A final chapter analyses the idea of sleep and closure in The Tempest, Waiting for Godot, The Winter’s Tale, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, Cascando, Nacht und Träume, Footfalls and Rockaby. The rhythm of sleeping and waking pervades the diurnal structure of Waiting for Godot, and many of Beckett’s characters sleep waking or wake sleeping. Likewise, the chapter addresses the many ways in which Shakespeare’s œuvre stages sleep. Staged sleep introduces a further level to the theatrical experience of seeing and being seen, of active and passive characters. In Shakespeare’s and in Beckett’s plays sleep can be read as a liminal state, in which the bodily presence simultaneously refers to a mental absence. Sleep, the chapter argues, becomes a productive meta-dramatic state, in which the theatre foregrounds the boundary between reality and illusion that affects the relation between the actor and the audience.

Although the dominant meaning of virtue today concerns human ethical capacity, the word had a much broader scope in Aristotle’s natural philosophy and in early-modern herbal and agricultural literature. This chapter tackles this ecological sense of “vertue” (as it was often spelled in the period), unpacking the resilient force it named in natural matter and the skill and virtue of stewardship it solicited from the humans entangled in its management in household, garden, or apothecary. As this chapter shows through readings of examples from Shakespeare, early modern practical texts, and modern environmental thinking, stewardship and resilience promise to capture the skills and virtues of household management in its broadest sense, to include care for the oikos shared by human and nonhuman creatures and systems – especially, in contemporary settings, in times of catastrophe. As keywords of contemporary environmental ethics, however, they have also been criticized for individualizing environmental virtue, undermining necessary structural change in favor of personal care and tenacity. This chapter suggests we might clarify this debate through a return to early modern vertues, by engaging the powers of nonhuman virtues and the legacy of these mixed and distributed agencies in the present.

In keeping with the pattern established in the first part of the book, the sixth chapter turns to a literary development of some key theoretical points, in this case examining how A Midsummer Night’s Dream guides empathic responses of audience members. More precisely, the processes of empathic understanding and emotion are highly complex in any real-world activity. That complexity involves repeated cycles of perception, recollection, inference, and simulation that are inseparable from one another, regularly providing the conditions for one another’s operation. (Simulation is a quasi-perceptual imagination of particular causal sequences that may be hypothetical and/or counterfactual, or they may simply serve to fill in unobserved aspects of an ongoing situation.) All these inferential and simulative processes are on display in our spontaneous and elective, automatic and effortful forms of empathic processing of literature. Through the analysis of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the chapter illustrates some aspects of this complexity as it bears on empathic response.

In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death, Shakespeare plays contradictory roles. On the one hand, he emblematizes the cultural inheritance Britain shares with the United States; on the other, he serves as the vehicle by which to assert British artistic superiority. The tensions between these roles is explored in a scene in which American service men and women, under the direction of a British vicar, rehearse episodes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Through this scene, Powell and Pressburger both mock American movies and betray their anxieties about the British film industry’s postwar future. At the same time, they make the case for the imaginative primacy of British cinema—and, indeed, of their own films—over Hollywood. The chapter concludes by considering links between A Matter of Life and Death and Powell’s unrealized adaptation of The Tempest, in which Prospero stands in for the filmmaker in exile.

Numerous Elizabethan philosophical and theological treatises deplored the duplicity, waywardness, and treachery of the imagination. Even Spenser participated in this, filling the chamber of Phantastes with freaks, monsters, and dangerous deceptions. Yet in the new commercial playhouses, from the late 1580s onwards, audiences were increasingly exhorted to ‘imagine’ or ‘suppose’, in a type of speech that we can dub the ‘imagine’ chorus. Originally a device to cover time and space in history plays and travel plays, the ‘imagine’ chorus began to be used not only to conjure unseen spectacles in the mind, but also to celebrate the powers of the imagination. This essay argues that it arose from the unprecedented experience of collective imagining in the new playhouses, and produced new thinking about the imagination as a magical and exhilarating creative force, as explored with particular sophistication by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Henry V.

This chapter explores representations of fantasy and romance in Anglo-American screen productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest. It is particularly concerned with how filmmakers of these plays make the fantastical and the romantic believable yet sufficiently otherworldly. Films of A Midsummer Night’s Dream discussed include those by directors Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle (1935), Peter Hall (1968), Adrian Noble (1996), and Michael Hoffman (1999). Each uses numerous elements from the cinematic toolbox to create plausible versions of Shakespeare’s faerie world. Films of The Tempest considered include those by Derek Jarman (1979) and Julie Taymor (2010). Airy spirit that he is, Ariel in The Tempest is kin to the fairies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Thus directors of The Tempest are faced with similar challenges of crafting verisimilitude as their counterparts face working on A Midsummer Night’s Dream; each meets those challenges with their idiosyncratic aplomb that does justice to Shakespeare.

A tenet of the burgeoning history of emotions is that emotions are cultural and social practices that change over time. Emotional understandings, vocabularies and representations are neither universal nor constant, but historically contingent and in a continuing process of adaptation. In this chapter we first examine the dramatist’s tool-kit that Shakespeare found to hand in his own theatrical profession and contemporary culture for constructing dramatic ‘personations’ apparently endowed with passions, affections and feelings. We then turn, necessarily more briefly, to how understanding of links between characters and emotions changed through the eighteenth century and into the more psychologically inclined twentieth and beyond. The main reference point is As You Like It, whose very title invites an affective audience response. This play abounds with characters speaking languages of love, and also exhibits metatheatrical references illuminating process of composition. We can observe at close range his strategies of creating ‘feigned’ dramatic personages who, though ‘artificial’, convey to audiences emotional consciousness.

This chapter explores the relationship between Shakespeare and climate. Taking its inspiration from weather disruptions to the 2017 Shakespeare Association of America conference, it riffs on the tweets that this climatic disturbance generated and the themes they reveal. It deals with the issues of: climate and its material effects on Shakespearean composition and performance, whereby climate and culture may be said to be co-constitutive; the resistance in Shakespeare’s time to codifying climate, in partial acknowledgement of climate’s unpredictability; and thus the extent to which Shakespearean texts portend human and non-human entanglement in the Anthropocene.

This chapter explores the relationship between Shakespeare and climate. Taking its inspiration from weather disruptions to the 2017 Shakespeare Association of America conference, it riffs on the tweets that this climatic disturbance generated and the themes they reveal. It deals with the issues of: climate and its material effects on Shakespearean composition and performance, whereby climate and culture may be said to be co-constitutive; the resistance in Shakespeare’s time to codifying climate, in partial acknowledgement of climate’s unpredictability; and thus the extent to which Shakespearean texts portend human and non-human entanglement in the Anthropocene.

This chapter explores the relationship between Shakespeare and climate. Taking its inspiration from weather disruptions to the 2017 Shakespeare Association of America conference, it riffs on the tweets that this climatic disturbance generated and the themes they reveal. It deals with the issues of: climate and its material effects on Shakespearean composition and performance, whereby climate and culture may be said to be co-constitutive; the resistance in Shakespeare’s time to codifying climate, in partial acknowledgement of climate’s unpredictability; and thus the extent to which Shakespearean texts portend human and non-human entanglement in the Anthropocene.

Over the past decade, anthropogenic climate change has encouraged authors and readers to confront new modes of imagining time, selfhood, and narrative and to reassess the relationships among experiential, historical, and climatological time. In Western literary culture, historical and climatological time traditionally have seemed one and the same. Working within the 5000-year time frame of biblical history, writers envisioned a world that, since the sixth day of creation, always has been inhabited and therefore always had been shaped and reshaped by humans. In this worldview, ‘nature’ is always a product of anthropogenic intervention. Beginning around 1800, however, work in geology, planetary astronomy, and palaeontology transformed conceptions of climate by decoupling planetary history from human experience, memory, and myth. In giving narrative form to the collision of experiential and climatological time, Anthropocene fiction explores the problem that science fiction often seems more ‘realistic’ than traditional narrative realism.