Abstract
In his hyper-canonical eighteenth Sonnet, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Shakespeare has his speaker use the brevity and tenuous hold of spring and summer as a metaphoric argument for seizing the day: “Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May /And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.”1 If these lines trail behind them a long tradition of carpe diem verse that hammers home the metaphoric connections between spring and youth, winter and old age, Shakespeare’s reimagining of the summer growing season as a short-term lease seems to demand a traditional New Historicist interpretation that might treat the language of property ownership and anxieties about patrilineal succession as a crucial means of structuring the reader’s perception of the natural world.2 Yet if the eighteenth sonnet yokes easterly winds and short growing seasons to a rhetoric of economic hardship and the problems of land tenure, it also invokes an experiential world of agricultural and arboricultural hardship in what was still, for many Elizabethans, a subsistence economy. “Summer’s lease,” in this respect, is characteristic of a persistent strain of imagistic language in the sonnets, and in a wide range of writing about the natural world in the sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth centuries. This language reflects a sensitivity to climatic conditions in early modern England that—all but unnoticed by most modern commentators—locates Shakespeare and his contemporaries in a volatile era in climatological history that, in some ways, offers an inverted, but potentially instructive, image of our own twenty-first-century descent into global warming.
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Notes
All quotations from the sonnets are from The Complete Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, ed. William Allan Neilson and Charles Jarvis Hill (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside P, 1942). My thanks to Andrea Stevens, Gillen Wood, Lori Newcomb, and Molly Rothenberg for their help with this essay.
See Paul Innes, Shakespeare and the English Renaissance Sonnet: Verses of Feigning Love (New York: St. Martin’s P, 1997).
For representative readings of the sonnets, see particularly Stephen Booth, An Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New Haven: Yale UP, 1969); Paul Ramsey, The Fickle Glass: A Study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New York: AMS P, 1979); Michael Cameron Andrews, “Sincerity and Subterfuge in Three Shakespearean Sonnet Groups,” Shakespeare Quarterly 33 (1982): 314–27; and Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, Harvard UP, 1997).
See H.H. Lamb, Climate History and the Modern World, second ed. (New York: Routledge, 1995), 211–41; Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300–1850 (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
See Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (NewYork: Penguin Books, 1984); Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996); and on the dialetical view of nature in the seventeenth century, Robert Markley, Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660–1740 (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993), 96–130.
See Mary-Floyd Wilson and Garrett Sullivan, eds. Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave, 2007); Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003); and Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000).
One thousand five hundred works were published in Europe about Asia before 1800, far more than about the Americas. This body of work is surveyed in Donald Lach, with Edwin J. van Kley, Asia in the Making of Europe, 3 vols. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1965–93). See also Geoffrey Gunn, First Globalization: The Eurasian Exchange, 1500–1800 (New York: Rowman & Littefield, 2003).
See Valerie Forman, Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economics and the Early Modern English Theatre (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2008); Su Fang Ng, “Global Renaissance: Alexander the Great and Early Modern Classicism from the British Isles to the Malay Archipelago,” Comparative Literature 58 (2006): 293–312. I discuss Edward Terry and Peter Heylyn in The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006).
Edward Terry, A Voyage to East-India (London, 1655), 124–25. On the problems of the English acclimating to alien climates, see Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India 1600–1850 (New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1999).
Peter Heylyn, Cosmograhie, second ed. (London, 1657), 881.
Alan Bewell, “Jefferson’s Thermometer: Colonial Biogeographical Constructions of the Climate of America,” Romantic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History, ed. Noah Heringman (Albany: SUNY P, 2003), 113. See also Jan Golinski, The Climate of Enlightenment (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007).
See Katherine Anderson, Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005).
Stuart Peterfreund, “‘Great Frosts and…Some Very Hot Summers’: Strange Weather, the Last Letters, and the Last Days in Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selbourne,” Romantic Science, ed. Noah Heringman, 85–108.
William H. Calvin, A Brain for All Seasons: Human Evolution and Abrupt Climate Change (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002), 206–07. During the last great Ice Age, the Younger Dryas, 12,000 years ago when much of North America was buried under more than a mile of glaciated ice, the mean worldwide temperature may have been only four or five degrees centigrade cooler than it is today.
On staging the storm in Lear, see the valuable analysis by Henry S. Turner, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts 1580–1630 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006), 155–75; Peter Anderson, “The Fragile World of Lear,” Comparative Drama 5 (1971–72): 269–82; James Ogden, “Lear’s Blasted Heath,” Durham University Journal 80 (1987–88): 19–26; Susan Viguers, “The Storm in King Lear,” CLA Journal 43 (1999–2000): 338–66; and Gabriel Egan, Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2006), 132–47.
Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1954). See also Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1987).
On paterial reproduction see Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies after Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990).
Godfrey Goodman, The Fall of Man, or the Corruption of Nature (London, 1616), 49.
Fagan, 103. On the problems of representation of agricultural labor in the Renaissance, see Liana Vardi, “Imagining the Harvest in Early Modern Europe,” Agrarian Studies: Synthetic Work at the Cutting Edge, ed. James C. Scott and Nina Bhatt (New Haven: Yale UP, 2001), 86–138.
John D. Post, Food Shortage, Climatic Variability, and Epidemic Disease in Preindustrial Europe: The Mortality Peak in the Early 1740s (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985).
Carole Crumley, “Historical Ecology: A Multidimensional Ecological Orientation,” Historical Ecology: Cultural Knowledge and Changing Landscapes, ed. Carole Crumley (Sante Fe: School of American Research P, 1994), 1–11; William Balée (ed.), Advances in Historical Ecology (New York: Columbia UP, 1998); Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (New York: Cambridge UP, 1995); and Kavita Philip, Civilising Natures: Race, Resources, and Modernity in Colonial South India (Rutgers: Rutgers UP, 2004).
See Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists through Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1987); Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1993); and Robert Markley, “‘Land Enough in the World’: Locke’s Golden Age and the Infinite Extensions of ‘Use,”’ South Atlantic Quarterly 98 (1999): 817–37.
Elizabeth Graham, “Metaphors and Metaphorism: Some Thoughts on Environmental Metahistory,” Advances in Historical Ecology, ed. Balée, 119–37.
See Cristina León Alfar, Fantasies of Female Evil: The Dynamics of Gender and Power in Shakespearean Tragedy (Newark: U of Delaware P, 2002).
McRae; Gillen D’Arcy Wood, “Constable, Clouds, Climate Change,” Wordsworth Circle 38 (2007): 25–34; and Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, “Crown Forests and Female Georgic: Frances Burney and the Reconstruction of Britishness,” The Country and City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550–1850, ed. Gerald MacLean, Donna Landry, and Joseph P. Ward (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), 197–212.
All quotations from “The Golden Age” are from The Works of Aphra Behn, volume 1, ed. Janet Todd (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1992). Parts of this paragraph extend the argument made in Robert Markley and Molly Rothenberg, “The Contestations of Nature: Aphra Behn’s ‘The Golden Age’ and the Sexualizing of Politics,” Rereading Aphra Behn: History, Theory, and Criticism, ed. Heidi Hutner (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1993), 301–21, and respond to the strangely dismissive reading of Behn’s originality as a poet made by Germaine Greer in Slip-shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet (New York: Viking, 1995).
See Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1991).
John Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation, third ed. (London, 1701), 115–16. This work went through thirteen editions by 1768 and then was reissued in 1798 and 1844.
William Derham, Physico-Theology: Or a Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, from His Works of Creation, second ed. (London, 1714), 48.
In addition to the historical ecologists cited in note 23 earlier, see Robert Markley, “Monsoon Cultures: Climate and Acculturation in Alexander Hamilton’s A New Account of the East-Indies,” New Literary History 38 (2007): 527–50.
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© 2008 Thomas Hallock, Ivo Kamps, and Karen L. Raber
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Markley, R. (2008). Summer’s Lease: Shakespeare in the Little Ice Age. In: Hallock, T., Kamps, I., Raber, K.L. (eds) Early Modern Ecostudies. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230617940_8
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