Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama by Bruce Boehrer (review)

The booming field of early modern ecostudies positions itself at a crossroads, one way pointing toward the increasingly urgent environmental discourses of the early twenty-first century and the other looking to the historicist procedures of early modern studies. Different critics manage this double vision differently, and the connection between contemporary ecological crisis and early modern literary culture remains fraught. Bruce Boehrer’s direct and persuasive new book provides powerful evidence that it is possible to be both a rigorous historicist and a thoughtful ecocritic. Addressing the risk of anachronism, Boehrer takes pains to distinguish his historical analysis from the postindustrial present. At the same time, he builds a powerful case for environmental stress as an underlying feature of Jacobean England, with special attention to the thriving, dirty, dangerous, and disease-ridden city of London. He uses literary and historical evidence to expose “the theater’s response to ecological pressures” (4). Richly detailed and structured, his book not only demonstrates that early seventeenth-century English playwrights responded to environmental questions, but also provides a far-reaching model for how critics in our own age can practice historicist criticism with an environmental focus.

The basic structure of the book’s six chapters presents three pairs of playwrights, each of whom responds to slightly different features of the Jacobean physical and literary environment. The first two chapters on Middleton and Jonson explore “urban satire,” the next two on Shakespeare and Fletcher analyze “pastoral escapism,” the final two on Dekker and Heywood uncover “proletarian nationalism” (27). Each chapter is detailed and thorough, providing valuable context for the varied careers of the six playwrights. Together, they comprise an argument about cultural responses to environmental stress, especially “growing resource problems and difficulties with pollution” (25). In a dense introduction, Boehrer lays out the evidence that Jacobean environmental problems emerged from human causes, especially overpopulation in London. Quoting John Evelyn’s Fumifugium (1661), Boehrer describes a painfully polluted city. He claims, in fact, that the smog and smoke about which Evelyn complains “had been developing steadily since the last quarter of the sixteenth century, as a consequence of London’s growing dependence on coal as a substitute fuel for firewood” (20). Perhaps his richest conceptual suggestion is that Jacobean dramatists responded to environmental pressure through literary genres: “I would argue that the literary modes of urban satire, pastoral escapism, and proletarian nationalism remain to this day the most powerful imaginative tools we have to confront the ongoing degradation of our natural environment” (27). This argument for genre as environmental tool animates his discussion throughout.

The opening chapter on Middleton and “ecological change” (28) is perhaps the strongest among a series of strong chapters. Middleton is above all a “city writer” (28), and Boehrer’s study of environmental degradation is primarily an urban story. By connecting “Middleton’s proto-ecological observations … [to] his religious temperament” (39), Boehrer makes the satiric snarl of Middleton’s plays into environmental commentary. “The vocabularies of moral degeneracy and environmental degradation,” he notes, “tend to merge in Middleton’s work” (39). In contrast with Middleton’s urban satiric spirit, the second chapter on Jonson’s “marked antipathy for the urban commercial sector” (49) leads to what Boehrer terms Jonson’s “chief environmental insight, at once simple and profound: goods decay, but trash is forever” (60). Ranging widely across Jonson’s career, from Stuart masques to urban comedies to pastoral Penshurst, Boehrer explores Jonson’s “deep-seated anxieties about the sustainability of a mode of life” (69). Jonson’s anxieties and Middleton’s anger provide a rich, conflicted portrait of environmentally-framed literary culture in Jacobean London.

After this gritty pair, Boehrer turns to “Shakespeare’s dirt” and Fletcher’s “ecology of manhood.” Exploring playwrights who, despite working in London, appear less deeply urban than Middleton and Jonson shifts the terms of “environmental degradation.” The reading of Shakespeare’s investment, literal and symbolic, in agriculture, land ownership, and grain consumption is excellent; I’ve...