Shakespeare’s Theater of Nature

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.