Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania (LHU) is a public university in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. It is part of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education. The main campus consists of 200 acres (81 ha) and the branch campus covers 12.9 acres (5.2 ha). It offers 69 undergraduate programs and 4 graduate programs.9 acres (5.
This chapter reassesses identity crisis in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, showing how the play points toward and resists a new conception of the human. Faustus presents as something of a divided or fragmenting hero, a subject trapped between competing notions of personhood. The interplay of individual and communal interests defines the Faustian struggle for identity and likewise holds significance for understanding the potentialities of the eco-self. Ultimately, Marlowe’s play encourages a phenomenological approach, one that acknowledges the interpenetration of self and world but likewise admits of a craving—a uniquely human need—for meaning and purpose. In so doing, Doctor Faustus lays the foundation for understanding the reluctant ecology at work in early modern tragedy.
This chapter scrutinizes the self/world dialectic in The Blazing World, a utopian prose text by Margaret Cavendish. Cavendish’s depiction of the human/nature relationship is examined in light of the burgeoning scientific revolution, developments that The Blazing World acknowledges and, at times, contests. Ultimately, The Blazing World offers a compromiseversion of the human, an ecological self, or eco-self, that both celebrates humans’ embedment in the surrounding world and confirms the necessity of periodically claiming some distance from it. This marks a significant departure from early modern tragedy, a genre that frequently evinces a reluctant ecology, mourning humans’ indistinguishability from the rest of nature. In making the case for certain proprietarily human needs, Cavendish offers important refinements to current ecological discourse.
This chapter analyzes tropes of negation in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, a text that interweaves the discourses of love and ecology. Shakespeare binds his romantic leads to their respective geo-political states, effectively grafting them onto the world. The diffusion of personae/ flesh into environment endorses ecological precepts but at the cost of annihilating the self. Ultimately, however, Antony and Cleopatra signals an important shift, anticipating the bounded, autonomous self more typically associated with the Enlightenment. Paradoxically, Antony and Cleopatra calls upon suicide to shore up the emerging conception of selfhood: the theatrics of death confer power on the aesthetic realm, in turn dampening the force of the abject. In this way, Shakespeare reimagines the self and disrupts the customary ecopolitics of tragedy.
This chapter reassesses the macabre nihilism of The Duchess of Malfi, showing how the distinctive chill of the Websterian universe derives from a relentlessly materialist conception of humanness. Enforcing this definition of the human, the play epitomizes early modern tragedy’s reluctant ecology, which concedes but laments humans’ indistinguishability from the rest of nature. Webster offers a provocative meditation on this theme, so his play anticipates the hypermaterialist hegemony currently governing academic work and pervading the varied domains of popular culture. By negative example, Webster confirms the necessity of harmonizing self and world so that the former is recognizably coterminous with the latter yet capable of periodically claiming some distance from it.
