Shakespeare and Ecology
Randall Martin
Reviews and Awards
"Beginning with deforestation, Martin traces an environmental narrative which shows Shakespeare's remarkable sensitivity to the changing consumer practices in early modern England ... Martin retains his attention on historicity, including enclosures, changing resources, sea-coal, saltpetre and wood, as well as shifting practices in land management, food production, exploitation and regeneration of the English landscape. The natural world is relentlessly animated and articulated through human responses to it, and Martin's book engages with these discourses at a conceptual as well as practical level." --Charlotte Scott, Shakespeare Studies
"The work Martin has done reconstructing aspects of Renaissance deforestation, husbandry, and the relationship between militarization and the environment, among many other things, is truly impressive. His book should be consulted by anyone working on environment and ecology in the early modern period." --Kevin Curran, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
"Randall Martin's Shakespeare and Ecology is a welcome addition to the field of Shakespearean ecostudies. It brims with insightful readings of Shakespeare and with concise explanations of key ecocritical concepts that promise to invigorate our pedagogies and to challenge our thinking on matters as diverse as the mixed land-use economies of the Forest of Arden and "the ecology of war" in the drama (79)." --Vin Nardizzi, Renaissance Quarterly
"...a marvelously concise account of current environmental debates. The affinity of our own time to Shakespeare's is central to Martin's case. This is surely the kind of discussion we need this year, as we mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death." --Resurgence and Ecologist
