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This chapter shows how the stage’s physical materials create meaning and position race as a construction of degraded European environments. In Titus Andronicus, Aaron’s black “hue” both begets and justifies the physical, bodily “hews” he orchestrates against the Andronicii, which are figuratively aligned with the excessive consumption of timber. In Lust’s Dominion, Eleazar’s furious “gall” (referencing both his ire and a popular ingredient in both ink and blackface cosmetic recipes) informs his audience how they should read his “Inky” face. The chapter investigates these material wooden puns in the context of England’s timber crisis and economic expansion at the turn of the seventeenth century. Through reorienting our understanding of Aaron and Eleazar around the wooden commodities that may have constituted their black skin on stage—namely, cork and galls—this chapter shows how the performance of “race” on stage was mediated by the natural world and the human commodification of it.

In plays such as Romeo and Juliet, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and A Christian Turn’d Turk, ladders of rope are used in scenes where male suitors seek to access commodified female bodies. In each of these “ladder plays,” the ladder (presumably made from hemp rope) is in close proximity to a real or metaphorical fire. Furthermore, Shakespeare’s ladder scenes reference Phaeton’s scorching of the earth, which implicates hemp in the same anti-tobacconist discourse that cautioned White English consumers against smoking tobacco, and conflates industrial hemp with psychoactive cannabis and tobacco. These ladder scenes stage hemp’s complex role in signaling the risks and punishments of economic expansion on the one hand, while laying the groundwork of a racial ideology on the other. Not unlike cork and galls, hemp on the English stage helps to create an inextricable link to the objectification of African bodies in the English imaginary.

Drawing upon a horticultural discourse, this chapter investigates John Fletcher’s Bonduca (1612) and its pervasive treatment of grafting as a meditation on the horticultural practices that were considered essential to early modern English colonialism. Through metaphorical imagery as well as physical gestures of grafting, Bonduca attends to the ecological repercussions of Britain’s colonial history and explores the potential risks of colonial expansion. In addition, the play represents the Roman exposure to several metaphorical diseases, which registers an early understanding of disease transmission as pathogenic, and which imagines a reversal of the effect of Old World diseases on indigenous human populations in the New World. These dramatized grafts sanction a complex representation of empire formation, where non-human actants play a more prominent role in determining the outcome of a political, military, and colonial struggle than human agents.