Shakespeare’s Nature: From Cultivation to Culture by Charlotte Scott (review)

In the current flood of ecocritical work in early modern studies, the surfacing of Charlotte Scott’s Shakespeare’s Nature: From Cultivation to Culture is sure to attract some attention. Since the publication of Gabriel Egan’s Green Shakespeare in 2006, relatively few books focused solely on Shakespeare’s engagement with the nonhuman world have appeared.¹ So Shakespeareans should take notice.

Quickly into reading this learned and densely written book, however, the eco-critical crowd may be disappointed. Much recent work on matters of nature in early modern English literature has sought to decenter the human and to make the non-human speak (as it were). So, for example, Jean Feerick and Vin Nardizzi introduce their collection of essays on The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature as a response “to an ecocritical call for (measured) anti-anthropocentric readings and models of exchange that elucidate the range of actors and complexity of networks that attach humans to nonhumans, ‘quasi-subjects’ to ‘quasi-objects.’”² In contrast, Scott’s book squarely and mostly unabashedly aims at people, and their complex interaction with the land and what it produces. What interests her about Shakespeare’s “nature” is the “rich landscape of human relations that it invokes” (3).

As she acknowledges, Scott’s approach to the topic of early modern engagement with nature has been influenced less by ecocriticism and more by the superb British scholarship on agrarian history, and, in particular, by Joan Thirsk, Andrew McRae, Michael Leslie, and Timothy Raylor. She does occasionally gesture toward ecocriticism and its concerns (for example, on pages 31 and 121), but mostly her work is rooted in the didactic literature of the period and economic history. Scott does share with the ecocritics a concern about how engagement with nature makes one rethink what is human: for her, cultivation of nature is essentially an ethical matter.

Central to Scott’s critical framework are the language and the practice of husbandry in Shakespeare’s time. Practical manuals like those of Gervase Markham were then advocating new approaches to land improvement, while moral and religious writers used metaphors of husbandry to preach about everything from pedagogy to providence. In these writings, “cultivation is more than tillage; it is a social discourse—and by implication an ideology—through which both human action and intention can be judged as well as expressed” (7). Cultivation thus locates us, not just in the muddy fields, but in an ethical framework. Scott promises that “by offering husbandry as a seminal network through which providence morphed into prudence and ethics into equity we can examine the multiple ways in which the human turned its cultivation into its culture” (22).

As this promise suggests, the book does present an overarching narrative of change in the discourse and practice of husbandry from the sixteenth into the seventeenth century. The first part of the book explores “the role of cultivation in the evaluation and expression of a socialized—not individualized—subjectivity. Drawing the individual . . . into a discourse of responsibility, husbandry provides an extended discourse on the nature (quite literally) of investment and reward, ethics and obligation” (29). The second half follows a transition from this ethical and agricultural self-fashioning to the individual’s alienation from the land in the context of a changing, more individualist, and consumer-oriented rural economy.

The book’s argument is worked out through readings of selected works of Shakespeare, beginning with an extended discussion of the Sonnets, an obvious choice because of the language of agriculture and production in the first eighteen poems. Chapter 2 presents husbandry as a “language for exploration of that which can be stored, invested, or produced” (36). Using both practical manuals and religious tracts, Scott persuasively demonstrates that in the Sonnets husbandry functions as an economic and an ethical language of waste, value, gain, obligation, profit, and loss, applicable to human interaction, and played out in the poems’ probing of reproduction and the social self...