The Eco-Self in Early Modern English Literature 9789048556946

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction : Ourselves Our Renaissance: The Verdancy of Critical Practice
1. The Verdant Imagination in Shakespeare’s Sonnets
2. The Intermediating Self in Doctor Faustus
3. Resisting Self-Erasure in Antony and Cleopatra
4. Wrestling with the Eco-Self in The Duchess of Malfi
5. Ecology and Selfhood in The Blazing World
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Eco-Self in Early Modern English Literature

Environmental Humanities in Pre-modern Cultures This series in environmental humanities offers approaches to medieval, early modern, and global pre-industrial cultures from interdisciplinary environmental perspectives. We invite submissions (both monographs and edited collections) in the fields of ecocriticism, specifically ecofeminism and new ecocritical analyses of under-represented literatures; queer ecologies; posthumanism; waste studies; environmental history; environmental archaeology; animal studies and zooarchaeology; landscape studies; ‘blue humanities’, and studies of environmental/natural disasters and change and their effects on pre-modern cultures. Series Editor Heide Estes, University of Cambridge and Monmouth University Editorial Board Steven Mentz, St. John’s University Gillian Overing, Wake Forest University Philip Slavin, University of Kent

The Eco-Self in Early Modern English Literature

Elizabeth D. Gruber

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Jean Mignon, Cleopatra Bitten by an Asap. ca. 1535–55. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, Open Access. Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 888 1 e-isbn 978 90 4855 694 6 doi 10.5117/9789463728881 nur 685 © E.D. Gruber / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2023 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.



Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 7 Introduction: Ourselves Our Renaissance: The Verdancy of Critical Practice 9 1. The Verdant Imagination in Shakespeare’s Sonnets

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2. The Intermediating Self in Doctor Faustus 77 3. Resisting Self-Erasure in Antony and Cleopatra 113 4. Wrestling with the Eco-Self in The Duchess of Malfi 149 5. Ecology and Selfhood in The Blazing World 177 Bibliography 217 Index 235

Acknowledgements I am pleased to acknowledge the debts incurred while writing this book. I had the good fortune to work with Erika Gaffney at Amsterdam University Press. Her editorial acumen and support have been instrumental in completing this project, which will appear as part of a series dedicated to the environmental humanities in pre-modern cultures. To my anonymous readers: your rigorous review of the entire manuscript has enabled me to refine the arguments in each chapter and sharpen the through-lines that unify the book. Likewise, Lea Greenberg is unrivaled as a copyeditor. While any remaining mistakes are, of course, my own, I so appreciate the rigor and dedication of everyone involved with Amsterdam University Press. I wish to thank Susan C. Staub for her insightful analysis of my essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets, an earlier version of which appears in the collection she edited, Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination, forthcoming from Amsterdam University Press. The chapter on The Duchess of Malfi, by John Webster, is derived, in part, from an article published in LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, in October 2021, available online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2021.19417 21. An anonymous reviewer for LIT pushed me to develop the concept of the eco-self, which then provided the focal point for The Eco-Self in Early Modern English Literature. I am grateful to LIT’s editors, Tara Harney-Mahajan and Amanda Smith, for their support of my work. As always, my husband, Bob Myers, has been my go-to reader and a daily source of inspiration and pleasure. I love navigating the world with you, and I am beyond grateful for your devotional attention to this project, from its inception to completion.



Introduction: Ourselves Our Renaissance: The Verdancy of Critical Practice Abstract This chapter lays out the rationale for the eco-self, a hybrid entity whose properties are discernible across broad swathes of early modern literature. In brief, the eco-self acknowledges humans’ embedment in the world while simultaneously confirming the necessity of periodically claiming a space apart from it. While ecological discourse has offered a necessary corrective to certain aspects of Enlightenment thought, the time is ripe for revisiting proprietarily human concerns. In undertaking this work, the introduction offers fresh conceptualizations of such key ideas as vulnerability, indistinction, and aesthetics. Keywords: Atomism; ecocriticism; ecopsychology; indistinction; materialism; WEIRDness

I want to tell the story of the self. The goal is an updated biography of a thriving entity, not an autopsy. Of course, a comprehensive account of the self would require a multi-volume work completed over the course of several decades, so the more modest and manageable focus here is on changing conceptions of personhood in early modern English literature. Tracking these innovations offers fresh insights into the zeitgeist of the period; reciprocally, the relevant changes have the potential to suggest some updates or refinements to current conceptions of personhood. The unique verdancy of critical practice invites diachronic comparisons. That is, literary criticism constitutes a fundamentally ecological endeavor in that it so often works by setting various texts or discourses in play and gauging their confluences and reciprocal effects. In this sense, virtually any text possesses an infinite renewability, a capacity to speak to and for diverse

Gruber, E.D., The Eco-Self in Early Modern English Literature. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463728881_intro

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epochs. Perhaps most crucially, while the quotidian experiences of early moderns differed from ours in obvious and important ways, there are some isolable, persisting dimensions of humanness. These are my focus. Because early modern texts interweave psychological and ecological concerns, they prove especially relevant to def ining humanness. In Hamlet (1602), for example, Shakespeare exploits the interdependence of self and world, so that the rot pervading Denmark taints its inhabitants. Specif ically, the debased king infects the entire geopolitical state. This interplay of self and world is often rightly assessed as a byproduct of humoral theory, so that it activates a particular conception of humanness, one predicated on porousness or permeability.1 On the other hand, both Hamlet and Hamlet draw attention to the possibility—at the very least the glimmer—of a robust or restless interiority, a self that periodically merges with and retreats from the surrounding world. In his defiant claim to “that within which passes show,” Hamlet acknowledges the individuated self (1.2.85).2 While this inner orientation does not exempt Hamlet from the demands of nature or the obligations enforced through belonging to a particular community, it intimates the necessity of a complex, fluid model of personhood, one that encompasses psychological as well as ecological principles. In repeatedly demonstrating the dialectical relationship between self and environment, early modern writers point toward a compromise version of humanness, summed up in the term “eco-self.” This hybrid entity enfolds biological exigencies (needs that are pan-organismic), yet it also encompasses the proprietarily human. To my knowledge, the term “eco-self” has not been employed by previous writers, though the concept certainly has roots in early modern scholarship and, more generally, in ecological discourse. For example, Robert N. Watson refers to the “ecological self” in an engaging reading of the identity theme in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Watson emphasizes dispersibility, so that the self is presumed to be diffused throughout the world. 1 Gail Kern Paster’s analysis of humoral theory is especially useful for contextualizing early modern preoccupations with embodiment. On the other hand, as this project endeavors to show, early moderns frequently engage questions of inwardness, so they are not thoroughgoing materialists. 2 Katharine Eisaman Maus assesses the importance of Hamlet’s self-description in Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance. For a very different reading of Hamlet, essentially a repudiation of the inward turn in criticism, see Margreta de Grazia’s Hamlet without Hamlet. These deservedly influential books stake out opposing moves in early modern studies, whereas my preference is a new synthesis of the two.

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As conceived here, the eco-self addresses both the relational dimensions of experience (i.e., Watson’s focus) and the periodic need to claim a space apart from the world. In this sense, the eco-self extends ecofeminist insights regarding selfhood.3 For example, in “Self and Community in Environmental Ethics,” Wendy Donner makes the case for championing “A strong sense of self, a unity of self, a self-affirming, autonomous self,” concepts she believes have been abandoned or discredited in environmental/ecological discourse (385). Following Donner, for oppressed or marginalized individuals and groups, claiming a self can be a liberating move, a vital step toward equity and justice. This self-assertion does not necessarily require abandoning a communal ethos. Ecofeminist work that focuses on the early modern period provides an especially useful context for understanding the eco-self. In their introduction to Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity (2011), Jennifer Munroe and Rebecca Laroche lay out a fundamental aspect of ecofeminism in their description of the self’s constant movement toward and away from the world, which is likewise central to my conception of the eco-self. Focusing on the specificity of female experience, they note that early modern women “necessarily acted in ways that mark them as distinct from and yet everconnected to—even in continuity with—the natural world they inhabited” (4). The diverse essays in their anthology successfully demonstrate how the discourses of ecocriticism, ecofeminism, and feminism prove mutually enriching, even interanimating (5). In her contribution to the collection, Lynne Dickson Bruckner suggests that, without defaulting to essentialism, “we can recuperate the historic bond between the feminine and nature in a productive and inclusive way” (17). She adds, “The historic alignment between women and nature locates a position for all humans to occupy” (25). The eco-self seeks to build on this insight, tracing the self-in-motion in various texts. My conception of the eco-self is indebted to the pioneering work of ecofeminists, though I emphasize shifting definitions of the self and new possibilities for subjectivity rather than, for example, focusing primarily on establishing or reviving the bond between women and nature. Whereas ecofeminists seek to restore a sense of agentic nature, the current project reconsiders the possibilities for human agency. That said, the eco-self does 3 Freya Matthews’s balanced essay, “Ecofeminism and Deep Ecology,” notes the commonalities as well as tensions in the two approaches identified in her title. And she responds to the founding tenets of Deep Ecology, as laid out by Arne Naess. Subsequent chapters consider more fully Matthews’s endorsement of the relational self, particularly its affinities with the eco-self.

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not originate in tropes or fantasies of dominating nature; rather, it acknowledges humans’ continuity with the natural world while simultaneously examining pressing psychological needs, such as those def ined by the concept of “individuation.” All the texts selected as focal points for ensuing chapters interrogate the relationship between self and world, individual and community, humans and/in nature, so they bring out the implications of the eco-self. Ecocriticism has been especially lucid in its articulation of what we share with all other living beings. It strikes me that the appeal of such approaches derives partly or even principally from collective weariness, a dissatisfaction with dominant institutions and accompanying values. Charlene Spretnak articulates this issue in The Resurgence of the Real: Body, Nature, and Place in a Hypermodern World (1997). Commenting on the fragmentary conditions of late-twentieth-century life (she is writing specifically of the Global West), Spretnak identifies an existential threat, “widespread collapse into an enervated self” (12). Notice how the self, so defined, offers cold comfort: it provides refuge from the hostile world but also enforces unwelcome alienation. In terms that sometimes verge on the mystical, Spretnak urges a return to a communitarian ethos, which she believes possible once we recognize that “[t]he real is poking its true nature through the modern abstractions that have denied it for several centuries” (13). For Spretnak, “the real” encompasses material and corporeal processes, to which she ascribes a kind of sacral power. Of course, in the decades since Spretnak published her book, ecological discourse has embraced the animated materialism she endorses. 4 The interplay of agency and communion, dating back at least as far as ancient Greece, lends a distinctive shape to Western history. Certain eras celebrate or enforce communal interests, while others enshrine the individual. Indeed, some historians argue that the early modern breaks from the Middle Ages by promoting an individualistic ethos.5 Generally, ecocritics (as well as ecofeminists and certain other varieties of feminist inquiry) emphasize the dangers of ignoring shared needs and aim to recuperate a communal set of values and accompanying actions. Such efforts are both necessary and laudable. But exigent circumstances, including such natural 4 Jane Bennett’s theorization of neo-materialism remains essential given its cogent articulation of all organisms as participants in networks of influence or effect. 5 Joseph Klaits examines the increasing emphasis on individual as opposed to communal interests in his account of witch persecutions. Deborah Willis also examines these tensions in her account of the gendering of witchcraft in the period.

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disasters as climate change or pandemics, require a new configuration of agency and communion, or individual and shared interests. To take one example, mitigating the spread of some viruses works only when each member of the collective complies with prescribed measures. Stated bluntly, one infected person behaving carelessly could contaminate a roomful of people, with the effects spiraling out from these unsuspecting carriers in formidable fashion. This scenario demonstrates the interdependence of moral agency or individual responsibility and collective well-being. In advancing the possibilities of the eco-self, the goal is to provide a sort of course correction, an alternative to the object-oriented (or object-obsessed) tendencies of many current strands of materialism. Ecocriticism and related fields such as ecofeminism lay the conceptual foundations for each chapter. And current philosophical and psychological models of selfhood also prove enriching. For instance, ecopsychology explores the synergy of self and world, so its salient principles inform the readings offered in each chapter.6 Although it can be tricky to apply one era’s insights to the cultural output of a preceding age, recent scholarship often emphasizes innate or biological processes, and these sometimes remain remarkably consistent over time. In The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought (2004), Gary Marcus meticulously outlines the genetic basis of all human behavior (a phenomenon that links us to all preceding and succeeding generations) while at the same time insisting on the inextricability of environmental factors from any assessment of essential traits or capacities. He ultimately concludes, “any attempt to fully disentangle nature from nurture is doomed to failure” (167). For those interested in early modern literature, this is an especially significant claim, given that Shakespeare articulates, and possibly originates, the pairing of “nature” and “nurture” as the dual or dueling facets of identity. Their intimate relationship finds succinct expression The Tempest (1611), when Prospero complains that Caliban is a “A devil, a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick” (4.1.188–89). This passage distills the identity-crisis that energizes early modern texts, indicating a desire to understand the origins of personality and behavior. If, as I take it, early moderns self-consciously redefined humanness, the current era exhibits a similar volatility. Writing of our present age, Stefan Herbrechter reflects that 6 James Hillman’s distillation of ecopsychology identifies the subfield’s abiding interest in where to draw the boundary between self and other or self and world. These questions likewise animate ecocriticism. And, as I seek to demonstrate, they lend a propulsive energy to early modern texts.

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“the human and humanity are in radical transition or transformation” (5). Whereas the early moderns were assembling a version of humanness that we have inherited, it seems that we are, often with equal self-consciousness or deliberateness, dismantling it, so this process is central to my overall project. For some decades, academic work has emphasized the contingency or cultural specificity of all human experience, in turn generating hostility to overarching claims about humanness. We might think of this as part of a general disaffection with the Enlightenment, particularly its version of universal humanity. In certain respects, this antipathy makes sense. After all, the traditional subject of the Enlightenment (i.e., the rational self it imagined and celebrated) often encompassed a narrow range of human experience. Ecocritics, particularly ecofeminists, have painstakingly traced the consequences of a faux-universality, a conception of personhood that excludes various individuals and cultural groups and insists upon (or creates) a gap between self and world. Carolyn Merchant’s Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (1980) encapsulates the eco-critique of Enlightenment thought. She offers a compelling story, really a cautionary parable, about humans’ misguided flight from the natural world. Merchant’s ecological history preceded by some decades ecocritical studies of the early modern period; her arguments discernibly shape ensuing discussions of early modern attitudes toward the natural world, and her characterization of Francis Bacon as an architect of the anti-ecological turn in Western thought has proven influential, though some ecocritics have pushed back against this reading.7 Implicitly or overtly, early modern eco-critics attend to the relationship between self and world, so in this sense we are intellectual heirs of Merchant. As early modern writers demonstrate, “nature” resists definition; it sometimes seems that any statement one makes about nature immediately invites its obverse. For instance, in their introduction to Early Modern Ecostudies: From the Florentine Codex to Shakespeare (2008), Karen Raber and Thomas Hallock offer the lucid observation that “Nature implies imperviousness to change, it points to physical laws of the universe beyond human control” (1). I admire the elegant simplicity of this assertion; moreover, “natural laws” have historically been invoked with formidable authority precisely because of their ostensible immutability, just as Raber and Hallock acknowledge. On the other hand, “nature” also readily conjures the antithetical possibility, 7 Todd Borlik outlines the pushback against Merchant’s arguments, focusing mainly on diverse perspectives among ecocritics. For a very different critique of Merchant, see Alan Sokal’s critique of the humanities.

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entailing and connoting perpetual change, as early modern sonneteers frequently remind us. The lexical richness of “nature” amplifies in the early modern period, given that the era revels in contrariety. To take one example, among the first wave of early modern ecocritics, we find two compelling but seemingly contradictory hypotheses. Specifically, Watson discerns in the period’s literature a longing for nature, a nostalgia that emphasizes humans’ estrangement from the material world.8 By contrast, Simon C. Estok mines a vein of early modern ecophobia, a hostility toward nature buried in numerous texts.9 Obviously, these are clashing presentiments; nonetheless, they are not mutually exclusive. In other words, at times early moderns courted/ worshipped/loved nature; alternately, they hated/feared/sought refuge from it, at least judging from the representations examined by Watson and Estok. Of course, even a cursory survey of twenty-first-century attitudes toward the natural world—within and beyond the Global West—will turn up similarly diverse perspectives. In The Accommodated Animal: Cosmpolity in Shakespearean Locales (2013), Laurie Shannon summarizes an important aspect of early modern rhetoric, noting, “when early moderns describe relations between humans and nonhumans, they readily frame them in terms of polity” (3). This is striking because it positions both humans and other animals “within the reach of politics,” a move that “runs directly against the grain of traditional political thought from Aristotle to Agamben” (3). The two philosophers named here epitomize the problematic binary thinking that Shannon ascribes to contemporary discourse, whereby humans are imagined in contradistinction to other animals. She seeks to counter an abiding penchant for “relapsing to a categorical alterity at odds with the genealogical commons established in evolutionary theory” (2). Notice how Shannon nimbly skips from the early modern version of affinities between humans and other animals to a post-Darwinian understanding of pan-organismic kinship. In doing so, she expressly decenters anthropocentric concerns. Similarly disruptive moves manifest in the work of other early modern eco-critics, reinforcing a shared opposition to the hierarchical thinking characteristic of the Enlightenment. For instance, in Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England (2006), Erica Fudge points out, “early modern anatomists knew that the human body and 8 See Watson’s Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance. 9 Estok’s monograph, Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia, traces the pervasiveness of the attitude named in his title, laying the foundation for much ensuing scholarship.

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the animal body were almost identical in the structure and overall workings of many of their organs,” and therefore corporeality (the raw material of humanness) could not have been imagined or deployed as “a central source of difference” (6). Fudge demonstrates that a facile binarism, the opposition of human to animal, does not accurately convey early modern thought. Of course, as Fudge acknowledges, early moderns perpetually confronted the possibility of devolving, lapsing into an ostensibly lower form of life. In this respect, other animals provided ballast or ground, as they were used to shore up flimsy definitions of the human. Yet the prospect of boundary crossing, such as by moving from human to beast, was not always or necessarily angst-ridden. A collection of ecocritical essays edited by Jean Feerick and Vin Nardizzi, The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature (2012), presents abundant textual evidence of early moderns’ fundamentally plastic understanding of selfhood, premised on the notion that organisms (human and non-human alike) exist in fluid relations with the surrounding world. Notably, this view of the individual was in flux, shortly to be supplanted by a new version of Western personhood, the one often associated with the Enlightenment. As anthropologist Clifford Geertz explains, this peculiarly Western self was understood as “bounded, unique, [a] more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe” (31). Generally, ecocritics oppose this conceptualization, effectively unmaking an episteme, by countering the heuristic power of Enlightenment ideas and ideals. Although the eco-critique of the Enlightenment was both necessary and warranted, this seems an opportune moment to revisit certain issues, such as the repudiation of the individual. In brief, we need the self for reasons that are at once intimately personal and profoundly political. Because it synthesizes diverse needs or experiences, the eco-self offers a remedy for healing the breach between a thoroughgoing materialism that cannot adequately address exclusively human needs or desires and a no-longer-satisfying social constructionism, outmoded because it does not account for the biological/evolutionary dimensions of human experience. The “eco” in eco-self conveys the relational dimensions of humanness, our perpetual—sometimes pleasurable, at times perilous—embeddedness in the surrounding world; “self,” by contrast, acknowledges the rich store of aesthetic and cultural endeavors that define humans and embraces the concomitant need to claim a unique vantage point, a space from which the world can be understood and appreciated. Early modern texts provide ample opportunities for tracking diverse conceptions of self and world and for gauging their interplay. For instance, the oceanic turn in early modern ecocriticism, pioneered in the scholarship

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of Dan Brayton and Steven Mentz, shows how Shakespeare and his contemporaries recuperated or reimagined the metaphorical, even visionary, power infusing the natural world.10 Commenting on oceanic themes in Shakespeare, Brayton speculates that a discernible “plasticity of meaning […] may well have been the basis for the ocean’s appeal to an artist of Ovidian imagination, drawn to transformation, mutability, and the mind’s capacity to shape the world. Imagining the trajectory of human life meant, for him, shaping poetry in which the human relationship to salt water is essential” (9). After laying out his absorbing assessment of the oceanic in Shakespeare, Brayton pivots to a consideration of human agency (or perhaps culpability). As he writes, “Human activity has demonstrably caused ecological regime shifts—and collapse—in marine ecosystems from the Caribbean to the Gulf of Maine, from the California Coast to the Baltic” (9). Early modern writers could not have predicted the ecological disasters Brayton outlines, but they were aware of certain dangers, such as shrinking natural resources. In Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees (2013), Vin Nardizzi brings to light an intriguing relationship between the aesthetic realm, particularly theatrical spaces, and the commercialized uses of the arboreal world. For example, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, he discerns an “ecomimetic logic” such that “matters pertaining to forest economy […] are also matters pertaining to playhouse ecology” (61). Nardizzi’s analysis contributes to an important subfield within early modern ecocriticism, scholarship that forefronts material concerns, focusing on the actual resources used in the production of artistic works.11 In my view, ecocriticism enriches English studies because it relinks scholarly activity and lived experience. With this in mind, I extend a point Brayton ascribes to Shakespeare, a recognition of “the mind’s capacity to shape the world.” This attitude, essentially a phenomenological perspective, recurs in literary texts across diverse eras and aptly describes how humans move through the world. That is, we shape the world because we understand it through the medium of consciousness, calling upon the twinned workings of memory and anticipation—built-in narrative structures—to lend meaning and coherence to experience. As tempting as it might be to posit a raw or unmediated self, as early modern writers understood, such an entity does not exist. I want to use the early moderns’ electrified awareness of the elusive self 10 See Mentz’s At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean and Brayton’s Shakespeare’s Ocean: An Ecocritical Exploration, for absorbing studies of oceanic possibilities in early modern texts. 11 For an interesting assessment of the material artifacts used to create sonnets, see Joshua Calhoun’s ecocritical essay on the Sonnets.

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to arrive at a persisting understanding, a workable model, of humanness. Not incidentally, in the twenty-first century, we retain something of this tension, the gap between the social persona/performative self and an accompanying desire for authenticity. Indeed, the proliferating social media platforms that transform the self into an endless masquerade paradoxically stimulate and frustrate the desire for some stable or authentic self.12 The Eco-Self in Early Modern English Literature pursues a model of the self flexible enough to shed light on early modern apprehensions and to engage the concerns or anxieties that delineate our current moment. In deliberately transgressing the boundaries effected through periodization, my approach taps the presentist energies of some early modern ecocritical work, a body of scholarship that generally prioritizes questions of praxis, so that the formalized study of literature becomes a means of engaging with the world, such as by advocating on behalf of pressing environmental issues. Of course, presentism no longer dominates the scholarship of early modern ecocritics. If, as Todd Borlik suggests, it took some time for ecocriticism to gain traction in early modern studies, now the approach hosts distinct phases or “waves” (the latter is a term Lawrence Buell uses to denote trends in ecocriticism proper).13 In fact, the inaugural interest in presentism has given way to a new movement, an outcropping of ecocritical essays inflected by a retooled historicism.14 Ultimately, adjudicating between presentism and historicism is unnecessary because the choice is false. We can embrace the forward-leaning, relevance-seeking goals of the former while also being diligent in the effort (always important, never perfectly realizable) to understand what it was like to be alive in the early modern period, as historicist critics endeavor to show. Peter Erickson elucidates the issue in Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves (1991), reminding us, “no study of the past is totally separated from, or uninformed by, the present,” which means that “the historical distinction between past and present is relative rather than absolute” (3). This is especially pertinent to studies of the early modern period; after all, the label itself reflects the judgment that we find in the earlier period the origins of values and institutions lending shape and meaning to the post-modern 12 A recent collection of essays by Jia Tolentino juxtaposes the desire for an authentic self with the distorting effects of social media performances of selfhood. 13 Buell outlines specific movements or “waves” in ecocriticism in The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. 14 Sharon O’Dair endorses presentism in early modern eco-studies. By contrast, Ken Hiltner cautions against “succumbing to presentism” (82).

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world.15 More recently, critics such as Marjorie Garber and James Shapiro have illuminated the time-traveling properties of many Shakespearean texts.16 In Garber’s judgment, “Shakespeare sampled, Shakespeare quoted without quotation marks, has become a lingua franca of modern cultural exchange” (xviii). She positions Shakespeare alongside other “initiators of discourse” (a term borrowed from Michel Foucault) to convey his abiding influence (xxii). Shapiro likewise emphasizes the adaptability of Shakespeare, noting how his conflicts, characters, or shaping themes speak to and for astonishingly different cultural contexts. While Shakespeare’s texts often seem remarkably portable, other writers also evince a similar flexibility, arguably because a hallmark of this era was the systematic, self-conscious effort to redefine the self. The struggle to understand humanness remains of pressing significance, which offers at least a partial explanation for the enduring relevance and the curiously presentist dimensions of early modern literature. A novel variant of presentism unifies a recent collection of ecocritical essays, Premodern Ecologies in the Modern Literary Imagination (2019), edited by Vin Nardizzi and Tiffany Jo Werth. In distinct ways, the contributors to this volume show that interpretation constitutes a spatialized practice. In his preface to Premodern Ecologies, Robert Allen Rouse explains the methodology that creates a framework for the book, noting that the goal is “to implement a critical practice of context-driven interpretation that attributes an interpretive weight to the geographies of the places in which a text is both produced and consumed” (xi). This reading strategy seems exceptionally well-suited to ecocritical work, as it emphasizes the relationship between person and world and makes the case for exploiting (rather than ignoring or trying to overcome) differences of time, place, ideology, and so forth. Moreover, this form of presentism highlights the experiential/ sensorial dimensions of reading, showing how we automatically, albeit unconsciously, refract literary landscapes through our own recollected travels across various terrain. This awareness of the reader’s embodiment, which reaffirms the interpenetration of self and world, likewise informs my conceptualization of the eco-self. For my purposes, what is most exciting in Premodern Ecologies is its endorsement of the generative work of the imagination, and the adjacent reminder that a rich inner life, a tendency toward introspection, could 15 A succinct explanation of the shift from “Renaissance” to “early modern” is provided by Leah S. Marcus. 16 See Garber, Shakespeare and Modern Culture, and Shapiro, Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us about Our Past and Future.

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ground us more firmly in the world. This realization crystallizes in the conclusion to Jeffrey J. Cohen’s engaging essay about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Having reexamined the dual trajectories that hurtle the poem forward (i.e., the rhythmic turning of the vegetal world, as well as the relentless movement of the Christian calendar), Cohen concludes by recreating a particular moment from his own travels through a park near his home. In this pleasingly meditative interlude, the commonplace action of gazing into a puddle suddenly takes on fresh meaning. In Cohen’s words, “Time, for a moment, slowed. Water became sky, the ground close to home disclosed a deeper story. I knew at this moment that I had to take this picture, an emblem for my eco-temps, to share my here with you” (52). Literary texts enable the everyday magic to which Cohen alludes, the ability to make one’s situation—oneself—suddenly available to others. Paradoxically, the very specificity one inhabits becomes transportable. Although megageneralizations about most topics should usually be avoided, the unique energy and value of reading literature is its infinite assay: the attempt to reveal a self or selves in motion, engaging with and withdrawing from the world. The eco-self encapsulates this fluxing process, so it acknowledges how humans—as everything else—are permanently ensconced in the world yet likewise capable, and at times desirous, of claiming some distance from it. In a way, the gap between person and world has closed. This is because current versions of humanness enforce a particular understanding of evolutionary theory. The trend, a variant of materialism, is discernible in multiple academic disciplines and across the varied domains of popular culture.17 In these diverse contexts, the distant past—usually the Paleolithic era—takes on acute significance, ostensibly because, in this vanished world, humans existed in perfect harmony with the surrounding world.18 This theory holds that our ancestors’ physical characteristics and cognitive abilities perfectly suited their environment, whereas now we labor under ancient endowments manifestly out of tune with the conditions of modern life. This tidy declensionist narrative implies our species’ perpetual estrangement from the natural world, a judgment that requires ignoring or discounting the motive principle at the heart of evolutionary theory. Notwithstanding 17 Peter Godfrey-Smith concisely defines materialism in Metazoa, noting “that experiences and other mental goings-on are biological” (20). As Metazoa demonstrates, the phenomenon of life erupting, differentiating, and spiraling out across the Earth is astonishing, as is our ability to read and reflect on it. For an especially illuminating analysis of materiality in early modern texts, see Jonathan Gil Harris’s Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare. 18 Robin Fox epitomizes the tendency to enshrine the Paleolithic as the Golden Age in our evolutionary story. See The Passionate Mind: Sources of Destruction and Creativity.

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nostalgia for the Paleolithic era, some recent scholarship on evolution presents a more nuanced and complex account of the relationship between humans and the spaces, natural as well as cultural, that we inhabit. Once again, the eco-self reflects this more balanced arrangement.

In Search of Consilience: The Eco-Self as Compromise There are good reasons to emphasize the irreducibly biological dimensions of human experience, but we should also attend to the uniqueness of our species—just as researchers do when studying bats, chimpanzees, or any other type of organism. Certain exclusively human needs originate in cultural rather than biological processes; assuming the neat separation of the two subverts the effort to understand humanness. After all, even E.O. Wilson, founder of sociobiology, celebrates proprietarily human needs/abilities, such as our attachment to the aesthetic, symbol-using, story-making realms of experience. Indeed, Wilson launches The Origins of Creativity (2018) with the claim that “[c]reativity is the unique and defining trait of our species,” adding that “its ultimate goal” is “self-understanding” (3). In The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter (2016), Joseph Henrich dispenses with the either/or treatment of “nature” and “culture” by insisting on their shared contributions to human evolution. Although evolutionary arguments often emphasize cross-species commonalities, Henrich attends to exclusively human practices, accomplishments, and values, among which he includes the desire to “play chess, read books, build missiles, enjoy spicy dishes, donate blood, cook food, obey taboos, pray to gods, and make fun of people who dress or speak differently” (ix). As the subtitle implies, The Secret of Our Success links evolutionary adaptations to cultural forces; once again, the effect is implosive, forcing a crumbling of the nature/culture dyad. In a more recent book, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (2020), Henrich offers an even bolder claim about the effects of cultural practices on evolving humanness. In brief, he argues that the early modern period hosted the birth of a new subset of the human species, the WEIRD individual newly defined by the following traits: “Western,” “Educated,” “Industrialized,” “Rich,” and “Democratic.” This emergent human, he suggests, was “psychologically unusual” (31). Henrich is not the first to remark on the novel traits associated with the early modern self. As he recognizes, the qualities in question comport with the Geertzian synopsis of Western personhood,

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an understanding premised on the notion (or illusion) that humans exist in contradistinction to the world (31). Admittedly, many ecocritics devote considerable intellectual energy to refuting precisely this version of the individual. Nevertheless, Henrich raises the distinct possibility that this new self, created through a complex network of cultural innovations, is part of our evolutionary heritage, not a perverse or “unnatural” departure from it. Indeed, the relevant changes are inscribed in the very tissue of our bodies, in measurably thicker corpus callosa.19 A foundational premise of The WEIRDest People in the World is the straightforward postulate that reading innovated our species; emphasizing this point might be the best way to restore the perceived relevance or cultural significance of literary studies.20 Doing so fosters the uniquely human appreciation for literary virtuosity, whereby each linguistic or syntactic or formal element in an artful text performs its role to perfection. An elegant account of the transforming effects of literacy anchors The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2011), in which Stephen Greenblatt documents a sharp turn from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. This tidy division of historical epochs risks alienating some readers, but Greenblatt offers abundant evidence in favor of the disjunctive paradigm. For him, the early modern period’s debt to the classical world is best expressed in terms of a mutual “glorious affirmation of vitality,” a celebration of the corporeal/ earthly/material dimensions of existence and a simultaneous turn away from the religious or spiritual or supernatural (9). Greenblatt makes a compelling story out of the shift named in his title. His unlikely hero, the Italian Poggio Bracciolini, ignites a cultural and intellectual revolution by recovering an ancient manuscript and ensuring its circulation in the world.21 Of this plot point Greenblatt writes, “The finding of a lost book does not ordinarily figure as a thrilling event, but behind that one moment was the arrest and imprisonment of a pope, the burning of heretics, and a great culturewide explosion of interest in pagan 19 Henrich documents the effects of literacy on the corpus callosum. As he argues throughout his book, the traits unique to WEIRDness have set the standard for understanding humanness per se, though they do not universally apply. 20 Various writers, with disparate aims, have chronicled the self-imposed marginalization of literary criticism. From an outsider’s (i.e., physicist’s) perspective on this issue, see Sokal’s attempted takedown of the humanities. 21 Greenblatt’s account of the found manuscript implicitly endorses a progress narrative of Western cultural development. For a comprehensive and nuanced analysis of the spread of literacy, see Margaret W. Ferguson’s Daughters of Dido: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France.

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antiquity” (13). The detonative process to which Greenblatt refers culminates in a new arrangement of humans and nature, premised, he suggests, on an appreciation for “order in the universe […] built into the nature of things, into the matter that composes everything, from stars to men to bedbugs” (237). This version of materialism structures The Swerve, implicitly offering a recuperative account of the relationship between humans and the environment. The enviable lyricism and compactness of the story Greenblatt tells might be liabilities as well as assets, given that historical developments are always messier than any coherent account allows. For one thing, as early modern ecocritics have meticulously demonstrated, the period’s attitudes toward nature ranged from biophilia to ecophobia. The images and metaphors used to represent nature were similarly diverse, a range sometimes evident within a single text. To take one example, in Titus Andronicus (c.1598–92) Shakespeare variously associates femaleness with savage tigers and vulnerable deer, thereby calling upon nature to figure conflicting qualities. In short, engaging with early modern ecocriticism would have enriched Greenblatt’s birth story for modernity. If The Swerve locates the roots of modernity in a tilt toward materialism, the book also advances a subtle, powerful counter-tale, an argument on behalf of human autonomy and agency and even of human exceptionalism. After all, though The Swerve unfolds with the pace of a thriller, it is structured around the adventures of Poggio, a protagonist who bears all the traces of humanness. Once again, it is the determination to preserve and disseminate a book, an object whose contents are only meaningful to humans, that propels Greenblatt’s story. Even though this work concedes that pan-organismic kinship is inscribed at the molecular level so that humans are positioned in the same plane as everything else, distinctively human needs cry out for attention. As previously acknowledged, countering certain Enlightenment tenets has been a paramount goal in contemporary ecological discourse. Most notably, those interested in ecological or environmental concerns treat the very concept of the individual as suspect, associating it with a destructive worldview. Additionally, critics representing a range of approaches have taken issue with the progress narrative that identifies literacy as one of the engines of ostensibly “forward” movement. Or, in Margaret W. Ferguson’s cogent distillation of this position, “literacy costars with print and Protestantism in a narrative of human progress toward enlightenment” (3). This stance, as Ferguson notes, extends the arguments of Claude Lévi-Strauss, particularly the so-called “Great Divide” theory that posits crucial distinctions between literate and non-literature cultures. The counter-tendency construes writing

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as inherently oppressive, a vehicle of domination. Both positions have merit because as a technology, writing is morally neutral, or perhaps ambiguous, in that it can be activated to beneficent or sinister effect, as early modern writers variously demonstrate. An important through line here concerns the centrality of reading to the version of the self, the eco-self, that emerged in the period. The early modern texts selected for inclusion in ensuing chapters bring out the readerly dimensions of the eco-self. Perhaps more crucially, literary navigations of the eco-self model the process by which actual selves are constituted. This is because the self arises out of continual interactions with the surrounding world and the reflective processes accompanying these experiences. Philosopher Thomas Metzinger, whose work influences my understanding of selfhood, offers a lucid explanation of the relevant self–world dynamic, noting, “Yes, there is an outside world, and yes, there is an objective reality, but in moving through this world, we constantly apply unconscious filter mechanisms, and in doing so, we unknowingly construct our own individual world, which is our ‘reality tunnel’” (9). Another philosopher, Heidi Ravven, makes a similar point about selfhood. Ravven suggests that the self “is not ‘atomic,’ not isolated and contained just within our skin. Rather, there is a self beyond itself, beyond the physical body” (287). While this position rightly acknowledges how the self arises through ongoing negotiations with the surrounding world, Ravven often relies upon a materialist worldview that seems unnecessarily limited, such as contending that free will cannot exist because scientists have been unable to isolate a neuro-structure in which it resides.22 By contrast, the eco-self recuperates moral agency, lighting the way toward a renewed understanding of the rational or deliberative functions that distinguish humans from other species. In elucidating the eco-self, the hope is to offer a newly energized reading strategy, one that permits us to time-jump in assessing certain fundamental properties of humanness and restores an appreciation for the unique vigor and range of early modern texts.

Crisis and the Practice of Criticism I began writing this book before the novel coronavirus took possession of our lives, but the global health crisis brought various themes into sharp 22 Ravven persistently maintains that free will is an illusion, or perhaps a delusion, given that no particular region of the brain seems responsible for it. An impetus for the current project is my conviction that we cannot afford to jettison the concept of free will.

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relief. The pandemic is humbling, an irrefutable demonstration of nature’s claims on us. Curiously, the virus that causes COVID-19 thrives on quintessentially human traits. Specifically, the need to socialize and the nearly constant use of our hands—to gesture, to show respect or affection, or to pick up and hold objects—propel contagion. Recognizing this, ecocriticism must now be prepared to grapple with distinctively human needs and behaviors without abandoning the important work of illuminating what we share with all other organisms. Overtly or unconsciously, any work of criticism binds itself to the moment of its construction. The time-stamping of critical work need not be viewed as a liability, given that particulars must always be addressed before anything approaching universal or generally applicable claims can be established. Focalizing attention on the relationship between humans and the natural world, the pandemic might bring a new vitality to criticism. This fits perfectly with the longstanding ecocritical attunement to praxis, as this approach originated in the awareness of global environmental crises and the necessity of acting. At times, this orientation to lived experience produces an odd malaise, a fear that critical practice is not only inconsequential but possibly detrimental, environmentally speaking.23 A different set of concerns informs the introduction to Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (2006), in which Robert N. Watson worries that ecocriticism might be “the last resort of identity politics in the academy” (4). These and other like-minded ecocritics raise legitimate concerns, but they ignore or discount the intrinsic value of reading and studying literature, activities that distinguish our species. Additionally, if the pandemic reminds us of life’s fleetingness and fragility by foregrounding our fundamentally biological identities, it also provides abiding evidence of art’s necessity in human life, a concern that awakens affinities with early moderns. In A Future for Criticism (2010), which assesses major trends in critical practice, Catherine Belsey suggests, “Fiction not only shows what is thinkable at a specific time,” it also “affect[s] what is thought” (107). The formalized study of literature, therefore, illuminates and alters the knowledge that lends shape and meaning to life in a particular era. Belsey urges critics to pay attention to the pleasures made available through reading literature. She also offers particular methodological advice, suggesting that “we should 23 Jonathan Bate makes this point at length in Song of the Earth, which develops his thesis that “culture” exists in unavoidably violent symbiosis with “nature.” Also see Buell’s introduction to The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination for a discussion of the putative limits or liabilities of ecocriticism.

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work outwards from the inside, allowing the fictional texts to construct for criticism a knowledge of its own” (103). Here, Belsey implies that criticism is all too easily hijacked by sociological or ideological aims. The solution? Embracing the uniqueness of literary texts or other cultural artifacts deserving of aesthetic analysis. In other words, methodological grace, if not purity, should define critical practice. Heeding Belsey’s advice does not require defaulting to an archaic formalism but, rather, demonstrating literature’s deep engagement with the themes, issues, or cruxes relevant to the approach one favors. Ecocriticism consistently meets this standard, and it especially suits the present moment given the renewed emphasis on humans’ embedment in natural processes. Obviously, mortality stalks us all, though this does not mean we are accustomed to dealing with death. In the world of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, of course, death was omnipresent, not an unpleasantness that could (however temporarily) be sealed off from daily life. Notably, Shakespeare’s own life was bookended by contagion. In 1564, when Shakespeare was several months old, a virulent plague, reminiscent of the Black Death that swept through the Middle Ages in the middle fourteenth century, menaced Stratford. In a way, a whiff of the miraculous accompanies the infant Shakespeare’s survival.24 Biographer Park Honan reminds us that Shakespeare seems to have died of a mysterious fever, lending an eerie symmetry to the conditions surrounding his arrival to and exit from the world. In an article published in The New Yorker shortly after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Stephen Greenblatt observes that Shakespeare’s works have remarkably little to say about the plague, though he sometimes uses images of pestilence to rhetorical effect. Perhaps Shakespeare remained comparatively silent on the issue of disease because it pervaded life. Then as now, those things that weave into the fabric of daily existence tend to go unremarked. In this light, literary criticism performs important epistemological work, bringing to light the taken-for-granted or exposing the newly contested. Historian Norman F. Cantor considers the impact of the Black Death on the Middle Ages and traces the ongoing effects of “chaotic morbidity.”25 Viewed in these terms, the early modern period takes on the appearance of 24 Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare and Jonathan Bate’s Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare offer enlightening accounts of the crucial social, cultural, and political contexts in which to place Shakespeare’s writing. 25 For Cantor’s influential analysis, see In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made.

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a post-apocalyptic landscape, albeit one in which bleakness and deprivation cede to artistic innovation and intellectual ingenuity. As scholars from various disciplines attest, diverse artistic mediums of the early modern period celebrate the human body, infusing it with a beauty and realism lacking in medieval art; representations of the natural world undergo a similar transformation.26 This newfound appreciation for the material world, including the bodies inhabiting it, is by now a commonplace in our understanding of the period’s robust aesthetic output. Nevertheless, the transition from rampaging anguish to the exaltation of bodies (human or otherwise) should give us pause, as there is nothing predictable or logical in this perceptual and artistic shift. Stated another way, a more expected response to the cruelties of late medieval life would be a surge of artworks confirming humans’ proneness to death and decay. With this in mind, early modern cultural innovations take on a rebellious character, marking an explicit counterpoint to lived experience.27 The early modern celebration of corporeality, abetted by the self-conscious revitalization of classical writers, artists, and thinkers, did incite psychological crisis. The period’s evolving aesthetic required a new confrontation with mortality. In a way, death—conceptualizations or apprehensions of mortality—became feral, as the chapter on the Sonnets suggests, because traditional beliefs were in a state of flux. For instance, as Philippe Ariès suggests, the longstanding metaphor of death-as-sleep was moribund. Death, therefore, took on a new or renewed ferocity. Across the cycle, Shakespeare invokes art as a reliable means of combating time, decay, and death. On the other hand, a strain of bitter acceptance, a reluctant ecology, infuses early modern tragedy. Shakespeare draws attention to this attitude in Hamlet when Gertrude offers the pseudo-solacing point that Hamlet should cease grieving for his father because such losses are so very commonplace. She advises her son, “Thou know’st ‘tis common, all that lives must die, / Passing through nature to eternity” (1.2.72–73). Even if Gertrude intends the advice as balm for grief, her words miss the mark. But they are instructive for ecocritics: in effect, Gertrude offers a mini-lesson in ecology, an assertion of the cycling rhythms of nature and humans’ ineluctable place therein. As 26 Edward William Tayler’s Nature and Art in Renaissance Literature outlines key aspects of the shifting attitudes toward and depictions of the natural world in this period; for an updated perspective on art and nature, see Randy Thornhill’s essay “Darwinian Aesthetics Informs Traditional Aesthetics.” 27 See art historian Mary D. Garrard’s Brunelleschi’s Egg: Nature, Art, and Gender in Renaissance Italy for an engrossing study of the way in which the Black Death catalyzed Renaissance humanism and stimulated artistic production.

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I want to demonstrate, early modern tragedy takes up this theme, showing how the genre concedes humans’ embedment in nature and mourns this reality.28 At its core, ecocriticism reveals the complex, multiform relationships between humans and the rest of the natural world. Research supports the claims that humans have a built-in love of nature and that we are wired to fear or loathe it.29 Rather than establishing which position is correct, the goal here is exploring diverse permutations of humans and (or in) nature. Now more than ever, the central concepts in ecocriticism, along with the vocabulary that constitutes its architecture, must be called upon to make sense of the world. For example, numerous ecocritics have taken up the analytical challenge of differentiating between zoe and bios; these terms, bequeathed to us from the ancient Greeks, both denote “life.” Whereas “zoe” refers to the instinctive, primal, and physiological, “bios” conjures the human-built world, including ideas, institutions, and artifacts of culture.30 Generally speaking, ecocritics have subordinated “bios” to “zoe,” principally to highlight our enmeshment in nature. This stance deliberately rejects the Enlightenment version of the self as an isolate subject governed by reason, a faculty presumptively belonging exclusively to humans. In any case, The Eco-Self in Early Modern English Literature offers a different perspective on tensions between zoe and bios, showing how critics’ preferences for one term over the other hew to assumptions of permanence. That is, ecocritics who celebrate zoe embrace the continuity it brings, as in the periodic regeneration of the botanical world. On the other hand, champions of bios assign posterity, longevity, and even permanence to cultural or aesthetic forms, as if in agreement with the speaker of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, who repeatedly and self-servingly touts the immortalizing effects of poeticizing. Crucially, these diverse positions link up in their shared (albeit usually ignored) confirmation that we chase permanence. 28 For a compelling analysis of ecological awareness in the early modern period, see Randall Martin, Shakespeare & Ecology. As I aim to show, this awareness often triggers anxiety in early modern text. 29 Edward O. Wilson makes the case for humans’ innate love of nature in Biophilia; for an account of humans’ antipathy toward and estrangement from the natural world, see Simon C. Estok, The Ecophobia Hypothesis. Scientif ic research conf irms both positions, indicating the importance of culture, context, and experience in assessing humans’ attitudes toward the natural world. 30 Cary Wolfe argues in favor of zoe over bios throughout Before the Law: Humans and Others in a Biopolitical Frame. Lewis Hyde’s discussion of the oppositional (or complementary) relationship between zoe and bios is likewise helpful; see The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World.

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We now have empirical and qualitative evidence that selves are at once culturally constructed and biologically determined so that segregating zoe from bios proves increasingly difficult. Freed from the necessity of choosing one over the other, we release the fullest potentialities of both, which is my goal in posing the eco-self as the best means of understanding humanness. This version of the human materializes in the early modern era and likewise speaks to contemporary experiences. With this in mind, I cannot help but wonder if our post-pandemic world will host a revved-up period of creative output, as happened in the wake of the Black Death. In this respect, we appropriate to ourselves the rejuvenating properties of the Renaissance, including the lushness of sensuous experience.

Reasserting the Self in an Age of Hypermaterialism Updated theories of embodiment offer bracing insights into the ebb and flow of existence, so they highlight the ways in which humans (like everything else) continually interact with other entities. As previously mentioned, just such a relational awareness, which Watson terms the “ecology of the self,” was already available to early moderns, though this apprehension of personhood was giving way, as evidenced by the changing meaning of “individual.” Originally denoting the embedment of person in world (including the physical environment and the social order), “individual” morphed into its own antonym, coming to denote the isolate, autonomous subject typically associated with Enlightenment thought. The current materialist hegemony, discernible across diverse academic and lexical fields, directly challenges the hierarchies established by Cartesian thought. Simply put, the pivot to materialism centers corporeal or biological concerns, and it invokes evolutionary theory to explain most phenomena, including behavioral patterns among humans. This shift was necessary, as it remedied the false notion of humans’ separation from the rest of nature. I am particularly interested in how the ascendance of materialism affects the self and in the related concepts of autonomy and free will. Political scientist Jane Bennett takes up this issue in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010), which advocates for a theory that “acknowledges an indeterminate vitality in the world without slipping back into a vitalism of nonmaterial agents” (92). This stance downplays or even repudiates the individual, instead prioritizing process and flux, the oscillating patterns that define existence. Influential theorists such as

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Stacy Alaimo and Karen Barad similarly emphasize boundarylessness.31 An ethical imperative to generate sounder ecological and environmental policies and modes of being powers much of this current scholarship. Even so, the widespread insistence on systems rather than individual subjects mutes moral agency. Bennett herself intimates this. To give a mundane example, she writes of consuming potato chips, speculating that doing so is not really a choice once the chip is in hand. She proposes to “treat food as conative bodies vying alongside and within another complex body” (39). The “dominant chip” requires or compels the act of consuming it (40). I suspect this example is meant rather playfully as a means for Bennett to bring to life her theoretical suppositions. Still, it encapsulates the lack-ofagency assumption so often endemic to current theories of materialism. Pursued to its inevitable conclusions, the example suggests that rampant consumption simply cannot be reined in. If true, this would hamstring the environmentalist movement, particularly its conservationist efforts. If, as I take it, we now live in an era of hypermaterialism, this has been a somewhat recent development. For instance, in their introduction to Material Feminisms (2008), Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman write of feminism’s general “retreat from materiality” (3). They object to the tendency on the part of social-constructionist feminists to conceive of “material reality” as something wholly distinct from “language, discourse, and culture” (3). In an essay appearing in the same volume, Elizabeth Grosz offers a similar argument, writing, “There has traditionally been a strong resistance on the part of feminists to any recourse to the questions of nature” (23). Now, roughly thirteen years since the publication of Material Feminisms, the social-constructivist position has been soundly defeated in most academic enclaves, with spiraling cultural implications. In the specific context of early modern studies, materialism clearly dominates academic inquiry, so this tendency receives sustained attention across various chapters.32 On the positive side, this indicates a broad acceptance of scientific research. But the original critique of “essentialism,” to use an older term for the materialist camp, has been discarded, though the issues it raised remain important. Specifically, as Grosz cautions, we need “a complex and subtle account of […] biology,” which would render it suitable to conveying “the rich 31 Alaimo’s “Trans-corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature” presents her theory of interconnectivity, whereby bodies are imagined in continual dynamism with the surrounding world; for Barad’s similar perspective on the unbounded self, see “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” 32 In “Materialism and Reif ication in Renaissance Studies,” David Hawkes offers a useful overview of materialism as the leitmotif in early modern scholarship.

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variability of social, cultural, and political life” (24). Of course, the problem is that describing (i.e., generating accounts of a thing) too easily slips into prescribing, with the relevant narratives accruing a delimiting power. To give one example, Galenic science governed apprehensions of gender for centuries. Furthermore, the one-sex model, as Thomas Laqueur observes, retained some of its heuristic force even after early modern scientists had regular access to human corpses and were able to dissect and study them.33 Simply put, early modern anatomists “discovered” in the body what they expected to find. In sum, the tools of “language, discourse, and culture” will always enable our examinations of material reality. With all these points in mind, The Eco-Self in Early Modern English Literature seeks to give the pendulum a slight nudge in the other direction as a means of countering the hypermaterialism of our era. Doing so does not entail rejecting evolutionary theory or the insights generated by the natural sciences; nor does it mean reverting to social constructionism. Rather, the goal is to establish the limits of materialism, which itself cannot adequately define or explain humanness. To make the case for an updated self, one attuned to material as well as tangible concerns, The Eco-Self in Early Modern English Literature draws upon current psychological research, including cognitive behavioral theory. Especially useful for defining the eco-self is the work of cognitive psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Deeply influenced by evolutionary psychology, Haidt concedes that a preponderance of human behavior derives from “automatic processing.”34 On the other hand, he presents a lucid and workable theory of human agency and accompanying ethical obligations. Simply put, Haidt reminds us that “all societies must resolve a small set of questions about how to order society, the most important being how to balance the needs of individuals and groups” (16–17). This delicate negotiation takes on acute significance in the early modern period, as the self was under reconstruction and the ensuing changes rewired the circuitries of moral thought. My aim is to bring out this tension, an emerging set of ethical dilemmas, that manifests in various early modern texts. From an ecological point of view, a dread of the Individual, that hubristic creature enshrined in the Enlightenment, makes perfect sense. On the other 33 Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud traces the persisting influence of the one-sex model, adroitly showing how “sex” was conceptualized as the more fluid term, with gender therefore activated in support of maintaining distinct socio-political roles between men and women. 34 See The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, for Haidt’s account of “automatic processing” versus deliberative decision-making (13). He believes the former dominates, though we do have some capacity for moral agency.

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hand, romanticizing groups carries its own risks or blind spots. Consider the following entities: community, collective, mob. Each connotes a specific type of group dynamic with radically varying outcomes. Groups can provide cover for unjust or brutal actions, a phenomenon especially acute during times of stress or crisis, whether caused by social unrest, natural disasters, or an admixture of the two.35 Potentially troubling aspects of collective identity materialize in “groupthink,” which Ravven defines as “the social pressures exerted by the leaders of a group and its overall dynamics toward loyal consensus of opinion and the elimination of doubting and dissonant voices” (127). Moreover, groups often coalesce around their antipathy toward perceived outsiders or Others. Pascal Boyer illuminates this tendency in Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create, writing, “A great part of coalitional psychology consists in mobilizing support against others” (45). This dynamic, we might think of it as “rage bonding,” is especially pronounced in times of heightened suffering or deprivation—as we see in our own tumultuous world.36 When groups morph into lethal mobs, they show us the dark side of “hive” experiences. The appeal of hive experiences is the temporary jettisoning of selfhood or self-consciousness, as one enters a collective realm of experience. In such contexts, a group of people moves as if with a single body and singular purpose. This very quality also holds the key to the potentially menacing aspects of the hive experience. As Haidt explains in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012), “Fascism is hive psychology scaled up to grotesque heights. It’s the doctrine of the nation as a superorganism, within which the individual loses all importance” (280). Subordinating the individual to the group does not always or necessarily yield desirable results. Finally, the necessity of the self (self-concept, if one prefers) snaps into focus when this elusive entity is imperiled, in extremis, threatened with complete erasure, such as when the fragile individual proves no match for groupthink and the actions ensuing from it.37 35 In The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, Haidt shows how societies oscillate between xenophilia and xenophobia, noting that the latter quality often ensues from the association of “plagues,” “epidemics,” and “new disease” with “foreigners” (173). In sum, deprivation or suffering triggers antipathy toward outsiders. 36 Boyer’s research extends Freud’s argument about the scapegoat function, which he makes at some length in Civilization and Its Discontents. All this work unsettles the belief that collective actions are necessarily salutary. 37 For an unapologetic defense of individual rights and an accompanying critique of groupthink, consider Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights. Hirsi Ali argues that “intersectionality” and “globalism” are detrimental to women, as various types of female-directed oppression end up being ignored or justified out of a desire to honor cultural

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While Descartes got a lot wrong, which we have no trouble pointing out from our distanced perspective, he might yet have something to teach us about humanness, as neuroscientist António Damásio suggests. His influential book, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (1994), joins the chorus of voices raised against the Cartesian notion of selfhood, particularly what he terms “the abyssal separation between body and mind” (250). Crucially, however, Damásio, retains—in fact, insists upon—the importance of the self, which he def ines as “a perpetually re-created neurobiological state,” and he rejects the notion of a “selfless cognition” (100). In short, we crave or even require acknowledgement of our inner lives, the intangibles that cannot be measured but nonetheless prove deeply meaningful.38 Damásio’s perspective on the self nourishes my understanding of the eco-self, so it marks an important through-line linking various chapters.

Assessing the Anthropocene Ecocriticism constitutes a vital tool for understanding the complex, varied relationships between humans and the rest of the natural world. Of course, literary criticism and other academic endeavors housed within the humanities do not generate new empirical knowledge of the natural world; likewise, critical practice is not the place for testing scientific theories. Still, while tensions between “the two cultures,” the sciences and the humanities, have proven tenacious, this does not negate the value of humanities disciplines. For instance, although literary critics are not authorities on how evolution works, we are equipped to evaluate the circulation of narratives about it and the meanings and values attached to it. This might mean bringing to light latent contradictions in the currently vogueish materialism. Specifically, consider that, even as various disciplines emphasize what humans share with all other organisms and note our ongoing indebtedness to evolutionary processes, some researchers advance a new form of essentialism that posits intractable differences—neurological differences— between men and differences. This is, obviously, a detonative point, which is all the more reason we should engage with it. 38 Psychologist Paul Bloom provides an exceptionally useful model for understanding the complexities of humanness in How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like. He cites abundant research demonstrating how expectations and assumptions shape sensorial experiences and produce measurably different activity in the brain, including the enjoyment of food (25–53).

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women, ostensibly owing to the intrauterine influence of testosterone on a developing fetus.39 The tension between these arguments, both testaments to the sway of materialism, fascinates, precisely because it reminds us that research is never value-free. With this in mind, it is worth considering who wins or loses from the argument that men’s and women’s brains are simply different and that these distinctions shape our lives. Such questions of value, meaning, or purpose lend a distinctive shape to the humanities. Earlier eras might have axiomatically accepted the notion that literature creates the opportunity for social transformation or, indeed, that it propels bracing engagements with the fundamental questions of human experience. We probably cannot assert either possibility with assurance right now, given the general downturn, the shrinking role and vanishing prestige, of the humanities. 40 Cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf speculates on the waning emphasis on literary studies, suggesting that because so much of our reading lives happens on screens, we have less and less immersive contact with actual books. This should concern us, Wolf argues, because reading primarily on screens diminishes one’s ability and, equally crucially, willingness to tackle complex texts. 41 Perhaps, then, we are undoing the effects of the intellectual/cultural/social revolution that distinguished the early modern era. In any case, according to Wolf, our era’s flagging interest in reading books erodes certain cognitive abilities. But this decline can be corrected, provided we rededicate to reading; in this sense, English departments (and critical practice) have a potentially crucial role to play given their ability to generate conversations about literature. In addition to restoring a love for and facility with reading, critical practice can also demonstrate its value by providing a vocabulary and conceptual framework for assessing the assemblage of stories that def ine any era, 39 Cordelia Fine documents the tendency in current scholarship to insist that testosterone shapes fetal brain development in Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society; she shows how the evidence for this claim is rather scant. Fine’s Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference is also important, as it shows how an essentialist perspective on gender roles skews contemporary research. 40 Kurt Spellmeyer analyzes the downturn in the humanities in Arts of Living: Reinventing the Humanities for the Twenty-First Century. Although I accept his analysis of the problem (depleted funding for the humanities and dwindling programs and opportunities across the landscapes of higher education), his solutions focus strictly on vocational concerns, so they do not address the intrinsic value of reading, writing, or critically engaging ideas. 41 Wolf documents the cognitive liabilities sparked by reading mainly on screens in Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World. Wolf does not advance a simplistic luddite position, whereby readers are urged to shun computers and technology. Rather, she calls for a judicious readjustment of our reading habits.

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including our own. With this in mind, I want to consider the genre of the Anthropocene, our current age. In literary contexts, knowledge of generic conventions primes us to identify the techniques employed to deliberate effect and to appreciate and evaluate the content of what we are reading. Genre encompasses writers’ obligations and readers’ expectations, so in this sense it is transactional. All of this is to say: if we can identify the genre of our current age, we will have a clearer sense of where we are headed. Now in common usage across multiple disciplines and cultural contexts, “Anthropocene” insists upon the novelty of our current age, the way it presents unique challenges vis-à-vis the human/nature relationship. In their trenchant overview of the Anthropocene, Tobias Boes and Kate Marshall suggest that this era requires us to accept that “human agency,” which must be “decoupled from individual subjectivity,” is “radically open to nonhuman influences” (62). The f irst point, the repudiation of the individual, is a commonplace in ecological discourse, and it receives sustained attention throughout each of these chapters. Obviously, no single individual can transform environmental policies or stave off disaster. Yet one person can pollute an entire watershed. Beyond this, lacking a sense of personal accountability frees people to overlook the daily behaviors that do have discernible impacts on the world, though this does not exempt large corporations from responsibility for their actions. Rather than abandoning the concept of the individual, we need an updated version of the personalized dimensions of human agency. That said, Boes and Marshall’s point about humans being profoundly susceptible to “nonhuman influences” is inarguable. Theorists of the Anthropocene repeatedly call attention to the theme of reciprocity. This is the defining narrative of our time with respect to humans and (or in) nature. As Boes and Marshall see it, “Nature has of course always acted in turn upon human societies”; But only in recent times have we had to confront the possibility that nature might also fundamentally alter our existence as a species and that, what is more, it might do so as the ultimate outcome of processes that we ourselves set in motion” (61). When we think of the Anthropocene as a genre, an overstory defined by specific conventions, the implications of this symbiotic arrangement snap into focus. Specifically, the Anthropocene takes on sinister aspects, as we appear to be living inside a revenge tragedy, an arrangement in which harmful actions inevitably produce a boomerang effect. I suspect the problem is evident: as this popular early modern subgenre demonstrates, once underway, cycles of vengeance predicate doom. Likewise, left unchecked, the environmental crises instigated and exacerbated by humans will engulf us.

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This might sound like hyperbolic doom-mongering, so I want to offer a provocative example of the Anthropocene as a revenge tragedy, intimated in Bill Schutt’s engaging Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History (2017). As the title implies, Schutt aims to show how, among certain species, cannibalism is an expected, even beneficial, practice. In his words, “Cannibalism makes perfect evolutionary sense” (287). As he concedes, this is a much tougher sell when considering human examples of cannibalism because “we’ve evolved along a path where cultural or societal rules influence our behavior to an extent unseen in nature” (288). Even in survival contexts, overcoming the taboo against cannibalism exacts a hefty psychological price.42 Near the end of his book, Schutt almost casually identifies a scenario in which humans will be forced to engage in cannibalism. Specifically, he suggests that global environmental crises will worsen deprivation and suffering and asks, “Since cannibalism is a completely normal response to severe stress, especially during times of famine and warfare, how much of a surprise would it be if the butchery of humans for food becomes commonplace in drought-ridden and overpopulated regions of the near-future Earth?” (294). Here’s the worst part: cannibalism among various human populations will, Schutt argues, set off a global pandemic. Admittedly, at this point the scenario is purely speculative. Perhaps this is the point: we yet have the chance to stave off or minimize environmental disasters. As ever, the question is how best to accomplish this work. As a partial solution, The Eco-Self in Early Modern English Literature advocates embracing rather than denying human uniqueness, while keeping in mind Joseph W. Meeker’s observation that “uniqueness does not in itself confer superiority” (4). Defaulting to a thoroughgoing materialism will not work, though this seems the clear trend. In an essay published two decades ago, Jonathan Franzen remarks on our “current cultural susceptibility to the charms of materialism—our increasing willingness to see psychology as chemical, identity as genetic, and behavior as the product of bygone exigencies of human evolution” (33). As he observes earlier in the same piece, an obsessive or hyper-materialism will “reduce our beloved personalities to finite sets of neurochemical coordinates” (19). He asks, “Who wants a story of life like that?” (19). Centuries before Franzen, early modern writers affirmed the necessity of cultivating a different understanding. The Eco-Self in Early 42 There are, of course, examples of humans deliberately engaging in cannibalism, which Schutt addresses. Additionally, Bloom’s How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like identifies several ways in which cultural practices, such as certain religious rituals or more isolated actions, entail cannibalism (36–39).

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Modern English Literature attends to this alternate story, endeavoring to show how the negotiated self, arising through continual interaction with the world, also encompasses a robust inner life. In short, the eco-self dominates early literature and provides us with an updated self-concept.

Chapter Overviews The first chapter, focusing on Shakespeare’s Sonnets, tracks the emergence and evolution of a new psychological orientation in early modern England. This burgeoning mindset amplified morbid psychologizing and sparked the desire for an elusive permanence. The problem shifts into focus in several poems that mournfully acknowledge the inevitability of becoming worm food, a chthonian destination that locates humans firmly within nature’s turning cycles. This ecological awareness proceeds in tandem with a revved-up focus on the posterity-ensuring potential of artistic expression so that organic and symbolic processes knit together. In keeping with ancient conventions, Shakespeare relies on botanical tropes and images to evoke perpetual renewal. But he departs from tradition by appropriating to the lyric mode the eternizing properties conventionally ascribed to the botanical world. Given their close attention to biological exigencies and the counter-magic of poeticizing, the Sonnets prove especially useful for tracking the eco-self with its similar admixture of the biological and the psychological. The Sonnets oscillate between continuity and removal: humans are ensconced in nature and ever-subject to its demands yet likewise desirous of claiming a space apart from it. This recurrent emphasis lays the groundwork for considering several early modern tragedies, texts that mutually concede humans’ embedment in nature, yet they likewise resist, resent, or mourn this fundamentally ecological condition. Tragedy has always, if paradoxically, been a potent vehicle for tracking selfhood. The goal here is to rethink the ecological implications of the genre’s obsessive psychologizing. Each of the three tragedies offers a different perspective on the eco-self. For instance, Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus depicts an intermediary creature, essentially a self trapped between competing views of personhood. Presenting Faustus as a creature of multiform appetites, Marlowe demonstrates that need mediates the relationship between self and world. Accordingly, Abraham Maslow’s well-known Hierarchy of Needs grounds my reading of Doctor Faustus. I do, however, propose a new geometry for Maslow’s needs: substituting a loop for the traditional pyramid acknowledges

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how we cycle perpetually among diverse needs, dispelling any illusion that we ever “transcend” the physiological demands that connect us to all other life-forms. Ultimately, Marlowe’s Faustus abnegates the proprietarily human need—periodic replenishment of the imagination—that prompted his illicit conjurations. To illuminate Faustian psychology, this chapter also engages with current research on phenomenology, as this scholarship provides crucial insights into the theme of identity-in-crisis that structures Doctor Faustus. Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra also contributes a vital chapter to the unfolding story of the early modern eco-self, as it takes up a crucial thread from Marlowe’s play. Additionally, Antony and Cleopatra extends the annelid theme so important in the Sonnets; in both contexts, worms prove essential to defining humanness. In the play, the Clown twice mentions “the joy of the worm,” thereby intimating the impending and curiously enacted suicide of Cleopatra. The version of Cleopatra’s death popularized by Shakespeare has proven tenacious, and I believe it encapsulates the play’s unique significance for ecocriticism, especially on the issue of humans’ continuity with or indistinction from the natural world. Likewise, images of dissolution, of one entity melding into another, pervade Antony and Cleopatra, a theme visually conveyed in multiple references to the Tiber, a river capable of sweeping everything into its surging currents. Drawing attention to such moments, Antony and Cleopatra exemplifies the anxious ecology that so often defines early modern tragedy. Shakespeare’s play points to the necessity of the self, of an abstracting inner life capable of exerting influence on the world. In so doing, Antony and Cleopatra offers a viable model of the eco-self. John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi proves disruptive vis-à-vis the story of the self. This play extends the reluctant ecology of early modern tragedy, dwelling on the prospect of humans’ eventual, inevitable entrée into nature’s cycling rhythms. More specifically, the Malcontent, Bosola, laments the reality that “we are eaten up of lice, and worms” (2.1.57). In the same rant, Bosola complains that humans are doomed to inhabit “a rotten and dead body” (2.1.59). This obsession with intransigent flesh—judged so because of its proneness to debilitation and decay—powers The Duchess of Malfi, occasioning productive engagement with current theories of selfhood, particularly as these tend to emphasize or even celebrate embodiment. In sum, The Duchess of Malfi demonstrates that ecological concerns brim with psychological significance. In brief, Webster’s howl of protest against corporeal frailty outlines a deep need, a manifestly human yearning, generated by the inexorabilities of organismic life. Yet, perversely, The Duchess of Malfi concludes in a spirit of nihilism, with the self imagined as fragile and imperiled—as ephemeral as bodies’ outlines cast in snow. Curiously,

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therefore, Webster offers a prescient critique of our own hypermaterialist age, with its similarly dismissive treatment of the self. By negative example, The Duchess of Malfi endorses the necessity of harmonizing biological and psychological needs. The bleakness of the Websterian universe, or its self-annihilative properties, recedes when read against the struggle to define selfhood in a utopian prose text by Margaret Cavendish. To conclude this biography of the early modern eco-self, the final chapter focuses on Cavendish’s engagement with emerging science and technological innovation in The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing World (1666). Writing as the Enlightenment was powering up, Cavendish both celebrates rationality and expands its range to include the world proper. In this way, Cavendish anticipates current trends (twenty-first-century moves) in ecological theory. If The Blazing World spotlights pivotal developments in Cavendish’s era, it also stimulates fresh consideration of how well the guiding principles and structuring tropes of ecological discourse serve our current needs. Writing in an era of acute devastations, Cavendish expresses reverence for the self-powering grandeur and infinite beauty of the natural world, in whose ambit humans are located. Yet her eco-awareness never effaces the individual. Striking a balance between communitarianism and individualism, The Blazing World advances an alternate version of the eco-self, one that melds the possibility of autonomy with an awareness of humans’ rootedness in the natural world. In sum, tracking the story of the self as it unfolds across diverse early modern texts brings out a key aspect of the period’s insights into humanness and has the potential to yield refinements to contemporary ecological discourse.

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1.

The Verdant Imagination in Shakespeare’s Sonnets Abstract This chapter advances an ecocritical reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, addressing various poems’ engagement with fundamental questions of organismic life. Approached as an ecosystem, the Sonnets predicate a new version of the self/world relationship. Their interdependence is conveyed via Shakespeare’s reliance on botanical tropes and images, though these are provocatively reimagined. Tracking such moments of iconoclasm yields updated readings of “art” and “nature” and generates fresh insights about “zoe” and “bios,” concepts essential to ecocritical thought. The omnipresent antinomies of “art/nature” and “zoe/bios” underscore the Sonnets’ quest for permanence, serving as a reminder that the ecological cannot be considered in isolation from the psychological. Ultimately, Shakespeare appropriates to the lyric mode the eternizing properties conventionally ascribed to the botanical world. Keywords: Ecocriticism; materialism; selfhood; Shakespeare; sonnets

Poetry has long been assumed to mediate the relationship between humans and the natural world. To Ovid, for example, poetry subdues, bringing nature’s awesome power under control.1 By contrast, in The Defence of Poesy (1595), Philip Sidney seeks to rescue poetry from the shoals of irrelevance by citing its ability to lift humans above the debasement of the material world. Not incidentally, in our own era, it seems that aggressor and victim, vis-à-vis the unfolding story of humans and nature, have swapped positions: now, poetry is being asked to rescue nature from humans’ ruinous assaults

1 See, for example, Book X of the Metamorphoses, when the lyric gifts of Orpheus calm the arboreal world.

Gruber, E.D., The Eco-Self in Early Modern English Literature. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463728881_ch01

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on it.2 In On Poetry (2012), Glyn Maxwell offers an updated defense of the venerable form, emphasizing its elemental functions. He writes, “Poems are responses to needs, urges, hungers, thirsts” (23). Maxwell construes poetry as an intense form of chiaroscuro, one whose patterning displays of black ink against swaths of whiteness—the artfully devised arrangements of lines and line-breaks—can thus be understood as attempts to cope with the passage of time or the daunting prospect of being banished from its sequential movements. All of these perspectives on poetry attest to its unique significance for ecocriticism. Accordingly, this chapter focuses on several of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, as they draw attention to the shifting boundary between self and world and also toggle between a consideration of bodily needs or exigencies and the equally pressing demands of an emerging interiority. In so doing, these poems outline the possibilities of the eco-self. The eco-self conveys movement, encompassing the self’s engagement in and retreat from the surrounding environment. The issues germane to this conception of personhood define the subdiscipline of ecopsychology (though, as far as I have been able to determine, “eco-self” is not part of their lexicon). As James Hillman explains, this scholarship concentrates on the following issues: “Where is the ‘me’? Where does the ‘me” begin? Where does the ‘me’ stop? Where does the ‘other’ begin?” (xvii). These questions draw attention to the dialectical rhythms of the self/world relationship, so they undergird my analyses of the eco-self. As the introduction acknowledges, the relational conception of identity has also been productively examined by ecofeminists, particularly among specialists who focus on the early modern period. A succinct statement of the issue is provided by Lynne Dickson Bruckner. She elucidates a core aspect of early modern ecofeminism, noting how its endorsement of the ongoing flow between person and world offers “a viable subject position,” a model of selfhood that is not tied to a specific gender (29). My goal throughout these pages is to build on the foundational work of ecofeminists while also reactivating interest in expressly psychological concerns, such as the inwardness—the sense of self—so important in the Sonnets. I begin with several Shakespearean Sonnets because they acknowledge the elemental needs Maxwell attributes to poetry, exigencies rooted in biology and materiality, but they also persistently chronicle a restless interiority. The taut linkage between the two snaps into focus in Sonnet 44. The poem opens with a frank acknowledgement of frustrated desire, 2 This plea unifies the anthology Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems, edited by John Felstiner.

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precipitated by separation from the beloved. The speaker complains: “If the dull substance of my flesh were thought, / Injurious distance should not stop my way” (1–2). In the first two quatrains, thought evidently possesses time-jumping, space-bending properties, as if the work of thinking can subvert natural law; however, the volta concedes, “But, ah, thought kills me that I am not thought” / To leap large lengths of miles when thou art gone” (9–10). The first-person pronouns in these lines equate the speaker with flesh; thought is the process that makes him painfully aware of the inexorable limits of being. In the compact fashion unique to its form, Sonnet 44 distills the relationship between self and world, thought and flesh. Likewise, this poem encapsulates a crucial function of poetry—namely, the remediation of the self/world relationship. Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets from an ecopsychological perspective reactivates engagement with the tension between “art” and “nature,” concepts frequently in oppositional play in early modern texts.3 The goal is to elicit fresh possibilities from the familiar thematic matrix, the clustering relations of Time, Nature, Art, and Death. In effect, I approach the Sonnets as an ecosystem, an arrangement of interdependent parts. My reading benefits from the ecocritical approach favored by Joshua Calhoun, who also envisions the cycle as an ecosystem. Moreover, Calhoun nimbly tracks the material underpinnings of literary production, this focal point an apt counterpart to the Sonnets’ emphasis on generation.4 In my view, the cycle’s deepest satisfactions derive from following through-lines that traverse multiple poems and create an overarching effect. For example, several poems wrestle with the seeming inevitability of ending as worm food, a possibility phrased in mournfully interrogative fashion in Sonnet 146, which asks, “Shall worms, inheritors of this excess, / Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body’s end?” (146.7–8).5 This metamorphosis receives attention in three other poems: Sonnets 6, 71, and 74. Though they differ somewhat 3 Ecocritics have illuminated contradictory early modern attitudes toward the natural world. For example, Simon C. Estok has helped to promote awareness of an abiding hostility toward nature, apparent in many Renaissance texts; see Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia. Conversely, Robert N. Watson discerns a longing for nature, powered by an awareness of humans’ progressive removal from it, in Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance. 4 Calhoun focuses on the material processes involved in the production of early modern texts. 5 Quotations from the Sonnets are from Stephen Booth’s edition. Throughout the essay, I refer to the commonly accepted sequence, which holds that poems 1–126 are addressed to a young man, whereas 127–152 are addressed to the “dark lady,” an appellation that itself arises via critical interpretation. The challenges of establishing an “authoritative” arrangement for the cycle are cogently addressed by Heather Dubrow’s essay, “‘Incertainties now crown themselves

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in emphasis, all three poems use worms as figures of abjection, heralds or reminders of death and decay. The recurring annelids, which intensify chrono-anxiety, reinforce the cycle’s attention to the botanical or horticultural given worms’ close association with the earth from which florae spring. Ultimately, however, Shakespeare works an iconoclastic magic in his poems, as they both originate out of and offer a challenge to the ancient tradition of analogizing human and floral forms. In his ecocritical study of Hamlet (1602) and Antony and Cleopatra (c.1606–07), Randall Martin summarizes Darwin’s analysis of the vital labor performed by earthworms. Martin suggests that understanding how worms optimize the soil’s potential (as, for example, Hamlet appears to do) yields an ecological awareness, a democratized vision of the relationship between humans and other animals. But the psychological dimensions of literary texts often bring out other aspects of humans’ inevitable affinities with worms. If the worm-ridden Sonnets (and indeed Hamlet) confirm the interconnectivity of all life, a point reinforced via the pervasive analogizing of human and botanical forms, this realization might generate hostility rather than comfort. Accordingly, I want to emphasize the tension between accepting the facts of biological existence (really, what choice is there?) and rebelling against the inevitable, seeking some form of egress from the life cycle, which is—as worms remind us—governed by a necrophiliac impulse. Typically, though not exclusively, the morbid psychologizing in Shakespeare’s Sonnets entails the speaker’s reflecting on his own eventual (or sometimes imminent) demise. Ramie Targoff reminds us that this personalized or inner-directed confrontation with mortality marks a significant difference between Italian and English poetry of the early modern period, as the former tends to dwell on the death of the beloved, not the poet-speaker.6 I submit that this change reconfigures the I–Thou relationship, giving a new attention, an obsessive focus, to subjectivity. Equally crucially, the Italian tradition persistently celebrates “posthumous reunion,” to borrow Targoff’s phrase, so that love transcends death (53). By contrast, she suggests, “Renaissance English poetry evolved through an understanding of love as finite,” and precisely this quality “intensifies the nature of erotic experience, and renders it more precious” (79, 105). Targoff uses the term “mortal poetics” assur’d’: The Politics of Plotting Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” Also instructive is Margreta de Grazia’s Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus. 6 See Targoff’s Posthumous Love: Eros and the Afterlife in Renaissance England. Her astute analysis of distinctions between Italian and English poetry offers fresh insights regarding the interplay of eros and thanatos.

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to describe the English insistence on death as the absolute endpoint of love. This label works best when contrasting English and Italian poetry, because it plays on the “immortal poetics,” or yearning for posthumous intimacy, characterizing the latter. Reflecting on similar themes in Romeo and Juliet (c.1595–96), Targoff suggests that Shakespeare “gives us a relentlessly materialist view of both love and death” (105). Not incidentally, this orientation to material or earthly/ fleshly concerns now dominates early modern studies. Indeed, in a review essay published in 2004, David Hawkes writes that early modern scholarship generally accepts the premise that “matter is the only reality” (114). This hypermaterialist perspective now manifests across multiple cultural domains, though it does not always yield satisfying explanations of human experience. The literary counterpart to hypermaterialism amounts to a necro-poetics, or an aesthetics of abjection, constituted by images and tropes that reimagine the life cycle as a death spiral. Therefore, it is not precisely accurate to claim, as does Targoff, that “Death plays … [a] startlingly little role in the English sonnet series” (3). It seems more fitting to think of death as a wellspring of creativity, lending urgency to artistic creations. Shakespeare’s Sonnets illuminate this trend, as in their frequent musings on wrinkle-marred flesh. This theme launches Sonnet 2, when the speaker urges his addressee to gaze into a mirror of the future, “When forty winters shall besiege [his] brow / And dig deep trenches in [his] beauty’s field” (1–2). The speaker’s militarized language imagines individuals at war with time, conceived as the handmaiden of death. Wrinkles and other visible signs of aging augur death, so their perceived assault on beauty likely originates in a deep-rooted dread of mortality, demonstrating the psychological dimensions of aesthetic judgments. Given the materialist underpinnings of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, their tidal devotion to permanence commands attention. Throughout the cycle, a sharp contradiction arises, a tension between insisting on mortality/ cessation/rupture and chasing a version of everlastingness. Targoff offers a conventional reconciliation of the two positions, noting how art takes on an elevated function, serving as the medium through which “the gift of immortality [is] experienced through generation after generation of audiences and readers” (133).7 Of course, across English sonnet cycles, a deliberate 7 For an ecofeminist analysis of the art/nature relationship, especially the way Shakespeare reimagines it, see Jennifer Munroe, “It’s all about the gillyvors: Engendering Art and Nature in The Winter’s Tale.” In this late Romance, Munroe argues, women’s “understanding of the natural world positions them as closer to Nature,” so that they grasp “how best to use what

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bait-and-switch consistently manifests: poets claim immortality for their subjects, their beloveds, but it is their speakers’ voices (or their own, if one is willing to elide author and speaker) which reverberate through the centuries, an “obvious irony” addressed by Targoff. Pace Targoff, I am not entirely convinced that English sonneteers, including Shakespeare, capture and hold the imagination of succeeding generations of readers primarily because they “preserv[e] the experience of love” (157). This stance implicitly construes sonnets as reliquaries, static repositories of meaning, so it discounts the flexibility of this poetic form. Rather than simply preserving vestiges of love, sonnets promote contemplation of this exhilarating state, given that they perpetually invite readers to step into the position of knowing/desiring/ suffering subject. Whatever one concludes about lovers’ eventual reunion after death (and early modern texts indicate sharp dissensus on this issue, as Targoff demonstrates), Shakespeare’s Sonnets gift readers with posthumous intimacy by uniting poetic and readerly consciousness. The psychological depth of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, their sometimes-eerie ability to accommodate succeeding generations of readers, suggests that early moderns and (post-)post-moderns share certain affinities, such as a particular mindset or way of being-in-the-world. In other words, the emerging self of the period is the model for the subjectivity we have inherited, one premised on a fusion of the biological and the psychological, though our era’s inclination toward hypermaterialism threatens this integrated entity. This self, defined here as the eco-self, variously engages with and claims a space apart from the world. Sonnet 27 epitomizes the two-dimensionality of the eco-self. The poem begins with the speaker’s complaint that he is “Weary with toil” and in need of “repose for limbs with travail tired;” (1–2). Physical exhaustion quickly recedes, however, as the speaker “begins a journey in [his] head, / To work [his] mind when body’s work’s expired” (3–4). This immersive work reunites the speaker with his addressee. The speaker calls upon his “soul’s imaginary sight” to cast out darkness so that he sees the “shadow” of the young man, “Which, like a jewel hung in ghastly night, / Makes black night beauteous and her old face new” (9, 10, 11–12). The speaker imagines the darkness, even barrenness, of night as an old woman, but her image fades, morphing into the adored face of the beloved. This is the imagination as its most verdant, creating ex nihilo a satisfying vision of loveliness. In sum, Sonnet 27 concedes the pressing demands of the material world, including the Nature creates” (154). The Sonnets pursue different aims, however, as they both acknowledge nature’s turning cycles (which necessarily means coping with mortality) and meditate on the fade-resistant potential of aesthetic creations.

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physical exhaustion that ensues from various labors or activities; but none of this cancels out the possibility (necessity?) of a robust inner life, a capacity, for example, to call to mind a lover from whom one is separated. Stated another way, even intensely physical experiences, such as the act of loving, require psychological dedication and a particular kind of self-awareness. Shakespeare’s Sonnets repeatedly affirm the non-negotiable facts of organismic life, but they also voice a surpassing desire for meaning and purpose. That they do so within a form which everywhere imposes limits on meaning and expression is key to their revelatory power. As philosopher Ian Bogost observes, “Constraints suggest a context. They set the terms for the experiences that take place within them” (179). He briefly mentions the sonnet form when laying out his theory. Subjugating need to the formal dictates of the sonnet, as Shakespeare consistently does, provides a way to explore and come to grips with vulnerability. In this way, the Sonnets can claim a transformational potency, even if most will not concede that poetry is the “monarch” of all knowledge, as Sidney thought. Sidney was wrong on one point: poetry matters not because it elevates us from our “clayey lodgings” as he imagined, but because it struggles (not always successfully) to make us at home there (219). Is it too much to claim that the afterlife of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, their odd, eerie relevance, is perennially assured because in them we glimpse the mysterious conjunction of two orders, the organic and the symbolic? Admittedly, the still vogueish critical preference, established some time ago, has been the elision of concepts such as “organic” and “symbolic,” along with a host of other seemingly antonymic terms. Most crucially, given my overall focus on questions of identity in early modern literature, the distinction between subject and object has been declared an anachronism, an imposition on early modern writers who, we have repeatedly been told, were manifestly uninterested in questions of subjectivity. In the interests of historical accuracy, early modern scholarship insists on a materialist approach to subjectivity (or the concept is simply jettisoned). It is just possible that such maneuvers unwittingly commit the very anachronism they intend to prevent. After all, the tendency to apprehend everything in strictly materialist terms is an outcropping of late twentieth- and early twenty-first century thought. Shakespeare and his contemporaries were certainly traveling some of the same intellectual pathways, particularly because of the atomism they excavated from classical Greek thought.8 But as the Sonnets attest, texts of the period often seek a via media, a negotiation 8

Drew Daniels examines resurgent atomism in “The Empedoclean Renaissance.”

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of biological and psychological needs. This delicate balancing act emerges in the cycle’s sustained use of botanical tropes and images, which are essential to questions of identity.

The Botanical in Historical Context The botanical theme pervading Shakespeare’s Sonnets draws attention to the alternately competing or complementary demands of organismic life and artistic expression. While sonnets are among the most predictable of literary forms, many of the poems in Shakespeare’s cycle engage in iconoclasm, upending a powerful, centuries-old association of vegetative life with eternal renewal; ultimately, this yields a new form of regeneration. In brief, Shakespeare appropriates to the lyric the eternizing properties conventionally ascribed to botanical forms. More specifically, the verdant imagination in the Sonnets encompasses both the rich supply of botanical imagery and the devotional attention to an active inner life, a hallmark of the lyric mode. This inwardness is not simply a formal or stylistic innovation; rather, it points to a version of selfhood just emerging in the period. Perhaps, then, Shakespeare’s complex use of botanical tropes and images derives from a tacit awareness that the meaning of humanness was in flux.9 For early moderns, the curious legend of the mandrake encapsulates the presumed affinities between human and botanical worlds. Specifically, the root of the mandrake was perceived as a homunculus; when picked, so the story went, the plant screamed its displeasure.10 Shakespeare summons this motif in Romeo and Juliet with a reference to the “shrieks like mandrakes torn out of the earth” (4.3.36).11 This apprehension ascribed vitality, even a kind of self-awareness, to a plant because it was deemed capable of protesting its own demise. At some point, the story of the screaming mandrake dropped out of popular usage, most likely a casualty of the new knowledge that was emerging in the late sixteenth century. While the enhanced study of the botanical world obviously generated important insights about plants and trees, in some respects, it depleted the symbolic register available to 9 Joseph Henrich illuminates the emergence of a new subset of the human in the sixteenth century one defined by “dispositionalism,” or the “tendency to see people’s behavior anchored in personal traits” (33). Henrich identifies the notable uptick in literacy as a crucial catalyst of this emergent self. 10 The humanoid mandrake is discussed by Larry Silver and Pamela H. Smith in “‘Splendor in the Grass’: The Powers of Nature and Art in the Age of Dürer.” 11 For an analysis of ecopolitics in this play, see Bonnie Lander Johnson’s “Blood, Milk, Poison.”

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Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Notwithstanding the biblical connotations of knowing, knowledge can preempt rather than enable intimate or affective relations. The modern discipline of botany was incipient by the late sixteenth century, part of the burgeoning science that prioritized close study, dissection, and labeling.12 Gardens were essential to this developing branch of learning, functioning as crucial sites of epistemological advancement. In a study of early modern contributions to natural history, Brian W. Ogilvie identifies a widening rift between experts and laypeople. He suggests, “The experience of a naturalist who recognized a type of wild rose as peculiar to a small region was qualitatively different from that of a local who had never known another kind” (15). Ogilvie emphasizes the transformed significance of gardens, which were at once “places of repose, visual delight, and social exchange” and crucial sites for formalized study (160). Gardens functioned as spaces of unique energy and flexibility, in which social roles could be confirmed or challenged.13 In Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens (2003), Rebecca Bushnell offers an elegant account of gardens as sites of desire, spaces that activated the imagination and provided a tangible location for its expression. Gardens also took on expressly political functions, such as when ostensibly “alien” landscapes were “civilized” through the establishment of English gardens, or in the countermove, whereby plants harvested in the “New World” were cultivated in England.14 At once tangible and rife with socio-political meanings, gardens capture the movement between organic life and symbolic processes. If Shakespeare’s Sonnets do not necessarily advance scientific knowledge of plants, they do demonstrate how images and tropes drawn from the botanical world are instrumental in depicting humanness.15 Sonnet 16 12 The collection Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, edited by Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, assesses the political contexts in which the discipline of botany was enmeshed. Leah Knight’s monograph Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England examines the intersections of print culture and apprehensions of/approaches to the botanical world. 13 God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660, by Andrew McRae, and Gender and the Garden in Early Modern English Literature, by Jennifer Munroe, elucidate gardens as spaces of social activity and contestation. 14 See Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition, and also his Song of the Earth, for additional analyses of gardens’ sociopolitical dimensions. Michael T. Bravo assesses the role of gardens in the colonialist project in his essay, “Mission Gardens: Natural History and Global Expansion, 1720–1820,” though of course he focuses on the eighteenth century. 15 A forthcoming volume edited by Susan C. Staub, Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination, offers richly diverse examples of how various Shakespearean texts address homologies between the

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encapsulates this theme. Here the speaker advises his addressee, “Now stand you on the top of happy hours, / And many maiden gardens yet unset, / With virtuous wish would bear your living flowers” (5–7). This image of the awaiting female body pretties up the speaker’s earlier reference to an “uneared womb” in Sonnet 3, the hapless condition of which would prompt any woman, even the fairest, to welcome impregnation from the young addressee (5). Such metaphors reinforce gender roles, with planting/sowing/ reaping imagined as masculine activities and the female body a fertile, pliant ground in which to work. In this way, agricultural motifs confirm the meanings associated with male and female experience.16 Superficially, the similarities between the human and botanical realms de-exceptionalize the former. As this chapter seeks to demonstrate, however, it is the very prospect of sameness, or non-differentiation, that produces the electrical charge of the Sonnets, their quest for a perpetuity that nature cannot grant.

Shakespearean Iconoclasm: Chasing Permanence Shakespeare’s reliance on botanical tropes and images reprises a longstanding poetic tradition. As Lewis Hyde explains in The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (2007), among the ancients, “[v]egetation” was “taken as a sign of indestructible life, and the vegetable gods of antiquity were its personification” (234). To illuminate this property, Hyde calls our attention to compelling evidence, the ruins of an ancient theater overtaken by vegetative growth; as the building crumbles into dust, it feeds the thriving plants that return each season.17 Initially, it might seem that Shakespeare’s Sonnets confirm the equivalence of plant life with eternal being. Specifically, across the young man’s sequence, the speaker repeatedly employs botanical images to point up the necessity of producing a child. For instance, in Sonnet 1’s opening appeal to narcissistic self-preservation, the speaker advises human and the botanic. An earlier version of this chapter is slated to appear in Staub’s collection; its diverse essays find much to celebrate in early moderns’ ubiquitous comparisons of the human and botanic, though my goal is to show how the Sonnets evince anxieties about such likenesses. 16 In Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Thomas Walter Laqueur analyzes distinctions between the one-sex model, dating back to Galen, and the two-sex model established in the eighteenth century. For a deft analysis of the different florae associated variously with male and female bodies, see Bushnell’s Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens (136–40). 17 Hyde discusses the image, an anecdote recounted by Kerényi; perhaps because the former is a poet, however, his account is the more compelling of the two. See Hyde, The Gift (41).

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that a child will ensure the continuance of “beauty’s rose” (2). While the exquisite flower could convey the indestructibility of the vegetative world, in Shakespeare’s treatment, the rose frequently connotes ephemerality. Along these lines, six of the eleven uses of “rose” evoke negative qualities, such as the reminder that roses have “thorns” (35.2) or that a rose might be spoiled by an insidious “canker,” a blemish heralding decay (95.2). Another pointed demonstration of Shakespearean iconoclasm arrives in Sonnet 68, which begins, “Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn, / When beauty lived and died as flow’rs do now” (1–2). In these examples, Shakespeare unmakes the ancient mythic pattern that associated vegetative life with infinite possibility: a propensity to decay and die affirms correspondences between human and floral forms. The eternizing properties of vegetation call up the ancient Greek distinction between “zoe” and “bios,” both of which denoted life. Historian Carl Kerényi provides useful definitions of the concepts, writing, “The significance of zoë is life in general, without further characterization. When the word bios is uttered, something else resounds: the contours, as it were, the characteristics of a specified life, the outlines that distinguish one living thing from another” (xxxii). Building on this work, Hyde observes, “Zoe is the life that endures; it is the thread that runs through bios-life and is not broken when the particular perishes,” adding, “In this century we call it the ‘gene pool’” (41). Hyde also uses the term “species-essence” to get at the regenerative power of zoe, the way it wends ceaselessly through generations. For both Kerényi and Hyde, the transgenerational features of zoe infuse it with spiritual meaning, by which they seem to invoke a kind of permanence. A different calibration of zoe and bios is presented by Giorgio Agamben. As many ecocritics have noted, with varying degrees of displeasure, Agamben denigrates zoe precisely because it emphasizes the physiological needs that humans share with all other organisms. From his perspective, bios is preferable, as it encompasses the purpose-built world that affirms human creativity and ingenuity and endures beyond a single lifetime or, more dramatically, outlasts succeeding generations. Notably, both responses to the zoe/bios distinction prioritize the concept that seems best equipped to confer permanence; the divergent conclusions might derive from the respective emphases on vegetative life (à la Kerényi and Hyde) as opposed to animal life (Agamben’s focus). Permanence likewise constitutes the elusive goal pursued in the opening subsequence of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The speaker repeatedly urges a burdensome prolepsis on the young man so that he will imagine his future self, furrowed and marred by age, nostalgic for vanished beauty. Sonnet 2

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warns of inevitable enfeeblement and decay and appears to offer a palliative, the filial facsimile capable of ensuring that the no-longer-young man will be “new made” so that his “blood” will “warm” when he “feel’st it cold” (13, 14). The projected condition and promised remedy seem eerily akin to zombification, as if the youth of the future reanimates his all-but-dead father. In The Art of the Sonnet (2010), Stephen Burt and David Mikics comment on the perversity of Sonnet 2, suggesting that its “stunning final image… is that of the young man grown old …. The son’s vivid warmth tells the father of his impending death” (63). Oddly, therefore, this poem presents the child of the future as a memento mori. Through a reverse alchemy, youthfulness and beauty conjure death. In repudiating the solacing comforts of progeny—of the younger generation itself—Sonnet 2 subverts the logic of the procreation poems. In numerous poems addressed to the young man, the speaker generates a paradoxical hostility toward the future by obsessing over his banishment from it. This point is made with incisive eloquence in Sonnet 60, in the speaker’s observation, “So do our minutes hasten to their end,” which immediately follows the poem’s opening simile, “Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore” (2,1). Likening minutes to waves that crescendo and then disperse on land, the lines intimate commensurateness between the implacable rhythms of the natural world and humans’ experience of time. But the ocean’s movement keeps generating fresh waves so that the seascape avoids finitude. Admittedly, the Sonnets repeatedly try to appropriate this sort of renewal to the human world, as in the opening subsequence’s imperative to procreate. But there is a difference between the (seemingly) ceaseless movement of the ocean and the ever-changing populations of humans. Therefore, Sonnet 60 showcases the limits of analogizing humans and the natural world. At some specific point, the future fails to include each human. Given the Sonnets’ obsessive focus on this prospect, it is worth noting that “future” (i.e., the word itself) is not given a single specific mention in any of the 154 poems. Similarly, “posterity” only shows up twice (in Sonnets 3 and 55), while “increase” fares slightly better, with four appearances. By contrast, “death” garners 20 mentions, although this is far short of the seventy-two references to “time,” all of which occur in the young man’s sequence.18 It is perhaps easy to gloss over the destructiveness associated with time, the way it so quickly emerges as a villainous threat to beauty, love, or life itself. Likewise, we might be familiar with the angst generated by 18 In Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Self, Love, and Art, Philip Martin confronts the promise as well as the limits of “poetic immortality” as it figures in Shakespeare’s sonnet cycle (150–58).

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contemplating personal cessation. For philosopher Justin E. H. Smith, our distinctive mental habits (e.g., contemplations of a future from which we will be excluded) ensure that we must, ultimately, locate meaning and value outside of ourselves (256). This is precisely the realization so often on display throughout the procreation poems, when the addressee is preemptively reminded of his own decay and instructed to compensate by creating a chrono-proof replica-child. As commonplace as this all seems, we should note that Shakespeare was writing amid a profound transformation, when apprehensions of mortality were shifting. In particular, the death-as-sleep metaphor had a palliating effect on conceptions of mortality. When the explanatory power of this comforting image of dormancy waned, contemplations of death provoked a new urgency. Or, as I see it, death became feral, rewilded.19 Shakespeare seems to acknowledge this significant shift in Sonnet 146, a poem whose complex examination of “body” and “soul” evinces Platonic and Pauline influences.20 Sonnet 146 ascribes a curiously vampiric quality to the soul, which renders it a fitting adversary of death. Their shared ferocity materializes in the following address to the soul: “So shalt thou feed on death, that feeds on men, / And death once dead, there’s no more dying then” (lines 13–14). Across Shakespeare’s sonnet cycle, the frequent invocations of “death,” and its accomplice, “time,” skew toward the melancholic or morbid, but their effects are overmatched by the 164 references to “love.” These linguistic phenomena convey the Sonnets’ orientation to fundamental questions of life. After all, as a character from the quietly lyrical novel Idaho muses, “An I-am is a pair of syllables. The first one soft, the second loud. It’s the rhythm of the human heart, which is also the natural rhythm of human speech” (103). This mistake, the transliteration of “iamb,” an aspect of prosody, into the homophonic two-word assertion of being, “I am,” captures the way in which literary conventions pulse with organic life or at least preserve residual traces of it. Following Maxwell, these emphatic declarations of being materialize against whiteness, so they confront the oblivion that forever threatens. Precisely because oblivion’s initial target is the frail body, so lamentably prone to debilitation and collapse, countering it requires seeking meaning 19 This new apprehension, the rewilding of death, is chronicled at length by Philippe Ariès in The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes toward Death Over the Last One Thousand Years. Also see William E. Engel’s Mapping Mortality: The Persistence of Memory and Melancholy in Early Modern England. 20 Stephen Booth’s long note on Sonnet 146 remains a vital resource for engaging the poem’s complexities, particularly its ability to inhabit contrariety.

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apart from, or in addition to, the limits imposed on all forms of life. Such efforts likely seem anathematic to ecocriticism, with its prevailing allegiance to materialism. Often the stated or implied goal of this scholarship is to challenge distinctions between humans and other organisms.21 Shakespeare’s Sonnet 1 anticipates this democratized biosphere in the couplet’s concession that eventually our debt to nature must be paid, since all comprise “the world’s due” (14).22 But this poem (along with the others sharing its thematic concerns) does not exactly celebrate humans’ participation in the cycling rhythms of the natural world. Indeed, the inaugural poem intimates the problem of relying on the botanical to proffer a stable version of beauty or being, as we see in the speaker’s acknowledgement that “the riper” will, inevitably, “by time decease” (4). Furthermore, the recalcitrant addressee stubbornly makes his youthful promise, or “bud,” an early grave (11). This and other poems rich in botanical images concede the dark power of the ecoimaginary, a repository of tropes and images highlighting humans’ inevitable transformation into humus, that loamy essence that hosts vegetative life. Ironically, in their frequent meditations on the green—lush, fecund—world, the Sonnets chronicle a quirk of humanness, an evident need, or perhaps obligation, to contemplate personal cessation. Additionally, it is precisely the realization of humans’ embedment in nature that generates the desire for an individuated existence.

Ecopoetics As several of Shakespeare’s Sonnets confirm, corpses are useful. Dead bodies serve living organisms, such as by providing alimentary satisfaction to worms. If the prospect of becoming, in death, a life-source to others offers its own brand of solace, an opportunity for post-mortem continuance, in Shakespeare’s Sonnets this process more typically occasions dread. Accordingly, Shakespeare tests the memorializing properties of artistic expression. Rather than leading away from considerations of the human/nature relationship, this focus renews their significance so that art deliberately remakes the human/nature relationship. In showcasing this process, the Sonnets take on expressly ecopoetical functions. 21 In their introduction to Material Feminisms, Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman consolidate scholarship on the materialist turn in ecocriticism and its intersections with feminist theory. 22 For a positive treatment of humans’ indistinguishability from the rest of the natural world, see The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, edited by Jean E. Feerick and Vin Nardizzi.

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Whereas originality often seems the metric by which aesthetic grandeur is judged in the twenty-first century, for Shakespeare and his contemporaries, imitation governed creative efforts. Among early modern writers and artists, both the natural world and classical works were sources of inspiration, models to be emulated. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann points out that this enabled the arts and sciences to work in tandem, though they would be decoupled in the seventeenth century (3–6). Reflecting on the interrelationship of art and nature, Derek Attridge illuminates the Renaissance interest in “instinct” versus “artifice.” He suggests, “Human beings behave naturally by following instinct and artificially by learning and following the rules of the art in question” (24). Early modern texts, including Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (1595), often prioritize “artificial” learning. From this perspective, adherence to aesthetic principles either effects or permits some distance from nature, which encompasses instinctive responses. Art historian Mary D. Garrard considers how artistic ventures convey differing attitudes toward the natural world. In a representative example she writes, “Landscape [painting] developed when nature was demoted from a power to an environment” (1). In this sense, art records—perhaps even enforces—human dominion over nature. Garrard argues that humans gained mastery over the physical environment as a result of “[t]he transition within the Renaissance from organic to scientific consciousness” (4). Garrard focuses mainly on painting and sculpture, but the evolution she describes is also conveyed through shifting poetic conventions and tropes. Eventually, the agricultural metaphors so prominently on display in the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries would be drained of meaning. Shakespeare’s Sonnets variously reimagine the relationship between art and nature. A cluster of activities, encompassing the domains of horticulture, biological regeneration, and writing, alternately converge and divide throughout the cycle. Once again, botanical images prove especially important, as they complicate any tidy distinction between “natural” and “constructed” worlds. As Vin Nardizzi observes, “The practice of plant grafting … was regarded in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English gardening manuals as both an analogue to procreation and a form of writing” (83). In Sonnets 15 and 17, at the end of the procreation subsequence, the speaker introduces the regenerative properties of art, imagined as alternative or counterpart to biological or botanic generation. In Sonnet 15, for example, the speaker describes himself as a combatant of “Time,” a role necessitated by his “love” for the young man, and in the final line promises, “As he takes from you, I engraft you new” (13–14). In this poem, the speaker enforces likeness between the human and the botanical, but their congruity derives from shared vulnerability. That is, “men as plants increase,” but they likewise experience

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commensurate decay (5). In Sonnet 17, the botanical theme fades, though remnants of it are suggested in the image of “papers (yellowed with their age)”; this poem concludes with a statement of art and biological reproduction as collaborators, mutual guarantors of the young man’s survival (9). “Art” and “nature” receive similar attention in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, with, respectively, thirteen and fifteen mentions. Surprisingly, the two only appear jointly in a single poem, Sonnet 127. Here acrimony taints their relations, as suggested in the speaker’s complaint about the “hand” that usurps “nature’s power,” thereby “[f]airing the foul with art’s false borrowed face” (5, 6). In this inaugural poem of the dark lady’s sequence, beauty has undergone a metamorphosis, one premised on the revaluation of fairness and blackness so that the latter term is privileged. This reversal, as the poem insists, arises from the inherently corrupting effects of artifice, whereby “beauty” had been “slandered with a bastard shame” (127.4).23 Of course, the medium undercuts the message: by using a highly stylized poetic form to argue against “artifice,” the speaker ironizes his own point.24 Often, the juxtaposition of art and nature in early modern texts trades on the assumption that the former entails corruption or at least artifice, whereas the latter enjoys an untouched quality, a purity, unavailable in the purpose-built world. As Nardizzi reminds us, however, the practice of plant grafting, an obvious intervention in botanical processes, affords a crucial subtext for understanding tropes of regeneration in the Sonnets. He notes that “plant grafting proves an altogether different model of generation,” one that might yield “a queerer version of generational and genealogical history, both sexual and textual” (99). Nardizzi’s observation implicitly warns against facile invocations of nature. After all, cultural and ideological assumptions inevitably mediate our perceptions and definitions of human and non-human worlds alike. On the other hand, in the domain of evolutionary aesthetics, a different iteration of the relationship between art and nature is underway.25 This 23 A similar point is made by Aaron, in Titus Andronicus. Following the birth of his son, Aaron celebrates blackness on the grounds that it is more authentic, less damningly mutable, than whiteness (4.2.100–04). 24 Booth examines depictions of blackness and whiteness in Sonnet 127 as volatile disruptors of longstanding aesthetic traditions. Also instructive on the issue of race, aesthetics, and form is Kim F. Hall’s Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. And Ania Loomba’s Gender, Race, and Colonialism remains essential for examining the interplay of those categories named in her title. 25 An overview of the salient issues in evolutionary aesthetics is provided by Brett Cooke’s “Biopoetics: The New Synthesis.”

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scholarship challenges the notion that beauty is culture-bound or subject to ideological or political judgments. For instance, Christa Sütterlin writes, “There is a large layer of shared experiences on aesthetic agreement in art worldwide,” and she cites the global appeal of various art exhibitions, ranging from “the Gold of the Pharaohs” to “the late work of Titian,” as evidence of this universalist aesthetic.26 Viewed in this light, organic processes govern aesthetic pleasures. In a way, this strikes me as an utterly appealing notion: notwithstanding decades of important scholarship on the contingency of all human experience, certain perceptual preferences and accompanying aesthetic forms establish a truly universal community. And yet, beauty cannot be neatly extracted from ideological or political judgments. As Randy Thornhill suggests in “Darwinian Aesthetics Informs Traditional Aesthetics” (2003), “The naturalist fallacy, applied to human physical attractiveness, has repeatedly led to oppressive and inhuman social policies, including the human breeding programs widely implemented under Nazism” (23). Furthermore, he continues, “The many eugenic programs of history have defined human beauty in ways that meet the political aspirations of the powerful” (24). With Thornhill’s arguments in mind, we probably cannot evade the possibility that a proto-eugenics materializes in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. After all, the opening line of the first poem celebrates a racialized fecundity in its avowal, “From fairest creatures we desire increase” (1). Albeit with a touch of stylistic elegance, this poem insists not simply on procreation but on the replication of whiteness. The technical virtuosity often on display in the cycle should not preclude recognition of the political consequences entangled with aesthetic judgments. Though “race” did not have the same meaning in the early modern era as it does for us, Shakespeare’s Sonnets nonetheless invoke corporeal differences to establish discrete categories of identity, labels (then as now) rife with political significance.27 Read against their incipient discourse of race, the Sonnets’ ubiquitous appeals to the botanical world as a source of perfect, if fleeting, beauty take on more significance. In “‘Nature’s Bastards’: Grafted Generation in Early Modern England” (2015), Claire Duncan adroitly summarizes the issue, observing, “Early modern England uses shared rhetoric to describe horticultural 26 See Sütterlin’s essay, “From Sign and Schema to Iconic Representation” (167). Another perspective on this relationship is provided in Ellen Dissanayake’s article, “‘Making Special’: An Undescribed Human Universal.” 27 Contemporary versions of white supremacy reinforce the complex entwining of putatively biological differences and the cultural norms and institutions annexed to or underlying them. Smith elucidates these connections in Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason (see especially 14–15).

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generation and human generation” (123). She builds on Nardizzi’s arguments about the importance of plant grafting, highlighting the violence of the relevant techniques. In this light, the lexical and metaphorical possibilities of the botanic world yield contrariety. In the Sonnets, this means that floral forms variously connote permanence/immutability and confirm nature’s susceptibility to human interventions. The practice of plant grafting evinces a desire for control, one matched by the exigent tone of the procreation Sonnets. Margreta de Grazia suggests that these poems “have an open and explicit social function: to reproduce, like an Althusserian state apparatus, the status quo by reproducing a fair young man.”28 She suggests that early modern audiences would have perceived the dark lady’s sequence as the more transgressive because it conjures “the patriarchal nightmare of a social melting pot” (106). This position reads the lady’s darkness as emblematic of her otherness so that her intimate relationship with the speaker assumes a transgressive power. Yet procreation drops out of sight in the dark lady’s sequence. Lust announces these poems, as in Sonnet 129, which imagines desire as relentless, a compulsion so intense, so irrepressible, that it deactivates reason. These temporary indulgences are, evidently, alarmingly brief, and incapable of providing any lasting pleasure. But the opening line of 129, the invocation of lust as “[t]he expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” divides passion from propagation, particularly in the graphic image of “spirit” or liquid being “wasted,” as if spilled or diverted from its reproductive function (1). Accordingly, the non-tributes to the dark lady militate against the cycle’s earlier appeals to the fecundity of the botanical realm. It might be tempting to find in the dark lady’s sequence the glimmers of a modernity that advocates for pleasure. Viewed in these terms, the early modern period sought to recuperate the bliss accompanying fleshly experience. But it is probably more appropriate—if less exhilarating—to concede Peter Stallybrass’s point: “The Sonnets … became a crucial site on which ‘sexual identity’ was invented and contested,” and the contentious history of their interpretation prompts us “to understand how the imaginary terrain of our own bodies came into being” (86).29 In this respect, criticism of the poems exposes (or guarantees) our entrapment within the symbolic 28 De Grazia’s analysis of transgressive desire is presented in “The Scandal of Shakespeare’s Sonnets” (102). A different reading of the opening subsequence, particularly the imperative to reproduce, is presented by Peter C. Herman in “What’s the Use? Or, the Problematic Economy in Shakespeare’s Procreation Sonnets.” 29 See Rebecca Laroche’s essay “The Sonnets on Trial: Reconsidering the Portrait of Mr. W. H.” for another view of sexual politics.

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order, a zone of endless significations.30 From an ecocritical perspective, such approaches are infelicitous because, in emphasizing the mediation of all human experience, they screen us from the organic realm. We should not be surprised at the solid purchase deconstruction finds in the ground of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, given the poems’ propensity for linguistic play, especially their tendency to implode binary oppositions. As Helen Vendler observes in The Music of What Happens (1988), “blackness turns fair, and loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud” (242). This rhetorical pattern, the movement of a thing into its opposite, prevails across the entire sonnet cycle. If such a phenomenon seems a marked retreat from the organic, indicative of a wish to isolate us within the symbolic order, we should consider that the commingling of opposites resides at the very core of existence, not in an esoteric or flashily deconstructive way, but in resolutely materialist terms. In The Dominion of the Dead (2003), Robert P. Harrison observes, “[O]ur planet as a whole, like all solid bodies in the universe, is a species of what is dead”; and the “biosphere,” which is “host to such an abundance of life,” is “necrogenic” (1). In this sense, the barrier between the quick and the dead has always been chimerical. Shakespeare’s Sonnets attempt the sort of magic Harrison ascribes to architecture, the transformation of “matter into meaning” (3). This dynamic, a manifestation of efforts to harmonize the biological with the psychological, lends purpose to Sonnet 20, a poem nourished by the early moderns’ abiding interest in nature and art. Here the speaker offers a mythopoeic account of his addressee, asserting, “And for a woman wert thou first created, / Till nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting, / And by addition me of thee defeated, / By adding one thing to my purpose nothing” (20.9–12). Evoking the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, Sonnet 20 is playfully self-aware, attuned to readers’ interest in the speaker’s relationship with his addressee. For all its self-conscious linguistic play, Sonnet 20 fixates on corporeality. To early modern readers still influenced by the one-sex model, there must have been an additional charge accompanying the prospect of “anatomical isomorphism,” whereby a woman suddenly transformed into a man.31 Additionally, Sonnet 20 imagines a new synthesis of art and nature: the latter takes on the pleasurable work of the former. This depiction of nature 30 John Kerrigan addresses the shift from “autobiographical” interpretations to those influenced by formalism and deconstruction in On Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature: Essays. 31 The phrase “anatomical isomorphism” is used throughout Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud; his analysis of the one-sex model’s enduring influence on Renaissance writers shapes my reading of gender distinctions in Sonnet 20 and elsewhere in the cycle.

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as an artist who falls in love with her subject is something of a departure from its customary handling in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. We have some basis for comparison, given the fifteen appearances “nature” makes (with two of these coming in Sonnet 20). Several times, nature is depicted as a cache of gifts that may be offered or withheld. For example, in Sonnet 4, “nature gives nothing but doth lend” (11); in Sonnet 11, nature reserves some “for stores,” while others must “barrenly perish” (9). Sonnet 60 strikes a predictable note, with “nature’s rarities” a feast for ever-gluttonous time (11). Sonnet 126 imagines nature as the “sovereign mistress over wrack,” so it intensifies Sonnet 18’s milder iteration of the destruction theme, which holds that “every fair from fair sometimes declines, / By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed” (7–8). In three poems (Sonnets 109, 111, and 122), “nature” connotes an aspect of human identity, so these usages stand apart from the others. Considered alongside the other poems, Sonnet 20’s presentation of nature as a creating-goddess accrues significance. Whereas this poem seems to confer power on the natural world, in truth it recreates nature in humans’ image. This is because, as Vendler writes of Sonnet 20 in The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1997), “This little myth of origins arises, probably, from the idea (in Sonnets 11 and 19), that Nature, as sculptor or artist, conceives a mental pattern from which she then prints or models her creatures” (128). The process, ably summed up by Vendler, models human cognitive and creative efforts. Currently, research across various disciplines emphasizes or celebrates non-human forms of knowing; typically, this work focuses on other varieties of animal intelligence, such as echolocation, or it attempts to show that various species possess reason or even participate in semiotic economies.32 Such scholarship focuses on varieties of knowing among animals. On the other hand, neuro-botanist Stefano Mancuso urges us to study the intelligence unique to plant life, which he believes superior to ours.33 Rather than asserting affinities between human and vegetative life, Mancuso proposes that we comprehend difference in felicitous terms, as something from which we can learn, indeed, a set of possibilities to be emulated. Convincing most people to accept this proposition seems a Herculean challenge; after all, even contemporary theories of reason that insist upon other animals’ 32 For an overview of diverse forms of knowing across the animal world, I recommend The Enigma of Reason by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber. 33 Mancuso lays out his case for the intelligence of plant life in The Revolutionary Genius of Plants: A New Understanding of Plant Intelligence and Behavior, noting that in some respects arboreal capacities surpass their animal equivalents.

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cognitive abilities tend to use the botanical world as a foil.34 Still, with enviable optimism for the future, Mancuso speculates that imitating the vegetative world would enable durable (if not exactly permanent) structures. In a way, he urges appropriating to bios the ancient, eternalizing properties of vegetative life.

Memory and Oblivion Whereas the Sonnets chase eternity, or at least a kind of earthy permanence, in certain contexts memory debilitates. For personal, collective, or overtly political reasons, forgetting is sometimes a necessity.35 The imperative to forget likely seems out of tune with Shakespeare’s Sonnets, as they so often dwell on mnemonic strategies. Of course, Sonnet 71 does exhort the addressee, “No longer mourn for me when I am dead / Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell / Give warning to the world that I am fled” (1–3). A subsequent line in the poem instructs, “let your love ev’n with my life decay” (71.12). Possibly the poem works a self-implosive magic, with each line subverting the injunction to forget.36 Interestingly, research on cognition suggests that it is exceedingly difficult to make oneself forget. This is because of the brain’s tendency to monitor itself; specifically, when the brain “checks in” to confirm the forgetting, the banished thought is once again called to mind.37 In any case, Sonnet 71 brings into view the morbid threat looming over much of the cycle, the prospect of being ousted “[f]rom this vile world” and sent “with vildest worms to dwell” (4). This line, echoed in the other three poems featuring “worms,” puts a new spin on Sidney’s “clayey lodgings,” calling attention to humans’ destined chthonian habitation, with annelids our only companions. Such moments unravel the Great Chain of Being, predicating an egalitarian biosphere that admits of no distinctions. The dread generated by this prospect suggests that ecological discourse must attend to the unique psychological needs of humans, particularly those generated 34 Although The Enigma of Reason, by Mercier and Sperber, often challenges human exceptionalism, they distinguish organisms who reason (i.e., animals) from vegetative life. 35 Lewis Hyde makes an eloquent case for “necessary forgetting” in A Primer on Forgetting. 36 This interpretive trend is acknowledged but repudiated by Vendler in The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. 37 Haidt presents a lucid account of how the brain works in The Happiness Hypothesis. He writes of the self as “one of the great paradoxes of evolution,” a blessing and a curse (206). This flexible definition, a skillful harmonizing of opposites, strikes me as particularly relevant to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, given their similar efforts to bring seeming polarities into balance.

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by contemplating the literal meaning of posthumous, which conveys our transformation into the loamy soil sustaining the botanical world. The end of the opening subsequence formalizes art’s wrangle with mortality. Up to this point, the speaker had asserted the preservative magic of a biological heir, employing persuasive tactics that ranged between the minatory and the apotropaic. Once again, however, in Sonnet 18 the speaker concedes, “every fair from fair sometimes declines, / By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed” (7–8). This sets up his self-serving consolation to the addressee, “Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade, / When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st” (11–12). Here, time’s sinister properties are transmuted: proliferating years enhance the value of cherished aesthetic objects, in explicit contrast to the corrosive effects experienced by aged (or aging) organisms. As is well understood, the real power on display in Sonnet 18 is that claimed by the poet, who creates “eternal lines” through his verse. Not incidentally, this depends on the efforts of succeeding generations of readers. The speaker explains, “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee” (13–14). By this logic, readers resurrect the poem, which in turn renews its honored subject. Perhaps the most important aspect of Sonnet 18 is its curious vacancy: the poem’s addressee, ostensibly its heralded subject, fails to materialize. The sequence of flattering comparisons provides no details about the young man, so we are left with the oxymoronic assurance that he surpasses perfection, given the proverbial sentiments associated with a “summer’s day.” Ultimately, Sonnet 18’s evasiveness guarantees its renewability, suiting it to each new era’s lovers. This flexibility is lyric’s special gift, an invitation to become the I who speaks.38 Yet doing so is at once an assertion of selfhood and the mark of its erasure. To state the point another way, taking up the subject position offered by a sonnet demonstrates that the self is publicly constituted, a phenomenon created through mimicry (of linguistic patterns) and appropriation (of behaviors and attitudes). In collating speakers from diverse eras, the Sonnets borrow the asterisked permanence of the botanical world, wherein decay and disappearance are ameliorated by the promise of eventual return. This dynamic is deftly outlined in an essay by Ann Patchett, which includes the following observation: “Plant life, like all life, is the subject of constant revision: one tree is hit by lightning, another is upended in a storm … Even if this expanse of green is composed of different constituents over 38 See Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye and a book deliberately styled as its counterpart, Christopher Martin’s Policy in Love: Lyric and Public in Ovid, Petrarch, and Shakespeare, for rich discussions of interiority in the Sonnets.

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time, the land still pumps out plants faster than anyone can count them” (106). The same applies to human communities: they remain a constant presence across the Earth, though their inhabitants perpetually change.39 The ceaseless play of the Sonnets, perennially occupied by fresh crops of readers, models this process. In this way, the lyric mode appropriates to itself—and possibly amplifies—the ancient promise of vegetative life. Rather than presuming an absolute separation between aesthetics and organic life, we might be better served by pursuing their congruities. Admittedly, doing so requires a careful negotiation so that artistic works are not flattened into cartoonish versions of mimesis, but they nonetheless are presumed to comment meaningfully on fundamental questions of humanness, such as (for example) coping with death. Shakespeare’s Sonnets obviously cannot solve the problem of mortality, there being no way to alter this absolute horizon of existence. But their choric insistence on being—on mattering, that is—affirms the neediness at the core of life. The compulsion to feel or to claim an individuated existence is not necessarily a symptom of human hubris. Following Mary Oliver, “One tree is like another tree, but not too much. One tulip is like the next tulip, but not altogether. More or less like people—a general outline, then the stunning individual strokes” (3). Oliver’s capacious ecology consistently finds room for the questing or immersive self, so it encapsulates the possibilities of the eco-self. The challenge is not so much discerning the forest amid an assemblage of trees but, rather, giving each tree (or tulip, or rose, or worm, or person) its due. Precisely because the Sonnets value the specificity of life, the recurrent need for each being to claim a space apart from the world, they brim with salutary ecological potential. This focus assures the perpetuity of the Sonnets: notwithstanding our era’s preference for dissolving the subject so that the self is diffused throughout the world, the fundamental issue of where “me” encounters “you” will never stale into irrelevance. While the Sonnets clearly bear the imprint of their own moment, drawing us into that zone of hyped-up creative output, they also serve as a prologue to modernity, particularly given the cycle’s sustained attention to the complementary dimensions of selfhood, the biological and psychological. If, as I take it, the Sonnets activate persisting issues, their renewability depends on an ongoing supply of readers. As W. H. Auden writes, “The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living” (22–23). This nod to anatomic interpretation, included in Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” 39 E. O. Wilson celebrates this dynamic, touting the potential “immortality” of social collectives in Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies (60).

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confirms the elemental function of poetry, the way it affects readers on a visceral level, activating trans-generational concerns or affinities. The intimacy and astonishing physicality of the author-reader relationship are striking, particularly because Auden makes the “guts” (not, say, the mind or heart) the locus of interpretation. Poetry is ingested, or digested, implicitly construed as a source of life or at least nourishment. “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” was occasioned by the death of the author named in its title, so its eulogizing properties confirm the value of this individual life and also the necessity of honoring its loss. Auden’s own grief charges the poem, as if he grants access to the inner reaches of his psyche. This makes an interesting counterpoint to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, given how they have often lured readers—poets among them—into biographical conjecture. For instance, Wordsworth was not immune to this. In “Scorn not the Sonnet,” he celebrates the eponymous form by claiming that it was the “key” that “unlocked [Shakespeare’s] heart” (2, 3). In a poetic riposte to Wordsworth, Robert Browning suggests that if Shakespeare bared himself in his Sonnets, “the less Shakespeare he!” (40). Commenting on this exchange, Jonathan Bate argues that the Romantics’ preference for biographical interpretation hijacked Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ushering in an era of rampant misreading (Genius 37). Curiously, Bate himself does not always resist the temptation to indulge biographical speculations when interpreting the Sonnets. 40 Nevertheless, he rightly notes that a desire to chronicle his own deepest fears or desires was not the proximate cause of Shakespeare writing these poems when he did. The patronage system, essential to the professional and commercial viability of Shakespeare and his peers, provides a partial explanation for both the timing and the structuring themes of the Sonnets. Additionally, when rampaging diseases shut down playhouses, playwrights were compelled to turn to genres other than drama; in this sense, nature provided the impetus for writing, confirming the interdependence of the aesthetic realm and biological exigencies. In sum, while the Sonnets can seem electrifyingly personal, they everywhere bear witness to collective experiences. Nevertheless, it is easy to see why the cycle prompts biographical speculations, perhaps especially because of the painful incongruity between the opening subsequence’s insistence on having a child to secure the future and the 40 Jonathan Bate outlines the arguments of Wordsworth and Browning in The Genius of Shakespeare. Though Bate rejects the biographical turn in criticism of the Sonnets, he succumbs to this trend, offering an engaging, if necessarily conjectural, hypothesis about the true inspiration for the Dark Lady (37, 56).

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knowledge that Shakespeare himself buried a son. Even if the procreation poems were written prior to the death of Hamnet, I suspect that for many readers, this loss shadows the first seventeen poems, undercutting the speaker’s assurances about the future. Linguistically and etymologically, to be human means to bury. That is, the word evolves from a root that denotes the act of interment.41 An innate or intuitive understanding of the spread of disease likely provides a partial explanation for the behavior that defines humanness. But the performance of obsequies ranges far beyond the physical act of burial, and art provides an additional way to understand the raw need expressed through burial. Shakespeare points us toward this realization in the Sonnets, given his exploitation of similarities between “tomb” and “tome”: in their distinctive ways, each houses precious human contents. 42 Six poems, Sonnets 3, 17, 83, 86, 101, and 107, include the word “tomb,” and Sonnet 4 uses “tombed,” so it may be grouped with the others. Collectively, they address the formidable implications of mortality even while hinting at the desire for posthumous continuance. In Sonnet 3, the speaker asks, “who is he so fond will be the tomb / Of his self-love, to stop posterity?” (7–8). A devotional narcissism ruptures the future, preemptively obliterating the “image” or biological heir (14). Similarly, Sonnet 4 warns that “unused beauty” will be buried or “tombed” with the addressee, who stubbornly exempts himself from the procreative cycle. These usages unsettle or provoke because of the untimeliness of the tomb’s intrusions, the way it enfolds the youthful beauty of the addressee. Conversely, Sonnets 17, 83, and 86 call upon the image of a tomb or its related associations to meditate on the effects of writing, specifically, of preservation-through-poeticization. In Sonnet 17, the speaker bemoans his efforts to capture the young man’s “most high deserts” (1). He worries that extravagant praise will be dismissed as hyperbole or poetic license by future readers, whereas “heav’n knows it [the poetic tribute] is but as a tomb, / Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts” (3–4). Sonnet 83 revisits the deficiencies of poetry, though in this case the speaker claims to have been “mute” on the subject of the young man’s “beauty,” which is a credit to him, because “When others would give life,” through odic poetry, 41 Robert Pogue Harrison traces the etymology of “human” in The Dominion of the Dead, structured around the notion that a necro-awareness—especially apprehension of personal cessation—define our species (ix–xi). 42 Booth speculates on the aff inities between “tomb” and “tome,” developing the points addressed in T. Walter Herbert’s essay “Shakespeare’s Word-play on Tombe” (283).

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they “bring a tomb,” given the surpassing glories of the flesh-and-blood reality (11, 12). Sonnet 86 further extends the theme, though it commences with the speaker’s stark assessment of the anxiety of influence, a condition triggered by his perception of “the proud full sail” of the rival poet’s “great verse” (1). The speaker offers a riveting description of anxious envy, noting its necrotizing effects on the brain, limned as the source of poetic generativity. Specifically, he wonders whether his agitation at not measuring up to the other poet “did ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse, / Making their tomb the womb wherein they grew?” (3–4). Self-doubt recedes in Sonnet 101, in which the speaker castigates his sluggard muse for withholding poetry. He writes, “Excuse not silence so, for’t lies in thee, / To make him much outlive a gilded tomb” (10–11). Finally, in Sonnet 107, the speaker proposes the poem as an alternate “monument,” one that will outlast “tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass” (14). In this final appearance of “tomb,” the “tome” claims precedence, emerging as the more secure route to the future. All of these poems reassert an obsession with mortality and yearning for escape from it. Once again, this release depends on readers so that the cycle stakes much on literacy itself. Contemporary views of literacy, or what is sometimes referred to as “alphabetic consciousness,” remain sharply divided, the terms of the debate still indebted to the “Great Divide” theory postulated by Claude Lévi-Strauss; the counter-position was established by Jacques Derrida. Lévi-Strauss acknowledges and attempts to mitigate the ethnocentric biases that so often infiltrate anthropological work. To avoid using the word “primitive,” with its inescapably negative connotations, Lévi-Strauss differentiated between “literate” and “non-literate” cultures, a classificatory schema to which Derrida objected.43 Lévi-Strauss reasoned that literacy promoted a certain type of self-concept and that it required particular kinds of intellectual work, so it establishes a useful framework for cross-cultural analyses. Derrida is probably correct that virtually any binary enforces a hierarchical arrangement of the two terms. That said, we now have abundant research on the cognitive and biological effects of literacy, which does change the brain—and, I would argue, alters the mind, or self-concept, which is distinct from the organ itself. 44 Shakespeare’s Sonnets intimate the readerly self, as in Sonnet 27, which depicts the speaker’s restless, capacious imagination, a self-awareness 43 Ferguson’s Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France skillfully addresses the debate (43–61). 44 For a useful overview of reading and neural activity, see Maryann Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World.

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that challenges the otherwise-inexorable limits imposed by the physical environment. Across the cycle, the speaker views almost anything—a rose, a glorious summer’s day, a beloved’s face—as an interpretable text. More broadly, the iconoclastic verve of the early modern period, with variously benef icial and oppressive effects, ensued from the dramatic spread of literacy. Reciprocally, diving into these poems breaks our own rootedness in the present, allowing periodic if temporary escapes from the otherwise all-controlling demands of the space-time continuum. It might be useful to think of reading as a technology in that it requires the use of tools, or signs. More precisely, the ability to read constitutes a bio-technology: it resides within humans. Viewed in this way, reading generates a particular version of the self, one that acknowledges the primacy of biological imperatives and the laws governing the physical world, constitutive experiential domains for everything that exists, yet it likewise yields a robust inner life and a sense—sometimes illusory or imperfect—of having the capacity to choose. Enacting these qualities, the Sonnets write the first chapter of the eco-self, ushering in a compelling if precarious mode of being-in-the-world. The same cluster of concerns, particularly the tensions oscillating around literacy/knowledge/power as well as the related issue of how or whether one chooses the path to the future, dominates Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, so the next chapter picks up the story of selfhood as it unfolds in this play.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford UP, 1998. Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan Hekman. “Introduction: Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory.” Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, Indiana UP, 2008, pp. 1–19. Ariès, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes toward Death Over the Last One Thousand Years. Translated by Helen Weaver, 2nd ed., Vintage Books, 2008. Attridge, Derek. Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce. Cornell UP, 1988. Auden, W. H. “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.” Another Time, Faber & Faber, 2019. Bate, Jonathan. The Genius of Shakespeare. Oxford UP, 1998. Bate, Jonathan. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition. Routledge, 1991.

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Bate, Jonathan. The Song of the Earth. Harvard UP, 2000. Bogost, Ian. Play Anything: The Limits of Play, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games. Basic Books, 2016. Booth, Stephen, editor. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Yale UP, 1977. Bravo, Michael T. “Mission Gardens: Natural History and Global Expansion, 1720–1820.” Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, edited by Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, U of Pennsylvania P, 2005, pp. 49–65. Browning, Robert. “House.” The Complete Poetic and Dramatic Works of Robert Browning, edited by Horace E. Scudder, Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1895, pp. 808–09. Bruckner, Lynne Dickson. “N/nature and the Difference ‘She’ Makes.” Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity, edited by Jennifer Munroe and Rebecca Laroche, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 15–35. Burt, Stephen and David Mikics. The Art of the Sonnet. The Belknap Press, Harvard UP, 2010. Bushnell, Rebecca. Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens. Cornell UP, 2003. Calhoun, Joshua. “Ecosystemic Shakespeare: Vegetable Memorabilia in the Sonnets. Shakespeare Studies, vol. 39, 2011, pp. 64–73. Cooke, Brett. “Biopoetics: The New Synthesis.” Biopoetics: Evolutionary Explorations in the Arts, edited by Brett Cooke and Frederick Turner, International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences, 1999, pp. 3–25. De Grazia, Margreta. “The Scandal of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” 1994. Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, edited by James Schiffer, Garland Publishing, 2000, pp. 89–112. De Grazia, Margreta. Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus. Clarendon Press, 1991. Dissanayake, Ellen. “‘Making Special’: An Undescribed Human Universal and the Core of a Behavior of Art.” Biopoetics: Evolutionary Explorations in the Arts, edited by Brett Cooke and Frederick Turner, International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences, 1999, pp. 27–47. Donner, Wendy. “Self and Community in Environmental Ethics.” Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature, edited by Karen J. Warren, Indiana UP, 1997, pp. 375–89. Dubrow, Heather. “‘Incertainties now crown themselves assur’d’: The Politics of Plotting Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” 1990. Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, edited by James Schiffer, Garland Publishing, 2000, pp. 113–34. Duncan, Claire. “‘Nature’s Bastards’: Grafted Generation in Early Modern England.” Renaissance and Reformation, vol. 38, no. 2, spring 2015, pp. 121–47.

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Engel, William E. Mapping Mortality: The Persistence of Memory and Melancholy in Early Modern England. U of Massachusetts P, 1995. Estok, Simon C. Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Feerick, Jean E., and Vin Nardizzi, editors. The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Felstiner, John. Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems. Yale UP, 2009. Ferguson, Margaret W. Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France. U of Chicago P, 2003. Fineman, Joel. Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye. U of California P, 1986. Garrard, Mary D. Brunelleschi’s Egg: Nature, Art, and Gender in Renaissance Italy. U of California P, 2010. Greenblatt, Stephen. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. W. W. Norton, 2011. Haidt, Jonathan. The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. Perseus Books, 2006. Hall, Kim F. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Cornell UP, 1995. Harrison, Robert Pogue. The Dominion of the Dead. U of Chicago P, 2003. Hawkes, David. “Materialism and Reification in Renaissance Studies.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, 2004, pp. 114–29. EBSCOhost, doi:10.2979/ JEM.2004.4.2.114. Henrich, Joseph. The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. Herbert. T. Walter. “Shakespeare’s Word-play on Tombe.” Modern Language Notes, vol. 64, 1944, pp. 235–41. Herman, Peter C. “What’s the Use? Or, the Problematic Economy in Shakespeare’s Procreation Sonnets.” Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, edited by James Schiffer, Garland Publishing, 2000, pp. 263–84. Hillman, James. “A Psyche the Size of the Earth: A Psychological Foreword.” Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, edited by Theodore Roszak, Mary E. Gomes, and Allen D. Kanner, Sierra Club Books, 1995, pp. xvii–xx. Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. 1979. Vintage Books, 2007. Hyde, Lewis. A Primer on Forgetting: Getting Past the Past. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019. Johnson, Bonnie Lander. “Blood, Milk, Poison: Romeo and Juliet’s Tragedy of ‘Green’ Desire and Corrupted Blood.” Blood Matters: Studies in European Literature and

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Thought, 1400–1700, edited by Bonnie Lander Johnson and Eleanor Decamp. U of Pennsylvania P, 2018, pp. 134–48. Kaufmann, Thomas Dacosta. The Mastery of Nature: Aspects of Art, Science, and Humanism in the Renaissance. Princeton UP, 1993. Kerényi, Carl. Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life. Translated by Ralph Manheim, Princeton UP, 1976. Kerrigan, John. On Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature: Essays. Oxford UP, 2001. Knight, Leah. Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England: Sixteenth-Century Plants and Print Culture. Ashgate, 2009. Laqueur, Thomas Walter. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Harvard UP, 1990. Laroche, Rebecca. “The Sonnets on Trial: Reconsidering the Portrait of Mr. W. H.” Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, edited by James Schiffer, Garland Publishing, 2000, pp. 391–409. Mancuso, Stefano. The Revolutionary Genius of Plants: A New Understanding of Plant Intelligence and Behavior. Translated by Vanessa de Stefano, Atria Books, 2018. Martin, Christopher. Policy in Love: Lyric and Public in Ovid, Petrarch and Shakespeare. Duquesne UP, 1994. Martin, Philip. Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Self, Love and Art. Cambridge UP, 1972. Martin, Randall. Shakespeare and Ecology. Oxford UP, 2015. Maxwell, Glyn. On Poetry. Harvard UP, 2013. McRae, Andrew. God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660. Cambridge UP, 1996. Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. Harper & Row, 1980. Mercier, Hugo, and Dan Sperber. The Enigma of Reason. Harvard UP, 2017. Munroe, Jennifer. Gender and the Garden in Early Modern English Literature. Ashgate, 2008. Munroe, Jennifer. “It’s all about the gillyvors: Engendering Art and Nature in The Winter’s Tale.” Ecocritical Shakespeare, edited by Lynne Bruckner and Dan Brayton, Ashgate, 2011, pp. 139–54. Nardizzi, Vin. “Shakespeare’s Penknife: Grafting and Seedless Generation in the Procreation Sonnets.” Renaissance and Reformation, vol. 32, no. 1, winter 2009, pp. 83–106. Ogilvie, Brian W. The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe. U of Chicago P, 2006. Oliver, Mary. Upstream: Selected Essays. Penguin Press, 2016. Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated by Rolfe Humphries, Indiana UP, 1955. Ruskovich, Emily. Idaho. Random House, 2017.

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Schiebinger, Londa, and Claudia Swan, editors. Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World. U of Pennsylvania P, 2005. Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. The Complete Works of Shakespeare, edited by David Bevington, 7th ed., Pearson, 2014, pp. 1005–50. Shakespeare, William. Titus Andronicus. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, edited by David Bevington, 7th ed., Pearson, 2014, pp. 966–1004. Sidney, Philip. The Defence of Poesy. The Major Works, edited by Katherine DuncanJones, Oxford UP, 2008, pp. 212–50. Silver, Larry, and Pamela H. Smith. “Splendor in the Grass: The Powers of Nature in the Age of Dürer.” Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe, edited by Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, Routledge, 2002, pp. 29–62. Smith, Justin E. H. Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason. Princeton UP, 2019. Stallybrass, Peter. “Editing as Cultural Formation: The Sexing of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” 1993. Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, edited by James Schiffer, Garland Publishing, 2000, pp. 75–88. Staub, Susan C., editor. Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination. Amsterdam UP, 2023. Sütterlin, Christa. “From Sign and Schema to Iconic Representation: Evolutionary Aesthetics of Pictorial Art.” Evolutionary Aesthetics, edited by Eckart Voland and Karl Grammer, Spring 2003, pp. 131–70. Targoff, Ramie. Posthumous Love: Eros and the Afterlife in Renaissance England. U of Chicago P, 2014. Thornhill, Randy. “Darwinian Aesthetics Informs Traditional Aesthetics.” Evolutionary Aesthetics, edited by Eckart Voland and Karl Grammer, Springer, 2003, pp. 9–30. Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The Belknap Press, Harvard UP, 1997. Vendler, Helen. The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics. Harvard UP, 1988. Watson, Robert N. Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance. U of Pennsylvania P, 2006. Wilson, Edward O. Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies. Liveright Publishing, 2019. Wolf, Maryanne. Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World. Harper, 2019. Wordsworth, William. “Scorn Not the Sonnet.” The Cambridge Edition of the Poets: Wordsworth, edited by Andrew J. George, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1904, p. 650.

2.

The Intermediating Self in Doctor Faustus Abstract This chapter reassesses identity crisis in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, showing how the play points toward and resists a new conception of the human. Faustus presents as something of a divided or fragmenting hero, a subject trapped between competing notions of personhood. The interplay of individual and communal interests defines the Faustian struggle for identity and likewise holds significance for understanding the potentialities of the eco-self. Ultimately, Marlowe’s play encourages a phenomenological approach, one that acknowledges the interpenetration of self and world but likewise admits of a craving—a uniquely human need—for meaning and purpose. In so doing, Doctor Faustus lays the foundation for understanding the reluctant ecology at work in early modern tragedy. Keywords: Ecocriticism; ecopsychology; indistinction; Faustus; Marlowe; phenomenology

Early modern tragedy proves central to understanding the eco-self, so this chapter takes up the story by focusing on the theme of identity-in-crisis in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (c. 1588–92). The dictates of drama can make sustained moments of introspection more challenging to pull off than their counterparts in the lyric mode, but formal elements such as the soliloquy offered playwrights particular strategies for delineating the self (or multiple selves). Marlowe exploits drama’s capacity for intimate depictions of the self, as evidenced in the architecture of the play. Specifically, after the Chorus’s opening prologue, Faustus appears alone on stage, declaiming a speech that goes on for sixty-five lines and concludes with the arrival of Wagner. Each subsequent act likewise begins by featuring a “solus” character, as the stage directions indicate, or with a summative statement by the Chorus, all of whose disclosures focus on Faustus. Moreover,

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Faustus faces death by himself, delivering his final fifty-five lines on an otherwise deserted stage. This pattern of isolation or aloneness points to a developing apprehension of the self, one that aligns with Clifford Geertz’s description of “the [Western] person as … a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against a social and natural background” (31). Of course, this version of the human is not transhistorical, even when narrowing the focus to Western apprehensions of identity. Rather, it arises in the early modern period through the confluence of several factors. As Doctor Faustus intimates, the rapid spread of literacy was essential to the revision of the self. Ultimately, however, the play presents us with a divided hero, a protagonist caught between competing models of personhood. The goal here is to track the intermediating aspects of Faustian selfhood, bringing out this character’s vacillating allegiances to diverse conceptions of the human. Specifically, while Marlowe’s character advocates for sensuous pleasures and a biologized self, he also cultivates a robust inner life. It might be tempting to view the former as the better alternative, the one more in tune with an ecological perspective, yet Doctor Faustus sheds light on the necessity of harmonizing the biological and the psychological, or mind and matter. Simply put, as a matter of theorizing and engaging the world, we cannot afford to jettison either term.

The Embattled Self In engaging the theme of identity-in-crisis, Marlowe draws attention to the vexed or vexing issue of human distinctiveness, a concept that nestles uneasily within ecocriticism and likewise in the proliferating discourses of posthumanism.1 For instance, early modern ecocritics such as Erica Fudge and Laurie Shannon have meticulously documented the era’s complex attitudes toward the non-human world, showing how the category of the “human” was not always or necessarily imagined in contradistinction to the rest of nature.2 Although the label “posthumanist” encloses diverse intellectual 1 Marjorie Garber assesses the identity crisis in the play, suggesting that Faustus “feels enclosed by his humanity” (11). 2 See Fudge’s Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England and Shannon’s Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales for informative analyses of the friable boundary between the human and non-human in the early modern period.

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trends, a through-line linking this work is its skepticism about the ontological status of the human. In Stefan Herbrechter’s phrasing, this position holds that “humanity as a universal value is no longer self-legitimating; humanism as a reflex or self-reflex cannot be trusted” (5). In other words, posthumanism evacuates the concept of the “human,” particularly that version of personhood identified by Geertz. In some respects, posthumanism and ecocriticism line up neatly, as each counters human exceptionalism and anthropocentrism, and an allegiance to materialist precepts subtends both approaches. But their methods and goals, and even certain theoretical underpinnings, might be much wider apart. For example, posthumanist accounts of our current situation sometimes endorse a technological hybridism that constitutes one of the ways in which humanness is undergoing a sea change. In simplest terms, we are becoming machinic, indistinguishable from the various technologies that dominate contemporary life. Not incidentally, in a monograph published several decades ago, ecologist Paul Shepard warns against the worship of the fossil fuel industry and adjacent reliance on technological innovation, developments that he believes segregate humans from nature and incite a collective pathology.3 In this sense, Shepard intimates a fault line that opens between ecological and posthumanist scholarship. In any case, plays such as Doctor Faustus compel examination of the benefits as well as the liabilities of renouncing human distinctiveness, given that Faustus himself craves exceptionalism. As a matter of analytics or theorizing, activities that lay the foundation for ensuing action, we regularly rely on sui generis aspects of humanness. More specifically, reading and writing are exclusively human endeavors, so a written discourse of the non-human seems self-contradictory. Beyond this philosophical point, one might wonder whether various iterations of the death of the human become thinkable only for those enjoying a degree of privilege or security. To be fair, Herbrechter argues that “the human or humanity are in radical transition or transformation,” a relatively safe claim, especially in our current moment (5). Nevertheless, certain situations call to mind the importance of maintaining the ontological status of the human, even fighting to preserve it. To take an extreme example, a refugee desperately attempting escape from a volatile geopolitical state probably takes human rights (not to mention individual freedoms) quite seriously. In other words, the pursuit of justice requires a belief in the individual along with a commitment to collective well-being. 3 Shepard advances a robust critique of “fossilfuelman” in Thinking Animals: Animals and the Development of Human Intelligence.

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Returning to literature per se, dispensing with the human, or questions of selfhood, is likewise problematic. In short, the embattled self (depicted as a discrete entity) is story-friendly, as Marlowe demonstrates in Doctor Faustus, and this remains true despite claims that the “characterological” analysis of early modern texts is anachronistic and misguided, a position often adopted by proponents of materialism. 4 This stance seems difficult to maintain vis-à-vis Doctor Faustus, given the way it spotlights Faustus’s predicament and draws attention to his internal struggles. An admixture of centripetal and centrifugal energies—the alternating rhythms of global voyaging and turning within—drives the play forward. More specifically, Faustus travels and encounters “the view / Of rarest things,” but he also periodically rededicates himself to scholarly pursuits, which requires a certain amount of immersive work (4.1.102). Indeed, in his opening lines, Faustus admonishes himself, “Settle thy studies, Faustus, and begin / To sound the depth of that thou wilt profess” (1.1.1–2). The verb “settle” variously denotes “place in order,” “fix securely,” “clarify, consolidate,” or “come to a fixed conclusion on.”5 In other words, Faustus begins by urging himself toward the consummation of his academic endeavors, precisely so that he can act on their implications. The play therefore links selfhood, agency, and the activity of reading, so it emphasizes distinctively human concerns. When Faustus turns to magic, he does not exactly abandon scholarship or intellectualism. Rather, his adventures in diabolism indicate certain affinities between magic and burgeoning science, endeavors whose interface is marked by the alchemical tradition.6 Although Marlowe’s character is not exactly an alchemist, he embodies certain qualities typically associated with its practitioners. When alchemy formally entered European universities in the Middle Ages, some writers and translators wrote under Arabic names, evidently in hopes that doing so would lend a sheen of venerability to their work.7 By the late sixteenth century, when Doctor Faustus was performed, alchemy had decisively come into its own. Marlowe picks up on the debate 4 In Being and Having in Shakespeare, Katharine Eisaman Maus examines the materialist renunciation of “characterological” analysis, which is relevant to approaches (such as mine) that pursue questions of identity or selfhood. 5 These semantic possibilities are highlighted in the editorial note accompanying the Bevington/Rasmussen edition of Doctor Faustus (109). 6 For an engaging account of the ancient Faustus, Simon Magus mentioned in the Book of Acts, see Philip Ball, The Devil’s Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science. 7 Lawrence W. Principe’s excellent history of alchemy, The Secrets of Alchemy, clarifies its connections with both the magical tradition and scientif ic procedures. Principe notes that medieval scholars in Europe appropriated Arabic names (56).

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over alchemy and science in subtle fashion. For instance, imagining the possibilities made available through magic, Faustus describe himself as a “studious artisan” (1.1.57). The phrase might sound commonplace now, but it melds intellectual work and craftsmanship, just as magic and nascent science did.8 Faustus’s devotion to learning affirms connections between how we know and who we are, so it showcases the era’s re-making of the self. As envisioned here, the eco-self seeks to amplify awareness of the connections between thinking, learning, and encountering the world, as this interpenetrative model confirms the domains of a rich inner life even as it acknowledges the ongoing influence of the environment. In “Sorcery and Subjectivity in Early Modern Discourses of Witchcraft,” Katharine Eisaman Maus cautions that “Elizabethan and Jacobean musings on the nature of human subjectivity are highly unsystematic and inexplicit” (325). This is partly because the concepts of “self” and “world,” always interdependent, were in a state of flux. When it comes to assembling a workable definition of early modern identity, it is as though we are using a series of partial blueprints for various houses to build a single structure. Extrapolating from literary texts, which offer unique proximity to early modern psychological awareness, might be our best means of understanding the period’s diverse and changing conceptions of selfhood. As Maus observes, the early modern discourses of magic and witchcraft prove especially useful for examining the self because they force a “collision” of competing theories of personhood (326). To illuminate these divergent possibilities, Maus focuses on the assumptions dividing “skeptics” and “believers,” though she does acknowledge the dissensus in both camps (327). Interestingly, her taxonomy of believers versus skeptics is structured around the issue of “permeability” or boundarylessness. Specifically, Maus writes, “Possessions and bewitchment require the devil, sorcerer, or witch to achieve entry into an apparently separate being” (328). Maus also applies the concept of permeability to “the capacity of minds or spirits to influence bodies,” and to believers’ acceptance of the friable boundary between “illusion and reality” (328). Skeptics, she suggests, endorse a version of the bounded self, rejecting all three types of permeability (328). The availability of both versions of the self, shorthanded here as the permeable and the impermeable, indicates the transitional or intermediating status of the self in Marlowe’s era. Doctor Faustus addresses the tension between the two models of the self, the permeable and impermeable, though the play frustrates any attempt at 8 The Bevington/Rasmussen edition points out that the OED cites Marlowe’s line as the first usage of “artisan,” meaning “one who practices and cultivates this art” (114).

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a tidy resolution in favor of one or the other perspective. For instance, the dueling influences of the Good and Evil Angels activate the assumptions specific to the boundaryless or permeable self. By this light, the person is imagined as open, porous, or inhabitable by ghostly or spiritual beings. On the other hand, Faustus often seems isolated, consigned to an unbreachable loneliness that feels more post- than early modern. The number of times Faustus appears alone on stage intensifies the effect of isolation or alienation, and the theme is further developed in the existential angst that plagues this character, a condition surfacing in his plaintive question, “What art thou, Faustus, but a man condemned to die?” (4.1.39). The sustained Faustian ruminations on mortality, constituting a pattern of abyssal thinking, are essential to the play’s complex treatment of identity.9 Of course, everything that lives is “condemned to die.” Faustus’s confrontation with this inalterable truth encapsulates an incipient, ambivalent ecology: humans are acknowledged to exist in a biological order from which there is no egress, yet this provokes despair. Overtly or with less awareness, we continue to struggle to define the ideal arrangement of self and world. Marlowe’s play cautions that the most satisfying definition will confront rather than ignore the angsty philosophizing in which Faustus engages.

The Needy Self Faustus’s morbid psychologizing captures a particular type of need, a human quest for meaning, that is not always acknowledged in ecological discourse given the general preference for identifying commonalities across all species. Ultimately, Doctor Faustus acknowledges diverse needs, with their propulsive heft moving the action forward. Accordingly, the play prompts a fresh reading of Abraham Maslow’s well-known Hierarchy of Needs, published first as an article and then a monograph, A Theory of Human Motivation (1943). Maslow leverages his arguments on the observation that “[m]an is a perpetually wanting animal” (14). The pyramidal design often used to represent Maslow’s schema clarifies his organizing logic, which is as follows: “needs arrange themselves in hierarchies of prepotency,” with the physiological (including access to food, water, and shelter) preceding all others (1). In a way, needs democratize, establishing commonalities based on 9 Here and elsewhere, my sense of the ecocritical implications of abyssal thinking is indebted to Robert Pogue Harrison’s eloquent meditations on this theme, especially in the essay “Toward a Philosophy of Nature” and the monograph The Dominion of the Dead.

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pan-organismic requirements for food, water, and shelter. On the other hand, privilege (or social injustice) might be grasped as catalyst or consequence of the uneven access to resources that meet basic or physiological needs. In any case, certain needs remind us of our irreducibly biological identities, a point Maslow acknowledges. Reiterating that physiological needs must be met before other cravings can be addressed, Maslow writes, “Another peculiar characteristic of the human organism when it is dominated by a certain need is that the whole philosophy of the future tends also to change. For our chronically and extremely hungry man, Utopia can be defined very simply as a place where there is plenty of food” (3). Scarcity comes to define life, commandeering all of its potentialities with the single-mindedness born of lack. Maslow’s assessment of need addresses both material and non-tangible concerns. Specifically, his design encompasses five distinct categories: the physiological, safety, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization (1). As Maslow sees it, the goal is to vanquish the physiological by ensuring the reliable, even permanent, satisfaction of these needs, so that “gratification” rather than “deprivation” motivates human behavior (4). This stance might initially appear inimical to ecology, which emphasizes, even celebrates, the interconnectivity of all forms of life. That said, Maslow’s position is commensurate with the environmental justice movement, which redresses scarcity and lack, along with their myriad consequences, by focusing on the unjust allocation of natural resources.10 Similarly, Maslow illustrates how any version of the good life depends on securing physiological needs, thereby affirming our dependence on the natural world. He errs, however, in urging transcendence of (i.e., permanent extrication from) the relevant processes. Reconceptualizing Maslow’s schema as a loop rather than the traditional pyramid would emphasize the ongoing claims of each distinct type of need, confirming that we perpetually cycle among them. Duly reconfigured, Maslow’s design better accounts for the indissoluble links between humans and world, or self and environment. Reciprocally, Maslow’s categories should prove enriching to ecological discourse since they cultivate a balance between the pan-organismic and the proprietarily human. For example, he argues, “The desire to know and to understand are themselves conative, i.e., have a striving character, and are as much personality needs as the ‘basic [physiological] needs’ we have already discussed” (9). Additionally, Maslow helps us understand the compulsive 10 Harriet A. Washington’s A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and its Assault on the American Mind, cogently outlines the history of the environmental justice movement.

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pleasures accompanying “self-actualization.” He borrows rather than coins this term, offering the succinct explanation, “What a man can be, he must be” (7).11 The deliberate questing conveyed in the concept of self-actualization awakens the ideals of early modern England. For example, Marlowe’s diverse cast of “overreachers” dramatizes the potentialities and limits of the striving self. More specifically, the hubristic protagonist of Doctor Faustus, whom the Chorus likens to Icarus, pushes against the limits of the possible and seeks to expand the boundaries of the knowable. As critics have long recognized, this is a tragedy of inversions, in which the divine and the diabolical swap places. In rejecting approved pieties, Faustus ostensibly pursues fleshly pleasure. Indeed, by his own judgment, Faustus is “wanton and lascivious,” a self-assessment generally endorsed in scholarship devoted to the play (2.1.144). Curiously, however, Faustus never really enjoys carnal satisfactions, so this need goes unmet; in these moments, other needs emerge as prepotent, typically through Mephistopheles’s deliberate manipulations. Presenting Faustus as a creature of varied appetites, Marlowe shows how needs mediate the self-world relationship, and he anticipates the diverse needs subsequently outlined by Maslow. Though several centuries separate their work, both Marlowe and Maslow intimate that a purely biological model of the self fails to capture the complexities of humanness, even as they jointly concede the irrefutability of the body’s needs. Doctor Faustus does not exactly obsess over the baseline or physiological concerns of Maslow’s design. Yet there are glimpses of these first-order needs. For instance, commenting on his achievements in what we would term “medicine,” he says, “The end of physic is our body’s health. / Why Faustus, hast thou not attained that end?” (1.1.17–18). This sets up Faustus’s rather immodest claim to have spared “whole cities” from the “plague” (1.1.21.23). His achievement, however, can do nothing to change the simple fact that he remains “but Faustus, and a man” (1.1.21, 23). Being a man—a human, an organism—means accepting ineluctable biological dimensions of existence. For Faustus, scarcity and lack are not the issue; rather, he struggles to find a way to accept humans’ immanence in the turning cycles of nature and their attendant processes of growth and decay. In so doing, Faustus distills an important aspect of early modern tragedy, which I have come to think of as its reluctant ecology. Simply put, the genre places humans firmly within the teeming world but laments this reality. The problem is given eloquent 11 In A Theory of Human Motivation, Maslow attributes the concept of “self-actualization” to Kurt Goldstein (7).

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expression by Robert Pogue Harrison, who writes, “Humans are those beings for whom being nothing but tiny microorganisms on a speck of cosmic dirt is a source of anguish” (“Toward” 434). One way to mitigate the prospect of personal oblivion is to celebrate humans’ inextricability from nature, including our eventual, inevitable chthonian habitation. It strikes me that this is often the preference for ecocritics or other proponents of ecological theory. For instance, Randall Martin concludes a reading of Hamlet (1602) and Antony and Cleopatra (c. 1607–07) with a thought-provoking call to reimagine death as symbiosis, transmuting tragedy’s agonistic treatment of nature and culture and transcending the genre’s anthropocentric leanings. He suggests that this view leads to a new genre, which he terms “posthuman tragicomedy” (158). As Faustus’s example reminds us, however, oblivion is a daunting prospect, which is why his devotion to the sensuous life periodically gives way to disruptive ruminations on mortality, described above as a pattern of abyssal thinking. Medieval texts do not evince the same obsessive focus on personal cessation, although the period was marked by rampant suffering and periodic eruptions of ravaging disease. Therefore, the Faustian abhorrence of the abyss cannot be dismissed as a “natural” or expected response to the problem named by Harrison. Perhaps the increasing tendency to view oneself as unique or distinctive, a person of and yet apart from the world, lends a new urgency to contemplations of mortality. Robert N. Watson discerns this pattern of thought in early seventeenth-century literature, writing that it “often reverts from its surface narrative to repressed anxieties about death as eternal annihilation” (Rest 3).12 Marlowe anticipates this possibility, as Doctor Faustus entangles tragic suffering with the qualities belonging to the nascent individual. In working through the ecopsychological implications of this point, this chapter seeks to extend the arguments set forth in Michael Neill’s Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (1998). His analyses contribute significantly to the work of thanatology, affording abundant examples of how death is a “human fiction” periodically rewritten across diverse epochs (2). Neill’s main quarry is death itself, or the shifting representations of it, along with the rituals and practices (the various cultural forms) generated in response to it. Neill mentions that “the devasting impact of epidemic disease” and “new understandings of 12 For a compelling examination of evolving early modern attitudes toward death, also see Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes toward Death Over the Last One Thousand Years, taken up at more length in the preceding chapter. Additionally, Michael Neill has an illuminating monograph on the relevant changes.

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the body and its relation to the ‘inner’ self” were integral to early modern conceptions and experiences of death (43). Probably most contemporary writers (or at least academics) would qualify “inner,” as Neill does in this context. Nevertheless, Marlowe’s Faustus offers glimpses of an interiorized self, a subject craving some independence from the surrounding world. Paradoxically, the Faustian quest for power, which propels him toward the occult, ensures his submission to (infernal) authority, so it undercuts his dreams of transcendence.

The Problem of Knowledge: Magic, Science, and Selfhood We will never arrive at a definitive understanding of Marlowe’s own attitudes toward devils and witchcraft. Nor is it possible to claim a homogeneous set of beliefs for the original audience of Doctor Faustus. We can, however, gauge early modern trends by considering relevant documentary evidence, such as the shifting legal statutes pertaining to witchcraft or the actions taken by Elizabeth I and James I.13 Early modern texts engaging with the supernatural likewise prove instructive. Of course, as Stuart Clark points out in Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (1997), the boundary between “nature” and “supernature” is ever-nebulous and always established within particular cultural contexts (152). For Kristen Poole, the supernatural elements in Doctor Faustus present us with an onerous challenge. She wonders, “How can we take the devil seriously?” and “How can we really study a devil we don’t think is real?” (25). Poole draws sharp divisions between the world of Elizabethan England and our own, and she seeks “the legacy of medievalism” rather than “the etiology of modernity” in her analyses of early modern texts (27). Poole speculates that, for early moderns, “[t]he devil provided a rational explanation for seemingly irrational events” (26). This stance might overstate the uniformity of belief among early moderns. After all, several years before Marlowe wrote Doctor Faustus, Reginald Scott published A Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), taking a skeptical view of the existence of witches. That said, Poole illuminates key aspects of early modern thinking, especially as they relate to notions of selfhood or apprehensions of the natural world. In particular, she mentions that “Demonic transformations were part of an epistemology which accepted the belief that meat turns into maggots” (54). From 13 Malevolent Nurture: Witch-hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England, documents the shifting statutes governing witchcraft and black magic in the period.

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this perspective, a distinctly Ovidian magic everywhere infuses nature, encompassing human experience. Marlowe plays with the possibilities of the Ovidian self in Doctor Faustus, but mostly in the comic interludes, such as when Mephistopheles transforms Rafe and the vintner into other animals. By contrast, Faustus intimates the stable or bounded Protestant self. In arguing on behalf of the eco-self, imperfectly realized in Doctor Faustus, my preference is for a balanced model of personhood, one that acknowledges humans as ever-evolving inhabitants of the natural world but also addresses the questing spirit periodically evinced by Marlowe’s hero, especially in his dalliance with magic. Magic, including the work of alchemists from the Middle Ages and beyond, emphasizes the relationship between self and world. Richard Cavendish outlines this connection when he launches The Black Arts: A Concise History of Witchcraft, Demonology, Astrology, and Other Mystical Practices through the Ages, writing, “The driving force behind black magic is hunger for power,” and “The magician sets out to conquer the universe” (1, 3). To exemplify these qualities, Cavendish calls upon the example of Cornelius Agrippa, a prominent early modern magician who evidently believed in the surpassing powers available to skilled practitioners of the “dark arts” (40).14 Marlowe appears to have had Agrippa’s example in mind, given that the two friends Faustus claims influenced his demonic quest were Valdes and Cornelius, with Cornelius Agrippa the likely eponym of the latter. When they first appear, Faustus tells them: “your words have won me at the last / To practise magic and concealèd arts” (1.1.103). In response, Valdes celebrates the anticipated glories the three friends will garner, and Cornelius focuses on “The miracles that magic will perform,” sentiments that channel Agrippa’s attitudes (1.1.138). Faustus, however, immediately qualifies his statement to Valdes and Cornelius, noting that his conversion to black magic arose “not [from] your words only, but mine own fantasy, / That will receive no object, for my head / but ruminates on necromantic skill” (1.1.105–07). This emphasis on “fantasy,” the consuming force of his inner life and obsessions, proves consistent throughout the play, tangible evidence of the desire to claim agential power.15 Even when presented with irrefutable evidence to the contrary, Faustus often (though not always) prefers to view himself as the architect of his own fate. 14 As does Poole, Cavendish considers pre-modern epistemologies and the appeal of Ovidian tropes and metaphors in the early modern period, though he imagines a decisive split between the Middle Ages and the ensuing era vis-à-vis their respective worldviews. 15 Bevington and Rasmussen gloss “fantasy” as “the mental faculty used to perceive objects,” or “imagination” (117).

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I suspect that the Faustian will-to-power proves as discomf iting to some twenty-first century readers as the play’s supernatural elements. As previously noted, current theories across multiple disciplines present us with a world awash in randomness, devoid of the opportunity for agential action. In certain respects, this deterministic framework links us directly to Marlowe’s era given the comparative rigidity of social norms, the vast inequities in wealth and privilege, and the daunting reach of both religious and secular authorities. Yet it is possible that the unique innovations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries actually generated a belief in personal autonomy. Joseph Henrich offers a bold assessment of the early modern period, essentially arguing that it marked a crucial developmental phase within the human species. He distills the traits of this emergent human in the acronym WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.16 No doubt the label and accompanying focus on these particular demographics will prove off-putting to some readers. On the other hand, Henrich follows the evidence where it leads. He is certainly aware of vast global inequities in wealth and opportunity (structural asymmetries that persist in our world), and his goal is not the valorization of WEIRDness or those people so classified. Rather, he seeks to bring out the material conditions that led to a particular version of humanness; in turn, this approach considers physiological and corresponding psychological changes in humans. Accordingly, Henrich provides an intriguing context for grappling with the eco-self. One of Henrich’s most important insights concerns the spread of literacy, a skill that alters humans’ neurological functioning, enlarges the corpus callosum, and generates a new or “peculiar” psychology (3–7). This research builds on numerous historical studies that track the rise of literacy in the early modern period, owing to a nexus of factors, including the development of the printing press, the greater accessibility of books, and the rise of a middle class that had the opportunity to cultivate this skill. Additionally, according to Henrich, statistical evidence demonstrates how Protestantism fueled literacy, with its emphasis on personalized study of the Bible (11). As Henrich acknowledges, in certain respects he is simply extending existing scholarship. In particular, he amplifies the Geertzian synopsis of Western personhood, cited above. The qualities Geertz identifies match up with the traits belonging to WEIRDness. Across multiple disciplines, this version of personhood has been discredited or dismissed, perhaps especially among 16 Henrich’s theorization of evolving personhood is laid out in The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.

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those interested in ecological issues or posthumanist theory.17 But the time is ripe for revisiting the inward turn discernible in the early modern period, not to bypass or deny material or corporeal exigencies but to gain a better understanding of their importance. Literary texts offer uniquely intimate access to psychological concerns, so they enable us to gauge the usefulness or applicability of Henrich’s claims about WEIRDness. Although Marlowe could not have anticipated Henrich’s theory, which derives from a fundamentally evolutionary approach to questions of humanness, Doctor Faustus nonetheless offers glimpses of the incipient (or burgeoning) cluster of traits defining the WEIRD human. This list includes “individualism,” “independence,” “nonrelational morality,” and “the molding of one’s disposition to a chosen occupation” (416). Faustus variously exhibits these qualities, as when he asserts his agency or shuns tradition. The Evil Angel’s enticements anticipate the linkage of occupation and disposition, such as by urging Faustus to embrace “that famous art / Wherein all nature’s treasury is contained,” so that he will “Be … on earth as Jove is in the sky / Lord and commander of these elements” 76–79). In other words, the work makes the man. Unlike Henrich, however, Marlowe addresses the pangs of transitioning to a new mode of being in the world. Ultimately, Faustus is not a perfect apostle of WEIRDness. Instead, he presents the WEIRD psyche in chrysalis. More specifically, at times Faustus evinces the individualized and autonomy-seeking traits distinguishing the emerging human, but he periodically reverts to a more communal ethos, one that ironically underwrites his obedience to the devil. Faustus himself seems aware of these dueling tendencies. Indeed, he obsesses over the challenges of being “resolute,” with this word or the related “resolve” recurring throughout the play. Faustus urges himself to “be resolute,” adding “Why waverest thou?” at the beginning of Act 2 (2.1.6, 7). Shortly after entering into the formal contract with Mephistopheles, Faustus insists, “I am resolved Faustus shall ne’er repent” (2.3.32). Both usages invoke the meaning of steadfastness, indicating Faustus’s desire to maintain a consistent stance; again, this correlates to WEIRDness, which presumes a coherent, stable identity, an inner core that remains consistent. Curiously, when Faustus uses “resolve” as a verb, he activates a different set of possibilities for the concept. The first instance comes in the opening act, when Faustus explains that one of his motives for summoning the devil is a desire to be “Resolve[d] of all 17 Frances Barker’s Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection anticipates the surge of posthumanist theory. Additionally, Stefan Herbrechter’s introduction to Posthumanist Shakespeares maps the shifting definition (even rejection) of the concept of the “human.”

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ambiguities” (1.1.82). Similarly, when engaging with Mephistopheles, Faustus demands, “resolve me in this question: why have we not /conjunctions, oppositions, aspects, eclipses all at one time” (2.3.62–64). In these instances, “resolve” means “rid” or “purge” (e.g., of “ambiguities” or uncertainties) and “satisfy.” In both cases, Faustus testifies to his hunger for knowledge and the power it brings. Conventionally ascribed to Francis Bacon, the dictum that “knowledge is power” sums up the Faustian mindset, which mates grandiose ambition with intellectual inquiry.18 Marlowe highlights the intimacy of knowledge quests, the way they claim possession of mind and body. Furthermore, psychic crisis originates in epistemological concerns. Faustus grapples with the seeming futility of his academic pursuits, asking, “Is to dispute well logic’s chiefest end?” (1.1.8). Bacon, of course, expressed a similar restlessness, decrying the echo-chamber effect of syllogistic learning, which is limited to affirming the already known. Among ecocritics, Bacon has sometimes served as a convenient whipping boy given his endorsement of the “dominator” model for the human/nature relationship.19 Of course, Bacon is not the sole architect of the Scientific Revolution (nor is he the one cause of an anti-ecological turn in Western thought), though acknowledging his contributions seems prudent. In The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (2007), historian Deborah E. Harkness suggests that Bacon earned the epithet “father of modern science” because he sought to transform “science” into “an organized activity pursued for the benefit of humanity” (7). She adds that Bacon’s call for invigorated epistemological endeavors was already being heeded in London, as “every activity Bacon describes taking place in Salomon’s House was already taking place in the City” (7). The two scenarios differ markedly. Bacon’s Salomon’s House features a single, dedicated institution in which academic work is conducted and through which the results are communicated or closely guarded, whereas the activities underway across London encompassed a free-form series of investigations and experiments 18 Lisa Jardine’s Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution adroitly establishes Bacon’s position within the complex, shifting intellectual terrain of the seventeenth century. I assess Bacon’s dissatisfaction with the epistemological status quo in Renaissance Ecopolitics from Shakespeare to Bacon: Rethinking Cosmopolis. 19 Carolyn Merchant’s influential Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution traces Bacon’s use of dominator-rhetoric in the effort to overhaul epistemology. And theorists such as Susan Griffin and Val Plumwood pursue the ways in which systems of oppression overlap. Of course, neither Bacon nor anyone else singlehandedly authored the anti-ecological turn in Western thought.

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carried out by virtually any interested person possessing the necessary means. Perhaps because he was aware of this bustling intellectual climate, Bacon staked much on the concept of authority. This manifests in The New Atlantis via its proprietary approach to intellectual discovery. Bluntly stated, Bacon opposed the democratization of science and learning (one wonders how he might respond to our current Age of Information). In any case, at issue is the matter of expertise, which tends to promote increasing specialization. There are downsides to this arrangement, such as the so-called “silo-effect,” a term conveying the insularity of academic disciplines. Like Bacon, Marlowe directly confronts epistemic upheaval. In Doctor Faustus, this theme corresponds to a fluxing morality, captured with archetypal power in the clashing influences of the Good and Evil Angels. Their competition to control Faustus demonstrates that epistemological quests always occur within specific value systems or sociopolitical matrices. The linchpin of Faustian moralizing is devotion to Mephistopheles, a condition requiring the former’s suppression of will and intellect. In this sense, Faustus’s actions bastardize the concept of a vow, so that obedience per se, and not allegiance to a lauded principle, prevails. Mephistopheles evidently has an astute grasp of the Faustian psyche, or at least of those desires that make him vulnerable. Specifically, Lucifer’s proxy uses Faustus’s passion for books and knowledge against him. For instance, when he cannot supply Faustus with a wife, Mephistopheles offers a book by way of distraction, and Faustus eagerly accepts this substitute (2.1.162). Paradoxically, questing for knowledge sometimes brings servitude and entrapment rather than liberation. This possibility strikes a discordant note, as if Marlowe uses his play to indict the very qualities, the self-conscious intellectualizing, that enabled its construction. In certain of its comic interludes, Doctor Faustus parodies, and therefore warns against, the democratization of knowledge. By way of example, consider Robin’s appropriation of the “conjuring book” belonging to Faustus (2.2.2). Once in possession of the text, Robin vows to “make all the / maidens in our parish dance at my pleasure stark naked / before me, and so by that means I shall see more than e’er / I saw or felt yet” (2.2.3–5). Here, then, Robin affirms his own ignorance (and perhaps lack of access to naked, dancing maidens). In his distinctly incapable hands, knowledge corrupts. The incompetence of the would-be conjuror is amplified when Rafe enters, pointing out Robin’s inability to read. Undeterred, Robin asserts that being in possession of the book will enable him to perform various feats of magic, though these tend to revolve around sexual exploits. Rafe is unimpressed,

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and his skepticism seems the proper response to Robin’s lofty ambitions, offering a comedic yet pointed critique of a thoroughly egalitarian approach to knowledge. Rafe’s worship of a book he cannot read invites closer examination of Faustus’s devotion to the various texts made available to him by Mephistopheles. Notwithstanding his own claim of being “wanton and lascivious,” Faustus’s desires have more to do with knowing or controlling the natural world than indulging fleshly pleasures. The book Mephistopheles offers as distraction evidently imparts the ability to summon “whirlwinds, tempests, thunder, and lightning” (2.1.165). An ungracious recipient, Faustus quickly requests additional materials, books that will allow him to “raise up spirits,” apprehend “all characters and planets of the heavens,” and “see all plants, herbs, and trees that grow upon the earth” (2.1.171; 174; 178–79). Subsequently, he will “prove cosmography,” according to Wagner, and publicly answer “questions of astrology” (3. Chorus. 7; 4. Chorus. 9). Almost all of these pursuits have to do with apprehending or circumventing natural law. Likewise, when Faustus arranges for the pregnant Duchess of Vanholt to enjoy out-of-season grapes, he demonstrates the desire (and seeming ability) to override the usual limits imposed by the natural world (4.2.15). In his effort to understand nature and to gain mastery over it, Faustus both highlights the intimacy of the self/world relationship and acknowledges the knotty relationship between science and magic in the late sixteenth century. At the time, the distinction between the two was not so absolute as we sometimes assume. Indeed, some historians of science argue that this discipline emerges out of, rather than in opposition to, the magical tradition.20 Distilling these endeavors to their core aims, we might say that science entails the effort to study and understand nature in order to mitigate or alter its effects on human life, whereas magic constitutes the attempt to harness the power of nature, with the practitioner becoming something like an accomplice. Both traditions evince awareness of vulnerability, of humans’ fundamental reliance on the workings of nature. This point is crucial (in Marlowe’s era as now) because it outlines the psychological need propelling attempts to dominate nature. In short, the wish to master nature originates not in overweening confidence but rather in fear and vulnerability. To 20 Principe traces the continuity of science and magic, in particular the way that alchemy and chemistry share certain key elements or procedures, in The Secrets of Alchemy. For a different perspective on the issue, see Matt Kaplan, The Science of the Magical: From the Holy Grail to Love Potions to Superpowers. A recuperative zest enlivens both texts, as they illuminate our indebtedness to the past.

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state the point a bit differently, fearing nature is often a perfectly rational response to one’s environment, and it predictably incites protective action. Although envisioned differently, magic and science mutually attempt the mitigation of nature’s sometimes-threatening authority.21 The theme of authority-in-crisis dominates Doctor Faustus, beginning with the text itself. The disparate editions, conventionally referred to as the “A” (1604) and “B” (1616) texts, deny us a pristine textual body. This bedeviling editorial predicament has certainly provoked much commentary from the play’s critics.22 Of particular note is Harry Levin’s observation that “Large allowances should be made for the mangled and encrusted form in which Doctor Faustus has survived. Its very popularity seems to have subjected it to an inordinate amount of cutting and gagging and all the other indignities that dramatic texts are heir to” (“Design” 43). Evoking Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy, Levin suggests the equivalence of text and flesh: both “are heir to” decay or debasement. This stance intimates a lost ideal, an Ur-text that pipelines into the enticing realm of authorial intentions. Levin’s assessment of the debilitating properties of flesh or text resonates differently in our current moment, given the current influence of materialism, an aspect of which includes some surprisingly devotional accounts of corporeality. At times, these odes to the body intimate a new era, one founded on mystical immanence, which might be our era’s updated version of magical thinking.23 But the story of humanness cannot be confined to elemental (i.e., physiological) needs and the pleasures of sating them. Doctor Faustus caricatures this stance when the doomed hero asserts, “The god thou servest is thine own appetite” (5.11). This utterance, a form of self-talk,24 unwittingly distills the Faustian dilemma: “appetite” has ceased to function as a reliable indicator of need. Neither necessity nor pleasure governs his actions. Faustus errs not in single-mindedly pursuing his own desires, but in abandoning the necessary work of cultivating a self that both engages and claims some 21 Ecophobia has received sustained attention from Simon C. Estok as well as numerous others influenced by his work. Estok extends his earlier work on ecophobia in The Ecophobia Hypothesis. The countertrend, termed biophilia, acknowledges humans’ innate love of nature. See Edward O. Wilson’s Biophilia for a distillation of this concept. 22 A. L. Rowse offers a useful synopsis of the vexing editorial questions posed by Doctor Faustus in Christopher Marlowe: His Life and Work. 23 The anthology Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, includes many essays that typify the current tendency to celebrate embodiment. Their inaugural chapter to the volume epitomizes this trend. 24 Jenaan Ismael elucidates the psychology of self-talk in “Saving the Baby: Dennett on Autobiography, Agency, and the Self.”

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distance from the surrounding world. In effect, he accepts Mephistopheles’s totalizing authority over him. Faustus’s servitude, an abdication of will, signals an impoverished inner life and misapprehension of the expansiveness made available through rigorous study. Consider again Faustus’s wish to be “resolve[d]” of “all ambiguities” (1.80). Superficially, the avowed goal comports with the traditional view of Marlowe’s hero as an overreacher, but it actually conjures a barren epistemological state, an equilibrium or stasis devoid of wonder, as previous critics have acknowledged. For example, Marjorie Garber suggests, “Faustus is trapped by his need to do away with limits” (11). According to Maslovian thinking, such a state is notable for its deprivation, as it frustrates the “everpersistent need to solve the cosmic mysteries” (8). Marlowe’s Faustus fails to recognize that the quest for knowledge, and not its attainment, holds the key to pleasure. Ironically, therefore, rather than presenting us with a galactic mind in pursuit of cosmic mysteries, Faustus conjures a world depleted of imagination and wonder. Doctor Faustus straddles the Middle Ages and the early modern period, given that Marlowe appropriates and updates a popular genre from the era preceding his own. Of course, the paradigm shifting that delineates succeeding eras typically occurs protractedly through a messy series of fits and starts.25 Anthony Gottlieb reminds us that the legacies of medieval thought were omnipresent in the Renaissance (his preferred term). Consequently, Marlowe and his contemporaries grappled with the belief that everything that “happens is ordained by a provident God and is therefore in some sense good” (409). Not incidentally, God is almost entirely absent from Doctor Faustus, and, as George Santayana points out, the Good Angel’s admonitions lack the persuasive flair accompanying the Evil Angel’s exhortations. The play does feature a crucial sign of the divine in the form of the script mysteriously appearing on the hero’s flesh, just at the moment when he prepares to enter into the dooming pact. The imprecatory phrase, “Homo, fuge!” fails to dissuade Faustus (2.1.77). After commenting on the ominous directive, he questions his perceptual abilities, noting “My senses are deceived; here’s nothing writ,” only to add, “I see it plain. Here in this place is writ ‘Homo, fuge!’” (2.1.79–81). Though previously stating his love for “Lines, circles, signs, letters, and characters,” Faustus ignores the message that seems to materialize on his own flesh. This same mindset, a deep strain of proof-resistant stubbornness, enables him to claim “hell’s a fable” (5.126). 25 In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn examines the processes by which a worldview or episteme evolves.

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Somewhat perversely, therefore, at certain key moments Doctor Faustus’s biggest challenge to medieval orthodoxies is not atheism but a-diabolism. After all, if hell does not exist, its inhabitants are consigned to the realm of the fantastical. Putting aside theological questions, Faustus’s refusal to heed the warning that appears on his skin encapsulates the theme of knowledge-in-crisis. The problem is not simply that seeing is believing, as the familiar saying has it. Indeed, in this case the reverse seems more apt: belief subtends or precedes the optical sense, determining what Faustus sees. By contrast, when Faustus conjures Alexander the Great and his “paramour” at the behest of the Emperor, the latter asserts, “Sure, these are no spirits, but the true substantial / bodies of those two deceased princes” (4.1.72–73). Though he has been warned that Faustus lacks the “ability to / present . . . the true substantial bodies” of the long-dead “princes,” the Emperor succumbs to the allure of the spectacle (4.1.47–49). Faustus’s willful blindness and other acts of stubborn misperception turn the play into a time-resistant fable, a cautionary (or backward-looking) tale with predictive (forward-reaching) signif icance. That is, Marlowe acknowledges how misrecognition and blindness perennially hamper perception, which in turn vexes ethical deliberations.26 In a way, Faustus’s dissatisfaction with “logic” (intended here as a synecdoche for academic work) is warranted, given that its chief aim is indeed to “dispute well.” Research on cognition confirms that reason is an evolutionary endowment and that its purpose is to enable one to justify her positions or actions.27 In other words, reason typically operates in post hoc fashion, which means that sophistry prevails and ethical questions become moot. Nevertheless, there is some good news. Cognitive psychologist Jonathan Haidt suggests that true ethical deliberation is possible, but it arises in communal circumstances when people with differing perspectives engage in genuine dialogue.28 Doing so is the only means of countering “confirmation bias,” the term psychologists use for the tendency to discount evidence that contradicts one’s presuppositions or to accept only those arguments that endorse one’s views. Faustus’s acquiescence to his fate illustrates the 26 For an engaging analysis of the scientific research pertaining to the limits of seeing and perceiving, see The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. 27 Gary Marcus’s The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought offers a lucid overview of the evolutionary basis of cognition. 28 Haidt outlines the importance of dialogue and robust debate in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.

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workings of confirmation bias. He interprets every “sign” that appears to him, from the warning inscribed on his flesh to the warring Angels or the Old Man, as proof of damnation, notwithstanding his disavowal of hell. If we look to the Faustian example for epistemological insights, the play warns against misplaced certitude. It strikes me that the twenty-first century pursues a different version of the quest for a fully known world. We have assembled our own set of inflexible rules, whereby everything is explainable via a reductive cause-and-effect paradigm or appeals to evolutionary theory. This new authority—think of it as a naturalistic ordinance—girds all attempts to know: knowledge incommensurate with this design is too easily dismissed, as evidenced in the moribund status of the humanities.29 The fate of these disciplines mirrors (or derives from?) the predicament of the self, as both are cast aside, discounted as antiquated irrelevancies. Reflecting on the intellectual hegemony of science in the late twentieth century, philosopher Paul Brockelman laments the depletion of wonder. In Cosmology and Creation: The Spiritual Significance of Contemporary Cosmology (1995), he writes, “Wonder is the mood or experience through which we pay attention to reality itself” (76). He adds, “Wonder … is our human reaction to the exuberant and astonishing power of things to be” (76). In turn, this reverence fosters an ethics of care, a devotion to preserving that which is not simply necessary but also awe-inducing. Brockelman argues for the recovery of wonder not by repudiating science but through invoking some of its greatest discoveries or innovations. Specifically, he summarizes the transformed perspectives of astronauts granted the privilege of seeing the Earth from outer space.30 In Brockelman’s view, knowledge and understanding should enrich rather than starve the human capacity for wonder. I welcome this optimism, but implementing Brockelman’s vision will require the overhauling of epistemology. This challenge is even more daunting than it would have appeared to Marlowe or his contemporaries, including Bacon, given the corporatization of knowledge-seeking, whereby the twin aims of utility and profitability typically govern academic work.31 29 The demise of the humanities is chronicled in Kurt Spellmeyer’s Arts of Living: Reinventing the Humanities for the Twenty-first Century. 30 Brockelman compares several accounts of astronauts who viewed the Earth from space. He suggests that this perspective fostered a “spiritual experience in which the planet was encountered as divine, or at least as a remarkable manifestation of the divine. It was no longer just a smooth-functioning machine” (5). 31 Generally, the humanities are less amenable to the prof it/utility regime. Spellmeyer acknowledges this and considers some remedial measures in his survey of the humanities in the twenty-first century.

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Our era demonstrates that scientific inquiry, along with the willingness to act on established research, sometimes holds life-and-death consequences. Academic work, irrespective of discipline, should foster and be receptive to robust challenges. Yet the sheer volume of information available to most people, much of it slickly packaged and infused with the rhetoric of urgency or immediacy, threatens epistemological endeavors. Moreover, the democratization of information has produced an unfortunate result, a hostility toward the very concept of “experts.”32 It is too early to gauge the lasting effects of intellectual populism, buttressed by the internet, though we will no doubt have virtually limitless examples from which to develop a theory. If Marlowe’s era moved to establish authoritative bodies of knowledge, we are dismantling them—and perhaps ignoring signs as obvious as the forbidding script that appears on Faustus’s flesh. We might have reached the terminus of a movement founded in the early modern period.

Self-hood, Phenomenology, and the Faustian Dilemma Doctor Faustus can speak to and for our present moment partly because of the two-directional energies, retrospection and anticipation, animating this text. Once again, Marlowe nods to the past by borrowing the conventions of the morality tradition from the Middle Ages, particularly the genre’s elegantly simple paradigm of temptation, transgression, and punishment. The play also deliberately reworks the conventions of tragedy. Proceeding from negative examples (what the play will not encompass) to the clarification that it chronicles “the form of Faustus’s fortunes,” the Prologue claims new possibilities for this venerable form (8). While Marlowe breaks with tradition by featuring a lowborn tragic hero, his play nonetheless confirms the ancient assumption that singularity propels tragedy. Notwithstanding its allegiance to the morality play tradition, Doctor Faustus captivates because it replaces the generic composite, Everyman, with an individualized figure who struggles toward self-definition. As Levin points out, in Marlowe’s play, “The Universal hero … will not be Everyman; he will be a particular private individual” (Overreacher 111). I would add that Marlowe presciently parodies this version of subjectivity in his depiction of Mephistopheles, whose radical displacement encapsulates the play’s depiction of identity-in-crisis. Specifically, when parrying Faustus’s denial 32 Tom Nichols’s monograph on current epistemologies presents stark evidence of the growing hostility toward expertise and intellectual rigor.

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of hell’s existence, Mephistopheles simply replies, “Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it” (4.1.77). Characterizing hell as a state of mind, not a locale, Mephistopheles advances a phenomenological argument, anticipating categories that remain influential in our own attempts at defining humanness. Accordingly, this section calls upon current psychological research, particularly phenomenological approaches, to flesh out the possibilities of selfhood outlined in Marlowe’s play. Overtly or less deliberately, the interpretation of tragedy activates prevailing assumptions about humanness. Levin snapshots this dynamic, as his reading champions the isolate, autonomous subject often associated with the Enlightenment. Calling upon this version of the individual would have been axiomatic, or perhaps automatic, for a previous generation of critics, just as it is now a commonplace to disavow this understanding of subjectivity. In any case, the move Levin makes—reading a literary character in terms of default assumptions regarding the human—dominates literary criticism, an intellectual enterprise that dramatizes the rise and fall (and possibly the remaking) of the self. Early modern critics have proven especially voluble on the topic of selfhood, so this academic subgroup usefully outlines the changing fortunes of the self. For example, Levin’s “particular private individual” accompanies the inward turn when interpretation emphasized questions of interiority or subjectivity.33 The focus on questions of interiority eventually acceded to the Foucauldian-influenced paradigms sponsored by new historicism, whereby the self was understood as a product of discourse. Ecocritics have resurrected the concept of the “ecological self,” to borrow a phrase from Robert N. Watson, emphasizing the ebb and flow of person and world. These diverse approaches collectively bring out important (and in some cases long-obscured) dimensions of early modern thought, but they also demonstrate how contemporary theories of humanness inevitably ground literary interpretation. For the moment, materialism has won the day, as it dominates multiple disciplines and influences the varied domains of popular culture. Accordingly, a unifying goal throughout these chapters is to counter the hyper-materialism that now prevails, including in the varied domains of early modern studies. The eco-self speaks to the demands/desire 33 For paradigmatic examples of the inward turn, consult Catherine Belsey’s Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama and Katharine Eisaman Maus’s Inwardness and Theater in the Renaissance. Their aims are markedly different, as Belsey focuses on the constitution of subjectivity (and also the ways in which obsessing over selfhood can distract from overtly political issues), whereas Maus traces the ubiquitous Renaissance interest in questions of interiority.

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of a robust inner life, a sense of being an individual, without denying our embedment in the world. Renewing attention to inwardness or interiority might be challenging in our current intellectual environment, given the undeniable benefits of certain aspects of materialism, a broad set of approaches that has expanded our understanding of multiple texts, issues, or concepts. The key is to focus on introspective or inner qualities without simultaneously pretending that these happen in isolation from corporeal processes or that they are somehow exempt from the ongoing relationship of self and environment. For my purposes, the fairly recent “affective turn” in early modern scholarship holds promise, as this work sets out to recover and revalue “the passions,” which have both physiological and psychological implications.”34 Commenting on this trend, Brian Cummings and Freya Sierhus suggest, “The passions are those parts of human nature which are closer to the instincts of the body” (1). A slight emendation seems fitting: passions promote undeniably physical experiences, but they derive from a complex mixture of anticipation, expectation, and recollection. In any case, in contrast to their classical Greek forebears, such as Plato, early modern writers—and even more so, our era’s proponents of materialism—sometimes celebrate corporeal processes.35 These positive valuations of the formerly degraded inform interpretation, demonstrating the importance of criticism in tracking shifting perceptions of the self. In sum, we seem to need the self, even when—as in this moment—it is mainly construed as a mirage to be exposed through sophisticated analyses. The critical history of Doctor Faustus reveals this neediness, specifically the desire for communion with other selves, in the tendency of many critics to jump from textual analysis to biographical conjecture. A. L. Rowse typifies this pattern, as his Christopher Marlowe: His Life and Work (1964) argues, “Marlowe must have recognized in Faustus his own counterpart” (151). In support of this position, he adds that Doctor Faustus “grips us with the peculiar force that is released when a writer’s own ego is deeply engaged” (151). More surprisingly, assertions regarding the autobiographical elements in the play also feature in Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From 34 As Brian Cummings and Freya Sierhus point out in their introduction to a volume of essays, the surging emphasis on embodiment in early modern discourse informs current approaches to selfhood. A balanced arrangement seems most judicious, so that both embodiment and inwardness are acknowledged. 35 See Christopher Tilmouth, “Passions and Intersubjectivity in Early Modern Literature,” for a helpful discussion of the era’s attitudes toward embodiment, particularly the enhanced status of “passions” or emotions.

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More to Shakespeare (1980). The chapter on Marlowe exhibits Greenblatt’s signature blend of lyricism and erudition, but it does not resist the temptation to read the author in and through his literary creations. After suggesting that “Marlowe’s heroes must live their lives as projects, but they do so in the midst of intimations that the projects are illusions,” Greenblatt adds that Marlowe’s own life evinced “a fathomless and eerily playful self-estrangement. The will to play flaunts society’s cherished orthodoxies, embraces what the culture finds loathsome or frightening, [and] … courts self-destruction in the interest of the anarchic discharge of its energy. This is play on the brink of an abyss” (219, 220). Imagining both Marlowe and his literary creations shouting into the void, Greenblatt makes them our fellows: they embody the peculiar malaise generally associated with postmodernity. They differ in significant ways, but the readings advanced by Levin, Rowse, and Greenblatt point to the phenomenological dimensions of literary criticism, an endeavor that requires us to inhabit diverse vantage points. Neither wholly independent nor entirely subservient, Faustus struggles to define a self, and precisely for this reason his example remains instructive, a primer on being ensconced in, yet (temporarily) extricable from, the world. Faustus’s missteps, including his stubborn blindness or refusal to acknowledge the signs confronting him, hold the key to his ongoing importance. As Marlowe understood, our apprehension of the world depends on occluding significant segments of it.36 Selective vision is a survival strategy: navigating the world (or simply enduring one’s existence) would be impossible if we noted all potential stimuli. Acknowledging this point, philosopher Thomas Metzinger defines the self as the filter or “tunnel” that provides a limited view of the teeming world.37 From this narrowed perspective, governed by sensory experiences and physiological processes, a story of the self and a corresponding narrative of the world emerge. Accordingly, the argument from biology might be the very thing that restores the discursive model of selfhood. As do numerous researchers, Metzinger begins with a refutation of the self, if this is imagined as an entity within, a non-material substance that governs thought or behavior. Having dispensed with this concept, Metzinger outlines his view of the “phenomenal self model [PSM],” which he explains 36 As a purely pragmatic matter, the mind must screen out various stimuli. Paul Shepard illuminates the relevant processes, confirming the evolutionary basis of how we process information, in The Others: How Animals Made Us Human. 37 See Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self, for a deft synthesis of current theories regarding the “science of the mind.”

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as “the conscious model of the organism as a whole that is activated by the brain” (4). He adds, “The content of the PSM is the Ego” (4). This lays the groundwork for Metzinger’s understanding of phenomenology, summed up as follows: “Yes, there is an outside world, and yes, there is an objective reality, but in moving through this world, we constantly apply unconscious filter mechanisms, and in doing so, we unknowingly construct our own individual world, which is our ‘reality tunnel’” (9). While Metzinger seeks to align his philosophy with the materialist paradigm, especially the explanatory possibilities of evolutionary theory, he nonetheless argues that the sense of “being directly in touch with the outside world” is a “robust illusion” and posits the “evolutionary emergence of a quasi-Cartesian ‘meta-self,’ the capacity to distance yourself from your bodily self” (80). This is striking, of course, given the general tendency to use Descartes as the foil against which current understandings of consciousness, or the human, and the relations of self to world take shape.38 Finally, as a practical matter, we cannot dispense with the self. In Metzinger’s succinct formulation, there is always some “entity having the experience” that comprises the field of phenomenology. Research on phenomenology emphasizes the experiential, calling attention to the ways in which a particular subject understands his or her reality. In the useful if rather inelegant phrasing of Christopher Shields, phenomenology takes as its starting point the notion that “[s]ome cognitive states seem to seem some way” (215). In other words, awareness of being is the focal point of phenomenology. Predictably, in recent decades the materialist turn has influenced the questions and assumptions of phenomenologists. Indeed, current research in this subfield contributes to the ever-growing body of anti-Cartesian scholarship. Mark Rowlands summarizes the issue, noting that whereas Descartes located “cognitive processes … inside cognizing organisms,” most scientists now wish to discredit this assumption (3). Specifically, mental processes range beyond the self in what some researchers refer to as the “4e” model of cognition (the four descriptors are “embodied,” “embedded,” “enacted,” and “extended”).39 In this schema, knowledge arises through sensory experiences, so it is rooted in corporeality and generated by the interactions of organism and environment. This is one contemporary version of the eco-self, duly vetted by scientific research. However, its downside 38 António R. Damásio outlines the main objections to Descartes’s apprehension of humans as radically distinct from all other animals. Damásio nonetheless argues in favor of preserving some notion of “mind” or “soul,” an intangible that does establish differences between humans and other species. 39 Rowlands offers a useful synopsis of the 4e model (3–12).

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is omitting the story of selfhood generated by the organism’s interactions with various environments. It is this narrative that provides continuity, creating the experience (or illusion, if one prefers) of having a self. The journey of Marlowe’s Faustus emphasizes the experiential, so the play permits scrutiny of theories of consciousness or differing models for selfhood. For instance, the “self-talk” briefly mentioned earlier, whereby a character (or actual person) uses the second-person form of address for himself/herself, has proven to be a portable phenomenon. Currently, psychologists explain self-talk as a strategy for coping with difficult situations, almost as if an inner voice takes on the role of coach or fan. While self-talk often seems to derive from overweening confidence (as in the boastful disclosure featured in epics such as Beowulf ), it also betrays performance-anxiety. Viewed in these terms, Faustus’s self-address, “The god thou servest is thine own appetite,” acknowledges the norm-flouting implications of his proposed actions (5.11). In sum, self-talk emphasizes connections between inner life and external expectations or judgments. As Marlowe deploys it in Doctor Faustus, self-talk exposes the nebulousness of the boundary between self and world, including its varied inhabitants. At times, Faustus appears to ventriloquize others’ voices, almost as if he experiences a dissociative condition, an internal splitting or perhaps multiplication. Another pattern of verbalization, technically illeism (referring to oneself in the third person), provides additional evidence of Faustus’s psychic distress. Illeism exhibits the same hybrid construction as self-talk, a blend of arrogance and uncertainty that acknowledges the complexities of differentiating self from others. Although illeism sometimes features in medieval drama, typically such usages originate in dramatic necessity. S. Viswanathan explains that illeism “is part of the primitive stage convention of self revelation … which is born of an inevitable theatrical exigency” (408). By contrast, early modern dramatists alter the technique so that it amplifies concerns with selfhood.40 In Doctor Faustus, illeism offers further evidence of the intermediating status of Marlowe’s character: he craves power and agency, yet he also appears to mistrust his ability to command. For instance, when Faustus begins his relationship with Mephistopheles, he instructs the latter, “I charge thee wait upon me whilst I live,” as if secure in his authority (1.3.37). But he immediately restates the command, adding 40 Viswanathan’s essay on illeism makes a distinction between “illeism proper” and “illeism with a difference,” as the latter entails the use of one’s own proper name, a pattern of iteration frequently on display in Doctor Faustus. I use “illeism” when Faustus refers to himself in the third person or with his own name.

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that his quasi-servant must “do whatever Faustus shall command” (1.3.38). Replacing the first-person pronoun with his proper name in the second iteration of the command, Faustus exhibits both a will-to-power and an awareness of the limits of his agency, a tension frequently enacted in his relationship with Mephistopheles. Collectively, the manifestations of selftalk and illeism underscore the play’s obsession with the self, highlighting the complexities involved in delineating between “me” and “world.” James Hillman defines this very process, establishing “the cut between me and the world,” as the cornerstone of psychology proper and the focal point of ecopsychology (xx). Within and beyond the discipline of psychology, the self is a necessity, because without it we have no means of recognizing (appreciating, understanding, sustaining) the world. Preserving distinctions between “self” and “world” redounds to their mutual benefit. Admittedly, Faustus typically focuses on his own aims and pleasures rather than the cultivation of a beneficent symbiosis between self and world. His obedience to appetite should amplify the self, especially that part of it dedicated to sensuous pleasures, but these desires are not reliably gratified. Specifically, Mephistopheles cannot grant Faustus’s request for a wife, so he is prohibited from enjoying even those intimate experiences certified by the morals and institutions of his world. Paradoxically, therefore, once committed to diabolism, Faustus progressively retreats from carnality; he transforms into an observer of, and not a full participant in, the material world. The pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins exemplifies Faustus’s altered state: instead of engaging in the forbidden behaviors himself, he watches performances of them. Marlowe surely brings the Seven Deadly Sins onstage to exploit the inherent theatrics of taboo-violating behaviors; still, this interlude confirms Faustus’s role as spectator, with experiences deferred or only available to him vicariously. Nevertheless, Faustus’s evident susceptibility to the distractions afforded by the pageantry of sinfulness reinforces his desire to transgress. Henrich’s analyses of WEIRDness provide a fertile context in which to gauge the evolution in humanness and bring to light changes in the structure of moral thought. As he mentions, early moderns increasingly relied on a new moral compass, one guided by “fairness, principles of impartiality, honesty, and conditional cooperation in situations and contexts where interpersonal connections and in-group membership are deemed unnecessary, or even irrelevant” (300). This incipient morality, premised on “impersonal sociality,” was essential to the expansion of global trade, as the older procedures for ensuring fairness, rooted as they were in community-based or in-group monitoring, no longer sufficed (Henrich 300). Impersonal prosociality might

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be viewed as an inauspicious turn away from a communitarian ethos, but it does enable alliances across vast geopolitical spaces, which is crucial in a world whose borders keep expanding. Marlowe’s play acknowledges and resists the prospect of an increasingly globalized world. For example, once contracted to the devil, foreign travel preoccupies Faustus. Yet he remains obsessively obedient to Mephistopheles, who appears before him. That is, Faustus’s dedication to his vow derives from his close contact with an emissary of the infernal world; in this sense, the older version of morality, a personal sociality, constrains his actions. Once again, Faustus presents as an interstitial self, halted in transit to the modern world. By contrast, Mephistopheles, hell’s ambassador, has crossed the threshold, a journey summed up in his insight about hell’s ubiquity—or rather, his awareness that place and mindset thoroughly commingle. As it happens, Marlowe was not alone in reimagining hell, articulating its changing significance for the coming world. Around the time when Doctor Faustus was composed, Galileo presented two talks focusing on hell as imagined by Dante. Mark A. Peterson notes that Galileo was seeking a professorship, so the lectures amounted to a job interview. Galileo began by acknowledging that “it is an amazing and wonderful thing that men have been able … to determine the measure of the heavens” but adds, “‘how much more marvelous must we esteem the investigation and description of the location and form of the Inferno, which, buried in the bowels of the earth, hidden from every sense, is known to no one by experience’” (qtd. in Peterson 234). The fascination with hidden depths prefigures an even more elusive quest. As Peterson states, the goal of Galileo and the architects whose work he examines is to reveal Dante’s “mind, his intentions” (235). In sum, determining the dimensions of hell gives way to the evidently more meaningful project of assessing the revered poet’s psychology. Both Marlowe’s depiction of hell and Galileo’s analyses of Dante bring out the intellectual turbulence of the late sixteenth century. By contrast, according to Joseph W. Meeker, Dante’s “life coincided with a climactic moment in medieval Christianity just prior to its disintegration” (102). Meeker adds that Dante was able “to construct in his poem the last image of an integrated universe before the fragmentations of the modern world emerged” (102). Marlowe travels the passageway between the two worlds. He uses his devil to ventriloquize a formidable isolation, a sense of being imprisoned by consciousness itself. Furthermore, Mephistopheles reinforces the belief that a core set of traits, consistent across time, defines each individual. To state this another way, Mephistopheles can never be other than what he is—damned, alienated, aware of his disaffection. In Mephistopheles, a

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figure estranged from the world and convinced of his abiding, immutable qualities, Marlowe generates a template of the new human, an entity born amid the radical transformations of the early modern period. In this way, he heralds the new arrangement of morality, need, and pleasure that will flower in the ensuing eras. These interlinked concerns, and their implications for the emerging self, constitute the focus of the final section, which extends the discussion of morality-in-flux.

Morality, Need, Pleasure We are often oblivious of the activities comprising moral thought; nevertheless, the relevant deliberations can have manifestly powerful consequences. Likewise, we are not always aware of the ways in which one’s community or environment (including access to resources, the base or physiological in Maslow’s schema) influences moral reasoning. Haidt addresses this point in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012), which outlines three ethical systems, essentially patterns of moral-decision making: “ethics of autonomy,” wherein “people are, first and foremost, autonomous individuals”; “ethics of community,” holding that “people are, first and foremost, members of larger entities”; and “ethics of divinity,” originating in the belief that “people are, first and foremost, temporary vessels in which a divine soul has been implanted” (116–17). Each system ensues from a particular configuration of self and other(s) so that this relationship implicitly governs ethical decision-making. The three ethical systems can be mapped to particular cultures or political entities, although as Haidt points out, they often coexist within a single geopolitical space. Rather than endorsing one at the expense of the others, Haidt works to reveal the benefits accruing to each. In an example that will periodically take on an eerie timeliness, Haidt mentions, “Cultures differ in their attitudes toward immigrants, and there is some evidence that liberal and welcoming attitudes are more common in times and places where disease risks are lower” (173). This openness recedes in less stable times. Specifically, according to Haidt, “Plagues, epidemics, and new diseases are usually brought in by foreigners—as are many new ideas, goods, and technologies—so societies face an analogue of the omnivore’s dilemma, balancing xenophobia and xenophilia” (173). For Marlowe and his contemporaries, a worldview that attempted to impose moral order on seeming chaos had to accommodate frequent eruptions of the plague. Faustus’s own sense of accomplishments in the realm of “physic,” as we

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have seen, featured his vanquishing of a lethal plague. In any case, Doctor Faustus places moral reasoning at its center and in so doing promotes awareness of the self-world dynamic, along with the competing allegiances to individualized ambitions versus communal authority. To some critics, Doctor Faustus engages in straightforward moralizing, very much in the vein of its morality play antecedents. Leo Kirschbaum sums up this stance in “Marlowe’s Faustus: A Reconsideration,” first published in 1943, arguing, “The Christian view of the world informs Doctor Faustus throughout—not the pagan view” (80). Kirschbaum has a point, as the “Christian view,” or what Haidt terms the “ethics of divinity,” proves relevant to Marlowe’s doomed hero. That is, Faustus never abandons belief in his soul or the corollary certainty that he is subject to an awesome and retributive power, one that claims its due at the moment of his death. By contrast, in a 1969 essay that seeks to “rehabilitate” Faustus, Santayana concedes, “This legend [of Faust] purported to offer a terrible and edifying example, a warning to all Christians to avoid the snares of science, of pleasure, and of ambition” (12). He adds, “Nevertheless, we may suspect that even at the beginning people recognized in Doctor Faustus a braver brother, a somewhat enviable reprobate who had dared to relish the good things of this life above the sad joys vaguely promised for the other” (12). The signaling language in the studies by Kirschbaum and Santayana indicates their differing responses to questions of morality. If, as I take it, Kirschbaum discerns in the play an endorsement of the “ethics of divinity,” Santayana celebrates its acknowledgment of the “ethics of autonomy” in which the individual is entrusted to select the pleasures and aims of his own life. The dueling interpretations derive from the play’s depiction of Faustus as a character who veers toward the ethics of autonomy but inevitably lapses into the familiar ethics of community. 41 Once again, Faustus finds himself trapped between incommensurate systems. Ironically, the singularly rebellious act of choosing sin short-circuits volition. Faustus’s final musings, their suspenseful lyricism a Marlovian gem, reinforce the play’s concern with fundamental questions of humanness, especially the tendency to engage in abyssal thinking. Faustus admonishes himself, “Now hast thou but one bare hour to live, / And then thou must be damned perpetually” (5.2.66–67). The sanctity orientation of Faustus’s concluding thoughts determines the shape and scope of his anxieties. Convinced of the permanence of his soul, the terror stalking Faustus is 41 See Klaits’s history of witch persecutions for an analysis of the rise of the individual and concomitant erosion of a community-minded ethos.

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not of perennial emptiness, the abyss or “void” so poetically invoked in Greenblatt’s reading of the play, but of a horrifying continuance. This possibility crystallizes through contrariety, in the ostensibly distinct fates of humans and “beasts.” Faustus envies the latter because he imagines that in death their “souls” will be “dissolved in elements” (5.2.111). With this example in mind, Faustus wishes for his soul to be “changed into little waterdrops,” presumably to facilitate painless evaporation into the atmosphere (5.2.118). Faustus casts dispersibility onto “beasts” and designates it the preferable outcome, anticipating Hamlet’s suicidal yearning to “resolve into a dew” (1.2.130).42 Intactness, being in possession of a unified self, is the postmortem condition Faustus dreads, though mainly because it makes him vulnerable to being torn apart. In this riveting detail, Marlowe defines the nascent self as that which can be annihilated. Over the course of several centuries, the dispersible or integrative possibilities that Faustus imputes to beasts will reemerge, forming a cornerstone of ecological thought. Humans are, as ever, compulsory participants in the ebb and flow of nature. Maybe it is this very inevitability that taints the prospect of seamlessly melding with the natural world. After all, recognizing this eventuality does not always or necessarily assuage suffering or fear. Similarly, Faustus’s concluding speeches, wherein he reckons with his coming punishment, assert the uniqueness of human subjectivity, especially that part of it described here as “abyssal thinking.” Marlowe puts a cruel twist on anagnorisis: rather than bringing ease or release, certitude propels horror. Viewed in this way, Doctor Faustus exposes the dismal boundedness of a world wholly within our ken. In this sense, the play makes a plea for magic and wonder. Seeking a historically relevant meaning for this cautionary tale, one might imagine Marlowe wrestling with the tenets of Calvinism, the psychological effects of living amid the virtual certainty of eternal damnation. For a select group of contemporary readers, this interpretation will still resonate. Yet the play’s warning proves expansive, its dramatization of epistemological tensions capturing a deeper, weightier struggle: in Marlowe’s era, as in ours, truth is under siege. The consequences of epistemic upheaval can feel at once intensely personal and far-ranging in effect. With Faustus’s example before us, the necessity of owning moral agency comes into focus. Equally significant, however, is carving out a space for wonder, which means conceding that no body of knowledge will ever (nor should ever) resolve 42 See also Maus’s comparison of a Faustian yearning for dissolution with the expression of a similar sentiment in Richard II, articulated in Being and Having in Shakespeare (29).

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all ambiguities. The ancient story of the magus-gone-rogue, exquisitely rendered in Doctor Faustus, holds meaning for us because it dramatizes a specific type of neediness—the quest for meaning—that requires periodic replenishment. Along these lines, although Faustus claims to have been “ravish’d” by magic, his various adventures across the globe or into the vast expanses of textual worlds leave him unchanged. Ironically, his anorexic appetite for discovery, and not a voracious hunger, seals his fate. Understood in this way, the play takes on a predictive power, operating as a thoroughly modern fable, a commentary on the intimacy of knowledge quests. The next two chapters follow up on the identity crisis outlined in Doctor Faustus, considering two different permutations on the self/environment relationship as it inheres in tragedy’s reluctant ecology.

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Keller, Evelyn Fox. “Feminist Perspectives on Science Studies.” Science, Technology, & Human Values, vol. 13, no. 4, 1988, pp. 235–49. Kirschbaum, Leo. “Marlowe’s Faustus: A Reconsideration.” Critics on Marlowe, edited by Judith O’Neill, U of Miami P, 1988, pp. 80–93. Klaits, Joseph. Servants of Satan: The Age of the Witch Hunts. Indiana UP, 1985. Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 3rd ed., U of Chicago P, 1996. Levin, Harry. “The Design of Doctor Faustus.” Twentieth Century Interpretations of Doctor Faustus, edited by Willard Farnham, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1969, pp. 43–53. Levin, Harry. The Overreacher: A Study of Christopher Marlowe. Beacon Press, 1952. Marcus, Gary. The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought. Basic Books, 2004. Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faustus A- and B-Texts: Christopher Marlowe and His Collaborator and Revisers. Edited by David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, Manchester UP, 1993. Martin, Randall. Shakespeare and Ecology. Oxford UP, 2015. Maslow, Abraham. A Theory of Human Motivation. 1943. Martino Publishing, 2013. Maus, Katharine Eisaman. Being and Having in Shakespeare. Oxford UP, 2013. Maus, Katharine Eisaman. Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance. U of Chicago P, 1995. Maus, Katharine Eisaman. “Sorcery and Subjectivity in Early Modern Discourses of Witchcraft.” Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture, edited by Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor, Routledge, 2000, pp. 325–48. Meeker, Joseph W. The Comedy of Survival: Literary Ecology and a Play Ethic. 3rd ed., U of Arizona P. 1997. Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. Harper & Row, 1980. Metzinger, Thomas. The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. Basic Books, 2009. Neill, Michael. Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy. Oxford UP, 1998. Nichols, Tom. The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters. Oxford UP, 2019. Peterson, Mark A. Galileo’s Muse: Renaissance Mathematics and the Arts. Harvard UP, 2011. Poole, Kristen. Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare’s England: Spaces of Demonism, Divinity, and Drama. Cambridge UP, 2014. Principe, Lawrence M. The Secrets of Alchemy. U of Chicago P, 2013. Rowlands, Mark. The New Science of the Mind: from Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology. MIT P, 2013. Rowse, A. L. Christopher Marlowe: His Life and Work. Harper & Row, 1964.

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Santayana, George. “The Rehabilitation of Faustus.” Twentieth Century Interpretations of Doctor Faustus, edited by Willard Farnham, Prentice-Hall, 1969, pp. 12–16. Scott, Reginald. The Discoverie of Witchcraft. 1584. Dover Publications, 1972. Shannon, Laurie. The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales. U of Chicago P, 2013. Shepard, Paul. The Others: How Animals Made Us Human. Island Press, 1996. Shepard, Paul. Thinking Animals: Animals and the Development of Human Intelligence. U of Georgia P, 1978. Shields, Christopher. “On Behalf of Cognitive Qualia.” Cognitive Phenomenology, edited by Tim Bayne and Michelle Montague, Oxford UP, 2011, pp. 215–35. Spellmeyer, Kurt. Arts of Living: Reinventing the Humanities for the Twenty-First Century. State U of New York P, 2003. Tilmouth, Christopher. “Passion and Intersubjectivity in Early Modern Literature.” Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture, edited by Brian Cummings and Freya Sierhuis, Ashgate, 2013, pp. 13–32. Viswanathan, S. “‘Illeism with a Difference’ in Certain Middle Plays of Shakespeare.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 4, Fall 1969, pp. 407–15. Washington, Harriet A. A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and its Assault on the American Mind. Little, Brown Spark, 2019. Watson, Robert N. “The Ecology of Self in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Ecocritical Shakespeare, edited by Lynne Bruckner and Dan Brayton, Ashgate, 2011, pp. 33–56. Watson, Robert N. The Rest is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance. U of California P, 1994. Willis, Deborah. Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England. Cornell UP, 1995. Wilson, Edward O. Biophilia. Harvard UP, 1984.

3.

Resisting Self-Erasure in Antony and Cleopatra Abstract This chapter analyzes tropes of negation in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, a text that interweaves the discourses of love and ecology. Shakespeare binds his romantic leads to their respective geo-political states, effectively grafting them onto the world. The diffusion of personae/ flesh into environment endorses ecological precepts but at the cost of annihilating the self. Ultimately, however, Antony and Cleopatra signals an important shift, anticipating the bounded, autonomous self more typically associated with the Enlightenment. Paradoxically, Antony and Cleopatra calls upon suicide to shore up the emerging conception of selfhood: the theatrics of death confer power on the aesthetic realm, in turn dampening the force of the abject. In this way, Shakespeare reimagines the self and disrupts the customary ecopolitics of tragedy. Keywords: Abjection; ecocriticism; eco-self; indistinction; Shakespeare; self-erasure

“Men suicide to consolidate a reputation, women suicide to get a reputation.” —Ceridwen Dovey

Dovey’s deliberate use of catachresis, the discordant transformation of “suicide” from noun to verb, highlights the purposive nature of the specified act. Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (c. 1606–07) lends credence to Dovey’s observation, as suicide confers permanence, a lasting iconicity, on Cleopatra. The effect is muted vis-à-vis Antony, partly because dissolution stalks him throughout the play. Indeed, in the opening lines, Antony appears to be outside himself, dispossessed by love. According to Philo, Antony’s “dotage / O’erflows the measure,” and “His captain’s heart … reneges

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all temper” (1.1.1, 2, 6, 8). The word “heart” appears forty-six additional times, with this linguistic pattern cuing the play’s interest in exploring the unbalancing or fragmenting events of passion on selfhood. At times, Antony recognizes how love disempowers, as when he refers to Cleopatra as a “charm,” a “spell,” and a “witch,” to convey the sinister effect she has on him (4.12.19, 30, 47). Furthermore, the servant Eros attends Antony’s protracted, messy death, as if to confirm the latter’s surrender to love. Ultimately, however, Antony and Cleopatra makes an aggressive bid for the self, so it furthers the metamorphosis getting underway in Doctor Faustus. To monitor the emerging self, this chapter revisits the tension between autonomy (separation from the world) and dissolution (fusion with the world); both concepts prove essential to early modern tragedy and are likewise of paramount concern in ecological discourse. Typically, ecocritics challenge or reject autonomy, instead prioritizing tropes or arrangements that subordinate the one to the many, precisely to emphasize humans’ inextricability from the rest of nature. In Arne Naess’s formulation, paradigmatic of Deep Ecology, humans are like all other organisms, “knots in the biospherical net or field of intrinsic relations” (95). Conversely, ecofeminist Wendy Donner argues in favor of individual rights and freedoms, precisely to counter injustice or oppression. Donner, therefore, endorses “autonomy and strongly bounded selves,” which she deems vital to resisting or overcoming oppression and trauma (385). As Donner points out, ecofeminism offers some needed refinements to Deep Ecology, given the former’s ability to encompass both the interrelationships that link humans to the rest of nature and the necessity of respecting individual selves. Freya Matthews makes a similar argument on behalf of ecofeminism, noting that its practitioners “tend to portray the natural world as a community of beings, related, in the manner of a family, but nevertheless distinct” (235). Humans are part of this dynamic system, not simply observers or interlopers. I would suggest, however, that the very tendency to elide “woman” and “nature” indicates the need to insist upon certain kinds of distinctiveness. Antony and Cleopatra persistently analogizes humans and nature, so it compels attention to the dynamism, the dialectical relationships, scrutinized by ecofeminists such as Donner and Matthews. For instance, Cleopatra’s various Roman observers, including Antony, repeatedly compare her actions to natural phenomena. In response to Antony’s cynical assessment of Cleopatra’s “cunning,” Enobarbus suggests that Cleopatra’s “passions are made of / nothing but the finest part of pure love. We cannot call / Her winds and waters sighs and tears; they are greater / Storms and tempests than almanacs can report” (1.2.152; 153–56). Bodily effluvia mirror natural

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phenomena, playing up the presumed affinities between Cleopatra and the space she rules/inhabits/represents. As Carolyn Merchant demonstrates in The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (1980), a particular eco-imaginary, an integrative conception of humans and the environment, stretched from the Middle Ages to the early modern period (and restoring the intimacy of the self/world relationship powers contemporary ecological theory). Merchant focuses on how the advent of the Scientific Revolution eroded the interdependent or ecological model so that humans were increasingly imagined in contradistinction to the natural world.1 No sweeping change of the sort Merchant tracks happens quickly or smoothly, so it makes sense that numerous early modern texts, including Antony and Cleopatra, feature conflicting ideas about the human/nature relationship. Writing several decades ahead of the ecocritical surge in early modern studies, Merchant lays the foundation for ensuing developments, such as the ongoing effort to challenge Enlightenment thought. Critiquing the excesses, misguided moves, or failed promises of the Enlightenment remains important, but some of its premises, including reliance on the scientific method, scrupulous reasoning, or a dedication to honoring and protecting individual rights, merit preservation. After all, as Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno point out in Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, “No matter which myths are invoked against it, by being used as arguments they are made to acknowledge the very principle of corrosive rationality of which enlightenment stands accused” (4). Admittedly, this claim sets up their stark assessment that “Enlightenment is totalitarian” (4). But rationality is not necessarily corrosive, and all intellectual work, no matter its theoretical or ideological allegiances, requires systematic analysis. Horkheimer and Adorno conclude that the Enlightenment implodes on itself so that celebrations of the individual fade into homogeny, a tendency made inevitable by the increasingly global reach of techno-corporate structures. As they put it, “The unity of the manipulated collective consists in the negation of each individual and in the scorn poured on the type of society which could make people into individuals. The horde, a term which doubtless is to be found in the Hitler Youth organization, is not a relapse into the old barbarism but the triumph of repressive égalité” (9). The sinister 1 Merchant’s book has influenced subsequent ecocritical work, though some ecocritics challenge or refine her claims. Todd Borlik offers a balanced assessment of the germane issues in Ecocriticism and Early Modern Literature: Green Pastures.

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alchemy of free individuals-into-horde sponsors another transformation, the rise of groupthink. By this light, the problem of the Enlightenment derives not from its overarching premises or goals but rather the collapse or perversion of them. By contrast, posthumanist critiques of the Enlightenment tend to emphasize the damaging impacts of the ethos of individualism and its adjacent premises. In Shakespeare and Posthumanist Theory (2018), Karen Raber outlines this position, noting, “Posthumanism … requires a sea-change, a radical revision of the nature and purpose of the category of the human and of the discourses that constitute it” (3). Raber contrasts humanist ideals or precepts with those lending shape to the Enlightenment. In a representative passage, she writes, “Studies of the early modern body dating back to the 1980s have emphasized the porous and unstable nature of bodily identity in pre-Enlightenment historical contexts” (58). This perspective counters the post-Enlightenment notion, or “modern idea,” of the body as a “solid closed container” (58). Writing in a similar vein, Stacy Alaimo maintains that all distinctions between “outside” and “inside” vis-à-vis organisms (humans or otherwise) and environment are illusory. Her Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (2010) adroitly maps the “interconnections, interchanges, and transits between human bodies and non-human natures” (2). This work joins the thriving ecofeminist discourse of embodiment, which has long been attentive to the dynamism of organism and world.2 The posthumanist revision, or perhaps reclamation, of the open, porous body might most accurately render the ineluctable conditions of being-inthe-world. But here’s the issue: some illusions are essential to navigating or even tolerating the world. This list might include various quirks of the ocular function, such as the automatic partitioning of one’s surroundings into processable or manageable segments, or the perception of a world awash in beautiful colors. Likewise, even if we are never really separate from others or the environment given the constant flow of bodies and objects, claiming certain kinds of autonomy or integrity, corporeal and otherwise, underpins most conceptions of justice or freedom.3 2 Karen Barad, whose work clearly influences Alaimo’s Bodily Natures, offers an insightful approach to questions of materiality in Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Barad’s essay, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” also offers an enriching context in which to reassess materiality and corporeality. 3 In English Revenge Drama: Money, Resistance, Inequality, Linda Woodbridge shows how the subset of plays featuring cycles of vengeance, including Antony and Cleopatra, anticipates the Enlightenment concept of “natural rights,” so these texts evince a democratizing impulse.

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In Antony and Cleopatra, tropes of dissolution or dispersibility coexist with a burgeoning insistence on discrete or bounded selves. To highlight the latter, Shakespeare exploits the theatrics of suicide. According to Enobarbus, women are prone to performing death, and he has “seen [Cleopatra] die twenty times” (1.2.148). Of course, the observation plays on the early modern equivalence of orgasm and death. Nevertheless, it ironically forecasts the staginess of Cleopatra’s suicide, a carefully managed spectacle that creates the possibility for her to escape repressive state control. Which is to say: suicide affords her a degree of self-control. Antony also anticipates his own demise, as when he summons various “household servants” and oversees a kind of hand-fasting ceremony. Enobarbus suggests that the purpose of Antony’s ritualized farewell is “To make his followers weep” (4.2.25). Indeed, Enobarbus himself evinces suicidal longings, noting that his “life” is “a very rebel to [his] will” (4.9.14). At this juncture, Enobarbus apostrophizes Antony, begging forgiveness for having deserted him, and commands “the world” to “rank [him] in register,” an ironic contribution to the play’s general obsession with fame (4.9.20–21). The death of Enobarbus consolidates the experiences of guilt and shame. More crucially, it emphasizes the discreteness or solitude of this character, while at the same time acknowledging his imbrication in a web of interlocking loyalties and responsibilities.

A Play of Opposites Antony and Cleopatra revels in contrariety, a point visually rendered in the persistent juxtaposition of Rome and Egypt. These crucial sites of classical antiquity play up connections between person and world, as if region binds into flesh, creating distinct personae; accordingly, the close attention to spatialized or place-based dimensions of identity holds particular importance for understanding the eco-self. In Losing Touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in Sixteenth-Century England (2014), Mary Thomas Crane connects the distinctive representations of Egypt and Rome to worldviews that were, respectively, moribund and incipient. She writes, “In Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare explores what it feels like to move from a natural, elemental world to an artificially constructed one” (159). Cleopatra and the other Egyptians depicted in the play typify a fundamentally ecological arrangement, in which humans are palpably grounded in the physical world. The Romans, by contrast, “look forward to a Cartesian mind-body split, in which self-contained individuals are separate from and gain mastery over their environment” (Crane 159). Ultimately, however, the eponymous

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lovers swap places: Cleopatra craves and courts individual renown, whereas Antony, as Crane acknowledges, must eventually confront the possibility that he is “made of the yielding and indistinct elements of water and air that make up clouds and mist” (162). In typical fashion, Shakespeare tempts us with a binary opposition, a template for naming/dividing the world, only to undermine the very terms of its instantiation. Perhaps this is precisely the point. We need a judicious combination of the Egyptian and the Roman (or the poetical and the scientific, to borrow variant terms from Crane’s compelling analysis). My hope is that the eco-self provides an instructive model, the means of effecting a satisfying compromise. As Crane and other critics acknowledge, Cleopatra and Egypt sometimes appear interchangeable: they share a chthonian magic that manages to entrance and repulse imperial Rome. 4 Even as he languishes into death, Antony refers to his lover by her country’s name, twice warning, “I am dying, Egypt, dying” (4.15.18, 41). Employing metonymy rather than, say, a demonym to address his lover, Antony’s farewell intensifies the connections between Cleopatra and the state she governs. Antony also represents his geopolitical state, except that love compromises his allegiance to prescribed virtues, in turn highlighting the fragility of the self. For instance, when Cleopatra goes along with the official story that she “fear’d” rather than loved Antony, Enobarbus comments on his master’s precarious status. In a remark addressed to the audience, Enobarbus says, “Sir, sir, thou art so leaky / That we must leave thee to thy sinking, for / Thy dearest quit thee” (3.13.63–65). The metaphor of Antony as a sinking ship is painfully apt, given the naval disgrace at Actium. Additionally, it connotes the permeability of the self, the way Antony messily disperses into the environment. Setting Cleopatra against (or in erotic entanglements with) several Roman triumvirs, the play yields a seductively orderly schema, a list of antinomic traits distinguishing the empire from its colony. Whereas Rome is a militarized, duty-obsessed, and distinctly masculine world premised on achievement and the fame attached to it, Egypt evinces earthiness and the promise of sensuous pleasures. Of course, Shakespeare works his own familiar magic in Antony and Cleopatra; presumed distinctions between Rome and Egypt, and the traits associated with each, are much flimsier than they initially appear. Seemingly opposed terms—Rome/Egypt; masculine/ 4 In Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global, Ursula K. Heise complicates facile acceptance of what I will call “blood-and-soil” affinities, noting how this ideology was coopted by “National Socialism,” subsequently fostering a German disenchantment with “localism” vis-à-vis “environmental rhetoric” (9).

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feminine; nature/culture; even life/death—blur into each other. Along these lines, disaster proves generative, a point encapsulated in Antony’s observation that “The higher Nilus swells / The more it promises; as it ebbs, the seedsman / Upon the slime and ooze scatters his grain” (2.7.20–22). The property herein ascribed to Egypt should not be grasped as an eco-oddity, a trait unique to this locale. Rather, the foison made available through strategically working the “ooze and slime” pierces the euphemistic sheen of phrases such as “life cycle,” reminding us that death and decay power the relevant processes. In this detail, Antony and Cleopatra exploits the pattern of thought Richard Cavendish ascribes to “classical times” and the “Middle Ages,” wherein it was accepted that “frogs were generated from rotting mud, bees and other insects from the mouldering corpses of animals, wasps from dead asses, beetles from horses, locusts from mules” (155). In sum, putrefaction proves fecund, a point Antony and Cleopatra confirms via its obsession with annelids.

The Ubiquitous Worm In a way, it seems inevitable and perfectly appropriate that worms provide a means of reckoning with humanness. After all, as Robert Pogue Harrison reminds us, the word “human” and all its semantic relations, including “humanities,” descend from a Latin root meaning “to bury,” a definition that accentuates our eventual communion with the loamy soil and those creatures assiduously working.5 Obviously, in the medicalized version of some anthropological models, burying is essential for hygienic reasons, a means of thwarting infectious disease. But I suspect the impetus to bury also originates in psychological concerns, such as a wish to transmute the formidable prospect of personal cessation. Our fate as worm food variously incites lamentation or celebration. Both responses materialize in Shakespeare’s plays, which include forty-seven references to worms (a f igure that excludes creative kennings, such as “worm-food”). In fact, attitudes toward the eventual intimacy of human and annelid might predicate generic distinctions. In As You Like It (c.1598–1600), for example, Rosalind evinces an earthiness (specifically, an acceptance of the fleshly realities of humanness) in her wry observation, “Men have died from time to time, / and worms have eaten them, but not for love” 5 For an excellent discussion of the etymology of “human” and its ecocritical implications, see Robert Pogue Harrison’s Dominion of the Dead.

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(4.1.101–02). From this perspective, comedy is a profoundly green genre, founded on accepting our entrée into the cycling rhythms of nature. By contrast, Hamlet reflects with some bitterness, “A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the / fish that hath fed of that worm” (4.3.27–28). This offers an ecological perspective on life, but one stripped of any solacing power.6 A different permutation on this theme arises in Antony and Cleopatra, which includes two of Shakespeare’s most intriguing references to worms. Specifically, the Clown twice alludes to the “joy of the worm” when forecasting the impending and curiously enacted suicide of Cleopatra. The Clown is no naturalist, as snakes are obviously distinct from worms. Shakespeare and his original audience would, of course, have noted differences between snakes and worms, so the semantic imprecision (“worm” in place of “asp”) likely carries a deliberate rhetorical effect—such as highlighting Cleopatra’s connections with the very soil of Egypt. Some historians, noting the logistical challenges of pulling off a suicide-by-snakebite, posit that the actual Cleopatra drank poison (perhaps a hemlock blend), which would have been a more practical means of killing herself.7 Still, the version of death popularized by Shakespeare has proven tenacious, and I believe it encapsulates the play’s unique significance for ecocriticism. For instance, possibly Cleopatra is imbruted by the serpent’s bite. Alternatively, it could be that the creature is exalted by its intimate dealings with a beautiful queen. Either way, the provocative death tableau highlights “indistinction,” wherein seemingly discrete entities merge. The upsides of the indistinct or dispersible self are well-chronicled in The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature (2012), edited by Jean E. Feerick and Vin Nardizzi. The benefits and limits of indistinction are addressed more fully in a later section; for now, consider the suggestive possibilities of the worm/ woman hybrid orchestrated by Cleopatra. She herself describes the asp as a suckling infant, asking her servant Charmian, “Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, / That sucks the nurse asleep?” (5.2.309–10). Here Shakespeare alludes to the unique alignment, the symbiotic attachment, of mother and infant. He exemplifies the Lacanian Real, the pre-linguistic phase of identity formation, wherein the murkiness of the boundary between mother’s and 6 Randall Martin assesses the annelid phenomenon as it features in both Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra in Shakespeare and Ecology. Whereas Martin celebrates the diffusible self, my goal is to track anxieties generated by this phenomenon. 7 Biographer Duane W. Roller offers a compelling elucidation of these points in his biography of Cleopatra.

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child’s bodies disrupts notions of autonomy and separateness. The exchange of fluids amplifies Cleopatra’s earthy magic, her inextricability from the exoticized world of Egypt. In an engaging discussion of topophobia and topophilia as mutually necessary responses to being-in-the-world, Neil Leach revisits Lacan’s account of identity formation, focusing on the transitions associated with the Mirror stage when the child develops a rudimentary sense of being separate from the mother. Leach’s analyses bring to light the relevant ecocritical implications. In particular, he reminds us that patterns of identification with and separation from the surrounding world and its inhabitants continually underwrite identity formation in humans (39). In doing so, Leach elucidates the value as well as the liabilities of analogizing humans and other animals. Ultimately, he favors a via media, cautioning, “Both the horror vacui of the alienated self and the horror of the undifferentiated self are potentially nihilistic conditions” (39). This holds great significance for ecocriticism, given the tendency to focus almost exclusively on the dangers accompanying the alienated self.8 Antony and Cleopatra skews the other way, ascribing minatory force to the ubiquitous promise of self-erasure, a condition enforced through the seamless melding of person and world. Shakespeare transforms the threat, assigning it an orgiastic energy that conjoins the realms of eros and thanatos. With this in mind, consider once again Cleopatra’s “suckling” of the asp. Obviously, there is nothing conventionally maternal about this scene. Rather than providing sustenance to her “baby,” Cleopatra absorbs its lethal venom, reversing the usual flow from parent to child. Alternatively, Cleopatra either misidentifies herself as the “nurse” in this transaction, or she transitions into the infant, the daughter who absorbs and embodies presumptively Egyptian traits. In an insightful reading of the scene, Gail Kern Paster writes, “Cleopatra’s suicide metaphorically reverses the ordinary meanings of the nurse with baby at her breast,” adding, “It is death that the nurse desires of the baby” (241). Paster interprets Cleopatra’s carefully staged death as evidence of “a form of carnivalesque power against which Caesar and all form of earthly power are conspicuously helpless” (244). Perhaps more provocatively, Paster speculates that playgoers in the seventeenth century would have made a virtually automatic connection between Cleopatra’s nursing of a snake and the “hyperordinary erotic bond of a witch and her animal familiar” 8 Ecofeminist critics offer valuable critiques of Enlightenment thought, particularly around the issue of interlocking oppressions. For a cogent synopsis, see Val Plumwood, “Ecosocial Feminism as a General Theory of Oppression.”

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(245). My understanding of the riveting economy of exchange is indebted to Paster’s thoughtful analysis, though I wish to bring the moment back to a consideration of the shifty boundaries of selfhood. Cleopatra’s suckling of the asp typifies the interchanges woven throughout Antony and Cleopatra, whereby a thing morphs into its opposite, indicating that these categories were never assured. Moreover, Cleopatra’s enactment of or participation in “malevolent nurture,” to borrow Deborah Willis’s apt phrase, brings out the paradoxical assumptions embedded in the early modern discourse of witchcraft.9 Specifically, the witch’s power was imagined as a perversion of natural processes, so it amounted to a kind of “unnatural nature,” which accords with the plays’ depiction of Egypt and Cleopatra herself. Ironically, however, in borrowing the witch’s sinister magic by suckling the asp, Cleopatra outmaneuvers her Roman adversaries, achieving exactly the sort of fame around which their noble aims are structured. After all, it is her ritualistic suicide that lifts Cleopatra from Lethe’s currents, assuring her legendary status. In this sense, the lowly “worm” (i.e., the asp) enables egress from the fundamentals of organismic life. Similarly, when Cleopatra prepares for her death, a guardsman informs her that a “rural fellow” insists on being granted an audience with her. After directing that the request be granted, Cleopatra remarks, “What poor an instrument / May do a noble deed! He brings me liberty” (5.2.233, 236–37). In this scenario, the humble servant takes on a crucial role, enabling Cleopatra’s release. Anticipating her own death, Cleopatra reflects, “I have nothing / Of woman in me. Now from head to foot / I am marble-constant; now the fleeting moon / No planet is of mine” (5.2.238–41). In death—in orchestrating a particular death, that is—Cleopatra gains possession of her image, which she deems more lasting, more constant, than her mortal self. The semantic imprecision that replaces “snake” with “worm” affords Cleopatra the perfect accomplice for her murder/suicide. As anthropologist Mary Douglas explains in Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966), worms are disruptors, animals that unsettle tidy distinctions among species. In a chapter on “The Abominations of Leviticus,” Douglas shrewdly observes that many “unclean” animals share a particular feature, an odd, category-defiant pattern of movement often translated as “swarming.” She suggests, “Swarming things are neither fish, flesh, nor fowl.… There is no order in them” (70). She adds, “The prototype and model of the swarming things is the worm. As fish belong in the sea 9 Willis’s Malevolent Nurture: Witch-hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England, remains essential for understanding the gendered discourse of witchcraft in the period.

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so worms belong in the realm of the grave, with death and chaos” (70). The problem of ontological stability (i.e., of some organisms evidently defying the classificatory order provided by fish, flesh, and fowl) likely does not resonate for us in the way it would have for Shakespeare and his contemporaries. This is because, as Douglas mentions, “[f]or us, ambiguous species merely provoke essayists to elegant reflections”; given that “we have recognised and assimilated our common descent with apes nothing can happen in the field of animal taxonomy to rouse our concern” (91). She might overstate our equanimity, but Douglas is right to note distinctions between pre-and post-Darwinian worldviews. She uses the term “cosmic pollution” to indicate epistemic violence, whereby master narratives give way. Of course, the current hybridization of the human, including our increasingly machinic tendencies, constitutes its own powerful strain on ontological categories. As many critics have noted, the early modern period hosted intellectual turbulence, especially in the dismantling of the Great Chain of Being.10 Occasionally, this prompts a nostalgic turn among ecocritics, as if the goal is to re-stitch the hermeneutical tapestry that lent order and meaning to the Middle Ages.11 In fact, contemporary ecological discourse sometimes asserts values or qualities Douglas ascribes to the “primitive” worldview, which presumes that “physical forces” are “interwoven with the lives of person” and holds that “things are not completely distinguished from persons and persons are not completely distinguished from their external environment” (109). Such beliefs were one casualty of the Copernican revolution, as Douglas acknowledges. Antony and Cleopatra plays with the volatile energies of epistemic change, demonstrating that the concepts of “person” and “world” must be considered in tandem. While the play addresses the enticing aspects of fragmentation or disorder, an answering desire to stave off entropy proves equally powerful. As Douglas points out, “Dirt is a symptom of disorder. There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder” (2). Viewed in these terms, Shakespeare’s Egypt performs the function of dirt, acting as ground to the figure of Rome. Indeed, the play ascribes quasi-magical powers to Egyptian soil, a substance that connotes both life and death. In this context, dirt is at 10 Although Stephen Greenblatt’s aims are not expressly ecocritical, his lyrical account of sweeping epistemic change, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, chronicles the demise of one worldview and ascendance of another. 11 Gabriel Egan advocates resurrecting the conceptual schema and orderly arrangements suggested by the Great Chain of Being in “Gaia and the Great Chain of Being.” He explores similar themes in his two monographs, Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism, and Shakespeare and Ecocritical Theory.

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once debased and exalted, contaminating and uplifting. Both Cleopatra and the land she governs/symbolizes manifest this duality, which crystallizes in her intimate encounter with the “worm.”

Cleopatra, Egypt, and the Explanatory Gap In a recent environmental history of Egypt, Alan Mikhail repeatedly announces his wish to “stand in the mud of Egypt’s canals to look out at Ottoman governance” (20). He believes this alluvial vantage point would grant special access to the establishment and development of Egypt, explaining, “It was really Egyptian peasants, calf-deep in Egypt’s mud, who controlled Ottoman bureaucrats—not the other way around—in the determination and execution of repairs to irrigation works” (32). Possibly Mikhail’s populism is exaggerated at times, but he does provide a compelling chronicle, an eco-history, of Egypt as a geopolitical state, demonstrating the indissoluble link between imperialist aims and the natural world. With this in mind, Mikhail writes, “Trees, water, lunar energy, mountains, gardens—these are the origins of imperial political power” (xii). If connections between polities and the natural spaces hosting them now seem obvious, this has not always been true. As Mikhail notes, an added complexity, in recovering the natural history of Egypt, is a persisting sense that its landscape and climate are “unique and dangerously fragile, flawed, degraded, fallen, contradictory, excessive, out of balance, always on the brink of collapse” (203). The othering or exoticizing of the landscape, as if nature itself takes on putatively alien or “unnatural” elements, anticipates the presumptions of Orientalist discourse. In laying the groundwork for Orientalism, Edward Said begins by identifying his founding “assumption,” namely, “that the Orient is not an inert fact of nature. It is not merely there, just as the Occident itself is not just there either” (4). Reminding us that places are never experienced in some pure, value-free way, Said indicates additional possibilities for ecocritical work, which likewise rejects the notion that “nature” can ever be grasped by or confined to a set of inert or stable data points. Shakespeare plays with the layering or construction of place in Antony and Cleopatra, furthering Egypt’s reputation as a space of paradox, a zone of “unnatural nature,” as in the emphasis on mud, soil, and devouring/creating worms. As previously noted, the play exploits apprehensions of the peculiar generativity omnipresent in Egypt. Lepidus voices this property, asserting, “Your serpent of Egypt is bred now of your / mud by the operation of your sun; so is your crocodile” (2.7.26–27). On the other hand, Shakespeare acknowledges the limits of

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cross-cultural gazing, as when Antony offers a series of non-statements about the crocodile in response to a question from the increasingly intoxicated Lepidus. Specifically, Antony says of the crocodile, “It is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as / it hath breadth. It is just so high as it is, and moves / with its own organs. It lives by that which nourisheth / it, and, the elements once out of it, it transmigrates” (2.7.43–46). Recognizing the vacuity of these statements, Caesar asks whether Antony’s report will “satisfy” Lepidus (2.7.51). It seems that the crocodile, like Cleopatra herself, both emblemizes Egypt and frustrates efforts at definition or classification. Shakespeare’s delineation of a landscape already overdetermined by the early seventeenth century affords us a primer on the complexities of perception, drawing attention to the psychological concept of qualia, particular aspects of subjective conscious experience. Psychologists who study qualia point to phenomena such as watching a sunset or experiencing pain to illustrate the variability or individualized dimensions of certain experiences. The very existence of qualia undercuts a strictly materialist paradigm, as Joseph Levine helps us understand. As he mentions, scientists have established that pain always entails a specif ic physiological response (“C-fiber firing”), but the recitation of this fact does not advance our understanding of this subjective state.12 Levine concludes, “psychophysical identity statements leave a significant explanatory gap,” because the meaning of a particular event, the way it is felt or lived, varies from person to person (354). Moreover, the preconceptions we bring to a given experience—say, listening to violin music or drinking a glass of wine—can have measurable effects on the sensorium.13 In short, qualia establish the necessity of understanding the psycho-physical components of experience. The value of the eco-self, a psycho-biological model of identity, originates in part from the “explanatory gap,” which conveys the insufficiency of materialist/functionalist explanations of experience. In a way, Antony and Cleopatra tries to breach the explanatory gap via its persistent linkage of self and world, as in the tight connections binding its leads to their respective states. This tendency is amplified in the depiction of Cleopatra, who evidently possesses her own brand of “unnatural natural”: a defiance of the usually inevitable processes of decay. Of Cleopatra’s enduring 12 In “Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap,” Joseph Levine explains the relevant concepts, showing how a thoroughgoing materialism does not adequately capture subjective experience. For instance, understanding the physiology of pain does not tell us anything useful about how it feels. 13 Paul Bloom offers abundant examples of how perception or expectations influence the experience of pleasure in How Pleasure Works.

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attractions Enobarbus says, “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety. Other women cloy / The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry / Where most she satisfies” (2.2.245–48). Like the enchantments of Egypt, Cleopatra’s magic turns on paradox, with satiety fueling hunger—or maybe this is simply the mechanics of desire. Antony’s first encounter with Cleopatra, when she memorably appeared on the water riding her gleaming barge, so pleased the senses as to confuse or hijack them, triggering synesthesia. Recalling this moment, Enobarbus reports, “From the barge / A strange invisible perfume hits the senses / Of the adjacent wharfs. The city cast / Her people out upon her;” (2.2.222–24). Isolated in the empty marketplace, Antony was “Whistling to th’air, which, but for vacancy, / Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too, / And made a gap in nature” (2.2.226–28). In this description, Cleopatra becomes an anti-Orpheus, a force capable of agitating rather than soothing her natural surroundings. Here, the air is ascribed sentience and an ethical sensibility, so it resists temptation in order to prevent the abhorred vacuum. Cleopatra herself comments on the wrinkles that have appeared on her flesh. She is not impervious to change or decay, though others look at her and see an icon of enduring (if dangerous) beauty in place of a fleshly-frail woman. In sum, Shakespeare anticipates the perception-governing (or is it distorting?) effects of qualia, whereby anticipation or expectations shape the act of perceiving. Literary texts are exceptionally useful vehicles for demonstrating how experiences, even those categorized as passionate or erotic, enfold the psychological with the physical/sensorial. As Andy Mousley observes, Shakespeare deftly manages “sensuous embodiment,” but at the same time “his plays remove us from sensuous immediacy and involvement by causing us to reflect” (9). Rather than hijacking the purity of physical experiences, literary texts chronicle reflective consciousness and provide unique insight into a distinctively human way of being-in-the-world. As Shakespeare’s play indicates, the potentially annihilative power of Cleopatra’s beauty consolidates traditional fears about women. Biographer Duane Roller notes that Cleopatra has been “stereotyped into typical chauvinist female roles such as seductress or sorceress” (2). In short, Cleopatra becomes a screen onto which desires may be projected or anxieties confronted. Yet, although Cleopatra is, as Stacy Schiff puts it, “among the most famous women to have lived,” her biography features notable lacunae (1). For example, the identity of Cleopatra’s mother has not been definitively established: she might have been a native of Egypt, possibly even a highranking priestess in a local religious cult. But we will likely never know for certain. Judging from the historical record, it is almost as though Cleopatra

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emerged through parthenogenesis, springing fully formed from the body of Ptolemy. In this sense she makes patriarchy’s ideal proxy, reminiscent of the motherless Athena who, at least in Aeschylus’s view, “favors the male in all things.” Still, as Roller meticulously documents, the historical Cleopatra was an imposing politician, “the only woman in all classical antiquity to rule independently” (2). And she appears to have had a sophisticated awareness of how to manage her persona, specifically by claiming allegiance to both Hellenic and indigenous Egyptian traditions. Possibly in homage to a nativeborn mother, Cleopatra embraced local religions. Roller reports that after giving birth to Caesarion, Cleopatra was likened to “divine single mother Isis” (79). Shakespeare also acknowledges this association when his Caesar describes Cleopatra appearing in public “In the habiliments of the goddess Isis” (3.6.17). The play could be making an edgily cynical statement about power’s self-conscious theatrics, though the actual Cleopatra’s dedication to learning the Egyptian language (she was the only member of the Ptolemaic dynasty to do so) hints that she wished to be firmly ensconced in the cultural traditions of Egypt, even while cultivating certain aspects of her Greek heritage. Shakespeare makes the most of Cleopatra’s layered cultural inheritances, with Thomas North’s 1579 translation of Plutarch’s Lives a likely source. Antony and Cleopatra ascribes its female lead a paradoxical quality, something like a native exoticism, that calls attention to the embedment of person in world. The historical Cleopatra ruled as a “client king” in Egypt, but she (re)fashioned herself as an indigenous queen. Shakespeare’s play emphasizes the latter designation, most notably in Cleopatra’s careful orchestration of her death. In sum, Antony and Cleopatra imagines identity as a fluid process, a perpetually unfolding relationship between self and world, so it illustrates the concept of the eco-self. This is important to our understanding of the ongoing drama of the self, especially because most studies date the emergence of the individual and the autonomous self to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Antony and Cleopatra bring us inside the relevant transformations, heralding the incipient self. In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), a monograph every bit as sweeping as the title indicates, Harold Bloom suggests that Shakespeare’s Cleopatra possesses an “ever-burgeoning inner self,” though its “inmost” qualities elude our understanding (568). Obviously, Bloom’s book was not well received by fellow academics, partly because it resurrected an older set of beliefs about literary criticism, one premised on the notion that the formalized study of literature yields important insights about human

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experience, so it aff irms the self. Remarking on the “hostile reception of Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human,” Neil Rhodes acknowledges the deficiencies of Bloom’s approach but adds, “one wonders how much of the hostility was directed towards the project itself rather than the achievement” (35). In the same essay, Rhodes suggests that Shakespeare has been “dehumanized” or coopted into the vogueish sphere of posthumanist scholarship, which rejects or dismisses precisely the kinds of questions Bloom engages in Shakespeare. Whereas many scholars working in the humanities accept the “dehumanizing” Rhodes discusses, as he likewise mentions, “scientists themselves have by no means given up on the possibility of identifying essential human-ness” (23). The scientists have a point: an appropriate or aspirational goal of studying literature is gaining a deeper understanding of proprietarily human traits. Moreover, only a robust knowledge of self and others enables the development of ethics and the praxis flowing from it. Rhodes points out that “in the sixteenth century the passions were still understood primarily in physiological terms” (26). Written and first performed in the early seventeenth century, Antony and Cleopatra signals an evolving apprehension of passionate experiences. Admittedly, the play often emphasizes embodied experiences or sensate pleasures, as in the perfumed air that envelops Cleopatra, or the music whose performances she commands, following her assertion that it constitutes the “moody food” for those “that trade in love” (1.6.1). Yet passions, including rage or love, are never completely reducible to physiological responses. As Cleopatra understands, she need not be present to provoke her lover’s desire, so “dotage” obviously cannot be explained away in purely physical terms. If this point seems obvious, we should recognize that these days, pleasure—like almost any other thing we might name—has been subsumed into the reigning paradigm of the biological/evolutionary. Which is to say: inwardness, or questions of the self, should have little to do with manifestations of desire. There is, however, a small but notable pushback against the primacy of the biological. For instance, psychologist Paul Bloom essentially endorses evolutionary psychology, but he also addresses the intangibles, including the complex introspective or imaginative work, that undergird experience. In a book-length study of pleasure, Bloom argues that “pleasure is deep,” by which he means not adequately rendered in a simplistic formula of stimulus and response. He asserts, “the enjoyment we get from something derives from what we think that thing is” (xii). Examples include the appreciation of authentic paintings versus forgeries, or any artifacts relevant to moments of significant historical impact. Applied to erotic life, Bloom’s concepts

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demonstrate the inextricability of flesh from fantasy. Writing centuries earlier, Shakespeare intuited the same point: Antony and Cleopatra simultaneously depicts the lushness of fleshly pleasures and their subordination to images or expectations. In other words, Cleopatra captivates because she conforms to, and thus activates, erotic expectations and in this way appears to incarnate the essence of female sensuality.

Confronting the Ethos of Molecularity: The Limits of Sameness Although tinged with misogyny, Cleopatra’s irresistibility and uniqueness encapsulate an important tragic convention: the genre that trades in death likewise exalts the subject, as Catherine Belsey points out in The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (1985). In this sense, tragedy resists or complicates core tenets of ecocriticism. More specifically, current ecocritics tend to favor boundarylessness and indistinction, bringing out what humans share with all other organisms and countering narratives (fantasies) of exceptionalism.14 Much of this work has a recuperative feel in that rejecting exceptionalism and its powering agent, humans’ alienation from the natural world, restores a pre-Enlightenment version of ecopolitics. Not incidentally, one of Shakespeare’s two usages of “indistinct” comes in Antony and Cleopatra. Antony asks Eros whether he has ever discerned images in clouds and, after securing an affirmation, notes, “That which is now a horse, even with a thought / The rack dislimns and makes it indistinct / As water is in water” (4.14.9–11). Antony uses this fanciful musing to set up his own precariousness, a proneness to fragmentation or dissolution, noting, “My good knave Eros, now thy captain is / Even such a body. Here I am Antony / Yet cannot hold this visible shape” (4.14.12–14). In both instances, being “indistinct” connotes a radical vulnerability. Obviously, Antony’s fears of being dislimned are partly instigated by political hostilities and his newly disgraced status. But we might also read the concept of indistinction in and through evolving early modern apprehensions of the natural world, which had a corresponding effect on conceptions of the human. The self-world relationship was thrown into crisis in the early modern period, partly through the revival of atomism, a potentially detonative strain of ideas extracted from the ancient Greeks. In a way, atomism enforces an expansive ecology, positing kinship at the molecular 14 Jane Bennett’s updated theory of materialism yields a new take on boundarylessness, essentially the perpetual flow between/among things in-the-world.

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level.15 Contemporary ecocritics, and also posthumanists, promote a more sophisticated version of atomism, a capacious ecology that I have come to think of as an ethos of molecularity.16 According to this worldview, cells replace selves as focal points of meaning. Additionally, this school of thought substitutes monism, an all-encompassing totality, for the bifurcated arrangement (humans contraposed against the natural world) typically associated with Descartes and other architects of the Enlightenment. The ethos of molecularity attracts adherents across multiple disciplines, but perhaps most crucially among natural scientists, closely followed by social scientists (with the latter group increasingly drawn to materialist concerns, effectively closing the gap between the two domains of scholarship). By way of illustration, I offer the culture-wide zest for narratives asserting how genes control all human behavior.17 This position obviously erodes the concept of free will, asserting a rigid biological determinism that moots questions of human agency. Whether or not one believes that jettisoning the concept of free will inevitably triggers calamitous results (a pessimistic assessment to which I subscribe), its implications for the aesthetic realm seem manifestly clear. Richard Russo cogently articulates the problem, writing, “As social and natural scientists continue to erode our belief in free will by revealing the extent of our genetic and cultural programming, novelists continue to hold people accountable for their actions and the consequences of those actions. This is the fiction writers’ manifesto, because without it there’s no story” (140). In the same essay, Russo suggests, “People in life—and therefore in fiction—must choose, and their choices must have meaningful consequences. Otherwise, there’s no story” (138). Antony and Cleopatra offers abundant support for Russo’s thesis, but to take just one example, consider Antony’s infamous flight from the Battle of Actium, which of course Shakespeare adapts from his historical source. Ostensibly, Antony let eros, his desire for Cleopatra, trump martial virtues, 15 Greenblatt discusses atomism in The Swerve. Also instructive on the significance of this intellectual trend in the early modern period is Robert N. Watson’s Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance. Both texts assess the effects of a retooled atomism on conceptions of humanness. 16 The early moderns’ deliberate embrace of classical theories of atomism, whereby they understood everything to be composed of a single substance, epitomizes the ethos of molecularity. Our era has amplified this belief, as in physicist Alan Lightman’s claim, “It’s all material … It’s all atoms and molecules,” offered in “The Infinity of the Small” (35). 17 Richard Dawkins popularized the notion that genes control human behavior in The Selfish Gene. More recent evolutionary approaches, ranging across multiple fields, emphasize the various factors propelling evolution and shaping humanness and human behavior. See, for example, Paul R. Ehrlich’s Human Natures: Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect.

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which is precisely what imbues the moment with significance within and beyond Shakespeare’s play. According to the amoral logic of the ethos of molecularity, Antony did not choose, because no one ever consciously does. Such a view moots morality and ethics and (as Russo warns) saps storytelling of its imaginative force. Rather than trying to use literature, an exclusively human activity, to downplay differences among species, we might be better served by celebrating distinctiveness. For instance, by stimulating introspective and imaginative pleasures, literature could generate new possibilities for appreciating the non- or more-than-human world. As William James comments: The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is inf initely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. “I am no such thing,” it would say; “I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.” (17)

This perspective, which entails finding uniqueness amid seeming uniformity, counters the effects of indistinction. Indistinction, usually manifesting as a kind of oblivion, frequently intrudes in Antony and Cleopatra, with this process artfully conveyed in images of the Tiber and the Nile, rivers deemed capable of enfolding or transforming the world. For instance, in a much-quoted passage Antony asserts, “Let Rome in Tiber melt and the wide arch / Of the ranged empire fall! / Here is my space. / Kingdoms are clay; our dungy earth alike / Feeds beast as man” (1.1.35–38). A hint of defiance shades Antony’s statement, uttered when he resists being summoned back to Rome. By Antony’s admission, all civilizations—no matter how powerful or oriented to the martial—are ephemeral, flimsy appurtenances that overlay the bedrock of nature. And nature, more precisely the earth itself, acts as stalwart in the scenario conjured by Antony. Humans, on the other hand, are dethroned, relegated to the same plane of existence that claims all other organisms. It strikes me that the pivot to modernity was founded on a kind of irony: just at the moment when affinities between humans and nature were being re-asserted (such as via a renewed interest in atomism), a wish to disclaim this kinship manifested. In this light, transcendence, or the separatism enshrined in Descartes’s cogito, could be viewed as a reaction to those anxieties generated by likeness or lack of differentiation, a possibility captured in Antony’s fluvial metaphor.

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Cleopatra hears Antony’s allusion to the powerful Tiber, but her own invocation of the Nile’s comparable force comes when she is meeting with servants and messengers outside of Antony’s presence. Echoing Antony, Cleopatra says, “Melt Egypt into Nile! and kindly creatures / Turn all to serpents!” (2.5.77–78). She imputes a dark power to the Nile, which sweeps up and transmogrif ies the inhabitants of Egypt. Both river metaphors emphasize vulnerability, a condition premised on the ephemeral or changeable nature of life and the realization that humans share the same fate as everything else. Whereas the phenomenon of changeability or indistinction is often celebrated by ecocritics, Antony and Cleopatra reasserts its daunting power, the psychic costs of accepting one’s own inconsequentiality. At the risk of stating the obvious, the prospect of being completely exchangeable for another (i.e., expendable) is not always a pleasant one. Not incidentally, tragedy and comedy offer starkly different perspectives on this issue. For example, Shakespearean comedy features multiple examples of characters resembling or standing in for one another, including the apparent interchangeability of Helena and Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or the ease with which Mariana pulls off the bed-trick, replacing Isabella, in Measure for Measure. While such moments might inject a note of cynicism, or even a sinister element, into the relevant plays, their march toward (multiple) weddings and the promise of posterity—of successive generations, that is— trumps questions of selfhood, of distinctiveness. The inexorable logic of tragedy provokes a different outcome, paradoxically affirming the self through its annihilation. Antony and Cleopatra obsesses over the prospect of self-erasure, wherein selves collapse or boundaries dissolve, with various characters commenting on this process. For example, after learning of Antony’s death, Caesar curiously calls his former rival “the arm of mine own body, and the heart / Where mine his thoughts did kindle” (5.1.45–46). Although Caesar does not quite establish kinship at the molecular level, his observation provides us with a stunning example of introjection, a mind-meld that works in tandem with blended bodies. In this passage, an altogether bizarre eulogy for his comrade-turned-rival, Caesar borrows from the language of eroticism: two become one, or so he says. Given that Caesar speaks almost literally over Antony’s dead body, it is difficult to see the declaration of communion as anything other than an act of appropriation (and a skewering critique of the comrade ideology that sustains martial rhetoric). A different type of boundary transgression, or indistinction, is made obvious through the joint refusal of Antony and Cleopatra to perform their

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ostensibly typical roles (i.e., those defined by gender). Caesar comments on this gender rebellion, noting that Antony “is not more manlike / than Cleopatra, nor the queen of Ptolemy / More womanly than he” (1.4.4–7). It might be tempting to find an admirable proto-progressivism in these instances of gender-bending. But I believe Caesar’s observation acknowledges the principle of chaos that stalks the play, an unruliness that confounds those categories tasked with assigning meaning and order to the world. Even our twenty-first century categories, vis-à-vis gender, which include nonbinary and transgender as viable markers of cultural identity, indicate that we cannot dispense altogether with naming and sorting. Notwithstanding the appeal of boundarylessness or indistinction, concepts which rightly proclaim humans’ inextricability from the natural world, some notions of difference, perhaps even of exceptionalism or significance, appear to be essential as a precondition for navigating the world. Repressing or denying this psychological need will only generate unease, or dis-ease, eventually requiring remediation. In one of the surprisingly scant ecocritical readings of Antony and Cleopatra, a compelling chapter in his Shakespeare and Ecology (2015), Randal Martin traces the play’s engagement with the complex, sometimes contradictory, discourses of contemporary environmentalism. Specifically, he shows how Shakespeare anticipates “tensions between [the] neo-Romantic and post-Darwinian” camps (138). Martin suggests that the former encompasses “a pure and direct connection with the natural world, not excluding its traditional spiritual values,” whereas the latter compels “acceptance of biological recombinations within ever-changing physical realities” (138). Ultimately, Martin discerns in Antony and Cleopatra a profoundly ecological bent, reflecting, “If we choose to see beyond tragedy’s conventional antagonism between culture and nature, and beyond anthropocentric categories of knowledge and being, Cleopatra’s symbiosis [e.g., her fusion with the “worm”] redefines death as posthuman tragicomedy” (158). By this light, death marks the entrée into a geo-matrix so that humans—as everything else—always, eventually, return to an earthy womb. The vibrant scenario Martin imagines conjures the ancient realm of Chaos, that primordial space antecedent to the sprawling generativity, not to mention the processes of differentiation and delineation structuring the material world. Like Chaos, the landscapes of “posthuman tragicomedy” are defined by non-differentiation so that distinctions among bodies cease to be meaningful. This gesture toward a metanarrative comports with Antony and Cleopatra’s unique emphasis on ancient-but-persisting concerns, a trait that invites grandly mythologizing readings. Likewise, ecocriticism

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often attempts its own remythologizing of the world, setting in motion a redemptive story of kinship among everything that exists.18 In a study of formal and conceptual iterations of the human/nature relationship, Joseph W. Meeker advances a compact explanation of the ecology of form. Having defined comedy as “an attitude toward life and the self” and a genre imparting “a strategy for living that contains ecological wisdom,” Meeker critiques tragedy for its “insistence upon the supreme importance of the individual personality” (12, 21, 24). To exemplify the comic worldview, he recollects witnessing a grizzly bear devour a just-born caribou. Meeker recalls the caribou mother’s grief, commensurate with his own response. But he concludes the recitation with an approving description of how the caribou mother virtually instantaneously rejoined the rest of her herd (12–13). Equanimity—surrender to the inevitable, such as one’s place in the “food chain”—might be a virtue, or perhaps a more convenient way to live. Yet art and aesthetic experiences often seem designed to rock us out of complacency or to provide opportunities both for noticing and grieving loss, as well as for remarking on and briefly catching hold of pleasurable moments. Genre encodes assumptions about human behavior, including the possibilities for navigating the world. Steve Mentz offers an insightful take on the ecopolitics of genre, originating in his observation “that ecological crisis is fracturing familiar narratives about the relationship between humanity and the natural world” (155). Corollary to this point, Mentz suggests, “Telling new stories about nature necessitates making new choices about generic forms” (159). This is Martin’s strategy in his reading of Antony and Cleopatra, as—pace Meeker—he seeks in tragedy a vision of interconnectivity. In a way, therefore, Martin claims for tragedy the principles Meeker celebrates in comedy. All of this work is compelling, though it jointly champions the principle of non-distinction, or self-erasure, whereas the goal here is a critique of this stance. A different perspective on Antony and Cleopatra’s treatment of humans and/in nature materializes in an ecocritical essay by Edward J. Geisweidt, which cautions against any facile celebration of the “circle of life,” a term he uses with evident unease. He writes, “I do not mean to suggest that the ecocritical value of Antony and Cleopatra lies in the notion of the cyclical 18 Gaia theory is one of the most salient examples of how ecocritics or those interested in ecological issues promote the concept of an interconnected world in which humans are simply one part of a teeming system. James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis are generally credited with proposing the Gaia Hypothesis in 1972. Stephan Harding examines the relevant issues in Animate Earth: Science, Intuition, and Gaia.

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operations of life—in a circle of life, as it might be called. Such a message is too upbeat (not to mention naïve) for this play, and little consolation would it be to suggest that Cleopatra’s corpse continues the circle by nourishing her asp” (102). His reservations seem warranted, and I likewise accept the corollary point that we need to carve out sources of meaning and satisfaction addressed to distinctively, even proprietarily, human concerns. Geisweidt’s essay, however, dwells on the elemental, as in the curiously generative soil ascribed to the environs of Egypt, or the processes of expurgation that command attention throughout the play. Rather than providing a robust alternative to becoming food for worms, Geisweidt’s reading remains focused on the fleshy dimensions of experience, precisely those that compel participation in the “circle of life,” so it does not fully address the dialectical energies of this play. Conversely, I submit that in its recurring fascination with the tension between flesh and fantasy—that edgier cousin of the body/mind antinomy—Antony and Cleopatra points to the necessity of the self, of an abstracting inner life capable of exerting influence on the world. In sum, both Martin and Geisweidt confirm the prominence and popularity of tropes of non-differentiation among ecocritics. Once again, this work often focuses on humans’ participation in a world of fluxing patterns and constant change, notable for its boundarylessness. In academic contexts and likewise in texts produced for more popular consumption, the self is under siege, often a casualty of the campaign waged on behalf of materialism. The emergent paradigm, identified here as an ethos of molecularity, tends to dismiss questions of introspection or inwardness by construing the self as an illusion, such as an effect produced by neurochemical reactions.19 There are exhilarating meditations on this theme, such as Alaimo’s discussions of the organismic capacity to merge with the environment or other of its inhabitants. In this view, “trans-corporeality” best defines the conditions of life, given that boundaries between putatively discrete creatures prove ever friable. A radical immanence and thoroughgoing interconnectedness characterize this version of being, providing the corrective to several centuries of misguided assumptions regarding humans’ transcendence of nature. But there are also some disenchanting aspects to this trend, such as the realization of one’s susceptibility to promiscuous viruses or pervasive toxins. If the impetus for current models (i.e., those rooted in immanence or trans-connectivity) is easily graspable, I am increasingly skeptical that such 19 Philosopher Heidi Ravven offers a viable model of the self-in-the-world in The Self Beyond Itself: An Alternative History of Ethics, the New Brain Sciences, and the Myth of Free Will. As her title suggests, she mostly discounts the possibility of free will.

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approaches will suffice. Once again: that we are stardust or carbon—and will eventually join the loamy essence enjoyed by worms—is a given, but ceaseless iteration of these facts does not necessarily guarantee the future. Focusing primarily on the “life cycle,” which is to say on the implacability of death, leaves little opportunity for discerning meaning, pleasure, or purpose in distinctively human experiences. As these pose the greatest threat to the environmental health of the planet, so they are the keys to its preservation. As Martin himself concedes, “humans do not simply live in nature, but outside it too” (164). This caveat is crucial to understanding the reluctant ecology at work in Antony and Cleopatra. Specifically, the “antagonism between nature and culture,” which Martin aptly identifies as a staple of early modern tragedy, is precisely the point, not a hindrance to be overlooked or overridden as we wrestle with the play’s ecocritical significance. While transcending an anthropocentric perspective might seem a worthy—indeed quintessential—goal for ecocriticism, it will always prove elusive. Rather than acceding to the posthuman tragicomedy, as Martin’s reading of Antony and Cleopatra urges, I suggest that we reconsider the play’s yearning to create a space outside the mortal realm of decay (a goal jointly espoused by the Sonnets), one that “age does not wither.” In any case, the biological equipment and processes that enable human cognition ensure certain limits on our epistemological endeavors.20 Antony and Cleopatra specifically addresses the mechanics of thinking, sometimes imagining the brain in conflict with impulses located elsewhere in the body. For instance, observing changes in Antony’s behavior and attitude, Enobarbus suggests, “a diminution in [Antony’s] brain / Restores his heart” (3.13.201–02). Here and elsewhere, “heart” metonymizes urges or passions that conflict with the mental faculty ascribed to the brain. To reassess the ecocritical significance of human cognition, it might help to consider the differences between “human evolution” and “the evolution of humanity.” As Roy Rappoport explains in Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (1999), the former acknowledges our status as animals “living among and dependent upon other organisms, and further, that our species emerged through processes of natural selection no different in principle from those that produced limpets or lions” (4). By contrast, the “evolution of humanity” illuminates “the capacity that sets our species apart from all 20 Contemporary research on cognition can be applied strategically to early modern texts, precisely because this scholarship brings out ancient endowments, processes, or functional capacities that link us to the early moderns (and, indeed, to ancestors who significantly predate them). Pascal Boyer’s Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create consolidates the current thinking on these issues.

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others” (4). These are complementary, not dichotomous, possibilities; their interplay governs the struggle to define selfhood in Antony and Cleopatra, once again affirming the need for the harmonizing potential of the eco-self. Using Enobarbus’s terms, this model of personhood accommodates the workings of “brain” and “heart.”

Ecology and Abjection: Revisiting Eros and Thanatos Even now, in an era that often proclaims the death of the self, fiction endlessly obsesses over it.21 Of course, one of the crucial differences between our world and Shakespeare’s is our comparatively bankrupt conception of fame, which has morphed into its own debased other, celebrity. By contrast, for the early moderns, fame remained essential, the means of fighting back against a relentless world. In literary contexts, selfhood and fame prove intimately connected. As Philip Hardie points out in Rumor and Renown: Representations of Fama in Western Literature (2012), “The desire for fame is generated out of the self, and is a classic example of the Lacanian Desire for the Other” (13). In this view, the self is immensely complex: it encompasses a deep-rooted desire for uniqueness and posterity but is dependent on others, i.e., their external judgments, for its fulfillment. This bipartite process likewise defines the eco-self, which necessarily attunes to the tensions or questions catalyzing the human quest for fame. Hardie also suggests that in the epic, “fame is always caught up in complex negotiations with the value-system of a competitive and hierarchical society, in which the desire of the individual hero for a lasting fame that will compensate for the brevity of his biological life may either work with or strain against the interests of the group of which he is a member” (48). The same applies to Antony and Cleopatra, a play whose denouement emphasizes the ways in which fame tests the relationship between individual desire and communal obligations. In turn, this tension materializes via the dueling energies of eros and thanatos, a dyad important across vast swaths of literature, from classical antiquity to the post-post-modern world. In the creation stories of Hesiod and Ovid, for example, the world is ushered into being through the unique dynamism of eros, but this is ballasted 21 Fiction would collapse without any notion of selfhood, as Sally Rooney demonstrates in her debut novel, Conversations with Friends. Emerging as a notable voice of the millennial generation, Rooney creates fictional worlds in which characters obsess over questions of inwardness while simultaneously acknowledging that the self always exists in tension with the world.

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by the appetites of a countering destructive force. The most important thing about eros and thanatos is how they converge. As we have already seen, in Antony and Cleopatra destructive natural phenomena bring forth new life so that generativity and annihilation meld. Perhaps more crucially, loving inevitably entails self-loss, as the much-chronicled effects of Antony’s dotage confirm. After all, as Karen Green reminds us in her haunting memoir Bough Down (2013), “I could love means I could die violently, or live violently; the threat of the arrow is everywhere at once, not just in the heart” (266). Rewritten in familiar Shakespearean rhythms, the lines would nestle comfortably into Antony and Cleopatra. The conflict between eros and thanatos has manifestly ecocritical implications, a point illustrated in David Abram’s Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (2011). In this book, a follow-up to his Spell of the Sensuous (1996), Abram updates eros, re-defining it as gravitational pull, the actual energy that inclines one toward the earth. Abram often seems intent on re-enchanting the world, as in his contention that “mind is a luminous quality of the earth” (132). Obviously, his overt mysticism disenchants some readers. Anyway, the arguments of Becoming Animal are profoundly integrationist, as they assert kinship among all species and even disavow the split between organisms and putatively inanimate matter. As Abram construes it, the erotic (the workings of eros) constitutes a principle of fusion, of coupling or combining. In a passage that undertakes a genealogy of the self, Abram reflects that the “crystallizing sense of one’s body as a general locus of awareness does not arise on its own, but is accompanied by a dawning sense of the rudimentary otherness of the rest of the field of feelings. The earliest experience of selfhood, in other words, co-arises with the earliest experience of otherness” (38). If the self is a point from which the world and its tantalizing others are encountered, the two cannot be precisely coterminous. In any case, Abram outlines the ecological significance of love’s rhetoric. Another version of the interface between love and ecology, or the borderland between their lexical fields, is presented by Ernest Becker in The Denial of Death (1973). He writes, “Love…allows the collapse of the individual into the animal dimension without fear and guilt, but instead with trust and assurance that his distinctive inner freedom will not be negated by an animal surrender” (42). The “animal dimension” as he uses it here applies to the appetites and demands of fleshly existence. In contrast to Abram, Becker believes that “[t]he body represents determinism and boundness,” so it renders us “creatures … clawing and gasping for breath in a universe beyond our ken” (27). If some ecocritics object to the unscientific elements in Abram’s

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work, his celebration of merging or melding—of boundarylessness—has generally trumped Becker’s view of the angst generated by recognizing our kinship with all other animals, which means in turn acknowledging the inevitable frailties of the body. In a way, Abrams attends only to eros, whereas Becker addresses thanatos. On the other hand, Shakespeare works the interface of creation and destruction, of eros and thanatos, and in doing so confirms the intimate relationship between self-concepts and apprehensions of fame. As Antony attempts to recover from his disgrace at Actium, he courts fame, telling Cleopatra that he is determined to fight. He says, “if from the field I shall return once more / To kiss these lips, I will appear in blood; / I and my sword will earn our chronicle” (3.13.176–78). In seeking to write his own “chronicle,” Antony chases posterity, as if willfully inserting himself into the historical record. The curious phrase “in blood” suggests a renewal of spirit and self (or self-concept), a condition evidently made possible through the act of f ighting. Of course, the description also activates a brutal version of masculinity, in which blood and wounds attest to male courage. By this calculus—it’s not Shakespeare’s alone, though he gives it a special intensity—erotic entanglements prove more threatening, more self-annihilative, than the theaters of war. As Antony and Cleopatra wrap up their conversation, Antony vows, “I’ll make Death love me, for I will contend / Even with his pestilent scythe” (3.13.196–97). The proposed battle turns Death into a combatant/lover so that martial skirmishing supplants devotion to Cleopatra. Antony’s pledge to recover glory through fighting comes to nothing, of course, given that Caesar refuses him the opportunity. Instead, Antony’s chance at fame arises through the combined forces of love and death. Right before falling on his sword, Antony says, “My queen and Eros / Have by their brave instruction got upon me / A nobleness in record. But I will be / A bridegroom in my death, and run into ’t / As to a lover’s bed” (4.14.97–101). The words do not quite suit the deed, as Antony badly botches the job of stabbing himself, his death therefore agonizingly prolonged. The cries of Eros (directed at the servant) provide an ironically apt accompaniment to Antony’s demise, especially given that Cleopatra has essentially orchestrated the scene by having him summoned to her monument on the false report of her death. In contrast to Antony, Cleopatra more decisively takes control of her situation once she knows that defeat is assured. Understanding that Caesar will march her through the Roman streets, captive emblem of his own glory, she yearns for an alternate habitation, one that cements her permanent association with Egypt. Specifically, she instructs, “on Nilus’s mud / Lay me

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stark-naked, and let the water-flies / Blow me into abhorring! rather make / My country’s high pyramides my gibbet, / And hang me up in chains” (5.2.58–62). In this searing image, Cleopatra imagines herself naked, stripped of all symbols of power. Yet she invokes the iconicity of Egypt via the references to the mud of the Nile and the soaring pyramids, almost as if these associations themselves impart a kind of permanence to her. Subsequently, Shakespeare seems intent on bringing Cleopatra into his own moment, as when she preemptively resents being turned into a debasing spectacle. Cleopatra anticipates having to watch “Some squeaking Cleopatra boy [her] greatness / I’ th’ posture of a whore” (5.2.220–21). The obvious reference to a staple feature of early modern theatrical productions, the convention of male actors playing female roles, sets up the play’s final meditation on the unique endowments of the aesthetic realm. Because tragedy revels in cessation—in death—it would seem to be wholly in service to thanatos. Of course, the genre proves stubborn, exchanging cessation for a kind of permanence made available through aesthetic expression. Antony and Cleopatra exploits this dynamic, especially in its juxtaposition of the elemental and the symbolic. The former category houses those things belonging to the Real, including the material world, all its inhabitants, and the life-cycling/death-bringing processes that command attention throughout the play. This world, rendered shadowy through the distorting effects of representation, counters the Symbolic Order, the realm marked by linguistics and redolent with signs of lack, traces of an obliterated wholeness. Not incidentally, a different presumption (or perhaps fantasy) of wholeness pervades ecological discourse, whose explanatory schema, as Abram confirms, often posit teeming networks of cause and effect that enfold everything that exists. Such heuristic devices might be thought of as ecology writ large, as if the problem of meaning resolves via the assertion of an eco-providential design whose organizing principle is interconnectivity. As previously noted, the appeal of such narratives is easy to grasp; in my view, however, they simply do not engage with deep-rooted issues or psychological yearnings unique to humans. In any case, this tension between the fundamental demands and realities of organismic life and an answering desire to escape them structures Antony and Cleopatra, particularly in its handling of eros and thanatos. Awash in death, Antony and Cleopatra manages a riveting demonstration of the power of the abject while simultaneously positing counter-measures that palliate its effects. As Julia Kristeva explains in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982), things that menace “identity, system, [and] order” constitute the abject (4). She adds, “The corpse, seen without God and

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outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life” (4). Additionally, says Kristeva, “refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live” (3). Death and decay, ubiquitous and intrusive realities, continually disrupt life and throw meaning into chaos. Given its meticulous attention to dung, dirt, and the suggestive activity of worms, Antony and Cleopatra acknowledges abjection, though the play corroborates Kristeva’s point about the chasmic differences between representing death and directly witnessing its effects. As she explains, “A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death—a flat encephalograph, for instance—I would understand, react, or accept” (3). Conversely, sudden encounters with actual death or decay, such as a particular “item of food, a piece of filth, waste, or dung,” to borrow several of Kristeva’s examples, prompt a visceral, physical response, as if the body rebels at stark evidence of its own fate (2). Simulations of death, whether they reach us in the form of medical graphs, literary texts, or other cultural artifacts, will always make pale stand-ins for the formidable actuality. Nevertheless, aesthetic forms might still mitigate the power of the abject. Kristeva actually points toward this possibility when she offers a provocative yet tidy equation, identifying “the experience of want” as an Ur-sign of identity and adding that literature acts as its signifier, abjection its signified (5). Simply put, literature counters the persisting horror of mortality, especially its looming, entropic effects, precisely because it provides templates of meaning and orderliness that both acknowledge and fend off dissolution. In this sense, tragedy transforms the abject into the aesthetically pleasing. This possibility is emphasized to the point of caricature in Cleopatra’s haste to compose an exalting legend for Antony. She says, “His legs bestrid the ocean; his reared arm / Crested the world; his voice was propertied / As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends; / but when he meant to quail and shake the orb, / He was as rattling thunder” (5.2.81–85). Even Cleopatra herself recognizes the hyperbolic disingenuity of her lines. Still, the very attempt at chronicling Antony indicates the compensatory promise of aestheticizing. Or, to coopt the final line from Antony and Cleopatra, uttered by Caesar, tragedy brings about “High order” from “solemnity” (5.2.366). Fetishizing death, subjecting it to the taut control of tragic conventions, tames it. Additionally, memorializing lovers in a shared tomb—“No grave upon the earth shall clip in it / A pair so famous,” as Caesar says of the burial plans for Antony and Cleopatra—gives eros the edge over thanatos (5.2.359–60). In Shakespeare’s play (which might preserve a kernel of historical truth), the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra initially offer grim evidence of love’s

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insufficiency, especially when measured against the ravening appetites of a demanding state. Additionally, Shakespeare’s Antony (like his true-to-life predecessor) dies a quintessentially Roman death, falling on his sword; Cleopatra, as previously acknowledged, also devises a suicide that emphasizes her political loyalties. Whereas their suicides evoke their respective allegiances to Rome and Egypt, the postmortem version of Antony and Cleopatra (or rather, of Antony-and-Cleopatra, always limned as a unit) reasserts the primacy of eros, if only in the aesthetic realm. Along these lines, Antony and Cleopatra exposes the curious perversity of amatory discourse, the simple but crucial fact that memorable lovers are virtually always doomed. Furthermore, the play exploits an overlooked or too easily accepted quirk of tragedy. Its characters exist in a sacrif icial economy that offers perpetuity in a different realm—the domain of storytelling or aesthetics—as recompense for brutality and premature death.22 This form of regeneration, a compelling instance of art’s quarrel with nature, was not exactly new when Shakespeare engaged it. Indeed, as the chapter on his Sonnets acknowledges, in chasing permanence, Shakespeare revives a tradition that dates back to the ancient Greeks.23 In Shakespeare’s era, however, contemplations of mortality took on a new urgency. Simply put, the emerging self cultivated an inwardness and sense of uniqueness that amplified the pangs of ruminating on life’s fleetingness. This distillation might sound too easy, a mere recitation of the Latin phrase “ars longa, vita brevis.” Maybe this is the point: at its core, art lays bare the desire for continuance, a psychological need that follows from an awareness of humans’ inextricability from the natural world. Vis-à-vis the abiding strife between art and nature, Cleopatra caps her mythopoeic description of Antony by asserting, “Nature wants stuff / To vie strange forms with fancy; yet t’ imagine / An Antony were nature’s piece ‘gainst fancy, / Condemning shadows quite” (5.2.96–99). In this lovely tribute, she suggests that fancy, or the potency of the imagination, generally wins out over nature’s more limited creative output; yet the incomparable beauty of Antony, imagined as nature’s masterpiece, trumps art. Of course, the passage’s logic unravels, as Antony’s beauty is a byproduct of Cleopatra’s (that is, Shakespeare’s) poeticizing. Interestingly, Cleopatra’s eulogy for her lover indicates that 22 For a compelling account of Shakespeare’s insistence on mortal love (love that ends at death) in the Sonnets or plays such as Antony and Cleopatra, see Rami Targoff, Posthumous Love: Eros and the Afterlife in Renaissance England. 23 Lewis Hyde makes a lyrical case for the ancient and abiding desire for permanence, and the capability of the aesthetic realm to deliver on this goal, in The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World.

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beautiful dead men (like their female counterparts) make fitting subjects of versification.24 From its opening through its final act, Antony and Cleopatra maintains a relentless focus on death, though at times the subject is treated casually, even with irreverent mockery. A strain of misogyny infects this rhetoric. For instance, when Enobarbus learns of Fulvia’s death, he comforts Antony by reminding him that wives are eminently replaceable, advising, “If there were no more / women but Fulvia, then had you indeed, a cut, and / the case to be lamented. This grief is crowned with /consolation: your old smock brings forth a new petticoat,” (1.2.165–69). In terms that manage to be both insultingly domestic and bizarrely ecological, Enobarbus imagines a replacement for Fulvia, assigning the same expendability to women and scraps of cloth. In the same conversation with Antony, Enobarbus accuses Cleopatra of manipulative necro-theatrics, noting, “I do think there is mettle in death, which commits some loving act upon her, she / hath such a celerity in dying” (1.2.149–50). If this passage exploits the orgasm-as-death metaphor common in the period, it also anticipates the staging of Cleopatra’s suicide. By her own account, “immortal longings” compel her self-imposed death, an act for which she prepares by donning regal attire (5.2.281). Early modern apprehensions of suicide were in flux, as the traditional, Catholic understanding met the complicating narratives enabled by the rhetoric and values of Protestantism. Notably, for example, John Donne wrote in defense of suicide in Biathanatos, a text that has received remarkably scant attention. Biathanatos was likely written in 1608, just a year or so after Antony and Cleopatra’s first public performance, but it was only published posthumously and perhaps against Donne’s own wishes. In any case, Donne sifts through numerous authoritative treatises, from the Bible to works of classical antiquity, with the general aim of challenging the notion that suicide necessarily or automatically constitutes a sin or that it inherently violates the laws of nature, reason, and God. Approximately 150 years after Donne wrote Biathanatos, David Hume presented his own determinedly rational defense of suicide. Intent on liberating men from the yoke of “superstition,” Hume endorses a personal autonomy, a freedom of will, that justifies suicide (122). To counter assertions that suicide interferes with providential design, Hume cites it as the instigating agent of everything that “happens in the universe” (122). From this perspective, acting to end life is morally equivalent to acting on behalf of 24 Elisabeth Bronfen’s Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic, remains an essential resource for understanding the typical gendering and aestheticizing of corpses.

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its preservation. Although Hume at times promotes a utilitarian philosophy that seems to place humans outside the natural world, he variously evinces a remarkably egalitarian ethos, such as by suggesting, “the life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than an oyster” (122). Additionally, this eminent spokesman of the late Enlightenment writes, “When I am dead, the principle [sic] part of which I am composed will still perform their part in the universe, and will be equally useful in the grand fabric” (122–23). Hume advances a profoundly ecological vision—indeed, the very principle of diffusion or indistinction that powers early modern tragedy. Perhaps, then, Hume inadvertently reveals a subtle truth at the core of Enlightenment philosophy: the recognition of animal kinship and our own insignificance propels human efforts to separate from nature. In this sense, egalitarianism (in ecological discourse, indistinction or boundarylessness) is the problem, not our panacea. Antony and Cleopatra anticipates Hume’s arguments, as Shakespeare likewise acknowledges human insignificance and attempts to create a space, however slim or threatened, for agential action. Specifically, while the play links person and world, suggesting their shared envelopment in cycles of growth and decay, it ends with the paradoxical act of choosing death. In this way, drama takes on the power of ritual, indicating the deep need for what Caesar calls “solemnity” to fend off formidable evidence of the abject. Stated another way, Antony and Cleopatra shows how drama morphs (back) into ritual, offering rites of renown, passageways to permanent habitation in the aesthetic realm, a world sealed off from the dungy earthy.25 In Shakespeare’s play, the world (including its human inhabitants) conforms to Achille Mbembe’s description of the current state of “humanity as a whole,” determined by endless “swarming, proliferation, and the grafting of everything into nearly everything else” (41). Though he speaks to and for our contemporary world, Mbembe’s assessment aptly conveys the mutability of early modern selves, a phenomenon discernible in Antony and Cleopatra; again, however, the play launches a rearguard action against this very possibility. Mbembe wonders, “has this half-carrion and half recumbent ‘something’ [i.e., humanity] ever really been there, before us, except in the form of an extravagant carcass—at best, an at once elementary, originary, and unreserved struggle to escape the dust?” (41). Substituting “dust” for “dirt,” his lyrical meditation supplies a fitting encapsulation of the tidal 25 Analyses of and debates over the origins of drama in ritual are both long-standing and tenacious. For an updated overview, see the introduction to The Origins of Theater in Ancient Greece and Beyond: From Ritual to Drama, by Eric Csapo and Margaret C. Miller.

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logic of Antony and Cleopatra, which at once acknowledges but struggles to resist the human/humus connection. Viewed in this way, the self is rebellious and necessary—and ushered into being through the ritualized power of literary texts. With this in mind, the following chapter considers the formal revolt evident in The Duchess of Malfi, whereby Webster refuses to concede the importance of the “individual personality,” instead insisting relentlessly on humans’ (as anything’s) eventual fate as worm food. The encompassing vision, wherein all things are connected in one teeming cycle of growth, decay, and death, generates a hollowed-out eco-vision, wherein abjection reigns.

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Ravven, Heidi. The Self Beyond Itself: An Alternative History of Ethics, the New Brain Sciences, and the Myth of Free Will. New Press, 2013. Rhodes, Neil. “The Science of the Heart: Shakespeare, Kames and the EighteenthCentury Invention of the Human.” Posthumanist Shakespeares, edited by Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus, Palgrave MacMillan, 2012, pp. 23–40. Roller, Duane W. Cleopatra: A Biography. Oxford UP, 2010. Rooney, Sally. Conversations with Friends. Hogarth Press, 2018. Russo, Richard. “Imagining Jenny.” The Destiny Thief: Essays on Writing, Writers and Life, Vintage Books, 2018, pp. 131–53. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. 1979. Vintage Books, 1994. Schiff, Stacy. Cleopatra: A Life. Back Bay Books, 2010. Shakespeare, William. Antony and Cleopatra. The Complete Works of Shakespeare, edited by David Bevington, 7th ed., Pearson, 2014, pp. 1331–83. Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. The Complete Works of Shakespeare, edited by David Bevington, 7th ed., Pearson, 2014, pp. 293–332. Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Complete Works of Shakespeare, edited by David Bevington, 7th ed., Pearson, 2014, pp. 148–79. Targoff, Ramie. Posthumous Love: Eros and the Afterlife in Renaissance England. U of Chicago P, 2014. Watson, Robert N. Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance. U of Pennsylvania P, 2006. Willis, Deborah. Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England. Cornell UP, 1995. Woodbridge, Linda. English Revenge Drama: Money, Resistance, Equality. Cambridge UP, 2014.

4. Wrestling with the Eco-Self in The Duchess of Malfi Abstract This chapter reassesses the macabre nihilism of The Duchess of Malfi, showing how the distinctive chill of the Websterian universe derives from a relentlessly materialist conception of humanness. Enforcing this definition of the human, the play epitomizes early modern tragedy’s reluctant ecology, which concedes but laments humans’ indistinguishability from the rest of nature. Webster offers a provocative meditation on this theme, so his play anticipates the hypermaterialist hegemony currently governing academic work and pervading the varied domains of popular culture. By negative example, Webster confirms the necessity of harmonizing self and world so that the former is recognizably coterminous with the latter yet capable of periodically claiming some distance from it. Keywords: Ecocriticism; eco-self; indistinction; materialism; Webster; Duchess

The decision to include John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi (1623) in a genealogy of the eco-self might strike some readers as misguided or perverse, given this playwright’s relentless focus on fragmentation and decay, which puts the self under siege.1 As T. S. Eliot reminds us in “Whispers of Immortality,” “Webster was much possessed by death / And saw the skull beneath the skin” (1–2).2 In this provocative passage, Eliot accords Webster something akin to x-ray vision, an ability to pierce flimsy exteriors and see the truth—rotting and putrefaction—lodged within a fragile dermal coating. As this chapter 1 The date of 1623 refers to the play’s first publication (approximately a decade after its first performance). See Forker’s Skull Beneath the Skin for an overview of The Duchess of Malfi’s performance history. 2 Eliot’s memorable phrase “skull beneath the skin” subsequently appeared as the title of a mystery novel by P.D. James, and of course it provided the title for Forker’s monograph, cited above.

Gruber, E.D., The Eco-Self in Early Modern English Literature. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463728881_ch04

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seeks to demonstrate, The Duchess of Malfi constitutes a reliable index of psychological preoccupations precisely because it obsesses over fleshly frailty, concerns that acquire a fresh resonance in our own era of hypermaterialism. With this in mind, Webster’s play enables certain refinements to the eco-self. At times, as Eliot intimates, Webster’s necro-obsession verges on madness. Ironically, however, psychic dis-ease does not originate in a fever-swamp of delusions or hallucinations.3 Rather, as The Duchess of Malfi demonstrates, trouble ensues from a putatively realistic apprehension, a de-mystified, demythologized version of humanness understood to be precisely coterminous with embodiment. Notably, the declining status of the human paralleled the increasing vulnerability of the natural world, plagued as it was by a series of interlinked crises. 4 Given the rampant environmental insecurities of the era, including hunger, disease, and deforestation, a blazing awareness of vulnerability makes sense. Webster pursues this motif to its extremes by exploring the concept of indistinction, which predicates permeable or unbounded selves. In The Duchess of Malfi, the Malcontent, Bosola, cogently outlines the problem, asserting, “Though we are eaten up of lice, and worms, / And though continually we bear about us / A rotten and dead body, we delight / To hide it in rich tissue” (2.1.57–60). Once again, the ubiquitous worm emphasizes the un-exceptionalism of humans, along with the body’s proneness to debilitation and decay. Throughout the play, Webster exploits the unique vantage point of the Malcontent, typically an intimate outsider who shakes up various complacencies. In this case, Bosola’s challenge to received wisdom spirals out from the text, into our own contemporary moment. That is, Bosola evinces ecological awareness, insisting upon humans’ thorough embedment in the natural world. But as we have observed in Doctor Faustus (c. 1588–92) and Antony and Cleopatra (c. 1606–07), respective focal points of the two preceding chapters, this awareness sometimes incites despair. Perhaps this is why Bosola subtly divides putrefying (hence rebellious) flesh from the sentient selves who vainly try to mask the inevitable. In this light, dualistic thinking (segregating mind 3 In “John Webster and the Dead: Reading The Duchess of Malfi’s Eschatology,” Stephen Marche argues that the play transcends chaotic morbidity via its orientation to the afterlife, an emphasis in tune with the period’s thriving discourse of eschatology. His against-the-grain reading is engaging, but the notion that “God is about to speak” throughout the play is contradicted by the lie Bosola tells as the Duchess is dispatched to death (89). 4 For an insightful account of the environmental insecurities in the early modern period, see Bruce Boehrer, Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama. Its one liability, for my purposes, is the omission of a separate chapter on Webster.

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from body, person from world) should be understood as a compensatory maneuver, a means of coping with morbid psychologizing. Bosola’s complaint about bodily decay exposes the dark side of indistinction, demonstrating that a thoroughgoing materialism will not necessarily yield a satisfying definition of humanness. The issue, most directly engaged by ecocriticism and in the related field of ecopsychology, is where to locate the boundary between self and world.5 In his taut exploration of selfhood, Webster confronts this question. Although following sections make use of some contemporary psychological insights, it is crucial to emphasize how the issues addressed here and throughout speak to early modern England’s changing zeitgeist, as these insights draw upon what I think of as the “biomechanics of selfhood,” or in-built processing systems that underlie the experiential domains of life and govern perception and the sensorium. More specifically, this chapter engages the abiding early modern obsession with the relationship between interiors or exteriors, a concern often manifesting in the epistemological problem of distinguishing seeming from being. I share David Hillman’s assessment that “the project of early modern England was the renegotiation of “inside/ outside boundaries” (310). Focusing on “the figure of enclosure,” Hillman traces the era’s systematic effort to delineate interiors from exteriors across multifarious sociocultural domains. He suggests, “The division of both the self and the world into an interior and an exterior is a necessary step in the construction of a coherent sense of identity, particularly in its formative stages” (299). The “coherent sense of identity” referenced here applies to a specific demographic, a subset of humans that emerged in early modern Europe and England.6 Hillman also reminds us of the early modern period’s unprecedented interest in, and corresponding ability to advance, the study of anatomy, a discipline that offers uniquely intimate access to the inner depths of the human body. Of course, the early modern anatomists did not always see the inner workings of the body with twenty-twenty vision, as Thomas Laqueur observes.7 In any case, in its obsession with internal bodily processes, The Duchess of Malfi directly addresses tensions between surface and depth, inside and outside. Moreover, Webster reminds us that knowledge always exacts a cost, usually the relinquishing of cherished beliefs or assumptions. In this sense, he presciently articulates the implications of 5 For a lucid overview of ecopsychology, especially its attention to the issue of how or where to locate the boundary between self and world, see James Hillman, “A Psyche the Size of the Earth: A Psychological Forward.” 6 See especially Joseph Henrich’s analyses of the emergence of WEIRD humans. 7 Laqueur assesses the interplay of “sex” and “gender” in Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud.

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an inchoate worldview, one premised on a thoroughgoing materiality that evacuates concepts such as soul or mind. In this respect, Webster speaks not simply to but also for our own moment. Ultimately, the chill of Webster’s world originates in absence, the notable exclusion of a robustly imagined inner life or even the story-making self that often populates tragedy’s conclusion. That is, the genre frequently ends with the plea or command that its events cycle on endlessly, through periodic iteration. The Duchess of Malfi turns this promise back on itself, prematurely ousting its eponymous protagonist, with only residual traces, ghostly whispers, of her presence persisting beyond death. If Antony and Cleopatra borrows the sacralizing power of ritual, indicating the special function of the aesthetic realm, The Duchess of Malfi brings us into a hollow world of fractured rites. All is fragile, “rotten and dead,” as Bosola laments; nothing endures, so that ordinary life is indistinguishable from a state of abjection. The very extremity or absolutism of this stance indicates the necessity of a compromise-self, a version of humanness alert to biological realities but willing to concede some space for intangibles as well as the possibility of creating lasting fictional worlds, landscapes repopulated by each succeeding generation of readings. Perhaps, then, a hint of perversity accounts for Webster’s inclusion here, as his play offers a cautionary tale, a negative example, that ends up endorsing the possibilities of the eco-self, particularly as antidote to an unalloyed materialism.

The Eco-Self as Compromise As previous chapters indicate, the eco-self takes a both/and approach to questions of identity, acknowledging the biological or evolutionary dimensions of experience while simultaneously insisting upon certain uniquely human qualities. The self becomes a site of contestation during the early modern period, given that the original meaning of “individual,” denoting the person’s thorough embedment in the surrounding environment (constituted by the physical world as well as the social order), was in a state of flux.8 Robert N. Watson identifies the earlier meaning of “individual” as an “ecology of selfhood.”9 Dispersibility, a capacity to be absorbed into the environment, 8 In The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606, James Shapiro discusses the evolution of “individual.” 9 Robert N. Watson presents an intriguing discussion of “the ecology of self” in an essay that appears in Ecocritical Shakespeare, arguing that Shakespeare evinces a radical skepticism about human autonomy.

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governed this model of being. This trait could elicit pleasure, but in early modern tragedy, as both Doctor Faustus and Antony and Cleopatra demonstrate, it functions as a wellspring of anxiety. For many early modern ecocritics, including Watson, the dispersible self holds great potential because it redresses humans’ estrangement from the natural world.10 The essays collected in The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, edited by Jean E. Feerick and Vin Nardizzi (2012), turn up abundant examples of boundarylessness that show how humans were not neatly differentiated from other animals or plants. This work extends insights promulgated by Gail Kern Paster in The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (1993). Though Paster was writing more than a decade ahead of the ecocritical surge in scholarship on this period’s literature, she skillfully lays out salient issues for this approach, particularly with respect to the self/world dynamic. Paster points out that apprehensions of corporeal experience vary widely across distinct historical periods (and they are not necessarily homogeneous when one takes a synchronic view). She also brings out implications of Galenic science, especially as these relate to the notion of “fungibility,” whereby “bodily fluids turn into one another,” and related “processes of alimentation, excretion, menstruation, and lactation were understood as homologous” (9). Selves are permeable, messy, prone to leakage. By now, Paster’s arguments have been mainstreamed, as only a dissident minority cleaves to the notion of a bounded, autonomous self. But perhaps we have overplayed the insistence on dispersibility or unboundedness, hallmarks of our own hypermaterialist age. As the grim lines from Bosola insist, the prospect of fusing with the surrounding environment, such as by serving as host organisms or the source of alimentary satisfaction for lice and worms, is not necessarily an auspicious one. Our current moment, marked as it is by a global pandemic, provides an updated context in which to assess the phenomenon of boundarylessness. Specifically, the novel coronavirus promiscuously uses humans to perpetuate itself, so we must dispense with any illusions of our separation from or transcendence of nature’s claims on us. On the other hand, the devastation caused by our plague likely amplifies the need to find some way of claiming or reasserting a space apart from the teeming world. The eco-self offers just 10 Versions of the eco-self abound among ecocritics and across environmentalist discourse. For a sociobiological perspective, see E. O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis and The Meaning of Human Existence. In Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame, Cary Wolfe argues in favor of a transformed biopolitical state defined by its egalitarian treatment of all species.

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such an alternative, since it embraces the biological and the psychological. Borrowing categories employed by Ernest Becker in The Denial of Death (1943), we need to synthesize “nature’s values,” encompassing the corporeal and “human values,” comprising the cognitive or introspective (31). We should also be wary of over-correcting, as the intervening centuries between this moment and the publication of The Duchess of Malfi demonstrate. That is, Webster’s era was heading toward a new version of the human, one predicated on the separatist politics, the subject/object relations, so often associated with Descartes. Ultimately, this meant that the dispersible self was explicitly rejected in the succeeding eras. Unsurprisingly, given materialism’s current influence, Descartes’s views are now subject to critique from scholars in a variety of disciplines. From an ecocritical perspective, there are good reasons to take Descartes to task: he estranges mind from body, person from world, as if nature itself were simply an afterthought, an incidental facet of human experience. Moreover, Descartes’s conception of animals as soulless machines justified the vivisectionist practices he advocated, which were part of formalized scientific investigation for some time.11 In this sense, Descartes weaponized the concept of “mind” or “soul,” using it to exalt humans precisely at the expense of the non-human world. The anti-Cartesian trend informs current manifestations of the dispersible self; these iterations tend to champion materialism and ignore or reject intangibles such as mind or spirit. For instance, in Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, Stacy Alaimo advocates the concept of “trans-corporeality” to insist upon the self’s dispersal throughout the world. Physicist Alan Lightman provides another way to understand humans’ affinities with the rest of nature, observing, “Atoms … unified the world. A leaf and a human being are made of the same stuff: take them apart, and we find identical atoms of hydrogen and oxygen and carbon” (36). Lightman poetically asserts broad kinship across everything that exists, but this stance, defined in the preceding chapter as “an ethos of molecularity,” is not necessarily beneficial or viable. As I have previously argued, current ecological theories court Chaos, that primordial space of energy, potentiality, and non-differentiation described by Hesiod and Ovid. In this sense, recent trends recuperate the principle of diffusion that portends disaster—and 11 In Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England, Erica Fudge elucidates distinctions between pre- and post-Cartesian conceptions of “other” animals. Also see Laurie Shannon’s The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales for useful discussions of human/animal relationships in the period.

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demands redressal—in Webster’s play. The Duchess of Malfi’s defiant break with tragic conventions, especially the premature murder of its eponymous hero and her echolalic return (an ironic “whisper of immortality”), insists that nothing is impervious to rot. Webster extracts dramatic potential from this position, setting before us a nihilistic world presided over by a Malcontent who grimly enforces a materialist ethos that disclaims his own and others’ agency. In sum, Webster simultaneously promotes and laments atomism—everything is subject to fragmentation or dispersal—so we might view him as a reluctant disciple of Lucretius. Confirmation of the need to reclaim or retain certain intangibles, thus tempering the materialist hegemony, comes from a surprising source: António R. Damásio’s Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (1994). A neuroscientist and practicing surgeon, Damásio elucidates the ways in which Cartesian thought misconstrued the workings of mind, such as by divorcing feeling or emotion from cognition. Nevertheless, Damásio ends with a plea, which is that we find a way to retain “spirit,” moving it from a “nowhere pedestal” to “a somewhere place” (252). Failing this, Damásio says, “we will be far better off leaving Descartes’ error uncorrected” (252). Psychologist Warren Colman outlines a promising via media. At once revisiting and transforming Descartes’s cogito, Colman cites the generative powers of the imagination as the hallmark of humanness. Colman frames his analysis around rather famous lines uttered by Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “Oh God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and / count myself a king of infinite space, / were it not that I have bad dreams” (2.2.255–57). Colman offers a thoughtful reading of the passage: “Through this strange admixture of a self that is bounded in the nutshell of the body and an extended mind, through which we are kings of infinite space, it is possible for us each to become part of one another, sharing a world in common as permeable, environmentally-embedded, embodied selves” (324). Harmonizing insights from biology and psychology, Colman articulates a vital aspect of the eco-self. Some ecofeminist work likewise offers an important perspective on the necessity of maintaining or allowing for certain boundaries between self and world, or among disparate selves. The significance of this stance finds cogent articulation in an essay by Wendy Donner, “Self and Community in Environmental Ethics,” which promotes a version of the “self-in-relation” to others (379).12 Rather than positing a diffuse world of unbounded bodies, 12 Donner builds on the work of Val Plumwood, especially the latter’s “Nature, Self, and Gender: Feminism, Environmental Philosophy, and the Critique of Rationalism.” Both writers indicate the necessity of balancing individual and collective interests.

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Donner outlines the possibility of merging with and retreating from the world (and all its other inhabitants). Webster tests the limits of the permeable or diffused self, as his Duchess persistently struggles to claim a limited autonomy, an agential freedom embodied in the ability to choose a husband for herself. This act of assertion requires disengagement from the familial or communal expectations that otherwise govern her actions. Although Webster does not really advocate on behalf of gender equity, his complex depiction of the Duchess intimates the necessity of an individuated self, an entity capable of moral choice.

Reclaiming Moral Agency in an Era of Hypermaterialism From its ancient roots through various contemporary manifestations, tragedy emphasizes moral choice: deliberate actions, rather than random clusters of misfortune, generate suffering and doom. Or, as preceding chapters also maintain, volition is story-friendly. Admittedly, this might be changing in our current era, judging by phenomena such as the rise of the “neuronovel.”13 In any case, Webster and his contemporaries must have experienced daily reminders of the insufficiency of choice given the abundance of things outside their power to control. Nonetheless, early modern tragedy plays up consequential choices, correlating actions with their outcomes. Suffering might not be deserved (or it might be out of proportion to one’s missteps, as Lear insists), but it does not usually arise through randomness or luck. The Duchess of Malfi both confuses and confirms the volitional bent of tragedy. Webster highlights the problem when the Duchess courts Antonio. Initially, she tells him, “I am making my will, as ‘tis fit prices should,” (1.2.291). Here, “will” denotes the binding legal document that ensures the orderly transition of property or wealth from one generation to the next. In this sense, making a will entails preparing for death. But the Duchess is also “making her will,” or asserting her desires and intentions (both synonyms for will), by wooing Antonio. Exploiting the semantic richness of “will,” the scene links eros and thanatos, forecasting the disastrous outcomes of the Duchess’s bold actions. Moreover, in the same encounter with Antonio, the protracted 13 The “neuronovel” refers to fiction that explicitly incorporates current neurological research, especially that segment of it that disallows concepts such as “agency” or “free will.” In “The Rise of the Neuronovel,” a concise distillation of the subgenre, Marco Roth suggests that this popular form paradoxically heralds “the novel’s diminishing purview.” The neuronovel is both symptom and generator of our current age of hypermaterialism.

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courtship, the Duchess laments her predicament. She complains, “The misery of us that are born great! / We are forced to woo because none dare woo us” (1.2.351–52). Her statement confirms the dual influences of gender and class, which complicate power dynamics within intimate relationships. The paradox of being “forced to woo,” or required to adopt the position of the choosing subject, encapsulates Webster’s complex treatment of agency. In blunt terms, the Duchess incites the cycle of doom by the act of choosing her husband, only to be yanked back into the orbit of her brothers, whose gravitational pull she is powerless to resist. At key moments, The Duchess of Malfi illustrates the dangers of abrogating responsibility for one’s actions. For instance, having accidentally killed Antonio (by mistaking him for the intended target), Bosola disavows his guilt. He complains, “We are merely the stars’ tennis balls, struck and banded / Which way please them” (5.4.53–54). Invoking an ostensibly “higher” power, Bosola deflects guilts and undercuts the very possibility of moral agency. Deferring to the empyreal realm, Bosola might seem to be indulging in a quaint fatalism. But our present moment’s explanations of human behavior rely on an updated version of fatalism: acquiescence to the notion that involuntary neural activity generates all human actions. Sam Harris proffers an extreme version of this argument in a book clearly aimed at a popular audience (and therefore enjoying a wide readership). Opening with an account of a brutal crime, Harris mentions that his sympathies are with the assailants, given that they did not choose to act as they did.14 This stance— “my neurons made me do it”—preempts agency and ethical responsibility, enforcing a rigidly deterministic materialism as fatalistic in its way as the position outlined by Bosola. As previous chapters acknowledge, political scientist Jane Bennett’s work has emerged as paradigmatic of current forms of materialism. Championing “vibrant materialism,” Bennett rejects the “life-matter binary” and advocates a “pluriverse … traversed by heterogeneities that are continually doing things” (92, 122). Of course, this alters the dynamics of “self” and “world,” such as whether or how the former acts on (and is therefore accountable to) the latter. Bennett favors the concept of “distributed agency,” precisely because it adopts “a hesitant attitude toward assigning singular blame” (33). Rather than presuming “an effect obedient to a determinant,” says Bennett, “one finds circuits in which effect and cause alternate position 14 Harris’s concise refutation of moral choice or agency is presented in Free Will. My aim is to find a compromise, a means of acknowledging biological traits without jettisoning concepts of autonomy and moral responsibility.

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and redound on each other” (33). Ultimately, Bennett promotes reverence, even awe, for existence itself, provided this is always understood in terms of systematized relations. While this perspective offers a necessary corrective to anthropocentrism, it cannot address uniquely human endowments, such as the capacity to make moral decisions and to be held accountable for them. Webster addresses the complexities associated with moral reasoning, which require deft negotiation of individual and communal interests, by emphasizing Bosola’s damaging envy. As Antonio observes, Bosola “rails at those things which he wants— / Would be as lecherous, covetous, or proud, / Bloody or envious as any man, / If he had means to be so” (1.1.25–28). Viewed in terms favorable to Bosola, disaffection arises from vast inequities in the distribution of wealth or other desirable social assets. Yet he does not advocate on behalf of the disenfranchised. Instead, he indulges envy’s familiar illogic, whereby another’s good fortune is reason enough for bitter discontentment. Ovid’s Metamorphoses skillfully conveys this process when an angry Minerva pays a visit to the goddess Envy. When Minerva arrives, she finds Envy “Eating the flesh of snakes, the proper food / To nourish venom with” (2.769–70). Affronted by Minerva’s luminous beauty, Envy is “Suffused with poison, and she never laughs / Except when watching pain; she never sleeps, / Too troubled by anxiety; if men / Succeed, she fails; consumes, and is consumed, / Herself her punishment” (2.778–81). Webster channels Ovid, using Bosola to demonstrate the corrosive effects of a relentlessly comparative mindset. If Bosola’s predatory covetousness underscores the malicious workings of envy, the play also subtly urges reconsideration of envy’s seemingly benign cousin, empathy.15 While their ethical implications appear to differ markedly, both envy and empathy entail acts of self-transport. In both scenarios, the self is cast onto, or imagined in tandem with, another. As biologist Frans de Waal demonstrates, the capacity for perspective-taking, or empathizing, features in various “ultrasocial” species, including humans and other primates. Deliberately countering the principles of the Age of Reason, de Waal cites empathy as the key to a new era of justice and equity, expanded to include non-humans. Empathy, however, sometimes proves unruly, arguably because of its kinship with envy. Interestingly, in the examples de Waal cites, certain hyper-social primates closely monitor their peers, at times meting out violent or even lethal punishments when they perceive an 15 For an excellent overview of empathy’s potential liabilities, see Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion.

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unequal distribution of treats or rewards.16 The memorable Malcontents of early modern drama, including Bosola, confirm that other-directedness, a kind of unboundedness, could generate malice as readily as good will.

Lupine Anxieties The perspective-taking implicit in envy or empathy pervades The Duchess Malfi, as the play repeatedly interrogates selfhood. To this end, Webster employs a common rhetorical gambit by using animals as explanatory devices for human behavior. Bosola, for example, articulates his straitened circumstances by claiming that “hawks” and “dogs” are better compensated for their “service” (1.1.59–69). He vows to “thrive some way,” likening his situation to that of “black-birds” which “fatten best in hard weather” (1.1.38). In these passages, subjectivity becomes knowable through recourse to the non-human world. Figuring humanness in terms of various other animals demonstrates our capacity for projection, which is really a form of selfreplication. We might never acquire intimate knowledge of “what it is like to be a bat,” but as Thomas Nagel’s classic essay reminds us, the key is the imaginative work necessitated in asking the question.17 This is an activity with both cognitive and affective implications, and the creative leaps it requires are—so far as we know—proprietarily human. Currently, ecocritics tend to strike out at difference vis-à-vis humans and other animals, instead emphasizing our non-exceptionalism. Assumptions of human uniqueness have justified certain kinds of environmental destruction or the mistreatment and slaughter of various animals, so challenging the “discourse of speciesism,” to borrow a phrase from Cary Wolfe, makes sense.18 But I am not certain that dispensing with categories (e.g., distinctions among species) will bring about the egalitarian order Wolfe desires. Alternatively, it is possible that a thoroughly democratized world is itself a vision of privilege, borne of the willingness to concede an exalted position that has never been available to all. That this elevated 16 See De Waal’s Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society, for compelling examples of empathy across a variety of primates along with documented cases of “retributive justice” in the non-human world. 17 Nagel’s “What Is It Like to be a Bat?” identif ies the generative work of imagination and consciousness as quintessentially human. 18 Wolfe writes prolifically of animal rights, or human/non-human relations. See especially his Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory, which critiques the hierarchization of species.

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status has typically been premised on illusory differences (such as an absolute split between humans and other animals) does not diminish its power. Notably, in The Duchess of Malfi Bosola lays out the unsettling possibilities of sameness, whereby humans are not distinguished from other animals. He reflects, “we account it ominous / If nature do produce a colt, or lamb / A fawn, or goat, in any limb resembling / A man, and fly from’t as a prodigy. / Man stands amazed to see his deformity / In any other creature but himself” (2.1.52–57). Here, animal bodies mimic human forms to foreboding effect. Webster’s use of animal motifs crescendos in his depiction of lycanthropy, whereby the human morphs into the wolf or werewolf. Ferdinand enters this diseased psychic state upon receiving confirmation of his sister’s death. The Duchess of Malfi rehearses the familiar signs of lycanthropy, a disorder whose symptomology remains consistent from the ancient world to virtually the present day.19 The lycanthrope has elicited diverse responses; Charlotte F. Otten collates the varied historical perspectives in A Lycanthropy Reader: Werewolves in Western Culture (1986). In particular, she contrasts ancient depictions of the werewolf with their medieval descendants; in the former, the hybrid creatures embody human tendencies toward violence, whereas in the latter “werewolves … were the victims of domestic plotting” (8). In The Duchess of Malfi, the lycanthrope reverts to its ancient roots, representing the savage appetites latent in the human. The physician summoned to treat Ferdinand explains that those “possessed” by this condition “imagine / Themselves to be transformed into wolves” (5.2.8, 10). The Doctor adds that Ferdinand likened himself to a wolf, save for this distinction: “a wolf’s skin was hairy on the out-side, / His on the in-side;” (5.2.17–18). Viewing himself as an inverted wolf, Ferdinand recognizes his own dark passenger, the repository of violence or savagery lodged within him. In Freudian terms, of course, he has confronted the id, and in Jungian terms, the shadow. Whether lycanthropy is understood in religious/spiritual terms or through recourse to scientif ic/medical definitions, it blurs the boundary between human and wolf.20 Psychologist Richard Noll describes lycanthropy as a “clinical phenomenon in which myth, fantasy, and reality converge,” so it compels us to examine “the 19 In a collaborative essay regarding modern manifestations of lycanthropy, psychiatrists Frida G. Surawicz and Richard Banta point out the consistency of symptoms associated with this condition, whether considering ancient accounts of it or those recorded in the late twentieth century. 20 Brett D. Hirsch’s reading of lycanthropy in The Duchess of Malfi specifies Webster’s “medical” (rather than “supernatural”) approach to this topic.

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psychological significance of the peculiar form that the symptoms of this disorder manifests—the transformation of humans into animals” (92). Noll believes that “the legend of the lycanthrope has symbolized the dual nature of humankind,” adding that it reveals a “primal, bestial side of the human animal” (92). This stance helps to explain the potency of animal images or symbols, but such devices are important exclusively for what they reveal about human nature. In contrast to Noll’s position, Robert Eisler’s posthumously published study Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism, and Lycanthropy (1951) challenges the traditional hierarchy of human and animal, principally by observing how various non-human primates display comparatively more peaceful (i.e., civilized) behavior than is readily observable in our species. For instance, Eisler lauds the “non-jealous, non-fighting …. Central American howler monkey,” favorably contrasting this animal with “the jealous, sexually combatant [human] male” (30–31). Although some of Eisler’s claims seem more mythopoeic than scientific, evolutionary theory clearly influences his approach. He offers the intriguing possibility that human phylogenesis forces a confrontation with the feral. As he puts it, humans moved “from the fruit-gathering herds of ‘finders’ to the lupine pack of carnivorous hunters,” a development he refers to as a “lupine travesty” (34, 36). In his estimation, humans aped wolves, thereby becoming more bloodthirsty and less cooperative. In effect, Eisler charts the fall of the self: the ostensibly serene conditions enjoyed by “frugivorous man” yield to the adversarial model instantiated by those wilder humans whose existence increasingly depended upon killing and consuming other animals. Eisler’s work is instructive not for its scientific acumen but because, in countering the progress narrative that sometimes attaches to evolution, it offers an alternate possibility for understanding the relationship between humans and other animals. At first glance, Webster’s handling of lycanthropy preserves the human/ brute split articulated by Noll. Yet the psychology of projection complicates the issue: lycanthropes such as Ferdinand do not so much discover the beast within as displace their own bloodlust onto the lupine world. Wolves become a psychological necessity, a means to confront the capacity for savagery. Additionally, Ferdinand’s descent into lycanthropy happens retrospectively; that is, his lupine self emerges only after he has commanded his sister’s murder. By our legal terminology, Ferdinand is a “cold-blooded” lycanthrope, one whose metamorphosis occurs after orchestrating an act of surpassing cruelty. Accordingly, Webster emphasizes that the savagely destructive appetites are of human rather than lupine origin.

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In her reading of lycanthropy in The Duchess of Malfi, Lynn Enterline observes that uncertainty over where to locate the boundary between oneself and another propels psychic crisis. Ferdinand’s “melancholia” has physiological effects: the body fails to act as a reliable barrier, so it “no longer guarantees the difference between male and female” (Enterline 303). Thus, Webster dramatizes the calamitous possibilities of the dispersible self. In this way, his play deliberately counters the “ecology of the self.” Generic conventions predict whether the fragmenting or dispersible self generates pleasure or pain. In comedy, which arcs toward the fulfillment of desire, traversable boundaries between selves are a necessity. While tragedy (including Webster’s) often features erotic tensions, it also emphasizes the specificity of selfhood. The two positions are not necessarily antithetical. Watson might well be correct (vis-à-vis early modern and twenty-f irst century selves) that the “boundaries of selfhood” are always “illusory” (34). But I would argue that such illusions are indispensable, the precondition for navigating the world. As Webster demonstrates, the significance of lycanthropy derives from our “deep need for animal symbols,” which is the elegantly simple premise of S. K. Robisch’s Wolves and the Wolf-Myth in American Literature (3). This need speaks to the complexities of subjectivity, the process previously described here as a capacity for self-replication. As Robisch cautions, certain patterns of figuration likely ignited fears about wolves and contributed to the rampaging assaults waged on this animal. The solution is not avoidance of lupine metaphors. Rather, we should resist killing the metaphor by confusing allegorical wolves with their real-life counterparts, a distinction Robisch meticulously addresses. Still, the non-human world powers the imagination, so I accept Claude Levi-Strauss’s statement that animals are essential to human cognition, as he suggests in Totemism. The Löwenmensch, the Lion Man statuette consisting of a human body and a lion’s head, corroborates Levi-Strauss’s point. This artifact, likely created forty thousand years ago, reveals “a mind capable of imagining new concepts rather than simply reproducing real forms,” as Jill Cook observes (30). In enabling this generative work, and not because we pursued, killed, and consumed them, animals made us human.21 As ever, perceived difference proves crucial to the fashioning of (human) identity. 21 See Paul Shepard, The Others: How Animals Made Us Human, for an argument about the ways in which predation assures humanness. Shepard cites the dual menaces of the rise of agriculture and the demise of hunting as catalysts of our current woeful situation, though he tends to naturalize sociopolitical hierarchies.

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Reckoning with Space-Time Researchers in a variety of disciplines have challenged the boundary between humans and animals, often by identifying superior capabilities belonging to members of the latter group.22 I appreciate the rationale for such moves, but it is not necessarily true that the eradication of difference between human and non-human populations leads to sound environmental policies or a sustainable future. In my view, it is a mistake to downplay the importance of self-reflective consciousness, long recognized (though now sometimes reviled) as a quintessentially human trait. The sense of existing in time enables this expansive inner life, so a workable iteration of the eco-self must address temporality. Moreover, as previously acknowledged, a ubiquitous fascination with the relationship between inner and outside dominates early modern discourse so that this “spatial metaphor,” as Hillman terms it, undergirds the period’s conceptual schema (300). Admittedly, this is a sharp turn from the preceding section, as I ask readers to pivot from a consideration of the corporeal, even bestial, to the metaphysical. But, after all, Webster’s play contains multitudes, so it calls for an equally capacious critical sensibility. Additionally, the eco-self deliberately encompasses two realms, the physical and the intangible, so it, too, cries out for multidimensional analysis. With these points in mind, this section seeks to illuminate Webster’s complex grappling with time and the attendant implications for selfhood. Time encompasses human experience but eludes our ken, with its familiar strangeness acknowledged by writers from St. Augustine to Stephen Hawking.23 Philosophers affirm rather than resolve the problem when they mention that time belongs to the “manifest image”: apprehension of it arises through theoretical reflections on ordinary experience, yet understanding is at best partial and sometimes mired in falsity.24 The ancient Greeks variously defined time as an illusion (the position staked out by Parmenides) or the very medium of life (the view favored by Heraclitus). Parmenides champions permanence, whereas for Heraclitus, as James Harrington acknowledges, “everything is radically new and different at every moment, including the self” (6). This debate, which can be distilled to being 22 James Hillman skillfully summarizes this trend in his overview of ecopsychology. 23 Augustine’s Confessions includes his much-discussed reflection on the elusiveness of time. And Stephen Hawking has written his own remarkably accessible treatise on time, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. 24 Harrington’s Time: A Philosophical Introduction and Adrian Bardon’s Brief History of the Philosophy of Time address the common-sense appeal of time, the way that events seem, so assuredly, to progress from the now into the future.

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vs. becoming, finds hospitable ground in the varied landscapes of literature, given that narrative locates “events in an unfolding time-course,” as David Herman writes (5). Irrespective of genre, narrative—like life—becomes comprehensible, then meaningful, as it is parsed into segments of time. For instance, Bosola’s despairing view of life as progressive decay amounts to a distorted Heraclitean perspective, which might be thought of as an ethos of un-becoming. Because Webster emphasizes time, process, and change, the Bakhtinian concept of the chronotope, adapted from Albert Einstein, proves relevant to The Duchess of Malfi. In Bakhtin’s useful distillation, the chronotope constitutes “the intrinsic interconnectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (40). Examples include the “public square” for ancient Greeks or the “soil of the Roman family” (Bakhtin 135–37).25 It is important to note the portability of Bakhtin’s explanatory schema, the way it speaks to perceptual and experiential abilities that migrate across distinct areas and geopolitical spaces. Chronotopes lend meaningful shape and scope to widely varying literary (and actual) worlds. The intellectual dynamism of the early modern period likely derives, in part, from the shake-up of long-established chronotopes and the ensuing angst produced by the burgeoning perception that time itself was subject to redefinition.26 For instance, in Studies in Human Time (1956), Georges Poulet contrasts medieval and Renaissance conceptions of time. In the latter he discerns a new attitude, the perception that “each lived moment” had a “precarious and fugitive character” (10). In Poulet’s estimation, the retooled perception of time, a salient feature of the Renaissance, accounts for the “essential anguish of man” and also manages to convey “the joy of being in time” (10). The dual effects of time, Poulet’s oscillating surges of joy and anguish, command attention in dramatic works. As a fleshly genre, drama necessarily addresses constraints of time and space and the attendant effects on particular bodies, as Brian Richardson argues in “Drama and Narrative.” In The Duchess of Malfi, provocative instantiations of this theme involve the capacity of one body to “stand in” for another. In one such instance, Ferdinand surreptitiously enters the Duchess’s quarters and hears the wifely disclosures she had intended for Antonio, who has just exited the room. 25 Müller’s “Notes toward an Ecological Conception of Bakhtin’s ‘Chronotope’” outlines the ecocritical significance of the chronotope. Craig Brandist’s compendious study, The Bakhtin Circle: Philosophy, Culture and Politics, offers a useful overview of the chronotope. 26 Poulet’s Studies in Human Time and Jonathan Gil Harris’s Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare interrogate the early moderns’ shifting attitudes toward temporality.

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In this scene, bodies interchange: the visual impact of Ferdinand literally replacing Antonio, especially in such an intimate space, invites the “incest readings” promulgated by multiple critics.27 Ultimately, however, Ferdinand’s interest in the Duchess’s sexual life might indicate disgust rather than arousal. Jonathan Haidt explains, “Disgust plays a role in sexuality analogous to its role in food selection by guiding people to the narrow class of culturally acceptable partners and sexual acts” (Happiness 186). From a sociobiological perspective, disgust functions as the gatekeeper of desire. Haidt emphasizes the positive regulatory functions of sexual disgust (i.e., the identification of sexual partners), but these emerge through proscribing certain others as mates. In Ferdinand’s case, disgust initially fails to do its work: unable to distinguish properly between his twin sister and himself, he vicariously experiences desire through her, but this culminates in self-revulsion and violent reprisal. This destructive pattern, arising from an insufficiency of difference, plays out with metrical precision. Webster repeatedly dramatizes temporal crisis, setting biological rhythms, such as the Duchess’s experience of pregnancy, gestation, and birth, against the tick-tock of events unfolded in the geopolitical sphere, the space presided over by her brothers. From the first interaction among the siblings, Ferdinand and the Cardinal demonstrate an acute awareness of their sister’s sensuality. Ferdinand lectures, “You are a widow. / You know already what man is” (1.2.209–10). The Cardinal adds that the Duchess should not let “anything without the addition, ‘honour’ / Sway [her] blood” (1.2.212–13). The Cardinal’s cynical attitude evidently applies to all women. He suggests that despite their usual promises, widows’ celibacy generally “lasts no longer / Than the turning of an hourglass; the funeral Sermon, / And it end both together” (1.2.219–21). For Webster’s world and our own, the hourglass retains its ancient potency, precisely because it seems to make time manifest, transforming an abstract unit of measurement into a concrete process. The observable phenomenon of sand or some other particulate dropping from one chamber to another captures the division between past and future and underscores the flightiness of the present, which slips away just as it comes into focus. Early modern conceptions of female identity, summed up in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1604) with the categories of “maid,” “widow,” and 27 Frank Whigham examines incest as an aristocratic tool for consolidating privilege and status. See especially his Seizures of the Will in Early Modern Drama. In The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing, Lynn Enterline scrutinizes the chaos provoked by an insufficiency of difference, which influences my understanding of the divided or diffusible self.

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“wife,” underscore the extent to which temporal constraints shape versions of selfhood (5.1.177). The designation “maid” essentially defined a woman in futuristic terms, with her virginity a promise, a potential held in abeyance for prospective suitors; a widow was, of course, defined in terms of her past relationship(s); whereas a wife inhabited the present, actively taking up the prescribed female role. The term “widow” consolidated sociopolitical assumptions regarding female behavior, enforcing or prohibiting specific actions. Webster’s Duchess recognizes that the label “widow” entraps because it renders a woman a prisoner of the past. In response to Ferdinand’s increasingly threatening behavior, the Duchess asks her brother, “Why should only I / Of all the other princes of the world, / Be cased up like a holy relic? I have youth, / And a little beauty” (3.2.135–38). Here she expresses dread at existing in a state of suspension, bereft of the pleasures activated by the twin gifts of “youth” and “beauty.” The Duchess’s question to Ferdinand pierces patriarchal ideology, exposing the costs of having to languish in unwelcome celibacy rather than indulge “earthlier” joys. Chronicling this tension, Webster establishes an important aspect of the tragic chronotope, which sets appetites and instincts, all that we relegate to “nature,” against a relentlessly violent social order. In sum, the very conventions of tragedy effect the subjugation of nature. In the grammar of human behavior, the categories of “subject” and “object” prove dangerously motive: certain subjects are perpetually at risk of lapsing into thingness. The Duchess of Malfi imagines this process with extraordinary specificity, as the hero morphs from the fleshly to the realm of iconicity, in a process aptly described by Margaret E. Owens as “monumentalization.” In Owens’s view, the Duchess succumbs to an “alabaster double … her first husband’s funeral monument” (870). Owens likens the Duchess to Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, suggesting that both characters must “transcend fleshly frailty,” and she compares Webster’s character to Christian martyrs (870). From this perspective, subjects (e.g., Cleopatra, the Duchess, or Christian martyrs) become objects of reverent or fascinated contemplation—persisting ideas or ideals, if not exactly “things.”28 In my view, Owens correctly assesses Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, who creates her own death tableau, an eroticized set-piece that ensures her migration 28 The Duchess’s bravery when confronting death establishes her nobility; by contrast, her servant Cariola begs to be spared, for which she has sometimes been subject to critical opprobrium. These interpretations reveal the entangling of aesthetics and ideology, a provocative nexus taken up at length in Elisabeth Bronfen’s Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic.

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from the earthly/temporal realm to the eternizing domains of posterity. Conversely, Webster’s Duchess yearns for ordinary pleasures, carnal experiences that should have been readily available to a woman of her time and place. In keeping with other domestic tragedies of the period, The Duchess of Malfi calls upon the irrefutable facts of the pregnant woman’s body to advance the action. Webster prolongs discovery of the pregnancy and coyly intimates rather than unequivocally shows this condition. For instance, Bosola suggests that the Duchess’s evident displays of “tetchiness” and “most vulturous eating of … apricocks” are likely “signs of breeding” (2.2.1–3). Across various early modern texts, an impressive catalog of pregnancy-symptoms manifests, confirming the desire to bypass exteriors and gain access to hidden depths. Of course, the female body eventually, inevitably acquires a kind of permeability or knowability: sooner or later, pregnancy will eradicate distinctions between inner and outer (womb and visible flesh), though the Duchess has evidently been successful at camouflaging the most obvious visual clues. Paster points out that childbirth, typically presided over by women, temporarily upended patriarchal authority. Yet she rightly acknowledges how this female “empowerment was constrained by a whole host of stratagems, both real and symbolic, designed to counter an understanding of the maternal body as polluted and polluting” (165). In this view of the female body, the pregnant (or, so to speak, just-delivered) body draws from and enforces the notion that selves are in continual flux with the surrounding world, including its other inhabitants. The Duchess never really seeks egress from this teeming maternal space; rather, she wishes to dedicate herself to it. In this sense, she craves participation in a manifestly natural order, a life dominated by the body’s generative rhythms but ever-subject to external control. In contrast to male tragic protagonists, therefore, the Duchess never asserts the desire for transcendence, which is precisely why she haunts her own play rather than being released into an aestheticized infinity. The Duchess of Malfi expresses contradictory attitudes toward fame, a point outlined in the play’s dedication. Addressing himself to George Harding, Webster edgily writes, “I do not altogether look up at your title, the ancientest nobility being but a relic of time past and the truest honour indeed being for a man to confer honour on himself” (lines 14–17). Critiquing inherited privilege, Webster voices dread at the prospect of being turned into a “relic of time past.” Not incidentally, this lament echoes in the Duchess’s objection to being “cased up like a holy relic.” Her statement eerily prefigures the coercive transformation from woman to icon of noble suffering. After all, as Webster’s Duchess understands, martyrs lay claim to posthumous

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significance. Finally, the Duchess’s transformation exemplifies the tragic repudiation of the eco-self: the perpetuity of reputation supplants engagement with the teeming flux of life. If this is tragedy’s standard bequest, Webster strips it of value.

Varieties of Intersubjective Experience: Remaking the Eco-Self To recap: the concept of the dispersible self that currently finds favor among ecocritics celebrates a thoroughgoing fusion of person and world. The lyrical articulations of this process often entice, yet I maintain that the self also requires some distance from the world, which paradoxically ensures its place within it, as the Duchess’s murder poignantly shows. With eloquent force, Elaine Scarry confirms the importance of delineating self from world in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985). Scarry reflects, “Through his ability to project words and sounds out onto his environment, a human being inhabits, humanizes, and makes his own a space much larger than that occupied by his body alone” (49). Conversely, torture, described as “a grotesque piece of compensatory drama,” alters the world of the prisoner, forcing him or her into a state beyond the reaches of thought and language (28). Scarry’s explanation of the process is as follows: “Intense pain is … language-destroying: as the content of one’s world disintegrates so the content of one’s language; as the self disintegrates, so that which would express and project the self is robbed of its source and its subject” (35). Admittedly, the example is extreme; yet precisely for this reason it applies to Webster’s play. The Duchess of Malfi anticipates some of Scarry’s observations about the structure of torture, especially the grim theatrics of power at work in the captor/prisoner relationship. Ferdinand orchestrates something of a passion play, with his sister, whom he has ordered into isolation, cast as reluctant star. Observing the Duchess’s confinement, Bosola imagines that the “restraint” will make her wild, comparing her state to that of “English mastiffs that grow fierce with tying” (4.1.12). Having instructed Bosola to kill the lights (specifically, “the torch” or “tapers” used for illumination), Ferdinand visits his sister. After announcing, “I account it the honourablest revenge, / Where I may kill, to pardon,” Ferdinand asks, “Where are your cubs?” (4.1.32–33). The threat is obvious, and the Duchess parries it by simply asking, “Whom?” (4.1.34). Not content with using minatory language, Ferdinand next offers his sister a severed hand, intimating that it belonged to Antonio. This savage display extends the play’s treatment of the subject-in-crisis, especially

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given the hand’s associations with uniquely human abilities.29 Evidence of the body’s actual dismemberment amplifies the grim Websterian take on corporeality. The next round of torture amplifies the fragility of the subject. Ferdinand arranges a cruel spectacle, a death tableau that seems to feature the bodies of Antonio and the children he shares with the Duchess. Although the stage direction explains that these are “artificial figures,” neither the Duchess nor playgoers would initially know this.30 As if delivering the epilogue in a play, Bosola directs the Duchess to view the “corpses,” noting that the “sad spectacle” confirms the death of her loved ones and adding, “Hereafter you may wisely cease to grieve / For that which cannot be recovered” (4.1.56–59). Bosola’s counsel violates sense, as grief typically entails yearning for the unrecoverable. In any case, the Duchess responds to the spiraling cruelties by asking that she be bound to Antonio’s “lifeless trunk,” as though necrophilia remains the only outlet for desire (4.1.66). Shortly thereafter, the Duchess vacillates between praying for and cursing her enemies. Choosing the latter, she imagines being able to return “the world / To its first chaos” (4.1.96-97). In effect, she desires the unmaking of the world, its reversion to a state of sheer potentiality and non-differentiation. Rather than heralding pleasure, this realm brims with imprecatory force. Ultimately, the spectacle presided over by Bosola rewrites the often-pleasing metaphor of “life as a stage.” Rather than showcasing growth or development or a fluid ability to try on various personae, the cruel performance commanded by Bosola highlights futility and powerlessness. This despairing ethos forecasts the play’s conclusion, in which Webster abnegates drama’s transformative potential, typically a consequence of its generative (i.e., posterity-enabling) magic. Following the premature murder of the Duchess, an assault on tragic conventions frequently discussed by critics of the play, the after-effects of savagery linger, as both brothers and Bosola wrestle with culpability.31 The Cardinal complains, “How tedious is a guilty conscience! / When I look into the fishponds in my garden, / Methinks I see a thing armed with a rake / That seems to strike at me” (5.5.4–7). Gazing at the water, and 29 Katharine Rowe analyzes the startling prevalence of severed hands in diverse literary texts in Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern. 30 In “John Webster, Tussaud Laureate: The Waxworks in The Duchess of Malfi,” Margaret E. Owens identifies the particular cultural practices, specifically the creation of effigial monuments, that Webster exploits for his purposes. 31 Enterline’s reading of generic anomalies in the play perceptively notes that the actual protagonist is not the Duchess but rather the version of her that exists within the domains of “male fantasy” (251).

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therefore confronting his own reflection, the Cardinal sees only an agent of destruction; he becomes in effect an anti-Narcissus repulsed by his own image. In Jungian terms, the Cardinal confronts his shadow, the reservoir of instincts or impulses housed within the psyche; the monstrosity evidently resides within the Cardinal but is visible in the exterior world so that questions of inner and outer become thoroughly confused. Considered from an ecocritical perspective, the Cardinal intensifies connections between the psychological and ecological realms. More specifically, he projects his guilt onto the landscape (or rather, into the fishpond). Person and world merge here, but their union effectively requires the disappearance of the latter, transforming it into a mirror of human malevolence. In this suggestive optics, the Cardinal demonstrates the dangers of the idiopathic self, whereby “the ‘I’ may project his own unique place in being on to the other and in so doing erase the unique position of the other from the perspective of the ‘I,’” as Craig Brandist explains (48). Analogously, we risk effacing nature when denying or disallowing any separation from it. Ferdinand’s experience of lycanthropy reverses the process, as he imagines that the wildness of the world, embodied in the figure of the wolf, resides within him. Ferdinand’s subsequent rationalization of the event, however, at once acknowledges and defers responsibility. He says, “My sister, oh, my sister—there’s the cause on’t. / ‘Whether we fall by ambition, blood or lust, / Like diamonds we are cut with our own dust’” (5.5.69–71). The proverbial “diamonds cut diamonds” alluded to in this passage puts the finishing touches on the crisis of selfhood. Viewing his sister as part of himself, Ferdinand asserts their joint responsibility for ruination. Accordingly, Ferdinand demonstrates the “heteropathic” I, which Brandist explains as the condition of being “so besotted with the other that the unique position of the ‘I’ is in danger of being lost” (48). If this process finds pleasurable expression—or indeed its apotheosis—in erotic experience, Ferdinand exposes its disastrous potential. Bosolo’s final speech, delivered just prior to his death, offers another meditation on the relations of self and world. He says, “We are only like dead walls or vaulted graves / That, ruined, yields no echo,” (5.5.95–96). Acknowledging the Duchess’s “return” in the form of an echo, the provocative similes reinforce Bosola’s earlier complaint about the futility of life, rendered in his description of the “rotten and dead body” (2.1.59). In the final iteration of his theme, Bosola adds that the “gloomy world” is actually a “shadow or deep pit of darkness” in which “Doth womanish and fearful, mankind live!” (5.5.98, 99, 100). The charged usages of “pit” and “womanish” endorse misogyny. We should also notice how, in these lines, the prospect of

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oblivion powers despair. Delio advances a similar argument in the closing speech. He condemns Ferdinand and the Cardinal as “wretched, eminent things” and asserts, “Leave no more fame behind ‘em than should one / Fall in a frost and leave his print in snow— / As soon as the sun shines, it ever melts / Both form and matter” (5.5.111–15). The outlines of bodies cast in snow inevitably disappear, just as decaying matter cycles into and becomes indistinguishable from the earth.32 Consigning Ferdinand and the Cardinal to oblivion works as a punishment precisely because it acknowledges an exclusively human appetite: hunger for the continuance made available through artistic or cultural endeavors, in whose purview fame resides. Offering perpetuity in this world, fame overrides distinctions between the earthly and eternal realms. Finally, Webster’s howl of protest against corporeal frailty outlines a deep psychological need, a yearning produced by the inexorabilities of organismic life. With this in mind, we need a model of selfhood that acknowledges our embeddedness in specific environments but likewise enables pursuit of the “infinite space” invoked by Hamlet. Rather than endorsing the eco-self, the compromise-entity that encompasses the pan-organismic as well as the uniquely human, Webster confirms through negation, advancing a prescient critique of a world that had not yet fully come into being.

Epilogue In The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve (2017), Stephen Greenblatt provides a recent demonstration of how animals are “good to think with” and how they might inspire enviously utopian longings in us. The story of the eponymous couple, suggests Greenblatt, “bears the mark of the imagination at its most extravagant” (3). His quest to illuminate the enduring appeal of Adam and Eve leads him on a cross-continental migration to Africa, where he shadows biologists studying a group of chimpanzees. Reflecting on our primate cousins, Greenblatt says, “We should be forever grateful to them. They enable us to see for ourselves what the Genesis origin story might have actually looked like, had it been real. Closely resembling us, they show us what it is to live without knowledge of good and evil, just as they live without 32 For an insightful reading of fame and posterity in The Duchess of Malfi, see Michael Neill’s Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy. Neill suggests that Webster “defiantly” offers the play itself as the “’true monument,” and he tracks the psychological implications of shifting early modern apprehensions of mortality (352).

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shame and without understanding that they are destined to die. They are still in Paradise” (299). The enviable position of chimpanzees is not utopian but u-chronic: they are spared from contemplating time’s ravaging power along with the accompanying prospect of personal cessation. Humans, by contrast, must accept this contemplative and imaginative work. In this condition, possessed of deliberative abilities and moral choice, we have some obligation to preserve the Earth as a paradisiacal landscape for all its non-human residents who will forever remain blissfully prelapsarian. Counterintuitively, embracing human uniqueness—honoring the self in “eco-self”—might be the best way to serve ecological goals. If Webster’s famously dismal meditations on humanness cannot themselves yield sounder environmental policies, his revved-up perspective on mortality indicates the need for maintaining or enforcing certain boundaries. This just might redound to the advantage of other species, such as by recognizing their distinct needs for particular kinds of habitats. With this in mind, the following chapter takes up a notably utopian text, Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World. In this prose-fantasy, which zooms in on the incipient ideals of the Enlightenment, Cavendish both insists on humans’ affinities with our animal-others and the physical world itself and asserts the necessary (because solacing or uplifting) role of uniquely human traits, chief among them being writing itself. In a way, Webster’s text necessitates the interventionist efforts of Cavendish, as she rescues or possibly redeems the fragile, imperiled creature encountered in The Duchess of Malfi. Cavendish cannot deliver us to an ecotopia devoid of the ills Webster so assiduously chronicles. But she does outline the possibility of a robustly imagined self that exists in harmony with the physical environment. In so doing, The Blazing World contributes an essential chapter to the biography of the eco-self.

Bibliography Alaimo, Stacy. “Trans-Corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature.” Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, Indiana UP, 2008, pp. 237–64. Augustine. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick, Pine-Coffin, 1961. Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, U of Texas P, 1981. Bardon, Adrian. A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time. Oxford UP, 2013. Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. Free Press, 1973.

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Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke UP, 2010. Bloom, Paul. Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. Harper Collins, 2016. Boehrer, Bruce. Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama. Cambridge UP, 2013. Brandist, Craig. The Bakhtin Circle: Philosophy, Culture and Politics. Pluto Press, 2002. Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic. Manchester UP, 1992. Colman, Warren. Act and Image: The Emergence of Symbolic Imagination. Spring Journal, 2016. Colman, Warren. “‘Bounded in a Nutshell and a King of Infinite Space’: The Embodied Self and Its Intentional World.” Journal of Analytical Psychology, vol. 60, no. 3, 2015, pp. 316–35. Cook, Jill. Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind. The British Museum, 2013. Damásio, António R. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Grosset / Putnam, 1994. Donner, Wendy. “Self and Community in Environmental Ethics.” Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature, edited by Karen J. Warren, Indiana UP, 1997, pp. 375–89. Eisler, Robert. Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism, and Lycanthropy. Spring Books, 1951. Eliot, T. S. “Whispers of Immorality.” The Poems of T. S. Eliot, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue, vol. 1, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018. Enterline, Lynn. The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing. Stanford UP, 1995. Feerick, Jean E., and Vin Nardizzi, editors. The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Forker, Charles R. Skull Beneath the Skin: The Achievement of John Webster. Southern Illinois UP, 1986. Fudge, Erica. Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England. Cornell UP, 2006. Greenblatt, Stephen. The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve. W. W. Norton, 2017. Haidt, Jonathan. The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. Perseus Books, 2006. Harrington, James. Time: A Philosophical Introduction. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Harris, Jonathan Gil. Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare. U of Pennsylvania P, 2009. Harris, Sam. Free Will. Free Press, 2012. Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. Bantam Books, 1988. Henrich, Joseph. The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.

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Herman, David. Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind. MIT Press, 2013. Hillman, David. “The Inside Story.” Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture, edited by Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor, Routledge, 2000, pp. 299–324. Hillman, James. “A Psyche the Size of the Earth: A Psychological Foreword.” Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, edited by Theodore Roszak, Mary E. Gomes, and Allen D. Kanner, Sierra Club Books, 1995, pp. xvii–xx. Hirsch, Brett D. “Lycanthropy in Early Modern England: The Case of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi.” Diseases of the Imagination and Imaginary Disease in the Early Modern Period, edited by Yasmin Haskell, Brepols, 2011, pp. 301–40. James, P. D. The Skull Beneath the Skin. Faber and Faber, 1982. Laqueur, Thomas Walter. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Harvard UP, 1990. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Totemism. Translated by Rodney Needham, Beacon Press, 1963. Lightman, Alan. “The Infinity of the Small.” Harper’s, March 2018, pp. 35–40. Marche, Stephen. “John Webster and the Dead: Reading The Duchess of Malfi’s Eschatology.” Renaissance and Reformation, vol. 28, no. 2, 2004, pp. 79–94. Müller, Timo. “Notes toward an Ecological Conception of Bakhtin’s ‘Chronotope.’” Ecozone: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, vol., 1, no. 7, 2010, pp. 98-102. Nagel, Thomas. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review, vol. 83, no. 4, 1974, pp. 435–50. Neill, Michael. Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy. Oxford UP, 1998. Noll, Richard, editor. “Introduction.” Vampires, Werewolves, and Demons: Twentieth Century Reports in the Psychiatric Literature, Brunner/Mazel, 1992. Otten, Charlotte F., editor. A Lycanthropy Reader: Werewolves in Western Culture. Syracuse UP, 1986. Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated by Rolfe Humphries, Indiana UP, 1955. Owens, Margaret E. “John Webster, Tussaud Laureate: The Waxworks in The Duchess of Malfi.” ELH, vol. 79, 2012, pp. 851–77. Paster, Gail Kern. The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England. Cornell UP, 1993. Plumwood, Val. “Nature, Self, and Gender: Feminism, Environmental Philosophy, and the Critique of Rationalism.” Hypatia, vol. 6, no. 1, Spring 1991, pp. 3–27. Poulet, Georges. Studies in Human Time. Translated by Elliott Coleman, Johns Hopkins UP, 1956. Richardson, Brian. “Drama and Narrative.” The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, edited by David Herman, Cambridge UP, pp. 142–55. Robisch, S. K. Wolves and the Wolf Myth in American Literature. U of Nevada P, 2009.

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Roth, Marco. “The Rise of the Neuronovel.” N + 1, vol. 8, Fall 2009, pp. 139–151. Rowe, Katherine. Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern. Stanford UP, 1999. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford UP, 1985. Shakespeare, William. Measure for Measure. The Complete Works of Shakespeare, edited by David Bevington, 7th ed., Pearson, 2014, pp. 414–54. Shapiro, James. The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606. Simon & Schuster, 2015. Shepard, Paul. The Others: How Animals Made Us Human. Island Press, 1996. Surawicz, Frida G., and Richard Banta. “Lycanthropy Revisited.” Vampires, Werewolves, and Demons. Twentieth Century Reports in the Psychiatric Literature, edited by Richard Noll, Brunner/Mazel, 1992, pp. 101–11. Waal, Frans de. The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society. Three Rivers Press, 2009. Watson, Robert N. “The Ecology of Self in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Ecocritical Shakespeare, edited by Lynne Bruckner and Dan Brayton, Ashgate, 2011, pp. 33–56. Webster, John. The Duchess of Malfi. Edited by Leah S. Marcus, Bloomsbury, 2009. Whigham, Frank. Seizures of the Will in Early Modern English Drama. Cambridge UP, 1996. Wilson, Edward O. The Meaning of Human Existence. Liveright Publishing, 2014. Wilson, Edward O. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Harvard UP, 1975. Wolfe, Cary. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. U of Chicago P, 2003. Wolfe, Cary. Before the Law: Humans and Others in a Biopolitical Frame. U of Chicago P, 2013.

5.

Ecology and Selfhood in The Blazing World Abstract This chapter scrutinizes the self/world dialectic in The Blazing World, a utopian prose text by Margaret Cavendish. Cavendish’s depiction of the human/nature relationship is examined in light of the burgeoning scientific revolution, developments that The Blazing World acknowledges and, at times, contests. Ultimately, The Blazing World offers a compromiseversion of the human, an ecological self, or eco-self, that both celebrates humans’ embedment in the surrounding world and confirms the necessity of periodically claiming some distance from it. This marks a significant departure from early modern tragedy, a genre that frequently evinces a reluctant ecology, mourning humans’ indistinguishability from the rest of nature. In making the case for certain proprietarily human needs, Cavendish offers important refinements to current ecological discourse. Keywords: Biopower; Cavendish; ecocriticism; eco-self; Enlightenment; materialism

In contrast to John Webster, whose well-chronicled reveling in macabre nihilism emphasizes the fragility of the self, Margaret Cavendish promotes a radical individualism, a standpoint that some readers might consider strident or off-putting. Given her persistent attention to theories of personhood, Cavendish virtually demands inclusion in a biography of the self, particularly because she both records and resists some of the changes incipient or underway in her world, transformations that would have considerable implications for theories of humanness. Accordingly, this chapter focuses on Cavendish’s Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World (1666), a utopian prose text that heralds the genre of science fiction. The Blazing World aptly suits my aims; more generally, this text speaks to our current moment, as evidenced by the thriving critical response to

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it, especially over the last decade or so. As Bronwen Price succinctly notes, “There is good reason to be interested in the work of Margaret Cavendish at the present moment,” given that “her writing raises many of the questions which have concerned English studies in recent years” (127). Price meticulously details the nexus of gender and power in The Blazing World, observing how Cavendish deliberately engages the work of male colleagues such as Francis Bacon or Robert Hooke (131, 133). In brief, Price clarifies how The Blazing World outlines “the politics of speaking, writing and knowing” (141). Aaron R. Hanlon likewise takes up epistemological concerns relevant to The Blazing World in his recent essay on this text.1 Hanlon cleverly appropriates the concept of “anecdata,” noting that the term, typically used as a pejorative, “describes … an instance off passing off personal experience or anecdotal knowledge as ‘data’ in support of a claim” (49). As does Price, Hanlon addresses the somewhat tenuous position Cavendish occupied as a would-be writer and maker-of-knowledge. Hanlon’s cogent observation that, “[f]or Cavendish, worldmaking is an act of fancy and of storytelling,” as well as “a performance of the reason-fancy dynamic” distills a key property of The Blazing World, a text that celebrates natural processes even as it makes an impassioned case for acknowledging human creativity and ingenuity. This chapter endeavors to honor both dimensions of Cavendish’s project, thereby extending the robust ecofeminist response to The Blazing World, as outlined in a subsequent section. In The Blazing World, Cavendish slams the door on the Renaissance (if we think of this era’s intellectual and artistic output primarily as a sustained and deliberate reworking of classical texts) in that she rejects imitation in favor of innovation, as though determined to create ex nihilo. Indeed, her husband William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, penned a laudatory poem announcing The Blazing World in which he favorably compares his wife’s text to the efforts of Columbus. William writes that Columbus “Found a new World,” which was “Only discovered, lying in Time’s shade” (lines 4, 6). The delimiting modifier “only” indicates the relatively inconsequential efforts of Columbus. By contrast, William approvingly notes that Cavendish herself had to fashion a “World of Nothing, but pure Wit” (line 10). Furthermore, in The Blazing World, a character bearing Cavendish’s own title, the Duchess of Newcastle, articulates a compulsive need for uniqueness. She states 1 For another useful perspective on epistemology and selfhood in The Blazing World, see Deborah Boyle’s “Margaret Cavendish on Perception, Self-Knowledge, and Probable Opinion.” Boyle addresses the philosophical underpinnings of Cavendish’s text and adroitly summarizes previous philosophical studies.

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that she “would not be like others in any thing if it were possible,” adding, “I endeavor … to be as singular as I can; for it argues but a mean nature to imitate others” (218). For my purposes, what is most important—not to mention variously intriguing and maddening—about the interrogation of selfhood in The Blazing World is the way it mates a fierce individualism with the realization that person and world are indissolubly linked. Acknowledging nature’s claims on humans and endorsing the pleasures of a richly imagined inner life, Cavendish encapsulates the salutary possibilities of the eco-self. In this sense, she offers an alternative to the perspective discernible in early modern tragedy. As the three preceding chapters argue, the genre of tragedy acknowledges but laments a fundamentally ecological truth, humans’ inextricability from nature; a curious form of ecophobia, one premised on vulnerability, surfaces in these plays. In such contexts, the self emerges as an embattled dissident, paradoxically affirmed via the formidable prospect of negation. By contrast, Cavendish recuperates the human/nature relationship, outlining the potential for a reciprocal dynamic. For precisely this reason, The Blazing World constitutes a necessary interventionist effort, a disruption of the pessimistic, even despairing, story of humans and/in nature. The Blazing World’s female protagonist frequently celebrates the interdependence of self and world. For instance, having voyaged to a new world (one that exists at several removes from her own), this character marvels at the novel architecture she encounters, especially the comparatively low-to-the-ground buildings. When she asks about the design, residents explain, “the lower the buildings were, the less were they subject either to the heat of the sun, to wind, tempest, decay, etc.” (136). Furthermore, the structures were designed to be thermodynamic, so that they were “warmer in winter, and cooler in summer” (136). The protagonist appreciates the eco-friendly design of the architecture, a nod to humans’ dependence on the physical environment. This attitude encapsulates the balanced worldview Cavendish cultivates in The Blazing World, whereby human comforts or pleasures are imagined as the outcome of a harmonious relationship with the natural world. If The Blazing World sometimes evinces the utility model, construing nature primarily as a set of resources available for human use, this perspective is muted by periodic assertions of interdependence and even of nature’s value exclusive of human interests. In her own prefatory address to readers, Cavendish outlines the structure of The Blazing World, indicating that it encompasses three parts, including the “romancical,” the “philosophical,” and the “fantastical” (124). These categories order the narrative, though Cavendish sometimes elides them.

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For instance, the “fantastical” final section of the text depicts mobile, vocal spirits who transit between worlds, with their astral projections requiring “vehicles” that turn out to be the bodies of dead people. If such details signal an escapist bent, a radical departure from the ordinary world, they feature alongside the text’s most sustained treatment of war, obviously a brutal reality that long dominated Cavendish’s lived experience. In fact, she bridges the gap between the real (or realistic) and the fantastical, as her protagonist briefly considers conscripting the spirits for a military campaign. She quickly dismisses the idea, however, noting that it would “be difficult to get so many dead bodies for their vehicles, as to make up a whole army” (204). Additionally, she says, a zombie army is impractical because the vehicles, or bodies, would quickly “stink and dissolve; and when they came to a fight, they would moulder into dust and ashes, and so leave the purer immaterial spirits naked” (104). We are in the realm of speculative fiction here, yet the passage reliably conjures the wreckage of war, especially its disintegrative effects on combatants. As she lays the foundation for The Blazing World, Cavendish explains that it originally appeared in tandem with her Observations on Experimental Philosophy. Pairing the philosophical meditation with a speculative work that voyages along similar terrain, Cavendish telegraphs her belief in the transformative power of the imagination, to which aesthetic creations may claim special access. Notably, The Blazing World was published the year after Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), something of a devotional tribute to emerging technologies. Its immensely detailed drawings of the insects studied under microscopes effectively conjure an alternate world by permitting observation of the previously unseen. Cavendish was obviously aware of these developments, although The Blazing World often registers mistrust of the new optical technologies. Specifically, the protagonist dismisses telescopes as “false informers” and questions whether microscopes have any capacity to enrich life (144). As to the former, Cavendish might have a point, at least in the sense that effectively using a telescope requires practice. Evidently, even using a newly available telescope, many early modern observers were unable to spot the distinctive features constituting lunar topography.2 On the other hand, the dismissal of microscopes proves ironic, especially as it precedes the protagonist’s stated wish to understand the epidemiology of the “spotted plague” (158). In retrospect, we know that an expanded knowledge of the insect world, made possible through the 2 In Galileo’s Muse: Renaissance Mathematics and the Arts, Mark A. Peterson discusses early moderns’ use of the telescope, noting Galileo’s facility with this new technology.

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use of microscopes, could have significant implications for understanding (hence curtailing) contagion. That said, there is no reason to dismiss Cavendish’s celebration of imaginative pursuits. Irrespective of discipline, most major breakthroughs or paradigm-shifting innovations depend on flexible thinking and a willingness to take risks by questioning received wisdom. Additionally, the scientific study of insects does not automatically cancel out the various metaphorical or analogical uses to which they are put. For example, John Donne’s wonderfully odd poem “The Flea” (1633) cannot impart scientific knowledge of this insect, but it might very well reveal something of significance about romance, erotic experiences, or a writer’s defiant perversity in the deployment of literary conventions. In this sense, the aesthetic realm must own a certain utilitarianism, in that literature and other artistic media persistently rely on nature to create alternate worlds or to shake up perceptions of the familiar. Despite her quest for originality and novelty, Cavendish launches The Blazing World by invoking an ancient text. Her unnamed heroine survives abduction and a forced voyage across the ocean, ultimately ending up in Paradise, the land inhabited by a prelapsarian Adam and Eve. Writing as global travel and trade were intensifying, Cavendish had tangible models, or inspirations, for her vision of an ostensibly exotic world that provided abundant opportunities for comparative or cross-cultural analysis.3 Moreover, as Stephen Greenblatt points out in The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve (2017), in the early modern period “Adam and Eve were brought together with strikingly life-like pagan statues that art-hunters unearthed from the ruins of Greece and Rome” (9). These artworks, he adds, “were compared to hordes of newly encountered naked men and women in the Americas—people who appeared strangely immune to the bodily shame that all humans after the Fall were supposed to feel” (9). Aphra Behn encapsulates this perspective in Oroonoko: Or, the Royal Slave (1688), as her narrator compares the “Indians,” indigenous inhabitants of Surinam, to the prelapsarian Adam and Eve, reflecting, “[T]hese People represented to me an absolute Idea of the first State of Innocence, before Man knew how to sin” (10). Behn’s narrator imagines that Surinam’s native inhabitants live according to the dictates of Nature, described as a “harmless, inoffensive, and vertuous Mistress” (10). If the image of a population living in perfect accord with the 3 William C. Spengemann’s essay “The Earliest American Novel: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko” illuminates the burgeoning interest in the lands, cultures, and peoples “discovered” by British and European explorers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Cavendish exploits the interest in novel worlds, though she focuses on innovations and tensions within England.

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physical world appeals, it also epitomizes ethnocentric thinking, precisely because it ennobles the Indians by presenting them as devoid of sociocultural traditions. In The Blazing World, Cavendish ascribes innocence to Paradise itself so that it materializes as a place wherein natural processes may be freshly encountered and studied. Cavendish’s narrative reverses Judeo-Christian teleology, moving from the fallen world to Paradise, described as an island located somewhere beyond the North Pole. This dislocation proves strategic, since it defamiliarizes and shakes up assumptions that had settled into complacency. Etymologically, “paradise” descends from the Iranian language and through Greek, Latin, and old French before entering English. Originally, “paradise” evoked “garden” or “enclosed space.” The concept of enclosure is especially important, variously connoting protection or imprisonment or emphasizing that which is excluded. In their earliest manifestations, gardens were likely intended to wall off the encroaching world; now, of course, it is probably more typical to imagine gardens as places of refuge because they seem to foster an encounter with the natural world. In Garden—Nature—Language (1988), Simon Pugh reflects on gardens as meaning-saturated spaces. He writes, “The metaphoric reference point of gardens is the idea of the garden as paradise, the site of a travesty, a falling away from bliss, but also the site of childhood, of both precultural bliss and of acculturation” (2). Pugh also suggests, “The minimum condition of the garden is that it is marked off from what surrounds it, closed off like Eden” (103). In identifying her fictional world with the biblical Paradise, Cavendish activates a rich symbolizing tradition with its attendant ideological implications. Through a propitious marriage, the protagonist becomes Paradise’s Empress. At her behest, Paradise functions as an interactive laboratory, occasioning close study of natural processes; this detail exemplifies Cavendish’s concern with developing science and its accompanying technologies and her corresponding interest in the evolving relationship between humans and the natural world. The Empress presents herself as an unapologetic or perhaps even redeemed Eve, ultimately explaining, “It is the nature of mankind to be inquisitive” (178). Price suggests that “The Blazing World provides … an ironic reformulation of the paradise myth, presenting itself through the perspective not of God, nor of Adam, but of the Eve figure of the Empress” (137). But she adds that “the Empress’s story is still haunted by the original myth, as she repeatedly asks where the fault for the fall from paradise lies” (137). Yet, even asking this question indicates a streak of rebelliousness, a refusal to accept the standard explanation of Eve’s culpability and with it the synecdochic implications for all women. Arrogating to women the

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prerogatives of seeking knowledge, Cavendish asserts a proto-feminist politics, and an activist potential underlies the very structure of The Blazing World. In this sense, Cavendish’s Empress anticipates the f igure of the “Ecofeminist Eve” scrutinized by Wendy Furman-Adams and Virginia James Tufte in their analysis of artistic representations of Milton’s Eve. The Epilogue to The Blazing World reasserts the generative potency of imaginative literature. Cavendish writes, “you may perceive, that my ambition is not only to be Empress, but Authoress of a whole world; and that the worlds I have made, both the Blazing and the other Philosophical World, mentioned in the f irst part of this description, are framed and composed of the most pure, that is, the rational parts of matter” (223). Here, Cavendish frankly acknowledges her own desire to create novel worlds (and perhaps to elicit praise for her efforts); she also presciently outlines the far-ranging significance of an increasingly literate population. Additionally, Cavendish’s valedictory statement about her conjoined Worlds reminds us that every society materializes via the collective vision of its inhabitants. Of course, this realization shapes utopian writings, which typically urge the amelioration of social ills, a project that requires exchanging one set of possibilities—a founding vision—for another. 4 In summing up her goals for The Blazing World, Cavendish implicitly links her conception of selfhood to an expansive appreciation for the surrounding world, as when she refers to the “rational parts of matter.” Writing as the Enlightenment was powering up, Cavendish both celebrates rationality and expands its range to encompass the world proper. In this respect, she anticipates current trends in ecological theory.5 If The Blazing World spotlights pivotal developments in Cavendish’s era, it also stimulates fresh consideration of how well the guiding principles and structuring tropes of ecological discourse serve our current needs. The intellectual upheaval that lends a distinctive shape to the Enlightenment widened the fissures in a cracking episteme.6 By the late Renaissance, 4 Karl Mannheim’s influential study Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge addresses questions of self and society in utopian texts. 5 In The Enigma of Reason, Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber examine uniquely human forms of cognition and reason, which they compare to distinct forms of knowing discernible in other species. 6 In a way, my argument updates the Jacob Burckhardtian view of the Renaissance as a transformational or disruptive era defined by its rejection of preceding traditions and quest for innovation. Thomas Kuhn’s examination of epistemic upheaval (or paradigm-shifting) is likewise relevant to understanding this view of the period. Finally, the recent scholarship of Joseph Henrich, particularly his views of WEIRDness, suggests that a new subset of the human (the presumptively Western self) emerged in the early modern period.

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the heuristic value of the Great Chain of Being was moribund, a development that complicated the belief in a divine imprimatur everywhere stamped on nature’s infinite pageantry. On the other hand, the scientists of Cavendish’s era and the ensuing periods generated new hierarchies and ordering schemas, particularly with respect to the relationship between humans and nature. On this point, Cavendish was something of a rebel. For example, The Blazing World advances a horizontal ethic, a worldview founded on kinship between everything that exists, as when the heroine asserts, “nature is but one infinite self-moving, living and self-knowing body” (176). Though Cavendish’s text does not always maintain this attitude toward nature, the passage distills an aspirational goal, one that has reemerged in contemporary theory in a tradition that often traces its origins to the work of Henri Bergson and, later, Maurice Merleau-Ponty.7 In distinct ways, both writers rework the ancient but persisting dyad of agency vs. communion, giving precedence to the latter term. Writing in an era of acute devastations, Cavendish expresses reverence for the self-powering grandeur and infinite beauty of the natural world in whose ambit humans are located, but this eco-awareness never effaces the individual. At several critical junctures, she ascribes agency and even the potential for compassionate action to nature. For example, the heroine survives abduction through her natural endowments, including her “beauty” and “the heat of her youth” combined with “the protection of the gods” (126). No such luck accrues to the kidnapper or the sailors who abet his voyage. They mutually succumb to the inhospitable conditions of the landscape, that cold region lying well beyond the North Pole, as though the earth itself offers protective assistance to the heroine and metes out justice to the men threatening her. Striking a balance between communitarianism and individualism, The Blazing World outlines the traits of the eco-self, melding the possibility of autonomy with an awareness of humans’ thorough imbrication in the natural world. In this way, Cavendish acknowledges pan-organismic experiences and claims a space for human uniqueness. Ironically, therefore, just as the Enlightenment was getting underway, Cavendish offered a prescient corrective to her era’s incipient understanding of human exceptionalism. The following section examines the curious admixture of individualism and ecology in The Blazing World, showing how Cavendish anticipates subsequent developments in feminism and eco-feminism. 7 As previous chapters acknowledge, Jane Bennett consolidates and advances current apprehensions of materialism.

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Ecology and Individualism Many of Cavendish’s writings convey an empathetic attitude toward the non-human world, which explains the burgeoning ecofeminist interest in her work. As Sylvia Bowerbank points out in Speaking for Nature: Women and Ecologies of Early Modern England (2004), in The Blazing World, Cavendish directly acknowledges certain threats to the environment, such as the timber shortage that ensued from protracted civil war (53). Reading expansively in Cavendish’s oeuvre, Bowerbank uncovers a “pervasive sense of loss—loss not only of the status, fame, and property of the aristocrat, but the loss of an associative, positive, and noble identity with the feudal and forest economy” (53). To redress this lapsed condition, at times Cavendish ventriloquizes other animals, such as when she adopts the perspective of Wat, the doomed rabbit in “The Hunting of the Hare.”8 This poem concludes with an incisive condemnation of its eponymous activity. In criticizing the apparent savagery of hunting, the speaker assails the notion that “God did make creatures for man’s meat” and the related belief that animals exist for humans’ “sport or recreation’s sake” (95, 97). Consuming the flesh of animals, adds the speaker, essentially means turning “stomachs” into “graves,” replete “With murthered bodies” that have been sacrificed for “sport” (99, 100). In sum, “The Hunting of the Hare” encapsulates Cavendish’s critique of the dominator ethic that took hold in the seventeenth century and has persisted, in various guises, ever since.9 Many ecologists emphasize the necessity of challenging the dominator ethic, although this is not universally the case.10 This project has been especially important to ecofeminists. As Candice Bradley points out, 8 For an incisive analysis of the perils (but also the necessities) of “speaking for nature,” see Rebecca Bushnell’s Afterword to Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity. With bracing insight, Bushnell writes that “Nature … must be forced into speech,” and she likens the silencing of nature to the exclusion of women from the historical record (213). While acknowledging the innovative work Bowerbank undertakes in Speaking for Nature, Bushnell draws attention to “a new optimism” a sense that feminism has been able to redress certain gaps in the historical record. 9 Val Plumwood’s Feminism and the Mastery of Nature distills Enlightenment views of nature, particularly tropes of domination. Also see Phil Macnaghten and John Urry’s Contested Natures, which summarizes Enlightenment assumptions and sets them against a diversity of other perspectives. Alister McGrath’s creatively interdisciplinary approach in The Reenchantment of Nature: The Denial of Religion and the Ecological Crisis offers a different assessment of alienation and fragmentation. 10 Ecologist Paul Shepard celebrates humans’ status as apex predators even as he endorses a robust ecology, one that insists on the interconnectedness of all forms of life. See especially The Others: How Animals Made Us Human.

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“Ecofeminism calls attention to the rift between the self and the environment, as well as the connection between the domination of the environment and the domination of women” (298). Some ecofeminists invoke women’s presumed affinities with nature in order to challenge or disrupt patterns of domination. Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (1978) typifies this approach. From this perspective, an enlarged capacity for intimacy and nurturance roots women more deeply in the natural world. We should recognize that asserting allegiances between women and nature could be a deliberate rhetorical strategy, one intended to generate a politics of engagement that effects change from within an existing symbolic register. Even so, the essentialism of such arguments alienates some readers. For instance, Janet Biehl’s Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics (1991) skewers ecofeminism for its putative adherence to essentialist principles.11 In Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (2000), Stacy Alaimo offers a more balanced and nuanced assessment of ecofeminism. She does acknowledge how essentialism has sometimes driven a wedge between feminists and ecofeminists, writing, “[F]eminists have identified the pervasive association of woman with nature as itself a root cause of misogyny and have advocated a feminist flight from this troublesome terrain” (3). As Alaimo points out, however, “nature has also been a space of feminist possibility, an always saturated but somehow undomesticated ground” (23). Cavendish evinces a similar mindset in The Blazing World, its very structure a confirmation of nature as a “space of feminist possibility,” a land of discovery whose epistemological activities are overseen by a woman. In Cavendish’s Paradise, we encounter a world where all animals live in a fashion “convenient to their species,” a harmonious arrangement that “very well satisfied” the Empress (147). The description of animals in tune with their surroundings exports the concept of the eco-self to the non-human world. This capacious vision lays the groundwork for appreciating the novel attributes and needs of each species. Cavendish makes the case for a uniquely human desire to explore and understand, but her Empress’s epistemological adventures do not generally require alienation from the world. Once again, this balanced approach aligns with core tenets of ecofeminism. Ecofeminism has proven to be remarkably portable, with a demonstrable applicability across diverse epochs and geopolitical spaces, for the elegantly simple reason that questions of self and environment, and 11 For an excellent assessment of essentialism in ecofeminism, I recommend Elizabeth Carlassare’s “Essentialism in Ecofeminist Discourse.”

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the various sociocultural mediations of this elemental dynamic, are of omnipresent significance. The Blazing World was written in the early stages of an intellectual revolution and in the context or immediate aftermath of political tumult, so it offers unique insights into Cavendish’s era. In my view, Cavendish’s celebration of an individualized ethos that proceeds in tandem with an environmental ethic takes on notable poignancy when read against the annihilative conditions of her world. Though she was an aristocrat by marriage and enjoyed certain privileges as a result, Cavendish had also occupied the precarious position of refugee, or perhaps “reluctant expatriate,” as she and her husband were forced into exile for decades during the war.12 Moreover, just prior to the publication of The Blazing World, England was again ravaged by plague, a situation that compels one to accept vulnerability as an ineluctable condition of life. In some respects, wars and pandemics create a leveling effect, enforcing a sense of shared vulnerability, though sociopolitical inequities will ensure that some bear the brunt of suffering. With all of this in mind, when the Duchess of The Blazing World owns her ambition and the adjacent desire to be “as singular as [she] can,” she demonstrates how a sense of fragility and ephemerality triggers acts of self-assertion. As previous chapters have acknowledged, ecofeminism provides a useful way to understand the relationship between self and community, with the latter encompassing the social order and the physical environment. Once again, this is because ecofeminists such as Wendy Donner remind us of the urgency—political, social, and psychological—of retaining some concept of the autonomous subject, particularly for members of imperiled or marginalized groups. Moreover, some ecofeminists can offer “a viable subject position (one we might identify as feminine) for all humans to share with nature,” as Lynn Dickson Bruckner writes (29). Following Bruckner, “Cavendish insists on an agentic Nature—knowledgeable and self-moving, a Nature that composes herself in several manners or ways” (28). It is time to claim (or reassert) the same flexibility for humans-in-process, as the eco-self is intended to do. I would add that jettisoning or repudiating the concept of the individual might itself reflect a degree of unacknowledged privilege: after all, one cannot relinquish that which one does not possess. In “Ecofeminism and Deep Ecology,” Freya Matthews notes her affinity for both philosophies named in her title. She does, however, establish a major difference between the two approaches, noting how the former retains space 12 The phrase is from Robert M. Myers’s biography of Harold Frederic, Reluctant Expatriate: The Life of Harold Frederic.

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for the individual, whereas the latter promotes identification with nature and endorses a version of indistinction, originating in the belief that there are no ontological differences among species (236). Without engaging in value judgments (i.e., positing that human interests always and necessarily trump all other concerns), it is nonetheless possible to address varying needs or desires, specificities that establish patterns of distinctiveness among species. Ecofeminism provides a conceptual framework for appreciating differences within and among species. This is because, as Matthews points out, “Ecofeminists … tend to portray the natural world as a community of beings, related, in the manner of a family, but nevertheless distinct” (235). Cavendish intimates this arrangement of interactive selves in The Blazing World. For instance, each of her curiously hybrid creatures (e.g., bear-men or bird-men) lives in a way customized to its unique features. Furthermore, these novel beings demonstrate an ethic of care, specif ically, a regard for others distinct from themselves. For instance, the protagonist’s first encounter with the bear-men puts her in their debt. The narrator reports that the bear-men dispose of the “nauseous” bodies of the abductors and sink the boat after rescuing its lone female passenger (127). The bear-men “showed … all civility and kindness” to their guest. When they (or the “ladies,” presumably bear-women) recognize that their visitor’s “constitution neither agreed with the temper of that climate, nor their diet, they were resolved to carry her into another island of a warmer temper” (127). In this idealized encounter, an appreciation of difference and recognition of the self/ environment relationship predominate. If there are glimmers of feminism or eco-feminism in The Blazing World, its Empress sometimes compromises the relevant ideals, such as by claiming proprietorship over knowledge and advocating hierarchical arrangements that counter the strategies favored by twentieth- and twenty-first-century feminists.13 The Empress both commands the creation of various “societies,” groups dedicated to particular examinations of physical processes, and, on the advice of her friend the Duchess, eventually orders their dissolution. The Duchess advances a rather chilling rationale, suggesting that “wheresoever is learning, there is most commonly also controversy and quarrelling”; she worries that internecine wrangling will “break out into open wars, and draw sometimes an utter ruin upon a state or government” (202). The fear is understandable, given the context in which Cavendish was writing, but 13 In “Feminist Perspectives on Science Studies,” Evelyn Fox Keller presents a compelling examination of the way in which epistemological endeavors, including those falling within the natural sciences, reflect or reinforce sociocultural assumptions and biases.

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this does not mitigate the authoritarian (hence anti-feminist) solution her character devises. This exchange between the Duchess and the Empress culminates in meta-discourse, with the Empress agreeing to follow the Duchess’s advice but worrying that she will earn opprobrium for doing so, given that she will “alter her own decrees, acts and laws” (202). This marks an interesting narrative moment, as the author speculates on the outcomes of undoing the world that she has set before her readers. If, as I take it, the knowledge-seeking project in The Blazing World ends rather disastrously when the Empress invokes a totalizing authority, an epistemological arena completely devoid of structure and appropriate checks-and-balances (think of this as the academic variant of populism) carries its own risks. Ironically, Cavendish’s leeriness of a thoroughly democratized intellectual realm speaks directly to our own current epistemological crisis.14 Patriarchal assumptions about women’s abilities barred Cavendish from membership in the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge (1660). Her outsider status possibly facilitated a challenge to emerging methodologies and assumptions.15 The tepid (or at times openly hostile) treatment she garnered from the academic community foreshadowed the ongoing struggles confronting female researchers in certain disciplines. The banishment likely compelled Cavendish to make a virtue of vice, offering a robustly imagined individual as the alternative to the exclusionary politics of the era’s collective knowledge-making. Even a passing familiarity with the history of science confirms Kathleen Lennon’s litotic assessment that “the relationship between feminism and science has not always been a happy one” (125). Neither feminists nor any other subgroup of academics should advocate against scientific knowledge or intellectual pursuits, but bringing hidden or unconscious biases to light remains important. In an address delivered in 1988, which subsequently appeared in an issue of Science, Technology, and Human Values, Evelyn Fox Keller elucidates the two-part strategy required for feminism to make noticeable inroads into scientific disciplines. The first response has to do with a pragmatic change: the necessity of boosting women’s participation in and contributions to the various discourses of science. In Keller’s view, the quantifiable dearth of women working in the 14 For a shrewd take on the current intellectual climate, see Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise. In particular, Nichols showcases the dangers of an “anything goes” approach to information, which traps us in a perpetual confirmation-bias loop. 15 See Haraway’s essay “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” for an overview of the key issues.

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sciences generates a second problem, which is ubiquitous and difficult to remedy. As she explains, because “scientists have traditionally been men, acculturated to privilege a particular set of values (e.g., competition),” the relevant fields of study “have tended to privilege competitive interactions,” and this emphasis holds true irrespective of the species being studied (73). This slanted or partial perspective has long influenced scientific work. In response, many feminist critiques of science, both predating and following Keller’s, focus on cooperative rather than competitive interactions as survival strategies among numerous species or, indeed, as the model for intellectual work.16 In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991), Donna Haraway urges us to see “domination as a derivative of theory, not of nature” (23). Additionally, she wonders whether “feminist standards of knowledge” could “genuinely end the dilemma of the cleavage between subject and object” (71). Current materialist feminists, whose interests often overlap with ecocriticism, sometimes fault Haraway’s work for failing to engage properly with the material world.17 Still, ecocritics generally share Haraway’s assumption that the “cleavage between subject and object” cries out for remediation. Indeed, the project of “healing” the rupture between subject and object, such as by “returning” humans to nature, involves multiple disciplinary fields. It might be helpful to remember that “cleave,” the root word for “cleavage,” belongs to the category of “Janus-words,” those with antonymic denotations. Specifically, “cleave” means both “to split” and “to adhere.” These semantic possibilities should guide us toward a flexible apprehension of subject/object relations: we can variously imagine them as separate entities with diverse needs or conceptualize them in tandem. Though unfashionable to admit, epistemological endeavors might require researchers to claim some distance—provisional, even arbitrary—from their objects of study. Analogously, the eco-self, which I take to be a productive, enduring, yet historically applicable model, seeks a judicious arrangement of person and world. Cavendish does not always realize this balance perfectly, but she offers many instantiations of it throughout The Blazing World. 16 Sandra Harding examines the gender dynamics or tensions in play in scientif ic work in Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives. Her reading epitomizes the feminist insistence on scrutinizing the role of the observer in epistemological endeavors or scientific experimentation. 17 Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman critique the inadequacies of social constructionism, especially its flight from the material world, in their jointly authored “Introduction: Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory.”

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Dispatches from Nowhere: Ecology and the Knowledge/Power Nexus Present exigencies always impose on the recreation of bygone worlds, including those efforts prompted by literary criticism. An astute grasp of this point undergirds Peter Erickson’s Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves (1991). He eschews “a one-way historicism that sheds the present to enter the past” (2). The Blazing World cries out for a similarly fluid approach, partly because Cavendish herself invokes the ancient world even as she addresses developments or controversies specific to her historical moment. Moreover, as we seek fresh meanings from The Blazing World (which is, of course, the goal of any proposed reading), we cannot simply jettison our era’s crises, though contemporary sensibilities should never simply be superimposed on the past. Because Cavendish understood that how we know reveals much about who we are, her utopian vision fosters a deeper understanding of the knowledge/power nexus and its implications for redefining humanness, particularly with respect to balancing solitary and shared interests or needs. Since the appearance of Thomas More’s Utopia in 1516, urgency and immediacy have powered the namesake genre, with its emphasis on ofthe-moment crises. Attunement to current woes incites the time-traveling impulses of utopian writings, as they either summon the future or invoke a distant and venerable past to escape an untenable present. As previously acknowledged, 1666, when Cavendish’s The Blazing World appeared, was a particularly tumultuous time: England had weathered a protracted civil war, absorbed the effects of regicide, adapted to a new form of government, witnessed its collapse, and adjusted to the reestablished monarchy. Furthermore, just before Cavendish published The Blazing World, a specific environmental disaster, the outbreak of a virulent plague, provided a sinister accompaniment to political uncertainty. Given that London’s inhabitants were virtually under siege by an epidemic when The Blazing World was nearing completion, Cavendish’s reflections on and proposals about the human/nature relationship brim with significance. Environmental disasters (including pandemics) demonstrate nature’s undeniable power over all life, but one suspects that this very vulnerability inspires fantasies of escape or domination, as research on shame, a unique type of powerlessness, confirms.18 Along these lines, at certain key moments, The Blazing 18 Donald L. Nathanson examines the shame accompanying vulnerability in Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex, and the Birth of the Self.

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World’s heroine evinces a desire for benign control over her world, and she understands that this entails the skillful management of natural resources. In laying out this vision, she offers a novel configuration of humans and/ in nature. As Cavendish’s readers and biographers have documented, The Blazing World transmutes autobiographical details into narrative tropes or exigencies.19 Then again, More somewhat coyly injects himself into Utopia, and Francis Bacon likewise draws heavily on his own career aspirations (or disappointments) in The New Atlantis. In sum, the influx of the personal does not necessarily contradict the utopian tendency to offer programmatic solutions to specified social ills. Interestingly, although prominent early modern utopists, including More, Bacon, and Cavendish herself, channel their experiences, the genre does not typically celebrate the individual. As Amy Boesky observes, “Utopias rely on both an elevated sense of human ability … and a far less benign view of citizenry, a suspicion that, unbridled, the self is always untrustworthy” (8). Following Boesky, to evaluate the attractiveness of any utopia (i.e., whether it improves upon the society implicitly subject to critique, usually the writer’s familiar world), one must consider the types of “bridling” its citizens endure. Perhaps inevitably, states ask citizens to trade certain freedoms for enhanced security. Cavendish’s Paradise reveals the ecological implications of this theme. If, as I believe, utopian texts pursue compensatory alternatives to suffering, one might expect The Blazing World to conjure a pestilent-free world that had decisively conquered virulent and mysterious-seeming illnesses. After all, the plague that swept through London in 1665 killed at least 200,000 people.20 Not incidentally, The Blazing World indulges a fantasy of perpetual physical health. Noticing that members of “the imperial race appeared so young,” despite having lived for several centuries, the Empress asks about the secret to their perennial health (155). Happily, as she discovers, Paradise contains the “philosopher’s stone,” a rock capable of reversing the effects of aging. The rock produces a “gum” that can be distilled into an elixir (this turns out to be a blissfully simple process), which precipitates a series of purgative effects and results in the shedding of “hair, teeth and nails”; evidently, they peel off “like an armour” (156). Having made it through these steps, the patient is then “wrapped into a cere-cloth” and required to wait “until the time of ninth months from the first beginning of the cure, which 19 In Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Genre, Exile, Emma L. E. Rees addresses the autobiographical elements of The Blazing World. 20 James Leasor examines the adjacent environmental disasters in The Plague and the Fire.

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is the time of a child’s formation in the womb” (156). After completing this second gestation, the fortunate patient “will appear of the age of twenty, both in shape, and strength” (156). Whereas the plague invades and destroys the body, the recuperative power of the philosopher’s stone transforms symptoms of ostensible illness or decay into the precondition of eternal youth. In the seventeenth century, science had yet to identify the causes of the plague and its means of transmission. Panic ignited by the rapid spread of contagion provoked misguided and unintentionally harmful actions. For instance, as James Leasor points out, efforts to contain the disease prompted the mass killings of stray dogs and cats; doing so exacerbated the problem, because it meant that fleas carrying the deadly parasites jumped from the doomed canine or feline hosts to humans. Curiously, Cavendish’s Empress inadvertently acknowledges a particular source of contagion when she reluctantly agrees to view “a flea and a louse” under a microscope, having already noted that she “pitied much those that are molested with [fleas]” (144). If Cavendish (like her contemporaries) failed to grasp the relevant epidemiological issues, she structures her utopia around epistemological endeavors aimed at a better understanding of the natural world. Cavendish had an intuitive grasp of how her period’s innovations in science and technology would reshape the human/nature relationship. Though Cavendish objects to certain burgeoning changes, The Blazing World also records her determination to participate in the period’s bustline academic scene, notwithstanding attempts to exclude women from these endeavors. For instance, from its opening depiction of maritime misadventure to its sustained emphasis on examining the natural world, The Blazing World deliberately evokes Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627). He launches his utopia by chronicling the misfortunes of a group of sailors adrift on menacingly vast waters, stranded by uncooperative winds. Bacon’s voyagers are eventually rescued and taken to an island, the fictive Bensalem, whose inhabitants’ chief aim is the pursuit of knowledge, particularly that which pertains to the natural world. Perhaps surprisingly given Bacon’s reputation among ecocritics, The New Atlantis actually conf irms nature’s power over human life, a point emphasized in the initial plight of the sailors.21 As Price argues, Bacon’s fictive community is “underscored by a sexual political rhetoric in which ‘the secrets of 21 Carolyn Merchant’s influential Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution examines Baconian rhetoric, calling attention to tropes of domination. For an updated perspective on Bacon, see Todd Borlik, Ecocriticism and Early Modern Literature: Green Pastures.

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nature’ are to be disclosed by ‘penetrating’ ‘her’ ‘inner chambers,’” whereas Cavendish “troubles the grounds” of the methods endorsed in The New Atlantis and other Baconian texts’ (131, 132). It is worth noting that Bacon’s exhortations to control nature follow from a deep-rooted understanding of human vulnerability, so the aggressive rhetorical constructions featuring prominently across his writings, such as the stated aim of racking Nature to elicit her secrets, suggest that Bacon wished to strike out against this imperiled condition. In this way, Bacon seeded a movement that would flower in the Enlightenment.22 Although Bacon himself died before its inception, the Royal Society, established under the enthusiastic support of Charles II, formalized the Baconian quest to overhaul knowledge. The Royal Society lent weight and authority to specific types of research and accompanying methodologies, and it certainly conferred respect and a degree of influence on participating scientists. Charles showed a particular interest in the Royal Society’s efforts, at times observing scientists as they conducted experiments.23 Though disqualified from membership in the Royal Society, Cavendish did receive permission to visit its premises and observe “legitimate” scientists at work. This must have been a decidedly bittersweet experience, a reminder of her banishment from an important corridor of power. In any case, reports of her visit to the Royal Society indicate that Cavendish herself drew significant crowds. Rather than observing the world, as is so often the task of the aspiring scholar, she herself became the object of a curious (and at times hostile) gaze.24 The Blazing World features a number of unsubtle digs at the Royal Society, such as the Empress’s critique of both microscopes and telescopes, neither of which she believes capable of imparting truly valuable knowledge about the world. Given Cavendish’s experiences with the Royal Society, along with her evident hostility toward the emerging technologies, one might expect The Blazing World to offer clear alternatives, such as an intellectual arena that deprivileges the visual or insists on the thoroughgoing democratization 22 Ecofeminists have been especially interested in the gendered implications of the Enlightenment or the way its various developments promote interlocking and systematic oppressions. For representative accounts, see Val Plumwood’s Feminism and the Mastery of Nature and the anthology Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature, edited by Karen J. Warren. 23 Peter Gay’s magisterial study of the Enlightenment, The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism, documents Charles II’s interest in science (314–15). 24 Lisa T. Sarasohn’s analysis of Cavendish, The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish: Reason and Fancy during the Scientific Revolution, assesses Cavendish’s fraught relationship with the Royal Society.

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of academic endeavors. Instead, however, Cavendish’s heroine commands through the manipulation or conjuration of seductive spectacles, moments that appear to suspend the laws of nature. This type of power actually depends on the careful guardianship of knowledge; in asserting this role, Cavendish establishes an unlikely alliance with her predecessor Bacon. Additionally, in a compelling analysis of the gender-politics structuring The Blazing World, Lisa Sarasohn shows how the text enabled Cavendish to claim the upper hand over the “serious” (male) scholars admitted to the Royal Society, noting that the “experimentalists and natural philosophers” become the “beast-men,” dutiful subjects of Cavendish’s Empress (191). Along these lines, adds Sarasohn, the beast-men “are all, except for the worm-men, deluded and useless” until the Empress “uses their inborn abilities in her efforts to conquer other worlds” (195). Ultimately, Sarasohn offers a neat analogy: the Empress governs knowledge-making just as “Nature rules matter” (195). In short, Cavendish grasped that power inheres in relationships, and she used her text to shake up the status quo, so often imagined as the “natural order” of things. The transgressive potential of Cavendish’s writings, particularly with respect to gender politics and conceptions of nature, likewise informs Lisa Walters’s analyses. As she observes, Cavendish’s treatment of these issues led to a “complex disruption of the cultural signifiers that founded early modern understandings of bodies and matter” (37). I submit that Cavendish retains her ability to shake up complacencies, such as by encouraging interest in minds and bodies (intangibles as well as the conveniently quantifiable).

Anticipating Foucault: Confrontations with Biopower and Necropower Cavendish’s grasp of the knowledge/power nexus matched Bacon’s, and she also shared his restlessness, a dissatisfaction with the current state of knowledge. In The Blazing World, for example, the newly anointed Empress quickly turns her attention to education, establishing schools, or “societies,” and effectively launching a new regime of epistemology. In this way, Cavendish corroborates Michel Foucault’s observation that power begets knowledge. Foucault’s account of the power/knowledge relationship ranges between the epic and the granular. He offers insights about sweeping social, cultural, and political transformations, such as by arguing that the Western world has undergone a profound ideological shift captured in the differences between “sanguinity” and “sexuality,” and he attends to the specific ways in

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which state power infiltrates daily life.25 Foucault’s assessment of biopolitics, the processes by which the state inscribes itself on the bodies of its subjects, is particularly relevant to The Blazing World. Attending to biopolitics requires considering several key questions, including the following: how does a regime (fictive or otherwise) order the relationship between the individual and society, self and world? What is the role of nature in the anatomical-political order? How does the production of knowledge uphold or reinforce the biopolitical status quo? Finally, does the abiding interest in biopower, notable in Foucault’s work and likewise in the many critics influenced by him, divert us from the underlying issue— namely, the establishment of necropower? As I use the term, “necropower” refers to the state’s presumptive labeling of all inhabitants, human and otherwise, as either deserving of protection or expendable. As Achille Mbembe comments in Necropolitics (2019), “The ultimate expression of sovereignty largely resides in the power and capacity to dictate who is able to live and who must die,” and he adds that this prerogative captures the significance of biopower as understood by Foucault (66). Mbembe extends Foucault’s arguments by reconsidering them in the context of contemporary political turbulence, global disruptions which he believes augur the end of democracy. In his eulogy for democracy, Mbembe writes, “Today we see the principle of equality being undone by the laws of autochthony and common origins, as well as by divisions within citizenship, which is to say the latter’s declension into ‘pure’ citizenship” (3). The resurgence of a politicized blood-and-soil mystique, signaled in the “laws of autochthony,” indicates that place-based conceptions of identity (or assertions of essence, of some immutable substratum of existence) do not always or necessarily promote egalitarian sociopolitical orders. Cavendish was, of course, writing to and for a very different world, so she could not have anticipated some of the historical developments that seed Mbembe’s theories. Notably, however, in setting her vision of Paradise before us, Cavendish offers her own perspective on the ways in which geography and physiognomy conspire to shape identity. In a way, she outlines a plausible alternative to our era’s insistence on a radically ecological vision, summed up in Mbembe’s statement that “it is now admitted that humankind is only part of a greater set of the universe’s living subjects, which also include animals, vegetanimals, plants, and other species” (14). This observation recalls Cavendish’s description of nature as “one infinite self-moving body,” a teeming 25 Foucault articulates the transition from one regulatory mode to another in “Right of Death and Power Over Life,” a chapter included in The History of Sexuality, Volume I.

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network that includes humans but is not structured for our benefit (154). As this chapter seeks to demonstrate, however, Cavendish’s expansive view of nature never cancels out her appreciation for the proprietarily human. Her conception of identity proceeds from the realization that humans are “the Earth’s only literary creatures,” to borrow Joseph W. Meeker’s incisive phrasing (40). With these points in mind, this section considers manifestations of biopower and necropower in The Blazing World, especially as they relate to the concept of selfhood. In the Epilogue, when Cavendish appears to drop her narrative mask and directly address readers, she advances a complex argument about the creative powers belonging to authors. As already noted, the Epilogue celebrates writing, which is why “ambition” prompts Cavendish “not only to be Empress, but Authoress of a whole world” (224). Here, she presents the author as a figure of totalizing, even tyrannical, power. Yet Cavendish quickly backs away from this position, adding, “I have destroyed but some few men in a little boat, which died through the extremity of cold, and that by the hand of Justice, which was necessitated to punish their crime of stealing away a young and beauteous Lady” (224). This valedictory insistence on agential nature indicates Cavendish’s yearning for a transcendental signified, an arbiter of justice capable of bringing human affairs into balance. In the narrative proper, however, Cavendish hews more closely to the sort of biopolitical regime imagined by Foucault, although her Empress prefers to rule through persuasion (benevolent coercion, I suppose) rather than the promise of lethal force. To this end, she arranges for the construction of two chapels, representing heaven and hell, so that she can install (or perhaps impose) her religion on the inhabitants of Paradise. Of these efforts the narrator concludes, “[T]he Empress, by art, and her own ingenuity, did not only convert the Blazing World to her own religion, but kept them in a constant belief, without enforcement or blood-shed; for she knew well, that belief was a thing not to be forced or pressed upon the people, but to be instilled in their minds by gentle persuasions” (164). Though the phrase “gentle persuasion” is likely intended to soften the Empress’s authority, the passage acknowledges mind control as an aspect of her power. As Cavendish demonstrates throughout The Blazing World, the knowledgepower relationship inscribes itself on the body, channeling through each individual to create an overarching effect, an anatomical-political order. The Empress’s openness, her willingness to grant the right-of-life to all creatures, is explicitly tested by her scientists. She instructs them to “dissect such kinds of creatures as are called monsters” (157). The scientists demur, noting their wish for monsters to be “commonly destroyed, except it be for novelty”

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(157–58). It is possible that the scientists are focusing on the post mortem fates of those designated “monsters,” but they could also be endorsing the necessity of exterminating any creature who falls into that ontologically precarious category. The scientists reason that the purpose of dissecting “dead animals” is to “observe what defects or distempers they had” in order to develop suitable treatments, but dissecting monsters will not “prevent the production of others” (158). By contrast, the Empress responds that “such dissections [of monsters] would be very beneficial to experimental philosophers,” though her interlocutors remain unmoved by this argument (158). The narrator never resolves this dispute. Likewise, the conversation does not evolve to establish the criteria for designating monsters. Ironically, the scientists themselves are hybrids, so—to Cavendish’s audience, if not in this era of posthumanist thought—they would be classified as monsters. In a text that often touts nature’s autonomy, the casual reference to “errors” in need of lethal correction strikes a remarkably discordant note. To advance her educational goals, which are commensurate with her governing ambitions, the Empress conscripts the hybrids, that subset of intriguing creatures embodying various combinations of human and nonhuman traits. Their composite physiognomies suit them to particular types of academic inquiries. For example, the “bird-men” are astronomers, given the ease with which they can explore the empyreal realm, whereas the worm-men are “natural philosophers,” tasked with examining the deepest layers of the earth itself. The hybrids’ bodies render them useful to the state, relegating each type to a narrowly defined sphere of action. In this way, power penetrates, reaching each subject as an aspect of embodiment. Moreover, Cavendish’s narrative generates its own anticipatory version of a blood-and-soil myth, insisting on its inhabitants’ indigeneity and the desirability of embracing putatively natural abilities. Embodiment can be the source of seemingly inexhaustible pleasure, but it likewise entails vulnerability, as Foucault demonstrates throughout Discipline and Punish. Not incidentally, he opens the chapter on panopticism by scrutinizing the regulatory processes developed in response to various historical manifestations of the plague. Foucault writes of the “strict partitioning” that segregated neighboring communities from an afflicted town whose members were forced to remain inside the firmed-up boundaries under penalty of death (195). He elaborates on the “political dream of the plague,” which entailed “the penetration of regulation into even the smallest details of everyday life” (198). In this light, the state’s power was absolute, realized on the body of each subject. Writing in the immediate aftermath of a raging epidemic, Cavendish softens and even transmutes this dynamic:

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acting in happy compliance with the Empress’s directives, her hybrids embrace their utility to the state, a quality deriving from the body itself. Once again, this is a world in which “each followed a profession as was most proper for the nature of their species, which the Empress encouraged them” (134). It requires little imagination to think of spurious manifestations of this philosophy, whereby official judgments, based on presumptively natural (innate, immutable) qualities, delimit opportunities and experiences. A straightforward demonstration of the body as a destination of power surfaces in a peculiar requirement enacted in Paradise: the stipulation that “priests and governors,” all “princes of the imperial blood,” were “made eunuchs” in order to carry out their duties (133). Obviously, enforced eunuchizing directly targets reproductive abilities, but it really transmutes into a futuristic version of necropower, a policy that kills potential subjects. In making male bodies the focus of pernicious state power vis-à-vis reproductive capability, Cavendish offers a stark counterpoint to our era. Curiously, however, although the policy directly affects men, it was evidently triggered by misogynist assumptions. Specifically, when the Empress asks about the rationale for state-mandated castration, she learns that the procedure was intended to prevent men from marrying, an evidently desirable outcome given the belief that “women and children most commonly make disturbance both in church and state” (135). The Empress briefly objects, noting that “women and children have no employment in church and state” (135). In response, the representatives of Paradise suggest that the two groups “are so prevalent with their husbands and parents, that many times by their importunate persuasions, they cause as much, nay, more mischief, secretly, than if they had the management of public affairs” (135). Here, too, silence intrudes in the narrative, as Cavendish’s Empress fails to call out the exclusionary politics of Paradise. As feminist theorists have long noted, for all his insightful theorizing of the body, Foucault has little to say about gender differences. In an article published several decades ago, Sandra Bartky points out, “Foucault treats the body throughout as if it were one, as if the bodily experiences of men and women did not differ and as if men and women bore the same relationship to the characteristic institutions of modern life” (105). She brings to light the “disciplines [regulatory processes, institutional arrangements] that produce a modality of embodiment that is peculiarly feminine” (105). We should also be alert to the ways in which various disciplinary mechanisms produce racialized bodies. The Blazing World challenges us to think through the problem given such cogent articulation by Bartky. In particular, the narrative celebrates a seamless integration of subject and state premised on

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the former’s unique corporeal endowments, so in this way it romanticizes the workings of biopower. On the other hand, at times Cavendish comes close to acknowledging the differential processes and outcomes addressed by Bartky. Indeed, this materializes in the opening scene, when the protagonist’s youth and beauty, attributes expressly connected to her femaleness, render her uniquely vulnerable. Even after the abductor and his accomplices perish, the woman can do nothing but await rescue. The narrator reports that the “distressed Lady … seeing all the men dead, found small comfort in life; their bodies which were preserved all that while from putrefaction and stench, by the extremity of cold, began now to thaw, and corrupt, whereupon she having not strength enough to fling them over-board, was forced to remove out of her small cabin, upon the deck, to avoid that nauseous smell” (126). At sea, in a world beyond her own and literally surrounded by the rotting corpses of her would-be abductor and his accomplices, the Lady experiences a profound powerlessness, a vulnerability expressly connected to the requirements of the body. A recent anthology, New Feminists Perspectives on Embodiment (2018), shows how corporeal experiences or biological exigencies variously generate pleasure and pain. In their contribution to this volume, Julia Janzen and Maren Wehrle explain, “Being embodied means, on the one hand, to be material, visible, and subject to the physical laws that govern causality” (37). Once again, corporeality assures vulnerability, positioning us within the determinative ebb and flow of the material world. Yet the nonnegotiable dimensions of bodily experience likewise account for pleasure, precisely because they render us “open to the world,” as Janzen and Wehrle observe (37). Another contributor to the same volume, Danielle Petherbridge, suggests that vulnerability can—and arguably must—sponsor an ethics of care founded on the recognition of shared suffering. The emphasis on vulnerability supplements other recent feminist work advanced under the auspices of a “new materialism.”26 Chief among this theory’s proponents are Karen Barad and Stacy Alaimo, both of whom emphasize humans’ thorough embedment in the environment. In a representative passage from “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Barad writes, “All bodies, not merely ‘human’ bodies, come to matter through the world’s iterative intra-activity—its performativity” (141). In “Trans-Corporeal Feminisms and 26 In “Feminism, Foucault, and the Politics of the Body,” Susan Bordo notes that Foucault implicitly defaults to male bodies in his theorization of biopower.

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the Ethical Space of Nature,” Alaimo uses the term “trans-corporeality” to highlight the interactive dimensions of the human/nature relationship and asks, “What are some of the routes from human corporeality to the flesh of the other-than-human and back again?” (253). Though Cavendish’s aims and goals (not to mention the knowledge available to her) differ markedly from those articulated by contemporary feminist philosophers such as Barad and Alaimo, she evinces a similar concern with the patterns of movement they address, whereby bodies merge and separate. Cavendish registers her interest in ontology and burgeoning science by focusing on the naming and categorizing of the various inhabitants of her fictional world. That said, lingering traces of magical thinking sometimes surface in The Blazing World, such as in the discussion of various species’ modes of propagation. Cavendish recycles the fanciful notion that “maggots [are] bred out of cheese,” a process the Empress explains by commenting, “there is some likeness between maggots and cheese; for cheese has not blood, and so neither have maggots”; also, she finds they “have almost the same taste” (147). The Empress concedes that all organisms share certain exigencies (e.g., each species has a means of reproducing itself), but in noting her alimentary preferences, she also calls attention to the ways in which she consumes nature, or parts of it, in order to live. This, too, is a form of ecological awareness. Of course, the concepts of “intra-activity” and “trans-corporeality” are fundamentally ecological given their joint consideration of reciprocity between humans and their natural surroundings. Across contemporary ecological discourse, the emphasis on reciprocity manifests as an ecovariant of communion, a celebration of humans’ seamless melding with the surrounding environment. To a world recently devastated by plague, however, boundarylessness—the ceaseless flow between bodies—might take on dangerous or even lethal implications. We should be cautious about invoking interconnectivity as an automatic solution to environmental (or other) problems. Nevertheless, the integrative models promoted by prominent theorists have become the signature of our current age, the Anthropocene. Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty provides a useful definition of the Anthropocene, essentially arguing that this era will eliminate myths or hopes of human mastery over the natural world. In brief, the human capacity to alter nature will bring about its transformation of us. In cynical terms, a mutant form of symbiosis, founded on reciprocal destructiveness, will be our undoing. Measured against our era’s propulsive movement toward environmental disaster, a cataclysm that thrives on the reckless exploitation of the natural world, Cavendish’s version of biopolitics includes certain pleasing elements.

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She does not exactly reject the utility model; rather, she acknowledges that any honest account of how to live, irrespective of species, entails using some (other) elements of the natural world in order to meet basic needs, such as those outlined in the base of Maslow’s pyramidal schema. Ultimately, the Empress’s academic mission, which assigns specific roles to disparate species, enforces a unique brand of symbiosis, as we see in the hybrids’ contributions. On the other hand, although admittedly laced with fantasy, the narrative’s final section, which deals with martial conflict in the Empress’s original world, literally conscripts the hybrid creatures populating Paradise. When the Empress learns that her homeland “was embroiled in a great war” and that “her native country, was like to be destroyed by numerous enemies,” she is desperate to assist (203). The worm-men prove especially useful in prosecuting the war. The Duchess of Newcastle comes up with a plan based on a curious geological formation of Paradise, a “fire-stone” that burns perpetually, so long as it is wet. The Duchess recognizes that these stones will decimate the invading naval forces, whose ships are made of wood. The only catch is that the firestone resides deep within the earth, inside the Burning Mountains. Realizing that the worm-men are perfectly suited to the task of retrieving the f irestones, the Duchess advises the Empress to “send a number of worm-men to the Burning Mountains” to retrieve “a great quantity of the fire-stone” (206–07). Similarly, the fishmen will be dispatched to take care of the enemy’s naval forces (206). The hybrids appear eager to provide assistance, which is consistent with the Empress’s wish to lead by inspiring devotion rather than fear. Yet their happy compliance does not quite dispel the troubling implications of the protracted scenario, the complacent assurance that the non-human world exists for humans’ benefit. By now, of course, we have numerous examples of how other species are similarly coopted into military campaigns, often to these animals’ detriment. Notwithstanding the romanticized portrayal of multi-species collaboration in military excursions, this detail enforces a radically anthropocentric agenda. If the conscription of the hybrids contravenes the text’s generally expansive, even egalitarian, attitude to the natural world, the achievements of the worm-men create a subtly redemptive effect. As I have previously argued, worms pervade literature, typically because they intimate the abject and serve as reminders of death and rot. Cavendish herself conveys antipathy toward annelids when the Empress considers the ostensibly unique propagation of the species. Her scientists assert that some worms “are produced out of flowers, some out of roots, some out of fruits, some out of ordinary earth” (153). As with the discussion of maggots emerging from

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cheese, this stance bodies forth an older understanding, a pre-scientific conceptual schema, bearing traces of Ovidian magic. Learning of worms’ unique genesis, the Empress initially deems them “ungrateful children,” in that “they feed on their own parents, which gave them life” (153). In current ecological discourse, humans take on the role of “ungrateful children,” the species evidently most capable of and intent on harming our shared planet. Read against the pervasive associations of worms with decay and death, the elevation of the worm-men reinforces the transgressive aspects of Cavendish’s approach to the human/nature relationship. She works a kind of alchemy, turning reminders of vulnerability—of putrescence—into benevolent assistants.

Object Lessons: Images of Selfhood and Otherness The tumultuous politics of Cavendish’s era meant that she herself experienced privilege and vulnerability. Cavendish made no secret of her support for the monarchy, and one might expect this attitude to saturate her writing. Some passages in The Blazing World do endorse monarchical power. Specifically, the Empress praises Paradise for its mode of governance, wherein there was “but one Emperor, to whom they all submitted with the greatest duty and obedience” (130). Here and elsewhere, Cavendish likens aristocratic power to the ideal conditions of Eden, a state on which considerable freedom is conferred. Yet critics do not ascribe consistently Royalist sympathies to The Blazing World. For example, Walters finds in the text “a view of the natural world that is more sympathetic to Republican than to Royalist ideology” (6). She adds that Cavendish’s divergence from Royalist politics is most evident in her science,” which posits that “humans cannot obtain absolute power in Nature” (13). Similarly, Sarasohn argues that Cavendish used parody to critique “an institution [the Royal Society] she viewed as dangerous, useless, and deluded in thinking that its experimental program could rival and confine the works of nature” (102). Walters and Sarasohn remind us that apprehensions of the natural world both informed and were shaped by conceptions of the political order; both types of knowledge were altered by evolving definitions of the human, including the expanded understanding of anatomy and physiology made available by the Royal Society’s efforts. To state this another way, the individual body and the body politic were defined in relation to each other, and both were likened to the workings of the natural world. When, for example, researchers studied cardiac functions (which they were able to

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do in a remarkably hands-on fashion) and learned that the heart pumps blood throughout the body, this discovery shook up traditional assumptions about the relationship of sovereign to subject. Indeed, some critics cite this discovery as an important catalyst of Republicanism, since it captures a collaborative dynamic that could be transferred to the political order.27 Cavendish certainly opposed key aspects of the Royal Society’s mission (not to mention the efforts of Republicans), but she understood the intimate relationship between self and world, whereby redefining one necessarily altered the other. Cavendish also grasped the fundamentally erotic nature of power, perhaps especially when it operates within a monarchical state. In such systems, the monarch’s body takes on special significance, as it represents a totalizing authority and commands the devotional attention of subjects. Throughout The Blazing World, Cavendish manipulates the eroticism of power dynamics, especially in the relationship between sovereign and subject. This section spotlights her complication of the usual arrangements distinguishing self from other, subject from object, particularly as these relationships were reimagined or reconf igured via advancing scientific knowledge. Cavendish lays the groundwork for understanding the “woman question” in science, so I briefly consider lingering manifestations of this issue. Cavendish’s visit to the Royal Society seems to have provided material for the opening scene of The Blazing World with its obviously gendered scopophilia. Specifically, the mere sight of the young and beautiful heroine incites the itinerant merchant’s lust. Captivated by the woman’s beauty, the merchant abducts her, spiriting her away on a sea voyage. When this “Lady” ends up in an unfamiliar land (i.e., Paradise), its Emperor “conceived her to be some goddess, and offered to worship her,” though he settles for marriage upon learning that she is human rather than divine (132). Presenting her protagonist as the object of adoring attention seems a way for Cavendish to acknowledge, even exalt, her own role as spectacle. In this detail, the narrative subverts distinctions between subject and object. At times, her beauty renders the character a passive recipient of the male gaze; variously, however, it accords her power and authority, albeit of a stereotypical kind. For example, the Empress’s military triumph culminates in a scene of worshipful compliance wherein potential rivals find themselves in thrall to her beauty and charm and awed by the spectacles she creates. In effect, Cavendish offers a primer on visual economies, which rely on distinctions between 27 An essay by Margaret Healy skillfully links theories of governance with apprehensions of embodiment.

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observers and observed. Additionally, The Blazing World demonstrates that eroticism shapes specular dynamics, a point with clear implications for epistemological endeavors. Specifically, knowing entails observing, which in turn necessitates intimate access to the object of examination. The narrative arc of The Blazing World turns on subject/object relations, particularly as they manifest in the act or art of looking, because we follow the heroine’s progress from eroticized object to privileged seer. But this journey is not one-directional, as the Empress periodically claims the role of observer and presents herself as a carefully orchestrated spectacle, so she disrupts tidy distinctions between subject and object. As we have seen, an anti-Cartesian trend currently unites various disciplines. Academic endeavors generally reject the subject/object dyad as Descartes imagined it and eschew intangibles, such as “mind” or “spirit.”28 In The Blazing World, Cavendish proves elusive on such questions: at times, she exhibits a reverential attitude toward the material world, including human bodies, while other passages make an ardent case for interiority, a core identity—she prefers the term “soul—that is not reducible to physicality. These dual dimensions of her philosophy snap into focus when the Empress summons spirits to her in order to work through a series of ontological puzzles. Her discussants inform her that “bodies made souls active,” and the conversation generally enforces a thoroughgoing dependence of soul and body (175). The spirits, however, cannot resolve all questions. For instance, when the Empress inquires “whether all matter be soulified,” they acknowledge their uncertainty (175). The protracted philosophizing comes to an abrupt end when the spirits suddenly, without explanation, “disappeared out of her [the Empress’s] sight” (179). Their departure causes the Empress to fall “into a trance, wherein she lay for some while” (179). Upon coming out of this state, the Empress experiences a deep sadness, precipitated by her belief that the spirits “had committed some fault in their answers, and that for their punishment they were condemned to the lowest and darkest vehicles” (179). Specifically, she worries that they now must reside in “the black and dark abyss of the earth” (179). When the Empress questions her fly- and worm-men about this possibility, the latter group assures her “that the Earth was not so horrid a dwelling, as she did imagine; for said they, not only all minerals and vegetables, but several sorts of animals can witness, that the earth is a warm, fruitful, quiet, safe and happy habitation” (179). 28 Refutations of and hostility toward Descartes are considered at some length in the three chapters focusing on early modern tragedy. Neuroscientist António Damásio’s Descartes’s Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, provides an excellent overview of key issues.

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In celebrating the deep, loamy layers of the earth, the conclusion of the Empress’s conversation with the spirits expressly counters the ecopolitics of tragedy, the apprehension of humans’ kinship with nature (including our, as anything’s, eventual, inevitable habitation in the earth), and provokes dread. This anxiety bakes into tragic conventions themselves, as if to insist that individuation comes at the price of a communitarian ethos. Cavendish rewrites this dynamic, aiming at a more balanced arrangement that rejects the blunt hierarchies promoted by dualistic thought. In so doing, she variously champions self and world, mind and body. After all, the narrative moves from the philosophizing spirits to the deepest layers of the earth: both are celebrated, neither reviled. Notice that Cavendish does not enforce sameness or homogeneity. Instead, she celebrates the specificity of each creature or locale under consideration. Shortly after the Empress wraps up her conversation with the spirits, questions of inwardness take precedence. Having decided to write a “cabbala” of her own, she desires assistance from a “scribe.” This creative quest recalls John Dee’s multiple conversations with angels (his efforts likewise necessitated a “scryer,” or recorder), wherein he claimed to receive divine communications. An apocalyptic fervor infuses Dee’s project, as he evidently believed the familiar world would shortly give way to a coming order, and he sought divine guidance for this transition.29 For Cavendish’s Empress, the cabbala has deeply personalized significance. The same holds true for Cavendish herself: this is the section featuring the Duchess of Newcastle, the character bearing Cavendish’s own title. When they meet, the Duchess initially yearns for the political power enjoyed by the Empress, revealing, “I would fain be as you are, that is, an Empress of a world, and I shall never be quiet until I be one” (184). The Empress offers to help, so her f irst move is recalling the spirits to seek their advice. They reroute the Duchess’s desires, telling her, “Every human creature can create an immaterial world fully inhabited by immaterial creatures, and populous of immaterial subjects, such as we are, and all this within the compass of the head or scull” (185). The spirits’ emphasis on the world-building properties of human creativity counters those passages that embrace materialism. Furthermore, the Duchess frankly asserts her desire for fame, another uniquely human concern, when she notes, “the shortest-lived fame lasts longer than the longest life of man” (185). If such assertions strike some readers as simplistic, even crude, they underscore Cavendish’s genuine 29 For an interesting study of this aspect of Dee’s work, see Deborah Harkness, John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabbala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature.

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engagement with the meaning of humanness, both its possibilities and its limits. Cavendish might have believed that writing rather than holding lofty political office afforded women a more viable way to imprint themselves on the world. But her Empress celebrates her own successful reign in Paradise. She asserts that her society is “governed without secret and deceiving policy; neither was there any ambition, factions, malicious detractions, civil dissensions, or home-bred quarrels, divisions in religion, foreign wars, etc., but all the people lived in a peaceful society, united tranquility, and religious conformity” (189). Here, of course, Cavendish offers her critique of the actual world, defining Paradise’s beneficence in terms of those inauspicious traits not replicated therein. In her text, the political heft of utopian discourse proves inextricable from its emphasis on selfhood, especially as it pertains to the self/world dynamic. The reformist or activist tendencies of the genre are amplified by the Empress’s consultations with the Duchess of Newcastle, signaling Cavendish’s wish to improve her actual world. While the appearance of the Duchess of Newcastle brings the narrative into the political urgencies of England in the seventeenth century, this character’s interactions with the Empress often tilt toward the fanciful. Specifically, when the two depart Paradise (a voyage that requires a standin spirit to inhabit the Empress’s body), they pay a visit to the Duchess’s husband. Indeed, the spirits of the Empress and the Duchess both end up inhabiting the Duke’s body. Cavendish plays with the eroticism of this arrangement, noting, “[T]he Duke had three souls in one body; and had there been but some such souls more, the Duke would have been the Grand Signior in his seraglio, only it would have been a platonic seraglio” (194). The Empress and her host quickly “became enamored of each other, which the Duchess’s soul perceiving, grew jealous at first,” though she conquers this by assuring herself that they are “Platonic lovers” who belong to the “divine” (presumably in contrast to the sensuous) realm (194–95). The instances of astral projection and soulful communing indicate the complexities of selfhood as imagined by Cavendish. Specifically, she enlarges the self by focusing on a core spirit, an inner identity capable of movement beyond the more restricted range enjoyed by the body. Throughout The Blazing World, Cavendish moves between a vitalized material world and the possibilities of mystical inwardness. The former vision nestles rather comfortably within twenty-first-century ecological discourse, especially given the devoted attention to narratives of “vibrant matter,” but the latter probably strikes most readers sympathetic to this camp as an indulgent piece of fantasizing and one that shores up impracticable, even harmful, conceptions of humanness.

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I suggest, however, that Cavendish’s emphasis on a truly dual existence offers a welcome corrective to current trends. After all, if the immersive pleasures of a richly drawn inner life were insignificant, there could be no justification for literary works or the critical endeavors accompanying them. Rather than dismissing the interludes of astral voyaging, we should dig into the yearning that powers them. This section of the text draws heavily from the rhetoric of desire with its lyrical tropes of oneness, of two morphing into one. The centripetal energy of narratives of desire suspends distinctions between lover and beloved (or subject and object). Cavendish does not offer a conduct book for ethical action, but in attempting to balance her version of the biological self with a celebration of proprietarily human concerns, she negotiates between extremes. Admittedly, calling upon a text composed roughly 350 years ago to offer insights into the daunting problems we confront, many of them coalescing around the self/world relationship, requires humility, a concession that past practices or accepted wisdom can and should be revived and put in service of contemporary issues. While The Blazing World cannot advance our knowledge of cutting-edge developments in the natural sciences, it does offer a unique perspective on coping with disaster and developing a viable worldview. This is because Cavendish’s self-conscious awareness of the power of storytelling, of locating oneself in a particular narrative, remains essential. She seems reluctant to vacate her Paradise, offering one final image of its Empress and Emperor enjoying music and dancing “according to their several places” (224). This scene harmonizes the aesthetic with the topographical, perhaps encapsulating the enduring psychological functions of art. In other words, pace Philip Sidney, art indigenizes, making us feel at ease—at home—in our “clayey lodgings.” In the months following its publication in January 1666, The Blazing World must have acquired an unintended relevance. Specifically, the text’s fiery resolution to military unrest, along with the memorable image of a world permanently lit up, eerily forecasts the fire that broke out in September of that year and raged for five days to destroy much of London. This disaster, coming on the heels of virulent plague, provides stark evidence of human vulnerability. Like it or no, we have little trouble imagining the disruptive effects of an uncontrolled blaze in our era of unpredictable weather. The aftermath of the 1666 fire imparts another kind of cautionary tale. Perhaps to counter feelings of impotence, London sought the identity of the culprit responsible for setting the fire. Investigators quickly assigned blame to a “foreigner,” as if to prove that danger emanates from outsiders and is not, conversely, a condition endemic to life (or the usual habits of a particular

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group). The accused, whom Leasor describes as “the 25-year-old son of a Rouen watchmaker,” was summarily tried, convicted, and sentenced to death on remarkably scant or questionable evidence (235). This unfortunate instance of pseudo-justice distills the workings of the scapegoat function, which endeavors to assign blame for misfortune, thereby sparing the privileged community from acknowledging hard truths. A clear pattern emerges: calamity and suffering stoke nativism, enforcing or perhaps reinforcing divisions between insiders and outsiders. Obviously, the solution is not eschewing judicial processes but rather hewing more closely to our unique role as humans, tasked with being the “moral inhabitants of the globe,” to borrow Toni Morrison’s phrasing.30 Ironically, at times this means countering behaviors that seem hardwired in humans (and often masquerade as inevitable and righteous), such as the tendency to promote in-group interests and isolate, target, or banish outsiders. Cavendish’s brand of individualism, which exists in tandem with an appreciation of humans’ dependence on the natural world, leans in a similar direction. Counter-intuitive though it seems, denying human uniqueness constitutes the more serious eco-menace because it absolves us of agency and responsibility—to ourselves and others, within and beyond the human world. In sum, we need the self, or the eco-self, understood to be in perpetual movement with the surrounding world.

Epilogue The Blazing World sometimes reads as escapism, enabling transit to an alien world, a space of imagination that stands in contrast to the writer’s familiar locale. Of course, retreating to (or through) writing in times of plague did not originate with Cavendish’s text. For instance, Boccaccio structures the Decameron (c. 1349–53) around a literal escape: the flight of privileged urban dwellers who have the means to relocate to the countryside during an especially lethal eruption of disease. The narrative arc of the Decameron enacts one version of the Pastoral in its juxtaposition of a corrupt (in this case, biologically tainted) urban space with an ostensibly safer or purer country habitation. For Boccaccio’s emigres, storytelling becomes the means of enduring, of passing the time. In a tangible way, therefore, infectious disease, a natural disaster, occasions Boccaccio’s narrative. According to one theory of composition, the threat of contagion likewise propelled Shakespeare’s Sonnets, which some 30 The line is from a speech titled “Moral Inhabitants,” which Morrison delivered at the University of Pennsylvania in 1976.

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critics speculate were written in plague-years when theaters were forced to close and writers compelled to take up other genres. These examples snapshot one variant of the relationship between art and nature, zoe and bios, indicating the compensatory functions of the latter terms. Yet literature and other cultural forms are not strictly conf ined to escapism. After all, The Blazing World sometimes confronts the specter that arguably incited its conception. In particular, once her societies are established, the Empress seeks knowledge of how “one body infects another, and so breeds a universal contagion” (158). She is “very desirous to know in what manner the plague was propagated” and wonders whether the disease “went actually out of one body into another?” (158). Ultimately, however, the Empress reports that “the most experienced and wisest of [her] society … do for the most part believe, that it [i.e., the plague] is caused by an imitation of parts, so that the motions of some parts which are sound, do imitate the motions of those that are infected, and that by this means, the plague becomes contagious and spreading” (159). Notably, the Empress does not herself assert a theory of contagion. Standing at the portal to a new world of ideas, an epidemiology informed by modern science, Cavendish’s character cannot quite see beyond the threshold. In refusing to concede the person-to-person transmission of disease and also rejecting the role of microscopes in unraveling the plague’s dark secret, the mystery of its infectiousness, Cavendish’s text opposes what we now understand as truth given advances in scientific knowledge. It seems crucial to consider why Cavendish’s Empress, consistently presented as a pioneer of knowledge and learning, rejects the possibility that the plague spread from one infected person to others, something that casual observation—or the intuitive reliance on Occam’s Razor—should have confirmed. Cavendish seems reluctant to concede the weaponizing of human flesh, the way that a familiar, loved body (even one’s own) could suddenly possess a lethal power. Even now, the prospect of bio-aliens invading the self might spark discomfiture (not to mention physical ailments). Perhaps Cavendish’s wish to retain autonomy or agency explains her opposition to epidemiological conclusions. Conversely, our era has moved in a radically different direction, as the discourses oriented to early modern studies persistently confirm. In a review essay published in 2004, David Hawkes fires a shot across the bow, launching a preemptive critique of our hypermaterialist age.31 He 31 See Hawkes’s “Materialism and Reification in Renaissance Studies.” Although he objects to the ultra-materialist turn, he offers balanced and perceptive assessments of the texts he reviews.

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traces the “ultra-materialist approach to subjectivity” to the influence of figures such as Richard Dawkins (par 1). Commenting on this trend, Hawkes writes, “Not only does the economy determine our ideas; ideas themselves are material, neurological and chemical reactions in the brain” (par 2). I submit that allegiance to such theories and the insistence on their pervasive application amounts to an unintentionally reactionary move, precisely because it disallows autonomy and erases distinctions between people and objects. Historically, as today, the equation of people with things works as a crudely obvious form of oppression. Reciprocally, celebrating the ostensible collapse of the subject/object dyad unwittingly demonstrates a privileged vantage point, a willingness to give up advantages not enjoyed equally. To understand the necessity of countering the materialist hegemony, especially its denial of the value of humanness, one might turn to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015). Presented as an epistolary work of non-fiction addressed to Coates’s son, Between the World and Me traces the grim alchemy by which humans morph into salable commodities. Coates writes, “You have to make your peace with the chaos, but you cannot lie. You cannot forget how much they took from us and how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold” (71). Read against this brutal history, the valorization of objects takes on a very different significance. Because as Hawkes suggests, “if there are any points on which the history of ethics is unanimous, they are that it is wrong to treat people as things and evil to treat objects as if they were alive” (par 5). The overt moralizing of this argument likely displeases some critics given the preference for dispassionate critique. That said, Hawkes yanks us back to the practical implications of ideas, the way they structure or rupture experience. This process unfolds with lyrical force in Coates’s narrative, especially given his incisive comment that “race is the child of racism, not the father” (7). “Race” operates with a formidable signifying power, but we can never—should never—lose sight of the fact that it is an idea, a particular representational politics, that ends up inscribing itself on human flesh. While Coates’s advice to his son often embraces a communitarian politics, he repeatedly insists on the value of individual lives. For instance, Coates writes, “The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history” (70). Which is to say: each life mattered. Cavendish does not consistently or perfectly realize this radically egalitarian vision in her fictive world, but she offers glimmers of it. We can never return to Paradise. But we could do worse than seek the Cavendish compromise, a version of the self that values both specificity and difference, engaging the world yet claiming a space apart from it. Reflecting

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on the ecological promise of The Blazing World, Hanlon suggests that the “anthropomorphized” or “already animated” nature imagined in this text offers a course-correct to our era, the Anthropocene, providing way to theorize “a world with characteristics that are as much ‘human’ as ours are ‘natural’” (65). Honoring the more-than-human world remains a significant ecological goal. Yet I maintain that charting the best path forward requires celebrating difference and distinctiveness across nature’s varied domains, rather than insisting on an unwavering sameness. After all, the disasters threatening the Anthropocene ensue from human behaviors, indicating the uniqueness of certain desires and potentialities. Failing to confront this might mean preemptively ceding victory to successive pandemics, disasters that will, according to Bill Schutt, be sparked by anthropogenic recklessness. In brief, climates crises will trigger suffering and deprivation, eventually leading to and even necessitating cannibalism, and this will be the catalyst of virulent global contagion. If humans can bring unmatched destruction to the Earth, the flip side of this grim realization is the somewhat paradoxical notion that sophisticated science (a uniquely human endeavor), mated with a committed environmentalism, holds the key to remedying the potential plagues of our current moment. Denying human agency will aggravate, not assuage, environmental problems. Embracing both dimensions of the eco-self holds the key to halting the revenge cycle brewing in the Anthropocene.

Bibliography Alaimo, Stacy. “Trans-Corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature.” Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, Indiana UP, 2008, pp. 237–64. Alaimo, Stacy. Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space. Cornell UP, 2000. Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan Hekman. “Introduction: Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory.” Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, Indiana UP, 2008, pp. 1–19. Bacon, Francis. The New Atlantis. Walter J. Black, 1942. Barad, Karen. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, Indiana UP, 2008, pp. 120–54. Bartky, Sandra. “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.” Feminist Philosophies, edited by Janet A. Kourany, James P. Sterba, and Rosemarie Tong, Prentice Hall, 1992, pp. 103–18.

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Index Abjection 48, 49, 141-45, 152 Agency (Human) Doctor Faustus and 89, 102-103, 107 Duchess of Malfi and 155, 156 n. 13, 184 eco-self and 11 environmental responsibility and 17, 209, 212 human need and 23 interplay with communion 12-13, 35, 184 literacy and 80 moral choice and 24, 30-31, 31 n.34, 211 neuronovel and 157, 157 n.14 versus biological determinism 130 Anthropocene 33-36, 201, 212 Art and Nature Antony and Cleopatra’s treatment of 142 ecofeminist analysis of 49 n.7 evolutionary aesthetics and 27 n.26, 60, 60 n.25 relevance to the plague/disease 210 Shakespeare’s Sonnets and 60-65, Atomism 51, 51 n.8, 129, 130, 130 n.15, 130 n.16, 131, 155 Bacon, Francis ecocritical responses to 90, 90 n. 19, 193 n. 21 epistemological interests or innovations 90, 90 n. 18, 195 The New Atlantis 192-194 Bennett, Jane 12 n.4, 29-30, 129 n.14, 157-158, 184 n.7 Biophilia 23, 28 n.29, 93 n. 21 Biopolitics 196, 201 Biopower 196-197, 200, 200 n.26 Bios and Zoe 28, 28 n.30, 29, 55, 210 Black Death 26, 26 n.25, 27 n. 27, 29 Boccaccio 209 Cannibalism 36, 36 n.42, 212 Cavendish, Margaret biopower/necropower 195-203 The Blazing World 179-212 ecological and epistemology 184, 191-195 Enlightenment critique 184 proto-feminism of 182-183 Royalist politics 203 Royal Society 194, 210 views of selfhood 184, 203-209 Chronotope Bakhtin’s definition of 164 early modern examples of 164, 166 ecocritical significance of 164 n. 25 Comic Worldview 134 COVID-19 Pandemic 25-27, 29, 153

Deep Ecology 11 n.3, 114, 187 Descartes, René Damásio’s views of 33, 155 dualism of 130-131, 154-155 ecocritical/academic repudiation of 101, 101 n.38, 205, 205 n.28 33, 101, 101 n.38, 205, 205 n.28 Donne, John 143, 181 Douglas, Mary 122-124 Drama and Ritual 136, 144 n. 25 Ecocriticism COVID-19 and 19, 25 early modern studies and 18, 23, 25, 115 n.1, 129, 193 n.21 ecofeminism/feminism and 11, 13, 190 Great Chain of Being interpretations 123 n. 11 human/nature relationship in 28, 33, 38, 120, 121, 133, 136 materialism and 17, 58, 58 n.21 nature/culture dialectic in 25 n.23 oceanic turn in 16-17 pan-organismic kinship and 12 posthumanism and 79 praxis and 26 relevance to poetry 46 self/world relationship in 13 n.6, 151 views of ecophobia vs. biophilia 47 n.3 views of human distinctiveness and 78 Ecofeminism critique of Enlightenment thought 194 n. 22 importance to the eco-self 11, 11 n.3, 13, 46, 186-187 negotiations of individual/communal interests 12, 12 n.3, 46, 114, 187, 188 views of essentialism in 186, 186 n.11 Ecophobia 15, 15 n. 9, 23, 28 n. 29, 48 n. 3, 93 n. 21, 179 Ecopoetics 58-65 Ecopsychology 13, 13 n. 6, 46, 103, 151, 151 n. 5, 163 n. 22 Eco-Self Cavendish’s treatment of 39, 179, 184, 186, 199 cognitive research and 31 consilience/compromise possibilities of 11, 16, 20, 21-24, 29, 155, 163, 199, 209, 212 Damásio’s research and 33 definition of 10 Doctor Faustus and 37, 77-111 ecofeminist implications of or influences on 11, 187 human uniqueness and 36, 172 moral agency and 24

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reading strategy 19 relational aspects of 16 response to materialism/ hypermaterialism 13 Shakespeare’s Sonnets and 37, 45-75 Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and 38, 113-148 temporality 163 Webster and 38, 149-175 WEIRDness and 88 Embodiment early modern conceptions of 10 n.1, 99 n.34, 99 n.35, 204 ecofeminist/feminist views of 116, 200 Foucault’s treatment of 198-199 reading and 19 Shakespeare’s depiction of 126 selfhood and 29, 38, 93 n.23, 150 Enlightenment Cavendish’s treatment of 39, 173, 183-184 critiques of 14-16, 23 dualism and 130 ecofeminist critiques of 121 n.8, 185 n.9, 194 n.22 Horkheimer and Adorno on 115-116 human vulnerability and 194 Hume and animal/relationship in 144 Merchant’s assessment of 115 posthumanist apprehensions of 116 views of selfhood in 28-29, 31, 98 Eros and Thanatos 48 n. 6, 137-140, 156 Ethos of Molecularity 130, 130 n. 16, 135, 154 amorality of 131 Explanatory Gap 125, 125 n. 12 Fame 117-118, 122, 137-139, 169, 171, 171 n. 32, 185, 206 Foucault, Michel 19, 195-199, 200 n. 26 Free Will 24, 24 n. 22, 29, 130, 135 n. 19, 156 n. 13, 157 n. 14 Freud, Sigmund 32 n. 36, 160 Great Chain of Being 65, 123, 123 n.11, 184 Greenblatt, Stephen Renaissance Self-Fashioning 99-100 Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve 171, 181 The Swerve 22-23, 26, 130 n.15 Heraclitus 163 Human Exceptionalism (see also Uniqueness) aesthetic products and 23 Cavendish’s view of 184 necessity of 133 rationality and 65 n. 34 repudiations of 79, 129, 159 specter of un-exceptionalism 150 Human Uniqueness (see also Exceptionalism) Cavendish and 178, 184 Cleopatra and 129

counterpoint to indistinction 131 Doctor Faustus and 107 early modern views of 142 ecological potential of 172, 209, 212 eco-self and 36, 137 environmental destruction and 159 necessity of establishing/preserving 21 Humoral Theory 10, 10 n. 1 Hume, David 143-144 Indistinction 38, 120, 129, 131, 132-133, 144, 150-151, 188 Interiority (also see Inwardness) 10, 46, 66 n. 28, 98, 98 n. 33, 99, 205 Intra-activity 200, 201 Inwardness (also see Interiority) The Blazing World and 206-207 desire and 128 early modern views of 10 n.1, 10 n.2, 98-99, 98 n.33, 99 n.34, 142 eco-self and 46 Shakespeare’s Sonnets and 52 storytelling/fiction and 137 n. 21 versus biological determinism 135 Jung, C. G. 161, 170 Literacy as a bio-technology 71 Great Divide Theory 70, 70 n. 43 human evolution and 22, 71 pivot to modernity and 22 n. 21 progress narratives and 23 selfhood and 70, 78 Sonnets and 70 WEIRDness and 22 n. 19, 52 n. 9, 88 Lucretius 155 Marlowe, Christopher Doctor Faustus 37, 38, 77-111 Faustian phenomenology 97-105 Intermediating or liminal self 77-82, 102 Maslow, Abraham Hierarchy of Needs 8284, 84 n. 11, 105, 202 Materialism Biological reductionism and 33-34 challenge to free will 29, 156, 157 counter-trend or pushback against 30 n. 32, 210 n. 31 early modern studies and 30 n.32, 80, 93 ecological theories and 12, 58 evolutionary theory and 20, 20 n.17, 29 feminist approaches to 200 hypermaterialism 31 influence on academic discourse 98, 99, 150, 154, 157 influence on pivot to modernity 23 limitations of 125 n.12, 151, 152 literary manifestations/necropoetics 49

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Index

obsession with objects 13 repudiation of selfhood 16, 36, 135 systems theory and 12 n.4, 129 n.14 vibrant matter and 12 n.4, 129 n.14 Memory as aspect of identity 17, 65 Merchant, Carolyn 14, 14 n.7, 90 n.19, 115, 115 n.1, 193 n.21, 204 More, Thomas 191,192 Morality shifting early modern views of 91, 103-105 WEIRDness and 89 Mortality early modern apprehensions of 26-27, 48-50, 56 n.18, 57, 57 n.19, 66-67, 82, 85,141, 142, 149, 171 n.32, 172 Nature Anthropocenic views of 35 Antony and Cleopatra’s depictions of 115119, 122, 124, 126, 131-133, 136, 142 art/aesthetics and 27 n.26, 27 n. 27, 47, 142, 181, 210 Bacon’s views of 90, 193 biophilia and 15, 23, 28, 28 n.29 biopower’s implications for 196 Cavendish’s views of 179, 184, 188, 191-198, 203, 206, 212 Deep Ecology and 114 dialectic with nurture/culture 13, 21, 25, 36, 154 Doctor Faustus’s views of 84-85, 92, 93 early modern views of 14, 15, 23, 25, 28, 59, 78, 118, 130 n.15, 143, 184 ecological theories of 29, 135, 154, 201 ecophobia and 15, 23, 28, 47 n.3, 93 n.21 eco-self and 11, 37-38, 179 Enlightenment attitudes toward 144 evolutionary aesthetics and 60 feminist/ecofeminist views of 11-12, 30, 30 n.31, 49 n.7, 185, 185 n.8, 185 n.9, 186, 190, 194 n.23, 201 generic conventions and 120, 134, 166 humans embedded in 10, 25, 27-28, 37, 58, 107, 114, 153 humans estranged from 12, 14, 79, 154 Merchant’s analyses of 90 n.19, 115, 193 n.21 Ovidian influences on 87 poetic views of 45, 46 n.2 Sonnets’ examinations of 49 n. 7, 50, 54, 58-64, 68 Necropolitics 196 Necropower 196-197, 199 Ovid 17, 45, 87, 87 n. 14, 137, 154, 158, 203 Parmenides 163 Permanence aesthetic possibilities for 142, 142 n.23

ancient views of 163 Antony and Cleopatra’s treatment of 113, 140 bios / zoe distinction and 28 depictions of 28, 37, 49, 55, 62, 65, 66, 106, 113, 140, 142, 142 n. 23, 164 Doctor Faustus’s depiction of 106 emerging self and 37 Sonnets’ quest for 49, 54-67 Phenomenology 38, 97-105 Posthumanism 78, 79, 116 Purity and Ontology 122, 126 Qualia 125, 125 n.12, 126 Regeneration Tropes of 28, 52, 59, 60, 142 Reluctant Ecology (tragedy) 27, 38, 84, 108, 136 Royal Society of London 189, 194, 194 n.24, 195, 203, 204 Science and Feminism 188-190 Self-Erasure 121, 132, 134 Selfhood/Individual boundarylessness and 129, 133, 153 early modern theories of 10, 10 n.2, 12, 12 n.5, 16, 21, 22, 29, 80 n.4, 81, 85, 89, 97, 98, 98 n.33, 99, 104, 106, 106 n.41, 117, 127, 137, 152, 152 n.8 ecological discourse of 11, 29, 30, 35, 114, 134, 157 n.12, 196 individual vs. communal aspects of 12-13, 12 n.5, 14, 23, 31, 32, 32 n.37, 79, 105, 106, 115, 138, 168, 176, 179, 186, 185-90, 197, 209, 211 phenomenological approaches to 38, 97-105 posthumanist conceptions of 115-116 Shakespeare Antony and Cleopatra 38, 85, 115-148 Hamlet 10, 10 n.2, 27, 48, 85, 93, 107, 120, 120 n. 6, 155, 171 Measure for Measure 132, 165 Sonnets 17 n.11, 27, 28, 37, 38, 45-75 Titus Andronicus 60 n. 23 Sidney, Philip 45, 51, 59, 65, 208 Sociobiology 21, 153 n.10 Speciesism 159 Suicide 38, 113, 117, 120-122, 142-143 Trans-Corporeality 135, 154, 201 Watson, Robert N. ecological self 10, 98 Webster, John Duchess of Malfi 149-175 Materialism of 149-152 WEIRD/ WEIRDness 21, 22, 22 n.19, 88, 88 n.16, 89, 104, 151 n.6, 183 n.6 Witchcraft 12 n. 5, 122 n. 9

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The Eco -Self in Early Modern English Liter ature

Wolfe, Cary Critique of speciesism 159, 159 n.18 discussion of zoe vs. bios 28 egalitarian biosphere articulated 153 n. 10 Worms Antony and Cleopatra’s depiction of 141 The Blazing World’s views of 202-203

ecological significance of 58 defining humanness and 38, 119-124, 135-136, 150, 153 Sonnets’ treatment of 47, 48, 65 38, 47, 48, 58, 65, 119-124, 135-136, 141, 150, 153, 202-203