Shakespeare's Ocean—An Ecocritical Exploration

Study of the sea--both in terms of human interaction with it and its literary representation--has been largely ignored by ecocritics. In "Shakespeare's Ocean, " Dan Brayton foregrounds the maritime dimension of a writer whose plays and poems have had an enormous impact on literary notions of nature and, in so doing, plots a new course for ecocritical scholarship.

Shakespeare lived during a time of great expansion of geographical knowledge. The world in which he imagined his plays was newly understood to be a sphere covered with water. In vital readings of works ranging from "The Comedy of Errors" to the valedictory "The Tempest, " Brayton demonstrates Shakespeare's remarkable conceptual mastery of the early modern maritime world and reveals a powerful benthic imagination at work.

Dan Brayton is Assistant Professor of English and American Literatures at Middlebury College and the coeditor ofEcocritical Shakespeare.