ToddBorlik, Shakespeare Beyond the Green World: Drama and Ecopolitics in Jacobean Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. 304 pp. £85.00/$105.00. ISBN: 9780192866639.

From its opening sentences, Todd Borlik's Shakespeare Beyond the Green World shows itself to be a must-read in the field. Pursuing 'two lines of argument' as they relate to Shakespeare's Jacobean period, it 'helps propel ecocriticism and Shakespearean studies beyond the green sliver of the color spectrum' and 'proposes that the most compelling case for Shakespeare as an eco-conscious dramatist can be made by locating him…within the corridors of power in urbane Whitehall' and intervening in 'environmental policy disputes at the Jacobean court' (1). These are indeed timely and warranted pursuits, and Borlik's Shakespeare Beyond the Green World does both beautifully. Building on the solid body of scholarship in ecostudies that locates Shakespeare's oeuvre amongst the nonhuman world, Borlik's extends that work, as the title suggests, 'beyond the green.' Shakespeare Beyond the Green World provides a capacious view from which to look at works both familiar and strange and shows how Shakespeare 'depicts the natural world not only in tension with but also as subject to the forces of history, law and commerce' where Shakespeare's Jacobean plays sit sometimes uncomfortably 'alongside the geo-political, legal and economic-environmental policies of the Stuart court' (2). To cover such rich territory, the book considers a range of landscapes (natural and cultural) from heath to sea, mountains and fens and to the subterranean resources beneath; and its scope goes beyond England to Scotland, Ireland and the Arctic, to show a Shakespeare knowledge, even sympathetic, to the destruction wrought by acquisitive expansion and greed. In these and other key ways, illuminates a brilliant 'spectrum from brown, gold, blue, purple, white, red and black in a bid to capture some of the diverse topographies of Great Britain and the great Globe itself' (23). In Chapter 1, we see how Macbeth portrays 'the heath as a battleground between the forces of fertility and sterility' as it 'champions sustainability and the fertility of the southern lowland farming economy, imagining a reproductive futurity that encompasses other species valued by humans' (45). Chapter 2 turns to the Scottish mines called to mind by Timon of Athens, showing how the 'perceived order of nature' in the play 'appears like a premonition not of an Anthropocene but of a Capitalocene' (62). Considering British fisheries as they relate to Pericles, the third chapter focuses on how the 'watery empires' in the play veer toward notions of 'making kin' (à la Donna Haraway) 'by recognizing the oceans as an international and inter-generational responsibility' (86). The 'eco-masculinity' of Shakespeare's Cymbeline has as its backdrop the 'naturalize[d] English dominion over Wales' at the same time the play posits a protected space for a uniquely Welsh 'sense of place' (111). In the two chapters that follow (5 and 6), Borlik reverses the familiar geography of The Winter's Tale and The Tempest (respectively). Whereas many scholars have set the former in the English countryside and court, and the latter in the colonial reaches of early British expansion, Borlik sets The Winter's Tale in the cold of the arctic and The Tempest closer to home, the Lincolnshire fens. The Winter's Tale 'delight[s] in indistinction' and indicts 'mistreatment by a patriarchal monarch' in broad strokes as it 'bestow[s] dignified personhood' upon 'women, children and non-human creatures' alike (115, 137). And in Chapter 6 Caliban figures not as oppressed colonial native but as a more local character and an example of Shakespeare's 'profound uneasiness' with the destruction of the swampy terrain of the East Midlands. For the final chapters, Borlik takes up two topics relevant to early modern England that manifest as modern anxieties associated with the climate crisis today. First, in Chapter 7, the subject is Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and Coriolanus, whereby we find familiar concerns about 'public health and overpopulation', a 'demographic crisis' 'reflected in miniature in the press of the Globe audience', whereby the plays were critical of what they depicted as inhumane Jacobean population management policies, including those related to the would-be conquest of the Irish in Ulster (169). And finally, Borlik's last chapter reminds us that our hyper-electrified spaces today were quite literally in the dark much of the time in Shakespeare's day; Shakespeare's late tragedies, argues Borlik, might serve as reminders of 'pre-Enlightenment literature as a means of reactivating the ecological mystique of the unelectrified night' that might in turn help us '[relearn] how to dwell within it rather than obliterate it' (195). Shakespeare Beyond the Green World thus serves both to bear down with a laser-sharp focus on scholarly lacunae even as it expands its gaze across space and time to show how Shakespeare's drama engaged incisively with environmental debate in its own day as it might help us with our own. In these and other ways, Borlik's Shakespeare Beyond the Green World is both lament and optimistic curative for the environmental ills that have brought us to where we are today, and it will be of great value for scholars, teachers and students alike.