Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama

Abstract

In Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama, Bruce Boehrer provides the first general history of the Shakespearean stage to focus primarily on ecological issues. Early modern English drama was conditioned by the environmental events of the cities and landscapes within which it developed. Boehrer introduces Jacobean London as the first modern European metropolis in an England beset by problems of overpopulation; depletion of resources and species; land, water and air pollution; disease and other health-related issues; and associated changes in social behavior and cultural output. In six chapters he discusses the work of the most productive and influential playwrights of the day: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, Fletcher, Dekker and Heywood, exploring the strategies by which they made sense of radical ecological change in their drama. In the process, Boehrer sketches out these playwrights' differing responses to environmental issues and traces their legacy for later literary formulations of green consciousness.

Historical Portrayal of Hoarding Disorder in European Literature and Its Relationship to the Economic and Personal Circumstances of the Authors

“…While Shakespeare is best known as a playwright, nearly all his earnings during the late 16th century were obtained outside of writing. Interestingly, much of his wealth resulted from his hoarding of grain during years of surplus and later selling the grain during years of famine at significantly increased prices [ 18 ]. In this case, Shakespeare hoarded for capitalistic purposes, and his depiction of Caius Marcius in Coriolanus appears to mirror Shakespeare’s real-life behavior.…”

Memory studies and the Anthropocene: A roundtable

“…Several databases, including the online Oxford English Dictionary (OED), house and make available the 'acts of human inscription' and 'communication device [s]' that I study. If, as literary scholars and environmental historians of early modern England have argued, the long seventeenth century is a critical moment in the histories of ecological degradation, activism, and thought (Boehrer, 2013;Borlik, 2011;Hiltner, 2011;Watson, 2006), then I propose that words circulating in English print culture might have captured and so fossilized this environmental change. More contemporary examples of this phenomenon include the term 'Anthropocene' (Boes and Marshall, 2014: 62) and Jussi Parikka's (2014) 'Anthrobscene', a concept that reminds me that the devices and platforms I employ to complete this project are strongly implicated in environmental degradation.…”

Environmental Renaissance Studies

“…For those who would contest that the whole field of ecocriticism – grounded as it is in the recognition of today's environmental crisis – could be labelled pedantically by historians as presentist, there yet remains a spectrum within it. Bruce Boehrer's Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama () proves an illustrative example. Boehrer claims that “the literary modes of urban satire, pastoral escapism and proletarian nationalism remain to this day the most powerful imaginative tools we have to confront the ongoing degradation of our natural environment” (27).…”