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At THE CLOSE ?? HENRY v, as the English and French King meet "face to face and royal eye to eye" to establish the terms of peace between their nations, Burgundy interrupts the ceremony to reflect on how the war has blighted "fertile France," how it has marred what he describes as die "best garden of the world" by reducing its cultivated fields to "rank" "heaps" of dirt.1 A character not present in the play prior to this scene, Burgundy is here given a capacious speech of nearly 50 lines, in which he powerfully laments the loss of France's Edenic purity. The speech reads as a nostalgic set piece, echoing many of die sentiments voiced by John of Gaunt of Richard II who similarly mourns the fall of England's "garden" to the indifferent, earth-devouring processes of a new economy (2.1.40-68). And yet Burgundy's speech expresses more than just nostalgia for land and gardens. It crystallizes as well what I would describe as a distinctively premodern way of organizing the relations between culture and nature, human and nonhuman. Indeed, his words powerfully embody what Bruno Latour identifies as the hallmark of the "premodems," namely, their open acknowledgment of a "continuous connection between the social order and the natural order," even a complete unconcern for the distinction between the two realms.2 For Latour, such overlaps and exchanges have been present in all periods and cultures, though it has been the singular failing of modernity to deny such transactions, to behave as if the realms of culture and nature are discrete even while being committed to smuggling hybrids of both realms in through the back door.3 Burgundy's words, then, impart the "reflexes and routines that we Westerners need" insofar as they remind us of what we have repressed: the idea that we have always been hybrid (Latour, Politics of Nature, 43). As such, his words serve as an appropriate starting point for assessing what readings of Shakespeare can contribute to the burgeoning field of ecostudies.
Notably, Burgundy entangles categories that we "moderns" perceive as distinct, if not diametrically opposed. Hence, in observing the unkempt fields, he laments that "her hedges even-plashed / Like prisoners wildly overgrown with hair / Put forth disordered twigs" (5.2.42-44). Here he compellingly entangles...