ABSTRACT
In the years that this book was written, 2004 and 2005, stories in the Western news media about climate change went from occurring once or twice a month to occurring once or twice a week. To those following the inexorable trend of global warming this is a predictable change in quantity, but in media circles this is a change in quality, for the repetitions are frequent enough to close the gap of forgetting. Once events are reported weekly, in the minds of consumers of news media they become continuous rather than sporadic, and so they represent an ongoing crisis not isolated events. Climate change became a crisis in 2005, long after its most damaging effects had become irreversible. At least, they did for most people. The first draft of this book was completed in March 2005 at the 33rd meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America in Bermuda, and the programme for the conference showed an extraordinarily wide range of interests: romance, sex, war, religion, history, cinema, and many more topics were covered from a Shakespearian angle. The impending ecological disaster facing humankind did not, however, make it onto the agenda. It is an ambition of this book to place it there and to show that our understanding of Shakespeare and our understanding of Green politics have overlapping concerns and can be mutually sustaining.
