ABSTRACT
Environmental activist, poet, and farmer Wendell Berry believes that “nature and human culture, wildness and domesticity, are not opposed but are interdependent.”1 Such is a basic premise of ecology as a science and environmentalism as a movement, yet it is an ideal belied throughout the course of European civilization and the history of its theatre. In short, we (I too) neglect, control, destroy nature in the name of culture. Some playwrights dramatically represent the nature/culture dualism and confl ict. Few as they are, such plays are well known, usually canonical, nonetheless never scrutinized in a single scholarly work. I bring together this drama in order to look closely at how nature is at stake in the playwrights’ works, lives, and times. Natural environments become dramatic forces, taking action with agency or reacting as enforced victims, not unlike characters. Although theatre is largely human-centered, the drama that I explore powerfully brings on stage the other-than-human world and its endangerment. My focus is natural entities, occurrences, and settings of consequence in well-known plays. In reading or directing them my mission is to draw out, then highlight the prevalent ecological ideas and environmental imagery.
