ABSTRACT
The Spanish Tragedy and Titus draws out the ecological significance of fluid or precarious selfhood, intimating the possibilities of person and world melding. In particular, both plays reveal a connection between gravid body and sepulchral earth, so that generation and annihilation become thoroughly confused. This chapter reverses the analytics: rather than showing how ecological crises saturate literary landscapes, and considers how literary form itself encodes beliefs about the human/nature relationship, thereby generating an ecological imaginary. To elucidate how formal properties generate an ecological imaginary, it focuses on two revenge tragedies, Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy and William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. In The Spanish Tragedy, the Ghost of Don Andrea launches the action by emphasizing his curious dislocation. The "unappeased shadows" haunting the respective first scenes of The Spanish Tragedy and Titus emphasize rupture and crisis, thoroughly complicating even the most basic questions of the identity.
