ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the future – and the ethics – of William Shakespeare performance and scholarship and does so by offering an ecocritical analysis of a post-apocalyptic adaptation of King Lear, Emily St. John Mandel’s novel, Station Eleven. In Year Twenty, calendars having been recalibrated upon the collapse, Kirsten walks with the Traveling Symphony, a group of musicians and actors who perform Shakespeare and music of all sorts to small communities who cling to the shores of Lakes Huron and Michigan. Readers learn early that the Symphony had “performed more modern plays sometimes in the first few years, but what was startling, what no one would have anticipated, was that audiences seemed to prefer Shakespeare to their other theatrical offerings.” Mandel subjects the value and even possibility of art-making, whether novel or performed Shakespearean play, to sustained pressure and interrogation.
