Dramatizing Environmental Fear: King Lear’s Unpredictable Natural Spaces and Domestic Places

Abstract

King Lear is vivid in its foregrounding of environmental unpredictability and in its dramatization of a fear of nature. The play markets this dramatic ecophobia to an audience very familiar with grain shortages, bad harvests, cold weather, and profound storms. It was a time of unprecedented exploration, perhaps in part owing to the poor harvests and lack of local fish,¹ and the world was getting smaller. The control of that world and of nature was getting much more desirable and attainable, yet here is Lear powerless within his own kingdom, victimized by the weather, unhoused, and alienated. Ecocriticism offers to give a vocabulary to the environmental ethics and attitudes of King Lear and to move beyond the thematicism and symbolic readings that have characterized so much of the critical work on Shakespeare’s representations of nature. Ecocriticism helps both to make sense of the startling fear of environmental unpredictability the play presents and to contextualize this ecophobia.