Nature on the Verge: Confronting “Bare Life” inArden of FavershamandKing Lear

Abstract

Earth, that nourish'd thee, shall claim Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again Hypothesis: Because the earth is the place where our death is at home, we have an urge to take revenge on it. With remarkably different implications, the passages from Bryant and Harrison present death as a state of fusion, a condition in which the barrier between human and nature vanishes. Whereas Bryant's poem offers this melding as a kind of solace, a necessary phase in the perpetuating cycle of life, Harrison speculates that the prospect of going “home” to earth fuels a geo-directed vengeance. The problem is one of likeness, not difference: eventual, inevitable continuity with nature propels humans' dread of it. This issue of the human–nature relationship materializes with acute force in many early modern texts, which stand on the verge of a modern-making intellectual revolution. Shakespeare's King Lear (1605), for example, draws attention to shifting apprehensions of nature, and their consequence for the meanings of humanness. With 38 references to “nature” (the most in any of Shakespeare's plays), King Lear illuminates the ecological and epistemological transformations that characterize the seventeenth century.1 Curiously, however, although ecocriticism is increasingly gaining traction in early modern studies, thus far King Lear has received rather scant attention from ecocritics.2 One explanation for this comparative silence is suggested in Greg Garrard's contention that Shakespeare's “plays do not deal with the natural world or animals in any significant way,” with the corollary assertion that early modern writers “were neither afflicted by major environmental problems nor plagued by doubts about the role of humanity on earth.”3 But King Lear powerfully contradicts these statements, re-imagining the human–nature relationship in terms that are both agonized and laden with ecological implications. The relevant issues shift into focus when King Lear is read as counter point to the anonymously authored domestic tragedy Arden of Faversham (1592), since both plays participate in the battle to re-define nature. In so doing, King Lear and Arden of Faversham illuminate the ecopolitics of tragedy, the way in which questions of identity are inextricably bound up with shifting apprehensions of the natural world.