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Two geophysical ratios haunt scholars in the blue or oceanic humanities. The first is seventy percent, which describes the amount of our planet's surface covered by water and also the approximate percentage of water inside each human body.1 This fluid's preponderance on our planet and in our bodies speaks to the deep connection between water and life. Both the biological sciences and many religious traditions view water as the crucial ingredient that forms humans.2
The second ratio is less notorious but more limiting. Only three percent of our planet's water is the fresh water needed to support agriculture and other human necessities. Within that scant three percent, over two-thirds of the earth's fresh water sits frozen inside glaciers and polar ice caps.3 We live on a blue planet that looks more like ocean than earth, but fresh water remains a scarce resource, increasingly so in our age of climate change. The sea surrounds us, but our supply of fresh water constrains us.
The physical opposition between the alien vastness of salt water and the scarce sweetness of fresh water has structured settlement patterns and cultural habits of our species throughout history. Humans always live near water. The historian John R. Gillis has claimed that, "Homo sapiens are best described as an edge species that has consistently thrived in the coastal ecotone where the ecosystems of land and sea meet."4 It is hard to know how to comprehend the human relationship with water, a topic both vast and intimate. What does the water in my body have to do with the fresh water trapped in the Greenland ice sheet and the salty North Atlantic Ocean into which that ice is melting?
When confronted with a hard topic, I turn to Shakespeare. It is an occupational habit for a literature professor to fish always in the same spots—but Shakespeare has the words to help me think.
THE BLUE HUMANITIES
This voyage into Shakespeare's poetics of salt and fresh water sails under the flag of the blue humanities, a term I have been using for over a decade for a tendency in scholarship to put the oceans at the forefront of our attention.5 Shakespeare, perhaps surprisingly, has been central to this...