Ecocriticism and Early Modern English Literature

Green Pastures

Todd A. Borlik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136741791
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria di Shakespeare

In this timely new study, Borlik reveals the surprisingly rich potential for the emergent "green" criticism to yield fresh insights into early modern English literature. Deftly avoiding the anachronistic casting of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors as modern environmentalists, he argues that environmental issues, such as nature's personhood, deforestation, energy use, air quality, climate change, and animal sentience, are formative concerns in many early modern texts. The readings infuse a new urgency in familiar works by Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Ralegh, Jonson, Donne, and Milton. At the same time, the book forecasts how ecocriticism will bolster the reputation of less canonical authors like Drayton, Wroth, Bruno, Gascoigne, and Cavendish. Its chapters trace provocative affinities between topics such as Pythagorean ecology and the Gaia hypothesis, Ovidian tropes and green phenomenology, the disenchantment of Nature and the Little Ice Age, and early modern pastoral poetry and modern environmental ethics. It also examines the ecological onus of Renaissance poetics, while showcasing how the Elizabethans' sense of a sophisticated interplay between nature and art can provide a precedent for ecocriticism's current understanding of the relationship between nature and culture as "mutually constructive." Situating plays and poems alongside an eclectic array of secondary sources, including herbals, forestry laws, husbandry manuals, almanacs, and philosophical treatises on politics and ethics, Borlik demonstrates that Elizabethan and Jacobean authors were very much aware of, and concerned about, the impact of human beings on their natural surroundings.

1
Reincarnating Pythagoras

Anima Mundi and Renaissance Gaia Theory

Much has been learned since the end of the eighteenth century in the study of nature based on evolutionary theory, genetics, ecological theory; but it is no accident that ecological theory–which is the basis of so much research in the study of plant and animal populations, conservation, preservation of nature, wildlife and land use management, and which has become the basic concept for a holistic view of nature–has behind it the long preoccupation in Western civilization with interpreting the nature of earthly environments, trying to see them as wholes, as manifestations of order.

–Clarence Glacken¹

In the midst of a relatively peaceful fin de siècle decade, anxiety about the aging childless Queen, who had reigned so well for so long, coincided with periods of turbulent weather and dearth. Roughly two years after her death, Shakespeare wrote King Lear, an apocalyptic tragedy that can be seen in retrospect to signal the demise of the so-called Elizabethan World Picture. In 2001, after a long fin de millennium decade of geo-political stability and prosperity in the West, a disputed election, Islamic jihad, and recession coincided with scientific reports on an up-tick in global temperature, triggering widespread concern that the environmental overreach of industrialized nations has gravely affected our planet’s long-term inhabitability. I call attention to this overlap not to discredit the truth of ecology or the recent groundswell of green criticism in academia. The search for “manifestations of order” in nature occurs with far too much regularity to be dismissed as a mere backlash or anodyne against political upheaval. Yet this search does become particularly intense during eras of accelerated change and uncertainty. These transitional moments in the past, of which the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century remains one of the best documented in English literature, harbor lessons that can illuminate and orient our own search in the present. The Renaissance itself rummaged for insights in the thought of antiquity, and that, in turn, is where this search for the origins of the belief in the inherent orderliness of the universe must begin.

One of the first individuals to expound a conviction in the organic integrity of the cosmos is the pre-Socratic sage Pythagoras. Best known today for the mathematical theorem that bears his name, Pythagoras is a remarkably complex and prescient thinker whose legacy deserves more thorough consideration than it has been afforded by either ecocritics or scholars of early modern English literature. If one may judge a philosopher by his enemies, it is a decisive mark in his favor that Pythagoras incurred the scorn of Francis Bacon. While Bacon’s hostility to Aristotle is notorious, he waged an equally bitter smear campaign against Pythagorean cosmology. In an overlooked yet characteristically slashing passage, the Lord Chancellor complains that the Pythagorean sect “did first plant a monstrous imagination; which afterwards was, by the school of Plato and others, watered and nourished. It was that the world was one entire perfect living creature” (2:640). Seeking to uproot the heresy, Bacon debunks their superstitious teachings that the tides were the respiration of the ocean, and the earth itself was vivified by a spiritus mundi:

This foundation being laid, they might build upon it what they would; for in a living creature, though never so great (as for example, in a great whale) the sense and the affects of any one part of the body instantly make a transcursion throughout the whole body; so that by this they did insinuate, that no distance of place, nor want or indisposition of matter, could hinder magical operations; but that (for example) we might here in Europe have sense and feeling of that which was done in China; and likewise we might work any effect against matter; and this not holpen by the co-operation of angels or spirits, but only by the unity and harmony of nature. (2:640-641)

Thanks to his role in writing the obituary of the animistic universe, Bacon has become a favorite whipping boy of environmental historians. With each new increasingly dire prognosis of the planet’s health, there comes a mounting recognition (not to mention a twinge of trepidation) that Europeans may very well “have sense and feeling of that which was done in China.” The irony lurking in the previously cited passage is that Bacon, while discrediting Pythagorean cosmology with his right hand, frequently personifies nature for his own purposes with his left. Inspecting his gendered representations of nature as female, critics such as Carolyn Merchant and William Leiss have notoriously accused Bacon of crafting a sadistic epistemology, where scientific inquiry resembles the sexually abusive inquisition of a witch. Recently, scholars have sought to complicate this cardboard version of Bacon as the sinister mastermind of the modern environmental crisis–some of the sexist tropes were embellished by Bacon’s Victorian translators, his metaphors are not invariably violent, his only extended personification of nature depicts it as the male satyr, Pan, and so forth. To some extent Bacon is simply a convenient scapegoat; it would be facile to assert that he single-handedly sparked the so-called scientific revolution of the seventeenth century.² Yet his hostility toward the Pythagorean-Platonic doctrine of an anima mundi, or world soul, his effort to discount it as absurdly “magical,” represents something of a tipping point. It is, I will argue, a marked departure from the opinions expressed by many of the leading minds of the Elizabethan age. After Bacon, the scientific mentality begins its slouch toward the uninhibited interrogation and subjugation of the natural world “to enlarge the bounds of human empire.” Lorraine Daston remarks that by the late seventeenth century, Baconian philosophers like Robert Boyle saw nature as “an artifact rather than a potentially usurping artisan,” and reviled the anthropomorphic representation of it as verging on idolatry.³ Since the anima mundi recognizes both a sanctity and subjectivity in nature, which encourages human beings to reflect on the ecological impact of their actions, it is tempting to speculate how the course of Western civilization might have differed if this notion had retained the viability it enjoyed in the sixteenth century.

Many feminist critics are justifiably concerned that the tendency to speak of “Mother Nature” inevitably stakes out culture as a male domain, reinforcing patriarchal notions of women as somehow unsophisticated, irrational beings whose energies would be best devoted to childbearing and childrearing. Yet in medieval and Renaissance England, particularly during that era when a powerful female monarch occupied the throne, the representation of Nature as a quasi-divine empress could also emphasize the status of all mortal human beings (both men and women, peasants and earls) as biological subjects, embodied beings dependent on the environment for their nourishment, propelled by carnal drives, swayed (so it was believed) by innate temperaments, humoral imbalances, and astral influences, and susceptible to the flesh’s thousand natural shocks.⁴ Equally important, the anthropomorphic fantasy of Nature as a living creature was both informed by and perpetuated an animistic mindset that made it difficult, in Lynn White’s phrase, “to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.” Roman agricultural texts, for instance, instruct farmers to offer expiatory prayers and sacrifices to wood spirits before thinning a grove.⁵ These rites had a practical ecological purpose, since having to kill some of one’s livestock every time one wanted to fell a tree would discourage over-harvesting.

While I have designated the period as “early modern” in the title of this book to underscore its continuity with contemporary society, the Renaissance, unfashionable as the term is today, remains a useful label insofar as it stresses the recovery and renewed prestige of pagan learning in Europe in the centuries following Petrarch’s coronation as a living embodiment of Greek and Roman culture. Renaissance humanists advocated a greater receptivity to non-Christian natural philosophy, ethics, spirituality, ways of relating to and being in the world. Similarly, one of the key objectives of an early modern ecocriticism must be to recover alternative, pre-Enlightenment modes of conceptualizing and engaging with nature. Post-modern historians of science have taught us to exercise caution when framing the advent of Copernican astronomy and Newtonian physics as a triumphant narrative of progress from naïveté to Truth. A cosmological model is not a fiction exactly, nor a mere projection; rather it is like Shelley’s multi-colored dome of glass which we construct from the materials around us and through which we perceive, refracted, the kaleidoscopic flux of reality. Every model can generate sufficient evidence to make it appear compelling, but the evidence is always selective, reaching us through our current epistemological filters, filters that are in turn bent and colored by certain socio-political beliefs and psychological needs. At the conclusion of his majestic Discarded Image, C.S. Lewis reflects on the mortality of the current scientific worldview.

It is not impossible that our own Model will die a violent death, ruthlessly smashed by an unprovoked assault of new facts–unprovoked as the nova of 1572. But I think it is more likely to change when, and because, far-reaching changes in the mental temper of our descendants demand that it should. The new Model will not be set up without evidence, but evidence will turn up when the inner need for it becomes sufficiently great.⁶

Less than a half-century later, the paradigm shift that Lewis imagines unfolding in some far distant epoch may already be under way. An onslaught of new evidence, from ferocious hurricanes to the thinning ozone, from silent bee hives to the grim reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are chipping away at certain assumptions about human entitlement to heaping portions of the global pie. Needless to say, the model that emerges to replace the old one will not be geocentric. Yet it very likely could, in other vital respects, resemble the classical-medieval World Picture.

As ecocriticism has slowly begun to gain traction in literary studies, new attempts are again being made in early modern studies to grab hold of the Great Chain of Being, one of the most enduring and ingenious of human schemes to impose intelligibility on the environment. Forged in part by Plato and Aristotle, who were working from (as I shall illustrate) certain assumptions made by Pythagoras, this model encouraged early modern Europeans to see a glimmer of purposiveness in all creation. The intellectual historian Arthur Lovejoy promoted the schema in the mid-twentieth century and it was widely embraced in English departments, its popularity not unrelated to the fact that it meshed nicely with New Criticism’s faith in the organic unity of the literary artifact. By the time New Historicism and Cultural Materialism emerged as the dominant critical paradigms back in the early eighties, however, the “Chain” was looking rather rusty. Over the past two decades early modernists have understandably sought to debunk this theory as the ideology of an elite, which served to naturalize the inequalities of the social hierarchy.⁷ But the time might be ripe for a re-appraisal. While its spiritual taxonomy works to underwrite a belief in human exceptionalism, its holism also fostered an “analogical habit of mind” that can be seen in some way as intimating an ecological sensibility in its insistence on the inter-dependence of human beings and the other organisms with which they share the planet. But in order for the Great Chain of Being to serve as more than the pre-modern equivalent of shallow ecology, early modern ecocriticism will have to re-forge it, as Jeanne Addison Roberts suggests, from a vertical hierarchy to a horizontal bond.⁸ An emphasis on the Pythagorean heritage of the Chain can allow for this more flexible reconfiguration of the model to occur. The Pythagorean scheme, as S.K. Heninger has remarked, includes “express provision for variety on a horizontal scale. At each level of creation, within each link of the chain, there also is diversity.”⁹ Fortunately, many early modern authors such as Shakespeare and Sidney seem to have grasped this more firmly than twentieth-century critics, who have tended to focus on its appropriation as political ideology. As Gabriel Egan shrewdly notes, “if the Elizabethan World Picture … was thinkable as a model of the world even as it was dismissed as official propaganda, then the Gaia hypothesis would have appeared unremarkable” to early moderns.¹⁰ Green Shakespeare has sounded the first bars of the reveille to restore the faded World Picture; the pages that follow will expand upon his efforts, applying new tools and methods to better reveal just how green it really was.

Since the Gaia hypothesis cannot be empirically verified, some redoubtable skeptics such as Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould have sought to discredit it as a mawkish fantasy of sentimental nature-lovers.¹¹ To be sure, the earth is not always a benevolent nurturer. Its multifarious terrains and life forms do not invariably conspire to promote human flourishing. The planet’s response to anthropogenic climate change may not be the product of conscious deliberation; there may even be a blizzard on the day your university has scheduled a global warming teach-in. Nonetheless, this does not disqualify Gaia from serving as a conceptual tool for tracing the subtle webs of mutual dependence that sustain life on our planet. In the paradoxical phrase of Robert Hooker, a noted draftsman of the World Picture, the atmospheric elements may be “involuntary agents” so that “what they do they know not, yet is it in show and appearance as though they did know what they do.”¹² Although he credits God as “the guide of nature,” Hooker’s language corresponds with Lovelock’s in that he, too, discerns an appearance of premeditated order in the operations of natu...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Reincarnating Pythagoras
• 2 Mute Timber?
• 3 The Reformation and the Disenchantment of Nature
• 4 “Hast any Philosophy in Thee, Shepherd?”
• 5 Rethinking Dominion
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index