Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia by Simon C. Estok, and: Ecocritical Shakespeare ed. by Dan Brayton and Lynne Bruckner (review)

Simon C. Estok’s monograph Ecocriticism and Shakespeare makes a case for the term “ecophobia,” a term that he hopes will help Shakespeareans to see connections between ecocriticism, feminist criticism, sexuality studies, and studies of racism and anti-Semitism (2–3). He promises in the introduction that “the pages that follow will offer nuanced and developed close-readings of Shakespearean drama” through an approach that “encompasses feminism, queer theory, critical racial theory, food studies, cultural anthropology, ecopsychology, poststructuralism, and deconstruction and demonstrates just how productive a theoretically informed historicist ecocriticism can be” (12). The book does deploy all of these ways of reading texts, but it did not convince me that they are all in the service of ecocriticism.

Attempting to ally all of these liberatory theories and practices leads Estok to some suspect claims. For instance, he seems to exaggerate King Lear’s misogyny when he says, “In Cordelia’s ‘nothing,’ Lear hears something, and whatever her ‘nothing’ signifies for him . . . the mere fact of her communicating anything is monstrous to Lear because she is a woman” (27). But this exaggeration may be necessary in order to claim that the play is both misogynist and ecophobic and that one tendency produces the other. Likewise, Estok parenthetically claims in chapter 4 that “Caliban is evidently vegetarian” (53). The marmoset-snaring Caliban may not be so easily allied with animal liberation. More significantly, the misogyny that is in King Lear may not be intimately connected with the play’s vision of the natural/human/animal world, and Caliban’s eating practices may have little to do with The Tempest’s ecological implications.

Another example of this problem occurs in chapter 3, “Coriolanus and Ecocriticism.” That chapter consistently reads Coriolanus’s rejection of the body politic and society as ecophobia. Although Estok is certainly right that “the social is embedded in the natural,” it does not necessarily follow that rejection of social ties equals rejection of the natural world (40). It also may not follow that the play’s rejection of Coriolanus because of his extreme individualism is ecophobic.

In general, the evidence the book presents for Shakespeare’s ecophobia is not entirely persuasive. Estok shows us that Shakespeare’s plays often extol nature’s virtues. But he often takes evidence of natural dangers as signs that a play is essentially ecophobic. It is more accurate to say that the plays present the natural world as sometimes nurturing and beautiful and sometimes dangerous. This vision of nature is certainly anthropocentric, but it can be as ecophilic as it is ecophobic. Estok’s second chapter, on King Lear, offers the play’s generally malevolent weather as proof of its horrific vision of an unpredictable natural world. It is a bit difficult to see how the play could have made winter on the heath into a positive image. Surely a stormy, miserable winter is as much evidence of nature’s predictability as it is of its unpredictability. Chapter 6’s reading of The Winter’s Tale as ecophobic is also problematic; the appearance of ravenous wolves and bears in the play may not mean that the play rejects or fears nature. Estok is very interested in the linkages he sees between homophobia and ecophobia; Shakespeareans who believe that early modern sexuality was organized along the lines of dominant late twentieth-century American sexuality might find his readings of The Merchant of Venice and Coriolanus (chapters 7 and 3) more persuasive than do I.

Estok’s book discusses many significant environmental and animal rights concerns during the early modern period. We can learn about, or be reminded of, the Little Ice Age in the late sixteenth century, the pollution problem in early modern London, the connections people were making between bad sanitation and ill health, and early...