Shakespeare’s Theater of Nature

Shakespeare’s Theater of Nature explores nature in Shakespeare’s plays not just as a source of pastoral nostalgia but also as a vital agent of knowledge, pleasure, and representation.  Due in part to its reframing through new visual technologies such as the printing press, the telescope, and the microscope, nature was increasingly understood as a structure of representation itself in early modern Europe.  Shakespeare’s foregrounding of nature also draws on important debates in classical, medieval, and early modern theology and natural philosophy. His innovative works for the Renaissance stage developed new strategies of representing nature using both language and embodied action.  Opening chapters survey printed books of nature and earlier traditions of theatrical mimesis that reframed the divine order of nature (ordo creationis), while later chapters offer detailed readings of eight plays by Shakespeare.

Aaron Kitch is Associate Professor of English at Bowdoin College and the author of Political Economy and the States of Literature in Early Modern England (2009). Together with Jennifer Rust, he is the co-editor of Rethinking Science and Religion in Early Modern Culture (2025) and has published articles in Studies in English Literature, Religion and Literature, Shakespeare Quarterly, Modern Philology, and Configurations, among other journals.