Shakespeare’s Theater of Nature: Science, Religion, and the Orders of Mimesis in Early Modern Europe

Shakespeare’s Theater of Nature argues that Shakespeare combined art and nature in new ways while experimenting with relations between words, images, and objects as sources of knowledge and pleasure.  Shakespeare’s re-centering of nature as a source of theatrical representation in a range of plays follows debates in natural philosophy and theology about how to understand divinity in and through the order of nature (ordo creationis). Early chapters analyze early modern reframing of nature by printed books of botany, cosmology, and history—as well Tudor interludes that center nature as a subject—while later chapters offer readings of eight plays by Shakespeare that draw on classical, medieval, and early modern debates in natural philosophy and theology to create new modes of dramatic mimesis.

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine

Reviews

Shakespeare’s Theater of Nature restores the history of religion to the prominent place alongside and in dialogue with natural philosophy that it held throughout the medieval and early modern periods. As a result, this book fills a serious gap in existing studies of early modern literature and science, brilliantly illuminating the complex contest over the representation of nature that Shakespeare’s plays develop as a technology of mimesis and address as a subject.
-Mary T. Crane, Thomas F. Rattigan Professor of English, Boston College

Deeply learned, thoughtfully complex, and gracefully written …
-Walter Cohen, Professor of English, University of Michigan