“…7 One of the best examples in Renaissance literature of Clarke's Third Law is Shakespeare's The Tempest. As I have suggested elsewhere, the play wades into contemporary debates over the draining of the fens (Borlik, 2013). It seems highly likely that Shakespeare based some aspects of the plot on the life of the demonqueller Guthlac, who may have been the subject of a lost play staged at the Rose in 1594.…”
This paper explores the ambiguous role of magic in the controversy over the draining of the fens, the last bastion of wilderness in seventeenth-century England. In what now looks like an early form of environmentalist resistance to the destruction of these wetlands, opponents of the drainage accused the undertakers of invoking diabolical aid in their audacious efforts to tamper with God’s creation. Evidence of this mentality can be found in both William Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Ben Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass. Via a close reading of Jonson’s comedy, this paper navigates the confluence of magic, technology, and “projection” in the ideological debate surrounding the fens. Just as the traditional Vice figures (Iniquity and Pug) find themselves out-devilled by Jacobean Londoners, the play dramatizes the appropriation and displacement of a residual poetics of enchantment by the emergent discourses of economics and applied engineering. A tendency to equate magic with hydro-engineering technology may have been encouraged by John Dee’s involvement in the project. Drawing on an unpublished manuscript in the Ashmole collection at the Bodleian Library, this paper seeks to uncover the extent and impact of Dee’s role in the drainage. Advocates of the drainage, however, not only denied any supernatural involvement but also counterattacked by accusing their opponents of credulity and magical thinking. They characterized the native fen-dwellers as superstitious heathens and cast a scathing eye on local folklore depicting the fens as a demon-haunted wasteland. In pro-drainage documents, the proposed draining of the fenlands becomes tantamount to an exorcism, purging the rural backwaters of paganism and witchcraft. Wetlands management will now be conducted through applied engineering rather than magical incantations. A little known Jacobean ballad, “The Powte’s Complaint” (c. 1619) revives these animistic tropes to protest the fen’s destruction. Jonson’s play may explain why this tactic was doomed to fail and why this poem has been forgotten. As the credibility of magic eroded in the mid-seventeenth century, opponents of the drainage instead sought to stir up public resentment against the foreignness of the Dutch under-takers rather than their supposed collusion with supernatural forces. Jonson’s own projection that the drainage was an impossible con (like alchemy) would prove inaccurate. Nevertheless, The Devil is an Ass stands as the one of the most ecologically-engaged texts in the canon of early modern English drama.
“…7 One of the best examples in Renaissance literature of Clarke's Third Law is Shakespeare's The Tempest. As I have suggested elsewhere, the play wades into contemporary debates over the draining of the fens (Borlik, 2013). It seems highly likely that Shakespeare based some aspects of the plot on the life of the demonqueller Guthlac, who may have been the subject of a lost play staged at the Rose in 1594.…”
This paper explores the ambiguous role of magic in the controversy over the draining of the fens, the last bastion of wilderness in seventeenth-century England. In what now looks like an early form of environmentalist resistance to the destruction of these wetlands, opponents of the drainage accused the undertakers of invoking diabolical aid in their audacious efforts to tamper with God’s creation. Evidence of this mentality can be found in both William Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Ben Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass. Via a close reading of Jonson’s comedy, this paper navigates the confluence of magic, technology, and “projection” in the ideological debate surrounding the fens. Just as the traditional Vice figures (Iniquity and Pug) find themselves out-devilled by Jacobean Londoners, the play dramatizes the appropriation and displacement of a residual poetics of enchantment by the emergent discourses of economics and applied engineering. A tendency to equate magic with hydro-engineering technology may have been encouraged by John Dee’s involvement in the project. Drawing on an unpublished manuscript in the Ashmole collection at the Bodleian Library, this paper seeks to uncover the extent and impact of Dee’s role in the drainage. Advocates of the drainage, however, not only denied any supernatural involvement but also counterattacked by accusing their opponents of credulity and magical thinking. They characterized the native fen-dwellers as superstitious heathens and cast a scathing eye on local folklore depicting the fens as a demon-haunted wasteland. In pro-drainage documents, the proposed draining of the fenlands becomes tantamount to an exorcism, purging the rural backwaters of paganism and witchcraft. Wetlands management will now be conducted through applied engineering rather than magical incantations. A little known Jacobean ballad, “The Powte’s Complaint” (c. 1619) revives these animistic tropes to protest the fen’s destruction. Jonson’s play may explain why this tactic was doomed to fail and why this poem has been forgotten. As the credibility of magic eroded in the mid-seventeenth century, opponents of the drainage instead sought to stir up public resentment against the foreignness of the Dutch under-takers rather than their supposed collusion with supernatural forces. Jonson’s own projection that the drainage was an impossible con (like alchemy) would prove inaccurate. Nevertheless, The Devil is an Ass stands as the one of the most ecologically-engaged texts in the canon of early modern English drama.
“…In response to chiefly postcolonial readings of The Tempest , dominated by issues of New World colonialism, Todd A. Borlik's “Caliban and the fen demons of Lincolnshire” () relocates critical attention from the Americas or parts of the Mediterranean to the fens of Lincolnshire in England:During The Tempest's travels throughout the past century of criticism, England itself has been left off the itinerary. Historicist studies have been so fixated on the horizon that they have neglected to attend to relevant developments in Shakespeare's own milieu.…”
Section: Caliban Lincolnshire Fen Spirits and Local Weathermentioning
As part of the response in the humanities to rising concerns of the human influence on the Earth system, ecocriticisman interdisciplinary approach to the study of literature focused on ecological and environmental concernsbecame a major trend in literary and cultural studies by the first decade of the twenty-first century. This period also witnessed an increase in ecocritical studies of Shakespeare's works, which have continued to proliferate. It is timely therefore to consider those individual works that have interested ecocritics and featured in ecocritical studies. This article will provide just such a consideration of Shakespeare's final play, The Tempest (1611), providing a critical review of the play's ecocritical studies thus far, and drawing attention to central ideas and common themes in the process. Finally, the article offers its own ecocritical analysis of the play, based on historical accounts of a catastrophic tidal event that took place in south-west England, in 1607. Leo Marx (1964) proposed that William Shakespeare's tragicomedy The Tempest (1611) be considered an allegory for the New World, in the midst of the social and cultural upheaval of the 1960s. 1 Subsequent critical readings of Shakespeare's final play readily adopted this interpretation and became increasingly influenced by the prevalent political radicalisms of the erafeminist, anti-racist and environmentalistthrough their literary theoretical noms de plume: feminism, post-colonialism and ecocriticism. Feminist and postcolonial studies of the play flourished during the latter half of the twentieth century. Ecocritical studies of The Tempest are, however, a more recent development,
“…8 Among the most influential works on the origins of the postcolonial reading are Fiedler 1972, Greenblatt 1976, Brown 1985and Barker & Hulme 1985 To these, many other more recent readings with new details can be added, among which the most important are Wylie 2000, DeCoursey 2003, Singh & Shahani 2010, Borlik 2013and Lahiri 2015. Especially original was a contribution by J.…”
Section: "This Rough Magic I Here Abjure"mentioning
Power, slavery, freedom are three words that define some insistently frequent semantic fields in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. These are very large figures: an extraordinary frequency, which is obviously not coincidental. This article aims to show that these three semantic fields define the three main pillars that enable a re-reading of the characters in The Tempest based on the analysis of the life positions of each of them, and ultimately in light of contemporary political thought.
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