ABSTRACT
The first chapter of this book is a review of literature and an introduction to the terminology and theory that will follow. I discuss my own background with biosemiotics and ecocriticism and point to how they intersect with Shakespeare’s texts. In a narrative frame, I discuss the idea of scholarly and cultural formation, invoking Shakespeare’s, Hamlet’s, and my own education to interrogate the ways in which an individual sits at the intersection of a massive network of histories and ideas which filter into a perspective that does work on the world around it. Finally, I present an argument about four different types of evolution, including the epigenetic and the textual, in laying a clear framework for the body as an encoded text which creates narrative, and ultimately literature, as it mimics the language with which it is written.
