Shakespeare and the Environment: A Dictionary

Sophie Chiari, Sandra Clark, Sandra Clark

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350110472
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria de Shakespeare

While our physical surroundings fashion our identities, we, in turn, fashion the natural elements in which or with which we live. This complex interaction between the human and the non-human already resonated in Shakespeare's plays and poems. As details of the early modern supra- and infra-celestial landscape feature in his works, this dictionary brings to the fore Shakespeare's responsiveness to and acute perception of his 'environment' and it covers the most significant uses of words related to this concept. In doing so, it also examines the epistemological changes that were taking place at the turn of the 17th century in a society which increasingly tried to master nature and its elements. For this reason, the intersections between the natural and the supernatural receive special emphasis. All in all, this dictionary offers a wide variety of resources that takes stock of the 'green criticism' that recently emerged in Shakespeare studies and provides a clear and complete overview of the idea, imagery and language of environment in the canon.

A

Africa, African (a) Africa is the second largest continent in the world, after Asia, and is currently composed of fifty-four different countries. In Shakespeare’s time, it was commonly thought to be one of the three main parts of the world (which included Europe and Asia). Much remained to be discovered on this remote land located in the torrid region of the earth.

(b) For us, Othello and Aaron stand as major African characters in the early modern repertoire, but they are never described as such by Shakespeare. Things are made more complex by the fact that Africa is present in the canon, but mainly through eponyms such as Mauritania, Ethiopia or Morocco. These references tinged with exotic touches always allude to a ‘non-white and even non-Christian’ culture (Ivic 2017: 91). Direct references to Africa can be found in 2H4, TRO, COR, CYM and TMP. When Africa is not seen as a hostile land breeding venomous creatures like serpents (‘Not Afric owns a serpent I abhor / More than thy fame and envy’, Aufidius tells Martius in COR, 1.8.3–4), it is regarded as a remote place: ‘I would they were in Afric both together’ (CYM, 1.1.168–9), Innogen says to the evil queen, wishing that the king her father and Posthumus could settle their argument in some neutral, faraway land, suitably viewed as desert. Africa was also associated with a scorching climate in the Elizabethan and Jacobean imaginary – a climate which has crucial repercussions on the physiology of its inhabitants. In TRO, Ulysses declares that ‘we were better parch in Afric sun / Than in the pride and salt scorn of [Achilles’] eyes / Should he scape Hector fair’ (1.3.371–3). Yet, for all these derogatory undertones, Africa could also be seen as a land of fancy. In 2H4, it is associated with wealth: ‘A foutre for the world and worldlings base! / I speak of Africa and golden joys’ (5.3.99–100), Pistol exclaims. Bulman notes that Pistol’s discourse may echo Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, a play which evinces a similar fascination for Africa (Arden 3, Bulman 2018: 409, note to 5.3.100). TMP conveys a much more critical vision of Africa and Africans when Sebastian tells Alonso: ‘Sir, you may thank yourself for this great loss, / That would not bless our Europe with your daughter / But rather loose her to an African’ (2.1.124–6), such a derogatory remark simultaneously associates Africa with inferiority, exile, forced marriage and loss.

(c) For an early modern account of the perception of Africa, see Leo Africanus’s A geographical historie of Africa, first published in Giambattista Ramusio’s Primo volume delle navigationi et viaggi (Venice, 1550), and translated into English by John Pory in 1600. Africanus describes the continent as one difficult to know because of its deserts and of the long and perilous voyage which explorers had to make before discovering the African coasts (Leo 1600: 1). Ortelius also writes about Africa in his Theatrum orbis terrarium, first published in 1570: ‘This the Ancients haue diuersly distinguished; but at this present it is diuided by Iohn Leo of Africa, into foure chiefe parts; Barbarie, Numidia, Libya, and the Land of Negros’ (1608: 4). From a geohumoral perspective, Bodin notes in The six books of a common-weale that the ‘inhabitants of Affrike’ have little heat inside because it is ‘exhaled by the heat and drought of the sunne: whereas the cold doth keepe in the heat in the Northerne regions’ (1606, The Fifth Booke, 1, 548). In his Astronomica, a Latin poem in five books probably written early in the first century ce and with whom the English literati were familiar, Manilius dwells on the specific complexions of each nation and states that ‘[t]he Ethiopians stain the world and depict a race of men steeped in darkness’ and that ‘[t]he Sun-god dries up with dust the tribes of Africans amid their desert lands’ (Book 4, 281). On the myth of Phaeton, see Ovid (2002: 66–9) (The Second Book, ll. 203–301). Many works of the period tapped into this well-known story when they referred to Africa. See for example Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1612, Part I, Song 1, ll. 421–3). On the presence of Africans in early modern England, see Habib (2008), esp. chap. 2 on ‘Elizabethan Black Records’ (63–120) and chap. 3 on ‘Black Records of Seventeenth-Century London’ (121–92). See also Ivic (2017: 11–13).

ague (a) The word ‘ague’ comes from the Latin febris acuta, or ‘acute fever’. It was then used to designate malaria and it remained in common usage until the nineteenth century. Partly originating in wet weather and pools of stagnant water, insect-induced diseases were frequent in Shakespeare’s England. Yet Shakespeare’s contemporaries generally blamed the bad air (i.e. literally, malaria) of the fens and of the Kent and Essex shores in the Thames estuary for the poor health condition of its inhabitants who were esp. prone to the marsh fever. They usually related fever and chills to the ague and they knew that the disease, characterized by its periodicity, came and went in violent fits.

(b) No wonder if references to the ague (that is, malaria and its variants), in conjunction with toxic air, are present in sixteenth-century texts: the word appears nine times in Shakespeare. Even when it does not, it may actually be implied, as in H5 where the Hostess, alluding to Falstaff’s illness, says that the fat knight ‘is so shaked of a burning quotidian tertian that it is most lamentable to behold’ (2.1.119–21). As Craik explains, these ‘compound agues’ did exist and ‘were especially dangerous’ in early modern England (Arden 3, 2016: 166, note to 2.1.119): if Shakespeare was familiar with Jones’s A dial for all agues (1566), he must have been fully conversant with this issue.

Now in the foggy and unwholesome atmosphere of Dunsinane, as Macbeth finally prepares to face the assault of Macduff’s troops, he asks his men to ‘let them lie [here] / Till famine and the ague eat them up’ (5.5.3–4). In JC, the word ‘ague’ is not employed (‘fever’ is used instead) but Cassius’s description of Caesar suggests that the latter caught malaria in Spain (1.2.119–21). The disease is perhaps most clearly evoked in TMP, where Caliban curses Prospero as follows:

All the infections that the sun sucks up

From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall and make him

By inchmeal a disease!

(2.2.1–3)

To seventeenth-century playgoers, the unwholesome bogs of the island were no doubt reminiscent of England’s own saline and putrid marshes, a reputedly dangerous habitat, in Shakespeare’s time, when the wetlands were increasingly drained and destroyed (Borlik 2019: 448–68). Later on in the scene, when Stephano sees Caliban shake, he is convinced that the ‘monster of the isle’ (2.2.64) suffers from the ague; so he decides to cure his symptoms with wine in order to ‘help his ague’ (2.2.92). However, the audience understands that Caliban is not ill but simply terrified by what he assumes are ‘spirits’ come to torment him (2.2.55, 63).

References to the ague thus always underline a state of emotional or physical distress. In a rather exceptional way, the word ‘ague’ can designate a bout of flu, as in H8, when Buckingham explains in the opening scene that ‘[a]n untimely ague / Stayed [him] prisoner in [his] chamber’ (1.1.4). Elsewhere in the canon, the term is more frequently used to designate any disease which caused shivering. In R2, the title part scornfully alludes to John of Gaunt’s ‘ague’s privilege’ (2.1.116), the Duke of Lancaster being then diminished by disease and old age. In this particular case, the ague does not point to any weakness of spirit: on the contrary, Gaunt’s imminent death makes him speak far too plainly for his nephew’s taste. Yet, further down in the play, the ague resurfaces and this time, it ironically applies to Richard himself. As the king gathers up courage to fight against Bolingbroke, he declares that ‘[t]his ague fit of fear is overblown’ (3.2.190): Richard’s chill-causing fever here points to nothing else but weakness and cowardice. In JN, written not long after R2, Constance describes her son’s physical state and is saddened by the fact that he will now ‘look as hollow as a ghost, / A dim and meagre as an ague’s fit’ (3.4.84–5). In yet another history play of the late 1590s, namely 1H4, Hotspur, having just heard Vernon praise ‘young Harry’ (4.1.103), asserts that ‘[t]his praise doth nourish agues’, i.e. makes him feverish (4.1.111).

Comedies contain the same kind of references. Salarino, in the opening scene of MV, says that his ‘wind […] / Would blow [him] to an ague when [he] thought / What harm a wind too great might do at sea’ (1.1.20–2). In TRO, a play riddled with allusions to disease and infection, ‘ague’ is synonymous with ‘fever’: ‘danger, like an ague, subtly taints’, Patroclus declares (3.3.234). Finally in TN, the sickly disposition of Sir Andrew is betrayed by his very name, Aguecheek, which also points to his cowardice.

(c) Ague is the main topic of Jones’s A dial of all agues. In the first chapter of his treatise, Jones defines the ague as ‘nothing els but an unnatural heate or caliditie, which taketh his beginninge at the harte, disperseth all over the body by the artiers and veines, and so hurteth the actions therof’ (1566: n.p.). The passage is also quoted in McConchie and Curzan 2011: 80. As noted by Skwire, the disease was extremely difficult to cure until the early seventeenth century, and ‘[b]ecause of the arrival of quinine from the New World, and its first prescribed use in 1660, ague was one of the few seventeenth-century diseases that could be effectively treated by modern standards’ (2004: 4). Iyengar supplies an ‘ague’ entry (2014: 16), and Clark also provides details from a different perspective (2018: 8). On ‘Malaria in England in the Little Ice Age’, see Reiter (2000: 1–11). On malaria in Britain then and now, see Kuhn, Campbell-Lendrum, Armstrong and Davies (2003: 9997–10001). On ague in metaphysical poetry (and in George Herbert’s poems in particular), see Skwire (2004: 1–27).

air (a) Today, air is understood as the general name given to the mixture of gases that make up our planet’s atmosphere. According to Aristotle, air is a substance surrounding the earth, composed of multiple exhalations. The Greek philosopher divides the atmosphere into a lower region and an upper one: the lower region of air, moist and hot, and the upper region, hot and dry. These ideas remained prevalent in Shakespeare’s time. As a result, air was then seen as a substance composed of hot and cold fumes thought to penetrate beneath the ground and, sometimes, to contaminate the atmosphere. If we follow the theory of humours so widespread in Shakespeare’s time, air was paired with blood.

(b) In the Shakespearean canon, air is best embodied by Ariel, who boasts early on in TMP that he can ‘fly’, ‘swim’, ‘dive into the fire’, ‘ride’ on clouds on command (1.2.190–2). The airy spirit is indeed able to move through the air or ‘drink the air’ (5.1.102), as he says, and he can make himself ‘invisible’ at leisure (5.1.97). Of course, air is first and foremost characterized by its invisibility. A dismayed Gertrude for instance realizes that her son speaks to ‘th’incorporal air’ (3.4.114), i.e. to a ghost she cannot see. Yet in the same play, the materiality of air is repeatedly emphasized. Comparing himself to a chameleon, Hamlet says, ‘I eat the air, promise-crammed’ (3.2.89–90), and the playwright puns on the heir/air homophony throughout the tragedy (Berry 1997: 58), thereby giving air a human-like, almost palpable dimension. In the same line of ideas, Ross remarks in MAC that, in Scotland, ‘shrieks that rend the air, / Are made, not marked’ (4.3.168–9).

Air was also naturally associated with the sky (‘this most excellent canopy the air’, HAM, 2.2.265–6), and more often than not, it was treated as a de-familiarizing element, because if its properties intrigued most men of science, they remained quite mysterious. Air, as a result, was a rather diffuse concept for Shakespeare’s contemporaries. The unknown being a source of suspicion, air, or more specifically the middle region of the air, was often associated with the power of the devil, then known as the ‘prince that ruleth in the aire’ (Ephes. 2:2, GNV). No wonder that, in JN, the Bastard alludes to ‘[s]ome airy devil’ who ‘hovers in the sky’ (3.2.2).

If elements, like animals, were regularly personified in early modern literature, air did not particularly lend itself to anthropomorphism. Yet Shakespeare, in TRO, manages to give the surrounding air human attributes, esp. when Agamemnon orders Ajax:

Give with thy trumpet a loud note to Troy,

Thou dreadful Ajax, that the appalled air

May pierce the head of the great combatant

And hale him hither.

(4.5.3–6)

This personified air, beating a retreat to Troy, dismayed by another ‘air’, that of the trumpet blast, is quite exceptional in Shakespeare: rarely is it endowed with such human features.

Granted, air is sometimes materialized and eroticized through its rich, enticing perfumes, as is the case in ANT, where it is closely associated with the sweet, ‘invisible’ scent of Cleop...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• List of Headwords
• Introduction
• A–Z
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint