Shakespeare's environmentalism: how his plays explore the same ecological issues we face today

• In fact, the common but misleading phrase “industrial revolution” masks the long history of resource extraction and ecological degradation in the British Isles stretching back at least to the arrival of the tin-hungry Romans.
• Renaissance England was reeling from the effects of all these problems.

King and countryside

• When King James became his patron in 1603, Shakespeare was tasked with writing plays to entertain a keen outdoorsman and hunter who was as much preoccupied with the material state of the British countryside as with matters of state.
• No wonder, then, the Shakespearean stage encompasses a remarkable variety of landscapes and features an abundance of animal imagery to rival the royal menagerie – basically King James’s private zoo – and compensate for England’s dwindling numbers of wild game.
• These articles mark the 400th anniversary of the publication of the First Folio, the first collected edition of William Shakespeare’s plays.

Enduring environmental issues

• Shakespeare adapted the story from a writer whose father had proposed the existence of a flooded land-bridge linking Britain to the continent (now known as Doggerland.
• While the shipwrecked king refutes claims to rule the unruly seas, the costumes donned by Shakespeare’s actors would have told a different story.
• Hermione acts like her namesake when she exclaims she too would rather die than stain her name as an adulteress.
• In inserting these environmental issues into his plays, Shakespeare forced his audience to reflect on the political, moral, and spiritual implications of early modern England’s growing power to transform the natural world.