investigation of various
literary and artistic responses, in the late-sixteenth and the seventeenth century, to the
anxious perception that this quality of indigeneity was disappearing:
Sixteenth-century England was (many economic historians agree) the time when
wage labour became dominant: segments of the feudal peasantry became a
rootless proletariat for hire, alienating workers from their fields and their own
bodies in the course of alienating work from product and ownership from object.27
In a learned and illuminating reading of As You Like It, the play with the most
straightforward thematic appeal to ecocritics, Watson reveals the intricacy of
Shakespeare’s testing of the possibility of deliberate return to that unalienated condition.
Watson finds in the play a demonstration that this attempt was inextricable from a tangle
of paradoxes: ‘the paradoxes of civilization elaborately simulating the wild’28.
Touchstone, for example, is ‘the kind of court fool who uses urbane wit under the
guise of being merely what Renaissance England called a “natural”, a born imbecile’ 29,
and his antics, as he confounds his challengers by switching from one viewpoint to
another, seem to suggest a radical dualistic separation between cultural construction and
material reality. Asked how he likes the country life, he answers with a frivolous
relativism: ‘in respect it is in the fields it pleaseth me well; but in respect it is not in the
27
Robert N. Watson, Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (Philadelphia, 2006),
p. 9.
28
Watson, Back to Nature, p. 92.
29
19
court, it is tedious’ (III, ii, 16-18), and more in this vein. Such capering from position to
position demonstrates a subjectivity that has no profound connection to any position and
can therefore satirise all. It is the freedom of the licensed fool, and his folly. He deploys
his court sophistication against the rustics Corin and Audrey who lack ironic self-
consciousness (though on the whole they are unperturbed by his demolitions of their
assumptions), but when he finds Orlando idealising the absent Rosalind in Petrarchan
style, he counters with bawdy earthiness. As Watson says, Touchstone is ‘a double agent,
tending to drag the courtiers back to physical reality while posing as an agent of high
culture for the country folk’30.
But it’s one thing for a Fool to do this, or Jaques in the similarly licensed position
of the melancholic whose self-marginalisation has absolved him of any responsibility to
find compromises. The play as a whole does not possess the same licence. Rosalind and
Orlando, the central pair of lovers, by surviving their mutual testing by sceptical satire,
eventually reveal a via media between the extreme positions of artifice and earthiness on
either side of them, positions that, as Watson demonstrates, are always liable to flip over
and become their opposites. Insofar as these two lovers function as the play’s moral
centre, they identify it – more than Watson acknowledges - with a more durably
pragmatic position than that of the thwarted, impacted and twisted ‘nostalgia for
unmediated contact with the world of nature’31 that is Back to Nature’s quarry. Watson
sees the play primarily as confirming, both ‘tragically and farcically’, the futility of ‘our
efforts to return to the primal feast: the symbiotic union of breast-feeding, the innocent
nurturance of Eden, a renewed communion with Mother Nature’32. I disagree with the
30
31
32
Watson, Back to Nature, pp. 106-107.
20
balance of emphasis in his reading of the play, and the disagreement becomes more
serious when his historicism crosses over into presentism.
His argument depends on an insistence that the impulse to return to nature is a
search for unmediated perception. ‘The difficulty of knowing nature objectively,’ he says,
‘becomes part of the entire subject-object problem, as well as the problem of other minds
and its subsidiary problem of erotic desire’33. Seeking to return to nature is thus
configured as a purist, all-or-nothing quest. Anything short of complete success is failure.
We either return to Eden or are shut outside in a fallen world. Watson quotes Locke on
similes: they ‘always fail in some part, and come short of that exactness which our
conceptions should have to things’34. It is exactness or nothing. And if the quest were, in
some unimaginable way, to be successful, similes, and indeed language, would fall away,
their mediating function no longer necessary, and those of us left behind, outside Eden,
would be unable to receive messages from the other side. In this respect, success would
look like death, to those left behind:
Does it profit a man to lose consciousness and regain a simple relationship with
the material universe? What death teaches is that conscious knowledge and
complete symbiosis with nature are mutually exclusive.35
But who, in the play or anywhere else, was aiming for complete symbiosis with nature,
involving loss of conscious knowledge36 ? This purist and dualist version of the return to
33
34
35
36
‘Complete symbiosis’ seems an oxymoron anyway. Wouldn’t that be ‘symbiogenesis’? For the
distinction, see Lynn Margulis, The Symbiotic Planet (London, 1998), p. 43.
21
nature is not the only version. When Watson says, later, prompted by the brief revelation
in As You Like It that the shepherd Corin is a distressed and insecure labourer working for
an absentee landlord, that ‘the loss of symbiotic contact with the land was inextricable
from the loss of unmediated value’37, he pairs two notions of loss and fall that raise very
different questions.
The ecological insight we need here is that we cannot lose symbiotic contact with
the land. That, in fact, is our problem. We cannot cease to depend on the land, but we can
certainly lose sight of that dependency. In modern industrial societies many of us do. We
can forget the land, and now the environmental crisis is telling us that this forgetfulness
has become deadly dangerous. Therefore, a social relationship with nature in which the
natural world continues to live in people’s minds, providing the comparisons, symbols
and metaphors they use to interpret and communicate their experiences, is something we
might now aspire to recreate. It is a central task for ecocriticism, and a reason why the
ecocritical revival of nature writing will remain an important part of the effort. This will
not be an attempt to recover the old pre-industrial forms, since environmentalists, for the
most part, do not wish to relinquish the whole of industrial modernity but to preserve as
much as is compatible with environmental safety and biodiversity. The old forms,
however, may be instructive and inspirational, as we attempt to devise new ones to reflect
our global environmental consciousness. Ecocritics and environmentalists seeking to
recreate this culture of nature will not be reaching for ‘unmediated value’, a much more
elusive concept than ‘symbiotic contact with the land’, or for unmediated experience.
Therefore the Lockean objection to simile is not so relevant. The virtue of simile in this
process is that it brings together different, non-identical things – ourselves and other life
37
22
forms or natural phenomena - reminding us of their ecological relation. It keeps them
with us.
Turning presentist to engage his reading with environmentalism, Watson gives us
two more unnecessarily polarised extremes. He has been discussing the way Jaques uses
the pathos of the death of a stag Duke Senior and his men have hunted, to tease them with
the thought that in their treatment of the deer they too might be seen as violent usurpers:
But deep-ecology movements, which attempt to abjure the human perspective and
expiate even seemingly benign human interventions, are very different from
popular or reform environmentalism, which tends (like Jaques here) toward
sentimental identification with particular lovely creatures rather than anything
arduously philosophical (like Jaques later)’38.
He ignores at least two other possibilities for environmentalism. First, there is a green
perspective in which deep ecology and reform environmentalism are not incompatible
alternatives but different parts of the solution, dialectically engaged with each other.
James Lovelock expresses this view in The Revenge of Gaia, when he argues that we
need deep ecology to teach us the values necessary to stabilise the changed world that is
coming, and we also need new nuclear power stations and other emergency measures that
in the circumstances are the lesser evils to enable civilisation to survive the shock39.
Second, reform environmentalism is not necessarily sentimental, even when it focuses on
particular lovely creatures (such as polar bears). Campaigners who put these creatures in
the starring roles know that if the creatures are to be saved in their wild state – which is
where they are most lovely - their habitats must be saved with them. A loosely
38
39
See James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth is Fighting Back – and How We Can Still
Save Humanity (London, 2006), especially pp. 66-105 and 135-159.
23
Heideggerean perspective is useful here: the creature as a discourse of loveliness is not
separable from its world, and it is the creature’s worlded being that environmentalists
wish to preserve, not specimens in zoos. The lovely creatures stand for whole
ecosystems, connected to our own. Therefore the comparison with Jaques is unfair to the
reform environmentalists, who have not retreated to the sidelines but are struggling to
achieve the best possible compromise in a world of conflicting interests. Jaques is the one
exile of the Duke’s party who chooses at the end of the play not to return to the social
world but to remain in the cave that has sheltered the Duke and his men. The others,
representing the play’s mainstream, set off back to the city, affirming the play’s
commitment to a dialectical relationship between country and city, and between the
various opposing styles and attitudes the characters encounter.
This dialectical relationship is where the ecocritical interest lies. James Lovelock,
as it happens, gives us an eloquent statement of what we need this renewed culture of
nature for:
Over half the Earth’s people live in cities, and they hardly ever see, feel or hear
the natural world. Therefore our first duty if we are green should be to convince
them that the real world is the living Earth and that they and their city lives are a
part of it and wholly dependent on it for their existence.40
The challenge is to persuade people whose practical lives do not give them direct
experience of natural ecosystems that nevertheless these systems are a matter of practical
interest to them. New nature writing sets out to reintegrate nature into mainstream culture
and mainstream lives. This means creating a contemporary sense of indigeneity that
40
Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia, p. 142.
24
reaches out from the local to the global; or perhaps the other way, since for some the
global might be the first point of interest. One of the aims of environmentalism is that
people in the new phase of modernity brought about by recognition of environmental
crisis should become neo-indigenous. People in industrial societies may well draw
inspiration from traditional indigenous cultures that have survived – this is especially
likely in postcolonial societies where the descendents of the colonisers are the large
majority and the colonised people a surviving minority. Neo-indigeneity doesn’t,
however, mean seeking to relinquish modernity and return to the culture of one’s pre-
industrial ancestors. Rather, it means seeking to combine the indispensable advantages of
modernity, including the technologies that enable us to perceive global and futuristic
environmental problems, with a rediscovered intimacy with the natural world, realised in
leisure but also in the environmental awareness that must now begin to permeate virtually
all kinds of work.
Shakespeare provides a rare point of contact with pre-industrial English
indigeneity. The plays in which characters make extensive reference to the natural world,
and use it to illustrate – indeed, to reach – their moral interpretations of the action, give
us a sense of what such indigeneity might be like in practice. And it is social indigeneity.
These plays mention birds, animals, herbs and flowers as if we knew them and could
recognise their characteristics as familiar to our social world. Because this is communal,
shared knowledge, it doesn’t matter essentially whether Shakespeare wrote any of these
passages from his own direct experience, or they all came second-hand, from literary
sources – though I shall say something about that in a moment. What matters a lot is the
way the audience and readers are addressed as people who recognise, and given such
25
vital images, so fully integrated with the play’s other, perhaps more familiar meanings, as
to stimulate the sensation of recognition. In as much as they continue to make a powerful
impression on new audiences, the plays renew – in this one, tiny cultural niche – a culture
of indigeneity. And what is also of great value, from the ecocritical viewpoint, is the way
individual readers and playgoers in successive generations identify the natural
environments they meet in Shakespeare’s plays with the ones they actually inhabit.
Thomas Hardy, to take an illustrious example, identified the Dorset heathland where he
grew up with the heath of Lear’s ordeal41. He sought some foundation in real ancient
history for this, but that wasn’t the main point (and the chaotic geography of
Shakespeare’s play was scarcely compatible with real historical sources in any case).
What mattered was that he was able to imagine himself in the same place, and, as an
artist, therefore achieve a continuity between Shakespeare’s tragedy and his own
creations. Imaginatively, he and others have been able to renew Shakespeare’s plays by
feeling themselves to be on the same ground. When this is combined with a direct interest
in natural history, the result, at least in flashes, is a reintegration of aspects of the world
that are usually kept separate. Two striking examples show how fertile this can be.
In 1996, the nature writer Richard Mabey published an encyclopaedic work
entitled Flora Britannica. Entries for British wild plants combined photographs, scientific
and historical information, folklore and anecdote. To some extent, Mabey was following
and updating the example of an earlier writer who intertwined literary and natural-
historical interests, Geoffrey Grigson, whose The Englishman’s Flora, published in 1955,
had similarly brought together science, literary references and folklore in a botanical
encyclopaedia. But the additional element in Mabey’s Flora was that the book had been
41
See Harold Orel, ed., Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings (London, 1967), p. 13.
26
compiled by means of a public appeal for observations of where the plants had been
found and for stories about them. It was an attempt to record, and at the same time rally, a
nation’s communal relationship with its wildlife. Fauna Britannica followed, in rival
versions by two different authors, and then Birds Britannica (giving up on the Latin)42.
These works contain numerous Shakespeare quotations and references. They treat
Shakespeare as a repository of historical material documenting Britain’s pre-industrial
relationship with nature. It is an enduring part of his status as the national poet.
My second example is an older one, from a time when the love of nature had a
different inflection, a few decades before environmental crisis made ecocriticism
necessary. Because of what I have described above, it doesn’t seem surprising that one of
the great strides in the history of Shakespearean textual analysis, the discovery of ‘image
clusters’, should have been made by a critic otherwise known as a distinguished writer of
popular ornithology43. Edward Allworthy Armstrong published Shakespeare’s
Imagination in 1946. ‘It rather looks’, says A. D. Nuttall, ‘as if he set out to write what
would have been a very boring book on “birds in Shakespeare”’44 . I don’t think it would
have bored me. Nuttall makes a casual, and I suppose humanist, assumption that the non-
human world in itself is of minor interest, which environmental crisis and ecocriticism
must render outmoded. One thing about this book might have limited its interest, though.
If Armstrong had isolated the subject of birds in Shakespeare, treating it as a complete
42
Richard Mabey, Flora Britannica (London, 1996); Geoffrey Grigson, The Englishman’s Flora (London,
1955); Stefan Buczacki, Fauna Britannica (London, 2002); Duff Hart-Davis, Fauna Britannica (London,
2002) (much less Shakespeare in this one); Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey, Birds Britannica (London,
2005).
43
One of the last great parson-naturalists, Armstrong wrote a classic of the genre, Birds of the Grey Wind
(London, 1940), and two books for the prestigious Collins New Naturalist series, The Wren (London, 1955)
and The Folklore of Birds (London, 1959).
44
A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker (New Haven, 2007), p. 5.
27
and specialist topic, a background, separate from the other meanings of the plays and
poems, then his book would have seemed disappointingly hobbyist. The point, in
ecocritical terms, is that nothing should be studied apart from the ecosystem. Its meaning,
and its life, is in its inter-relations and co-evolution in the ecosystem it co-constitutes with
other life-forms such as people. If in the 1890s the New Yorker Eugene Schieffelin really
did plan to introduce to America every bird mentioned in Shakespeare, as is said, perhaps
apocryphally, it was a whole ecosystem of meaning he was hoping to import (with the
starling he succeeded spectacularly, at least in introducing the bird).
Armstrong concluded that Shakespeare’s natural history did not come mainly
from direct observation. ‘A close study of his ornithology has convinced me that personal
observation played a very minor part, while traditional symbolism and folk-lore bulked
large in his imagination45’. What prompted this comment was the ornithological
improbability of the crows flying halfway-up Dover cliffs mentioned in King Lear.
Armstrong found natural history inaccuracies in some very memorable Shakespeare lines,
and concluded that ‘For Shakespeare, symbolism was more important than exact natural
history’46:
The poet was no entomologist – nor ornithologist for that matter. A little
observation would have shown him that the beetle is not “shard-borne” but that its
elytra serve as covering for the wings. If he had picked up a glow-worm he might
easily have ascertained that the fairies could not light their tapers at its eyes – for
the luminescence is in its tail.47

45
Edward A. Armstrong, Shakespeare’s Imagination (London, 1946), p. 20, footnote.
46
Armstrong, Shakespeare’s Imagination, p. 20.
47
Armstrong, Shakespeare’s Imagination, p. 25.
28
This is Armstrong the amateur field naturalist talking. Some Shakespeare experts don’t
wholly agree that personal observation was not an important ingredient. Jonathan Bate, in
his recent biography, notes that Shakespeare’s return to Stratford for the period from 1607
to 1610, when the London theatres were closed because of the plague, coincides with a
turn in his work to pastoral romance. Bate guesses confidently that Shakespeare would
have known the wild herbs of his local fields from early childhood:
[H]ow many students and playgoers today could identify specimens of fumitory,
darnel, or cuckoo-flower? Shakespeare, brought up in the country, had a field
education, in all probability before he even went to school.48
And the closeness with which the details of flowers are described, when Shakespeare
wants a delicate comparison to convey the intimately observed detail of human bodies,
can only come, it seems to Bate, from Shakespeare’s own observation:
It is perhaps in Cymbeline that Shakespeare’s art of natural observation is at its
most acute. The supposedly dead Fidele is apostrophized with the phrase ‘the
azured harebell like thy veins’. The colour and structure of the harebell precisely
resemble those of human veins. (…) And the mole on Innogen’s left breast:
‘cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops / I’th’bottom of a cowslip’. Is there any
other English poet, save John Clare, who has such an eye as this?49
I’m not even sure that ‘shard-borne beetle’ (Macbeth, III, ii, 42) is inaccurate. True, it is
the film-thin, translucent wings, not the hard, shard-like wing-cases called elytra, that
beat the air and lift the beetle, but the open elytra are the most noticeable feature, jutting-
out like rudders and giving the larger beetles, especially, the jerky, blundering movement
48
Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare (London, 2008), p. 58.
49
Bate, Soul of the Age, pp. 54-55.
29
that calls attention to them and makes them, in flight, slightly uncanny. In London,
Shakespeare is very likely to have seen the imposing Stag Beetles, Lucanus cervus, by far
the largest British beetle, in flight at dusk on summer evenings (their numbers are much
in decline now, wouldn’t you know it?). These answer the description most strikingly50.
Around Stratford, however, Shakespeare is much more likely to have encountered the
smaller Dor Beetle, Geotrupes stercorarius, a British dung beetle that also fits the
description (and is found in Scotland, where there are no records of the Stag Beetle,
though Shakespeare wasn’t necessarily regionally accurate in his natural history).
This leads me to a discovery I made (new to me, I mean, not to the world),
investigating the ‘shard-borne beetle’ phrase for the first time, for this article. Many
editors, it seems, interpret it not as Armstrong does, and I always have, as meaning
‘carried by shard-like wings’, but as meaning ‘hatched in dung’. Specifically, this would
be cow dung, since the Oxford English Dictionary gives ‘a patch of cow dung’ as the
second primary meaning of ‘shard’, and tells us that the Dor Beetle used to be known
sometimes as the Shard Beetle, being so named in a natural history published in 1854.
Kenneth Muir, in his Arden edition, re-issued in 1984, gave both meanings, as did the
1997 Norton Shakespeare and the Riverside Shakespeare of the same year, but Bate and
Eric Rasmussen in their Complete Works of 2007 give only ‘born in dung’.
I am very reluctant to yield up the wing-case meaning. It gives us the beetle as
Macbeth (and Shakespeare) might actually have seen it; the beetle on their eye-level, and
thus as the focal point around which a whole scene, including the human observer,
springs into life. The flying beetle is an individual beetle Macbeth or Shakespeare has
50
Some good photographs of Stag Beetles in flight, illustrating the point about the ‘shards’, can currently
be found at http://maria.fremlin.de/stagbeetles/andras/flying_aa.html
30
seen, whereas they probably haven’t actually watched a beetle hatching in dung, so the
latter sense must come from second-hand, generic information. Therefore the flying
beetle places author and character, attached to it by a sightline, in the natural environment
they share with it. And ‘shard-borne’ in the wing-case meaning makes the whole line into
a much more integrated perception (even though it features a mythical figure):
Ere to Black Hecate’s summons
The shard-borne beetle with his drowsy hums
Hath rung night’s yawning peal
The hums are the sound of the wings in flight. One moment of perception is given to us
by the wing-case meaning; two different moments by the other. The flying beetle has the
capacity to surprise, revealing more of its behaviour. It gives us movement, leading our
eye, like the bat and birds mentioned in nearby lines, towards the shadows. Anyway, it is
the picture the phrase has always given me.
3. An Ecocritic’s Macbeth
What brings me to Macbeth, then, is the role in the play of what used to be called
Shakespeare’s Natural History: the references to weather, birds, animals, flowers and
trees, so constant throughout the play as to constitute the continuous presence of an
ecosystem in which the human characters and their desires and actions are embedded. I
am coming to this as an ecocritic now, but it was always an integral part of what excited
me in this and other plays.
Introducing a collection of new critical essays about Macbeth, the editor, Nick
Moschovakis, provides a brief history of landmark critical and theatrical interpretations
31
of the play from 1606 to 200551. He structures this history as an oscillation between two
poles. There have been Dualistic Macbeths, in which good and evil were clearly
distinguished from each other, and Problematic Macbeths, in which, for various reasons,
the two moral categories were more indistinct and paradoxically related. No ecocritical
interpretations feature yet in his history. I want to make one, by reading Macbeth as anti-
dualist play, in which a powerfully-impelled attempt to see, and manage, the world and
the self in dualistic terms becomes untenable and has to give way to holistic terms. This
will be an ecocritical reading primarily because the attempt at dualistic management of
the self is shored up by an attempt to attribute dualistic contradictions to nature.
Macbeth’s hope is that nature derives its unitary stability from a balance, a clear division
of identity and separation of spheres between two opposing forces, and that the same will
be true of his moral selfhood. When these related attempts both fail, an opening appears
for a non-dualistic, proto-ecological view of nature and the self. Under the heading of the
good and evil dualism, several others are marshalled: day and night, light and dark,
sighted and blindfolded, good creatures and evil creatures, good and bad weather.
Macbeth’s whole enterprise depends on maintaining these separations and preventing the
two sides from coming to reckoning and resolution. It is connected with an attempt to
repress the relationship of his lifetime to the lives of future generations. Instead, he is
prone to delusions of immortality. To environmentalists, these characteristics are sadly
recognisable.
The play opens with an immediate confusion of dualistic opposites. ‘When the
battle’s lost and won,’ says the second witch, and the three chant ‘Fair is foul and foul is
fair’. The line about the battle makes sense, since one side will lose and the other win, but
51
Nick Moschovakis, ed., Macbeth: New Critical Essays (New York, 2008), pp. 4 -72.
32
the suggestion is that the two outcomes may, in a more sinister sense, be mixed together.
Winning will bring with it a greater danger of losing. Macbeth echoes the ‘foul is fair’
line just before he and Banquo encounter the witches in Scene III. He seems to be
contrasting the fairness of his victory with the foulness of the weather (the ‘fog and filthy
air’ described by the witches earlier in the day), but also expressing surprise at the
contradiction, as if fine weather was to be expected in recognition of a day of fine deeds.
This is his first attempt to find a consistency between natural phenomena and his own
actions that would legitimate those actions, and his first puzzled failure to do so.
The witches’ prophecy begins to work on Macbeth’s mind, and after hearing
Duncan name Malcolm as successor, he makes his first use of a dualistic ruse connected
to the ‘fair is foul’ puzzle:
Stars, hide your fires!
Let not light see my black and deep desires;
The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be
Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see. (I, iv, 50-53)
Starting as a wish that the stars should hide themselves so that light in general – public
knowledge, and perhaps divine perception – will not see his desires, the speech begins to
formulate the idea that he himself will not need to see them, nor the actions that will
gratify them. This will become a dominant idea for Macbeth; his main hope for most of
the play. The eye winks at the hand as a sign of complicity, but it also winks to blind itself
so that it can claim not to know. Macbeth wishes to commit the crime while retaining a
self, or conception of self, that is clear of the guilt. He wishes to do the deed without
becoming the person who did the deed, which means imagining that he can sequestrate
33
the fact of having done the deed inside himself somewhere where it will be sealed off and
will not spread throughout his being. With this goes an imaginary division of his body, so
that the hand can strike the blow without implicating the eye that did not see, though at
this stage he has not quite brought off this rhetorical trick of denial, and the wink betrays
the eye’s share in the guilt.
Lady Macbeth also gives us the image of Macbeth as a divided self, but for her it
is the obstacle to action, rather than a manoeuvre to make the crime psychologically
possible:
Yet do I fear thy nature:
It is too full o’th’milk of human kindness,
To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great;
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it: what thou wouldst highly,
That wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false,
And yet wouldst wrongly win; (I, v, 16-22)
For Lady Macbeth, the two sides of Macbeth are incompatible and deadlocked. She is the
holist, believing that resolution is necessary, though the resolution she wants is in the
destructive direction. Here she introduces the image of mother’s milk, starting a
succession of images connected with babies, children and future generations that will be
another of the structuring image-chains of the play. For Macbeth to be full of milk makes
him feminine, compromising his masculine ability to act ruthlessly, and temporarily
swapping the gender roles in their marriage. But it is the general ‘milk of human
kindness’, identifying kindness as a general principle with the nourishing of the young,
34
and the sharing of the world with the new generations who will inherit it. Against that
principle, the murder is an act entirely for the here and now of Macbeth’s lifetime,
violently sundering the relationship with future generations. That is the ecocritical
significance of the play’s emphasis on the Macbeths’ childlessness. On the reading I am
offering, the childlessness can stand for a loss of sense of relation to the future; a collapse
of the idea that the significance of one’s own life includes having things to hand on. It
need not refer specifically to whether someone has children.
This question of the natural compact with future generations is very much to the
fore in Macbeth’s great tortured speech of indecision, where he glimpses the implications
of breaking that compact for the sake of a personal gratification limited to one’s own
lifetime:
If it were done, when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well
It were done quickly: if th’assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all – here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We’d jump the life to come. (I, vii, 1-7)
If, that is, we could sequestrate a particular action, not only so that it would not pollute
the remainder of our moral being, but also to ensure it would have no repercussions
running into the future. That is the meaning of ‘trammel up the consequence’, and of ‘the
be-all and the end-all’. As Macbeth steels himself to hazard his soul in a Faustian bargain,
‘here’ has the strong meaning of ‘here in this world’, as opposed to ‘the life after death’,
35
but it then modulates, in the second ‘here’, towards meaning ‘here and now, at this very
moment, when I still haven’t committed myself’. At this moment of choice, the flow of
time seems to have slowed for him (if ‘shoal’ is the correct word; there is some debate),
in recognition of the momentousness of the decision that paralyses him, and in warning,
too, that once it has been taken, the current will gather pace. His speech then gathers
rhetorical pace itself, as his vision of the consequences of the crime becomes a violently
apocalyptic allegory, ascending to the cosmic or global scale:
And Pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven’s Cherubin, hors’d
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind. (I, vii, 21-25)
The spirit of Pity, rising up in cosmic horror at the deed, has the form of a baby,
representing future generations, as the rage of the cosmos takes the form of hurricane-like
blasting winds, hurling the deed everywhere like debris, and matched in their strength
only by the universal grief, the tears. These two images – the horrified, accusing baby and
the devastating global wind – are of great ecocritical significance. Lady Macbeth’s
subsequent image of plucking her nipple from a baby’s gums and smashing the child’s
head reinforces this significance, identifying the Macbeths’ crime as one against future
generations.
After the deed, Macbeth persists in his efforts to divide himself, attempting to be
at once the beneficiary of the deed and a person untainted by it: not the kind of person
who would commit such a crime, even though he has. Ironically, his dualism, in reversed
36
form, eventually communicates itself to the country he brutalises: Ross reports a Scotland
‘Almost afraid to know itself’ (IV, iii, 166). Reaching for support for his division of
himself, Macbeth turns repeatedly to his perception of the natural world around him. His
basic recourse is to see his natural environment in terms of a simple and traditional binary
division between good and evil, the clarity of which is achieved by translation into two
other dualisms: light and dark, and day and night. This cosmic division is a basic
assumption in the culture Macbeth inhabits.
We have already encountered it in the contrast between the ‘temple-haunting
martlet’ (I, vi, 4) Banquo observes to be nesting in large numbers on the walls of
Dunsinane, and the raven Lady Macbeth says ‘croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan/Under
my battlements’ (I, v, 38-39). The martlet, (it seems not to be clear whether the bird
Shakespeare had in mind was the Swift or the House Martin) is a bird associated with
light, holiness and the sweetness of clean air. Indeed, it needs ‘delicate’ air for its well
being, and could not survive in the ‘fog and filthy air’ (I, i, 12), suggestive of the murk of
Hell, in which the witches delight. Duncan, arriving at the castle, has just praised the
quality of the Dunsinane air that ‘Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself/Unto our gentle
senses’ (I, vi, 1-2). Such air is a moral and holy medium, nourishing to the most moral
and sympathetic faculties.
Its presence at Dunsinane, and that of the martlet breeding in profuse numbers,
can be taken as deceptive, since it leads the visitors to assume that this will be a safe
place, an atmosphere in which treachery cannot thrive. In one sense this is the first
breakdown of the moral dualism this culture projects onto nature. Until now, that dualism
has held. Nature has seemed to confirm and complement the moral order proclaimed by
37
Scotland’s social hierarchy. During the recent civil war, Duncan, having asked a captain
whether the two commanders, Macbeth and Banquo, were intimidated by the enemy,
received a confidently ironic reply:
Yes;
As sparrows eagles, or the hare the lion. (I, ii, 35)
That is, not at all: absurd suggestion. But after the murder, a rumour goes round that a
‘falcon, towering in her pride of place’ has been ‘by a mousing owl hawk’d at and killed’
(II, iv, 12-13). Nature is now seen to be imitating the shocking reversal of hierarchy that
has occurred in the human world.
But the fact that martlets gather in large numbers at Dunsinane is not wholly
deceptive. Nor is the presence of both martlet and raven, in a kind of natural heraldry
above the gates, a sign that the dualistic understanding of nature doesn’t work: not at this
stage in the play. The two birds’ presence together also confirms the idea that these two
moral natures are both present in Macbeth. Before the murder, an obvious suggestion is
that the two birds symbolise sides of Macbeth’s nature that are in battle for his soul. The
owl’s victory over the falcon then symbolises the outcome. But for Macbeth, the dualistic
structure has not been superseded by that outcome. He seems to need it more than ever. It
still seems to be a matter of attempting to convince himself that good and evil occupy
strictly demarcated spaces and are therefore able to co-exist without admixture. This idea,
if he can sustain it, will enable him to preserve the notion of his own good, clean nature,
uncorrupted by contact with his other nature, even as the atrocities multiply.
Having arranged the murders of Banquo and Fleance, he tells Lady Macbeth:
Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck,
38
Till thou applaud the deed. (III, ii, 45-46)
He is now projecting onto her the doubleness he seeks for himself: innocence, in its
fullest sense, inhabiting the same soul as unrepentant ruthlessness. The idea is
immediately generalised by means, once again, of the night and day dualism, found in
nature and gratefully interpreted as a moral dualism and a clear division:
Come, seeling Night,
Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful Day,
And with thy bloody and invisible hand,
Cancel, and tear to pieces, that great bond
Which keeps me pale! – Light thickens; and the crow
Makes wing to th’rooky wood;
Good things of Day begin to droop and drowse,
While Night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.
It is ‘Stars, hide your fires’ again, but now the eye is not gleefully winking but submissive
in its complicity, allowing itself to be blindfolded (or, worse, sewn up, like the eye of a
falcon in training) so that it will not be able to see the crime; and it is the more general,
allegorical eye of Pity and of Day. If pity is only operative during the day, Macbeth will
be liberated to be ruthless at night (or dusk) without losing his capacity to pity, and the
knowledge of what pity is that is part of his sense of self. He tells himself that this
division is natural, and that a host of natural creatures, ‘Night’s black agents’, are in the
conspiracy with him. Already, just before the line instructing his wife to be innocent, he
has looked forward to the coming dusk as the appointed time for another dreadful deed,
naming, as the first harbingers of the shift from light to darkness, the bat and our old
39
friend the shard-borne beetle. Now crows and rooks are added (in a line quoted, I would
guess, in the majority of nature writing books about corvids since).
Further additions to the bestiary of ‘Night’s black agents’ are soon to come in the
list of familiars and ingredients recited by the witches over their brew. These include ‘the
brinded cat’ (perhaps a domestic cat, but ‘brinded’ could also be a description of the Wild
Cat, Felis sylvestris, the last surviving wild feline in Britain in Shakespeare’s day and
now; by coincidence it is now found, in Britain, only in the Scottish Highlands and is an
emblematic Scottish animal, but then it was widespread across England and therefore
probably known to Shakespeare), the ‘hedge-pig’ (hedgehog), wolves (still relatively
common in Scotland in Shakespeare’s time), bats and owls again, and a comprehensive
list for its time of the British reptiles and amphibians (‘fenny snake’, if it means ‘snake
from the fens or wetlands’, would most accurately describe the Grass Snake; Adder and
‘blind-worm’ (Slow Worm) are mentioned, though the latter is inaccurately given a sting,
and lizard, toad, newt and frog are listed generically rather than in their several species).
The witches also mention several spectacular exotics (tiger, baboon and shark, the last not
necessarily exotic), one mythical beast (dragon), some domestic animals (dog, goat, sow
and perhaps cat) and two native plants believed to have sinister magical properties
(hemlock and yew).
What places a creature on the dark side rather than the light seems to be one or
more of the following characteristics: nocturnal, black in colour, dangerous and
devouring, creeping near the ground, associated with dark places or associated with
wetness. A further characteristic is worth special mention: creatures are agents of
darkness if they are associated with decaying matter or carrion. Corvids are a recurring
40
presence in the play. Ravens, crows and magpies all feed extensively on carrion (Macbeth
calls the magpie by an old variant name, ‘magot-pie’, which, sounding like ‘maggot’,
reinforces the connection, though maggot is not the derivation). Rooks also eat carrion,
though seeds and invertebrates play a larger part in their diet – but Shakespeare may have
used ‘rook’, ‘crow’ and ‘chough’ interchangeably, as was common. The beetle, too,
would be associated with dung and rotting. But the carrion-eater invoked most
dramatically in the play is the kite, Milvus milvus, the Red Kite, almost wiped out in
Britain in the nineteenth century but today increasing dramatically after a series of
reintroductions. In Shakespeare’s time, they were a familiar sight, filling the skies over
cities and feeding on carrion in the streets. They feature in many of the plays, and the
association of the kite with bed linen, which it was said to steal from washing-lines as
nesting-material, was the basis of the first image cluster noticed by Armstrong. A. D.
Nuttall, writing about this, describes the kite, in an impatient parenthesis, merely as ‘a
kind of bird’52, as if it didn’t really matter what kind, but this shows his neglect of
ecological significance.
Macduff, in shock at the news of the murder of his wife and babes, calls Macbeth
‘Hell-kite’ (IV, iii, 217), continuing the almost incessant bird references and analogies
that mediated that shocking scene itself. Here Macbeth, memorably, is the kite swooping
on ‘all my pretty chickens and their dam’. Kites do take living birds in this way, and
Cocker and Mabey suggest that this is the main reason why, in the ensuing centuries, they
were almost exterminated in Britain53. But the kite’s main visibility, and usefulness, was
as a disposer of carrion and refuse. London in Shakespeare’s time protected them by law
52
Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker, p. 5.
53
Cocker and Mabey, Birds Britannica, p. 118.
41
because of what might now be called their ecological service54. Macbeth protests to
Banquo’s ghost:
If charnel-houses and our graves must send
Those that we bury, back, our monuments
Shall be the maws of kites. (III, iv, 70-72)
This has generally been taken to mean that if burial cannot keep the dead confined, their
bodies should instead be left out for the kites; it also gives the image of the open-mouthed
kite fluttering over the dead body in parody of a decorous monument. The underlying
suggestion, though, is that Macbeth’s crime has arrested the natural order of bodily decay,
dissolution and new life, the recognition of which gave Hamlet new strength in humility:
Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away. (Hamlet, V, i, 196-197)
Christian humilitas gives one significance to human acceptance of the decomposition and
recycling of the earthly body; our present-day environmentalism gives another, not
necessarily incompatible. Acceptance of the stages of life, and the necessity of death, is
what each generation, on a planet in environmental crisis, owes the next. We have to
make way. That is why the natural recyclers of decaying matter, the kites, corvids and
beetles, are not really on the dark side. They embody the process of dissolution and
handing-on; processes of material exchange and temporality that encompass even the
airy, heavenly martlets.
The Macbeths, in contrast, have blocked these processes. Once they have gained
the crown, their preoccupation is mainly with thwarting the predicted succession. They
have no lines of work or hope leading into the future beyond their lives. Their victims do
54
See Cocker and Mabey, Birds Britannica, p. 114.
42
not decay and are not naturally consumed. Duncan continues to bleed, and Banquo comes
back from the grave. Natural signs of aging that Macbeth finds, metaphorically, in
himself – ‘My way of life/Is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf’ (V, iii, 23-24) – are not
attended by the consolation that the comparison with leaves might normally and
traditionally bring (the leaves change and fall, but this is part of the process of growth
and renewal, and the tree is constituted by photosynthesis, one of the great recycling
processes that make the living world). Macbeth can expect no comfort in his old age from
continuities with past and future. His ‘yellow leaf’ indicates not a natural autumn but
merely a terminal decline in his political fortunes, and so he sees his life as a ‘brief
candle’ (V, v, 22) that will be extinguished leaving nothing behind.
Having thrown away all positive sense of personal interest in the world after his
death – he has merely, but tormentedly, a negative interest in denying that world to
Banquo’s issue – he becomes reckless of the whole existence of that world, even exulting
in the idea of its destruction. When he goes to see the witches a second time, his fantasy
once again becomes apocalyptic, and he tells them he is willing to countenance global
devastation, if that is the price of what he desires:
Though you untie the winds and let them fight
Against the churches, though the yeasty waves
Confound and swallow navigation up,
Though bladed corn be lodged and trees blown down,
Though castles topple on their warders’ heads,
Though palaces and pyramids do slope
Their heads to their foundations, though the treasure
43
Of nature’s germens tumble all together
Even till destruction sicken, answer me
To what I ask you. (IV, i, 68-77)
Perhaps it seems a crude transference, but the preoccupation that is the starting-point of
this essay obviously prompts me to connect these images with climate change, especially
the floods and winds. A violent convulsion of nature, across the globe, is envisaged here.
The reference to ‘nature’s germens’ is especially suggestive in ecocritical terms, since
these ‘germens’ are the seed-producing organs, or ovaries, in a plant, or for all forms of
life the template, the basic store of genetic information, from which all individuals spring.
Lear has this vision as well, in his rage in the storm:
And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o’the world!
Crack Nature’s molds, all germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man! (King Lear, III, ii, 6-9)
Once the mould has been cracked, no further copies can be made. If all the germens are
spilled at once, or they tumble all together, none will be left for future generation. Lear
conflates the particular ingratitude, as he sees it, of his daughters with a general human
ingratitude that makes not just certain individuals, of a certain generation, but all
humanity, for all time, forfeit the right to life. Both tragedies feature this image because
they are concerned with the breaking of bonds between generations – Macbeth with one
generation’s cruel recklessness of children and future, and King Lear with children’s
cruel repudiation of parents. The image is of one move at one moment that lays waste the
world’s whole potential for regeneration, which once squandered can never be restored.
44
Retribution comes to Macbeth in two symbolic forms that fulfil the prophecies he
thought of as mere metaphors for the impossible. The first undoes his dualistic separation
of two kinds of nature. Birnam Wood marches to Dunsinane in the form of branches cut
and carried by soldiers. Robert Pogue Harrison, in his study of the cultural meanings of
forests from antiquity to the present, follows many commentators in seeing the marching
trees as symbolising an uprising of nature against so many unnatural crimes. This
interpretation exposes as a failure and delusion Macbeth’s attempt to see those crimes as
natural by imposing a dualism on nature. The ‘rooky wood’ isn’t on his side after all, will
not hide his crimes and has not licensed them.
This does not mean that the moral dualism imposed on nature has entirely gone
from the play. Harrison is analysing the long history of that dualism, and for him forests
are a compelling example because although they are the primal dark nature against which
Northern European civilization first defined itself in the form of clearings, they are also a
foundational raw material, and therefore have been managed and rationalised in
numerous ways. Through this example, he explores the centuries-old dialectic between
the ideas of civilisation and wild nature; a dialectic in which the one idea never fully or
permanently subdues the other. So, for Harrison, if at the end of Macbeth the forest seems
to have changed sides, then the dualism has not disappeared but only shifted its ground.
In his analysis, the play now features a moral contrast between forest and heath: ‘by the
end of the play the moving forest of Birnam comes to symbolize the forces of natural law
mobilizing its justice against the moral wasteland of Macbeth’s nature’55. Heath, where
the witches meet, is ‘wasteland’ of no economic value (before the days of industrial-scale
gravel and peat extraction) and can be left to bear the moral opprobrium. The play has not
55
Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago, 1992), p. 104.
45
entirely disposed of the traditional dualistic construction of nature, but it can certainly be
read as demonstrating the harmful consequences of that dualism and the need for it to
change; a need that in our time is urgent because of ecological crisis.
Final retribution for Macbeth is his bodily defeat after his army has been
vanquished, and that is where the second symbol comes in. Macbeth believes he bears a
charmed life because the witches have told him that no man born of woman can kill him.
His nemesis is Macduff, who reveals when they finally face each other that ‘Macduff was
from his mother’s womb/Untimely ripped’ (V, x, 15-16). The significance of this is not
merely to do with a distinction between artificial and natural birth. Lisa A. Tomaszewski
has pointed out that ‘In most cases, from antiquity through the Renaissance, a caesarean
was only performed on a woman who was already dead or who was dying’56. No record
exists of a mother surviving one in Britain before the end of the eighteenth century57.
Macbeth, who has shown himself so reckless of the lives of future generations, and so
lacking in compunction (the ‘milk of human kindness’ he is said to possess in abundance
at the beginning) about harming children, meets his end at the hands of a man who lives
because a mother bore him at the price of her death. His charms and prophecies
discredited, he declares ‘Yet I will try the last. Before my body/ I throw my warlike
shield. Lay on, Macduff,’ (V, x, 32-33). It is a recognition, in his final moments, of the
failure of dualism. The last is his physical body, an undivided self, all parts of which will
die together.
56
Lisa A. Tomaszewski, ‘ “Throw physic to the dogs!”: Moral physicians and medical malpractice’, in Nick
Moschovakis, ed., Macbeth: New Critical Essays, pp. 182-191, p. 189.
57
See Tomaszewski, ‘Throw physic to the dogs!’, p. 189. Her source for this is Roy Porter, The Greatest
Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (New York, 1997).
46
In giving this reading, I have been identifying aspects of the play that acquire an
additional charge of meaning, ecocritical meaning, in our present environmental
predicament. These are the aspects that might well stand out for ecocritically-minded
readers. Theatre and film productions have not usually given much attention to these
aspects, but they could find ways of giving them special emphasis. Such a production
would be making a ‘green’ interpretation of the play. I’d like to see it.
47

An Ecocritics Macbeth

Загружено:

Сведения о документе

Авторское право

Доступные форматы

Поделиться этим документом

Поделиться или встроить документ

Параметры публикации

Этот документ был вам полезен?

Это неприемлемый материал?

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

An Ecocritics Macbeth

Загружено:

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

An Ecocritic’s Macbeth

1. Ecocriticism, Shakespeare and Presentism

than any others, would be the making of one’s literary intelligence.

This view of Shakespeare, which I later learned to associate with ‘liberal

humanism’, was a standard, background assumption when I took my undergraduate

feminists, often chose Shakespeare as their ground of contention. Radical and

about Shakespeare. This assumption is not to be encountered so often in literature

university English teacher. Nevertheless, the position of Shakespeare in the national

culture, continues to reproduce the assumption.

attention at this juncture?

importance at the critical moment. Ecocriticism’s vocation is to analyze culture from an

politics and Shakespeare studies as mutually sustaining activities, therefore, he is

asserting that the pursuit of ecocritical readings of Shakespeare is a valuable contribution

cultural territory: the centrality that is maintained by Shakespeare’s pre-eminent place in

the school curriculum. Whether this centrality is merited by Shakespeare’s pre-eminent

Ecocritical interpretations of Shakespeare, associated with the broad ecocritical

is perceptible by means of recently developed technologies and scientific methods, and

ecocritically is therefore to read from an extremely specific present. In this sense,

Sharon O’Dair, surveying Shakespearean ecocriticism as an especially

this context, as they lead us to different ecocritical priorities.

that ‘presentism is a commitment to the possibility of making general interpretations

of the engagement of the reader’s full emotional, embodied response.

And bathos is not the inevitable consequence of this kind of connection-making.

redemption, powerfully moving because it is mediated by a symbolic event capable of

possibility of a shared, communal spirit of forgiveness. In that case, do emotions

neglect any of them.

contrasted with an exclusively historicist approach:

Historicism is a tacit insistence on impersonal and intellectually detached forms

resources to help them understand what they’re reading. And presentism

feelings as the point of departure for the exploration of a complex, emotionally

demanding text like King Lear.12

tradition of mind/body dualism that enthrones detached, impersonal, disembodied

property of men as opposed to women, of Western colonialists as opposed to indigenous

sometimes with Heideggerean ideas of authentic dwelling, in which the moment-by-

abstract or metaphysical definitions. Ecocritics of these persuasions see the Cartesian

colonised peoples, the others to Western rationality.

operation of this ideology:

realms is accomplished and the possibility of continuity is destroyed from both

nature become the dualised other of the mind.13

located. Place considered in ecological terms is ‘ecosystem’: the unceasing flow of

predisposed to be wary of this. The attempt at such detachment constitutes a denial of

ecological relations. Ecology, as a scientific discipline, developed as a reaction against

a process of continuous, fluctuating relations that in their locality constitute an ecosystem

reactions – is attractive in ecocritical terms.

heightened awareness of immediate ecological relations, this must not preclude a

representation, and ways of reading, that combine these aims.

ecocritics, is described by Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes as a Shakespeare criticism

covertly happens anyway.14

historicist ecofeminism, locates the turning-point in a profound displacement, across

of aligning woman with nature now becomes more powerful:

restructuring of priorities may be crucial if people and nature are to survive’.18

the trope central to Merchant’s argument - is casually dismissed by Egan as an example

In the next breath he resorts eagerly to a post-Freudian knowingness in order to belittle

retrieve them as forms of proto-ecological understanding wrongly suppressed by

enlightenment rationality. Both writers point to recent developments in science as giving

historicist task of elucidating their historical meaning.

Moreover, Egan’s presentist historicism is layered. He seeks to retrieve not only

macrocosm/microcosm correspondence to be found in E. M.W. Tillyard’s account of the

the large-scale pattern is reproduced in small-scale instances and images. An

of literature as an organic whole:

I wish to argue that the abandonment of ‘organic unity as an aesthetic value’ is a

unity can be a powerful solvent of the fracturing impulses of late industrial

capitalism, not least of all in the case of the unitary Earth.22

systems: how an image, in a Shakespearean speech, for example, reinforces or