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The story of how The Globe (1599) was rebuilt from the reused oak timbers of The Theatre (1576) is well known. Less familiar is the environmental crisis that prompted this thrifty recycling. Shakespeare’s company, the Chamberlain’s Men, were in danger of losing The Theatre because the lease had expired. The landlord, Giles Allen, was threatening to pull down the playhouse and put its wood and timber to other uses. The leaseholders, Richard and Cuthbert Burbage, got there before him because a clause in the original agreement made them owners of the building on Allen’s land. In the lead-up to their stealthy dismantling of The Theatre on the icy morning of 28 December 1598, when Allen was away celebrating Christmas in the country, each side had been eyeing the valuable timber and wood. Its reuse was the lynchpin of a deal between the Burbages and five actor-sharers of the Chamberlain’s Men, including Shakespeare, for building The Globe: the brothers offered to supply the main materials if the sharers contributed to the lesser expenses of construction and maintenance. The Burbages had spent their savings on building an indoor theatre at Blackfriars two years before. Although it had begun to pay them rent, they could not afford to buy new materials because the price of wood and timber had risen 96 per cent over the quarter century since The Theatre had been built. This inflation was the result of southern English woodlands being deforested. Ancient English woodland and forests had been shrinking throughout the middle ages. By Henry VIII’s time the pace began to accelerate. Worried about timber supplies for shipbuilding, the government took the first steps—largely ineffective—to manage depletions. Climactic and demographic pressures aggravated overexploitation, and by the 1590s caused a fuel crisis in south-east England and the country’s first major environmental controversy. Similar to the threat of warming global temperatures today, the stresses on southern English woodland—at that time the country’s most essential but finite natural resource—reached an ecological turning point. A solution was in the offing, but it was a highly ambivalent one.

Cymbeline makes a theatrical virtue of continually echoing dialogue and scenarios from Shakespeare’s previous plays. Earlier critics were doubtful about this recycling, wondering whether Shakespeare was not falling back on re-runs to make up for failing inventiveness towards the end of his career. These opinions tended to overlook his return to writers such as Boccaccio and Holinshed for fresh material, as well as his projection of personal conflict into new geographic contexts, in the manner of All’s Well That Ends Well and his other late romances. Modern stage productions have capitalized on these signs of imaginative vigour, however, by embracing Cymbeline’s retrospective recreation as cheeky, knowing humour, particularly in the final scene of over-packed revelations and entwining narratives. Cymbeline’s multiple storylines create a polygeneric experience characteristic of Shakespeare’s plays in general and his romances in particular. Steve Mentz has observed that Cymbeline and other ‘polyglot’ romances are well suited to staging modern narratives about the natural world’s tendencies to interdependence, adaptation, and biodiversity. Every main character in Cymbeline has his or her own environmental attachments (e.g. Innogen and Britain, Giacomo and Italy, Lucius and the Roman empire, Cymbeline and ‘Lud’s Town’, Belarius, Arviragus, Guiderius and Wales, Posthumus and Milford Haven). Each of these place-identities represents a different physical and cultural worldview, so when they shift and/or interweave, they suggest dynamic networks operating at multiple levels of planetary space and time. These webbed relations raise modern questions of environmental ethics and practice. Which plane of ecological relations suggests the best way of dwelling responsibly in the world? Which life-challenge might analogize a resolve to reduce excessive consumption and reverse human harm? (e.g. cultivating the local allotment garden? travelling to fewer conferences? preserving boreal forests?). Following trends in postmodern and postcolonial studies, ecotheorists observe that environmentalism has tended to privilege local attachments and modes of dwelling as the common ground for resistance to degrading forces of economic globalization. Pioneering ecocritic Jonathan Bate, for example, celebrated regional and village-focused writers such as William Wordsworth and John Clare.

This chapter highlights the importance of considering people as integral to foodwebs. Despite extensive recent research on coupled human-natural systems, lacking are models that incorporate human behavior in a way that yields pragmatic insights into the management of multispecies fisheries. Using the US West Coast commercial fisheries system as a case study, this chapter develops a novel network approach of linking the social system (i.e., fishing communities) to the ecological system (the fish). The analysis reveals that fisheries that seem unconnected biologically, such as benthic Dungeness crabs and pelagic tuna, can in fact be strongly linked by fishing vessels that are active in both fisheries. Understanding how human behavior connects seemingly disparate ecological systems has important implications for fisheries managers seeking to balance human well-being with sustainable populations of fish.

Disaffected from the court and shaken out of conventional assumptions about human nature by the Ghost’s revelations, Hamlet begins to think of comparisons with non-human life, beginning with his father as ‘old mole’ (1.5.170). Later he turns to worms, and his attention suggests a willed strategy of existential and ecological discovery, since worms occupied a place diametrically opposite to humans in the traditional hierarchy of life. Renaissance Humanists often used the perceived inferiority of worms and other animals to define human uniqueness. Their gradations of being, by extension, justified human mastery of the earth represented in Hamlet by Claudius’s modernizing transformation of Denmark into a military-industrial state. Adopting a worm-oriented perspective (wryly imagined by conservation ecologist André Voisin in my epigraph), Hamlet begins to question his own conventional Humanist reflexes, such as those on display in his opening soliloquy (e.g. ‘O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason /Would have mourned longer’ [1.2.150–51]). Recent critics have shown how analogies between social behaviour and animals in Hamlet and other Shakespeare plays reflect the rediscovery of classical scepticism towards human superiority by Humanists such as Michel de Montaigne, before René Descartes and other Enlightenment philosophers elevated mind and soul into essential qualities of human nature. As in other areas of ecology and environmentalism discussed in this book, early modern reflections such as Hamlet’s look forward to today’s post-Cartesian and post-human enquiries into human, animal, and cyborgian crossovers. In this chapter I want to align these pre-modern and present-day horizons with the scientific revolution that links them: evolutionary biology’s tracing of human origins to the shared creaturely and genetic life of the planet. Worms will be my trope for Hamlet’s attention to what Giorgio Agamben calls a ‘zone of indeterminacy’ between human and animal life, and what Andreas Höfele identifies as the complex doubleness of similarity and difference that runs through all of Shakespeare’s animal–human relations, beginning with the comic dialogues of Crab and Lance in The Two Gentlemen of Verona.