ABSTRACT
What to say about Shakespeare is a daunting dilemma. More than for any other playwright, there is a lengthy record of scholarship on his ideas and images about nature including a number of new ecocritical studies.1 Others mention his knowledge of environmental occurrences, but I try to do so in depth, related to his life and his two most nature-laden plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest. Possessing an exceedingly large quantity of natural images, both plays also are exceptional for their lack of a principal source, which has perplexed scholars.2 By conjoining these often-cited facts, my deduction is that nature was Shakespeare’s main source. In Dream and Tempest, he amply drew off of everything he knew environmentally and empirically such as English woods, fl owers, plants, birds, and animals. Then, he incorporated protoecological ideas from natural philosophy, notably that of Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon. Both essayists usually are associated with Shakespeare, particularly Tempest, but for me there is a specifi c connection to their thinking related to nature. Finally, I bring together the plays in a new way around the agency of nature, departing from the more usual comparison of imagery, characters, and fanciful or dreamlike spectacle in two of Shakespeare’s most widely produced and openly interpreted plays.
