Writing the Forest in Early Modern England: A Sylvan Pastoral Nation

CONTENTS

CONTENTS List of Figures vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Sylvan Pastoral in Early Modern England xi CHAPTER ONE The Rise of Sylvan Pastoral: Literary Form Meets Forest History 1 Part I—Sylvan Pastoral, Shakespeare, and 1590s England CHAPTER TWO Shakespeare’s Green Plot: The Stage as Forest and the Forest as Stage in As You Like It 35 CHAPTER THREE Green Plots and Green Plotters: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Sylvan Struggle 91 CHAPTER FOUR A Border Skirmish: Community, Deer Poaching, and Spatial Transgression in The Merry Wives of Windsor 121 Part II—Forest Knowledge/Forest Power: Sylvan Pastoral in Mid-Seventeenth Century England CHAPTER FIVE Sylvan Pastoral and the Civil War: Representing National Trauma in Sylvan Terms 157 CHAPTER SIX Royalist Woods 213 CHAPTER SEVEN John Milton’s Sylvan Pastorals and the Theatrical and Godly Individual 243 Notes 291 Bibliography 339 Index 359 ...