Shakespeare / Nature sets new agendas for the study of nature in Shakespeare’s work. Offering an expansive exploration of the intersections between the human and non-human worlds, chapters by 19 experts focus on the rich and persuasive language of nature, both as organic matter and cultural conditioning. Each chapter is grounded in a close reading of Shakespeare’s plays and poems and among the many themes considered are natural theology in Macbeth; the influence of the stars in Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Hamlet and Macbeth; monstrous bodies in Richard III and The Tempest; kinship in King Henry V; places and spaces in Love’s Labour’s Lost, and acting sex scenes in a range of plays including Measure for Measure, Titus Andronicus and The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Approaching ‘Nature’ in all its diversity, this collection explores the multifaceted and complex ways in which the human and non-human worlds intersect and the development of a language of symbiosis that attempts to both control as well as create the terms of human authority. It offers an entirely new approach to the subject of nature, bringing together divergent approaches that have previously been pursued independently so as to explore their shared investment in the intersections between the human and non-human worlds and how these discourses shape and condition the emotional, organic, cultural, and psychological landscapes of Shakespeare’s play world.

Contributors approach Shakespeare’s nature through the various lenses of philosophy, historicism, psychoanalysis, gender studies, cosmography, geography, sexuality, linguistics, environmentalism, feminism and robotics to provide new and nuanced readings of the intersectional terms of both meaning and matter.