SHAKESPEARE FOR FUTURE

17th-century ecology. 21st-century theatre. A creative experiment.

Programme Book
Video Project






"Shakespeare for Future"
Digital Performance Project

"For we have sucked the sweet and sap away,
And sowed consumption in the fruitful ground.
The woods and forest clad in rich array,
With nakedness and baldness we confound."


(From: Thomas Bastard, "Our Fathers did but Use the World Before", 1598)



Climate change is real and a threat not only to us but also to the generations to come. In the last decades this has become increasingly clear to (almost) everyone on the planet. Floods, droughts, the melting of the ice caps, the vanishing of glaciers or the extinction of species are only some of the disastrous consequences and effects of the anthropocene.

However, as much as we may think climate change and concern about it to be rather recent phenomena of this and the last century, this is not the case. Already in the 16th century people observed changes in the climate and nature and related them to their own actions. For example, John Evelyn in his polemical treatise
Fumifugium: Or the Inconveniency of the Air and Smoke of London Dissipated (1661) complained about London's air pollution caused by the burning of coal and how London's "Inhabitants breathe nothing but an impure and thick Mist accompanied with a fuliginous and filthy vapour [...] corrupting the Lungs and disordering the entire habits of their Bodies" (490). To address the pollution he suggested among others to plant "diverse garden[s] and orchards [...] even in the very heart of London" (491). In 1655 the physician Thomas Moffett criticized the way livestock is kept and asked "whether this penning up of birds, and want of exercise, and depriving them of light, and cramming them so often with strange meat" (378) can be considered humane. Only a few decades later, in 1691, the English sugar merchant Thomas Tyron, probably the "first outspoken vegetarian in English history" (Borlik 379), identified the eating of meat "as the root of all evil" (ib.) and saw a "Tyranny of Man over his Fellow-Creatures" (Tyron 380). The number of 16th- and 17th-century texts addressing environmental issues is in fact quite staggering. Todd Andrew Borlik's anthology of Literature and Nature in the English Renaissance (CUP, 2019) cites passages from more than 200 texts dealing, for example, with air- and water pollution, vegetarianism, deforestation and climate change in general.

The six digital performance projects of "Shakespeare for Future" are the results of the two part module "English Drama in Action" taught in the Optionalbereich programme at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum in the winter term 2020/21. The module, consisting of a seminar and a theatre laboratory, is offered on a regular basis and geared toward students who wish to combine their interests in English literature and practical theatre work.

In the seminar "Early Modern Ecocriticism" taught by Prof. Roland Weidle (English Seminar) ten students identified and contextualized ecological concerns in early modern texts by William Shakespeare, George Herbert, John Donne, John Evelyn, Margaret Cavendish, Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, Thomas Bastard, and George Hakewill. In order to provide a foundation for the work in the theatre laboratory, the students examined the ways in which these texts voice some of their own ecological concerns and the extent to which these arguments and their stylistical, generic and formal features could be adapted for a 21st-century audience. Through creative experimentation in the theatre laboratory taught by Kai Bernhardt (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) and Dr. Niklas Füllner (Universität Koblenz-Landau) the students used the results of the seminar to write, rehearse and ultimately record their digital projects.

Both the seminar and the theatre laboratory were taught as online courses via Zoom. The performances were recorded by strictly observing the Covid hygiene rules in place at the time. No animals or oak trees were harmed during and for the production.



References
  • Bastard, Thomas. "Our Fathers Did but Use the World Before." 1598. Borlik 2019, pp. 532.
  • Borlik, Todd Andrew, editor. Literature and Nature in the English Renaissance: An Ecocritical Anthology. Cambridge UP, 2019.
  • Evelyn, John. Fumifugium: Or the Inconveniency of the Air and Smoke of London Dissipated. 1661. Borlik 2019, pp. 488-94.
  • Moffett, Thomas. "Of Fatting of Meats." 1655. Borlik 2019, pp. 377-79.
  • Tyron, Thomas. "The Voice of the Dumb, or the Complaints of the Creatures, Expostulating with Man, Touching the Cruel Usages they Suffer from Him." 1691. Borlik 2019, pp. 379-83.