SOURCE: Estok, Simon C. “Teaching the Environment of The Winter's Tale: Ecocritical Theory and Pedagogy for Shakespeare.” In Shakespeare Matters: History, Teaching, Performance, edited by Lloyd Davis, pp. 177-90. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003.

In the following essay, Estok petitions for the academic recognition of a new critical theory called ecocriticism, or the study of how the environment has been perceived and represented in literary texts. The critic then presents a brief ecocritical assessment of The Winter's Tale, noting how the play reveals Shakespeare's “ecophobia” through his representation of nature as hostile and his depiction of crossbreeding as genetic pollution.

Recent accounts of Shakespeare have done a lot of useful work in exploring discursive intersections between gender and categories such as class, race, and sexual orientation,¹ but there has been almost no work done that looks seriously at how representations of the early modern natural environment fit into...