1 - The Verdant Imagination in Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Summary

Abstract

This chapter advances an ecocritical reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, addressing various poems’ engagement with fundamental questions of organismic life. Approached as an ecosystem, the Sonnets predicate a new version of the self/world relationship. Their interdependence is conveyed via Shakespeare’s reliance on botanical tropes and images, though these are provocatively reimagined. Tracking such moments of iconoclasm yields updated readings of “art” and “nature” and generates fresh insights about “zoe” and “bios,” concepts essential to ecocritical thought. The omnipresent antinomies of “art/nature” and “zoe/bios” underscore the Sonnets’ quest for permanence, serving as a reminder that the ecological cannot be considered in isolation from the psychological. Ultimately, Shakespeare appropriates to the lyric mode the eternizing properties conventionally ascribed to the botanical world.

Keywords: Ecocriticism; materialism; selfhood; Shakespeare; sonnets

Poetry has long been assumed to mediate the relationship between humans and the natural world. To Ovid, for example, poetry subdues, bringing nature’s awesome power under control. By contrast, in The Defence of Poesy (1595), Philip Sidney seeks to rescue poetry from the shoals of irrelevance by citing its ability to lift humans above the debasement of the material world. Not incidentally, in our own era, it seems that aggressor and victim, vis-à-vis the unfolding story of humans and nature, have swapped positions: now, poetry is being asked to rescue nature from humans’ ruinous assaults on it. In On Poetry (2012), Glyn Maxwell offers an updated defense of the venerable form, emphasizing its elemental functions. He writes, “Poems are responses to needs, urges, hungers, thirsts” (23). Maxwell construes poetry as an intense form of chiaroscuro, one whose patterning displays of black ink against swaths of whiteness—the artfully devised arrangements of lines and line-breaks—can thus be understood as attempts to cope with the passage of time or the daunting prospect of being banished from its sequential movements. All of these perspectives on poetry attest to its unique significance for ecocriticism. Accordingly, this chapter focuses on several of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, as they draw attention to the shifting boundary between self and world and also toggle between a consideration of bodily needs or exigencies and the equally pressing demands of an emerging interiority. In so doing, these poems outline the possibilities of the eco-self.