LEAF, BARK, THORN, ROOT: ARBOREAL ECOCRITICISM AND SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA
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2019-04-30Author
Hogue, Jason Charles
0000-0002-1563-2073
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Leaf, Bark, Thorn, Root traces the appearance of trees and their constituent parts in five Shakespearean plays: Macbeth, The Tempest, 3 Henry VI, Richard III, and As You Like It. The dissertation shows how these plays reveal arboreal agencies intra-acting with the characters of the play-texts by assessing the mergings of human and arboreal bodies, as well as instances of hacking and hewing inflicted across these bodies. Taking a posthumanist approach informed by ecomaterialism, critical plant studies, and affect theory, I argue that these sites of painful human-arboreal encounter in Shakespeare’s plays initiate potentials for thinking-with and feeling-with, across not only species (in the spirit of Donna Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto) but also across biological kingdoms. Throughout the dissertation, I complicate philosopher Michael Marder’s theories of plant-thinking via these early modern depictions of and relations to trees, whose complex existences inform the texts in multiple registers. The trees of Shakespeare offer ways into theorizing plant-being that not only reflect early modern preoccupations but also resonate across the centuries, potentially serving as a bridge between historicist and presentist methodological concerns, a useful nexus for facing looming ecological issues like climate change, the effects of which long-lived trees bear bodily witness in their annual growth rings and in the shifting of leaf longevity. Using a version of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert’s “veer ecology,” the chapters of the dissertation represent both arboreal body parts and action verbs (leaf, bark, thorn, root), and illuminate a number of “arborealizations.” Four conceptual tools that I develop from these Shakespearean arborealizations are deciduous-sense, inter-missing time, thornition, and queer rhizosphere. In a coda, I apply these four theoretical eco-tools in a brief reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to assess speculative possibilities of vegetal pleasure and desire.