Shakespeare's Silvae: Mapping Shakespeare's Dramatic Arboreal Landscape
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Authors
Robison, Hailey
Issue Date
2010-05-09
Type
Thesis
Language
en_US
Keywords
Department of English, University of the South , Sewanee, Tennessee , Shakespeare , Trees , Arboreal , Nature , Titus Andronicus , A Midsummer Night's Dream , As You Like It , Renaissance Drama , Forest
Alternative Title
Abstract
Much like Macbeth, Shakespeare was besieged by trees. His literary and theatrical fate was grafted with them. In Shakespeare’s Judeo-Christian background, a tree marked both the foundation of Man’s Fall and the beginning of His resurrection. He not only performed within the “wooden O†(H5 I.chorus.13 ) but also set many of his plays both in and on the outskirts of real and imagined forests – including Arden, Windsor, Birnan, and Athens. Allusively, physically, dramatically, and structurally, Shakespeare encloses his work and himself in trees. How, then, does this arboreal envelopment inform his dramatic corpus? Shakespeare uses trees, both individually and collectively, as shifting paradoxical images: they are a place of protection and danger, noise and silence, structure and collapse, and freedom and entrapment.