Simon C. Estok: Ecocriticism and Shakespeare. Reading Ecophobia

As its split title suggests, Estok’s book does two things at once: (p. 1) it reads Shakespeare ecocritically and (p. 2) it theorizes “ecophobia,” a term broadly defined by the author as “an irrational and groundless fear or hatred of the natural world, as present and subtle in our daily lives and literature as homophobia and racism and sexism” (p. 4). According to Estok, ecophobic behaviors stem from humanity’s timeless attempts to control the unpredictability of nature. Assuming that Shakespearean ecocriticism is useful to contemporary environmental discussions (p. 1), he explores the staging of ecophobia in several of Shakespeare’s plays: an indomitable and antagonistic nature rampant in King Lear; the weeding-out of the queer in Coriolanus; the conflation of social and physical disease with the environment in 2 Henry VI and 2 Henry IV; the policing of monstrous and cannibalistic bodies in Othello and Pericles; the disgust over rot and pollution in Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Winter’s Tale that feeds the plays’ misogyny; the environmental degradation and commodification of the New World that folds into the xenophobia of The Tempest and The Merchant of Venice; and, finally, the early modern antipathies against sleep, considered at the time to be an inbetween space that challenged human agency because of its bestial associations. But if ecophobia seems to offer us a “new” vocabulary for literary criticism (p. 5), Estok shows how we have lived with – even prolonged – its damaging effects historically. To cite his reading of King Lear, modern culture continues to operate “on an ethics of anxiety about material predictability” (p. 28), perpetually reimagining the horror of being displaced, of being cast away from a harmonious home into an apocalyptic and alienating natural world.