Ecology and Environment in European Drama (review)

How might the canon of European drama be opened up to ecological readings and stagings? This is the question Downing Cless sets out to answer in Ecology and Environment in European Drama. Arranged historically and drawing on case studies of five plays he has directed at Tufts with an aim toward bridging the nature/culture divide, the book provides a framework for thinking about the history of European drama's relationship to ecology and the environment and a model for dramaturgical research intended to unearth the "natural" where literary history has heretofore only found the "cultural."

Cless begins his investigation with Greek tragedy, arguing that while the Greek tragedians "valorize the emergent culture, they often cast a critical eye toward its abusive treatment of nature" (17). Cless's target in this section is the historical reception of tragedy as a genre that unequivocally glorifies culture over nature, and he rebuts this view by reading the major tragedies, from Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound through Euripides's Bacchae, as works that trace the Greeks' awareness of human interdependence on nature even as they seek to establish culture as a predominant concern onstage. Cless then turns his attention to Greek comedy and presents, as a case study, a reading of Aristophanes's The Birds through an eco-critical lens. In this, as in his subsequent case studies, Cless models a theoretical/historical approach to reading the play that involves both mapping out how the relationship between humans and the environment was theorized and understood during the era of the play's composition and researching (to the extent possible) the writer's knowledge of the natural world; this research then becomes the basis for interpreting and staging a production that seeks to bring ecological issues to the foreground. In the case of The Birds, the research led Cless to a staging that focused on what he labels Pisthetairos's "eco-hubris": "Pretending to care for the natural world, Pisthetairos only endangers it. He is a developer claiming to be friendly to the environment but only making it worse, all for his own greed and self-inflation" (51).

Cless's study then moves forward in history. After a transitional chapter that investigates the reasons nature took a back seat in drama during the two millennia separating the Greeks from the Renaissance, the book turns to ecocritical readings and stagings of Renaissance drama, with case studies focusing on Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest. Cless finds an ecological sensibility at work in both these playwrights, albeit in different ways. Where Marlowe reveals the dark side of the early modern attitude toward nature, Shakespeare offers moments of reverence for nature. Marlowe's Faustus, Cless argues, is not only "the preeminent icon of early modern control of nature, he embodies the absurd lengths to which emerging capitalism goes with natural commodities" (89). In Shakespeare, on the other hand, Cless sees evidence of a playwright for whom nature "is not . . . a privately owned resource for commodity production, or only a retreat for elites" (117); rather, Shakespeare's "astounding reverence for natural details" (116) is evidence of a strong ecological sensibility. Here, as in the earlier chapter on The Birds, Cless supports his eco-interpretation of the plays with research into early modern theories about the natural world as well as with a description of his own production choices in the course of directing the work.

The ensuing two chapters, "From Renaissance to Romanticism" and "Ibsen and Chekhov," look at, respectively, what Cless perceives as a near-total occlusion of nature from drama during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the turn back to considerations of nature and the natural world in the nineteenth century, with particular focus on the novel ways in which both Ibsen and Chekhov represent the clash between ecology and industry in their plays. Cless then turns to the twentieth century in his final two chapters, providing a case study of Giraudoux's The Madwoman of...