Slow Shakespeare: an Eco-Critique of “Method” in Early Modern Literary Studies

Abstract

In July 2006, I watched An Inconvenient Truth at a movie theater in Long Beach, California, just before I flew to Australia to deliver a version of this essay at the Eighth World Shakespeare Congress in Brisbane. The film had been in theaters for a while; mine was a late afternoon screening; and most of the few people in the theater were elderly. Behind me sat three people, two of whom had been brought to the film by the third, a woman who had seen the film two times already and was bent on seeing it yet again and bringing other people too. Across the aisle sat a middle-aged woman and her teenaged son, who slept through much of the film, thus disconfirming most people’s opinions that this Al Gore was not boring. The rest of us were attentive and, I dare say, even thoughtful. But when the film came to its close, and Gore asked, “Are you ready to change the way you live?” I could not help but look around at my fellow filmgoers and imagine a collective response that would emerge if only it could. Soft, low, and embarrassed, our response would nevertheless sound strongly: “Maybe, but not a lot, I’m afraid.” My imagined response was only strengthened by walking out of the theater and into the bright California sun, where my sun-glassed eyes focused on oil rockers at the edge of the parking lot. These rockers had lain dormant for years, for decades, but were bobbing again—slowly up and slowly down—now that prices for crude oil had reached levels high enough to make profitable squeezing out every last drop. This parking lot housed the automobile of every single person who had seen An Inconvenient Truth, some of whom, like me, had driven to the film alone.