Shakespeare's Botanical Imagination

Published by Amsterdam University Press 2023

Shakespeare's Botanical Imagination

Edited by: Susan C. Staub

Volume 5 in the series Environmental Humanities in Pre-Modern Cultures

https://doi.org/10.1515/9789048551101

Overview
Contents

About this book

Writing on the cusp of modern botany and during the heyday of English herbals and garden manuals, Shakespeare references at least 180 plants in his works and makes countless allusions to horticultural and botanical practices. Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination moves plants to the foreground of analysis and brings together some of the rich and innovative ways that scholars are expanding the discussion of plants and botany in Shakespeare’s writings. The essays gathered here all emphasize the interdependence and entanglement of plants with humans and human life, whether culturally, socially, or materially, and vividly illustrate the fundamental role plants play in human identity. As they attend to the affinities and shared materiality between plants and humans in Shakespeare’s works, these essays complicate the comfortable Aristotelian hierarchy of human-animal-plant. And as they do, they often challenge the privileged position of humans in relation to non-human life.

Author / Editor information

Staub Susan C. :

Susan C. Staub is Professor of English at Appalachian State University. Her publications include Nature’s Cruel Stepdames: Representations of Women and Crime in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and The Literary Mother, as well as numerous essays on Early Modern prose, Shakespeare, and Spenser. Her current book project focuses on Shakespeare and botany.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	1
Table of Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	5
List of Figures Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	7
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	9
Introduction Susan C. Staub Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	11
Part 1. Plant Power and Agency
1. Vegetable Virtues Rebecca Bushnell Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	43
2. The “idle weeds that grow in the sustaining corn”: Generating Plants in King Lear Susan C. Staub Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	63
3. Botanical Barbary: Punning, Race, and Plant Life in Othello 4.3 Hillary M. Nunn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	87
Part 2. Human-Vegetable Affinities and Transformations
4. Shakespeare’s Botanical Grace Rebecca Totaro Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	105
5. “Circummured” Plants and Women in Measure for Measure Claire Duncan Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	127
6. Cymbeline’s Plant People Jeffrey Theis Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	149
7. ‘Thou art translated’: Plants of Passage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream Lisa Hopkins Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	171
Part 3. Plants and Temporalities
8. Clockwork Plants and Shakespeare’s Overlapping Notions of Time Miranda Wilson Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	193
9. The Verdant Imagination in Shakespeare’s Sonnets Elizabeth D. Gruber Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	219
10. The Botanical Revisions of 3 Henry VI Jason Hogue Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	243
11. Botanomorphism and Temporality: Imagining Humans as Plants in Two Shakespeare Plays Elizabeth Crachiolo Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	267
Afterword Vin Nardizzi Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	285
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	295

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 302
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 7
Keywords: Shakespeare; botany; plants; ecocriticism; ecofeminism

eBook

Published: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9789048551101