Breaking the Bounds of Domesticity: Ecofeminism and Nature Space in Love's Labour's Lost

As ecocriticism defies the misconception of the natural world as passive, inert matter, it can also serve as an effective lens with which to analyze areas that seem antithetical to nature space. One of these is the largely indoor realm of the domestic, a zone long-designated as feminine. In her work on ecofeminism, Stacy Alaimo points out that women have long turned to nature for inspiration in subverting customary roles, such as those related to the household. She identifies the wilderness in particular as "undomesticated" space, "both [as it is] a space apart from the domestic, and, in the sense that it is untamed, serves as a model for female insurgency." Notably, and in correlation to Alaimo's findings, the play Love's Labour's Lost contains key moments in which disadvantaged women step away from the domestic and claim for themselves outdoor nature space. Acting as agents though perceived by their male counterparts as objects, the Princess and ladies of the play transform "passive" natural areas into staging grounds for action, undoing constructions of the natural world as exploitable material and recasting nature as agential, feminist space. Through dramaturgical study of the text and analysis of Dominic Dromgoole's 2009 revival of his 2007 production at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, this article addresses how theater-makers of today may realize and produce ecofeminist interpretations of this—and by extension, other—classical play(s).