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Where I go, words carry no weight: it is best
Then, I surrender their fascinating counsel
To the silent dissolution of the sea,
Which misuses nothing because it values nothing.1
WE GO TO THE BEACH FOR FUN, but right up against the water's edge there's no real comfort. The ceaseless spectacle of surf engages but does not reassure. It's a place to visit, not to live. We like looking because we can't stay. What fascinates is the palpable experience of boundary. A few steps away is the part of our world in which humans can't survive. A fluid body that we enjoy touching with our own mostly fluid bodies, as we dip our toes and submerge our limbs, but from which we always retreat. What's on the other side, past the watery border? What secrets does the ocean keep? What would it be like to cross over?
Shakespearean theater follows a comparable beachy logic of temporary and transformative immersion. The plays create for a brief shared time and space an imaginative world that follows its own rules. Inside the charmed circle, the boundary between "art" - things created by human ingenuity and technique - and "nature" - the physical landscape into which we are born - ceases to hold. The art-nature distinction becomes flexible, textured, and subject to poetic play and refiguring. It's like crossing over without leaving our seats. We dive in without getting wet. Sometimes this seems too easy, and Shakespeare comes to resemble a vacation property. But every beach house sees its share of storms.
The ecological humanities have been drawn to Shakespeare in part because he's the biggest fish in the Anglophone literary sea,
but also because his long and living stage history provides tangible evidence of canonical texts engaging contemporary dilemmas. The current surge of ecocritical Shakespeare, however, risks seeing only the happier side of nature, a beach where the weather is always good.2 Sustained attention to the Shakespeare's "green" should not occlude his dramatization of a harsher "blue ecology" that locates itself not in cultured pastures or even marginal forests but in the deep sea. Shakespeare's literary works can't get us all the way into this massive blue body - the most basic feature of the world ocean is...