Ground-Work: English Renaissance Literature and Soil Science 9780271093529

Citation preview

Ground-Work

Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies

General Editor Rebecca Totaro

Editorial Board Judith H. Anderson Diana Treviño Benet William C. Carroll Donald Cheney Ann Baynes Coiro Mary T. Crane Stephen B. Dobranski Wendy Furman-Adams A. C. Hamilton Hannibal Hamlin Margaret P. Hannay

Jonathan Gil Harris Margaret Healy Ken Hiltner Arthur F. Kinney David Loewenstein Robert W. Maslen Thomas P. Roche Jr. Mary Beth Rose Mihoko Suzuki Humphrey Tonkin Susanne Woods

Originally titled the Duquesne Studies: Philological Series (and later renamed the Language & Literature Series), the Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies Series has been published by Duquesne University Press since 1960. This publishing endeavor seeks to promote the study of late medieval, Renaissance, and seventeenth century English literature by presenting scholarly and critical monographs, collections of essays, editions, and compilations. The series encourages a broad range of interpretation, including the relationship of literature and its cultural contexts, close textual analysis, and the use of contemporary critical methodologies.

Foster Provost Editor, 1960–1984

Albert C. Labriola Editor, 1985–2009

Richard J. DuRocher Editor, 2010

GROUND-WORK

English Renaissance Literature and Soil Science EDITED BY

HILLARY EKLUND

DUQUESNE UNIVERSITY PRESS Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Copyright © 2017 Duquesne University Press All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by Duquesne university Press 600 Forbes Avenue Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15282 No part of this book may be used or reproduced, in any manner or form whatsoever, without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of short quotations in critical articles or reviews. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Eklund, Hillary Caroline, 1977– editor. Title: Ground-work : English Renaissance literature and soil science / edited by Hillary Eklund. Description: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania : Duquesne University Press, 2017. | Series: Medieval & Renaissance literary studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016051408 | ISBN 9780820704999 (cloth : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780271092133 (paper : acid-free paper) Subjects: LCSH: English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. | Nature in literature. | Soil and civilization. | Ecocriticism. | Literature and science—England—History—16th century. | Literature and science—England—History—17th century. Classification: LCC PR428.N39 G76 2017 | DDC 820.9/36—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016051408

∞ Printed on acid-free paper.

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Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Toward a Renaissance Soil Science Hillary Eklund

vii 1

1. Compost/Composition Frances E. Dolan

21

2. Richard Carew and the Matters of the Littoral Tamsin Badcoe

41

3. Visions of Soil and Body Management:   The Almanac in Richard II Bonnie Lander Johnson 4. Unsoiled Soil and “Fleshly Slime”:   Representations of Reproduction in Spenser’s Legend of Chastity Lindsay Ann Reid 5. Groping Golgotha: Soil Improvement in the   Towneley and Chester Shepherds’ Plays Rob Wakeman 6. Winstanley   and Postrevolutionary Soil Keith M. Botelho

59

79

103 117

7. Fertility versus Firepower: Shakespeare’s   Contested Soil Ecologies Randall Martin

129

8. Wetlands Reclamation and the Fate of the Local   in Seventeenth Century England Hillary Eklund

149

vi  Contents

9. Manuring Eden: Biological Conversions in Paradise Lost David B. Goldstein

171

Afterword Sharon O’Dair

195

Notes Bibliography About the Contributors Index

203 253 285 289

Acknowledgments The germ of this book had a long dormant period while I was busy tilling other plots. But a timely confluence of events at the Shakespeare Association of America meeting in 2013 accelerated its growth, for which I am grateful. I am also grateful to all of this volume’s contributors for trusting me with their work and for their collaborative spirit as the collection came together. They have advised and inspired me, engaged one another, and made the entire project a pleasure. I am honored to be in their company. Rebecca Totaro, the series editor for Medieval and Renaissance Literary Studies from Duquesne University Press saw this book’s potential early on and offered wise counsel throughout the editorial process. She has become a mentor, co-conspirator, and kindred spirit in adventure. I am grateful to the anonymous readers whose enthusiasm and insightful recommendations have propelled the project forward and improved it in countless ways. The editorial staff at the Press, including Susan Wadsworth-Booth and Kathy Meyer, have looked after this book as if it were their own. For their artisanal care and craftsmanship I am truly grateful. It is impossible to count all the exchanges that have shaped the direction of this book and my own thinking about soil over the years. For especially memorable conversations and responses to various parts of this book in draft form, I thank Sarah Allison, Patsy Badir, Joe Campana, Daniel Ellis, Steve Hindle, Heather Hirschfeld, Justin Kolb, Rebecca Laroche, Steve Mentz, John Morgan, Timothy Morton, Laura Murphy, Vin Nardizzi, Karen Raber, Christopher Schaberg, John Sebastian, Laurie Shannon, Brian Sullivan, Rian Thum, Timothy Welsh, and Tiffany Werth. I am always excited to involve students in my research, both in and beyond the classroom. My students at Loyola University New Orleans have helped me to ask new and better questions about the ecological

vii

viii  Acknowledgments

and the literary. The intrepid Caroline Fisse assembled the bibliography for this volume, and Taylor Hebert and Erin Hildebrand helped with tracking down, vetting, and verifying sources. Hoo, har har hoo! The writing and editing of this book has been generously supported by the College of Arts and Sciences and the Department of English at Loyola University New Orleans. Special thanks to Maria Calzada, John Biguenet, Diane Riehlmann, and Heidi Braden for their encouragement and help. For their warm welcome in the fens and for inspiring me to keep digging, I thank Anne and Andrew Cowan, Mike and Pat Petty, and the staffs at the Prickwillow Drainage Museum, Burwell Museum, and the Ely Museum. And thanks to Goat, wherever he is, for some of my earliest and best lessons about soil. My greatest thanks go to my family, especially to Greg Larsen. Our shared sense of adventure has led us to tend and traverse many soils together. Those experiences have animated this work as much as they have fed my love and gratitude for him.

Introduction Toward a Renaissance Soil Science Hillary Eklund

When Gertrude chides her son Hamlet for what she perceives as his protracted mourning of his dead father, she urges him not to “Seek for thy father in the dust. / Thou know’st ’tis common — all that lives must die, / Passing through nature to eternity.”1 The idea that Hamlet senior has passed through a natural state into metaphysical eternity, and Gertrude’s insinuation that Hamlet will not find his father in the dust, elides the material fact that the king’s recently expired body lies precisely there, decomposing and gradually becoming part of the soil.2 Is that body the father that Hamlet seeks? Or is the dust, like death itself, now common — incapable of being particularized or resolved into what was or is Hamlet’s father? Hamlet’s interest in soil is apparent not just to Gertrude but throughout the play, from his admission that his disposition is so heavy “that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory” (2.2.288–90) — a rocky outcropping that time and erosion have yet to change into soil — to his antic praise of the leveling agency of the worm, fatted on the body of a king and now baited on a poor man’s hook: fish eats worm, man eats fish, and thus “a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar” (4.3.30–31). Speaking to Horatio about

1

2  Introduction

the late Yorick, Hamlet proposes to “trace the noble dust of Alexander till a find it stopping a bung-hole”: “Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust, the dust is earth, of earth we make loam, and why of that loam whereto he was converted might they not stop a beer-barrel?” (5.1.187–95). Virtually obsessed with the decay and regeneration that soil enacts, we might see Hamlet as an early soil scientist keen to understand the human — “this quintessence of dust” (2.2.298) — in relation to the mysterious natural processes of soil. As Randall Martin argues, Hamlet’s interest in soil and in particular the work of worms “enable[s] him to re-theorize human mortality as a transitional stage of ongoing ecological interdependency rather than terminal physical closure.”3 The prince of Denmark’s deep contemplation of the ground beneath his feet — as his point of origin and final destination, as the tie that binds him to all other life forms, and as both the lowest biological common denominator and the very “quintessence” of human exemplarity — befits the concerns of sixteenth and seventeenth century agrarian England. Texts produced in this environment frequently discuss what Shakespeare’s Holofernes calls “the face of terra, the soil, the land, the earth” — from the fecund fields of sixteenth century husbandry manuals to the epic strains of Milton (Love’s Labour’s Lost 4.2.6). Literary scholars, however, have seldom paid more than passing attention to soil, instead folding it into other topics like agriculture or territory. If, as Dan Brayton argues, most ecocriticism is shaped by a “terrestrial bias” and is limited by the “fetishization of land as a conceptual foundation or primitive term,” ecocritics’ attention to “ground” seldom digs deep in the soil.4 And if ecocriticism has one foot in literature and one, as Cheryll Glotfelty claims, on land, that land often precludes or occludes its own soil composition.5 To be sure, soil is less charismatic than the giant sequoia or the white tiger. Humorally linked to the black, melancholy earth, it is, nevertheless, a substance both vital to sustaining the planet’s biological life and profoundly subject to intervention by human inhabitants. Brown, as Steve Mentz reminds us, “is the color on which all agricultural societies, which is to say, all human societies, depend, no matter how green our environmental fantasies.”6 With critical ecostudies on the rise, this neglect of soil in literature may reflect a

Introduction  3

broader failure to attend to a natural resource every bit as vital to the survival of life on earth as water or air, and index the consequence of that failure: the planet’s soils are quietly disappearing. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization reports that the world has about 60 more years of growing crops with current methods before the topsoil is completely destroyed.7 According to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, 12 million hectares of topsoil are lost every year due to soil degradation. Intensive farming practices, pollution, deforestation, and climate change all contribute to soil destruction, and the loss of soils creates a vicious cycle: less soil means less absorption of atmospheric carbon, less filtration of water, and greater need for chemical fertilizers. As the lands that support life contract and deserts grow, human, animal, and vegetable migrations place greater strains on still viable soils.8 This unfolding soil crisis urges more critical thought about soil across the disciplines, and this book is a response to that call. How, then, does soil move, adapt, inspire, transform, and engender? How did the early modern shift from a mainly agrarian economy to a trade economy affect both representations of soil and its uses? What shapes did the language and stories of soil assume in the period? In taking up these questions, Ground-Work  —  the first collection dedicated to representations of soil in literature — supplies a critical vacancy in the field of literature and environment. Rooted in the interpretive field of ecocriticism, these essays discuss the pre-modern origins of modern ecological practices (such as composting) as well as the relevance of pre-modern ecological thought to contemporary challenges (such as climate change). Taking soil seriously as not just a symbol but also a crucial feature of the nonhuman world that mediates a variety of biological, social, and material relations, these essays also extend work on the ecopoetics of cultivation, from the Renaissance garden to the Royal Society.9 With its elemental focus, Ground-Work shares some of the priorities articulated in recent studies that focus on oceans, trees, animals, and stones in order to draw attention to a previously overlooked ecological element, and to explore how it informs relations between humans and the nonhuman.10 Looking beyond ecocriticism, the essays in this volume also address topics such as public works, property, chorography, reproduction, war, sin, and filth — 

4  Introduction

topics foregrounded in early modern writers’ tendencies to consider soil not as a homogeneous element but as qualitatively specific (e.g., slime, loam, dust) and by their routine association of “soil” with pollution and transgression. The chapters do not assume an arc of early modern ecological thought that tends toward ideas we would recognize now as sustainable, conservationist, or green. Instead, GroundWork sifts through the horizons of early modern approaches to soil to find a buried contest of ideas about land use, habitation, politics, and aesthetics. From its earliest appearances in reference to the ground, or the face of the earth, the term “soil” expanded its semantic range in the early modern period, and the multiple valences of soil are reflected in the sheer number of terms that refer to it in the chapters of this volume: compost, dust, earth, filth, ground, home, land, landscape, manure, muck, mud, and so on.11 As this range of terms would suggest, Renaissance writers considered soil not only as a material resource but also as a site for exploring questions of material and spiritual being, power and belonging, art, past, present, and future. The dense concentration of meanings within soil endows it with the signal feature of the literary — interpretability — and this shared feature may explain why so many literary terms, such as “plot,” index soil in some way. (For instance, Sir Philip Sidney describes poetry as “an imaginative ground-plot of a profitable invention.”12) Within soil’s horizons, or layers, lie records of an area’s geological and climatic history, traces of its past and present inhabitants, as well as information about possible future uses of the soil. Observers of different landscapes may draw contradictory conclusions about their healthfulness or utility, or adduce examples from the soil to justify conflicting actions. Soil is thus both a primal site of reading and a frequent occasion for representation, as these chapters trace in texts ranging from agrarian treatises, chorographies, and natural histories to poetry, plays, and works of political theory. Within this archive we find varied systems of knowledge organized around soil, or what I am calling a Renaissance soil science. Leaning on the pre-modern sense of “science” as scientia — knowledge or intellectual understanding — we can conjure what a Renaissance soil science might have looked like from what early modern observers recorded. Their approaches include but also go beyond the modern

Introduction  5

soil sciences of pedology (the study of soil formation and composition) and edaphology (the study of how soils affect the life forms they support). They knew, for instance, that with its combination of minerals, organic matter, air, and water, soil is animal, vegetable, and mineral. It is the living and the dead, both flourishing and decaying. Soil is at once the foundation on which we build and the volatile skin of a living earth that slides, opens, leaches, and erodes. Soil, thus, is a means for us to understand the human within complex networks of involvement that challenge the boundedness of embodied selves and, accordingly, require us to look not just around but also below.13 Early modern writing reflects the multivalent qualities of soil in part by recording a dichotomy between the earth as a generative, life-giving home made especially for humans and the natural world as an impediment to profitable human activity.14 For people who took the Creation story of Genesis literally, soil was not so much a nonhuman element as it was the essential substance of created man and, at the same time, his domain. The theology of dominion offered a powerful connection between humans and the soil they inhabited, whereby “the world had been created for man’s sake,” for man to dress and keep according to God’s command.15 The soil was thus the stuff of being, a field of authority, and a source of sustenance. From the industry of worms to the ploughman’s complaint, soil is also a topos for labor of all kinds. The growing population in sixteenth century England required a sharp rise in food production; unpredictable climate conditions put further strain on farmers and the nutrient-depleted soil they cultivated. In a branching literary tradition stemming from Virgil’s Georgics and Columella’s De re rustica, gentlemen farmers like Thomas Tusser and Gervase Markham describe the toilsome application of labor to hard, rocky ground and methods for improving soil and its yields.16 These improvers, as Andrew McRae and others point out, conferred unprecedented dignity on agrarian work and promoted a national ethos of cultivation.17 So powerful was this discourse of improvement that even the muddy “wastes” of Ireland and Virginia could be reimagined as desirable and profitable spaces.18 Nor, as Hamlet so clearly understands, is this labor exclusive to humans. Plough horses, sheep, moles, worms, and other beasts were seen as collaborators in the tending and use of soils.19 This labor — “groundwork” — is thus not reducible to what we would today

6  Introduction

call a “cultural” practice (as opposed to a natural process). Instead, it operates prior to the artificial severance of nature from art. For all its vivid descriptions of agrarian labor, however, the logic of improvement was by no means limited to literal discussions of farming. As the literary critic Joanna Picciotto demonstrates, agrarian work served as a template for reimagining investigative and intellectual labor (science) in the seventeenth century.20 If improvers saw soil as a composition — a product of human art — fashioned through expert agrarian labor, soil also served as a figure for representing other human compositions. (As Frances E. Dolan’s essay in this volume argues, the practice of soil amendment provided a pattern for theorizing literary composition in the period.) Figurations of nationhood likewise have their roots in soil. Early modern chorographers such as William Camden, Michael Drayton, and Richard Carew (about whom Tamsin Badcoe writes) anthologized the various soils of the realm in “forms of nationhood,” texts that elaborated a land-based understanding of English identity.21 Political revolutionaries such as Gerrard Winstanley (the subject of Keith M. Botelho’s essay) used soil in combined literal and metaphorical ways to foreground a utopian vision of the nation as a spiritually regenerate commons. Still other representations traffic in oppositions that move well beyond soil as a material resource: filth and cleanness, sin and innocence, sullen earth and heaven’s gate (on these topics, see essays by Lindsay Ann Reid and David B. Goldstein). As the anthropologist Mary Douglas argues, dirt is disorder in a cultural sense, and its elimination is a form of reordering one’s environment to conform to an established idea.22 The earthiest of earthly substances, soil quietly escapes notice until it appears out of place or until the specialist — the gravedigger, the surveyor, the husbandman — names it and acts on it. The essays in Ground-Work seek not only to describe Renaissance soil science as it appears in the archive, but also to engage it as a critical methodology in order to address the complex puzzles soil presents. Soil science presumes that soil making and knowledge making are mutually embedded processes. As practitioners of our own Renaissance soil science, then, we explore nodes of intersection between literary studies and a variety of other disciplines. The conversation among the essays proposes a set of terms for Renaissance soil science that bridges the scholarly encampments that can divide the study of the human

Introduction  7

from the nonhuman, the subject from the object, the past from the present, and the natural from the built environment. Because soil itself bridges so many of these categories, it is an ideal instrument for this larger critical goal. The rewards of this concerted effort are similarly varied: while these essays reveal sustained and complex ecological thought during the period, they also contextualize modern practices that have harmed the soil as well as efforts to address challenges of nutrient depletion, contamination, and erosion. Exploring the richly textured valences of early modern soil, they uncover ways of thinking that have escaped prior scholarly notice, turning up what Mentz describes as a “brown” ecology that pushes back on the hegemonic clean/green dyad of ecological critique. What’s more, by attending to the mutually embedded processes of soil making and knowledge making, they show how those processes shape our understanding of three topics vital to the study of environmental sciences and humanities: materiality, place, and temporality. Materiality (Mold)

The first soil we see when we look down, the soil that gardeners work when they grow vegetables and flowers, is the surface layer, or mold. Mold receives everything that falls on it — decaying leaves, animal waste, rain, take-out containers, cigarette butts — and sets to work, in its barely perceptible time, to assimilate it all. A lively mix of abiotic and biotic substances mingles here, but most of what is alive in soil exists in the mold. As a highly variable assemblage of materials and life forms, including fungi, bacteria, worms, insects, and small mammals, mold typifies soil’s complex materiality. It exhibits the kind of “thing-power” that, according to Jane Bennett, “draws attention to an efficacy of objects in excess of the human meanings, designs, or purposes they express or serve.”23 The word “mold” also refers to the decaying matter considered the very stuff of the human body, and to the shapes that same body and other organic bodies take.24 It is this sense that Ophelia evokes when she describes Hamlet as the “mould of form” (3.1.152). Mold, therefore, is both substance and form, both a product and a constant process of decay and regeneration enacted by a multitude of interrelated living and dead ­organisms in whose company humans occasionally find themselves. A soil science

8  Introduction

that attends to mold’s teeming multiplicity has the potential to disrupt a tendency in modern thought much lamented by Bruno Latour, whereby individuals “felt themselves absolutely free to give up following the ridiculous constraints of their past which required them to take into account the delicate web of relations between things and people.”25 As Latour reminds us, a better ecology — we might say, a better soil science — rests on a more complex understanding of matter and materiality than one in which prepotent human actors impose their will on a world of passive objects. Latour, along with Bennett, Alaimo, and others, has inspired a growing elemental focus on the study of literature and environment, particularly in the early modern period — a time when the modern logics that separate nature from culture, the wild from the improved, and the human from the nonhuman remained incompletely formed.26 The complex materiality of mold disturbs any clear separation of nature from culture. As Frances Dolan shows in her essay that leads this collection, sixteenth and seventeenth century agrarian writers took seriously the art of soil composition. Indeed, soil’s alchemy endows it with the very qualities of a maker: it transforms waste and decaying organic material into valuable nourishment and fuel. It is, to borrow the words of the Nicene Creed, the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. As such, soil is not only a site for contemplating the nature of materiality and embodiment, but also a vehicle for understanding the immaterial. In Rob Wakeman’s essay, for instance, sheep manure physically present onstage in the Townley and Chester shepherds’ plays occasions contemplation of the divine. Recognizing mold as a substance co-produced by art and nature, whose materiality obviously depends on the entanglement of multitudes of objects and processes, the essays in Ground-Work see mold as a model for the kind of “object entanglement (rather than object solipsism)” that, as literary theorist Srinivas Aravamudan argues, can help us understand current ecological challenges in a way that imagines not simply catastrophic end-of-the-world scenarios but, rather, different orders of material existence in the future that call for greater attention to and willingness to collaborate with the nonhuman.27 In an agrarian society like early modern England, intimate and sustained encounters with soil may have encouraged more receptivity to the nonhuman. Mold, then, provides a chance to question the

Introduction  9

view that early moderns saw the natural world as intrinsically corrupt, fallen, and in urgent need of human-driven amelioration.28 Simon Estok proposes the term “ecophobia” to capture this attitude: “an irrational and groundless fear of the natural world” that, Estok argues, is “as present and subtle in our daily lives and literature as homophobia and racism and sexism.”29 This useful concept helps to explain widespread attitudes both then and now — such as hostility toward wetlands, which I explore in my own chapter — that fuel a conceptual distinction of nature from culture and, with it, a sense of human superiority. Ecophobia appears, however, to be far from automatic or endemic in the period. Some natural products (e.g., saltpeter, as Randall Martin’s chapter shows) prove less dangerous than the monstrous compounds (e.g., gunpowder) into which they are processed. To be sure, when the natural world appears in Renaissance literature, it often invites human control. Karen Raber illustrates this with horses, which frequently “represent the need for reason to control the (bodily) passions.”30 But Raber just as deftly illustrates the subtle awareness and appreciation of the nonhuman that early moderns possessed: “early modern human bodies were shared with, invaded by, occupied by, and colonized by animals,” resulting in a kind of intimacy with the nonhuman that we see in a poem like John Donne’s “The Flea.”31 If humans’ proximity to the nonhuman inspired Donne’s commingling of lovers’ blood in the body of a flea, it is reasonable to suspect that humans’ greater proximity to the soil informed similar forms of intimacy with, and perhaps respect for, the nonhuman. A mostly rural population that did not enjoy the conveniences of modern pavement, sanitation, and transport, early moderns had a much closer relationship to soil than their descendants in the modern West. They understood that, like every human and animal body, the soil was teeming with the smallest of life forms. If, as Watson, Raber, and others have argued, early moderns had “models of a nonautonomous, ecologically embedded ‘self,’ ”32 what kinds of soil science did these models form? In this volume, Bonnie Lander Johnson frames this question in terms of parallel representations of human bodies and soil. Both Johnson and Lindsay Ann Reid trace how soil challenges conceptions of embodiment as a form of enclosure or autonomy. Materially speaking, then, we are more like soil than we might suppose. Owing to this likeness and proximity to soil, Renaissance soil

10  Introduction

science illuminates a constantly shifting set of relations between the human and the nonhuman that activates writers’ imaginations and challenges what Jane Bennett describes as “the fantasy that ‘we’ really are in charge of all those ‘its.’ ”33 Instead of supposing that some essential element of “us” (the human) really is in those “its” (the soil), the essays collected here seek to historicize numerous ensoiled “theys” and “its” and the relations among them. Here, we take another cue from Alaimo, who argues that because of the entanglement of the human with “networks that are simultaneously economic, political, cultural, scientific, and substantial,” the study of the human must perforce extend “into a rather ‘scientific’ investigation into the constitution of our coextensive environments.”34 In the environment of soil, mold gives form but also breaks down genres. It opens channels between the subject and the object that affirm the permeability and entanglement of each with its fellows and with one another. At the end of each life — plant, animal, human — is a mutation enacted by mold. Place (Earth)

If mold teaches us to be multiple, contingent, and dynamic in the way we imagine soil as matter, then earth, as a geological fact perhaps too easily conscripted as epistemological metaphor (“the very ground under our feet”), presents an opportunity to examine various forms of environmental locatedness. When soil science focuses on earth — our shared planetary home — it is better able to challenge the notion that there is a nature out there, whether a transcendent category, as Latour would say, that reveals itself to us bit by bit or, as Timothy Morton puts it, a “surrounding medium” that can be saved, destroyed, or subdued.35 Each of the essays in this collection, in its own way, uses figures of soil to toggle among local, global, and even cosmic understandings of the oikos. Collectively, they foreground an understanding of soil that highlights the systems, networks, and forms of knowledge that connect the intimacy of the domestic sphere or kitchen garden to larger processes of dwelling. The foundational texts of early modern ecocriticism have illustrated the importance of exploring the literary terroir of the period.36 In response to the New Historicism’s imperative to situate texts in their cultural, historical, and political contexts, these works interpret

Introduction  11

r­ epresentations of the natural world not simply as metaphors or templates for other kinds of experience but as part of an early modern ecological consciousness and experience of the earth as well. Accordingly, these readings take seriously the specificity of place and modes of habitation they encounter in the literature, from Robert Watson’s examination of Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden to focused readings of country estates by Louise Noble and Amy Tigner.37 A key site for exploring early modern environmental awareness has been the cultivated garden. Since McRae’s foundational God Speed the Plough drew attention to the rise of agrarianism and the multigenre “discourse of improvement” from the sixteenth century on, several monographs have offered more focused analyses of the eco-poetics of cultivation.38 Although diverse in their approaches, these critical endeavors risk falling into the traps laid by the very discourses they critique, by treating soil primarily as a field of human action. Charlotte Scott writes, for instance, that the discourse of husbandry was “a powerful place for the initiation of individual will” as well as the articulation of “subjectivity, responsibility, and obligation.”39 Navigating the space between the versified tending of the earth (as celebrated in Virgil’s Georgics) and improvement strategies pioneered in English sixteenth century husbandry manuals, the discourse of improvement privileged ecological rootedness and settled agriculture, and foregrounded a labor theory of property. In some respects, the overwhelming critical attention to agrarianism may have circumscribed our understanding of different modes of habitation in the period, privileging emerging conceptions of property over other forms of local habitation. But soils prove reluctant adopters of the characteristics that settled agriculture and private property would impose on them. While recognizing human dependence on soil as one of the main reasons to pay attention to it, and while exploring the multiple forms of interaction between humans and soils, the essays in this collection extend their focus to soil’s other capacities. Lindsay Ann Reid’s chapter, for instance, explores a kind of soil that seems to defy representation altogether, while Tamsin Badcoe’s and my own addresses circumstances in which dynamic soils elude human efforts to enclose, cultivate, and own, undermining as much as underpinning a sense of locatedness. Beyond cultivated spaces often lie a more nuanced poetics of locatedness and a more complex set of arrangements for inhabiting,

12  Introduction

interacting with, and representing place. Landscape, for Garrett Sullivan, is “a way in which the land is brought into knowledge and meaning,” which means that considering multiple landscapes can illuminate multiple ways of understanding and interacting with the land — not just as private property, but also through “stewardship” and “custom.”40 Sullivan’s work equips us to push back on the logics of dominion and improvement that color not only the literature of the period but much of the criticism as well. To better learn soil’s lessons of place, though, we might turn to Ursula Heise’s concept of “eco-cosmopolitanism,” a mode of thinking that sees the local, the individual, or the group as tied to planetary networks of influence and material in motion.41 In her insistence on “deterritorializing” space — that is, moving away from a sense of localized place toward “a less territorial and more systemic sense of planet” — Heise offers a way out of both the anthropocentrism of reducing soil to a site of human activity and the epistemological limitations of privileging either the local or the global.42 Understanding that the local is porously bounded and tied to the global in a cosmopolitan way, we can better attend to the specificity of the local — and of local customs and practices — without fetishizing it and without restricting it to real or imagined uses by humans. It is the shattering of what Alaimo calls “fantasies of transcendence or imperviousness” that connects soil’s ability to confer multiple senses of place to its ability to inform multiple senses of materiality, immateriality, and “material transit across bodies.”43 Temporality (Horizon)

If soil, with its rich brown hues, provides a point of entry into what Morton has called “dark ecology” — a way of thinking that renounces nature and professes “excessive fidelity to the darkness of the present moment” — its decelerated and multiple temporalities also suggest alternative ways of thinking about ecological time more than recent criticism has admitted.44 The critical embrace of the Anthropocene — a name for a geological age marked by comparatively large impact of human activity on the physical state of the planet — has circumscribed futures yet to be imagined with a present that Morton and others see as catastrophically dark, and with

Introduction  13

the near certainty of species death — the end of human activity. The slow alchemy that, over billions of years, transforms mineral particles into the precious humus that supports all planetary life, however, moves outside and beyond the dark present of the Anthropocene. Lying parallel to the surface of the earth, soil’s horizons, or layers, tell this story. It is due to the erosion of the planetary bedrock, and the further breakdown of mineral substances and their intermingling with water and organic matter over billions of years, that we have life or soil at all. And because soil formation proceeds at different stages in different areas, we must see soil formation not just as a historical progress but also as a transhistorical process. Thus, horizons, to use the more pedestrian sense of the word, both limit our view and compel us to imagine what lies beyond them. They are not fixed or final frontiers but thresholds of understanding that require multiple modes of imagination and knowledge-seeking attuned not just to soil’s senses of place and materiality but also to its multiple temporalities. With these multiple temporalities, soil typifies what Jonathan Gil Harris calls “untimely matter.” Harris criticizes the New Historicism of the 1980s and 1990s (even as it turned its attention to the social and affective “lives” of objects) for adhering to an understanding of temporality that situates historical events, subjects, and objects almost exclusively in their “cotemporal contexts.”45 Harris maintains that this approach restricts our understanding of artifacts of the past to a rather constrained historicity, and proposes instead to focus on things that cross borders of temporality. These polychronic (acting at various moments in time) and multitemporal (belonging to various epochs or moments) objects he calls “untimely matter.”46 Given its constantly changing form and its incredibly slow accretion, there is no substance that is, at least according to Harris’s description, more untimely than soil; it is soil’s very untimeliness that makes it do what it does. It therefore falls in line with the matter that early moderns recognized as, in Harris’s paraphrase of Ben Jonson, “neither of an age nor for all time” — intrinsically “out of time with itself” — and as such “challenge[s] conceptual organizations of time that often predominate in our own moment, including the very idea of the ‘moment’ as a selfidentical unit divided from other moments that come before and after it.” In this respect, an early modern understanding of matter envisions

14  Introduction

a “hybrid assemblage” of matter, place, and time — of mold, earth, and horizon.47 Soil’s multitemporality is easy to envision because of its slowness relative to the few brief decades that comprise the human life cycle. Yet in its slowness, soil is vulnerable to the same representational biases that, according to Rob Nixon, have limited our understanding of the “slow violence” of environmental degradation that “is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales.”48 We think about the catastrophic explosion of constructed environments, or the disappearance of the polar bear. But we haven’t thought carefully enough about soil. By directing our attention to the soil, its slowness, and its untimeliness, a Renaissance soil science can challenge what Aravamudan calls the “catachronistic impulses” of object-oriented ontology and recent climate change criticism. According to Aravamudan, these critical approaches tend to recharacterize “the past and the present in terms of a future proclaimed as determinate but that is of course not yet fully realized.”49 Central to this project is the concept of the Anthropocene, which “enacts a theological desire for the end times promulgated by Judeo-Christian and secular Hegelian metaphysics, without which the warning would not be able to stake its claim.” Rather than focusing on a catastrophe created by humans and framed around the eventual suffering or demise of humans altogether, Aravamudan advocates moving instead “to a theory of systems and assemblages that collocates subjects and objects” for the sake of a specific benefit: instead of imagining catastrophe, “Climate change criticism can also anticipate the futuristic notion of a multi-species swarm . . . rather than any homogeneous notion of the democratic human community.”50 Such is the project of David Goldstein’s essay, which tracks how the temporalities of sin and filth in Paradise Lost transform a narrative of disaster into one of material regeneration. For Aravamudan, as for Milton, this is a formal project as well as a political one: multiple genres are required to conceptualize big problems. In hailing species extinction, the Anthropocene obviates “the anthropolitical function of critique, whose rhetorical appeal depends on the prediction of an open, rather than a determined future.”51 At once past and present, soil defies the limited temporality of the Anthropocene and its overriding concern with disaster. As

Introduction  15

such, it facilitates an expansive reorientation of humanist inquiry that shifts the human, as Latour suggests, not “along the horizontal line that connects the Object pole to the Subject pole, but . . . along the vertical dimension that defines the modern world”52 and informs contemporary discussions of a global future. Chapter Summaries

The essays that follow weave through the themes I have just discussed — soil’s materiality, place, and temporality — as they chart forms of ground-work that enrich our understanding of the period as well as, through Renaissance soil science, our understanding of soil itself. From the first essays, which address textual assemblies of soil, we find ourselves moving ever more down in the muck, to the raw material figuration of soil (as, say, body and livelihood) to diverse and often competing uses of soil (including subsistence food production, mineral extraction, and public works). Throughout, the essays attend to the disputed role of human agency in making, improving, cultivating, tending, and moving soil for a range of purposes not limited to meeting the basic human needs of food, clothing, and shelter. The first three chapters in the volume consider soil’s textual frames — the composting manual, the chorographical survey, the almanac — and how soil is produced through mutually embedded reading, writing, and labor practices. Frances Dolan’s chapter surveys numerous treatises on gardening and composting that treat soil not as a given but as a work in progress, a product of ongoing collaboration between humans and natural processes. Dolan’s soil scientists select, compile, and synthesize disparate elements in a process that closely resembles writing, which for Dolan suggests a more positive view of mixtures and miscellanies than is often recognized in the period. In this process of “creative breakdown and assembly,” we find a template for the alchemical transformation of waste into value and for patterns of interaction between the human and the nonhuman that give rise to new patterns of resource use and forms of imaginative expression. The long view of soil composition that is espoused by Dolan’s soil amenders reverberates in Richard Carew’s Survey of Cornwall, the subject of Tamsin Badcoe’s chapter. Here, historical ­representation, national mythmaking, and ecological understanding are mutually

16  Introduction

i­ nterconnected activities. Out of the Cornish soil and its working inhabitants Carew builds a national mythos of prosperity “networked by occupations and industries” from husbandry to mining, rooted in the “memory” of the soil’s complex layers and tempered by “the environmental integrity of local places.” Carew, Badcoe argues, evinces a “generous curiosity” that tempers an instrumentalist approach to dominating nature with a keen awareness of ecological vulnerability. The Survey of Cornwall thus moves freely between county and country, past and present, and what we might recognize as conservationist and exploitative forms of land use. Bonnie Lander Johnson’s reading of blood and soil in Shakespeare’s Richard II builds on Badcoe’s careful exploration of soil’s historical and national properties, adding an explicitly political dimension by tracing through the play’s mutually embedded figurations of land as garden and mother the human impulse to control the natural world. Johnson first explores how the play dramatizes a desire for certainty through figurations of the earth as garden/body and through human actions cast alternately as horticultural labor and therapeutic ministration. She then links this desire to order the chaos of political and ecological systems to the popular practice of almanac reading — a practice that understands soil simultaneously as historical and political. That the play dramatizes Richard’s deposition in terms that closely parallel the almanacs’ histories, planting schedules, forecasts and prophecies, suggests a flawed but justifiable hope “that those who can best ‘read’ the forces of nature . . . will suffer the least harm.” Lindsay Ann Reid offers a complementary approach to the double figuration of earth as garden and body. In a fresh interpretation of book 3, canto 6 of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Reid considers the poet’s curious attempts to “clean up” the dirty business of human sexuality with soil and plant metaphors. For Reid, the poet’s rendering of the sleeping nymph Chrysogone’s conception of her twins Belphoebe and Amoret as an act of spontaneous generation leaves open a number of interpretive gaps. Considering a range of inter- and intratextual references from Ovid to popular folklore, she suggests that the Legend of Chastity ruptures any “carefully cultivated sense of peaceful horticultural and elemental synthesis” as we confront, through the ­“permeable boundaries of chastity and lust,” the ecological entanglement of bodies, plants, and soil.

Introduction  17

Rob Wakeman adds to this notion of environmental entanglement one of multispecies communion in his reading of the Chester and Towneley shepherds’ plays. The pastoral economy depicted in the shepherds’ plays, he suggests, figures a meaning of the human that is already enmeshed with and dependent on the nonhuman, particularly soil and sheep. Accordingly, in the newly “desacralized” English countryside, religious, economic, and ecological changes inform new ways of imagining service to God. By collocating “the christological ideals of the shepherds’ plays” with “the dirty work” of mud and manure — whose material sign was inescapably present on the stage in performance — Wakeman discovers not only a “convocation of several species of material: human, animal, plant, abiotic earth” but also the very mucky material ground of ecclesiastical metaphor. The relation between material and metaphor figures similarly in Keith M. Botelho’s treatment of soil in the writings of Gerrard Winstanley. Reading Winstanley as a postrevolutionary eco-reformer, Botelho frames a broader argument for what he calls, riffing on Steve Mentz, a “brown cultural studies” that “forces us to look down, to see and feel the soil below our feet, to engage with the materiality of the ground.” For Botelho, Winstanley foregrounds a vision of civic restoration through agrarian labor — digging up not only the enclosures that excluded the commons but also turning the soil for a project of national cultivation. The chapter thus posits ground-work as labor with moral, spiritual, and political consequences as well as material benefits. The contested soil ecologies of English nationalism are further evident in Randall Martin’s chapter, which traces the deterritorializing effects of shifting patterns of land use in the period. Focusing on the two parts of Henry IV, Martin explores conflict between “new military-industrial policies” and related trade interests on the one hand, and “agrarian and ecological revaluations of soils as a national resource” on the other. The manufacture of saltpeter — a key ingredient in gunpowder — from decomposing material in the soil perversely “substituted the negative production of war and the flow regimes of global economics for still largely noncapitalized English agriculture.” Soil, as a result, sustains a “double loss” through state violence and “nonsubsistence growth.” This short-circuiting of the classical swordsinto-ploughshares cycle results in the reduction of regional biodiversity and “entropic relations of imperial conquest.”

18  Introduction

Both Martin’s chapter and my own cast doubt on the regenerative claims of georgic husbandry. My essay brings these questions to bear on the context of English wetlands reclamation projects in the seventeenth century. In debates surrounding large-scale drainage initiatives, a national impulse to leave no English land uncultivated squares off with local customs and adaptive habitation practices. Tracing this contest through the drainage debate pamphlets and Richard Brome’s The Sparagus Garden, I argue that literal or metaphorical drainage projects, along with the displacement of wetlands inhabitants, result in irretrievable ecological and cultural losses registered by shrewd observers of this volatile period. The last chapter in the volume synthesizes many of the concerns of the others. David B. Goldstein examines Adam and Eve’s postlapsarian manuring of the garden in Paradise Lost as a vehicle for grace, even as Satan persists in the fallen world as a kind of fertile filth. Just as early moderns supposed that no ground in the fallen world could assume its properly fruitful role without human intervention, so Milton suggests paradoxically that only the introduction of ordure into Eden — the self-same “filth that Satan, Sin, and Death make possible” — can nurture repentance and human flourishing after the Fall. In the “refinement of satanic manure in the world,” Goldstein sees echoes of Renaissance soil science and its processing of dangerous materials into valuable fertilizers. But beyond metaphor, Goldstein also reminds us of the enmeshed relationships between humans and the teeming multiplicity of the soil — our shared point of origin, our field of labor, and our destiny. Sharon O’Dair’s afterword reframes the conversation in light of pres­ entist considerations implicit in the chapters themselves. Chief among these is how the Anthropocene forces us to “change the ways we live and work, to contemplate alternative forms of habitation,” and how political action — often marginalized in materialist approaches — fits into that project. Renaissance soil science, O’Dair posits, “can offer us, twenty-first century readers, writers, and ­citizens, a new direction for ecocritical thinking, away from both familiar ecocritical claims for stewardship and the . . . insistent materialism” of object-oriented approaches. The scholarly groundwork laid in these essays is necessarily preliminary; we have aimed here to start a conversation about a long-overlooked

Introduction  19

ecological element, not to cover it comprehensively. The essays that follow issue a collective call to scholars to pay attention to the lessons soil offers us about matter, place, and time, and about the forms of knowledge that arise from humans’ dependence on and engagement with the soil. We hope that our readers will respond to this call with questions of their own, as investigation into a range of topics will profitably expand what we know of Renaissance soil science. These may include figurations of soil in women’s writing and in transatlantic contexts, the development of land-based notions of property and legal rights, the role of soil in experimental science in the seventeenth century, the early modern rise of archaeology, the material autonomy of soil outside the scope of human action, and many others. Ultimately this ongoing conversation may turn up new perspectives on the truths about soil that Hamlet articulates and that the chapters of GroundWork affirm: that all life comes from and returns to soil, that soil binds the human to the nonhuman, and that soil is at once biologically “common” and aesthetically designed.

1 Compost/Composition Frances E. Dolan

Today, “how-to” pitches for composting tend to authorize it in part through a call back to the past, as for example, “the ancient and premodern means of returning living material to the ecological cycle,”1 even as they also tout composting as “trending.” The early modern period also advocated composting and its use in soil amendment as old and new. For example, Gervase Markham’s The Inrichment of the Weald of Kent, a guide to “the true Ordering, Manuring, & Inriching of all the Grounds not only in Kent but in all of England,” which went through numerous editions, argues that soil amendment using marl (or clay rich in calcium carbonate or lime) is “not now newly discovered, but was the ancient practice of our forefathers many yeares agoe.” Nevertheless, the practice had fallen into disuse by the time that Markham wrote and so needed to be “newly born and revived, rather than restored,” in part through treatises on composting and soil amendment, which proliferated in the seventeenth century.2 Other contributions to this volume demonstrate that soil and soil amendment have a history and that, in a range of ways and across varied sites, early modern writers addressed the soil not as a given but as a work in progress, and the spur to and beneficiary of creativity. For gardeners and farmers hoping to increase their yields, the project of soil amendment, necessarily, favors art over nature, process over place. Those who write how-to guides assume that soil can be ameliorated,

21

22  Frances E. Dolan

and they set out to instruct their readers on how to do so. Markham, for instance, insists that whatever kind of soil the reader has, he or she can amend it so that more “fruitful[ly] placed neighbours” will not “exceede [the gardener] in any thing, more then in a little ease.”3 In other words, labor (as opposed to ease) is a fundamental ingredient in compost. Compost’s purpose is to be spread, yet it is also rooted in the ground, absorbing the waste products of a particular place and enabling a given locale to remain productive over time. A daily ritual and an improvisation, simultaneously domestic and unhoused, composting operates by what Albert Howard, sometimes called “the father of compost,” calls “the law of return,” by which one puts back into the soil what has been taken from it.4 While this is sometimes touted as a closed system with “no external inputs,” compost receives from the air and rain. Furthermore, what returns has been changed. Time seems to move differently for different components. Some things break down and become unrecognizable while others stubbornly persist, the peach pits of history. Whether a static pile or a turning barrel, the compost heap mucks up layers; its striations are not discernable. It is constantly mixed up. Influential theorizations of temporality have turned from the timeline, measuring tape, or yardstick to figurations such as waves, spirals, and loops to describe the way time doesn’t march on as much as it loiters and doubles back. Theorists who have influenced how early modernists think about the relationship between past and present have relied heavily on figuration to capture different models of that relationship, including the rhizome, the ghost, the time-knot, a crumpled handkerchief, a palimpsest, a shipwreck, and leftovers.5 What all of these inventive proposals have in common is a commitment to describing time as nonlinear as well as a dependence on vivid images of copresence.6 To this catalog I would add the compost pile both as a figuration and as a material site that, in Pierre Nora’s terms, “administer[s] the presence of the past within the present.”7 The compost pile welds together symbolic and functional, practical and ritual; it is rooted in a concrete space and dynamic. Like other sites of memory Nora discusses, this one has “a capacity for metamorphosis, an endless recycling of [its own]

Compost/Composition  23

meaning and unpredictable proliferation of [its] ramifications” (19). But rather than trying to stop time, as some sites of memory do, it works time. Like many newly trending farming practices, composting poses a challenge to Nora’s insistence on a rupture between premodern and modern, in particular “the irrevocable break marked by the disappearance of peasant culture, that quintessential repository of collective memory” (7); as a daily practice it also challenges Nora’s distinction between history and memory. It is both “a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present” and “a representation of the past.” As promoted in practical treatises both in the early modern period and today, the compost pile assembles and ripens the past’s leftovers in the service of some future enrichment, even as it challenges many of the available models for thinking about how the present relates to the past by emphasizing simultaneously persistence and decay. We can see both continuity and transformation in an ancient and familiar adage Robert Herrick repeats in his poem “The Country Life”: “the best compost for the lands / Is the wise master’s feet and hands.”8 This axiom can be found as early as Aristotle and Xenophon; biodynamic and “low intervention” farmers use it now. For instance, I have found “The best fertilizer is the farmer’s footsteps” on a winery website.9 It endures without necessarily alerting those who use or hear it to its pedigree; its provenance no longer visible, the aphorism, “composted” by time, proves fecund across changing terrains and conditions. In every version of this axiom, it emphasizes human occupation of and intervention in land. What Herrick names “compost” was more often called “dung,” which meant not only manure but, more broadly, fertilizer. In choosing the word “compost” instead of “dung” or “manure,” Herrick draws attention to the relationship between noun and verb, a substance to be added to soil to enhance its fertility and a process or series of actions. (In their essays here, both Keith Botelho and David Goldstein discuss the similar way in which “manure” can serve as both noun and verb.) Herrick also draws attention to the resonances of the word “compost.” In its meaning of “a mixture of various ingredients for fertilizing or enriching land,” “compost” shares its emphasis on collecting and combining ingredients with literary compendia and compositions, compounded rather

24  Frances E. Dolan

than simple drugs, and compotes or stews. Essays included here by Botelho, Goldstein, Hillary Eklund, and Randall Martin provide invaluable discussions of what Eklund calls “Renaissance soil science,” as well as the motives, methods, politics, and even theology of early modern soil amendment. I focus on the relationships between composting and composition, while emphasizing throughout how figural and material, theoretical and practical, past and present intertwine in the compost pile and on the page. Making compost generates composition in the literary sense, spurring authors to share their own experiences, encourage experimentation, and write and disseminate their proposals for how to enrich and improve the ground, starting with the practice of collecting and ripening compost. The fact that Markham’s treatise on amendment was itself “painfully gathered” out of preexisting materials and then “revised, inlarged, and corrected” through collaboration suggests the parallel between composting and composition.10 Jeffrey Knight points out that “one of the most common ways for a publisher to market a work in the period was to claim on its title page that it had been ‘enlarged’ or ‘augmented,’ ‘annexed’ to another text, or otherwise reconfigured” (6). Writers of practical advice were particularly unabashed augmenters.11 Promoting composting in texts that were themselves assembled and ripened, the early modern writers on whom I focus participated robustly in an early modern culture of recycling, in which textual compiling took its place beside other kinds of repurposing and recombining. Writers on composting address an English audience, with specific reference to contemporary English conditions and needs. As William Lawson explains, “I admire and praise Pliny, Aristotle, Virgil, Cicero, and many others, for wit and judgement in this kind, and leave them to their times, manner, and several Countries.”12 Yet despite this claim, composting and writing about it may have been as indebted to classical authorities as they were to personal observation and daily practice. For example, Columella’s first-century argument that soil that had lost its fertility was not spent with age but, rather, starved of nutrients, and so could be revived, served as the conceptual foundation for projects of soil amendment in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Joan Thirsk argues for the influence of “this one pregnant

Compost/Composition  25

sentence” in Columella’s De re rustica, presented here in an eighteenth century translation: Nor am I ignorant, that there is a certain kind of land, and some places in the country, wherein neither cattle nor fowls can be kept; yet it is a sign of a slothful Husbandman, even in such a place as that, to be destitute of dung: for he may amass and put together any kind of leaves, and collections of any other things, out of thickets and highways; he may cut down ferns, without doing any injury to his neighbour; yea, he may even do him service by it, and mix them thoroughly with the dirt and sweepings of the court-yard; he may sink a pit . . . for laying up dung in, and gather into it, in one heap, ashes and dirt of the kennels, sinks, and common sewers, straw, and stubble, and the other things that are swept out of the house.13

Columella assumes that effort can counteract lack — of fertile land in the first place; then of farm animals and their droppings — and turn waste into resource. The word “dung” here shifts from manure, which not everyone has, to a compost one can make. In this translation, the verbs describing what the industrious rather than slothful husbandman will do include “amass” and “put together,” “collect,” “mix,” “lay up” and “gather.” This exhaustive yet judicious assembly of fragments links composting to commonplacing and composition. Columella’s provocative list of possible contributions to the dunghill — leaves, ferns, sweepings, sewage, ashes, straw — would generate ever more detailed lists of possibilities. Early modern composting began with what might at first appear to be the indiscriminate collection of materials. Gervase Markham’s Markhams Farewell to Husbandry; or, The Enriching of All Sorts of Barren and Sterile Grounds in Our Kingdome, to Be as Fruitfull in All Manner of Graine, Pulse and Grasse, as the Best Grounds Whatsoever, lists not only rotting vegetable matter but also animal hair, malt-dust, “and other excrements of the malt”; fish carcasses, animal entrails, and offal; and even human and animal blood, urine, and feces (E8v). Markham disregards the logic that sometimes governs what goes in a compost heap — of separating animal waste from vegetable waste. He recommends shavings of horn from tanners, horners, and lantern makers. “Now if of these you cannot get sufficient to trim all your ground, you shall then deale with Butchers, Sowse women, Slaughter-men,

26  Frances E. Dolan

Scullions, and the like; and from these you shall get all the hoofes you can, either of Oxe, Cow, Bull, Calfe, Sheepe, Lambes, Deere, Goates, or any thing that cheweth the cud, and which indeed, if not for this use, are otherwise utterly cast away to the dung hill and despised” (E7v). He also includes the by-products of early forms of manufacture, including lint, rags, shreds, and “base peeces of woollen cloth whatsoever, which are only cast out, and fit for nothing but the dung-hill,” as well as “the rubbish, sweepings, parings, and spitlings of [the reader’s] house and yard, as also of shovelings up of the high-waies, back-lanes, and other such places, and especially if they be any thing clayie, or morish [damp or spongy], or sandy mixt with any other soile.”14 Many other writers join Markham in listing possibilities for the compost pile with Jonsonian copia and relish.15 In the composting and soil amendment economy, there is no waste because everything has value.16 What might be despised as “fit for nothing but the dunghill” finds new value and purpose there. Composting was, of necessity, associated with garbage, filth, and excrement, with that which is, proverbially, as plain as dirt and as poor as muck. Yet composting also partakes of magical transformation. In Samuel Hartlib’s papers, for example, we find a secret for the ultimate “universal compost” confided on a deathbed as well as ideas for “quintessencing or exalting of ordinary compost.”17 Through time and transformation, waste becomes not something dangerous to be shunned but, rather, a form of wealth to be treasured and invested. Some farmers simply spread these materials onto their ground or ploughed them in. Walter Blith, for instance, in his popular and compendious The English Improver Improved, a work that will soon become familiar to readers of this collection, concludes several chapters on soil amendments with the advisory that “Also Fearne, or Rushes, Thistles, or any coarse straw, or Trash whatever, flung, or cast into the Fothering-yards, among your Cribs under your Cattell, will be both good Litter to lay your Cattell dry and warme, and will make very good soyle, as all good husbands know.”18 Others piled their collections in heaps, allowing time and heat to transform the raw materials. Several early modern writers advocate collecting compost in pits, positioned to collect run-off from stables and kitchens, rather than piles, which dry out and erode, or even in a moat or standing pool.19 The

Compost/Composition  27

contained compost is hotter and wetter; it breaks down or ­transforms more quickly. Like collecting the ingredients, containing and covering the compost had a history. Turning again to Columella, we find him advising, Let there be also two dunghills, one which may receive new offscourings and filth, and keep them a whole year; and a second, from which the old may be carried. But let both of them have their bottoms somewhat shelving, with a gentle descent, in the manner of ponds, both well built and paved, that they may not let the moisture pass through; for it is of great importance, that the dung retain its strength by the juice of it not being dried up; and that it be continualy soaked in liquor, that so, if there be any seeds of thorns or grasses thrown into it, with straw or chaff, they may perish, and, when carried out into the fields, not fill the corns with weeds.20

In this proposal for a covered compost pit, Columella sets out the basic principles of composting: an ongoing, wide-ranging, and open-minded process of collecting and contributing; a container to receive what has been gathered; and time to generate heat and decay. Only the “old” or cured is ready for use. Columella’s emphasis on keeping the compost moist and hot suggests the conditions under which a pit or barrel can play a role parallel to that of animals’ digestion; just as getting animals to forage and then excrete in fields transforms cover crops such as clover or turnips into manure that will fix nitrogen in the soil — which was central to the emerging practice of crop rotation — the compost pit breaks down its components, making their nutrients more available and prohibiting seed germination. The pile, pit, and pool all emphasize the compos(t)er’s agency in assembly as well as the crucial role of patient waiting. Time will erase the origins of the constituent parts, breaking them down so that they are unrecognizable, so that the assembled fragments constitute a new whole. John Evelyn, for example, distinguishes “well-digested Compost . . . without any Mixture of Garbage, odious Carrion, and other filthy Ordure, not half consum’d and ventilated . . . as it should be” (K2v–K3r) as the only kind that should be used to “impregnate and enrich” “Natural Mould.”21 Whereas Columella first defends compost as a substitute for manure, compost can claim pride of place for those squeamish about the connection between food and excrement. As Evelyn explains, everyone

28  Frances E. Dolan

prefers food raised on “sweet Soil and Amendments, before that which is produc’d from the Dunghil only” (K3r). In John Webster’s play The Duchess of Malfi, Bosola’s attempt to reveal the Duchess’s pregnancy depends both on the widespread use of manure and just such squeamishness about it. Bosola presents the Duchess with “the first [apricots] our spring yields” and takes her greedy consumption of them as evidence that she is pregnant. After she has gobbled up the apricots, he expresses regret that she did not peel them first because “the knave gardener, / Only to raise his profit by them the sooner, / Did ripen them in horse dung.”22 The Duchess then goes into labor. Interestingly, she does not refer to the horse dung as her cover story but, rather, claims that the fruit was underripe. My point here is that Webster’s scenario reminds us of the practice of using dung — to achieve results that could be questioned as somehow unnatural or dishonest (“knavish”) — and capitalizes on mixed feelings about that practice. Composting addressed such unease by offering an alternative to manure, what Evelyn might have called a “sweet amendment,” and by obscuring its origins. While various writers’ lists of potential ingredients for the compost pile are capacious and informative, designed to open up rather than close down possibilities, they should not suggest that soil amendment was simply a matter of indiscriminate collecting and waiting. Instead, most writers depict the process of soil amendment as considerably more mindful and creative than that. Writers such as Markham and Evelyn elevate composting and soil amendment from collection to composition by adding artful human intervention to the sovereign effects of time and decay. Markham praises his reader as “Thou whom it hath pleased God to place upon a barren & hard soyle, whose bread must evermore be grounded with sweat and labour, that mayest nobly and victoriously boast the conquest of the Earth, having conquered Nature by altering Nature, and yet made Nature better then she was before.”23 As William Lawson asks in his guide to “the best way . . . to make any ground good, for a rich Orchard,” “what is Art more than a provident and skilful Correctrix of the faults of Nature in particular works, apprehended by the Senses?”24 The idea that “nature is made better by no mean / But nature makes that mean,” as Polixenes puts it in The Winter’s Tale (4.4.89–90), is, of course, a familiar one, rehearsed in defenses of rhetoric, cosmetics, grafting, and a host of other ­disputed

Compost/Composition  29

improvements of nature.25 This particular site for this oft-rehearsed argument showcases the role of human skill in composing fertile earths. Evelyn, for instance, claims that he seeks “to incite the curious to essay artificial Compositions in defect of the natural Soil; to make new confections of Earths and Moulds.”26 Evelyn’s emphasis on “compositions” and “confections” suggests how writers’ descriptions of soil amendment as artful collection and assembly parallels their own composition processes. Evelyn depicts soil amendment as a kind of matchmaking. As he explains, “Earths should be married together like Male and Female, as if they had Sexes; for being of so many several complexions, they should be well consider’d and match’d accordingly.” The best match, by his logic, is that of complementary or corrective opposites.27 Soil amendment more generally, and composting in particular, depended on the mixture of the local and what Evelyn calls “things promiscuous” — amendments to the soil brought in from elsewhere. Londoners were the most likely to be able to access all of the forms of waste that appear in the remarkable lists of ingredients for the composter’s brew. What were called “foreign” composts were used infrequently not because of their foreignness but because it was expensive to transport them.28 But all composters were mixers, “since all fertility is the result of mixture contrary in quality.”29 As Blith explains, “in all Soyles and sorts of Earth, there is a Combustible and Incombustible Nature; Each Wrestling with other, and the more you can occasion Quarrels and Contention by these, that is, the more you adde to that which is predominant, and so allay the distemper in the end, the more gaineth the Earth thereby; For I suppose there is a kinde of contrarietie in Nature, it was ever so from the Fall, and ever will till all be swallowed up againe in one.”30 The improving composter, then, must bring contraries together to promote productive contention. “Mingling of grounds is exceedingly advantageous,” as Adolphus Speed advises in Adam Out of Eden.31 We find here, then, a site at which “mixture” is viewed positively. In his book Exquisite Mixture, Wolfram Schmidgen argues that “Across different fields of inquiry and political persuasions, early eighteenthcentury Englishmen were increasingly assertive about mixture as the source of their nation’s perfections, as the cause of its unity, power, and civility.” For Schmidgen, this positive valuation of mixture made

30  Frances E. Dolan

it possible to imagine and embrace mixed government. While Schmidgen does not include agricultural treatises on his “semantic map of mixture in seventeenth-century culture,” the compost pile was one early site at which the English explored the generative potential of mixture.32 We are familiar with early modern suspicion of matching persons and substances of “several complexions,” because it was so often reiterated. As one anti-Catholic polemicist warned darkly, “beware of mixture.”33 Let me turn to two examples from the drama because the stage simultaneously depended on and disparaged mixture. While Sir Philip Sidney famously condemns “mingling kings and clowns” in plays, the stage offered hybrid genres, collaborations, multiple plots, and tonal dissonance to its heterogeneous audiences. The patchworks it purveyed registered both the inevitability of mixtures and the discomfort they conventionally occasioned, especially when it came to marriage. For example, in Chapman, Jonson, and Marston’s play Eastward Ho! (1605), Mildred, the goldsmith Touchstone’s daughter, disdains her sister’s aspiration to marry a lord and herself ultimately weds her father’s apprentice: “I judge them truly mad that yoke citizens and courtiers, tradesmen and soldiers, a goldsmith’s daughter and a knight,” she asserts. “I had rather make up the garment of my affections in some of the same piece, than, like a fool, wear gowns of two colours, or mix sackcloth with satin.”34 The patching together Mildred so conventionally rejects resembles the composter’s matchmaking Evelyn extols (and, perhaps, the collaboration of three writers on the play itself). In Philip Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1625), Lord Lovell chooses a wealthy widow, Lady Allworth, rather than the young daughter of the grasping Sir Giles Overeach, explaining I would not so adulterate my blood By marrying Margaret, and so leave my issue Made up of several pieces, one part scarlet, And the other London blue.35

London blue was the color of servants’ liveries. Such passages document one of the things we think we know about early modern culture: sexual and social mixtures were routinely denigrated. Expressions of discomfort about mixture extended far beyond the drama. Patricia Parker points out that, in a wide range of early modern texts, “the

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language . . . of contaminating, sullying, or mixing is part of a series of distinctions already in place before miscegenation (literally ‘mixing’) became the historically later term for the adulterating or sullying of ‘white.’ ”36 Adulteration, mixture, and bastardization also provided the figural vocabulary for disparaging admixtures and contamination of various kinds, including that of wine, as I explore elsewhere. Beverages that mixed different kinds of wine or combined wine with sweeteners and other ingredients were routinely belittled as “bastard,” a widely used term for a popular sweetened or mixed wine, and “balderdash.” Both terms signal something spurious or deceptive in these mixtures, which were, regardless, widely consumed.37 Disgust at mixture is not the whole story. In the two examples I’ve just cited, a goldsmith’s daughter and a lord uphold an ideal of the unmixed marriage. Yet, as Laurie Shannon argues, heterosexual marriage was itself a mixture that, however normative, “contradicts the likeness topos at the center of positive ideas about union” in the period. She continues, “Though heterosexual coupling — it goes without saying — is a sine qua non of social reproduction and so draws support from a range of other cultural imperatives, its merger of disparate, incommensurate kinds, especially in marital or celebratory forms, poses something of an intellectual problem.”38 What’s more, these two characters, Mildred and Lord Lovell, draw their metaphors from the world of clothes making, assuming a decorum in which sackcloth and satin, blue and scarlet, do not mix. Yet the practical arts provide numerous examples of combining apparently disparate materials into valued assemblages. While “motley” was associated with fools, as Mildred suggests, fashionable people routinely pinned and laced together their clothes and could recombine the parts in new ways. The process of assembling a costume, for the stage or the street, was so complicated that one might require assistance. Indeed, as Natasha Korda demonstrates, the work of seamstresses and tirewomen was so essential to theatrical performance that plays both figured it in characters such as tirewomen and, ultimately, elided it.39 Like players, everyone assembled their ensembles out of disparate pieces. While some of these might be new, others might well be old or used. As is now well known, early modern England had a culture of recycling, with flourishing markets in secondhand clothes, metals, ritual objects, building materials and architectural ornaments, and even

32  Frances E. Dolan

“broken victuals” or leftover foodstuffs.40 Contemporaries themselves recognized the similarities between different ways of ­assembling new compositions out of existing fragments, as we have seen in the metaphors of mixed marriages as piece- or patchwork. Robert Burton links edible and wearable compounds when he describes “compound, artificial, made dishes, of which our cooks afford us a great variety, as tailors do fashions in our apparel.”41 While Burton warns that such dishes “engender gross humors,” compounding was central to cooking. There were numerous words for culinary mixtures: hash, pottage, ragout, gallimaufry, and stew, among others.42 Such words sometimes accrued negative connotations over time, but at root they simply described the combination of preexisting ingredients into a new composite dish. The word “hash,” for example, descends originally from the French word hacher, “to chop.” The Oxford English Dictionary gives the earliest definition of the word “hash” as “something cut up into small pieces.” Gallimaufry, which seems to have come into use in the sixteenth century, describes “a dish made by hashing up odds and ends of food; a hodge-podge, a ragout” and then, by extension, “a heterogeneous mixture, a confused jumble, a ridiculous medley.” The dish compiler or cook depended on the creative assembly, preservation, and then recombination of available ingredients in new ways. “Mess” moves from meaning a serving of food to, in the nineteenth century, “an unappetizing, unpalatable, or disgusting dish or concoction; an ill-assorted mixture of any kind, a hotchpotch.” While negative associations were available in the early modern period, they appear to have become more established later. My point here is that the most basic operations of feeding and dressing one’s self often required mixture and that this mixture was both inventive and productive, on the one hand, and the source of unease, on the other. The composition always threatened to become a hodgepodge, jumble, or mess. Wendy Wall’s work on manuscript recipe collections suggests the parallel between early modern dishes and the books, often the work of different hands over time, that taught readers how to prepare them.43 The recipe collection was not the only manuscript that resembled a cauldron or compost pit. Recent scholarship has revealed commonplace books as containers of a sort, in which readers recorded or pasted in and organized pieces of preexisting texts so as to ­constitute

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a new text and to inspire or generate future texts and actions. Many early modern people relied on the process of writing or pasting things into notebooks or commonplace books to fix them in memory and later returned to these sites to prompt their remembrance.44 Just as some medieval and early modern people seem to have organized their memories spatially, such books organized material under common places — which were also called “nests” in the period, that is, heads, topics, or keywords — rather than by source or in chronological order.45 Some readers purchased books with printed headings at the top of blank pages to receive their notes and clippings. Others compiled fragments without regard to predetermined categories. For some, the goal was to store and retrieve information. For example, Thomas Harrison’s indexing system, discussed by Noel Malcolm and Richard Yeo, was a cabinet or “Arca Studiorum” in which loose slips of paper were hung on hooks.46 While the arc or cabinet bears a clear resemblance to the compost pit, the analogy between composting and commonplacing breaks down at retrieval, I confess, since the goal of composting is for each scrap to dissolve and become unrecognizable. I am thus interested in the kind of commonplacing that was less about retrieval than it was about submerging collected fragments into one’s own composition. While commonplacing is now well known and much discussed, the particular subset of commonplacing that relied on decomposition in the service of recomposition has only recently been drawn to our attention by historians of the book who are interested in a productive form of consumption that they identify as recycling. According to William Sherman, the commonplace book was one of the early modern reader’s “most powerful and pervasive tools” in the project of “textual recycling.”47 Jeffrey Knight and Adam Smyth similarly refer to commonplacing as a form of recycling, emphasizing readers’ active, even violent chopping up of texts into fragments and then the creative organization of those pieces into new assemblages. Knight refers to early modern England as a “compiling culture” in which “ ‘compiling,’ in fact, was production, strictly speaking, in the semantics of Renaissance literary activities. In early usage, the verb ‘to compile’ could mean ‘to compose,’ to produce an ‘original work.’ ”48 Smyth extends this idea of a compiling culture to the formation of an ­aggregative identity, patched together from scraps and fragments, and

34  Frances E. Dolan

affiliated with rather than distinguished from others.49 Like Knight and Sherman, Smyth emphasizes commonplacing as “process as much as product,” an ongoing, collaborative and unfinishable process extending across time and focused on usefulness, by which writing emerged out of reading, collecting, and mixing.50 This kind of commonplacing was less about retrieval than it was about creative assembly. If Roland Barthes proposes that we think of authors as “scriptors” and a text as “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture,”51 that is, as a register or container of scraps from elsewhere, commonplace books expose the seams of that patchwork tissue and the role of the commonplacer or “notebooker” not as a channel for voices but rather as a self-aware and active mixologist. Deborah Harkness uses distillation as a figure for how “notebooking” worked in Elizabethan experimental science to promote “a cycle of collecting, copying, clarifying, and comparing” by which knowledge could be kept “in a constant state of circulation through the page and within [the] community,” and by which “circulation and recirculation of matter led to the production of a new substance,” but only very gradually.52 Composting, I propose, might be another such figure that, like distillation, is not an “empty metaphor” but a reminder of the close connection between the material processes (in this case of decomposition) being described, the practical proposals being promoted (systematically collecting, ripening, and using compost), and the creation of texts to disseminate that advice. The good housewife was one figure for the compiling composer. In his Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton describes composition not only as theft (from others’ dunghills) but as recombination — “we can say nothing but what hath been said, the composition and method is ours only” — and compares writers to “a good housewife” who “out of divers fleeces weaves one piece of cloth,” and to “apothecaries,” who “make new mixtures every day.”53 Texts in praise of exemplary women, which were often riddled with contradictions and undermined by ambivalence, also describe their subjects’ creativity as depending on a distinctly housewifely mode of compilation. Margaret Cavendish, using a simile informed by agricultural experiments, famously insisted on her own self-sufficiency: “Yet I must say this in the behalf of my thoughts, that I never found them idle; for if the senses bring no work

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in, they will work of themselves, like silk-worms that spins out of their own bowels.”54 Yet one of her contemporaries, Walter Charleton, recasts her proprietary singularity as a matter of skillful combination: “I find nothing which is not intirely Your own. Like good Housewives in the Countrey, you make a feast wholly of your own provisions: yes, even the Dressing, Sawces, and Garniture of the Dishes are Your own.”55 Charleton’s praise not only domesticates and feminizes what Cavendish casts as fantastical and autochthonous but also raises the question of her “provisions.” The housewife, making her feast, assembles it out of raw materials, leftovers, and other domestic products (sauces, garnishes, cheeses, preserves), some of which she made and some of which she purchased. The work Charleton praises is Cavendish’s Olio. Olio is another word for a culinary mixture or stew; it was also used to describe a literary miscellany. Cavendish’s Olio is her own because of the skillful way she has selected and organized various parts into a new composition. Thus even Cavendish, who might seem to offer a model opposed to the composting form of composition, is praised for creating her “own” out of what had already been provided, what is stocked up and on hand. Similarly, a funeral sermon praises Lady Anne Clifford, well known as an early diarist and Vita Sackville West’s ancestor, not as an author but as a collector or compiler who worked her chamber as a walk-in commonplace book: She was not ignorant of knowledg in any kind, which might make her Conversation not only useful and grave, but also pleasant and delightful; which that she might better do, she would frequently bring out of the rich Store-house of her Memory, things new and old, Sentences, or Sayings of remark, which she had read or learned out of Authors, and with these her Walls, her Bed, her Hangings, and Furniture must be adorned; causing her Servants to write them in Papers, and her Maids to pin them up, that she, or they, in the time of their dressing, or as occasion served, might remember, and make their descants on them. So that, though she had not many Books in her Chamber, yet it was dressed up with the flowers of a Library.56

The “Great Picture” Clifford commissioned, which has been much discussed, announces her erudition and supports her claim to her

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c­ ontested inheritance by placing her in relation to books. Yet her ­eulogist here, Edward, Lord Bishop of Carlisle, insists that she “had not many” in her chamber. Although he emphasizes her achievements as a builder — constructing six great houses — he draws our attention not to the monuments she left behind but to a process that endures only in his account of it. By this account, Clifford did not use fragments of text to help her remember. Instead, she began with a well-stocked memory. Then, in a process similar to the “distributed cognition” Evelyn Tribble associates with the theater, Clifford offloaded the demands of memory onto the built environment.57 According to this eulogy, she first broke down what she read into “sentences, or sayings of remark,” then preserved them in her storehouse, then selected particular flowers from this storehouse, and finally dictated them to others to write out and pin up around their living space. The servants’ task of writing them out fixed these posies in their own memories. The process is hierarchical — a mistress and her servants — yet it is also collaborative. Clifford’s memories are common — to be shared — and firmly grounded in the place of her chamber. But they are also mobile as memory circulates among the female inhabitants of that chamber, who recycle what Clifford remembers, help to produce the flowers of her library out of a process of decomposition and distribution, and descant or elaborate on it — going off their texts. Their descants engage the flowers not as summations but as provocations. When we consider the compost pile and Clifford’s storehouse of memory and dressed-up chamber as parallel sites of memory, we notice a temporal element to which Clifford’s eulogizer does not attend: the collected fragments would ripen and wither with time, some falling off or ceasing to attract the eye as they grew familiar, others replacing them. Describing them as flowers is thus particularly apt. As a collaborative installation, Clifford’s chamber, as remembered after her death, is also ephemeral, surviving as a memory of Clifford’s virtue. Clifford’s practice is one not of fixing but of fragmenting, mixing, scattering, and sharing. In her chamber, she is the origin of all the wisdom on display. The sources of her flowers seem irrelevant. In a 1697 funeral sermon for a less famous woman, Mrs. Elizabeth Dunton, the author, Timothy Rogers, draws attention to his own role in assembling and combining materials, again described as plants, to compose a vivid picture of the deceased:

Compost/Composition  37 I might, I say, have brought in a World of Authors to speak for the women, but in this Case I reckon ’tis with Books as with a Dinner; If I give my Friend a Sallet, ’tis not needful to tell him every Plant, or out of what Garden it came, if it be well mingled, and help his Stomach, ’tis enough; when-ever in the following Discourse I have occasion to speak in another Man’s Words, I always usher it in thus; as one says, or observes. And this is all the Mark I give my Reader to know a Stranger by when he meets with him.58

Rogers’s explanation of his method is typical of the commonplacer as Smyth describes one, neither emphasizing debts nor pretending not to have them. Rogers both acknowledges interest in what menus today call “sourcing” — of plants or quotations — and dismisses the idea that anyone really cares who grew her lettuce and where. In Rogers’s example, the salad stands as the kind of dish I have already mentioned, defined by its skillful combination of ingredients into a “well mingled” whole. Just a few years later, John Evelyn published his Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets, elevating this particular mixture to a composition: “We have said how necessary it is, that in the Composure of a Sallet, every Plant should come in to bear its part, without being over-power’d by some Herb of a stronger Taste, so as to endanger the native Sapor and Vertue of the rest; but fall into their places, like the Notes in Music, in which there should be nothing harsh or grating: And tho admitting some Discords (to distinguish and illustrate the rest) striking in the more sprightly, and sometimes gentler Notes, reconcile all Dissonancies, and melt them into an agreeable Composition.”59 Focusing on the salad maker’s artistry, Evelyn quotes Milton’s description of Eve’s skill in knowing what to choose — from a paradisal array of plants more varied than any garden would yield after the Fall — and how to combine them so as “not to mix / Tastes not well join’d, inelegant.”60 Like Milton’s narrator, Evelyn praises, then, a mixture that doesn’t seem mixed up. Composting was not just metaphorically connected to this kind of compiling. Like assembling a hash or salad, lacing new sleeves onto a bodice, or cutting up and reassembling parts of different texts, composting was another cultural site of creative breakdown and reassembly. While the word was sometimes used interchangeably with “dung” to describe any soil amendment, when “compost” is the focus of husbandry advice it describes in its fullest manifestation the assiduous and inventive collection

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of ingredients, careful storage and patient ripening, and judicious application. In comparing composting, commonplacing and composition, amendment and expansion or revision, I join other contributors to this volume in addressing the importance of soil amendment in early modern English agriculture while also emphasizing the ways it generated writing and modeled what writing is in ways that remain useful. While all of the other essays here, despite their considerable variety, gain traction through a focus on one particular author or text, I have undertaken a composter’s approach of collecting a wide variety of materials. My fragments of evidence gain significance through their participation in my assembly. The mixture of materials is simultaneously archive, method, and argument. As all of the contributors here agree, the seventeenth century commands our attention as a period in which agricultural innovation was a trial, a venture, an experiment, and a hands-on practice for which there were dedicated sites (such as the dunghill, the notebook, the library, and the garden plot). Reading mingled promiscuously with doing,61 old world with new, study with experimentation. Composting in particular was a topic of vigorous theorization and negotiation. As they argued for composting or debated different strategies for using texts, early moderns constantly reflected on their own relationship to the past. Since so many of us now have compost bins and barrels, and engage in the daily process of collecting what is compostable —  balancing “green” and “brown,” peering, prodding, and turning —  considering this daily habit in historical context might provide an occasion to think about doing and writing, composting and composition, the present and the past. Composting yard and kitchen scraps, like composing texts, is necessarily collaborative and protracted; it troubles the distinction between the practical and the theoretical, waste and value, the historical and the daily, and, as I have emphasized, the material and the figural. Engaging in a practice we share with early modern people, like composting, might give us access to one kind of knowledge about the past, as historical phenomenologists argue. But composting was not a practice lodged in the collective memory or bodily habits of early modern people; it had to be justified and advocated — that’s why so many

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people wrote about it, leaving their reflections for our contemplation. In those textual traces, we can spot a persistence from the Romans to the early moderns to us that is generative and workable, a memory and a discovery, and that depends as much on what has broken down beyond recognition as on what we think looks familiar.

2 Richard Carew and the Matters of the Littoral Tamsin Badcoe

That nothing under heaven dooth ay in stedfast state remayne. And next that nothing perisheth: but that eche substance takes Another shape than that it had.  — Arthur Golding And yet, writing makes no soil fertile.  — Richard C. Hoffmann and Verena Winiwarter

As Richard Carew proposes at the beginning of the “earthy description” that comprises his Survey of Cornwall (1602), he will begin by telling the reader of “such mynerals as her bowels yeeld forth” before passing on to other things, namely the matters “of growing, and feeling life, which upon her face doe relieve themselves.”1 Moving from depth to surface, from the subterranean earth to thriving plants and persons, and from mythical past to the concerns of his present, Carew surveys a county that is shaped by the combination of a desire to labor with the capacity to dream; the work he produces is of both mind and matter, supplying stuff fit for the entertainment and education of “the Cornish wonder-gatherer.”2 With an expressive style that is sensitive to the mutable colors, textures, and forms of a littoral landscape, Carew may modestly refer to his prose masterpiece in his dedicatory

41

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letter to Sir Walter Ralegh as an “ill-husbanded Survey,” but the land limned by his pen reveals itself to be very well husbanded indeed.3 Owing to its dramatic surfaces and its blustering but healthful air and waters, Carew’s Cornwall exists as a fecund place “that with utmost bound / Of Zephire art possest”; it provides a setting for Carew’s meditations on the relationship between humans and the environment, and owing to its distinctively maritime aspect, on the temperament of England’s most westward shores.4 Surrounded by the ebb and flow of the sea, Carew’s Cornwall emerges as a precarious but well-governed place, sounded by the richness of the author’s vocabulary and wit. Writing of a place where the land may seem to be at its most fragile, “ravined” by the “encroaching Sea,” Carew attempts to catch at something that he knows cannot stand forever.5 Indeed, as he writes in the companionable letter addressed to the reader that prefaces the work, acknowledging the inescapable belatedness of his writerly labors, the country has already “undergone so manie alterations, since I first began these scriblings,” but that “a wonder it were, that in the ceaselesse revolution of the Universe, any parcell should retaine a stedfast constitution.”6 Always aware of the constant threat of mutability, of the interaction between soil and saltwater that is an everyday environmental experience for the county’s inhabitants, Carew’s surveying eye is drawn to the achievements of labor, invention, and endeavor, and the creation of practices and customs that persist and endure. By building on the work of Wendy Wall, this essay explores how Carew praises both heroic named individuals and the unnumbered anonymous husbandmen that shape the destiny of the land, whereby the “grand inscriptions of a heroic and mythic national project” can be located in “the more mundane meanings of the land: as soil, dirt, earth.”7 By focusing on Carew’s interest in the matters associated with coastal terrain, I address how The Survey of Cornwall participates in a mode of writing that flourished in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, in which, as Wall observes, “real dirt meets a glorified georgic head-on.”8 For Carew, this means tracing shared material concerns between local spaces, exemplified perhaps by the pleasure of managing a much-beloved saltwater pond at Antony, his ancestral home, and their national equivalents, where soil and saltwater interact on grander scales. From microcosm then, a pond that “doth th’Ocean captive make,” to macrocosm, in which a sea

Carew and Matters of the Littoral  43

surrounds and shapes a nation, Carew’s focus moves freely between county and country, offering models of correspondence and modulating harmony that delight in the correlation between aesthetics, matter, and the imagination.9 Carew rarely moralizes his landscape, but he finds within it a series of narratives that associate cultivated and inhabited land with the progress and development of civility and culture; for Carew, as for many others during the early modern period, “the cultivated landscape becomes the supreme expression — national, political, and religious — of the ‘country,’ and the most powerful figuration of the cultivation of the human spirit.”10 The impulse to ameliorate, aestheticize, and theorize the soil, which Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor describe as “terracultural thinking,” manifests in Carew’s work in the way that he is attentive not only to founding myths but also to the quotidian, practical tasks involved in the work of husbandry.11 After envisioning a once uncivilized place ill governed by Titans, where the “earth groan’d at the harmes / Of these mount-harbour’d monsters,” he goes on to explain how Cornwall gradually came to be cultivated, connecting trade routes and the movements of merchants to the way that resources are managed in regional terms.12 An interest in writing the surveyed county into a national economy, networked by occupations and industries, is tempered by an attention to the environmental integrity of local places, which reinscribes received epic narratives within an appreciation of grounded cultural practices.13 When beginning his survey by rewriting the topographical account popularized by Geoffrey of Monmouth and William Camden, for example, in which Corineus, companion to Brutus, “the first Conquerour of this Iland,” defeats “a mightie Giant, called Gogmagog,” he describes how Corineus “threw him over Cliffe, brake his necke, and received the gift of that Countrie, in reward for his prowesse,” giving it his name in return.14 As Elizabeth Jane Bellamy observes, this moment of “coastal violence” acts as “the necessary first stage of Britain’s evolution into a new, westerly fertile crescent”: a myth that suggests the importance of Cornish terrain as a developmental epicenter for the rest of the isle.15 For Carew, who reflects on the controversies concerning location generated by the myth, where some writers favor Cornwall and others Dover in a conflict as strenuous as the “wrastling pull betweene Corineus and Gogmagog,” even his own reasoning is

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couched in terraqueous terms: for, “if there be any so plunged in the common floud, as they will still gripe fast, what they have once caught hold on, let them sport themselves with these conjectures, upon which mine averment in behalfe of Plymmouth is grounded. The place where Brute is said to have first landed, was Totnes in Cornwall, and therfore this wrastling likely to have chaunced there, sooner then elsewhere.”16 As this essay explores, Carew’s descriptive tendencies move easily between the fluid and the “earthy,” and he takes delight in ensuring that his proofs are “grounded,” or substantiated; an interest in the surface of the earth, in “meadow ground,” “quicke ground,” and “gaully grounds” is, as we shall see, accompanied by an antiquarian interest in the relationship between “the memory of our Chronicles” and “our owne view.”17 The effect of grafting husbandry to myth is to create a survey of a promontory that is shaped by both mythic narratives and vital and everyday labor, and where signs in the soil are complemented by dreams promising prospective prosperity. In order to think about the kind of work Carew does with soil, and the curious attention he pays to local habit and improvement, this essay also pays attention to the literary genres and transformations with which the Survey engages. For Richard Helgerson, Carew’s chorographical writing directly complements his political career, whereby allied kinds of “topographical representation” (he represented the Cornish constituency of Saltash and later that of Mitchell in Parliament) can be read as a “parliamentary counterpart” to writing the land.18 In God Speed the Plough, Andrew McRae draws attention to a poem Carew includes within his survey that “celebrates his family’s etymological link to the tilling of the soil” by punning on the Carew surname and the word “Carru” (“a plowe”).19 As McRae observes, the verse’s interest in “the spirit of industry and improvement . . . underpins and invigorates the Survey’s predominantly pastoral emphasis on retirement”;20 however, as this essay will argue, Carew’s sustained interrogation of process and unavoidable change ensures that both his strategies of praise and his idealizations of the relationship between labor and place never truly approach the realm of literary pastoral and the static ecologies in which this mode invests. When offering an initial brief survey of the varied quality of the Cornish soil, for example, the author’s mind travails freely over the geographical contours of the fluctuating terrain, directing the reader’s gaze toward a landscape shaped by the implicit presence of human intervention:

Carew and Matters of the Littoral  45 The Cornish soyle, for the most part, is lifted up into  many hils, some great, some little of quantitie, some steepe, some easie for ascent, and parted in sunder by short and narrow vallies. A shallow earth dooth cover their outside, the substance of the rest, consisteth ordinarily in Rockes and Shelfe, which maketh them hard for manurance, & subject to a drie Summers parching. The middle part of the Shire (saving the inclosures about some few Townes and Villages) lieth waste and open, sheweth a blackish colour, beareth Heath and spirie Grasse, and serveth in a maner, onely to Summer Cattel. That which bordereth upon either side of the Sea, through the Inhabitants good husbandrie, of inclosing, sanding, and other dressing, carrieth a better hue, and more profitable qualitie.21

Through a description that is attentive to both the effects of manuring and enclosure, and to the lived and worked contingencies occasioned by the changing seasons, this moment provides fertile ground for the kind of reading Steve Mentz calls for in an essay arguing for the need to move “beyond happy fictions of sustainability.” As Mentz suggests, “literary culture has always been fascinated with the interplay of stability and disruption, and literary attitudes toward change can aid us in reimagining ecological dreams.”22 By writing proudly of the effects of “good husbandrie,” Carew reveals the constant inconstancy of terrain where salt, sand, and soil are mixed and compounded in ingenious ways in order to ensure the continuing depth of the harbors and the fatness of inland fields. In so doing, his writing can be seen to participate in the activities of composition that are so elegantly outlined by Frances E. Dolan in the opening chapter of this collection. In Carew’s hands, the secretive constitution of the soil requires narration. His antiquarian disposition and interest in preservation may partially inform the way in which he writes about place, but his narratives also preemptively include what Simon E. Estok identifies within certain kinds of knowledge-making activities as a “latent affective ethics of activist engagement.”23 In particular, Carew’s interest in plotting the tensions that underwrite what we might now call a littoral ecotone, in which “marine and terrestrial ecosystems meet,” draws attention to the land ethic of two interconnected labors, namely, soil amendment and the ways in which the earth must be moved in order to facilitate the mining of tin.24 For Carew, these were sometimes antagonistic and sometimes complementary processes. At the point where sea and land meet, and where water and soil are constantly exchanged,

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Carew demonstrates a concern with substance and alteration, particularly when attempting to articulate ecological vulnerability. As a result of his shaping imagination, the shared features of agriculture and metallurgy are occasionally suggestive of alchemy, where, to borrow Mircea Eliade’s formulation, both processes can be seen to “pursue the transformation of matter, its perfection and its transmutation.”25 Far from displaying anxiety at what Walter M. Kendrick identifies as a troubling “compound of mind and mud” in the works of contemporaries such as Edmund Spenser, whom Lindsay Ann Reid discusses further in this volume, this essay argues that Carew’s survey displays a generous curiosity, which exceeds the purely economic, in the peculiarity and texture of littoral matters.26 Of Tin and Strong Imaginations

When surveying the minerals and metallic ores found naturally occurring in Cornwall, Carew praises tin above all: a commodity that “is in working so pliant, for sight so faire, and in use so necessarie, as thereby the Inhabitants gaine wealth, the Marchants trafficke, and the whole Realme a reputation.”27 His celebration of tin acts as a recuperative strategy, for as Carolyn Merchant observes, mining was often criticized as a stimulus for greed and cruelty during the early modern period. Noting the way that the forcible extraction of metals was often discussed as the violation of a feminized earth, she emphasizes the persistence of critical attitudes inherited from ancient Roman authors such as Pliny and Ovid.28 Carew’s fellow Cornishman and poet Charles Fitzgeoffrey, for example, addresses his homeland as “nympha metalliferis praegnans Cornubia venis,” or as a “nymph pregnant with ore-bearing veins,” which attributes a loaded and sexualized female anatomy to the county.29 The implied desirous gaze is not solely focused on the nymph’s fertile womb but on the charged seams that run throughout her body. For Carew, the gendering of the tin itself is associated with its boundless utility: in “travailing abroad, in tarrying at home, in eating and drinking, in doing ought of pleasure or necessitie, Tynne, either in his owne shape, or transformed into other fashions, is alwayes requisite, alwayes readie for our service.”30 By commending the substance’s involvement in the spaces of both venture and the domestic, with nourishment, and both the pleasurable

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and the practical, Carew associates the worked qualities of tin with the active and the masculine.31 As Carew argues, there is little cause for avaricious behavior because it is “with such plentie therof hath God stuffed the bowels of this little Angle, that (as Astiages dreamed of his daughter) it overfloweth England, watereth Christendome, and is derived to a great part of the world besides.”32 Notably, the simile chosen by Carew is somewhat disconcerting due to how it elides displaced physiognomies, commerce, and prophecy; in the dream, which concerns unchecked power, Astyages, king of the Medes, “thought . . . that his daughter made so much water at one time as filled al the streets of the city Ecbatana, & that it did overflow all Asia.”33 In the quotations included here, the hollows of the earth are granted anatomical form: the loaded veins, stuffed bowels, and bladderlike womb are all bodily spaces through which matter moves, either for circulation or ejection. For Astyages, the flood of waste water from within his daughter’s hidden interior spaces was a portent of ill-tidings; however, in Carew’s survey it becomes a sign of plenty, strangely associated through proximity with the manner in which the Cornish “tynners” read the aftereffects of the Biblical deluge in the contours of their livelihood. The miners, Carew reports, discover all sorts of flotsam and jetsam in the earth as they dig: “The Cornish Tynners hold a strong imagination, that in the withdrawing of Noahs floud to the Sea, the same tooke his course from East to West, violently breaking up, and forcibly carrying with it, the earth, trees, and Rocks, which lay any thing loosely, neere the upper face of the ground. To confirme the likelihood of which supposed truth, they doe many times digge up whole and huge Timber trees, which they conceive at that deluge to have beene overturned and whelmed.”34 It becomes clear that Carew is fascinated by the ability of the “tynners” to interpret preserved objects in the soil, as if they can read the history of the land in its composition; the depth of the earth becomes a repository for things once living on its surface. As Philip Schwyzer notes, remarking on Carew’s description of fishermen dredging up objects that were once parts of domestic structures from the silty sea bottom off the coasts of Land’s End, and perhaps discovering evidence of the submerged island of Lyonesse, in “plumbing the depths, they were touching the past.”35 In both cases, the record retained by the soil commemorates a time in which the ­relationship between land and

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sea was radically different, suggesting that the county retains multiple memories of previous ecological catastrophes even as it presents commodities for future consumption. As in much of Carew’s writing, the lingering impression is of flux and flow, and of a sustained interest in the interaction of water and earth on both microcosmic and macrocosmic scales. The author’s image of ancient trees found under the soil is mirrored in the forms taken by the mines themselves. Complementing his interest in the mysteries of the soil with another kind of authority, Carew records that from “the bowels of this little Angle,” the tin deposits, which are “couched at first in certaine strakes amongst the Rockes, like a tree, or the veines in a mans bodie” move up “from the depth whereof the maine Load spreadeth out his branches, untill they approach the open ayre”:36 similes that, in their evocation of a circulatory system or arboreal form, find their origins in the writing of ancient Greek philosophy.37 As Carew explains, the self-presentation of the tin at the surface, in the form of “Tynnestones” or “shoad,” the soil in which earth and tin is mixed together, is used to divine where to sink mineshafts, from whose bottom, “you shal at no one dayes discrie the Starres.”38 Yet, for all the work that can be done by reading “the quicke ground (as they call it) that mooved with the floud, and . . . the firme, wherein no such Shoad doth lie,” Carew hastens to point out that the soil is often keen to keep its secrets, frequently reducing the prospector’s labors to conjecture and the venturer’s hopes to ruin: “But you may not conceive, that everie likelyhood doth ever prove a certaintie: for divers have beene hindered, through bestowing charges in seeking, and not finding, and many undone in finding and not speeding, whiles a faire show, tempting them to much cost, hath, in the end, fayled in substance, and made the adventurers Banckrupt of their hope and purse.”39 The cautionary tales enact a shift in Carew’s focus, suggesting that his drive to survey the land is tempered by different ways of knowing and understanding its properties.40 As he reports, some men have succeeded in seeing their dreams of prosperity manifest in substantial terms, recalling the story of a gentlewoman in the time of Edward VI who “dreamed, that a man of seemely personage told her, how in such a Tenement of her Land, shee should find so great store of Tynne, as would serve to inrich both her selfe and her posteritie”; putting this to her husband, he “found a

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worke, which in foure yeeres, was worth him welneere so many thousand pounds.” Another man, “by a like dreame of his daughter (see the lucke of women) made the like assay, met with the effect, farmed the worke of the unwitting Lord of the soyle, and grew thereby to good state of wealth.” Ever attentive to material success, Carew comments that though he will not attempt to “bind any mans credite, . . . that of the Authors have herein swayed mine,” thus acknowledging the place of orally transmitted local knowledge and superstition alongside more empirical means of prospecting.41 It seems that Carew shares “a strong imagination” with the “Cor­ nish Tynners”; his survey temporarily travails with them under the earth and the result is an extraordinary description of the miner’s labor that charts a candlelit encounter with the subterranean peril of “loose earth,” “exceeding hard Rockes, and . . . great streames of water.” Pro­tected from falling earth by timberwork, the miners run the risk of having to endure a structural collapse and the threat of being pressed to death. They perform a subterranean existence, which prompts Carew to liken them to inhuman burrowing creatures, breathing air that conveys little nourishment: “While they thus play the Moldwarps, unsavorie Damps doe here and there distemper their heads, though not with so much daunger in the consequence, as annoyance for the present.” The miners undergo a temporary metamorphosis in his imagination into organisms whose natural habitat is the soil, and his appreciation of their aptitude prompts a series of remarks on the associated transformation of mind and physical motion: “If you did see how aptly they cast the ground, for conveying the water, by compassings and turnings, to shunne such hils & vallies as let them, by their too much height or lownesse, you would wonder how so great skill could couch in so base a Cabbin, as their (otherwise) thicke clouded braines.”42 In a manner akin to the sailor who is only at home on the sea, the miner seems to Carew to be most attuned to the earthy element through which he moves, embodying, to borrow Walter M. Kendrick’s words once again, a particularly specialized “compound of mind and mud.”43 For all Carew’s praise of the miners, there are elements of their occupation that retain the memory of Ovid’s encroaching Iron Age and the uncomfortable proximity of the consequences of agriculture and metallurgy:

50  Tamsin Badcoe Not onely corne and other fruites, for sustnance and for store, Were now exacted of the Earth: but eft thy gan to digge, And in the bowels of the ground unsaciably to rigge. For Riches coucht and hidden deepe, in places nere to Hell, The spurres and stirrers unto vice, and foes to doing well.44

As the survey progresses, Carew begins to make a connection between the labors of the miners, the husbandmen, and an increasingly personified ecological balance; if “any ryver thwart” the activity of the “tynners” then “hee is trained by a new channell from his former course,” thus altering the relationship between land and water. This may “yeeldeth a speedie and gaineful recompence to the adventurers of the search,” but, as Carew continues, “I hold it little beneficiall to the owners of the soyle.” With the suggestion of a sentient environment that is responsive to, and critical of, human influence, he concludes how “those low grounds, beforetime fruitfull, having herethrough their wrong side turned outwards, accuse the Tynners injurie by their succeeding barrennesse.”45 The idea that the earth can be turned “wrong side . . . outwards” suggests that mining inverts an established natural order and damages the nurturing earth, and from here on Carew becomes increasingly interested in questions concerning the capacity of the earth for self-regulation and renewal. By reporting on adventures of speculation, profit, and the necessary collaboration between prospectors, Carew reflects upon the needs and desires of an industry that is not only constantly forward-looking but also alert to the riches that can be found by retracing old ground: the “old Stream and Loadworks” that “former adventurers have beene given over.” Citing the theories of Francis Leandro and Sebastian Münster concerning the possibility of whether within “twentie or thirtie yeeres” an emptied mineral vein will “become alike ful againe of the same mettall, as at first,” Carew ruminates on the substantial requirements of a replenishing metamorphosis, where perhaps “the ayre and water replenishing the voide roome, through the power of the uniuersall agent, and some peculiar celestiall influence, are turned into the selfe substance; and so by consequence, neither the Owre groweth, nor the earth consumeth away.” Such thoughts are handled as further speculation: musings on an environment whose bowels prompt a kind of toil that can be “so extreame” that it often cannot be endured “above foure houres in a day.”46 The discrepancy between

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Carew’s rarefied intellectual conjectures and fanciful imaginings, and his awareness of the realities of the miners’ physical labor, further demonstrates how, although he may envisage a form of oikos that is interested in the possibility of permanence and endurance, his mind is rarely invested in the ideals of “pastoral stasis.”47 His record of the implications of the miners’ subterranean actions for nearby husbandmen also presents an image that contrasts starkly with that of the restorative digging described in this volume by Keith M. Botelho in his discussion of the writings of Gerrard Winstanley. For Carew, a latent accusation of injury and ingratitude lingers in “the voide roome” of the emptied mine and in the barrenness of the turned soil: a cautionary vision of what happens if one does not repay that which is “exacted of the Earth.” In the brief evocation of an Ovidian Iron Age, Carew’s focused perspective  —  that of the surveyor whose eye rarely rests — temporarily shares in the critical viewpoints identified by Randall Martin in his reading of the habits of saltpetermen. As Martin writes in his essay in this volume, their ways of working the soil not only had immediate local consequences, but also a national and even global reach, owing to the involvement of their trade in the armament industries. In Carew’s case, there is perhaps an unspoken understanding that the mined tin, once “transformed into other fashions” could be used in the manufacture of bronze guns, which were notably prized for their use at sea in the late sixteenth century owing to their lightness and noncorrosive properties.48 Indeed, as Sir John Fortescue was heard to observe in a speech made in the House of Commons in 1593, the colonial endeavors of Elizabeth I were partially reliant on her modernization of naval technologies: “Yea, she hath with her ships compassed the whole world, whereby this Land is made famous throughout all places. She did find in her Navy all Iron Pieces, but she hath furnished it with Artillery of Brass, so that one of her Ships is not a Subject’s but a petty King’s wealth.”49 As such, although Carew’s meditations on the interactions between man and soil root themselves in a consideration of the local, his contemplation of the possibility that the earth may one day be compassed and consumed away resonates beyond Cornish shores. It is this emergent awareness of the relationship between local, national, and global activities that becomes the undersong of the following section of the Survey, which moves, as promised, to matters

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concerning “growing, and feeling life.” As the rest of this chapter will discuss, his imaginative and material investments in national and colonial endeavors are entangled with an appreciation of the environmental integrity of the immediate region from which he writes.50 The Curse of Midas

As a horn of land “cast out into the Sea,” Cornwall, Carew observes, fosters a distinctive selection of naturally occurring plant life, which thrives in its saline environment.51 The coastal soils bring forth “greater store of Seaholm and Sampire, then is found in any other County of this Realme,” and the damp or “gaully grounds . . . yeeld plenty of Rosasolis,” or sundew; in addition, on the precarious periphery of land and sea, rocky cliffs provide sufficient lodging for the growth of “wilde Hissop, Sage, Pelamountayne, Majorum, Rosemary, and such like well-savouring herbes.”52 On its own terms, the land is naturally fruitful; however, Carew comments, ruefully acknowledging the economic expense of working the land, “whosoever looketh into the endevour which the Cornish husbandman is driven to use about his Tillage, shall find the travell painefull, the time tedious, and the expences verie chargeable.”53 William Camden also explains in his description of the Cornish environment that the soil is unwelcoming in its natural state and must be dressed in order to become truly fecund: “This our Cornwall, as if nature made amends and recompense for the incroching in of the sea, is for the most part raised on high with mountains, being in the valleys between of an indifferent glebe, which with the Sea weede, or reit commonly called Orewood, and a certaine kind of fruitfull Sea-sand, they make so ranke and battle, that it is incredible.”54 The proliferation of archaic words concerning soil and soil amendment in Philémon Holland’s English translation of Camden’s work is striking, where “glebe” pertains to the “soil of the earth,” “reit,” to a particular kind of waterweed, and where the description “ranke and battle” conveys the sense that the addition of manures makes the soil “extremely rich, heavy, or fertile” or “rich, fertile” and “productive.”55 The nutritious riches found in both the seaweed and in “the Ose or salt water mudde,” and their aptitude for subsequent use in soil amendment, evokes an ecological balance between land and sea; by

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intervening in such a balance, as Mircea Eliade writes, “man, with his various techniques, gradually takes the place of Time.”56 The husbandman transforms nature, colonizing its processes, whereby only “permanent effort can stabilize the preferred features” of the system.57 Such a drive is also identified, for example, by Bonnie Lander Johnson in her essay on Shakespeare’s Richard II in this volume, wherein the failure to comprehend and manage the contingencies of the oikos is seen to have tragic consequences. For Gervase Markham, for example, the use of “orewood” to dress the soil is intrinsically linked to the support of larger patterns of husbandry in coastal areas, including the growing of hemp and flax: commodities, he notes, that were of vital importance to fishing communities for the making of nets and other devices. As he advises his readers, goe downe to the low rockes on which the sea beats, and from thence with dragges and other Engines, gather those broad leaved blacke weeds, which are called Orewood, and grow in great tufts and abundance about the shoare, and these weeds you shall bring to your Hemp-land, and cover it all over with the same, and then you shall plow it againe, burying the weeds within the earth: And herein is to be observed, that in any wise you must lay these weeds as wet upon the land, as when you bring them out of the Sea, provided still that you adde no other wet unto them but the salt water, for so they are of all soiles or meanures whatsoever, the only best and most fruitfullest, and most especially for these seeds, and breed an increase beyond expectation.58

Like Camden, Markham emphasizes the extent to which the effect of the labor is “incredible”: it results in “an increase beyond expectation.”59 If captured when brought in by the tide and before being carried away by the wind, the “Orewood,” found “growing upon the rockes under high water marke, or broken from the bottome of the sea by rough weather,” can also be used to enrich soils for the growing of barley.60 Always attentive to texture and form, Carew describes how this “Floteore is now and then found naturally formed like rufs, combs, and such like: as if the sea would equall us in apparel, as it resembleth the land for all sorts of living creatures,” echoing ideas found in the work of ancient authors interested in the analogical relationships between marine and terrestrial life.61 The analogy that Carew draws is an intricate one, whereby the dress and ornament of the sea can be

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l­ ikened to the fashions of the court: a suggestion, perhaps, that the sea’s production of enriching matter for the land acts as the extension of a generous courtesy and a strange reflection of human need. From rough sod to ooze, and from ash to fecund saltwater weeds, the matters of Cornwall’s coastal spaces are used in ingenious ways to make the inland soils more fit for tillage, ensuring that the renewed earth yields “it selfe as ready to receyue and foster” even, Carew ambitiously declares, grapes fit for winemaking.62 Yet, most importantly, in describing the persistent action that can be taken to redress temperamental imbalances in the soil, Carew also reveals his anxiety concerning the wrongful displacement of earth, and its wasteful or ungoverned contact with other elements. When drawing his reader’s attention to the interconnected labors of the husbandman and the tin miner, for example, Carew notes the damage that can be caused by human activity, most notably concerning the shape and depth of harbors and havens: Divers of these are dayly much endammaged by the earth which the Tynners cast up in their working, and the rayne floods wash downe into the rivers, from whence it is discharged in the havens, and shouldreth the sea out of his ancient possession, or at least, encrocheth upon his depth. To remedy this, an Act of Parliament was made 23. H. 8. that none should labour in Tynneworks, neere the Devon and Cornish havens: but whether it aymed not at the right cause, or hath not taken his due execution, little amendement appeareth thereby for the present, and lesse hope may be conceyved for the future.63

Here, the presence of the displaced earth that results from the activities of tin mining is seen as an affront to a personified, sentient, and ancient sea; in human terms, Carew’s words are also an invitation to reflect on the failure of existing legislation, established in 1531, to conserve the natural contours of the environment and, as a direct consequence, the free and easy passage of large ships in and out of harbors. In an act passed in the twenty-third year of Henry VIII’s reign, ­concerning “the amending and Maintenance of the Havens and Ports of Plymouth, Dartmouth, Teignmouth, Falmouth and Fowey,” it is argued that owing to the activities of persons “more regarding their own private Lucre, than the common Wealth and Surety of this Realm,” the creation of streamworks has resulted in a “marvellous great Quantity

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of Sand Gravel Stone Robel Earth Slime and Filth” being washed into “the said Ports and Havens, and have so filled and choaked the same” that large ships can no longer enter at low water.64 With little apparently done to enforce the act, the implied audience of Carew’s survey is called, perhaps, to attention; when addressing Sir Walter Ralegh in his dedicatory letter, who had been made Lord Lieutenant of Cornwall and then Lord Warden of the Stannaries in 1585, Carew describes him as a man whose “eares, and mouth, have ever beene open, to heare, and deliver our grievances” and whose “feete, and hands, readie to goe, and worke their redresse.”65 Here, Ralegh is figured as a laboring man himself, whose body is no stranger to the contingencies of living by the sea, and Carew’s criticism is short lived. The discharge of runoff soil into the sea may suggest mismanagement and the triumph of greed over national necessity; however, as Carew goes on to observe, the movement of matter at the coastline is cyclical, not linear. Once cast into the waters by the activity of man, the excess “earth, slime and filth” is transformed by the salt of the sea into something valuable, which, through a combination of the sea’s transformative capabilities and the labors of men, can once again be brought back to terra firma. It is as if the earth, like the sea, is capable of ebb and flow: what is cast off is returned, subject to a regulated kind of tidal motion: Yet this earth being through such meanes converted into sand, enricheth the husbandman equally with that of Pactolus: for after the sea hath seasoned it with his salt and fructifying moysture, his waves worke up to the shore a great part thereof (together with more of his owne store, grated from the cliffes) and the Tillers, some by Barges and Boats, others by horses and waines, doe fetch it, & therewith dresse their grounds. This sand is of divers kindes, colours, and goodnesse: the kinds, some bigger, some lesser; some hard, some easie. The colours are answereable to the next Cliffes. The goodnesse increaseth as it is taken farther out of the Sea.66

The association Carew makes between the transformation of waste matter into enriching sands for the husbandman, and the motion of the Pactolus, the river in Asia in which King Midas was said to have “washt his golden Wish away,” adds a mythical dimension to his description of the merging of labor and natural activity.67 Like an alchemical process, man can be seen to “collaborate in the work of

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Nature, to help her produce at an ever-increasing tempo, to change the modalities of matter.”68 Here, the actions of the waters are cathartic, washing away the charges of greed and the desire for “private Lucre” associated with the runoff earth, replacing them instead with communal reward: a way of amending barren soils with riches, as if the irrigating waters, like those of the Pactolus, had “adorne[d] this land with tokens and brookes of golde.”69 The lingering impression is of exchange and metamorphosis, of the translation of matter between locations, and the transformation of one substance into another. In the renewal of the soil, the curse associated with the avarice of Midas is lifted. Conclusion

If, as Gerald Maclean, Donna Landry, and Joseph P. Ward argue, it was not until the reign of Elizabeth I that “English poets first seriously begin to imagine the English nation, and the British Isles,” and that while “reiterating Virgil’s line about the Britons inhabiting a world apart, they also began to look inside the national coastline to examine the astonishing variety of local customs and histories that made up the national map,” then Carew’s writing, as poet, prose stylist, and antiquarian, is exemplary.70 In addition, if the British Isles were indeed once a world apart in classical models of geography, then Cornwall still retained the memory of westward isolation: “shouldred out . . . into the farthest part of the Realme, and so besieged . . . with the Ocean,” it appears as “a demie Iland in an Iland.”71 As Carew writes, it was from these shores that the rest of the island has been defended from invasion and ships have been launched that can circumnavigate the globe. Carew may have begun his survey by narrating the landfall made by Brutus and the exiled Trojans, establishing a connection between history, land, and culture, but the rhetorical prowess of his survey is most apparent when coasting the Cornish side of Plymouth harbor in his present moment.72 As the sustained panegyric that accompanies this section of the survey suggests, it was from this place that men sought out new shores and established a gaze that could prospect across oceans: Here, mostly, have the troups of adventurers, made their Rendez vous, for attempting newe discoveries or inhabitances: as, Tho.

Carew and Matters of the Littoral  57 Stukeleigh, for Florida, Sir Humfrey Gilbert for Newfound-land, Sir Rich. Greynvile for Virginea, Sir Martyn Frobisher, and Master Davies, for the North-west passage, Sir Walter Raleigh for Guiana, &c. . . . Here, Sir Fra. Drake first extended the point of that liquid line, wherewith (as an emulator of the Sunnes glorie) he encompassed the world. Here, Master Candish began to second him, with a like heroicall spirit, and fortunate successe. Here, Don Antonio, King of Portugall, the Earles of Cumberland, Essex, and Notingham, the Lord Warden of the Stanneries, Sir John Norrice, Sir John Hawkins (and who elsewhere, and not here?) have ever accustomed to cut sayle, in carrying defiance, against the imaginarie new Monarch; and heere to cast anker, upon their returne with spoyle and honour.73

By producing a series of monuments that focus on making landfall and casting anchor, discovering distant soils for plantation and other sea bottoms to hold fast in, Carew suddenly expands his consideration of littoral matters so that his local concerns are writ large across the globe: an extension of “the point of that liquid line” far beyond the shores of his own county. Indeed, as F. E. Halliday notes in his edition of Carew’s writings, “The Survey of Cornwall is a product of the Renaissance and the Reformation: of the new spirit of creative inquiry and of crescent nationalism, and Carew was doing in his odd angle of England what Drake and his peers were doing in the world at large — charting territory unknown, or scarcely known, to his fellow Englishmen.”74 The tension in Halliday’s words is an interesting one: the image of Carew as an explorer of terra incognita sits provocatively alongside his position as an inhabitant of the county he surveys, where he was born in July 1555 at Antony House at Torpoint, at the mouth of the river Tamar. In his vision of Plymouth harbor as the meeting place of those “attempting newe discoveries or inhabitances,” Carew joins together the idea of doing something for the first time with a customary way of living: a characteristic pressure that shapes both the generic hybridity of his Survey and its multivalent approach to the ethics of land use. In the litany of navigators called to mind, previous discussions of labor and rest are reframed within the epic mode and, via the image of a return journey replete with “spoyle and honour,” also within the idealizing fictions of romance.75 Beginning his survey with the hope that

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“each wel-minded Reader will wish a merrie passage” to his “rather fancie-sporting, then gaine-seeking voyage,” the subsequent movements of Carew’s eye, mind, and hand draw lines of influence that chart the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm, soil and shore, county and country, home and globe.76 He takes his reader not only across the surface of the soil but under its surface: a progress that moves from the tops of cliffs to subterranean depths and horizontally along a “rugged and wearysome path” traced to Land’s End.77 To pro­ ject beyond the shore, Carew seems to suggest, one first needs fecund, nurturing earth on which to stand. It doesn’t need to be terra firma, as his descriptions of the sands, tin-laden soils, and saltwater oozes prove, but something generative, self-regulating, and capable of transformation.

3 Visions of Soil and Body Management The Almanac in Richard II Bonnie Lander Johnson

Richard II is dense with images of the English soil manured, watered, and planted but also touched, kissed, mourned, and praised. Through their actions and their figurative language, the play’s characters at once work and cherish the land because they view it as both a garden and as a body that gives birth, nurses, weeps, bleeds, is bled, drinks, and swallows her dead in fleshy graves. No other play by Shakespeare is so interested in embedding these two figurative systems within each other to the extent that they become the one sign system: earth as mother, blood and tears as rain and water, soil as skin. The interconnectedness of these sign systems is most pronounced at those moments when fortune’s wheel is turning: the tears of a weeping queen water the Rue that grows up in testimony to her grief and, in an act of cruentation, the earth itself is said to bleed afresh for the murdered Gloucester. Amy Tigner charts early modern interest in the garden as a figure for the sexualized female body: a trope with classical and biblical precedents.1 But the insistence with which Richard II views the soil (within its seasonal and horticultural cycles of growth, change, and decay) as a

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fleshly body governed by the humoral, biological, and seasonal movements of blood, tears, digestion, and spirit needs to be understood as part of the play’s broader concern with the human desire to regulate and control the turbulence of nature. This chapter situates Richard II’s horticultural and therapeutic language within the immensely popular practice of almanac reading: the one early modern cultural practice that drew on the human desire to control both body and soil through the same seasonal and astrological mechanisms. Wendy Wall’s 1996 study of Gervase Markham’s husbandry manuals as crucial forms of early modern nationalism argues that the Englishing of the soil was enacted as much through the high georgic of writers such as Edmund Spenser as through “low” forms of household reading such as Markham’s manuals. England’s emerging national identity was in this way a cherishing of the land enabled as much by working the soil as by reading about soil work.2 Since then the critical reception of early modern writing about the land has continued to develop our understanding of the soil’s textual framing.3 Chapters in this volume by Frances Dolan and Tamsin Badcoe extend this view of soil’s textuality by identifying the practical and conceptual convergence between compost and compilation, and the role of the “survey” (whether seen on foot or read in an armchair) as a means of encountering and loving particular stretches of the English landscape. The almanac was always a text whose existence depended on its relationship to the natural world: readers did not consult almanacs for pleasure but for practical information, primarily about soil and body management. In doing so, however, almanac readers were also participating in a specific form of nationalism, which understood the English soil and English bodies as sites in which history and prediction converged. The content and organization of almanacs invited readers to encounter the vast expanses of the past and the future through the mundane and material reality of their own short lives. By reading Richard II’s interest in soil as part of the play’s replication of almanac practices, this chapter offers a new model for thinking about the generic nature of Shakespeare’s history plays: one in which the soil itself is the material “ground” for those historical and political processes whose relentlessly cyclical nature so confounds Richard II’s characters. The material cycle through which the mournful tears

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of Richard’s queen are transformed into a rue plant is not simply a ­metaphor for the political cycle of kings over which she weeps but a recognition (by the gardener and the worldview he represents) that all human life — however noble or obscure — and all political maneuvering come from and will return to the earth. In this sense, the soil is history: it receives the blood and bones of all people. But the soil is also political: out of the manure of history it nurtures future kings, both righteous and corrupt, with the seemingly indiscriminate care of a mother. Nationalism, Maternity, and Royal Authority in Richard II’s Earth/Body Figures

Many of Richard II’s characters express an awareness of — and usually a deep emotional investment in — the link (both metaphoric and actual) between the soil and the body. Having interrupted the lists at Coventry, Richard warns against civil war, describing it as “civil wounds ploughed up with neighbour’s sword,”4 and on receiving his punishment, Bolingbroke equates the separation of a banished man’s body from his land with the separation of the soul from the body (1.3.194–96). He goes on: “then England’s ground, farewell! Sweet soil, adieu, / My mother and my nurse that bears me yet” (305–06). The sentiments expressed by Richard and Bolingbroke in this pivotal moment use the body/soil figure as a means of articulating unnatural actions: civil war is a diabolical “farming” of both the soil and the skin of one’s neighbor; the separation of an Englishman from his land is both a murder (a division of soul from body) and a separation of child and mother. By using the body/soil figure to depict the unnatural, Richard and Bolingbroke signal their view of natural order. In his study of the play’s investment in local debates over land enclosure, James R. Siemon outlines Richard II’s contested vision of the best and most natural relationship between the English people, the English soil, and God.5 Siemon traces in the language of individual characters a number of different local arguments, but by following the full range of the play’s many uses of the body/soil figure across all the characters who articulate it, a more general and idealized picture of natural order emerges: one that expresses a conservative and very personal desire for

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certainty and continuity. That order, so threatened by the events of the play, ensures a benign God in heaven, a nurturing maternal ground, and a stable, hierarchized social order (extending from anointed king down to assistant gardener) that exists without unrest or rebellion. This idealized vision of England is held as much by the play’s aristocratic characters as it is by the gardener. As I hope to show, it is this conservative desire for hierarchized order that underpins the almanacreading practices Richard II’s characters replicate in their attempts to control the future. Believing in a divine ordering of the created world, the characters seek to minimize the chaos around them and to avoid their own destruction. This desire is, however, ultimately exposed as naïve and tragic but also as very human and thus in itself a “natural” instinct — one right and proper to the human condition, however flawed it may be. My reading locates in the play an early modern attitude to the natural world that differs from what Robert N. Watson identifies as an infatuation “with hopes of recovering some original and authentic reality,” and a nostalgia for “unmediated contact with the world of nature.”6 Richard II’s characters do not yearn for a lost Eden: they believe that even the fallen world ought to adhere to the civilized order of primogeniture, divine right monarchy, and a nurturing ground. Their crisis emerges when they are confronted with the reality that nature (like politics) is seasonal, as destructive as it is beneficent, and will not conform to social hierarchies. I find in Richard II’s almanac vision a tragic note that depicts such struggles against nature’s chaos with tenderness; it therefore differs again from Simon Estok’s “ecophobia.”7 Richard II’s characters do not express fear or contempt for the earth as such. Rather, their idealization of and disappointment in nature express a belief that England’s soil ought to care for their particular cause, that it belongs to them, and a simultaneous anxiety that in fact nature controls humans. This anxiety is most evident through the play’s interest in the body/soil figure: while a garden can to a large extent be tamed, a female body can never be fully controlled. The idealized form of social order expressed by the play’s characters suits the motif of the political world as garden. Peter Ure has charted the didactic function of the motif in classical treatise, medieval preaching, and in early modern guides to princes:8 texts that are

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shaped by the identification of specific “weeds” in the contemporary world and the comparison of the rot they have engendered with that ideal or heavenly garden to which the contemporary world ought to aspire. In describing the political world as a fallen garden, the literary and polemical tradition of this motif also describes it as a body: a conjunction of images that draws on the long Christian history (extending back to the Song of Songs) of depicting the church as both mother/ lover and Edenic garden. Shakespeare brings to the bodily element of the motif a more thoroughly early modern awareness of the antifeminist anxieties that surrounded any attribution of universal power to a figurative body gendered female. As Richard’s “ploughing with neighbour’s swords” image demonstrates, the reversion of the play’s idealized natural order is often expressed with reference to the interruption of the soil’s fleshly (female) capacities; such reversion not only brings weeds to the “garden” but degeneracy to the female “body.” Again arguing against civil war, Richard worries that “our kingdom’s earth should not be soiled / With that dear blood which it hath fostered” (1.3.125–26). Richard’s play on “soil” as both literal soil and soiling recognizes that war is a kind of infanticide that sullies the ground (as idealized mother) by making her absorb the blood of her children. However, a third definition of soiling as feeding with fresh or raw food complicates Richard’s idealization. Lear uses this definition of soil in his mad musing on lechery (he refers to the “soiled horse,” which, fed with fresh grass, is skittish and wanton).9 In her perfect state, Richard’s England is an unsullied maternal body, but once soiled her fall is catastrophic: taken together, the images of diabolical femininity in Richard’s play on “soil” constitute a formidable personification of the ground transformed by civil war into a wanton, cannibal infanticide devouring the blood of her children. Crucially, where Bolingbroke used a number of maternal descriptions for the ground in his mournful departure (England as “mother,” “nurse,” and continued “bear[er]”), Richard instead refers to the soiled earth as a “fostere[r]” of men. This oblique reference to the earth’s maternity is repeated by others in the play and reveals their uncertainty about the implications of figuring the ground as a female body. In his “sceptred isle” speech, Gaunt describes England in what he sees as her proper state: “a fortress built by Nature for herself,” “a precious

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stone set in the silver sea,” and a “nurse” and “teeming womb of royal kings.” But under Richard’s rule, England is “now leased out . . . like a tenement or pelting farm” (2.1.41–60). By placing the teeming womb of royal kings on the same spectrum as a paltry, rented plot of farmland, Gaunt is describing England as at once feminine, fertile, and as soil. In her most “natural” state, England’s fertile soil produces kings and great men, feeds and nurtures them, but is also owned by them since in her debased state she is instead leased for money and worked by less noble hands. Gaunt’s use of the soil/body figure relies on an implicit comparison between the soil as dignified mother and as prostitute. But the gendering and sexualizing of this comparison ought to draw our attention to Gaunt’s greater anxieties about possession. While the tenant farm and/or prostitute figure aptly articulates his fear that the land is debased through possession by ignoble men, the mother versus gentle landowner comparison betrays his uncertainty over whether England is possessed by those noblemen who know best how to maintain her dignity or whether all men are in fact the possession of England’s “teeming womb.” Gaunt never uses the word “mother”: his “teeming womb of royal kings” simply follows a description of England as “nurse.” His figurative language only goes as far as personifying the maternal through a description of woman as hired laborer, carer and feeder of infants before shifting to a description of the maternal soil or “plot” as the disembodied organ that produces royal infants. Occluding the personified mother to whom both of these descriptions logically point, Gaunt’s choice of language suggests his inability to recognize the soil as the one fleshly body that most possesses, by forever repossessing, the children it produces. Such anxiety about the soil as a powerful, and powerfully destructive, entity that cannot be fully possessed by man also informs Richard’s speech on his return to England from Ireland. One of the play’s most sentimentalized versions of the soil/body figure, this speech sees Richard caressing the ground. As he does so, Richard figures the soil as a child and himself as the long-absent “mother”: “So weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth, / And do thee favours with my royal hands” (3.2.8–11). Even before Salisbury’s entrance, however, Richard’s confident sense of possession over the soil wavers and he instead petitions it to “feed” only him:

Visions of Soil and Body Management  65 Feed not they sovereign’s foe, my gentle earth . . . . . . . . Yield stinging nettles to mine enemies; And when they from thy bosom pluck a flower, Guard it I pray thee with a lurking adder.

(3.2.12–20)

Richard’s appeal to the soil to assist his cause and to damage that of his enemies is an acknowledgment of the earth’s capacity to decide the fate of men. It is an appeal built from the language of soil and garden management: by describing the violence of an untended garden, Richard fantasizes that he can himself so “garden” the earth as to weed out his enemies. With the arrival of Scroop, this fantasy gives way to despair and Richard instead sees his own body as the dust it will become, the “small model of the barren earth / Which serves as paste and cover to our bones” (3.2.153–54). Conceptualizing the English soil as both body and garden, Richard begins the scene by casting himself in the role of confident parent before anxiously descending to the position of one who is instead fed by the soil and eventually to the defeated acknowledgment that he is merely that dust to which his death will return him. While he may fantasize that he is the gardener, Richard is in fact little more than an observer of the soil’s patterns: an observer who acknowledges his vulnerability to the inevitable decay brought about by nature’s cycles of creation and destruction. Everywhere in Richard II, the body/soil figure describes man’s desire to control the forces of nature while acknowledging that ultimately nature controls man. The play’s interest in human beings’ desire to control their fate through the language of both soil management and body management finds particular expression in what Andrew Gurr calls the “submerged metaphor . . . of the Plantagenet name and the Tree of Jesse.”10 Most vivid in the Duchess’s “seven vials” speech, which depicts the Gloucester brothers as both “seven fair branches springing from one root” and “seven vials of . . . sacred blood” (1.2.12–13), this metaphor also works more broadly in Richard II’s play on “Plantagenet” and “plants.” People are frequently described as plants in order to demonstrate their vulnerability to others: York warns Aumerle to “bear you well in this new spring of time / Lest you be cropped before you come to prime” (5.2.50-51) and, once deposed, Richard warns Northumberland

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that Bolingbroke shall think that “thou, which knowst the way / To plant unrightful kings, wilt know again / . . . another way / To pluck him headlong from the usurped throne” (5.1.62–65). In his final speech, Bolingbroke implicitly acknowledges the truth of Richard’s warning by describing himself as a plant nurtured on blood: “my soul is full of woe / That blood should sprinkle me to make me grow” (5.6.45–46). Bolingbroke’s reference to the horticultural importance of blood draws directly on the image first described in the Duchess’s “sacred tree” speech, but it also extends the play’s broader thinking on the soil as both body and garden. Bolingbroke’s “blood” is both the manure that enables his flourishing as plant in the political garden of England and the actual blood that locates him as part of England-as-bodily-system, in which the movement of fluids causes change and upheaval. In none of these references does the speaker ascribe the role of gardener or physician to themselves; the gardeners or movers-of-fluid are instead cast as powerful and dangerous opponents. Carlisle makes the most explicit claim for the power of figurative gardeners when he argues that God is himself the gardener by whom Richard has been “planted many years,” and to depose him will result only in the “blood of English” “manur[ing] the ground” (4.1.127–38). However, such cautious ascription of horticultural and therapeutic power is not usually observed by Richard or his queen, whose willingness to describe themselves as managing England’s body/soil either registers their impending failure to do so or functions as a lament for anticipated pain or loss already suffered. In the play’s opening scene, Richard seeks to make peace between Mowbray and Bolingbroke by casting himself as the physician who will “purge” the combatants’ choler. Unable to do so, he instead assures his court that at Coventry their “swords and lances” shall “arbitrate” “the swelling difference” of “their settled hate” (1.1.153–54, 1.1.199–201). At the lists, however, Richard is still unable to manage the humours of his gentry and his banishment of Bolingbroke conversely enacts the course of events by which Richard will himself be purged from the court. In the garden scene the queen claims to water “with true love’s tears” her “fair rose,” the “wither[ing]” king (5.1.6–11). Equally despondent, Richard comforts the weeping Aumerle: “we’ll make foul weather with despised tears: / Our sighs and they shall lodge the summer corn / And make a dearth

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in this revolting land” (3.3.161–63). In these laments, both Richard and the queen align their own bodies with the body of nature, their tears with the rain that fosters plants in the English soil. But in both instances, the human action (weeping) is muted and ineffectual and offered merely as a griever’s alternative to that course of action which nature has already determined. Richard’s critics describe him as having failed to manage England as both garden and body (he has allowed the ground to “choke” with “weeds” and “swarm” with “caterpillars” [3.4.44–46]), and Boling­ broke’s uprising is diagnosed as “the sick hour that [Richard’s] surfeit made” (2.2.78). But Richard does not blame his deposition on his own failure to properly manage England’s soil. In his and the queen’s descriptions of their tears, the monarchs identify themselves bodily with the English earth while at the same time accusing it of having “rebelled” or “revolted” from the cause they deem right: the fostering and protection of kingship. To describe nature as rebellious assumes that it was once under royal control: an assumption that can only be read as tragic irony. This is, I think, how Richard II presents such thwarted human desire for control over the created world. Richard’s extended meditations on the separation of his divinely instituted sovereignty from his earthly, fleshly self seek to understand how something sacramental and enduring can be severed by men (and ultimately by the God who sanctions men’s actions). These are reasonable enough questions for a king facing deposition. Less reasonable is the assumption that Richard’s status as anointed sovereign extends to him the same control over the created world as God himself enjoys. Just as Gaunt’s imprecise descriptions of the soil’s maternity revealed his anxious desire to possess the ground and not to be possessed by it, so the monarchs’ despondent attempts to replicate the vast powers of the created universe through their own minute biological mechanisms speaks of their utter powerlessness. It is the one real gardener in the play who seems most immune to nature’s upheavals, or who can, at least, most effectively manage the soil. The gardener, of course, succeeds within his realm because there he deals only with actual, rather than figurative, plants and is excluded (or protected) from the violent world of politics. And yet he uses the same figurative language used elsewhere in the play and to

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similar effect: he too thinks through the problems of soil management as a way of conceptualizing those elements of the created world he can control and those that must control him. Where the Plantagenets figure themselves as plants vulnerable to the violent cycles of the political world, the gardener figures his plants as political men: his garden is a “government,” his apricots are unruly children; his sprays are too fast-growing and must be cut by his “executioner” (3.4.29–34). The gardener’s assistant voices frustration that he should so labor to govern nature when those who govern him can bring no order. But the gardener does not so despair of their labor. Although his own soil management has no effect on the changing world of politics beyond the walls of his garden, the Gardener can nonetheless assure his assistant that no such chaos as that which has been suffered under Richard would ever endure in his domain. In fact, through its use of the body/soil figure, the play suggests that the gardener is the most powerful character — he is the one who can best manipulate that natural power which governs and destroys kings. His figurative language indicates that he believes in an idealized natural order similar to that espoused by those whose gardens he keeps, only he sees himself as king of that order’s social hierarchy. The gardener’s plants, like his frustrated workmen, are nothing if not subject to him. Where the Plantagenets worry that they cannot fully possess or control the created world they were born to govern, the gardener’s “skill” in managing nature is instead largely invulnerable. His skill is not even “subject” to a queen’s curse. Rather, in the very plot of soil where the queen acknowledges her fall from power, the gardener plants his rue, transforming her bitter tears into his “herb of grace” (3.4.105). And yet, despite his sovereignty over the small “compass” of his “pale,” the gardener acknowledges that the political turmoil beyond his walls is ultimately ensured not by the actions of individuals but by the continued cycles of nature and its demands for change: Richard, who has permitted such a “disordered spring,” has now “himself met with the fall of leaf” (3.4.49). Unlike Richard, but perhaps like Bolingbroke, the gardener’s skill is his ability to read and interpret a power much greater than his own. He anticipates nature’s cyclical movements and acts in sympathy with them: he cuts back wherever there is too much growth, and supports where there is “oppression” (3.4.31).11

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Viewed through the lens of early modern English writing about soil and body management,12 the soil and the body are two systems with similar characteristics: both are capable of providing health, life, and sustenance, and both are sure to turn toward illness and death. Both follow seasonal and cyclical patterns of growth and decay that can to a certain extent be anticipated but are ultimately governed by powers beyond human knowledge. Through its use of the body/soil figure, Richard II demonstrates how crucial it is to properly manage both systems. The play also makes clear that those who do rise to power are the ones who have best anticipated the signs before them: those who have, unlike Richard, seen that it is indeed the “month to bleed” and the time to “lop” and “bind” (1.1.156, 3.4.64, 3.4.29). Richard II’s Replication of Almanac Reading

I have been describing Richard II’s awareness of the earth’s power to determine events in the lives of men, but clearly these appeals to nature are also appeals to fate and God. Why is this play so interested in addressing the divine through the turbulent behavior of its created world? One answer is that the body/soil figure is a way of synthesizing the play’s nationalism (the ground so cherished and feared is England) with its particularly tragic vision of man’s desire to control those forces that control him (nature is fickle and unmerciful, unlike the Christian God). But there is another explanation for the play’s interest in the languages of soil and body management that I want to explore: almanacs. When Richard calls for peace between Mowbray and Bolingbroke, he asserts that his “doctors” have determined the timeliness of his action. Those doctors are the astrological authorities whose prognostications filled the pages of early modern almanacs. By far the most frequently printed popular texts throughout the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, almanacs were small, cheap, annual volumes containing crucial information for the year to come. Their short life span ensured their low survival rate: at the end of the year most almanacs were recycled as toilet paper, seals on pickling jars, wallpaper, or were simply burnt or discarded. Their information was of local relevance (market days, weather forecasts, maps) and national relevance (news, feast days, the monthly calendar). It was from the

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astrological ­arrangements of the year’s calendar that almanacs provided their readers with medical and agricultural guidance: when to plant, prune, feed, and water crops and plants and when to bleed, lance, sweat, fast, rest, and exercise the body. This advice was most thoroughly detailed in the section for the four “quarters,” or seasons, of the year, which provided details on how each coming season would affect crop patterns, bodily humours, which sicknesses would most prevail, and what quality the air would have. Almanacs often provided the astrological information from which guidance on soil and body management assumed its authority. However, one of the crucial characteristics of an almanac’s function that I think demands attention (especially in relation to Richard II) is that they were not handbooks for understanding the movements of the planets as such but, rather, guides on when to do those activities that formed the basis of early modern life in the best and most timely fashion. Put another way: while almanacs were underpinned by astrological knowledge, almanac users did not have their eyes fixed on the stars but instead on the ground and their bodies. This is one of the key reasons I read Richard II as a play that replicates the experience of reading and applying almanacs: the play’s characters do not look to the heavens for answers but instead seek to control the turbulence of their bodies and their soil. Elizabeth’s reign saw the standardization of the almanac form and in the 1590s, when Richard II was written and performed, the popularity of almanacs began to climb to the heights they would enjoy in the following century. In this decade almanac reading also became increasingly contested. The 1590s produced a famous Puritan detractor, William Perkins, who put forward arguments against the practice that would last well into the following century (that almanacs drew people away from God by offering knowledge from a diabolical source; that the practice caused panic; and that almanac compilers were profiteering frauds). The decade also saw the birth of the mock-almanac, a genre that enjoyed only a short life and in no way diminished the appeal of the genre it satirized. The 1590s was a decade marked by poor harvests and plague, and controversial prophesies of doom began to emerge from astrologers and almanac compilers (such as Abel Jeffes’s 1595, A Most Strange and Wonderfull Prophesie upon this Troublesome World).

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Literary criticism is beginning to register the importance of almanac reading on the poetry and drama of the period.13 So far, however, this work has dealt only with those texts that overtly narrate their debt to almanacs.14 No almanac is ever brought on stage in Richard II, nor is there an almanac on stage in King Lear — the other Shakespeare play that is so intensely concerned with the thwarted human desire to understand the movements of the natural and cosmological worlds. When Shakespeare does bring almanacs onstage, or references them explicitly, it is always for satirical effect (Bottom must consult one before choosing the night for his performance; Falstaff and Prince Hal call on one for bawdy purposes; and Enobarbus uses one to deride Cleopatra’s mutability). Early modern almanac readers were popularly condemned as common and gullible. Yet in reality almanacs were read by members of every social class: from royalty, gentry, priests, and physicians to yeomen, artisans, and the tenant farmer so despised by Gaunt.15 The popular image of the gullible almanac reader explains the comedic function of the almanacs brought onto the Shakespearean stage, yet I think it also helps explain why two of Shakespeare’s great tragic narratives do not make explicit reference to an actual almanac. Instead, Richard II builds its tragic vision of man’s desire to understand and control the natural world through the everyday experience of reading and applying the particular style of wisdom offered by almanacs: an exacting attention to the details of soil and body management, a desire to perform important acts in the most timely fashion, and a sense — a flawed and tragic but ultimately very human sense — that knowing the cycles of the earth and heavens might help one to control their vicissitudes. Also of interest to Richard II is the fact that almanacs provided the common reader with their primary historical education. These small volumes did not only predict the future; they also narrated the past, and (by narrating only those key events that joined England’s history with the biblical and classical past) they did so with a view to encouraging precisely the isolationist nationalism that characterizes Richard II. The key (and sometimes only) events in the “histories of the world” section of Elizabethan almanacs were the birth of Christ, the Norman Conquest, Henry’s seizure of Boulogne from the French, Elizabeth I’s coronation, and the Spanish Armada. John Dade, one of the most prominent almanac compilers from the 1590s, provided a history of

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the world that was so truncated it is difficult to interpret it as historical information at all; rather, his histories appear to have operated as frames to augment and situate the cyclical patterns within the single year treated by the almanac. Dade’s historical events feature on the same page as his overview of the year’s prognostications for when to shear sheep, sell crops, and let blood. Rather than record the dates of historical events, Dade provides the number of years that have passed between the event and the year with which the almanac is concerned. In 1602, his list included: the creation of the world (5564 years before 1602), the conquest of England (586), and Elizabeth’s coronation (44). In the years surrounding the performance of Richard II, Dade’s almanacs, like those of many other compilers, were offering their many readers a vision of time that situated the daily, weekly, and monthly tasks of body and soil management within the entire spectrum of Christian history — with the emphasis weighted decidedly on the present. There is in the cyclical nature of both the historical and the annual information provided by almanacs something akin to the vision of Richard II, which thinks through concerns of great historical importance (royal succession, changing theories of divine kingship, civil war) as though they were in essence simply the mundane work to which every early modern man and woman attended. Richard’s awareness that “the death of kings” is a long history of murder (3.2.156) speaks to the play’s awareness that history’s cycles come around with the frequency of bodily cycles and the turning of the seasons. Richard’s keen sense of tragic self-defeat knows only too well that kingship, like the maintenance of the soil and the body, must be attended to with passion and rigor despite the fact that in due course his sovereignty will, like his body, return to the soil and its “graves, worms and epitaphs” (3.2.145). The cyclical nature of time envisaged by almanacs can also be seen in their investment in the political future: almanacs contained prophecies of future doom. In 1595, an almanac translated from the Italian promised divine punishment for Protestant England, claiming that in March “the maine Seas shall bee so troubled with mighty tempests and windes, that they shall swell above their bankes, and ouerflowe an Island where the double crosse hath gouernment, onely because the sinnes of the Prince is so hainous before the Maiestie of God.”16 Political speculation of this kind was a major component of English

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almanacs in the first half of the sixteenth century (and continued to be on the continent well into the seventeenth century) but it came under strict control in Elizabethan England. The result was a genre of political speculation that was extremely vague. Jeffery Neve, for instance, warned that the 1605 lunar eclipse would bring to the body “corruptions of the blood” and “pain about the midriff” but that it would also bring “among the baser sort of people” “much mischief,” “untimely births, discord and dissension about patrimonies and the inheritance of dead men’s goods.” To the better sort, the eclipse would bring “sorrow, sadness, lamentation, hatred, imprisonment, deceivers, backbiters” and “envious persons.”17 Restricted by Elizabethan sanctions on prediction, almanacs from the turn of the century registered their uncertainty about the future in other ways: they offered memento mori, such as Philip Ranger’s “the grass that grows tomorrow is hay / And man that’s now as soon is clay.”18 And before the civil wars complicated such easy nationalism or affection for monarchs, almanacs condemned traitors and called for prayers on behalf of the sovereign. There is something in the language of Richard II that recalls these vague, predictive claims and moral platitudes, such as York’s distressed reaction to Bolingbroke’s rebellion and his own inability to take control of the situation: “by bad courses may be understood / that their events can never fall out good” (2.1.212). Other characters, however, indulge in exactly the political prophesying outlawed under Elizabeth. The Welsh captain refuses to fight on Richard’s behalf because “the bay trees in [his] country are all withered / And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven. / The pale faced moon looks bloody on the earth.” “These signs” he determines, “forerun the death or fall of kings.” Even Salisbury’s response to the Welsh retreat is in the same vein, casting Richard’s fall as a series of natural signs: “Ah, Richard! With the eye of heavy mind / I see thy glory like a shooting star / Fall to the base earth from the firmament / Thy sun sets weeping in the lowly west” (2.4.7–24). And Carlisle’s warnings about English blood manuring the soil are formed as political prediction: “if you crown him let me prophesy: / The blood of English shall manure the ground / And future ages groan for this foul act” (4.1.137–39). It is important that these predictive claims are often in rhyming couplets, especially when they are platitudes like York’s sceneconcluding remarks about bad courses. Richard II’s extensive verse

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form is unique to the Shakespearean canon and is also perhaps something that can be traced to the play’s interest in replicating the experience of using almanacs. Critics since Coleridge have offered a range of possible explanations for Richard II’s verse form and the play’s large portion of perfect rhymes (a quarter of its total line endings); my own suggestion does not seek to discredit assertions that the play’s language has particular functions in terms of characterization, tone, or its debt to medieval contemptus mundi traditions.19 Nor do I wish to suggest that the play’s verse form is not without variation in style. However, a consideration of Richard II’s interest in the experience of almanac reading does potentially help to explain the frequency of those moments when characters (usually in a state of acute fear or sorrow) not only revert to rhyming couplets but do so to express sentiments whose trite emotional register can seem out of place. One crucial characteristic of early modern almanacs was their extensive use of verse form.20 Rhyming couplets and closed rhymes were used for medical and agricultural advice, and for pastoralized commentary on the changing of the seasons. Gabriel Frende, who compiled almanacs in the 1590s, said of March 1593: “Such victuals as March acquireth / As are both lyght and pure, / Bloodletting somewhat profiteth, / And medicines somewhat cure.”21 Platitudinous rhyming couplets were also used for vague political commentary and are echoed in lines such as Boligbroke’s “the more fair and crystal is the sky / The uglier seem the clouds that in it fly” (1.1.42), and Gaunt’s rhyming reaction to Richard’s “lour”: “things sweet to taste prove in digestion sour” (1.3.236). York’s horticultural warning to Aumerle is itself one of these couplets (“bear you well in this new spring of time / Lest you be cropped before you come to prime”). Once again, it is the gardener who proves the most successful at political commentary. This skill, together with his consummate use of the play’s horticultural and humoural knowledge, suggests that the gardener is the play’s most astute almanac reader. He knows the king’s fate before the queen does — she has to learn it from him and her response seeks to discredit both his husbandry and his skill in “divin[ation]”: “why dost thou say king Richard is deposed? / Darest thou, thou little better thing than earth / divine his fall? Say where, when and how / camest thou by this ill tidings?” (3.4.77–80). The

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g­ ardener responds by chastising Richard for not observing the same cyclical actions (set out in almanacs) that he himself has observed: “Oh what a pity it is / That he had not so trimmed and dressed his land / as we this garden!” Unlike Richard, the gardener “at time of year” “wound[s] the bark . . . Lest being overproud in sap and blood / With too much riches it confound itself.” Describing those “superfluous branches,” which “we lop away, that bearing boughs may live,” the gardener concludes with a couplet on Richard’s political doom: “had he done so, himself had borne the crown / Which waste of idle hours hath quite thrown down” (3.4.55–65). The queen seeks to discredit the gardener’s knowledge and skill but the scene demonstrates that the gardener’s good husbandry will outlast her sovereignty. In fact, it will subsume her: the gardener monumentalizes the queen into his garden plan before she has even lost her crown or her life. “Here did she fall a tear. Here in this place / I’ll set a bank of rue, sour herb of grace.” Again concluding with a couplet: “Rue even for ruth here shortly will be seen / In the remembrance of a weeping queen” (4.1.104–07). The gardener absorbs the queen’s very body, through the tears she sheds, into the material reality of the garden — the “soil” that will, through his labor, continue to thrive and live (because it is well managed) where hers will be barren. In the political world beyond the garden walls, it is perhaps Bolingbroke who most shares the gardener’s ability to read nature’s cycles. The meeting at Flint Castle, placed immediately before the garden scene, dramatizes the shift in power from Richard to Boling­ broke through precisely the language I have been detailing here. Bolingbroke determines to observe reverence to Richard’s “most royal person” “provided” that his lands are restored (3.3.38–41). The conditional nature of Bolingbroke’s deference recognizes that the political tide is turning his way: if Richard will not acquiesce, Bolingbroke will “use the advantage” of his “power” and “lay the summer’s dust with showers of blood rained from the wounds of slaughtered Englishmen” (3.3.40–44). Bolingbroke continues to imagine their meeting as though it were a storm: “methinks king Richard and myself should meet / With no less terror than the elements / Of fire and water when their thundering shock / At meeting tears the cloudy cheek of heaven” (3.3.54–57). In this meeting, Richard will be the fire (the proverbially

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weaker element that moves upward to the sky), and Bolingbroke will be the “yielding water” (3.3.58). While he is “yielding,” or deferential, to the kingship he covets for himself, Bolingbroke will use his “strong’st . . . hands” (3.3.200) to overcome the man who still clings to the crown: “the rage [fire] be his,” he vows, “whilst on the earth I rain / My waters; on the earth and not on him” (3.3.57–60). Where Richard and the queen failed to replicate the powers of the natural world through their own biological mechanisms, Bolingbroke may succeed. His waters, he claims, will feed England’s ground, but they will not feed his rival. As his power starts to slip away from him, Richard begins to prophesy: should Bolingbroke reach for the crown, Ten thousand bloody crowns of mother’s sons Shall ill become the flower of England’s face Change the complexion of her maid-pale peace To scarlet indignation and bedew Her pasture’s grass with faithful English blood.

(3.3.96–100)

Where Bolingbroke speaks as though he, like the gardener, were successfully reading the changing signs in the natural world and participating in them with his very body and “waters,” Richard divines instead the diabolical murder and rape of England that he has feared since the play’s opening. While Richard II seems to affirm Bolingbroke’s almanac reading and lament that of Richard and his supporters, Bolingbroke’s final observation that he has been watered with Richard’s blood could be read as a recognition of the immoral ends to which Bolingbroke directed his almanac reading and his own failure to recognize that he belongs to a world (both natural and political) that is cyclical. In the same way, if Bolingbroke’s final rhyming couplet (“my soul is full of woe / That blood should sprinkle me to make me grow”) is read as the trite platitudes of a man overcome by the brutal reality of his murderous participation in nature’s (and history’s) cycles, then Richard’s almanac reading has proved correct: he prophesied the earth’s “rebellion” and man’s rape of “fair” England. However, if Bolingbroke’s lines are read as cursory and unrepentant lip service to the death of his rival, then we could say that his confident use of almanac reading has, like the gardener’s, triumphed. Crucially, both conclusions register the tragedy in man’s desire to interpret and control the created world;

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even if Bolingbroke only superficially acknowledges that his kingship is merely part of a great cycle, he remains, in our eyes, a victim of nature’s turbulence. He too will soon fall.

E

In Richard II, to work the soil/body is to “monarchize”: to invest in the unbroken line of sovereignty as a stabilizing structure of government when that line is in reality little more than a series of men violently “cropped” before they have reached their “prime” or “purged” of too much “blood.” All of the play’s main characters use horticultural and therapeutic language to make sense of the political events unfolding around them; their almanac reading can as much explain how the “caterpillars” and “weeds” have come to be rampant in Richard’s court as it can justify Richard’s robbing of Gaunt (the “ripest fruit” that “falls first”), or stir “hot” revenge out of “cold cowardice.” In this way Richard II’s awareness of almanac reading as a way of justifying a range of (often conflicting) politically motivated actions exposes the human desire to control and order nature as ultimately futile since no one person or cause can claim absolute support from the maternal soil or absolute knowledge of its operations. The play’s almanac vision neither sanctions Bolingbroke’s maneuvering nor condemns Richard’s behavior. And yet by dramatizing Richard’s deposition in the language of nature’s cycles, the play suggests that those who can best “read” the forces of nature (those who can see that the new “branch” is stronger than the old, and that it is indeed “the month to bleed”) will suffer the least harm. The postwar critical reception of Shakespeare’s history plays transformed the way we read the political world they depict. Cynical about the nationalism that previous generations enjoyed in Shakespeare’s histories, twentieth century readers instead began to recognize in the cyclical nature of these plays a bleakly futile view of monarchical power struggles. Bolingbroke’s final rhyming couplets, spoken as he observes the dead body of his predecessor, exemplify the awareness — evident in Richard II and in the cycle of history plays as a whole — that “every chapter [of royal succession] opens and closes at the same point . . . when the new prince . . . assumes the crown he will be just as hated as his predecessor. He has killed his enemies, now he

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will kill his former allies. And a new pretender appears in the name of violated justice. The wheel has turned full circle. A new chapter opens. A new historical tragedy.”22 Bolingbroke’s recognition that Richard’s blood, sprinkled on his own body/soil, has made him “grow” in his predecessor’s place situates the history plays’ cyclical vision of political violence within the almanac tradition. In divine right theory, royal successions ought to be moments of grace in which a divinely appointed monarch is clearly identifiable as successor and peacefully takes the throne. If in reality royal succession is instead violent and uncertain, this is only in keeping with the truth of human frailty and the rhythms of the natural world. It is those rhythms that almanacs sought to navigate and understand by placing the daily, weekly, monthly, and annual activities of body and soil management within the vast expanses of Christendom’s historical perspective, its past and future. Richard II’s investment in almanac practices is equally evident in its deployment of this historical model to nationalistic ends. England’s history, like its soil and the bodies of those who work the soil, is at the center of Christian time. The birth of Christ and the reign of kings are the moments of change that form the background for those more immediate changes — the seasons, the feasts and festivals, the wanings of the moon — that structured the daily lives of English men and women as they read their almanacs and worked the soil around them. By so locating the wider patterns of England’s political heritage in the material vicissitudes of the body and the soil, the almanac potentially offered Shakespeare a model on which to build his new dramatic genre. Part tragedy, part consolation, part education, the history plays gave their audiences an experience at once new and very familiar. In the decade of Richard II’s composition, bad harvests and plague were devastating early modern England; almanac printing escalated. With an uncertain royal succession also imminent, Shakespeare’s play of deposition replicated the nature-reading, body-regulating, chaos-controlling language of the almanac in order to at once confirm and console the widespread fear that “the blood of English shall manure the ground.”

4 Unsoiled Soil and “Fleshly Slime” Representations of Reproduction in Spenser’s Legend of Chastity Lindsay Ann Reid

Given that book 3 of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene is ostensibly devoted to depicting the virtue of chastity, it is difficult to know what we should make of its attendant emphasis on Britain’s heroic lineage — and, by extension, the crucial role that human (or fairy) reproduction plays in the unfolding of this history. After all, the deeply nationalistic “Legend of Britomartis; or, Of Chastitie” is concerned not only with the battles waged against lust and its agents by Britomart but equally with the future progeny of this cross-dressed “mayd Martiall.”1 As Kent R. Lehnhof aptly puts it, Spenser’s Legend of Chastity “also turns out to be a legend of nationhood,” with the titular virtue’s champion “figur[ing] into the poem’s fictional genealogy as the mother of the British nation.”2 The principal connections that The Faerie Queene establishes between Britain’s ancient, legendary past and Spenser’s own Tudor present are, thus, inescapably sexual. Spenser’s Knight of Chastity is fated to reproduce: the “fruitfull Ofspring” of her eagerly anticipated conjugal union with Artegall

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are concomitantly the British nation’s “destined descents” who will perpetuate its identity through the ages to come (3.3.23, 2). Even if we rationalize Britomart as the embodiment of that culturally specific, Reformation-era concept of married chastity (or monogamous, wedded love), the relationships among sexuality, desire, abstinence, and fertility in book 3 of The Faerie Queene remain tangibly uneasy.3 Throughout the Legend of Chastity, Spenser repetitively, and rather Neoplatonically, aims to distinguish love from those fleshly, sensual impulses “which doth base affections moue / . . . and filthy lust inflame” (3.3.1). In so doing, he habitually associates the “filthy” (3.2.40, 3.1, 11.4) sexual desires of the unchaste with subhuman, animalistic behavior. In an equation that closely echoes the Book of Common Prayer’s marriage service, wherein “mennes carnall lustes and appetytes” are described as being like those of “brute beastes,” lust in book 3 is, again and again, cast as “brutish” (3.3.1, 7.15) and “beastly” (3.1.17, 7.15, 8.26, 11.4).4 It is therefore significant that where Spenser tries to distinguish Britomart’s projected marital union with Artegall from these baser impulses, he relies, in part, on edaphological and botanical imagery — an especially salient point, given that plant reproduction was widely understood by his contemporaries to be an asexual process. When Britomart, for instance, first catches a glimpse of Artegall in her father’s magic mirror, her love for him takes “first rooting” (3.3.16); later, in Merlin’s visions of the British ages to come, Britomart and Artegall’s “famous Progenie” are complementarily imagined as a family tree “enrooted deepe” in the heroine’s “wombe” (3.3.22). This arboreal conception of Britomart’s offspring allows Spenser to sidestep associating his Knight of Chastity with the “fleshly slime” of animalistic reproduction (3.6.3) — and also skirts the problematic similarities between chaste marital and lustful extramarital sex. In this ecological recoding of her connubial and maternal body, the Spenserian heroine’s fertile womb provides the figurative soil from which the “Most famous fruits” of her “matrimoniall bowre” will simply “spring” (3.3.3, 22). Britomart’s prophesied acts of reproduction are thus rendered in terms that sound suspiciously like spontaneous generation. The crucial subtext for such images, of course, is the idea that a de-sensualized genesis from dirt is less dirty, so to speak, than genesis resulting from

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run-of-the-mill, libidinous copulation. Though Spenser’s use of this representational strategy — like his use of so many others — is inconsistent throughout The Faerie Queene as a whole, the way soil is used in book 3 as a site for rethinking reproduction along both ethical and ecological lines nonetheless speaks to the muddy distinctions between lust and chastity in the production of Britain’s illustrious heirs. Tom MacFaul argues that “Spenser is more preoccupied than any other poet of his time — arguably more than any poet tout court — with the idea of biological generation.”5 Nonetheless, human genesis in the Legend of Chastity is, as Joseph Campana observes, “anything but conventional in either its erotic psychology or its relationship to the materiality of the human body.”6 In what follows, I reexamine the problem of reproduction in book 3, focusing particularly on canto 6, which has long been understood as the book’s “allegorical core.”7 Extending the scope of Marjorie Swann’s recent discussion of how “the relationship between people and the natural environment was shaped by botanical . . . discourses” in the early modern era, my primary interest is the ethically charged polysemy of soil and florescence that we detect in Spenser’s use (and simultaneous subversion) of edaphological and horticultural imagery.8 While attuned to the analogical thinking that so often equated human bodies with both earth and plant life in this period, I share Swann’s interest in exploring the literary implications of what was perhaps the primary “difference between plants and people” in the early modern English imagination: the fact that, as she puts it, the “asexual generation of plants marked an important limit in the congruence between the botanical and human realms.”9 Canto 6 opens by purporting to explain how the twins Belphoebe and Amoret (the respective wards and protégées of Diana and Venus, often read as dual emblems of chastity in its variant forms) first came into the world “pure and vnspotted from all loathly crime” (3.6.3). This depiction of the sisters’ anomalous yet morally laudable birth is — much like Merlin’s aforementioned vision of Britomart’s future maternity — conspicuously rooted in soil. Before they were whisked away to be brought up by their adoptive mothers Diana and Venus, Belphoebe and Amoret were carried by and delivered of Chrysogone, a “Faerie . . . yborne of high degree” (3.6.4). Mysteriously impregnated by “straunge accident” while napping outdoors, the twins’ fairy birth

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mother went on to bear “withouten paine” the daughters she unconsentingly “conceiued / Withouten pleasure” (3.6.5, 27). This unconventional birth narrative at the start of canto 6 encapsulates the broader Spenserian problem of trying to symbolically delineate between various commendable and reprehensible types of sexuality and reproduction. As he relates the curious circumstances of Belphoebe and Amoret’s origins, Spenser’s narrator ostensibly endorses an interpretation of the twins’ birth as an act of earth-based, spontaneous generation. Though this tale of pseudoparthenogenetic reproduction is superficially justified by the narrator’s commentary, canto 6’s many inter- and intratextual connections simultaneously invite a contradictory and troublingly sexualized alternative interpretation, in which Chrysogone instead seems a likely rape victim of Apollo. I ultimately argue that these interpretative discrepancies seem calculated: after all, the competing lenses through which we are invited to view the tale of Chrysogone are closely replicated and echoed in Spenser’s ensuing treatment of the famed Garden of Adonis at the end of the same canto, an episode in which literal and figurative mire similarly comingle. Florified Faeries and Nile Mud

That the story of Belphoebe and Amoret’s irregular conception and birth can be read as an allegory of elemental fusion is underscored not only by the infant girls’ explicit, editorialized comparison with “creatures . . . / Informed in the mud, on which the Sunne hath shynd” (3.6.8), but also by the imagery used to describe the peculiar circumstances of Chrysogone’s impregnation: It was vpon a Sommers shynie day, When Titan faire his beames did display, In a fresh fountaine, farre from all mens vew, She bath’d her brest, the boyling heat t’allay; She bath’d with roses red, and violets blew, And all the sweetest flowres, that in the forrest grew. Till faint through irkesome wearinesse, adowne Vpon the grassie ground her selfe she layd To sleepe, the whiles a gentle slombring swowne Vpon her fell all naked bare displayd;

Unsoiled Soil and “Fleshly Slime”  83 The sunne-beames bright vpon her body playd, Being through former bathing mollifide, And pierst into her wombe, where they embayd With so sweet sence and secret power vnspide, That in her pregnant flesh they shortly fructifide.

(3.6.6–7)

In what has been called “the most flamboyant creation narrative in The Faerie Queene,” earth, water, and light (re)productively intermingle.10 New life is generated through the commixture of the “fresh fountaine,” the “grassie ground,” and the “sunne-beames bright” so generously proffered by “th’author of life and light” (3.6.9). Having been laid onto the soil, the fairy’s dampened and “mollifide” body is saturated by the sun’s life-giving warmth, and there is something unmistakably botanical about the text’s representation of the Chrysogone’s uberous “wombe of Morning dew” (3.6.3). The poetic equations here are multifaceted, linking and blurring boundaries between soil, flower, and fruit. On the one hand, we recognize a direct analogy between the fairy’s soon-to-be maternal body and the fecund earth upon which she reposes, an analogy that seems calculated to recall Spenser’s earlier depiction of Britomart’s fertile womb as lush seedbed in canto 3. On the other hand, the body of the passive, vegetative fairy simultaneously becomes an analogue to those “roses red, and violets blew” with which she bathes, and Chrysogone’s horticultural associations are further underscored by the fact that she is, by the end of this passage, appropriately “fructifide.”11 As Rebecca Bushnell establishes, early modern authors frequently “compared people to plants in their common experience of growing, flourishing, and fading.”12 This equation often took on a gendered dimension as well: Spenser’s poetic forebears and contemporaries habitually described women as flowers, and, to borrow Hillary M. Nunn’s phrasing, botanical images were also “routinely invoked . . . in the context of women’s reproductive roles” in early modern medical literature.13 Spenser was therefore drawing upon on well-established representational conventions when he used this symbolic register to describe Chrysogone’s fructification, and the evocative intermingling of soil, flower, and fruit imagery in this episode comes to bear on the descriptions of her twinned offspring, as well. Shortly after birth, Amoret is stealthily adopted and “farre away conuayd” by Venus, who

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arranges for her newly acquired infant daughter to be domesticated and trained up “in true femininitee” in the Garden of Adonis (3.6.28, 51). Once she has achieved “perfect ripenesse” in the confines of the garden, Amoret is transplanted to the court of the Faerie Queene, where she is much “admyred” for her carefully cultivated perfections (3.6.52). Meanwhile, having been separated from her twin and taken by Diana “to be vpbrought in perfect Maydenhed,” Belphoebe is alternatively “ripened” to “dew perfection” in “saluage forests” (3.6.28, 3, 1), yet her own floral alliances are, if anything, more prominent than her sister’s. When Belphoebe first enters The Faerie Queene in book 2, “in her cheekes the vermeill red did shew / Like roses in a bed of lillies shed / The which ambrosiall odours from them threw” (2.3.22). Such botanical associations are further emphasized by the physical grafting of plant matter onto Belphoebe’s kindred body as she traverses “the flouring forrest”: “In her rude haires sweet flowres themselues did lap, / And flourishing fresh leaues and blossomes did enwrap” (2.3.30).14 These extensive descriptions of the ripening and blooming of both Amoret and Belphoebe establish their rooted connection to the allegorical earth from which they appear to have spontaneously sprung and, furthermore, align the twins’ maturation with the language and imagery of soil-based cultivatory activities. As my above examples indicate, there is abundant imagery found elsewhere in The Faerie Queene that resonates with the biopoetics of Chrysogone’s tale. Furthermore, the extensive editorializing of Spenser’s narrator as he relates the circumstances of the twins’ “guiltlesse” vegetative birth has distinct moralizing overtones, which hearken back to the symbolic opposition between spontaneous, vegetative and amorous, sexual generation (3.6.10). The “whole creation” of Chrysogone’s daughters is praised by the narrator as having been admirably “vnspotted” by the “loathly crime” of parental lust and, it is implied, bestial desire. Stigmatizing quotidian sexual reproduction as a disagreeable process mired in “fleshly slime,” the narrator seems to favor the notion that Belphoebe and Amoret are the naturally occurring by-products of literal, earthy slime mixed with water and sunlight (3.6.3).15 This rendition of the twins’ genesis establishes a loose poetic association between the generative power of earth, reproductive purity, and the spotless moral characters of the progeny thus generated.

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Described as a “goodly storie,” the narrative of Belphoebe and Amoret’s origins is also, as the narrator suggests, a remarkable one: invoking the authority of phantom pretexts, he claims that the twins’ atypical conception and birth is significant or unusual enough to have been “mentioned” by authors elsewhere in the many “antique bookes” of his acquaintance (3.6.5–6). Yet even as Spenser’s narrator insists on the remarkable nature of the twins’ conception — claiming that they were “enwombed” differently than “other wemens commune brood” and asserting that “wondrously they were begot” — he also makes the seemingly paradoxical claim that this “straunge ensample of conception” is not actually as “miraculous” as it may seem at first blush (3.6.5–6, 8). Pointing to a recognizable example borrowed from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Spenser’s narrator argues that new forms of life can and, in fact, routinely do unmiraculously result from nothing more than the comingling of natural elements: reason teacheth that the fruitfull seades Of all things liuing, through impression Of the sunbeames in moyst complexion, Doe life conceiue and quickned are by kynd: So after Nilus invndation, Infinite shapes of creatures men do fynd, Informed in the mud, on which the Sunne hath shynd.

(3.6.8)

Despite the narrator’s purported moral approval of this chaste form of soil-based reproduction, his confident use of “Nilus invndation” to explain away Belphoebe and Amoret’s unconventional origins is not wholly convincing — nor, I will argue, does it seem meant to be. Though he appeals to our reason, the narrator’s own response to Chrysogone’s story is conspicuously uncritical in its acceptance and rationalization of this nonmiraculous miracle. And it glosses over a number of obvious inter- and intratextual relationships that would cast doubt on this interpretation of events. First, it is useful to check the narrator’s Ovidian citation. His reference to what C. W. Lemmi, writing nearly a century ago, memorably dubbed “monster-spawning Nile-mud” has been long recognized as a direct reference to a passage in book 1 of the Metamorphoses.16 I here reproduce the relevant passage alongside its sixteenth century translation by Arthur Golding:

86  Lindsay Ann Reid Cetera diversis tellus animalia formis sponte sua peperit, postquam vetus umor ab igne percaluit solis caenumque udaeque paludes intumuere aestu fecundaque semina rerum  vivaci nutrita solo ceu matris in alvo creverunt faciemque aliquam cepere morando. sic, ubi deseruit madidos septemfluus agros Nilus et antiquo sua flumina reddidit alveo aetherioque recens exarsit sidere limus, plurima cultores versis animalia glaebis inveniunt. [The lustie earth of owne accorde soone after forth did bring According to their sundrie shapes eche other living thing, As soone as that the moysture once caught heate against the Sunne, And that the fat and slimie mud in moorish groundes begunne To swell through warmth of Phebus beames, and that the fruitfull seede Of things well cherisht in the fat and lively soyle in deede, As in their mothers wombe, began in length of time to grow, To one or other kinde of shape wherein themselves to show. Even so when that seven mouthed Nile the watrie fieldes forsooke, And to his auncient channel eft his bridled streames betooke, So that the Sunne did heate the mud, the which he left behinde, The husbandmen that tilde the ground, among the cloddes did finde Of sundrie creatures sundrie shapes.]17

There is a distinct echo of Ovid’s semina rerum, or “fruitfull seede / Of things well cherisht in the . . . soyle” in the “the fruitfull seades / Of all things liuing” mentioned by Spenser’s narrator (3.6.8), and his reiteration of the idea that “ubi temperiem sumpsere umorque calorque, / concipiunt” (when that moysture with the heate is tempred equally, / They doe conceyve) (Metamorphoses 1.430–31; 1.513–14) evinces an Ovidian fascination with the metamorphic and generative possibilities of soil. Nonetheless, an examination of the broader context of this Ovidian passage suggests that the comparison ill fits Chrysogone’s two daughters. The aforementioned image of the Nile’s inundation is used by Ovid to specifically describe the postdiluvian repopulation of the earth’s fauna, or, as the original Latin text specifies, animalia. What is more, the remainder of this Ovidian passage clearly establishes the prodigious nature of many of the newly (mis)created life forms that emerge from the mud:

Unsoiled Soil and “Fleshly Slime”  87 in his quaedam modo coepta per ipsum nascendi spatium, quaedam inperfecta suisque trunca vident numeris, et eodem in corpore saepe altera pars vivit, rudis est pars altera tellus. . . . . . . . . ergo ubi diluvio tellus lutulenta recenti solibus aetheriis altoque recanduit aestu, edidit innumeras species partimque figuras rettulit antiquas, partim nova monstra creavit. (1.426–29, 434–37) they spied some, Even in the instant of their birth but newly then begonne, And some unperfect, wanting brest or shoulders in such wise, That in one bodie oftentimes appeared to the eyes One halfe thereof alive to be, and all the rest beside Both voyde of life and seemly shape, starke earth to still abide. . . . . . . . . And therfore when the mirie earth bespred with slimie mud, Brought over all but late before by violence of the flud,  Caught heate by warmnesse of the Sunne, and calmenesse of the skie, Things out of number in the worlde, forthwith it did applie. Whereof in part the like before in former times had bene, And some so straunge and ougly shapes as never erst were sene. (1.507–12, 519–24)

Not only is it difficult to reconcile these nova monstra — “unperfect” bodies of “ougly” creatures — with Chrysogone’s “two babes, as faire as springing day” (3.6.26), but it is also worth noting that, in the Metamorphoses, the creation of new people does not mirror the spontaneous generation of other, nonhuman life forms: as a matter of fact, divine intervention rather than mere elemental combinatorics is required to create humans. The inaptitude of the narrator’s Ovidian citation to rationalize Belphoebe and Amoret’s muddy genesis is further underscored by Spenser’s own prior use of this same classical referent earlier in The Faerie Queene to describe a very different example of multiple birth — a repetition which, as readers including Jon A. Quitslund have noted, “injects some irony and indeterminacy” into the text.18 In book 1, in Redcrosse’s pseudoepic battle with Errour, the “floud of poyson horrible and blacke” that “spewd out of her filthy maw” is similarly compared to “old father Nilus” swelling to “ouerflow each plaine and lowly dale” with “fattie waues,” “fertile slime,” and “fruitfull seed”

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(1.1.20–21). In this earlier Spenserian reference to Ovid’s Nile passage, the grotesque nature of the river’s progeny is made explicit. “Vgly monstrous shapes” emerge from “heapes of mudd,” and a clear connection is made between these creatures and Errour’s own multitude of (apparently fatherless) “yong ones” (1.1.21, 15). Like Ovid’s imperfectly formed animalia, Errour’s teeming brood “of sundry shapes” are “all ill fauored,” alternatively described as “deformed monsters, fowle, and blacke as inke” (1.1.15, 22). It is curious, to say the least, that we find Spenser invoking this same, memorable Ovidian allusion to describe both the vile products of Errour’s auto-reproduction and the allegedly perfect and metaphorically “slime”-free daughters of Chrysogone. Chrysogone and Other Sleeping Victims

It is not only the direct Ovidian and Spenserian inter- and intratextual comparisons I have been discussing that suggest the inadequacy of the narrator’s explanation that Belphoebe and Amoret were born of elemental comingling, or simply “informed in the mud, on which the Sunne hath shynd.” Rather, a careful rereading of Chrysogone’s tale reveals a dissonance between the tale’s details and the narrator’s gloss, and it is the implications of this incongruent relationship that concern me in the remainder of this chapter. Despite the text’s literal insistence that Chrysogone’s was a “chaste bodie,” as well as the Spenserian narrator’s superficial affirmation of “her guiltlesse conscience” (3.6.5, 10), there is an unmistakably erotic subtext to the descriptions of her impregnation. It is worth reiterating Mary Thomas Crane’s observation that “Spenser’s Faerie Queene persistently depicts sexual encounters taking place outdoors.”19 Located in a typical al fresco setting where Spenserian sex is most likely to occur, Chrysogone’s hot and wet figure is “all naked bare displayd,” and, as she basks in the warmth of “Sommers shynie day,” the fairy is surrounded by the flowers of amatory courtship. Presented as the object of scopophilic pleasure, she is accordingly “layd” out on the grass to be “playd” with and “pierst” (3.6.6–7). It is also hard to miss certain perverse echoes of Acrasian “luxuree” in this description (2.12.80). After all, when “That wanton Ladie” (2.12.76) was first spied at the close of book 2, we learned:

Unsoiled Soil and “Fleshly Slime”  89 Vpon a bed of Roses she was layd, As faint through heat, or dight to pleasant sin, And was arayd, or rather disarayd, All in a vele of silke and siluer thin, That hid no whit her alablaster skin, But rather shewd more white, if more might bee: More subtile web Arachne can not spin, Nor the fine nets, which oft we wouen see Of scorched deaw, do not in th’aire more lightly flee.

(2.12.77)

Similarly “layd” out déshabillé for voyeuristic, “hungry eies” (78) to feast upon, the artfully “disarayd” exhibitionist Acrasia, too, reposes upon a “bed of Roses.” Seeming “faint through heat,” her warm and moist figure is (barely) wrapped in a veil of “scorched deaw.” Here, too, as in Chrysogone’s tale, is a mixture of elemental water and fire imagery found in an unmistakably erotic context. Furthermore, Chrysogone’s own reaction upon discovering her startling pregnancy seems at odds with the gentle, botanically inspired explanation offered by the narrator. Terrified “to see her belly so vpblone” and mystified about the origins of “that vnweeldy burden” she now carries, Chrysogone’s thoughts turn to pedestrian explanations for her condition. Fearing “foule disgrace,” she immediately flees to the dense forest where she will bear her children (3.6.9–10). Our attention thus moves from the episode’s literal dirt to the “fleshly slime” of human sexuality as we pruriently register the horror the fairy feels in reaction to her swelling body and note her developing sense of “shame,” an emotion often associated with carnal misbehavior (3.6.3). As previous scholars have sometimes noted, Chrysogone’s unexpected pregnancy has a myriad of mythological, biblical, and legendary resonances, and it is worth considering how this intertextuality —  particularly parallels with legendary stories of sexual violation —  complicates our understanding of who really fathered Chrysogone’s twins.20 Though, as Mary Ellen Lamb has argued, “Spenser’s evident debt to . . . fairy tales, announced in his title The Faerie Queene, has received . . . little attention” to date, it is hard to miss the similarities between this “goodly storie” and the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty.21 It is worth briefly tracing similarities between this Spenserian tale and Sleeping Beauty analogues in both Perceforest, a fourteenth century prose romance, and Giambattista Basile’s Pentamerone, a collection of

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tales recorded in the Neapolitan dialect and presumed to have been in oral circulation during the early modern period. Such intertextual connections raise doubts about the mud-and-sunbeams explanation for Belphoebe and Amoret’s origins, instead encouraging a synchronous reading of this tale in which the rhetorically florified Chrysogone also plays the part of unwitting rape victim. “L’histoire de Troylus et de la belle Zellandine,” an episode from book 3 of Perceforest, relates the stealthy violation of Zellandine by her betrothed Troylus. Urged on by Venus, Troylus rapes Zellandine, who remains in a deep, enchanted sleep (the result of a unfortunate flax-spinning incident) throughout the encounter. Nine months later, the sleeping woman goes on to deliver Troylus’s child without waking. It is only when her newborn son mistakes her finger for a nipple that Zellandine is magically restored to the waking world.22 A second close analogue for Chrysogone’s tale is found in Basile’s “Sole, Luna, e Talia,” in which the heroine, like Zellandine, falls into a deep sleep as a result of a spinning-related mishap. When a king stumbles upon Talia, he tries unsuccessfully to rouse the unconscious maiden before impregnating her. The comatose Talia, like Chrysogone, goes on to give birth to a set of twins. As in Zellandine’s story, a nursing infant initiates the woman’s postpartum return to consciousness.23 The extraordinary fact that Chrysogone, like both Zellandine and Talia, is insentient at the critical moments of insemination and childbirth cannot be overemphasized. Overwhelmed by a preternatural, “gentle slumbering swowne,” the napping virgin is not cognizant of her initial penetration by “sunne-beames bright” (FQ 3.6.7), and she is soporifically “ouerkest” by another “sad cloud of sleepe” just before the birth of her daughters (3.6.10). Under the influence of this second “heauy swowne,” Chrysogone is saved from the need to “implore / Lucinaes aide” in childbirth, yet simultaneously rendered unable to prevent the abduction of her two “tender babes” by Venus and Diana (3.6.27). Northrop Frye once remarked of The Faerie Queene that “on practically every page there is either a good rape, or a good try,” and, while this assessment may be somewhat hyperbolic, it is worth noting that Spenser’s epic repeatedly links predatory images of lust with sleeping victims — a pattern that invites us to understand the swooning fairy

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of book 3 more as sexual victim than lush soil or blooming flower.24 Book 2, for example, had concluded with the memorable image of Acrasia and “her louer lose, / Whose sleepie head she in her lap did soft dispose” (2.12.76): the faire Witch [was] her selfe now solacing, With a new Louer, whom through sorceree And witchcraft, she from farre did thither bring: There she had him now layd a slombering, In secret shade, after long wanton ioyes: . . . . . . . . And all that while, right ouer him she hong, . . . . . . . . And oft inclining downe with kisses light, For feare of waking him, his lips bedewd, And through his humid eyes did sucke his spright, Quite molten into lust and pleasure lewd; Wherewith she sighed soft, as if his case she rewd. . . . . . . . . The young man sleeping by her, seemd to bee Some goodly swayne of honorable place, That certes it great pittie was to see Him his nobilitie so foule deface. (2.12.72–73, 79)

We hear at length in book 2 about the lecherous Acrasia’s “horrible enchantment” that lulled Verdant into a somnolent state, and the young man’s status as hapless amatory victim is further underscored by the descriptions of his weaponry, the very symbol of his knighthood, idly “hong vpon a tree” (2.12.80). If we return focus to book 3, in stanzas 26 and 27 of canto 6, the adjective “vnwares” is thrice repeated to describe Chrysogone’s somnolent state at the moment of the twins’ conception and birth. In this wording, we also hear an echo of the earlier description of Britomart, who was likewise slumbering “vnwares” at Castle Joyeous when the “leachour” Malecasta slipped under the warrior maiden’s “embroderd quilt,” snuggling in “by her side” (3.1.61–62). Still “ignouraunt” of Britomart’s “contrary sex,” the shameless queen hopefully checked the “vnwares” Britomart to see “if any member mooued” in response (3.1.47, 60–61). A similar scenario, in which lustful desires are directed toward an unconscious subject, is portrayed in Malecasta’s “costly”

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wall hangings “of Arras and of Toure” depicting “Venus and her Paramoure / The faire Adonis” (3.1.34). In this well-known ekphrasis, Spenser’s Venus looks distinctly proto-Shakespearean: here, too, she is represented as a “bold-faced suitor” who employs a variety of “sleights and sweet allurements” to entice and entrap her questionably eager young lover (3.1.35).25 This portrait of Venus is also decidedly Acrasian, for Venus subjects Adonis to ocular molestation while he is — at her own persuasion — napping “vnwares”: him to sleepe she gently would perswade, . . . . . . . . And whilst he slept, she ouer him would spred Her mantle, colour’d like the starry skyes, And her soft arme lay vnderneath his hed, And with ambrosiall kisses bathe his eyes . . . . . . . . So did she steale his heedelesse hart away, And ioyd his loue in secret vnespyde. (FQ 3.1.35–37)

This same topos of a lustful predator molesting a sleeping victim is again exploited at the close of book 3, when Britomart enters the House of Busirane and encounters “faire pourtraicts” of “all Cupids warres” hanging on the walls (3.11.29). This encyclopedic rehearsal of rapes portrays Jove’s, Apollo’s, Neptune’s, Saturn’s, and Bacchus’s various “amorous assayes,” and in one of the ekphrasis’ lengthiest descriptions, an “vnwares” Leda is portrayed as “in daffadillies sleeping” as she is “rusht” at and violated by the ever-cupidinous Jove, who “did her inuade” in the guise of a “proud Bird” (3.11.44, 32). And these repeated parallels — with the “vnwares” Verdant, Adonis, Britomart, and Leda, as well as with Zellandine and Talia — invite us to reread Chrysogone’s tale as a similar story of predatory lust and a sleeping victim rather than a tale of spontaneous, botanical generation. Belphoebe and Amoret’s Ambiguous Paternity

There is much circumstantial evidence to suggest that Chrysogone’s progeny — and, particularly, the ever-so-slightly elder twin, Belphoebe —  may be the half-divine daughters of the god Apollo. That is to say, they may well have been generated not so much by the gentle rays of

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the sun acting upon the soil as by the forceful insemination of their “vnwares” mother by a lustful sun-god — a divinity who is also guilty, as Busirane’s tapestries will later remind us, of the attempted rape of the nymph Daphne, among others. Hints of Belphoebe’s divine parentage seem to abound in the text. In what has been called book 2’s “chaste blason,” she is introduced as a character “borne of heauenly birth” and brimming with an aura of “dredd Maiestie” (FQ 2.3.21–22).26 Belphoebe’s outward “heritage of all celestiall grace” is again hinted at when she reappears in the Legend of Chastity (3.6.4). The suggestive onomastic, and perhaps patronymic, connection between the names “Phoebus” and “Belphoebe” is emphatically underscored when her character is there reintroduced in a comparison that explicitly links her beauty with Apollo: “Belphœbe was her name, as faire as Phœbus sunne” (3.5.27).27 And her “heauenly light,” “celestiall hew,” and aura of having been “heauenly borne” continue to be repeatedly remarked (3.5.45, 47). Physically, Belphoebe’s body inspires awe and seems to bear the marks of divine, and particularly celestial, paternity. Demanding devout reverence, her legs loom “Like two faire marble pillours . . . / Which doe the temple of the Gods support” (2.3.28). Furthermore, “her heauenly face,” so perfect that “flesh it seemed not,” is described as being “Cleare as the skie,” and her alluring “yellow lockes” fan out about her, framing her features like a crown or halo of “golden wyre” (2.3.25, 22, 30). With “aygulets, that glistred bright, / Like twinckling starres” and an extravagant “golden fringe,” Belphoebe’s elaborately conceived garb, too, seem calculated to emphasize her solar affiliations (2.3.26). It is little wonder, then, that both Trompart and Timias, upon meeting Belphoebe, assume that she is no mere mortal. “O Goddesse,” Trompart addresses her, explaining “for such as I thee take to bee” and elaborating that “neither doth [Belphoebe’s] face terrestriall shew, / Nor voyce sound mortall” (2.3.33). And when Timias later encounters Chrysogone’s daughter, he offers to “kisse [her] blessed feete” and gushes “Angell, or Goddesse, do I call thee right?” (3.5.35). These reactions of both Trompart and Timias to Belphoebe explicitly recall the famed exclamation of Aeneas in book 1 of Virgil’s Aeneid when Venus appears to the epic hero disguised as a huntress. Upon encountering his mother, Aeneas asks, “o — quam te memorem, virgo? namque haud

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tibi vultus / mortalis, nec vox hominem sonat; o dea certe!” (But how should I address you, maiden? Your face / Is hardly mortal, and your voice does not sound human).28 And just as the Virgilian Venus subsequently attempts to deny her divinity — insisting “haud equidem tali me dignor honore” (I am hardly worthy of such honor) (Aeneid 1.335– 37) — Belphoebe similarly insists she is the ordinary “daughter of a woody Nymphe” rather than a “Goddesse” or “Angell” (FQ 3.5.36). Despite Belphoebe’s emphatic location of herself amongst the “mortall wights” with their “commun bond of frailtee” (3.5.36), the Virgilian subtext for both Trompart’s and Timias’s dialogue would suggest otherwise: Virgil’s Venus is unable to fully conceal her divinity from Aeneas, who immediately perceives that there is something extraordinary about his interlocutor, and Venus’s refutation, in which she improbably tries to pass herself off as an ordinary Tyrian girl, is marked as patently false. Belphoebe’s connection to a recognizable classical moment of concealment and deceit strongly suggests that there may be something false — whether or not she realizes it — about this denial of her apparently divine nature. Even Belphoebe’s botanical knowledge, though based in the plant world with which she and her sister are symbolically associated, may imply an Apollonian heritage rather than a spontaneous birth from mud. From our first introduction to Belphoebe, we know that she is reputedly “Hable to heale the sicke, and to reuiue the ded” (FQ 2.3.23), and Belphoebe’s “great intendiment” of “hearbes” is put to good use in book 3, where she skilfully draws upon her marvelous acquaintance with “heauenly salues and med’cines sweete” to cure Timias’s thigh wound (3.5.32, 35). It is possible that Belphoebe’s healing abilities, which clearly extend beyond the mere recognition of medicinal plants, might be a genetic inheritance from Apollo, the god of medicine, rather than something exclusively learned under the tutelage of “the Nymphe, which from her infancy / Her nourced had” (3.5.32). Indeed, Spenser’s “sad Æsculapius” (1.5.36) — another of Apollo’s semidivine children, and possibly the half-brother of Belphoebe and Amoret — shares in this same ability “to heal the sick, and to revive the ded” that Belphoebe is credited with: book 1 shows him condemned to hell and “Emprisoned . . . in chains remedilesse, / For that Hippolytus rent corse he did redresse,” an unwise

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use of his “wondrous science” that offended Jupiter’s sensibilities (1.5.36, 40). If Chrysogone is taken to be a latently erotic figure and canto 6 is reread with the attendant assumption that the fairy was the unwitting and unwilling rape victim of Apollo, the narrator’s description of Belphoebe’s (and, by extension, Amoret’s) horoscope that prefaces the tale takes on decidedly sinister overtones. It is possible that the twin sisters were not, like book 1’s Redcrosse, simply “borne vnder happy starre” (FQ 1.1.27): But to this faire Belphœbe in her berth The heauens so fauourable were and free, Looking with myld aspect vpon the earth, In th’Horoscope of her natiuitee, That all the gifts of grace and chastitee On her they poured forth of plenteous horne; Ioue laught on Venus from his soueraigne see, And Phœbus with faire beames did her adorne, And all the Graces rockt her cradle being borne.

(3.6.2)

As Harry Berger notes, the detailed references to the planetary deities who presided over Belphoebe’s birth in this passage seem to invite readings indebted to “iconography, numerology, and astrology.”29 However, like Berger, I sense within this superficially “heavenly horoscope” presented at the start of canto 6 the suggestion of an alternative “Ovidian horoscope” — perhaps an unsurprising reading in an epic that so often figures male-female relations through images of sexual violence.30 There is something menacing about this image of the merry gods “looking with myld aspect vpon the earth.” Do they have, as is so often the case in Spenser’s classical models, vested interests and personal agendas as they watch events play out in the mortal world? Certainly, Apollo’s concern for Belphoebe might be paternal in nature, and the “gifts of grace and chastitee” so liberally bestowed upon her by the other deities could easily suggest recognition of the newborn’s semidivine status. However, I want to draw particular attention to Jupiter’s laugh, as it seems a particularly damning piece of evidence to support a reading of Chrysogone as Apollo’s rape victim. The laugh of Jove in this passage references a classical proverb — a proverb also drawn on by Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet, where

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the heroine famously declares, “At lovers’ perjuries / They say, Jove laughs” (2.1.134–35). The most direct classical source for this image occurs in Ovid’s Ars amatoria, in which we learn “Iuppiter ex alto periuria ridet amantum” (Jupiter from on high smiles at the perjuries of lovers).31 Ovid’s reference to the laugh of Jove appears within the Ars amatoria’s broader discussion of how men might profitably lie to women in matters amatory, and it is there glossed with the further explanation that “Per Styga Iunoni falsum iurare solebat / Iuppiter; exemplo nunc favet ipse suo” (Jupiter was wont to swear falsely by Styx to Juno; now he favours his own example) (1.635–6). The proverbial nature of Jupiter’s laugh colors the programmatic reaction of the Spenserian Jove to Belphoebe’s birth in canto 6 of The Faerie Queene, suggesting that, from his celestial vantage point, the ruler of the gods has perceived an act of erotic deceit. This horoscope thereby invests the subsequent tale of Chrysogone with what Berger might call the seeming “shimmer of Ovidian rape.”32 In the absence of a definitive paternity test, what are we to conclude, based on textual evidence, about the narrator’s commentary regarding Amoret and Belphoebe’s edaphological origins? To summarize, Chrysogone’s tale can be read as an allegory of elemental fusion, and the botanical imagery of fructification and floral blossoming associated both with the fairy and her two daughters encourages such a reading. Nevertheless, the narrator’s citation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses to bolster his claim that there is nothing unusual about such a soil-based birth does not hold up to close scrutiny, nor can it fully account for the blatantly erotic overtones of Chrysogone’s impregnation. Both the story’s close resemblance to Sleeping Beauty fairy tale analogues and The Faerie Queene’s repeated staging of scenes where an “vnwares” character is subjected to sexual violation invite an alternative interpretation of Belphoebe and Amoret’s birth mother as an unwitting rape victim, and Belphoebe, both physically and also in terms of her medical aptitude, could plausibly be the half-divine daughter of Apollo himself. Furthermore, this disharmony between the narrator’s gloss and the tale’s myriad of contradictory intertextual alliances seems deliberate. Spenser’s text purposefully offers up two distinct, mythologically and ecosocially infused possibilities for our consideration: Chrysogone’s pregnancy and the later birth of her twin daughters resulted either  from morally “vnspotted,” spontaneous generation  à

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la  Ovid  or from  a male deity’s filthy behavior  à la  Ovid. And it is worth noting that whichever way we choose to read the creation of Belphoebe and Amoret — rooted in unsoiled soil or mired in lustful, “fleshly slime” — it all seems to lead back to dirt. Rumors of Reproduction in the Garden of Adonis

As the argument preceding canto 6 reminds readers, the story of Belphoebe and Amoret’s genesis is indissolubly related to the subsequent descriptions of the Garden of Adonis that are contained later in that same canto: The birth of faire Belphœbe and Of Amoret is told. The Gardins of Adonis fraught With pleasures manifold.

It is thus that I turn to The Faerie Queene’s best-known ecological site at the close of this chapter. A place of lush fecundity and metamorphic vitality, Spenser’s hortus conclusus is, like Chrysogone’s tale, brimming with (and perhaps overburdened by) intertextual significance. It is a locus that recalls Eden and the traditions of Christian iconography as well as poetic renditions of the golden age and the various terrestrial paradises of classical tradition; as such, it invites a variety of theological, philosophical, and mythological interpretations. Without retreading well-known ground or reviving irresolvable debates about the garden’s precise intellectual and aesthetic debts, I want to suggest that the unresolved hermeneutic status of Chrysogone’s tale — with its problematization of desire’s role in reproduction and its loose yet suggestive symbolic associations between generative soil and sexual purity — lays the groundwork for book 3’s notoriously indecipherable garden. Spenser’s Garden of Adonis evinces the same uneasy constellation of tensions regarding Ovidian metamorphosis, the creation of new life, and rapacious lust that we found in Chrysogone’s tale, and it does so by similarly presenting readers with two competing and irreconcilable narratives (succinctly put, edaphological and fleshly) about the mechanics of reproduction. From our first introduction to the metaphorical seedbed of Amoret at 3.6.29, it is clearly established that the Garden of Adonis, a place

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that “All other pleasant places doth excell,” cannot be mapped using conventional spatial metrics. As Richard T. Nuese notes in his relevant entry for The Spenser Encyclopedia, the image of the garden presented to readers “is complex, heterogeneous, and difficult if not impossible to visualize as a single entity. The description alternates disconcertingly between the vividly concrete and the highly generalized or abstract. Just when the garden seems to be a definite place with a distinct topography, it fades into the no-place of a conceptual scheme, only to reappear later as an actual location.”33 Subtly replicating the narrative structure of the tale of Chrysogone that preceded it, the Garden of Adonis is also presented as an apt subject for a “goodly storie,” and one way of reading the perplexing comingling of topographical specificity and ontological indeterminacy in this episode is to posit it as a consequence of the Spenserian narrator’s professed unfamiliarity with the locus. While he avows that this phenomenological place is “farre renowmd by fame,” the details of its landscape are clearly marked as being known to the narrator only through secondhand sources. Though he affirms the fluorescent garden’s reputation as a  “ioyous Paradize” that serves as Venus’s domicile “when she onearth does dwel,” nonetheless, he cannot confirm its location: “Whether in Paphos, or Cytheron hill, / Or it in Gnidus be, I wote not well” (3.6.29). For all he knows, it might be in Asia Minor, or Cyprus, or one of the Aegean’s many other islands. Given that Spenser’s narrator is relying on and reproducing what we might think of as gossip about this place, the possibility is raised that the garden is “difficult if not impossible to visualize as a single entity” because its depiction is colored by competing rumors. The extended description of the Garden of Adonis that occupies stanzas 29 to 50 of canto 6 follows a rhetorical pattern earlier established in Chrysogone’s tale by presenting readers with two distinct and incongruent accounts (an amalgamation of conflicting hearsay about this famous locale) regarding the generative nature of this fecund garden. In the first of the two reports that the narrator provides about this hortus, the Garden of Adonis — though it is allegedly Venus’s holiday home and is “called is by her lost louers name” (3.6.29) — is essentially a Venus-less and an Adonis-less paradise. In this initial account, the garden is the “first seminarie / Of all things, that are borne” (3.6.30). There, life’s “endlesse progenie” spring up

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“of their owne accord” from the “fruitfull soyle of old” (3.6.30, 34, 31). Imbued with an “eternall moisture,” the garden’s seedbeds need no tending, no cultivation by a “Gardiner to set, or sow, / To plant or prune” (3.6.34). This spontaneous growth of plant life is twofold: immaterial souls are “in that Gardin planted,” yet from the same soil springs the physical bodies and temporary “fleshly weedes” with which they are materially cloaked when they periodically leave “to liue in mortall state” (3.6.32–33). Conceptually, this edaphological tale directly parallels the earlier account of Belphoebe and Amoret’s mud-and-sunbeams birth, and the narrator’s assertion that “infinite shapes of creatures” are thus “bred” in the garden tellingly echoes his earlier, Ovidian-derived assurances that it is not unusual to discover “infinite shapes of creatures . . . / Informed in the mud, on which the Sunne hath shynd” (3.6.35, 38). Moreover, in the narrator’s initial descriptions of the mythological garden, we sense a familiar alignment of moral cleanliness and vegetative reproduction. As in Chrysogone’s tale, purity is characterized by the absence of flesh, and the fruitful soil of the garden is contrasted with the figurative “sinfull mire” of “fleshly corruption” (3.6.32–33). There is thus a distinct dislocation here of human reproduction from human (or divine) bodies, which are bypassed as a source of generation in this first account of the garden’s ontological mechanics. This initial narrative is disrupted, however, by a second, disharmonious explanation for the generative nature of this seemingly idealized horticultural space. And, as in the tale of Chrysogone that directly precedes it, this competing hermeneutic is vested with a tangible sense of Ovidian eroticism. Spenser’s narrator draws our attention to the fact that he is presenting an alternative — and likely contradictory — interpretative tradition when he references another rumor in circulation about the famous garden. “Some say,” he asserts in stanza 46, that Venus’s mortal paramour is not actually dead but merely “hid from the world.” Continuing to tell us what “they say” (3.6.47, 48) in this alternative tradition, he elaborates that “in secret [Adonis] does ly, / Lapped in flowres and pretious spycery,” covertly kept by Venus “in the middest of that Paradise” on her “stately Mount” (3.6.46, 43). Surrounded by “a pleasant arbour” impenetrable even to “Phœbus beams” and “Aeolus sharp blast,” the distinct possibility arises that Adonis has been jealously “emprisoned” by the infatuated Venus,

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much like “that wilde Bore, the which him once annoyd” that Venus has also entrapped “in a strong rocky Caue . . . / Hewen vnderneath that Mount” (3.6.44, 48). When viewed through the lens of the earlier Venus and Adonis ekphrasis from Castle Joyeous, these stanzas depicting “faire Venus often . . . enioy[ing] / Her deare Adonis” ironize the narrator’s assertion that Venus’s lover “liues in euerlasting ioy,” instead inviting a reading of Adonis — not unlike Chrysogone — as the questionably sentient amatory victim of an oversexed deity (3.6.46, 49). With no hope of rescue, Adonis is the object of erotic desirability, and it is clear just whose sexual urges are being satisfied as he eternally couples with the goddess: in this tightly controlled space, Venus “reape[s] sweet pleasure of the wanton boy” and “when euer that she will, / Possesseth him, and of his sweetnesse takes her fill” (3.6.46). What is more, this second biological narrative about the garden apparently contradicts the first. The reproduction that it details is specifically sexual, the product of lustful desire. If this rumor that Adonis lives is true, then it is not the sun who is the “great father . . . of generation” and “th’author of life and light” (3.6.9). Rather, in this second account, the garden’s bounty is rendered as the product of erotic distress and sexual fulfillment: Adonis becomes “the Father of all formes” who, as Venus’s questionably willing partner, “liuing giues to all” (3.6.47). In the tensions between these competing stories about the Garden of Adonis, we sense that same hermeneutic plurality — rather than a simple closure of meaning — that characterizes Chrysogone’s tale. In canto 6’s allegorically and intertextually complicated representations of genesis, Spenser repeatedly invokes but also subverts ethically resonant symbolic oppositions between spontaneous soil-based and amorous sexual generation. The text first invites us to read Chrysogone and her offspring as fruits of the earth — integral, constituent parts of an unsullied, and ethically pure botanical world — and then ruptures this carefully cultivated sense of peaceful horticultural and elemental synthesis. Disturbing inter- and intratextual allusions to violent sexuality and victimization lie just beneath the tale’s surface, allusions that threaten to blot the collective moral spotlessness of both Chrysogone and her two ambiguously generated daughters. Similarly, in the first vision that we are given of the Garden of Adonis, the

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“endlesse progenie” emerging from “fruitfull soyle of old” seem distinct from the products of lust’s metaphorical “slime” or “mire,” yet this depiction of asexual, botanical generation is decentered and arguably neutralized by the narrator’s later admission that there is an alternative account of “fleshly corruption” in circulation that might otherwise account for the garden’s generative mysteries. It is thus that Spenser’s many-sided treatment of chastity in book 3 of The Faerie Queene — in which we find the author drawing on, repeatedly juxtaposing, and sometimes blending inharmonious ideas about the nature of love and sexual generation — calls attention to the inherently paradoxical nature of its own attempts to definitively distinguish the divine and “sacred fire, that burnest mightily / In liuing brests, ykindled first aboue, / Emongst th’eternall spheres” from the earthly fire, “which doth base affections moue / In brutish minds, and filthy lust inflame” (3.3.1). If soil-based horticulture is, on the one hand, symbolically represented throughout canto 6 as a possibly clean alternative to the beastly filth of carnality and rape, this division is eventually impossible to maintain. The ultimate indistinction between generative corpora and generative soil at the heart of Spenser’s Legend of Chastity points to the underlying weakness of any attempt to segregate and ethically delineate between various categories of sexuality and reproduction. Rather, the demonstrably permeable relationships between bodies, plant life, and earth in book 3 draw attention to the similarly permeable boundaries of chastity and lust. In short, when we start digging around in Spenser’s allegorical dirt, things get awfully muddy.

5 Groping Golgotha: Soil Improvement in the Towneley and Chester Shepherds’ Plays Rob Wakeman

In the wake of the early sixteenth century enclosure movement, which saw church grange lands repurposed under the auspices of the Henrician Reformation, the coeval spiritual and agricultural unrest found dramatic expression in the Chester and Towneley shepherds’ plays.1 These plays explore the evolving agricultural networks of Northern England by switching out the pastures of biblical Judea in Luke 2:8–20 for the ecological and economic conditions of late-medieval and early Tudor Cheshire and Yorkshire.2 With recent critical consensus locating the authorship of the Chester Shepherds’ Play and the compilation of the Towneley manuscript in the sixteenth century, considering these plays within the context of expanded agricultural development and manuring of sheep pasture will improve our understanding of these dramatic works.3 The Chester Shepherds’ Play literalizes the struggle between old tradition and new economic imperative through a contest between Trowle, the herders’ servant boy, and his masters. After Trowle calls his elders “fowle filth”4 and refuses to take part in their extravagant feast, the shepherds plan to put him back in his place by challenging 103

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him to a wrestling match: “False lad, fye on thy face! / One this grownd thow shall have a fall” (CSP 250–51). Another shepherd adds a mild curse to his provocation: Trowle, boy, for Godes tree, come eate a morsel with me; and then wrastle will we here on this wold.

(CSP 226–29)

To allude to “Godes tree” at this moment in the biblical cycle foreshadows the incarnation of Jesus. The Chester cycle uses the Nativity plays as a transition from the prophecies of the Hebrew Bible to the New Testament and the reference to “Godes tree” unites the book of Isaiah’s messianic prophecy to the Crucifixion on Calvary. Thus, these unlikely shepherds — as yet unaware of their evangelical destiny —  prepare for the coming of the Messiah by tossing about in the mud. One of the five extant manuscripts of the Chester cycle gives Trowle two more lines that underline the connection between the book of Isaiah, the Nativity, and the Crucifixion. As he sits alone atop the hill, Trowle takes a sip of ale and dourly proclaims, “At me all men learne mon / this Golgotha grimly to grope” (CSP 191n). The “Golgotha” refers to Trowle’s skull-shaped drinking cup, but the reference to the site of the Crucifixion is telling. The audience comes to understand that as the shepherds grapple in the muck and the mire, they are also groping toward salvation. By throwing the negligent shepherds on the ground during the wrestling bout, Trowle humbles the shepherds and prepares the way for the flourishing of the Rod of Jesse. As it surveys the enclosed and engrossed pastures of a desacralized landscape, the Chester Shepherds’ Play, like the Towneley First and Second Shepherds’ Plays, seeks to re-endow the soil with teleological purpose. Mud and manure play an unlikely role in realigning economic development with service to God, but given the quantity of ovine waste splattered along miles of northern droveways, the muck present in these plays should come as no surprise. Sheep and shepherds, even when they serve as ecclesiastic symbols or purport to represent the divine as the Agnus Dei, are filthy creatures. The dirt- and dung-stained labor of the shepherds’ plays demonstrates the vital pathways that connect soil, sheep, and human to substance, metaphor, and significance.

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The counterpastoral comedy of the Chester and Towneley shepherds’ plays enacts the gritty agronomy lessons for driving, grazing, and folding sheep practiced in the early sixteenth century and later described in John Fitzherbert’s Boke of Husbandry (1523) and Thomas Tusser’s A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie (1557) and its sequel, Fiue Hundreth Points of Good Husbandry (1573). Just as the biblical parable of the sower explains the crucial role “good ground” plays in the cultivation of sacred meaning, so too should we read the christological ideals of the shepherds’ plays in connection with the dirty work of pastoral.5 Good stewardship of the land and its resources (humans, sheep, and soil) was of crucial importance to the economic agenda of landowners, many of whom were also invested in the production of biblical drama. Plays were sponsored and patronized by guilds, civic organizations, and gentry families heavily invested in the business of agriculture. For example, the last recorded performance of the Chester Shepherds’ Play occurred in 1575 in celebration of the arrival to the city of Henry Stanley, Earl of Derby and Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange.6 The Stanleys were the most important benefactors of Cheshire drama and the fact that the city singled out the Shepherds’ Play for performance is revelatory. The city risked running afoul of Puritan magistrates, who suppressed the plays of the Chester cycle once and for all following this performance, to stage this play of pastoral labor before the largest landowning family in Cheshire and southern Lancashire. Late medieval drama insists that the soil does not belong solely to the proprietors of the agricultural economy but has a vital purpose within a larger teleological framework. Rather than simply till the earth for human ends, the biblical figures in these plays find themselves reclaimed by the soil as part of a salvific destiny for the English economy. An especially early example of medieval drama’s sensitivity to the economic and ecological conditions of agricultural England comes from the late fourteenth century Cornish Origo Mundi.7 Adam, having accepted his exile from Eden and beginning his labor as a ploughman, must contend with adverse environmental conditions for the first time: I must go in poverty through the land; For want of clothes and shelter,

106  Rob Wakeman Well nigh perishing with cold; Nor know from trouble Whether we be in field or in wood. My heart is weak and empty By my taking and having food. Eve, take thy distaff, To spin clothes for us; And I go with all my strength, To begin to dig in the ground.

(COM 360–70)

The stage direction following these lines indicates that Adam’s new world is not passive, but actively resistant to Adam’s labor: “And he shall dig, and the earth cries: and again he shall dig, and the earth cries” (COM 370, s.d.). Adam calls on God to resolve this agricultural standoff: Great wonder is surely to me The earth will not let me break it, That I may raise corn: Nor can I go on, in truth. I pray to thee, high Lord, That thou wilt give leave to the earth, That it allow me before I die To seek for myself food in it.

(COM 371–78)

In asking for God’s allowance, Adam recognizes that living in the world means living with the other elements of the ecosystem. God comes down to the stage and commands the soil to cooperate: “I command thee, O earth, / Allow Adam to open thee” (COM 381–82). The tillage here is more than background or setting for the narrative; soil is a vital agent that actively participates in the play as it does in the agricultural economy. Under God’s commandment, soil must now learn to coexist in ecological relation to the farmer who tills it. Theopolitical ecology has an even more central role in the Towneley and Chester shepherds’ plays as the husbandmen draw explicit attention to their concerns as contemporary agricultural laborers, conspicuously ensnared within the ecosystem. Among the extant late medieval English drama, the Chester and Towneley shepherds’ plays are especially interested in the material exchange that occurs among different taxa: sheep, grasses, dogs, human laborers and producers, and human

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consumers and developers. As each relationship links together two or more bodies or elements in the ecosystem, questions of each component’s meaning, purpose, and value grow more complex. The agricultural laborers, still suffering the penalty of Adam, are comprehensible only to the extent that we understand their relationships with their sheep and the soil they dung. The relationship of shepherd to pasture is coextensive with the ecosystem he tends and of which he is, in effect, a member. Shepherds are, first and foremost, “sely husbandys / That walkys on the moore” (TSSP 14–15).8 Editors generally gloss the word “sely” as simple, hapless, or spiritually blessed. But given the generally pitiful and despairing tone of these monologues, we should also consider other definitions of “sely,” where the word could also mean “weak, feeble, frail; insignificant, trifling.”9 Like Adam in the Cornish Origo Mundi, the livelihoods of the husbandmen of the shepherds’ plays are dependent upon the soil. The opening monologue in the Towneley Second Shepherds’ Play begins with Coll drawing attention to the foul weather and the fallow tillage: No wonder, as it standys, If we be poore, For the tylthe of oure landys Lyys fallow as the floore, As ye ken.

(TSSP 18–22)

In this scene, Coll has woken from sleep (“So long haue I nappyd” [TSSP 4]) and rises from the cold, dead, infertile earth, his body showing wear from winter labor. J. W. Robinson connects the agricultural laborers of the shepherds’ plays with the creation of Adam in Genesis, formed from “the slime of the earth” (Gen. 2:7): “The sorrows of the Old Testament world are evoked by the first thing the audience sees, an old man rising up out of the mud.”10 By comparison, in the Towneley First Shepherds’ Play, living on the pasture has made Gyb “heuy as a sod” (TFSP 31).11 Muddied and soaked through with rain, the shepherds’ bodies are sullied by the earth on which they stand. The shepherds are so mired in their ecosystem that their bodies blend in with the mud and dung until they are finally, inevitably consumed by the graves, or, worse, common ditches, as John Horne describes in the TFSP:

108  Rob Wakeman John Horne:

Poore men are in the dyke And oft-tyme mars. The warld is slyke; Also helpars Is none here.

(TFSP 131–39)

The world is “slyke” (or “such,” as editors Martin Stevens and A. C. Cawley gloss the word): humans are helpless beings caught up in the world’s miseries. But “slyke” also calls to mind the contemporary homophone “slike,” that is, mud, slime, and sludge.12 The world’s “slyke” could be the same slimy substance from which Adam was created. With this image in mind we may compare John Fitzherbert’s view of humanity in his Boke of Husbandry: “And saynt Bernard saith, Homo nihil alies es, quam sperma fetidum, saccus, stercorum, et esca vermium. That is to say, a man is nothyng but stynkynge fylth, a sacke of donge, & wormes mete, the whiche saynges wolde be remembred.”13 Fitzherbert is quoting here from Bernard of Clairvaux’s Meditations, which is replete with castigating reminders that humans have humble origins as the slime of the earth: “Man take hede what you were before thy natyuyte. What thou arte fro the begynnynge vnto thyne endynge. And what thou shalte be after this lyf. O man fyrste fylth & lothsom matere. Afterwarde a stynkynge sackefull of dounge. And at the last mete to wormes to gnawe on in the grounde.”14 The placement of a quotation from Bernard of Clairvaux in Fitzherbert’s husbandry manual has a measure of irony to it, given Bernard’s insistence that all filth must be washed away from the body until it “is made pure and clene.”15 For Bernard, dung is a sign of human decay; for the husbandman, a sack full of dung is fertility and the promise of new growth. Put to good use, a sackful of dung leads to glorious fruits, just as putting poor men in the dyke leads to salvation: before Adam dies in the Cornish Origio Mundi and before his body is buried in the earth, Seth obtains three seeds from the garden of Eden to be placed in his father’s mouth at his burial. This fulfills a vision Seth has in Eden: Seth:

Cherub, angel of the God of grace, In the tree I saw, High up on the branches, A little child newly born; And he was swathed in cloths, And bound fast with napkins.

Groping Golgotha  109 Cherub:

The Son of God it was whom thou sawest, Like a little child swathed. He will redeem Adam, thy father, With his flesh and blood too, When the time is come, And thy mother, and all the good people. (COM 803–14)

But the ecological conditions described in the shepherds’ plays are not yet fit enough for the flourishing of the Rod of Jesse. In the Towneley First Shepherds’ Play, Gyb laments that the dead “that hens are past” belonged to a more hospitable world. Now, stability is hard to find in a world of rough, changeable weather — “Now in hart, now in heyll, / Now in weytt, now in blast” — which has such disproportionate effects on the downtrodden that Gyb describes the whole as a “mekyll vnceyll,” that is, a “great misfortune” (TFSP 5–8). Conditions are even worse in the Towneley Second Shepherds’ Play, where Coll describes a landscape afflicted by a deluge of biblical proportions: “Was neuer syn Noe floode / Sich floodys seyn” (TSSP 183–84). The desolation of the shepherds’ plays’ wild moors and muddy wolds, along with the grim “Golgotha” referenced in the Chester play, has not yet seen the prophecied tree sprout from its roots. As foretold in the book of Isaiah’s messianic prophecy, the land first needs improvement before the Rod of Jesse can flower:16 The vois of a crier in desert, Make ye redi the weie of the Lord, make ye riytful the pathis of oure God in wildirnesse. Ech valey schal be enhaunsid, and ech mounteyn and litil hil schal be maad low; and schrewid thingis schulen be in to streiyt thingis, and scharpe thingis schulen be in to pleyn weies. And the glorie of the Lord schal be schewid, and ech man schal se togidere, that the mouth of the Lord hath spoke. The vois of God, seiynge, Crie thou. And Y seide, What schal Y crie? Ech fleisch is hei, and al the glorie therof is as the flour of the feeld. The hei is dried vp, and the flour felle doun, for the spirit of the Lord bleew therynne. Verely the puple is hey; the hey is dried vp, and the flour felle doun; but the word of the Lord dwellith with outen ende. (Isa. 40:3–8)17

Isaiah’s teleological vision of reordering the wild landscape into a productive space fit for the coming of a messiah is caught up in the aims of an anthropocentric economy. Like the plays’ shepherds, the book of Isaiah poignantly situates humans under judgment in an

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unstable wasteland in which human flesh is equated with feeble hay.18 The Wycliffite translation of the Latin faenum as “hei,” that is, hay or animal fodder, suggests that on the material plane, people are constituted of the same stuff as the animals in the field — products of the earth. Isaiah’s ecological vision sees the heaths of Israel much in the same way that the Chester playwright and the Wakefield Master see the barren ground of their Cheshire and Yorkshire environs. But under the Lord’s directive, as ordered in the second half of the book of Isaiah, humans and sheep will, together, transform the unproductive landscape into fertile soil; the desolate land will be restored to life. As Andrew McRae extensively details, the book of Isaiah was often cited in the pamphlet debates as an authority against enclosure and engrossment and for a well-ordered moral economy. But, as McRae points out, what was best for the soil, the economy, the laboring class, and the landowning class was a hotly contested issue: “The discourse of [soil] improvement not only challenged the orthodoxies of moral economics, but itself erected a powerful new set of values, which would underpin the consolidation of capitalism in both country and city.”19 Despite the objection in Isaiah 5:8 to the engrossment of estates, Isaiah’s promise that “Ech valey schal be enhaunsid” calls to mind the agricultural development that occurred across the northern landscapes, as enclosure and engrossment sought to increase productivity from common pastures. Just as the rural hinterlands of the Cheshire and Yorkshire foodsheds were being converted from common fields and tillage to more profitable enclosed pasture, so Isaiah forecasts a divinely sanctioned, improving ecological destiny for the land of Israel. The TFSP begins with Gyb mourning the loss of his sheep to a plague of murrain. He then concocts a new plot to bring order to this hostile landscape that threatens his survival: Now if hap will grynde, God from his heuen Send grace! To the fare will I me, To by shepe, perdé, And yit may I multyplyé, For all this hard case.

(TFSP 59–65)

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As if he is writing himself into Isaiah’s prophecy, Gyb, one crier on a lonely landscape, resolves to realize the economic potential of the pastoral ecosystem. What Gyb does not recognize, however, are the ploughmen who envision a different purpose for the land. John Horne presents a serious obstacle to Gyb’s plan: there is a town already standing where Gyb imagines sheep should be grazing! Thus, the play exposes the central anxieties concerning the forced depopulation of rural villages and brings to the fore two different visions for the agricultural future of the wolds and who should receive priority in rural communities — humans or sheep. Not only are the economic futures of Gyb and John at stake, the play also raises the central question of how local communities will be fed and who will suffer the consequences of agricultural development. Gyb seeks to multiply his flock, while John Horne expresses concern for the poor husbandmen growing corn. When John Horne sees Gyb, he quickly admonishes his rival for trampling his crops: How, Gyb, goode morne! Wheder goys thou? Thou goys ouer the corne! Gyb, I say, how!

(TFSP 118–21)

Upon discovering that Gyb is on his way to buy sheep, John Horne grows even more concerned about the fate of the common tillage: Nay, not so! What, dreme ye or slepe? Where shuld they go? Here shall thou none kepe.

(TFSP 147–50)

He cannot fathom that one would prioritize sheep over corn, but Gyb grows even more insistent, saying, “I wyll pasture my fe / Wheresoeuer lykys me; / Here shall thou theym se” (TFSP 153–55). They are so far from accord here that when John Horne demands “Not oone shepetayll / Shall thou bryng hedyr,” Gyb responds by saying that he will purchase a rather large flock of 100 sheep (TFSP 157–60). These tensions were common as the landscape evolved from the late medieval through the early modern period.20 As sheep were herded up and down the sheep walks that ran between winter and summer pastures and

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crisscrossed the landscape from rural estates to market towns, pastoral husbandmen inevitably came into conflict with ploughmen. Nevertheless, despite the competition for tilling and pasturing space, the two types of agriculture depended on each other: the ploughmen depended on flocks’ manure and the herdsmen needed pasturage on ploughmen’s land following the harvest.21 This feedback loop consequently changed the relationship among soil, sheep, and humans as shepherds and ploughmen competed for the same land. The sheep altered the pastoral ecosystem through manuring and improving soil fertility, mowing grasses, and by providing impetus to plant more fodder crops. In the view of the proponents of land improvement, everybody would win. Thomas Tusser, for example, praises enclosure and points to agricultural success stories in Essex and Suffolk where, Tusser says, enclosure and sheep-corn husbandry was widely practiced: Example (if doubt ye do make) by Suffolk & Essex go take. More plentie of Mutton & biefe, corne, butter & cheese of the best, More wealthe any where (to be briefe) more people, more handsome & prest. where finde ye? (go searche any coest) than there, where enclosure is moest More worke, for the laboring man, as well in the towne as the fielde. Or thereof (deuise if ye can) more profit, what countreis do yelde?22

In Norfolk, however, Tusser indicates that tillers and pasturers are not able to cooperate to the despair of all: drovers destroy corn by tramping herds through fields, while covetous farmers leave gates open on the enclosed fields: What speake I of commoners bye, With drawing all after a lyne, So noying the corne, as it lye, with cattle, with sheepe & with swine. when all is bestowed the cost, looke halfe of the same to be lost.

Groping Golgotha  113 The flocks, of the lordes of the soyle, do yerely the winter corne wrong, The same in a manner they spoyle, with feeding so lowe & so long.23

The “lordes of the soyle” — a common epithet for the owners of estates and their flocks of sheep — are limited in their sovereignty without the cooperation of the laborers, animals, corn, and land that comprise the pastoral ecosystem.24 To unlock the latent potential of the soil, the agronomist must nurture these productive relationships or risk draining the earth of its vitality. The produce of this economy is evident in both the Chester Shepherds’ Play and the Towneley First Shepherds’ Play, each of which features elaborate feast scenes in which the husbandmen gorge on an array of local foodstuffs. The variety and quantity of food that the shepherds consume give some hint of the food producers, animals, plants, good weather, and good soil on which the foodshed depends. The shepherds’ feasts are indicative of the vast interconnectedness of the late medieval local food economy. Trowle, the servant boy in the Chester Shepherds’ Play, notes that the food is itself stained by the earth on which the shepherds sit. When Trowle refuses to try his masters’ sauce, he points out the filthiness of their board: Nay the dyrte is soe deepe, stopped therin for to steepe; and the the grubbes theron do creepe at whom at thy howse.

(CSP 213–16)

The meal cannot be rid of the fields from which it came. The manured pasture is present “deepe” within this meal, a muck that exudes from the heart of the shepherds’ foodstuffs. The ecological relations between eater and eaten are entangled in a complex and dirty web. Like Bernard of Clairvaux and Fitzherbert’s reminders about humans and their origins as the slime of the earth, Trowle maintains continuity between food and soil, consumption and production, and eater and eaten. That this servant boy seems to belong as much to the sixteenth century as he does to the first century demonstrates that there are still injustices that need to be attended to on earth. The prophecy of Isaiah — in which the hostile moors and wolds would be “enhaunsid”

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for the coming of a messiah — did not end the worries of agricultural laborers in Tudor England. Order and justice did not arise in the pastoral ecosystem after all. Engrossment and enclosure persisted; wage inequality and poverty remained; expanding flocks of sheep continued to have priority over the rural villages. A moral economy remains a remote miraculous possibility at the conclusion of these plays, only possible with the arrival of a savior (once again). The agricultural “improvers” redeveloped England’s rural landscapes and yet the inequality on pastures amplified. The Kentish ballad “Now a Dayes” (ca. 1520) reflects how agro-economic reforms of the sixteenth century favored land development over spiritual well-being: The townes go down, the land decayes; Off cornefeyleds, playne layes; Gret men makithe now a days A shepecott in the church. The places that we Right holy call, Ordeyned ffor christyan buriall Off them to make an ox stall thes men be wonders wyse. Commons to close and kepe; Poor folk for bred [to] cry & wepe; Towns pulled downe to pastur shepe: this ys the new gyse!25

The sentiment of this ballad reflects discontent with changes in land use across England. Agricultural policies converted cemeteries and churchyards into spaces for agricultural production and left bodies buried in the earth untended by prayer. Sacred spaces were no longer enclosed for anchorites but for sheep.26 Looking to reclaim these desecrated landscapes, the conclusion to the Chester and Towneley shepherds’ plays sees the shepherds still dreaming of the resacralized soil that was promised to them. While all three plays suggest that the shepherds will become evangelists singing their joyous news, the Chester Shepherds’ Play provides the shepherds with the most specific itineraries for their future vocations. The playwright sends them from the Bethlehem manger back to England’s droveways: says Harvye, From London to Lowth such another shepperd I wott not where is.

Groping Golgotha  115 Both frend and cowth, God grant you all his blys.27

(CSP 685–88)

By bringing their message to the people of England, the shepherds undertake a mission to see Isaiah’s prophecy realized anew. The shepherds’ plays offer an alternative to the interpreters who view the plays’ representation of agriculture as petty earthly concerns erased by the promise of salvation that follows.28 However, following Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour’s discussions of the hybridity of culture and nature, it would be reductive to push the shepherds’ plays’ representation of sheep, manure, and composted soil into a category of the ecological substance without significance or into a category of the theological significance without substance. What obtained in theatrical space was a convocation of several species of material: human, animal, plant, abiotic earth. This is to conceive of theater akin to what Bruno Latour calls the “Parliament of Things”: a legislative body in which theology and ecology can be discussed together, at once, without either achieving priority over the other. Latour argues that the resolution of ecological dramas can only occur when “natures are present, but with their representatives, scientists [or husbandmen] who speak in their name” and when “societies [or religious institutions] are present, but with the objects [sheep, grass, soil] that have been serving as their ballast from time immemorial.”29 The pastores of the shepherds’ plays are prime candidates to convene this theatricalized meeting of substance and significance. These plays examine the cultural function of ovine metaphors and the material bases for those metaphors side by side. As Julian Yates argues, reading the multiplicity of meanings for the sheep “means regarding the whole network of associations, the relays across time and across different registers that constitute persons and things — all considered now as hybrids.”30 Because these plays are grounded in the economy and ecology of Cheshire and West Riding pastures, the setting cannot be completely conscripted into a symbolic pattern in which sheep and pasture only have meaning in terms of ecclesiastic metaphor. Nor can we say grass and soil exist entirely outside human meaning in the realm of “nature.” The pastoral ecosystem becomes a vessel for human meaning, but — and this is critically important — that meaning is inextricably bound up in the complex

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preexisting relationships the soil, sheep, and humans have with the economy and ecology of the fields. We must remind ourselves that the holy symbolism of husbandry in the Bible, as recorded in the books of Genesis, Isaiah, Micah, the Psalms, Proverbs, and the Gospels, is itself founded on the role of tillage and pasturage in the ecology and economy of ancient Judea.31 Without the slimy manured ground, no ecclesiastic metaphor is possible. The plays’ religious symbolism grows from the ground up. Spiritual significance in the shepherds’ plays depends upon intimate knowledge of sheep — real sheep that urinate and defecate, whose warm breath, milk, skin, and flesh nurtures human and non­ human alike. As companion species on the pasture, all of the participants in the shepherds’ plays are co-constituted from the same soil. The Wycliff book of Isaiah imagines flesh as “hei” (or as the Douay-Rheims and King James Bible more famously put it, “All flesh is grass”) in order to bring humans back down to earth (Isa. 40:6). There is an invocation of the pastoral food web here as well — animal flesh is made of grass. All flesh belongs to the metamorphic chain of the food web: the sheep ingest grass, humans ingest sheep, and humans are “fed” back into the earth through the processes of burial and manuring. The acts of eating central to these plays — sheep “grassyd to the kne,” shepherds feasting on mutton, and humans devoured in dykes — point to an idea of ecology as a multispecies communion. Husbandry, as an ethics of care and a practice of neighborliness to the nonhuman, means balancing interests across the ecosystem: care for the soil, care for the grass, care for the sheep, care for the humans. By practicing attentiveness to the world, the husbandman can improve the productivity between humans and nonhumans on the pasture.

6 Winstanley and Postrevolutionary Soil Keith M. Botelho

But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. — Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Gerrard Winstanley’s popular reception, not to mention his established critical reputation, identifies him as a radical social reformer, the central figure behind the short-lived Digger movement, which began on St. George’s Hill in the months following the death of King Charles I. Recently, however, there has been an important revisioning of Winstanley as he has begun to attract attention for his environmental concerns.1 Part of this shift can be traced to Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s 1975 film Winstanley, which is clearly in dialogue with the countercultural elements that were central to the eightyear period in which it was filmed (1966–74). The film establishes a basis for seeing Winstanley as both a social and eco-reformer who put his land-based platform into action. Brownlow’s aim was “complete authenticity,” attempting to capture the spirit of these “simple socialists” by shooting in black and white and as close to St. George’s Hill as possible (since the hill where the digging first began ironically became, in the twentieth century, part of an exclusive private living community).2 The film’s powerful wide-angle shots of the landscape 117

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deftly capture Winstanley’s insistence in his writings that soil was not merely a secondary concern to his platform but, rather, it was indeed the free use of the land that mattered. In addition to the shots of the Digger community actively working the land, the filmmakers also capture panoramic sweeps of the countryside, showing how the soil was a central component of the Diggers’ livelihood. Of note in the film is the omnipresence of rain, calling to mind the materiality of the soil and the exchange of properties once it becomes wet. Mud is a reality in the film, and the long shots of rain and wet soil remind the viewer of the continual environmental hardships endured by the Diggers during their utopian experiment. Furthermore, the film insists that the struggle for the right use of England’s soil is central to Winstanley’s platform of political resistance and reform. In bridging political and ecological concerns, Winstanley anticipates what today we might call a “brown” interpretation of the Digger experiment — an interpretation aided by Andrew McRae’s observation that Winstanley “sought to bind this principle of social justice for the commoners to contemporary arguments for agrarian ­improvement.”3 I want to begin by making a case for a brown cultural studies by which we might better understand Winstanley’s soil-based program for restoring England. First, we must take into consideration that blue and green approaches populate early modern ecocritical study. As Vin Nardizzi outlines, “Sustainability’s official badge is green, and in our cultural moment this badge functions as shorthand for environmentalism’s goals.”4 Dan Brayton acknowledges that “the color green has become the totemic color for popular environmentalism as well as for ecocritical enquiry.”5 Furthermore, Steve Mentz discusses at length what he calls “blue cultural studies,” a form of criticism that “takes seriously the place of the ocean in early modern history and culture.”6 Yet there needs to be a space for brown in the spectrum of environmental readings of the early modern period. But what exactly would a brown cultural studies look like? A brown cultural studies forces us to look down, to see and feel the soil below our feet, to engage with the materiality of the ground — its distinct smell, its transformation by rain into mud, its displacement when overturned, its relationship to humans. Taking the ground seriously in its various material forms is one way to establish brown as a way to read early modern culture.

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In advocating for a brown cultural studies, we can follow Bruce Smith’s view in The Key of Green that “green is not a thing; it is a relationship.”7 In Prismatic Ecology, Steve Mentz, in his chapter “Brown,” writes, “Brown is the color of intimate and uncomfortable contact between human bodies and the nonhuman world” for humans are entangled with brown in the world, and thinking brown “pushes us into hybrid spaces that span living and nonliving matter.”8 Mentz describes “an ecological order beyond green harmonies,” one that often unsettles and challenges green fictions and refuses boundaries, a brown ecology in which “the living can never escape mixture with the nonliving.”9 Soil made history10 — blue, green, and brown worlds existed simultaneously beyond the crowded London streets, but in 1649 it was brown that mattered, and the specificity of the historical moment colored how the actors on St. George’s Hill perceived the world. The soilscape thus comes into focus in this postrevolutionary moment. In “taking seriously” the soil as a mode of criticism, nuancing discussions of land to focus in on the specificity of soil, we can look anew at the period from the ground up. The act of digging, rich with parallels to the georgic tradition and laden with radical potential, prioritized the land, returning Winstanley and the Diggers to vibrant matter, alive with its own potentialities. The soil animates the activism of the Diggers above ground, and their digging, their turning over the soil (which Winstanley took pains to justify through Scripture and through recent historical shifts), reconnects us with a mid-seventeenthcentury moment that sought to restore England through an intimate relationship with the earth. Winstanley and the Diggers were no green environmentalists but, rather, brown postrevolutionary radicals who understood that the restoration of England must begin in the soil. On Sunday April 1 (or by some accounts April 8) 1649, some two months after King Charles I was beheaded, the digging on St. George’s Hill commenced. What has been called “post–civil war sectarian radicalism” was certainly a set of actions of the political moment.11 In Christopher Hill’s landmark study of popular mid-seventeenthcentury radical ideas and groups, The World Turned Upside Down, he details how the Diggers’ actions were “a symbolic assumption of ownership of the common lands” but were also part of a larger trend

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of anti-enclosure and activist movements during the upheaval of the 1640s.12 From 1649 to 1652 (even though their experiment lasted a little over a year), the Diggers, led by Winstanley, composed 13 texts detailing their platform, which sought to “justifie our act of digging upon that hill.”13 Such pamphlets, which according to Robert Watson emerged in a culture attuned to reproducing and recovering an Edenic state, “contrasted recent enclosure controversies and urban dystopia with a lost organic community.”14 Yet the reform advocated by the Diggers was decidedly not seeking to return to Eden or to a golden age; rather, their activity in cultivating the soil moves beyond pastoral, which Peter Lindenbaum notes centers on a type of life that is “essentially inactive,”15 and adopts the language of georgic, which Anthony Low claims is a mode that “stresses the value of intensive and persistent labor against hardships and difficulties.”16 Winstanley and his followers embraced a social attitude toward eco-reform whereby active labor might bring forth restoration. As Winstanley made clear, humanity’s curse is in “division, contention, covetousness, or quarrelling about the earth,” for “it is the earth that every one seeks after.”17 But the digging could also, as he details, be the source of England’s restoration in this post-monarchical moment, as he states, “I am assured of the righteousness of the work, and it shall take root in one place or other.”18 Winstanley’s intriguing idiom here, “to take root,” which dates to the 1530s, points to his idealism that this experiment would be replicated elsewhere. As Winstanley would encourage his followers almost a full year into the Digger experiment in 1650, “stand up for your freedom in the Land, by acting with Plow and Spade upon the Commons.”19 What some initially saw as a “foolish undertaking” quickly became “the talk of the whole Land.”20 Yet the Diggers endured arrests, slanders, beatings, burnings, vandalism, and other “malicious wickednesse” from local villagers, Cobham parish inhabitants, tenants, and landowners.21 In A New-Yeers Gift, a text written in December 1649 that sought “to reaffirm the religious underpinnings of the Digger programme,”22 Winstanley details the suffering the Diggers had endured since they first began to dig on St. George’s Hill in April of that year to plant parsnips, carrots, and beans. The “rude multitude” had taken away their tools and wood, cut to pieces their carts and wheels, spades

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and hoes, pulled down their houses, and “indeed at divers times besides we had all our Corne spoyled; for the Enemy was so mad, that they tumbled the Earth up and down, and would suffer no Corn to grow.”23 Clearly, the commoners’ free use of the wasteland is at stake here, but we should pause at the cruelty done to the people and their livelihood, the soil. To tumble the earth (the OED marks this usage as “to thrust roughly or forcibly; to toss or pitch”; “to handle roughly or indelicately”) signals a certain violence against the soil, an action anathema to the righteous cultivation that was central to the Diggers’ work and which they believed was the vehicle for England’s future.24 The central Digger rationale “that the Land of England, shall be a Common treasury to all English men without respect of persons”25 is articulated repeatedly in Winstanley’s writings, and this view extended from his denunciation of private property as unrighteous, a sentiment he first expressed in his January 26, 1649, publication, The New Law of Righteousness. Noting that there is “land enough,” he demonstrates repeatedly that the words and actions of the Diggers are “the very life of Scripture,” and that “this work of digging, to make England a free Common-wealth, is the life and marrow of the Parliaments cause.”26 Winstanley makes the case that all of England’s people, particularly the poor, have a right to the free use of the land, and since kingly power remains in the hands of the lords of manors who deny land to the people, England can’t be free until this bondage is undone. The poor have a right to the common land and deserve equality with everyone in England because of their losses and hardships in deposing the king and other significant sacrifices in the war, but their claim is also valid, Winstanley argues, because the “Law of Creation” makes it so.27 There is a thread in the Digger writings that hypocrisy reigns in England now that the king is dead. For instance, in An Appeal to the House of Commons, Winstanley, referencing clause 1 of the Solemn League and Covenant, writes, “For you swore in your National Covenant to endevour a Reformation according to the Word of God, which reformation is to restore us to that primitive freedom in the earth . . . that is to be a common treasury of livelihood to all, without working for hire, or paying rent to any.”28 England had a chance to reform, to be restored to righteousness by allowing the commons to be cultivated by the poor so they could produce their own sustenance.

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Unrighteousness and covetousness “[destroy] the Earth,” dividing it up for unequal use, for the “King of Righteousnesse . . . made the Earth for All.”29 Winstanley details how at first the whole earth was common, but corruption and unrighteous action led to divisions, or one man over another, dividing, buying, and selling the land while the “weaker brother [is] shut out of the Earth.”30 In An Appeal to All Englishmen (March 26, 1650), written at Little Heath in Cobham, where the burdens of the war were deeply felt and where Diggers had sympathetic allies, Winstanley repeats familiar Digger claims, summing up his rationale on the title page: “the work of digging upon the Commons, is not onely warranted by Scripture, but by the Law of the Commonwealth of England likewise.”31 This pamphlet, with its millennial and revolutionary contexts, insists upon action, and for Winstanley, restoration (restoring not the king but rather restoring the earth to a common treasury again) is only possible through active resolve — “the work of restoration” lies “not in words only, as Preachers do, but in action.”32 As he would say in An Humble Request, “this is the true badge of a hypocrite, to say, and not to do.”33 Winstanley realized the hypocrisy in inaction, noting, “Every one talks of freedome, but there are but few that act for freedome”34 and that the Diggers “do not merely speake and write” but “act and practice” their platform.”35 Saying and not doing, which Winstanley observed in England as promises to the common people were broken, was true hypocrisy. Throughout his Digger writings, and again with a focus on activity, Winstanley rails against human idleness, both of those who refuse to act on their words and of those who did not engage in the active cultivation of the land for the benefit of all humankind. Winstanley writes, “The Common Land hath lain unmanured all the dayes of his kingly and Lordly Power over you. . . . And the Land which would have been fruitfull with Corne, hath brought forth nothing but heath, mosse, furseys, and the curse.”36 In other words, barrenness emerges from inaction, fruitfulness from action. But this action is specifically tied to the soil. He implores the people of England to take Plow and Spade, and break up the Common Land, build you houses, sow Corne, and take possession of your own Land, which you have recovered out of the hands of the Norman oppressor . . . wil

Winstanley and Postrevolutionary Soil  123 you not rise up & act, I do not mean act by the Sword. . . . But come, take Plow and Spade, and build and plant, and make the wast Land fruitfull, that there may be no beggar or idle person among us; for if the wast Land of England were manured by her Children, it would become in a few yeares, the richest, the strongest, and flourishing land in the World.37

Righteous labor of the land — a reaction against the enclosure movement in England and the “harsh logic of colonialism”38 as practiced in Ireland in the 1640s — pointed a way to achieve economic, political, and ecological restoration. And it was England’s children — the laboring commoners — who would most benefit. Winstanley’s recurring motif of labor — as a pretext for common land rights, an instrument for revealing hypocrisy, and as a manifestation of both divine and legal approbation — gains further specificity through his frequent allusions to “manuring.” To manure (from the Anglo-Norman word mainoverer, to work or till the land) means to cultivate land or work the earth, improving the ground to make it fertile. Winstanley gives voice to the dispossessed who he believes are at the heart of England’s future, and the opportunity to cultivate the land would help to secure England in the wake of political upheaval. Throughout the Digger writings, the activity of manuring the land becomes a central tenet in this new law of righteousness, posing a challenge to ideas about private land ownership. Furthermore, Winstanley speaks of the activity in ways that mirror how they would manure the hill: till, plow, dig, break up, reap, plant, dress, thresh, improve, subdue. In his most well-known work, The Law of Freedom, Winstanley endorses numerous “bodily imployments,” hoping to plant the kingdom with those who are not idle. The platform endorses husbandry, the planting of the earth to make it fruitful, which includes “planting, dinging, dunging, liming, burning, grubbing, and right ordering of Land, to make it fit to receive seed, that it may bring forth a plentiful crop.”39 Active working of the land for the benefit of many, not merely possession of land for the benefit of a few, guided Winstanley’s pursuit of righteousness in this postrevolutionary moment — theirs was not revolutionary action but, rather, restorative action. The earth is to be acted upon, although it never loses its agency, for the fertility of the soil in order to benefit humankind as a common treasury was

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paramount. The Diggers, Winstanley insists, are “righteous Actors in the Earth.”40 In his August 26, 1649, work, A Watch-Word to the Citie of London, Winstanley recounts how he “took my spade and broke the ground upon George-hill in Surrey.”41 The ground of which Winstanley speaks and upon which he and the Diggers enacted what he called their “Works upon the Hill”42 is quite specific, not only located in an area that had seen its share of hardship but also one that had a tradition of radical activity. It was also, by many accounts, wasteland and infertile soil, and even in the first Digger pamphlet, Winstanley acknowledges the soil on St. Georges Hill to “be very barren.”43 But Winstanley, who reports he had a vision that God would make the land fruitful, pushes forward with his land-based initiative that emphasizes the biopolitical nature of soil. Winstanley’s platform begins in specificity on a particular hill and broadens out to encompass all of England, employing a rhetorical strategy of interchanging variations of the word “ground” throughout the Digger writings: • Land (“plant Corne upon the Commons and unnurtured land”) • Common (“our digging upon that barren Common hath done the Common good”) • Acre (“they have planted divers Acres of Wheat and Rie”) • Earth (“give thy free consent to make the Earth a Common Treasury”) • Heaths and wasteland (“This shewes, that the Commons, Heaths, and waste land that hath lain barren”)44 The “English Earth”45 to which Winstanley refers is at first a template for what he saw as a larger project in the world, although by the end of his first year he recalibrates this mission. Winstanley, in An Appeal to the House of Commons, directs their attention downward: “The maine thing you should look upon is the land . . . for one third part lies waste and barren.”46 The ground that is to be dug and manured is infertile land, not that of the private enclosures (although many of Winstanley’s writings rail against private property). Land, as he makes clear, is for everyone in England, but because the common land has been left unmanured, it is not useful. Referencing Jeremiah 25:33,

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Winstanley notes in A Declaration of the Bloudie and Unchristian Action that God would be “casting down the bodies of some that were proud oppressors to be as dung to the earth.”47 Winstanley would “trust the Spirit for a blessing”48 that poor soil would be fertilized by the bodies of their tormentors. Winstanley interestingly appeals to the nourishing power of Mother Earth in several works; such depictions, Andrew McRae notes, were “a commonplace of rural description”49 and, as Bonnie Lander Johnson shows in her essay in this volume, Richard II is similarly filled with maternal descriptions of the English soil. In The True Levellers Standard Advanced, Winstanley writes, “Therefore do not thou hinder the Mother Earth, from giving all her Children suck,” that “the poor may labour the wast Land, and suck the brests of their mother Earth, that they starve not.”50 The Digger platform emphasized the righteousness of having “food and raiment from the Earth, their Mother.”51 Yet Winstanley was not advocating for an unrestrained devouring of the fecund earth and its resources but, rather, seeking to “honor our Mother the earth, by labouring her in righteousnesse,” a sustainable form of activity with Virgilian echoes that would preserve the land and restore all of England’s people.52 Winstanley also notes that if no one would see the righteousness of the Digger cause, “then we appeale, to the Stones, Timber, and dust of the Earth you tread upon, to hold forth the light of this business, questioning not, but that Power that dwells every where, will cause light to spring out of darkness, and freedom out of Bondage.”53 These appeals to the nourishing power of the earth turn their gaze downward in recognition of the transformative potential of the soil to heal England in the aftermath of political upheaval and the ecological depredations of war. The Diggers also met with harsh conditions in 1649–50, as agriculture was impacted because of drought, severe winter, famine, and periods of rain.54 The heavy smell of dirt and mud must have registered daily with the Diggers, and the material manifestations of their hardships figure forth in Winstanley’s political writings. Mud features on few occasions, although the uses are significant. In A New-Yeers Gift, he writes, “but as your Government must be new, so let the Laws be new, or else you will run farther into the Mud, where you stick already, as though you were fast in an Irish Bogge.”55 Winstanley

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would argue that even though the king was beheaded, oppression still reigned because kingly power remained in the hands of lords of manors who abused the common people for pursuing righteous labor on common lands. Such self-love, he claims, should not “be-muddy your brain.”56 And in The Law of Freedom, he would again return to the mud, writing that Parliament should help the poor, for “surely those are blinde Eyes that lead the people into Bogs, to be entangled in Mud again, after they are once pulled out.”57 Bogs, as Hillary Eklund’s essay in this volume also discusses, represented the counter to more fertile land or ground that could yield nourishment to the people, and mud (in these cases the situation that Parliament and landowners of private property put common people in) was unrighteous ground that kept people in bondage, an impediment to achieving fruitful land for the benefit of all. In The Law of Freedom, Winstanley outlines how the earth was to be planted and reaped, with the fruits of the land carried to storehouses that are “Common Stock to every family.”58 He writes, “Every household shall keep all Instruments and tools for the tillage of the Earth, either for planting, reaping or threshing. Some households . . . shall keep Plows, Carts, Harrows, and such like: other households shall keepe Spades, Pick-axes, Axes, pruning hooks, and such like.”59 This array of tools was integral to the Diggers achieving their goals of bringing the earth into a community (see fig. 6.1). In the Digger texts, Winstanley refers to the plows, spades, plowshares, hoes, and pruning hooks that were central to their work but that were also a threat to landowners, as evidenced by the reports of the Diggers’ oppressors’ “unchristian-like abuse”60 that included breaking and damaging these tools. On numerous occasions, Winstanley, referencing Isaiah 2:4, mentions turning “Swords into Plough-shares, and Speares into Pruning-hooks.”61 He declares, “we shall not strive with sword and speare, but with spade and plow and such like instruments to make and barren and common lands fruitful.”62 The civil war, which brought about environmental degradation, was over in England, and Winstanley sees this moment as an opportunity to return to the land, exchanging the instruments of war for the implements of digging and manuring to bring the earth into a community and unite all Englishmen in love. Theirs was a nonviolent program that sought to “live quietly and in peace”63 and

Fig. 6.1  Walter Blith, The English Improuer Improued (London, 1652). Image courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC.

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restore God’s original creation and harmony after private property had brought forth division and war. Winstanley’s actions during this “brief episode in English history”64 were motivated by religious, economic, and political interests, yet underlying these were ecological concerns about cultivating wasteland. Winstanley, with his own brand of agrarian communism,65 championed the manuring of the commons, recognizing that longterm sustainability of the soil, not to mention the vitality of England, was at stake. Yet should we label Winstanley an early modern environmentalist? Does the Digger experiment anticipate the kind of ecoactivism associated with the land that we see, for instance, in recent debates about hydraulic fracturing of the ground in the United States? I would suggest that we might view Winstanley as a curator (from the Latin curatas, “to take care of”) of England’s commons and its poor and oppressed, a word that embraces both the religious connotations of the word meaning “spiritual guide” as well as meanings about the responsibility for the care of something. In order for Winstanley, a steward of the land, to “plant Righteousness”66 in this moment of social and political upheaval, he needed to turn England’s attention to the soil, the starting point for England’s restoration. After all, it was imperative for Winstanley to remind his readers that they were, in fact, “autochthones,”67 a people sprung from the soil they inhabited, and it was only natural to return to the soil once again.

7 Fertility versus Firepower Shakespeare’s Contested Soil Ecologies Randall Martin

The ecological health of farm soils became controversial for the first time in early modern England. Soil theorists and local farmers responded to the period’s unprecedented demographic and environmental impacts in ways that anticipate today’s debates about sustainable cultivation and biological diversity in the face of global climate change, industrial agriculture, desertification, and species loss. ­Shakespeare alludes to this emerging ecological awareness across many plays, but in Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2, he focuses particular attention on one major flashpoint: the state-sponsored expropriation of saltpeter — the main ingredient in gunpowder — from local farms in order to profit from a new global market in firearms and artillery. Framing his main story of the generational transfer of English dynastic power within an ecological narrative of the soil as living matter with physical needs and organic agency, Shakespeare juxtaposes the regenerative land ethic of georgic husbandry against gunpowder’s transnational destruction of regional soil integrity and community subsistence. I want to explore Shakespeare’s representation of these exploitative and conservationist developments first by outlining how natural and manmade pressures generated competition between increasing 129

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national food production and preserving the structural health of local soils. Early modern capitalism’s shift toward maximizing crop yields and revenue from arable land also made soil improvement and sustainability contentious issues. Shakespeare encodes their competing discourses in the agricultural details and fraternal rivalry of Orlando and Oliver in the opening scene of As You Like It. Because saltpeter was manufactured from manured earth, fertile soils became a source of commodifiable natural energy in the form of military matériel and national capital. But these new sources of imperial power clashed with local goals of boosting agricultural yields while safeguarding ecological resilience. Turning to parts 1 and 2 of Henry IV, the second section of my essay will examine their representation of new military-­industrial policies that clashed with agrarian and ecological revaluations of soils as a national resource requiring local stewardship. My final section will argue that Shakespeare wrote the conflicting ecologies of firepower and fertility into the dramatic opposition between warfare and husbandry in Henry IV, Part 2. His play questions the continuing relevance of the classical theory of a self-regulating balance between war and cultivation signified by the trope of swords-into-ploughshares. It implies that soils and landscapes destroyed by war are always cyclically revitalized by peacetime husbandry, thereby justifying the eventual resumption of war and condoning its inevitable overconsumption of natural resources and collateral destruction of human and animal lives. Looking forward to the cannon-enhanced but short-lived imperial triumphs of Henry V, Shakespeare suggests that gunpowder culture has introduced a new human-generated condition of ecological overreach and self-destructive risk. Ecological Pressures and Soil Resilience

Early modern discussions about soils were shaped by husbandry manuals that adapted practical farming advice from classical works such as Hesiod’s Works and Days, Varro’s Three Books on Agriculture, and Virgil’s Georgics to more northerly European environments.1 Hugh Plat and Gervase Markham also offered English readers nation-­building discourses of regional terrains and experimental techniques for soil improvement. Part 2 of Plat’s The Jewell House

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of Art and Nature (1594), entitled “Diuerse new sorts of Soyle not yet brought into any publique vse, for manuring both of pasture and arable ground,” developed an innovative program of soil management based on a two-pronged strategy of “Mucke-heapes” and “Marlepittes.” Composted dung, plant matter and other organic waste provide soils with “vegetative salts,” or nitrates.2 Variably colored marl, or lime-rich clay, contains what Plat calls (borrowing concepts and terminology from revolutionary French soil theorist, Bernard Palissy),3 “generative water,” which strengthens poorer soils and builds the physical substance of plants and trees.4 These methods understood the need to replace nutrients and minerals used by crops to safeguard the soil’s long-term biological health. Markham’s highly popular The English Husbandman (1613) likewise set out to match English soils and climates with particular crops and cultivation practices. These included biodynamic ley farming (allowing unsown land to generate “weeds and quicks” which would be ploughed under to build up soil nitrogen) and manuring.5 Prior to Plat and Markham, English husbandry discourse had long measured soil fertility and productivity in terms of “profit.” During the Middle Ages profit meant being rewarded with the fruits of the land as part of a spiritual and occupational contract with providence. As Andrew McRae has shown, local soils were understood to be a common “treasury” from which landlords, farmers, and laborers collectively benefited, and to which they claimed customary rights (Gerrard Winstanley’s Diggers mounted an effort to defend these rights in the mid-seventeenth century, as Keith M. Botelho discusses in his essay for this volume).6 Plat and Markham invoke this traditional land ethic when advocating georgic techniques of soil management for the “public weal.” In As You Like It, Corin has these benign meanings of “profit” in mind when he invites Rosalind, disguised as Ganymede, to consider buying the neglected sheep farm of Corin’s master: Go with me. If you like upon report The soil, the profit, and this kind of life, I will your very faithful feeder be, And buy it with your gold right suddenly.7

But the social and ethical associations of profit took more materialistic turns in the new Tudor land market, inaugurated by Henry VIII’s

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confiscation and selling-off of church lands. Soil was increasingly viewed as a private commodity that individuals ought to exploit for revenue-generating growth. Orlando mobilizes these functional valences to contrast his brother Jaques’s profit from a university education, which his elder brother, Oliver, has denied him, with his lowly upbringing among Oliver’s farmhands and animals: “call you that keeping for a gentleman of my birth, that differs not from the stalling of an ox? His horses are better bred, for besides that they are fair with their feeding, they are taught their manège, and to that end riders dearly hired. But I, his brother, gain nothing under him but growth, for the which his animals on his dunghills are as much bound to him as I” (1.1.8–15). Orlando resents being forced to cultivate what one might call the brown life of a husbandman instead of the golden one of a gentleman.8 Although the conventional values of As You Like It’s romance narrative justify his resentment, Shakespeare’s contemporary agrarian and ecological perspectives also question the primacy of those values. In a volume of essays that refracts ecocriticism into a heuristic spectrum beyond conventional “greenness,” Steve Mentz argues that brown is the emblematic color of soil fertility and terrestrial ecology: a hybrid shade of smelly dead matter and rich generative potential.9 Orlando is unable to recognize the mucky realities that nourish deepgreen riches — unlike, say, the formerly gold-plated Timon, who (in his characteristically bitter way) identifies the teeming earth as “a thief / That feeds and breeds by a composture stol’n / From gen’ral excrement” (Tim., 4.3.442–44). Hamlet satirizes the complicated social, aesthetic, and environmental identities of cultivated brownness when he describes Osric — whose “water-fly” fashions depend on income from “much land, and fertile” — as “spacious in the possession of dirt” (Ham., 5.2.84–90).10 Unconsciously, Orlando’s complaints reveal the productivity of Oliver’s mixed-use farm, which boasts abundant crops and well-caredfor animals and employees. (Contrast the poor carriers’ diseased horses and starved turkeys in suburban London [2H4, 2.1.9–10, 25–26.]) The root of Oliver’s prosperity is Plat’s strategy of regular manuring to maintain soil fertility, implied by Orlando’s contemptuous references to his brother’s dungheaps. (The marl component of Plat’s program is implied by the “felden,” or cultivated terrain of Oliver’s farm in the

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mixed landscape Forest of Arden, whose arable soils were composed of marl.) Similar to the methods of organic farming today, vitalizing fields and orchards with composted vegetable and animal waste sustained the soil’s vitality and prevented structural degradation. (For discussion of compost as a breakdown and re-assembly of waste that sustains both organic and cultural creativity, see Frances Dolan’s essay in this volume.) Shakespeare used such down-to-earth details to contemporize Oliver’s original counterpart Saladyne in Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde as a character of divided social and ecological identities. On the one hand, Oliver is the proverbially oppressive older brother and anti-social landlord of biblical narrative, romance fiction, and agrarian complaint literature.11 His privatizing enclosure of his family’s and neighboring lands signals his grasping and hoarding tendencies. On the other hand, Oliver is Plat’s and Markham’s model farmer, using bio-regenerating and bio-diversifying techniques such as composting and manuring, crop rotation, and integrated animal and agricultural husbandry to boost yields while also balancing the long-term health of his soils, plants, and animals — including his human animals. Oliver’s paradoxical behaviors reflect contested early modern ideologies about land use and soil stewardship that were being reshaped by a nascent capitalist economy and Calvinist revaluations of profitable self-­interest. In dramatic terms, Oliver’s residual and emergent subjectivities suggest a psychologically fluid character who is open to later change and conversion. Early modern audiences would have judged Oliver’s thriving husbandry partly in relation to their lived experience of unprecedented environmental and ecological pressures on food production. One of these was a cooling climate and volatile weather. England and the rest of northern Europe were living through what today’s climatologists call the “Little Ice Age.” Between 1300 and 1850 England’s average temperatures fell when the regular oscillation between low pressure over Iceland and high pressure over the Azores reversed.12 Winters were wet and icy and “summer’s lease” was cool and brief, resulting in the disruption of normal seasonal expectations. In Henry IV, Part 2, Gloucester remarks on these conditions, which are again becoming familiar in an era of human-aggravated climate change and winters like that of 2013–14 in England and Wales, which was

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the wettest in 200 years: “The seasons change their manners, as the year / Had found some months asleep and leaped over them” (2H4, 4.3.123–24).13 When this and other late Elizabethan plays were being performed in London’s open-air theaters, frigid and flooded conditions were devastating English harvests and animal populations,14 as Shakespeare lamented in Titania’s “climate change” speech in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2.1.81–117). On-the-body experiences of extreme weather and dearth also intensified spectators’ responses to Shakespeare’s depictions of starvation, cold, and homelessness (e.g., Jack Cade in Henry VI, Part 2, Adam and Orlando in As You Like It, Poor Tom in King Lear, the people in Coriolanus, the citizens of Tarsus in Pericles).15 A second profound challenge to soil integrity and community subsistence was the need to feed increasing numbers of people from limited arable land. Historians estimate that England’s population grew from two to five million between 1500 and 1660, and from three to four million between 1559 and 1603.16 These changes reversed the late Middle Ages’ decline caused by the Black Death and the foreign and civil wars dramatized in Shakespeare’s English history plays. Population anxieties centered on towns and cities, and above all London, which grew rapidly over Shakespeare’s lifetime through migration from the provinces and immigration from abroad.17 Boosting food production and expanding arable land through marling, manuring, and other soil-improvement techniques became key goals for English husbandry writers and their gentry and yeoman readers (such as Shakespeare in Stratford, owner of two gardens and two orchards at New Place, and cultivated fields at Welcombe).18 Their concerns were shared by Elizabeth’s counselors, albeit more for political reasons. During the worst periods of dearth, as John Walter and Keith Wrightson have shown, government officials were prepared to tolerate certain levels of social protest in the provinces after food and fuel was diverted to London in order to forestall more menacing disorder there.19 Cascading climate and demographic disturbances made early modern men and women keenly aware that human survival in either towns or the countryside depended on what modern ecologists call carrying capacity. This is the ability of a defined area to produce

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enough resources to meet the needs of its inhabitants for food, fuel, and shelter without causing long-term environmental imbalances and degradation.20 A related concept is ecological footprint: the total amount of land and water required in a given area “to produce all the resources consumed, and to assimilate all the wastes produced” by that population.21 When yields of crops, wood, and other commodities fell short of local carrying capacities, it became apparent that ecological footprints were difficult to shrink, and that soil productivity and integrity had to be actively managed for both human and non­ human benefit. In the late sixteenth century Forest of Arden, in which Shakespeare partly set As You Like It, growing numbers of people struggling with poor harvests caused common arable land to be overexploited and soils to become eroded. This temporarily reduced human fertility as well as agrarian fecundity.22 In the face of this original “tragedy of the commons,”23 new national policies such as the introduction of convertible husbandry sought to conserve England’s arable soils. An early form of traditional ley farming and crop rotation, convertible husbandry gave landlords the right to enclose biologically exhausted common land to give it an opportunity to regain “heart.” In practice this meant allowing its soil to revert to grassland or to lie fallow for several years before returning it to cultivation. During this “up” period, unfortunately, landless commoners and small-scale tenant farmers lost their customary ground for subsistence agriculture. This became a life-and-death issue for many and provoked violent protests such as the 1607–08 Midland riots, which Shakespeare alludes to in Coriolanus. While the intentions of convertible husbandry were ecologically progressive, in practice they created intractable conflicts between short-term productivity and long-term resilience. Resilience is the structural capacity of an ecosystem to absorb and recover from environmental disturbances — such as the early modern climate and demographic pressures I have been outlining. Recovery does not mean returning to exactly the same conditions as in the past or to some pristine state of nature. It means regaining the relative stability that allows for continuing natural and human impacts while safeguarding an ecosystem’s nutrient cycles and microbiological diversity, which is what early modern commentators meant by the

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soil’s “heart.”24 Resilience diffuses ecological shocks so that biological integrity is preserved and openness to evolutionary adaptation continues. Implicitly it establishes ecological thresholds beyond which severe disturbances and/or degradation can destabilize an ecosystem and cause its regime to shift catastrophically, such as when topsoil erodes to the point of becoming desert (e.g., the direction Caliban’s island may be going because of Prospero’s aggressive tree-felling, despite the isle’s temperate climate [Tmp., 2.1.37–45]).25 The specifically humangenerated dilemma of compromising ecological thresholds to a point that stops short of total catastrophe yet causes irreparable structural damage is a condition sociologist Ulrich Beck calls “reflexive modernization.” Beck posits that capitalized wealth-generation produces environmental boomerang effects. This is because market-oriented economies tolerate certain levels of degradation while their hyperconsuming societies consent to being exposed to allegedly contained or manageable health hazards. Reflexive risk illuminates the irreducible trade-off between short-term economic gain and long-term overexploitation that characterizes gunpowder’s threats to soil fertility and ecological resilience in Henry IV, Part 2, and Henry V. Black-Earth Ecologies and the Powers of Nitrogen

The nascent gunpowder economy overthrew the traditional calculus of soil fertility, crop growth, and terrain resilience by introducing state-mandated levels of resource extraction, over and above heightened damage by firearms and cannons themselves. This was because the raw material for the domestic production of saltpeter (potassium nitrate, KNO3) consisted of composted animal and human waste, which farmers used to replace the nutrients and minerals depleted by cultivated crops and fruit trees.26 The most important of these elements is nitrogen. It creates the amino acids plants need to produce chlorophyll, which converts solar energy and carbon dioxide into oxygen.27 Soil bacteria produce usable nitrogen, or nitrates, from decomposing plant and animal matter. Sustainable husbandry practices such as ley farming and manuring strengthen the nitrogen cycle. Although early modern soil theorists and husbandry innovators such as Palissy, Plat, and Markham did not fully understand the chemistry of these

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processes, they knew from georgic literature and empirical experience that recycling organic matter was crucial for maintaining soil health, productivity, and ecosystem resilience.28 Creating a national guns-versus-butter conflict, governmentcommissioned saltpetermen built niter (potassium nitrate) beds and boiling factories near plentiful wood and water supplies. They then proceeded systematically to search local farms to dig up waste-drenched earth or compost to a depth of six to eight feet.29 The saltpetermen were supposed to fill in holes they had made and repair the buildings they had damaged, but evidently they often failed to do so. Plat attested to their “dayly offenses, in the breaking up of stables, barnes, sellers, &.”30 They also did not pay for what they took since farmers were supposed to be contributing a strategic resource to national security. Disturbances to birds, cattle, and other creatures did not matter. The saltpetermen loaded up the black earth in barrels and hired local carters to transport it to county works, which produced one to two bushels of saltpeter from 30 tons of earth, as well as noxious smells.31 If farmers or carters protested, the saltpetermen coerced them on the authority of their royal patents. Once the locality’s resources had been exhausted, the saltpeter men moved on. Their actions turned the productive fertility of the nation’s soils into a battleground of competing social interests, cultural values, and temporal rhythms: public and private, local and (trans)national, ecological and commercial, cyclical and developmental.32 Plat recognized saltpeter’s aggravating impacts on the period’s shortages and rising prices. In A Discoverie of Certaine English Wants (1595) he proposed shrinking saltpeter’s environmental footprint in two ways: using artificially made coal-balls to reduce the large quantities of precious local wood used in the peterworks’ rendering factories; and recommending an underexploited source of “multiplying earth” to supply the nitrate-rich soil for saltpeter extraction.33 Plat was coy about identifying this new source, but he hinted at it more directly the following year in Sundrie New and Artificiall Remedies against Famine (1596). In a section titled “A new and extraordinary meanes for the inriching of arable grounds,” Plat tried to one-up John Harington’s invention of the water closet in A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, Called the Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596) whose

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preprint publication in manuscript had excited more interest than Plat’s pamphlets. Plat’s “multiplying earth” was night soil from privies. Contemporary evidence indicates saltpetermen had already cottoned on to this source. Squeamishness about using human excrement (whose “fecopoetics” in Paradise Lost David Goldstein explores in this volume) may partly explain why Plat’s coal-balls also failed to secure the royal patent, or “Privilege,” he was seeking for them. He finally abandoned hope by publishing a direct description of their economizing and pollution-reducing benefits in A New, Cheape and Delicate Fire of Cole-Balles, wherein Seacole Is by the Mixture of Other [cheaper] Combustible Bodies, both Sweetened and Multiplied (1603). For the present purposes, Plat’s interventions were significant in several ways. They recognized that the saltpeter industry’s resource footprint was excessive and unsustainable, literally undermining urgent local needs for food and fuel, and paradoxically dependent on conserving black-earth husbandry. For Plat, saltpeter’s ecological value and public benefits in the ground outweighed its military-industrial value as gunpowder. As the agents of state expropriation, the saltpetermen’s vexations paralleled the forced impressment of farm workers by corrupt army recruiters such as Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 2, and the related disruptions to community food production and personal welfare. Mouldy protests that being forced to become a soldier will mean abandoning his crops and impoverishing his wife: “My old dame will be undone now for one to do her husbandry and her drudgery . . . she is old and cannot help herself” (3.2.111–12, 229). Thomas Middleton and William Rowley likewise associated the saltpetermen with extortion. In A Fair Quarrel (1617), the cynical materialist Russell arranges to displace his daughter Jane’s penniless but secretly betrothed lover, Fitzallen, in favor of the rich Cornish farmer, Chough, by having Fitzallen arrested on trumped-up charges of debt. Russell ambushes him by having two sergeants arrive — supposedly more discreetly — in disguise as saltpetermen.34 He makes a show of having to admit them but also being able to fob them off using the same expedient as Mouldy’s better-off neighbors in Henry IV, Part 2: Servant: Russell:

Sir, there’s a couple desire speedily to speak with you. A couple, sir, of what? Hounds? or horses?

Fertility versus Firepower  139 Servant:

Men, sir; gentlemen or yeomen, I know not which, [sic] But the one sure they are. Russell: Hast thou no other description of them? Servant: They come with commission, they say, sir, to taste of your earth; if they like it, they’ll turn it into gunpowder. Russell: O, they are saltpetre-men; before me, And they bring commission, the king’s power indeed! They must have entrance; but the knaves will be bribed: There’s all the hope we have in officers; They were too dangerous in a commonwealth, But that they will be very well corrupted; Necessary varlets! Servant: Shall I enter in, sir? Russell: By all fair means, sir, And with all speed, sir; give ’em very good words To save my ground unravished, unbroke up. [Exit Servant] Mine’s yet a virgin earth; the worm hath not been seen To wriggle in her chaste bowels, and I’d be loth A gunpowder fellow should deflower her now.35

By “virgin” Russell presumably means fields that have been freshly manured but not ploughed to turn up the worms in their soil. Although he is dissembling to set up his trap for Fitzallen, Russell expresses a common sentiment in equating the saltpetermen’s digging with the rape of his soil (a view confirmed by Shakespeare; see below. Russell’s control over his property and daughter are obviously related). Although Russell feigns respect for the crown’s distant authority, he feels no compunction about publically evading it. Farmers neither rich nor complacent enough to bribe their way out of having their fields or barns ransacked complained loudly to government officials and MPs. As David Cressy observes, their voices emerged “from all points of the ideological spectrum, from champions of parliament . . . to arch-royalists.”36 Saltpeter undermined traditional community relations and patronage networks by establishing new state-driven priorities and economic hierarchies. Intensive resource depletion and industrial labor converted plant and animal waste — proverbially worthless to all but farmers, as Shakespeare’s numerous “dunghill” insults attest — into a profitable new commodity for domestic investors, international traders, and militarizing

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nation-states.37 The abstraction of fertile soil made transnational footprints in local terrains and transferred organic energy into capitalized power.38 Saltpeter production thus represents an early example of what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call “deterritorialization,” or the multiscaled displacement of local relations by centralized authorities and globalized systems (e.g., export of gunpowder and armaments through the Ordnance Office in the Tower of London serving continental clients and gunpowder colonialism).39 Saltpeter’s asymmetrical competition with husbandry expanded England’s nitrogen footprint and overshot the supply of nitrate-rich soil within already stressed agricultural communities. Later in the seventeenth century these imbalances forced England to outsource the military’s ever-growing demands for saltpeter to off-shore production by an underclass in Bengal.40 Well before then, however, the national policy shift from fertility to firepower had been underway. Organic energy flowing through the nitrogen cycle was diverted into the combustible energy of gunpowder. Peter Whitehorne, writing the most popular book about saltpeter extraction in England during the period, understood enough about the nitrification process to advise readers that saltpeter should be optimally leached from composted soil when the latter was dry rather than wet; that is, when the nitrogen-fixing bacteria had completed their work and produced the most nitrate.41 (In their rush to seek out nitrate-rich soil, the saltpetermen didn’t bother to wait. Ironically, they treated the earth as inert, since this elided the ethics of confiscation.) But like other writers about gunpowder, Whitethorne was baffled about what gave the otherwise plain-looking salt its combustible power. Following the logic of humoral theory, saltpeter seemed to channel the dynamism of all four principal elements into something unique. Francis Bacon observed that the “crack and report” produced by “the nitre in gunpowder” originated in the “spirit of the earth.”42 The vitalism intuited by early modern natural philosophers is not far off from a modern understanding of the nitrogen cycle, since it is the soil nitrates enabling photosynthesis that allows solar energy to be exchanged into the plant growth that feeds terrestrial life.43 Since food webs correspond with ecosystems, including their detrital and regenerative networks, saltpeter extraction substituted the negative production of war and

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the flow regimes of global economics for still largely noncapitalized English agriculture. From a wider historical perspective, it replaced the resilience-enhancing biodiversity of regional terrains and ecosystems with the entropic relations of imperial conquest. These contending environmental, commercial, and political values were in play when farmers and landowners mounted combative challenges to the saltpetermen from the 1580s onward. In 1603 their dissent culminated in a nationwide protest. Local farmers took advantage of the queen’s death in that year to claim defiantly that the saltpetermen’s patents had lapsed. The patent holders petitioned the council that their activities were “a matter of Royall prerogative inseperablie [sic] belonging to the imperial crowne.”44 The new peace-promoting diplomacy of James I led to a temporary fall in demand for saltpeter that undermined the protesters’ efforts. But the profitable export trade continued, and by the 1620s the build-up to war with the Netherlands again overrode farmers’ renewed complaints. Henry IV, Part 1, echoes these protests in a humorously veiled ecological critique: Hotspur’s satirical report of an effete lord sent by King Henry to demand Hotspur’s prisoners. The dual-voiced sarcasm of the lord and Hotspur distances Shakespeare from appearing to comment directly on the saltpeter controversy, which — given its political relationship to national defense — might otherwise have spurred the Master of the Revels to censor the passage: Came there a certain lord, neat and trimly dressed . . . [Who talked] so like a waiting gentlewoman Of guns, and drums, and wounds, God save the mark! And telling me the sovereign’st thing on earth Was parmacity for an inward bruise, And that it was a great pity, so it was, This villainous saltpetre should be digged Out of the bowels of the harmless earth, Which many a good tall fellow had destroyed So cowardly, and but for these vile guns He would himself had been a soldier. (1H4, 1.3.32–63)

Modern editors pass over “villainous saltpetre,” perhaps assuming its hostility is connected to the prissy antimilitarism of the lord’s “chat.” Yet the incongruity between speaker and opinion is just one of the

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manifold ironies of this passage. The decidedly civilian courtier voices chronic grumbles by Elizabethan military writers about the displacement of hand-to-hand combat by more deadly and unromantic firearms, and, more generally, about the death of chivalry, against which Hotspur fights a rearguard action. But “villainous” also refers to the method of obtaining saltpeter by digging fertile soil out of the “harmless bowels of the earth” to supply the firepower for “these vile guns.” The lord parallels this kind of extraction with that of “parmecity,” or spermaceti, which he (half-?) facetiously recommends as a healing ointment “for an inward bruise” (1.3.57).45 Spermaceti was refined from the waxlike substance dug out of the heads of sperm whales. It provided a base for the pomades and perfumes that this brisk lord might have used himself.46 Ventriloquized by the dismissive Hotspur, the free-floating sarcasm of each speaker cancels the other out, leaving the critique of saltpeter production open to construction by contemporary audiences. The lord’s “many a good tall fellow” mimics the muscular language Hotspur uses to describe admired comrades. But Hotspur either does not recognize or rejects its ridicule of the hated saltpetermen, who destroyed fields and farms in the name of the martial chauvinism that Hotspur adores, and the profitable interests that Falstaff’s nickname (“Gunpowder Percy”) exposes in his hunger for battle glory. The tall fellows’ destruction was “cowardly” because there was nobody to defend the soil’s interests, as Elizabethan rural protesters did. As Shakespeare’s fictional and topical invention, the lord’s disparaging remarks about the saltpetermen serve to frame the canonical story of Prince Hal’s rise to power and French conquest in terms of the country’s ecological interests.47 They likewise announce new ecocritical challenges to chronicle history’s dominant concern with royal dynastic politics: Who stands up for sustainable husbandry against the competition of resource-hungry industries in an era of national shortages? Who speaks for the earth against the ecologically degrading forces of globalizing modernity? Shakespeare dramatizes answers to these scaled-up questions on the wider canvas of events in Henry IV and Henry V. James C. Bulman has shown that the classical paradigm of spilling blood and tilling the soil that Virgil set out in his Georgics (translated into English in 1589) gave

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Shakespeare a framework for interpreting patterns of political change across the English history plays.48 I suggest it also provided him with an ecological grid for mapping the deterritorializing effects of the emerging gunpowder regime. In the Gloucestershire scenes of Henry IV, Part 2, as well as the more diffused environmental and military details of his three serial history plays, Shakespeare registers the obsolescence of Virgil’s cyclical pattern in relation to the faltering resistance and vulnerability of georgic husbandry. The ambivalent outcomes of Henry V — victory at Agincourt soon followed dispossession of “world’s best garden” and national political hemorrhaging — call into question the classical ecology of war and agrarian redemption in the new military-industrial marketplace.49 The End of Swords-into-Ploughshares

War’s traditional peace dividend was social renewal through cultivation. In Richard III Richmond invokes its promises to frame the approaching battle at Bosworth as a definitive end to the Wars of the Roses and a return to farming: “cheerly on . . . / To reap the harvest of perpetual peace / By this one bloody trial of sharp war” (R3, 5.2.14–16). As the Henry IV plays, Burgundy’s complaint of peace in Henry V, and King Charles’s hopeful wishes at the end of the play demonstrate, the second tetralogy repeatedly reminds early modern audiences of the georgic theory that armed conflict always ends with the prospect of national healing through agriculture (H5, 5.2.32–67, 447–48). In the tragedies it underlies Duncan’s vows to “plant” Macbeth and “make [him] full of growing” after the Scots’ victories over the Norwegians, Malcolm’s concluding renewal of that promise (“What’s more to do / Which would be planted newly with the time”) (Mac., 1.4.28–29, 5.11.30–31), and Cordelia’s imagery of “sustaining corn” in King Lear (History KL, 18.6). War and husbandry were connected because farmers were thought to make good soldiers. In both cases closeness to the soil and medical theories that individual bodies absorbed the humoral environment of their birthplace made husbandmen ideal defenders of their country.50 Henry V has these relationships in mind when he rallies his army’s yeoman, “Whose limbs were made in England, show us here / The

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mettle of your pasture; let us swear / That you are worth you breeding” (3.1.26–28). New systems of national impressment to replenish armies slaughtered by gunpowder artillery destabilized these assumptions, however, by displacing more limited models of feudal recruitment. Henry IV, Part 2, stages the modern paradigm when Falstaff’s trawl for recruits through Gloucestershire uses the handling of firearms as a means of testing ability (2H4, 3.2.251, 259, 262, 271).51 Burgundy extrapolates the protests of those “pricked” to serve in Shakespeare’s “presentist” version of Lancastrian wars in his moving lament for the devastated French landscape during the peace negotiations that follow Agincourt (H5, 5.2.38–67). There is a note of Edenic pastoral in the image of “fertile France” as the “best garden of the world” (repeated in the play’s heroically deflating epilogue). But Burgundy’s emphasis on agricultural tools and manual labor, seasonal cycles, and named plants defines his rhetorical mode as georgic realism.52 While his frame of knowledge is domesticated nature, it censures war’s anthropomorphic equation of the war-torn environment with the “wildness” and “savagery” of mobilized husbandmen who “nothing do but meditate on blood” (5.2.43, 47, 60). In the meantime, “all her [France’s] husbandry doth lie on heaps, / Corrupting in it[s] own fertility” (5.2.39–40), echoing Mouldy’s prediction after being impressed by Falstaff. The soil’s productive power has suffered a double loss from state violence and (for humans) nonsubsistence growth (i.e., inedible weeds; compare the gardener in Richard II: “I will go root away / The noisome weeds which without profit suck / The soil’s fertility from wholesome flowers” [3.4.38–40]).53 Speaking diplomatically, Burgundy avoids mentioning Henry’s wars as the cause of this collateral damage. Instead he emphasizes peacetime hopes of agrarian and social reconstruction. He conceives of this process ecologically as a making “even,” or restoration of long-term symbiosis between seasonal rhythms of nature and human culture. (See Hillary Eklund’s discussion following this essay of drainage projects in the East Anglian fens as a similarly contested site of shared human and nonhuman life.) Burgundy’s approach recalls the gardener’s political allegory of sustainable husbandry rejected by Richard’s anxiously defensive queen (R2, 3.4.75). The Gloucestershire scenes of Henry IV, Part 2 enlarge on Shakespeare’s georgic references by presenting an unexpectedly detailed picture of Elizabethan agriculture. Functioning within a

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georgic culture of self-sufficiency and independence like that defended by early modern farmers, Shallow’s agrarianism stages a bioregional alternative to Henry IV’s wartime displacements — contextually related, as we have seen, to Elizabethan England’s expropriation of saltpeter at the expense of organic farming. Following the lead of Falstaff’s mocking soliloquies at the end of 3.2 and 5.1, critics and directors usually interpret Shallow’s homely dialogue with Davy about ploughing, sowing, and paying off tool debts as rural grist for the performance of Shallow’s comic provincialism, which we laugh at from Falstaff’s urbane perspective. But Falstaff is also amazed at Shallow’s transformation from the “very genius of famine” into squiredom: “Fore God, you have here a goodly dwelling, and a rich” (2H4, 5.1.299, 5.3.5–6). As Orlando’s remarks about Oliver’s husbandry reveal, Shallow’s empirical understanding of a two-way relationship between the land’s carrying capacity and his community’s ecological footprint contextualizes and demystifies his social mobility (which is also untainted by Oliver’s controversial associations with enclosure). Representative of the period’s profitable shift from grazing sheep to mixed farming,54 and metadramatically enlivened by Shakespearian place names,55 Shallow’s dialogue makes sustainable relationships between cultivation and consumption materially visible. The evident resilience of his community presents an authentic alternative not only to wartime dearth and ill health but also to the severe weather alluded to in both parts of Henry IV.56 Asked, for example, about using the hade (Quarto) or head (Folio) land, Shallow tells Davy to sow it with “red wheat.” The quarto reading refers more precisely to strips of unploughed soil between fields. Red or winter wheat was sown in late summer, whereas white or spring wheat is already growing in the fields.57 Elizabethan audiences who experienced the climatically aggravated subsistence crisis of 1596–97 and the war scares of the following year (2H4, Induction 12) would have appreciated the implications of no ground being wasted and it being put to seasonally productive use. Shallow’s practice of crop rotation, as implied by his discussion of plough irons with Davy, was also familiar to audiences who understood that arable soil was capable of such robust cultivation without loss of “heart.” In Henry IV, Part Two, act 5, scene 3, a postprandial Shallow ushers Falstaff and others into his orchard to eat a banquet of local sweetmeats (caraways) and apples (pippins, leathercoats), which he has

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cultivated himself. This abundance stands in contrast to the barrenness of Shrewsbury’s bloody fields (Induction 24) and Northumberland’s orchard (1.1), a space of contrived and actual disease. The only biological activity going on there is the burial of Northumberland’s “hold of ragged stone” by earthworms. Their fertilizing labors are slowly regenerating an ecologically exhausted landscape and converting a stagey theater of war into Gloucestershire’s robust ecosystem, in which the living soil and its biota claim a stake with their human co-inhabitants.58 In Gloucestershire, progressive images of agrarian well-being and sustainable prosperity briefly ring true because soil management and environmental stewardship are in tune with seasonal rhythms and bioregional limits. The wistfulness of Shallow’s community nonetheless registers the passing of traditional georgic as a reliable remedy for war. Gloucestershire’s very marginality is integral to Shakespeare’s juxtaposition of agricultural and military profit, whose cultural prestige and material production have become irretrievably entwined. Just as Henry’s V accession and Falstaff’s thousand-pound debt suddenly darken Shallow’s future well-being, his husbandry has become ecologically bound to new military industries, trade, and adventurism emblematized by the imperial canons of Henry V. Their theatrically spectacular presence erases any trace of Agincourt’s famous longbowmen, just as modern firearms displace the historical archers in reports of Holmedon at the beginning of Henry IV, Part 1 (1.1.55– 58). Through these contemporizing adaptations, Shakespeare embeds Henry’s national triumph within a new eco-cosmopolitan domain of local and global entanglements, in which older bioregional relations are involuntarily resituated within transnational markets defended by big guns.59 (Similar displacements are recorded in Richard Carew’s chorographic Survey of Cornwall [1602], discussed by Tamsin Badcoe in her essay for this volume.) Through both parts of Henry IV and Henry V, emerging mechanized warfare undercuts georgic attempts to heal environmental damage or avoid modernity’s risks to health and sustainability. Shakespeare recognizes that self-sufficiency cannot insulate bioregionalism because local place is no longer a privileged standard of ecological value (any more than globalism is). When the aptly named Pistol arrives with

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news of Henry V’s accession, Shallow’s incomprehension suggests a provincialism overwhelmed by deterritorializing forces it has avoided coming to grips with. Their vanguard is Henry’s French campaign of offshore resource appropriation by “civil swords and native fire[power]” (2H4, 5.5.104). The threats to local soil fertility and long-term resilience by the rapidly globalizing gunpowder economy anticipate the meteorological and geophysical ruptures now being triggered by anthropogenic climate change. In his allusions to gunpowder’s bioregional displacements, Shakespeare seems to foresee Britain’s modern history of progress being redefined by technologically enhanced but ecologically unsustainable conquest of the earth.60

8 Wetlands Reclamation and the Fate of the Local in Seventeenth Century England Hillary Eklund

“A Soft Kinde of Soile”

In a literary history of wetlands William Howarth argues that until the nineteenth century “the human attitude toward wetlands was consistently negative: they were read as dangerous, useless, fearful, filthy, diseased, noxious.”1 From an early modern perspective there was good reason to be suspicious of these amphibious spaces. The humid and in some cases fetid air was thought to spread disease.2 Land that was normally or periodically submerged was hard to cultivate and therefore deemed, according to a moral economy that valued agrarian improvement, “waste.”3 Nor did the mixture of slow-moving water and soft soils offer solid ground for building. With limited support for large settlements, wetlands were sparsely inhabited and often isolated. Yet a generically diverse range of early modern texts reveals striking ambivalence about wetlands even after aggressive land reclamation projects began in England in the 1630s. From chorographies and colonial travel narratives to debates about draining the English levels and fens in the early seventeenth century, wetlands — and humans’

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relations to them — gather numerous and often contradicting associations: desert waste and fertile field, sickness and hardiness, indolence and labor, rebellion and loyalty.4 Neither land nor water, wetlands represent, in Howarth’s formulation, “a continuum between terra and aqua. In rhetorical terms they are not syntax but parataxis, phrases placed side by side without apparent connection . . . wetlands dispossess readers of old codes and lead toward new syntax, where phrases may begin to reassemble.”5 William Camden captures the geomorphological and rhetorical in-betweenness of wetlands when he describes the English fens as a place “where the Rivers become standing waters, when they have once found a soft kinde of Soile.”6 Here water encounters a new vessel — soft soil — and reassembles itself accordingly, assuming a new “standing” shape. No longer gathered in one place and separated from the “dry land” as in the Genesis story (Gen. 1:9, Geneva Bible), these waters would seem to stand in defiance of creation, ambiguously mingling with soil, mixing vulnerability and resilience, alluring fertility and forbidding topography. In these and other parataxical combinations, wetlands defy expectations that soil should be firm, stable, and enclosable. They function as what Robert Watson has called “zone[s] of shared life” that challenge both “human presumptuousness” about self-contained individuality and the “class arrogance in agronomics” that justifies undertakings like land reclamation.7 Following Steve Mentz’s injunction that “Any attempt to imagine a brown ecology must confront swamp,” this essay surveys encounters with wetlands in early modern England and its colonial periphery, then turns to Richard Brome’s comedy The Sparagus Garden (1635) — a play that features both a drained garden and characters from the Somerset Levels — to explore efforts to render these locales and their inhabitants stably profitable and civil. These efforts, in their very incompleteness, force us to rethink what we know about soil and water and the ideologies of habitation, cultivation, and possession that knowledge underpins. Tracing the contest between local customs and the homogenizing will to improve through representations of wetlands in the period, I argue that reclamation projects and the ecological and demographic changes that result from them produce a palpable sense of loss. More specifically, in displacing the Somerset native Tim Hoyden from his habitat and “draining” him of his inheritance,

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The Sparagus Garden dramatizes the loss of local customs and culture that proceeds from land reclamation schemes. In the late medieval and early modern periods, English wetlands were governed by customs of habitation that defy the telos of permanently dry land, the topos of settled agriculture, and the kronos of developmental narratives.8 They were “mainly pastoral economies, supplemented by fishing and fowling,” and their inhabitants enjoyed traditional use-rights to common resources like turf and pasture.9 Regular floods made what arable land there was incredibly fertile and supported small villages and hamlets above the water level.10 The small farmers and peasants who thrived there were adaptive in both constitution and occupation; naturally inoculated against the “ague” (malaria) by their upbringing, they traveled by boat, built and often walked on stilts, and adapted their economy to the environment so successfully, according to the agricultural historian Joan Thirsk, that they not only fed themselves satisfactorily but also “supplied some necessary foodstuffs to the other parts of the kingdom, especially London.”11 They availed themselves seasonally of both lowland pastures and upland grazings and arable fields, setting up small, scattered plots in common fields.12 A process of “intercommoning” allowed for the depasturing of cattle to higher and dryer grazing areas during the wet winter months and back to the newly enriched lowland pastures in the dry summers. Thousands of years of intermittent flooding had created large peat deposits that provided fuel, which locals collected according to a custom known as “turbary.”13 The absence of large estates delayed enclosure and other infringements on the rights of common in the region.14 The customs that regulated everyday life in these wetlands, prior to and even threading through early drainage efforts, enlivened the cultivation and preservation of local knowledge, the practice of adaptive habitation, and the sharing of material resources — customs that explicitly work against the Lockean notion that humans enjoy an executive power over nature.15 Local wetlands customs further illustrate what historian Nicola Whyte has called the “indivisibility of the physical experience of landscape and demarcation of local social and economic relations.”16 As such, wetlands complicate narratives of progress — and even narratives of georgic regeneration, as described in chapters by Bonnie Lander Johnson, Keith Botelho, and David B.

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Goldstein — based on agrarian labor. Such narratives often require, as Charlotte Scott argues, the “suppression of those communities that inconvenience or disturb the implied trajectory of unified national ascent” — a trajectory discursively rooted in agrarian improvement and widely deployed “for the betrayal of commonality” in the reclamation schemes of the seventeenth century.17 At issue in seventeenth century drainage projects of the fens and levels, then, is a conflict between comparatively low-impact patterns of resource use and dramatic reconfigurations of the landscape for large-scale resource expropriation, between a commons available for the pursuit of a shared livelihood and a logic of property that supports individual enrichment, and between local customs and the growing economic and cultural hegemony of a state with increasingly plausible imperial ambitions. Homogenizing the World

Drainage projects in England were not isolated public works initiatives but instead part of a more widespread tendency among European powers to make the natural unknowns of the world both known and controlled. In France, for instance, inland lakes were drained as projectors sought to manufacture land for arable and animal husbandry and for housing.18 European involvement in New World reclamation projects dates back to the settlement of Mexico City, where Dutch engineers undertook drainage projects as early as 1614.19 In these and other locales, drainage was a crucial thread in knitting the fabric of human prepotency over cyclical changes in the natural world. As such, it formed part of what Shakespeare scholar Garrett Sullivan terms “the landscape of sovereignty,” which “reflects and shapes the ambitions and imperatives of those who control or would control the kingdom; and, more broadly but distinctly . . . represents the conceptual annexation of distinct cultural spaces in the name of monarch or (a culturally homogenized) nation.”20 By imposing a homogenized, official landscape onto what literary critic and environmental theorist Rob Nixon has called a “vernacular landscape,” colonizers, chorographers, and drainage promoters threatened the lives of local inhabitants as well as patterns of living that integrated cultural and environmental knowledge and practices — a soil science of the swamp.21

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As an economic response to new ecological information, the “official landscape” or “landscape of sovereignty” traffics in a mixture of desire (for profitable land) and disgust inflected by ecophobia, a term the Shakespearean eco-critic Simon Estok uses to describe “an irrational and groundless fear or hatred of the natural world” that often appears in an early modern tendency to “imagin[e] badness in nature and [market] that imagination.”22 (Here we need only think of the sinful Slough of Despond in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress [1678], the swamp into which Christian sinks under the weight of his sin.23) In Shakespeare’s Tempest, for instance, the shipwrecked nobles disagree about the climate of the island: where Antonio and Sebastian complain that the air is rotten, “as ‘twere perfumed by a fen” (2.1.48–49), Gonzalo and Adrian praise the qualities of the isle.24 Similarly, both before and after the establishment of Jamestown on the fertile floodplains of the Tidewater, explorers in Virginia construed the land as an empty waste even as they praised the fecundity of the soil. In his Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Somer Isles (1624), Captain John Smith derides unfavorable reports of the swamps of coastal Virginia as “vulgar rumour,” which attributes the colony’s troubles “to the vnwholesomnesse of the ayre, and barrennesse of the Country, as though all England were naught, because the Fens and Marshes are vnhealthy.”25 In drawing a direct comparison between colonial and domestic attitudes toward wetlands, Smith opens the channel through which modern plantation strategies that had been developed in the New World may have driven higher-stakes improvement projects in England. Indeed, as new landscapes were domesticated, they might even look better than those closer to home: “some small Marshes and Swamps there are, but more profitable then hurtfull,” writes Smith, “and I thinke there is more low Marsh ground betwixt Eriffe and Chelsey, then Kecoughton and the Falls, which is about one hundred and eighty miles by the course of the Riuer.”26 Though neither example looks too favorably on wetlands themselves, by drawing a direct comparison between the marshlands of England, Ireland, and Virginia, Smith charts a comparative imperial history of wetlands that not only consolidates their profit potential under the banner of colonial plantation but also indicates how technologies deployed on the colonial frontier made their way back to the imperial center.

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Concurrently, while many New England colonists perceived a need to improve lowland swamps and saline bottom grounds known as “quaking bogs,” William Wood praises the marshlands of New England for their abundant grasses and opportunities for fowling.27 He also marvels at the fertility of the adjacent uplands where, “too lazy to catch fish,” Indians “plant corn eight or ten years in one place without it, having very good crops.” While Indians thrive on this unmanured soil, Wood quickly adds that just as “there is no ground so purely good as the long forced and improved grounds of England, so is there none so extremely bad as in many places of England that as yet have not been manured and improved.”28 Like Smith, Wood suspends the New World’s future between two English presents, each of which affirms the strategy of improvement. To colonize New England according to English best practices is also to insist on the ongoing homogenization of a national landscape.29 As Todd Borlik remarks in his reading of The Tempest with respect to the English fens, the play is “not only about the colonization of peoples and their land but also, on a deeper level, the colonization of non-human nature itself by anthropocentric science.”30 Just as colonial promoters construed wetlands as (at worst) breeding grounds for disease, indolence, and savagery, or (at best) farmland in potentia, English observers saw the levels and fens as spaces suffused with biological and moral risks yet rich in potential. In his Britannia (1637), William Camden writes ecophobically of the “slabby quave­ mires” and “most troublesome Fennes” of Holland in Lincolnshire, where inhabitants cannot walk even with stilts, and where they watch the water rise “with great care and much feare, as against a dangerous enemy.” Yet he offers a more tempered picture of the levels. Though Somerset in winter, he wryly remarks, “may worthily be called, a winterish Region, so wet, and weely, so miry and moorish it is, to the exceeding great trouble and encombrance of those that travell in it,” he deems it nonetheless a fertile region that is generally pleasant and inhabited by benign pastoralists. Camden’s appraisal of fen dwellers is similarly ambivalent. While “the barbarous Britaines” who “kept the fennie bogs, and most thick woods, out of which they might more safely assaile the Romans” betoken a form of heroic nationalism, their descendants are “a kind of people according to the nature of the place

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where they dwell rude, uncivill, and envious to all others whom they call Vpland-men: who stalking on high upon stilts, apply their mindes, to grasing, fishing and fowling.” These rugged fenmen suffered little for their sustenance, however, as winter inundations made the land fertile enough to yield an overabundant supply of food, fuel, and building materials. We may read these descriptions, placed as they are in Camden’s ideologically nationalist chorography, as tacit invitations to bring wetlands and their inhabitants more in line with increasingly standardized views of “good” land and proper English industry.31 Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1622) similarly sees both good and bad in wetlands. The Plain of Salisbury sings a song contrasting the fertile marshes — flooded treeless meadows — and the wooded “darke and sleepie shades . . . where mists and rotten fogs / Hang in the gloomie thicks, and make unstedfast bogs.”32 But Poly-Olbion also lauds the human power to alter and improve the landscape.33 The third song allegorizes the changing course of the “lovely Bry” (River Brue) in Somerset, as a contest among amorous female-gendered locales vying for his attention. As the Brue flows toward Avalon (Glastonbury), many a plump-thigh’d moore, & ful-flanck’t marsh do proue To force his chaste desires, so dainty of his loue.  First Sedgemore shewes this floud, her bosome all vnbrac’t, And casts her wanton armes about his slender wast:  Her louer to obtaine, so amorous Audry seekes:  And Gedney softly steales sweet kisses from his cheekes.  One takes him by the hand, intreating him to stay:  Another pluckes him backe, when he would faine away:  But, hauing caught at, length, whom long he did pursue,  Is so intranc’t with loue, her goodly parts to view, That altring quite his shape, to her he doth appeare,  And casts his crystall selfe into an ample Meare:  But for his greater growth when needs he must depart,  And forc’t to leaue his Loue (though with a heauie hart)  As hee his back doth turne, and is departing out,  The batning marshie Brent enuirons him about:  But lothing her imbrace, away in haste he flings,  And in the Seuerne Sea surrounds his plentious Springs.34

The poem’s erotic rendering captures not only the river’s meandering course over the levels but also the struggle between a land greedy for

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water and human agents seeking forcibly to change the river’s course. Meare Pool, for instance, was the product of a thirteenth century river diversion scheme. The “marshie Brent” refers to several contiguous parishes between Somerset and the Bristol Channel (“Seuerne Sea”), where a high coastal clay belt inhibited the easy drainage of water into the sea. The accumulated water flooded the low-lying moors, rendered here as the lascivious “plump thig’d moore” whose untamed landscape connotes racial alterity. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the monks of Glastonbury oversaw reclamation projects intended to increase grazing land and stabilize trade routes to the surrounding area.35 For Drayton, the ultimate result of the Brue’s movement across the region and its rising and falling water levels is a general enrichment of the land. Somerset is left with “sundry sorts of soyle, diuersitie of ground; / Where Plow-men cleanse the Earth of rubbish, weed, and filth, / And giue the fallow lands their seasons and their tylth.” This picture of Somerset as a site of profitable agrarian labor, “As giuen all to gaine, and thriuing huswifrie,” may embellish the record, but Drayton’s rendering also illustrates the priority of transforming English landscapes, both rhetorically and geomorphically, into profitable spaces.36 The nationalist projects of Camden and Drayton thus share with colonial texts a combination of deep suspicion about wetlands and their inhabitants, and sanguine assurances that amphibious landscapes are best read as pastoral and agrarian paradises ready for optimization. Even as Camden and Drayton outwardly celebrate the geographic and cultural diversity of England, they seek at the same time to render these diverse locales readable as English soil — a knowable, arable, and profitable landscape. These works pave the way for a growing body of texts that casts land reclamation not just as an economic project but also as a national one with cultural and moral implications. As the English economic historian R. H. Tawney notes of early descriptions of the fens, “Struck by the enigma of economic arrangements and a manner of existence unintelligible to civilized men, not a few observers reacted to the unfamiliar spectacle with repulsion, pity, or contempt. They depicted the Fens as a swamp, useful only when, through drainage, it should have ceased to exist, and their inhabitants as a population sub-human in its lawlessness, poverty, and squalor.”37 Like Amerindians, the thriving commoners who inhabited English wetlands were deemed

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improvident and detrimental to a national ethos of diligence. Their subsistence methods — adapting their own growing, hunting, and pasturing processes to the seasonal fluctuation of the soil — were recast as indolence, and their isolation seen as dangerously conducive to heterodoxy. One drainage promoter known as “H. C.” enumerates the disadvantages of this isolation during wintertime, which bars, among other things, the baptism of children and the administration of Communion. H. C. also worries about the effects of this landscape on the bodies of its inhabitants: “What should I speake of mens bodyes, where there is no Element good. The Aer Nebulous, grosse and full of rotten Harres; the Water putred and muddy, yea full of loathsome vermine; the Earth spuing, unfast and boggie; the Fire noisome turfe and hassocks: such are the inconueniences of the Drownings.”38 Indeed, the correspondence between body and environment — one that Brome highlights in the character of Tim Hoyden — offered a rich vocabulary for urging drainage schemes. In one passage H. C. likens the inundation of the fens to a kind of national kidney failure, “like the stopping of the Vrine neere the fall of the Kidneyes” that “drown[s] the Patient in his owne Water.” The only cure, the writer continues, is to restore “the naturall Out-fall” of water through rivers and drains, “at which, the whole Body of the Fenne will equally and speedily vnburthen it selfe, and so returne to that pristine Condition, so much extolled in the Monuments of Antiquitie.”39 Drainage thus is purported not to interfere with natural processes but to correct processes that have somehow been interrupted as if by a disease, and therefore to restore a pristine, yet immemorial, ecological past.40 In short, if only these few uncivilized people knew how to live in the fens, then the fens should be brought to increasingly national standards of habitation and husbandry.41 At once contaminating and emboldening, seditious and patriotic, impoverished and rich in potential, these landscapes bred a combination of disgust and desire that seemed to demand correction — and that correction came in the form of drainage. Reclamation Projects in Seventeenth Century England

In the seventeenth century, mounting prejudice against wetlands collided with the profitable potential of new soil, and historically speaking the moment was opportune for drainage. Once freed from

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frequent inundations, reclaimed land could be either engrossed and cultivated by upland landowners or parceled and sold by the projectors who drained it. Investors (including the crown) would gain rights to reclaimed land.42 Engineers could secure patents for machines invented for the purposes of water management, as well as rights to levy tolls on canals and bridges.43 Sir Cornelius Vermuyden, the Dutch-born engineer who undertook to drain the Hatfield Chase and later, in collaboration with the Earl of Bedford, the Great Level, was assured a reward of 90,000 acres for bringing some 360,000 acres to a suitable condition for cultivating or pasturing cattle.44 The price these fertile fields would fetch would make Vermuyden and his fellow projectors rich men indeed. And the lucrative new crops they would yield — including rapeseed and dyeplants, as well as luxury vegetables like asparagus — were forecast to bring ongoing profits. Ben Jonson satirizes this game of investments and profits in The Devil Is an Ass (1616), when Merecraft the Projector deploys Engine the Broker and Trains to help him cheat the gullible gentleman Fabian Fitzdottrel out of his money.45 Together they trick Fitzdottrel into investing in a drainage project, with the promise that it will make him the “Duke of Drowned-Land” (2.4.22). The thing is for recovery of drowned land, Whereof the Crown’s to have his moiety If it be owner; else, the Crown and owners To share that moiety, and the recoverers To’enjoy the tother moiety for their charge.

(2.1.45–49)

Here Merecraft closely follows the formula of the historical drainage promoters, awarding to each investor in this joint venture the profits of the reclaimed land. In addition to the (hardly auspicious) title of “Duke of Drowned-Land,” he promises Fitzdottrel a yield of up to £18 million — £7 million the first year — and announces his intention to correct the poor drainage projects of the past by beginning “at the pan, / Not at the skirts as some ha’ done” (53–54). Whether Fitzdottrel keeps or sells the drained land, Merecraft assures, his condition will be much improved:46 Keep you the land, sir The greatness of th’estate shall throw’t upon you. If you like better turning it to money,

Wetlands Reclamation  159 What may not you, sir, purchase with that wealth Say you should part with two o’ your millions To be the thing you would, who would not do’t?

(2.1.117–22)

Merecraft’s proposal highlights the logic of drainage schemes to make land in order to possess or alienate it. Drainage projects would hardly have attracted the investment they did without the underpinnings of a logic of possession that ensured the projectors’ rights to profit from the yield of their newfangled estates or, instead of “turning” the soil for agricultural purposes, turn it “to money” by selling it. Of course, the title “Duke of Drowned-Land” that hangs over Fitzdottrel’s ill-advised transactions testifies to the great difficulty of actually drying out land through drainage: to be the Duke of Drowned-Land is to be the duke of no land at all, which is exactly what happens to Fitzdottrel. Among the drainage projects actually undertaken in England, those that began in the 1630s were by far the most dramatic. Unprecedented investments spurred unprecedented feats of engineering as drainage projects “took place in the Somerset Levels, in Hatfield Chase, the Isle of Axholme, on the coastlands of the Thames estuary in Essex and Kent, and the meres of Holderness in east Yorkshire.”47 And of these, the greatest undertaking was certainly the one to drain the Great Level. After a few false starts and explosive disagreements among financiers, engineers, and local and crown authorities, the drainage project designed by Vermuyden and overseen by the Earl of Bedford was under way by 1631.48 Reclamation technologies borrowed from the Low Countries and from Venice, including dikes, straight cuts, sluices, mechanisms to prevent the erosion of riverbanks, and later windmills, were all employed. Gradually meres disappeared and the reclaimed land was converted to field and pasture.49 The drainage was announced complete in 1637, at which time Charles I pronounced himself the undertaker with a new mandate to make land dry in winter as well as in summer and to expand the drained area geographically.50 But while Charles was busy delineating the dry land he wanted for himself, costs escalated; the project lost the support of the commons, and before long the civil war broke out, effectively halting all reclamation efforts until 1649.51 By comparison, little in the way of drainage projects was undertaken in Somerset during this period. What drainage projects there were in the levels were largely headed by

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religious houses.52 Williams estimates that “an area of approximately 22,000 acres, or about one-third of the land liable to flooding in the levels, was reclaimed by 1600; this, of course, includes the medieval reclamations.”53 Small or large, the reclamation projects bore dire and far-reaching consequences for the wetlands and their inhabitants. Like so many Dukes of Drowned Land, cottagers lost access to their fields and pastures either by engrossment or incomplete drainage. The sewer commissioners were given power to levy taxes on any land deemed at risk of flooding, and when the taxes went unpaid, “the commissioners seized the land and sold it to an ‘undertaker’ who would then drain the land in return for an allotment of newly drained land enjoying the full rights of private property.”54 This coercive removal of land from local control — a form of what Nixon calls “displacement without moving” — meant diminishing access to traditional modes of subsistence farming, grazing, fishing, and fowling. The local economy suffered, with disproportionate hardship accruing to the poor. One pamphlet claims that the region’s poor, like its “pastures and corn ground,” have been destroyed, for the drainage scheme has “utterly disable[d] us to relieve them.”55 Even the ardent promoter of drainage H. C. addresses objections on the basis of dispossessing the Commons of their livelihood: “I confesse it is a common calamitie in all unstinted Commons, and deserveth a great deale of wisedome and care in the State to preuent it, especially in such rich Soyles.” This confession suggests that the commons’ best hope is that rich men “dwell but a Mile off” or that land be leased “at reasonable rents,” and then assures “there will be enough for all if it be well ordered.”56 It was a gloomy prognosis for fenland inhabitants who bore the cost of others’ enrichment through soil. Like the inundations and the schemes to eliminate them, popular resistance to drainage was intermittent. Local landowners and commoners did not stage extended or coordinated campaigns of resistance but instead threatened the undertakers when tensions boiled up.57 In Somerset, commoners complained about the expansion of pasturing and the importation of cattle from outside the region, which reduced available common land.58 Men and women of the fens took up arms against enclosers and drainers alike, and in more coordinated fashion

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even raised “fighting funds” and money to petition the king to safeguard their rights.59 Debates among the projectors, the commoners, the gentry, and the crown were recorded in a series of feisty pamphlets. The pro-drainage Discourse concerning the Drayning of Fennes (written by H. C., probably on Vermuyden’s behalf, and published in 1629) articulates a fantasy of mastery over water supply and the triumph of reason over stubborn adherence to local tradition. Where some might object to drainage because it will create a scarcity of water where it is now abundant, he answers “that when the Riuers and Draynes are deepened . . . they will hold a world of water more then they now doe.” The point, for H. C., is to teach the fenmen “the difference between a wildernesse of water & a goodly greene Meddow,” which will prompt them rationally to agree that drainage “may be best for themselues and their posteritie.”60 Where H. C. proposes a Genesis-style separation of the waters from the firmament, one of Vermuyden’s sharpest critics rhetorically transforms drainage into inundation. In his 1641 Explanation of the Drayning Workes Which Have Beene Lately Made for the Kings Maiestie in Cambridgeshire, Andrewes Burrell alleges that Vermuyden has imperiled the most vulnerable fens, casting “mischiefe . . . upon many of his Majesties Subjects,” particularly those inhabiting the lowlands adjacent to areas drained. “Now Sir Cornelius hath turned the Southerne waters upon them; for there will come three times so much water upon them now as did before.”61 Burrell casts the Dutchman as a bad engineer who has defrauded investors, nearly drowned inhabitants, and managed only to make a few fens dry in summer, but not in winter, and that at the terrible cost of heavier inundations to previously protected areas.62 (Tamsin Badcoe’s chapter in this volume discusses other unintended consequences of earthmoving public works, such as the buildup of silt in ports and harbors that disrupts natural drainage channels and shipping patterns.) If H. C.’s and Burrell’s debate centers around a problem of maintenance, unintended consequences, and disproportionate profits and losses, the anonymous pamphlet titled The Anti-Projector; or, The History of the Fen Project (ca. 1646) addresses a problem of consent from the perspective of commoners. The Anti-Projector upbraids those projectors who, “pretending what a glorious work drayning would be to the Publick,” used public money to drain their private lands and

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thereby “took away the poor Country-mens lands (which were never drowned, or bettered by overflowing) for melioration.”63 The repetition of the phrase “bettered by overflowing” — it appears two more times in the eight-page pamphlet — indicates an awareness that seasonal inundations were part of a healthy local soil cycle. Even so, the pamphlet holds that the sewer commissioners’ regular maintenance of “the old Sewers” would have regulated the land in a more equitable way for all its inhabitants.64 Instead, the undertakers are alleged to have committed “a Rape upon the Republique, in ravishing the good People of this Nation (by their Tyranny and Oppression) out of their Properties and Liberties.”65 One could hardly expect the inhabitants of the fens to welcome so stark a change in their landscape, social structures, and livelihoods.66 Moreover, as Eric Ash notes, partisans on both sides of the drainage debates saw the potential for prosperity in the fens. “Yet their diverse portrayals and uses of ‘nature’ reveal a growing divergence in their perceptions of the natural environment, particularly with respect to the degree of human action required to cultivate, improve, and profit from it.”67 Fenland commoners further registered their resistance through what William Dugdale deems “libelous songs to disparage the work.” Dugdale records one such song in his History of Imbanking and Drayning Divers Fenns and Marshes (1662). Titled “Powtes Complaint,” the song describes in ten quatrains the livelihood of the fenmen — “Brethren of the water” — and the unique economy bred of the fenland ecology: Away with boats and rudder, farewell both boots and skatches, No need of one nor th’other, men now make better matches; Stilt-makers all and tanners shall complain of this disaster; For they will make each muddy lake for Essex calves a pasture. 68

Instead of plying their trades and thriving “in Fen and Reed,” the fenmen will now work to feed the cattle and pigs of yet another projector, the Earl of Essex. Gone too are the relationships they recognize between themselves and the fens’ nonhuman inhabitants: “The feather’d fowls have wings, to fly to other nations; / But we have no such things, to aid our transportations.” The song appeals to ancient “water nurses” and “Captain Flood” to drive off the undertakers and their grazing animals, implying a mode of habitation that not only

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accommodates periodic inundations but also recognizes them as a source of nourishment and as an authority. Perhaps, they hope, this “Captain” who “yet was never known to fail us,” will accomplish what their own armed resistance could not: “His furious rage none could assuage; but, to the world’s great wonder, / He bears down banks, and breaks their cranks and whirlygigs asunder.”69 Recognizing the authority of water over land — as well as the instruments, like windmills (whirlygigs) that keep dry land dry — informs more than a vision of the total destruction of the drainage infrastructure; it urges us to consider modes of habitation that adapt to the fluctuations of the soil as resilient and profitable in their own way. English reclamation projects of the seventeenth century — particularly that of the Great Level undertaken in the 1630s — are rhetorically supported by two compelling contradictions. First, the “land” is a noxious waste but nevertheless excites desires for possession and profit. And second, the people of the wetlands are impoverished and boorish, yet they lack nothing for their livelihood until the drainage projects begin to destabilize their habitat. And while competing projectors promise different means to and returns on their drainage schemes, they express a shared commitment to controlling water levels in the interest of stable human habitation. By contrast, “Powtes Complaint” simultaneously laments the loss of local customs and articulates a powerful vision of water asserting its control over the projects to preserve or restore traditional trades and more adaptive forms of habitation. Turning to Brome’s Sparagus Garden, we can see how the effects of reclamation schemes on the fate of the local play out onstage. The Sparagus Garden

Probably written in 1635 for the King’s Revels Company, The Sparagus Garden’s satire of a yeoman who comes to the city to seek advancement may seem entirely conventional.70 Yet even among a raft of plays engaged in similar social critiques, The Sparagus Garden appears to have been a particular success, perhaps for its vivid topical references to city life or for the rich local color of characters who come to the city from Somerset: Tim Hoyden, his brother Tom Hoyden, and their man Coulter.71 If these rural figures have anything to do with the play’s success, however, their regional difference is all but erased,

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either through their disappearance from the action (Tom and Coulter) or through their assimilation into London life (Tim). Through its representation of various schemes for pursuing money and status, recurring references to land reclamation, and tracing of the effects of these “projects” on Tim Hoyden’s purse and person, the play comments on the all too real stakes of efforts to homogenize English soil and its inhabitants. Like Jonson’s The Devil Is an Ass, The Sparagus Garden presents drainage as just one of many money-making schemes. Characters undertake “adventures” of luring clientele to the titular Asparagus Garden (1.2.83) — a recreational park ideal for lovers’ trysts. A poor knight is accused of having a “projective” wit (89); and a young suitor “cast[s] how to find the way” to his beloved and her fortune (1.1.52).72 But of all the profit motives on display in Brome’s comedy, those for improving land are the most vivid. One character comments that the Asparagus Garden is “more profitable than twice two thousand fens till the drainers have done there” (3.1.442). The Gardener and his Dutch wife Martha are striving to make the garden they steward profitable enough so they can purchase land of their own. Martha, whose Dutch identity links her to expertise in managing land and water, tells her husband, “’tis not your dirty ’sparagus, your artichokes, your carps, your tulips, your strawberries, can bring you in five hundred pound a year if my helping hand, and brain too, were not in the business” (3.1.413). And when a young gallant invites some ladies to dance in the garden, predicting they will “double the increase, sweetness and beauty / Of every plant and flower” (556), one of the ladies proposes that they “compound for shares / O’th’ gardener’s profit” (557). Running even deeper than the machinations of so many “projective” wits might suggest, Brome’s play takes up what Gail Kern Paster calls “psychological materialism” by mapping references to flooding and drainage onto the embodied experience of its characters.73 The language of inundation pervades the play. The gentleman Walter Chamlet comments that the enamored Samuel Touchwood is “deep in thought,” and Walter’s friend Gilbert Goldwire affirms he is “over head and ears in his Mistress Contemplation” (1.1.48–49). The sexual innuendo, expressed through images of submersion, establishes continuity between Samuel’s hopeless love of Anne Striker and

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environmental conditions. Fearing that his financial schemes will be exposed by Tom Hoyden, Sir Hugh Moneylacks worries that if he doesn’t find a way to be rid of Tom, “our trade sinks and up our house is blown” (4.2.1008). These metaphorical inundations accompany curious confrontations between characters of opposite humoral complexions. Both the cantankerous patriarch Samson Touchwood and his son, Samuel, are choleric and dry (1.1.66), but a friend of Samuel’s also comments on “the tempest of thy father’s fury,” which he describes as “a storm in April, spent in swift extremes / When straight the sun shoots forth his cheerful beams” (1.1.72). In a humoral economy of friendship and enmity, Touchwood Senior inadvertently soothes his phlegmatic arch-enemy, Striker (Anne’s father), when their frequent confrontations induce extreme fits of coughing in the latter. Soon after one such meeting, Striker comments, “I was heart-sick with a conceit which lay so mingled with my phlegm that I had perished if I had not broke it and made me spit it out; hemh, ’tis gone, and I’ll home merrily” (2.2.372). Recognizing the healthful effects of these purgations, he adds, “I could not get another / To anger me so handsomely!” (372) and calls his rival “my physician, dog-leech Touchwood” (2.3.374). Like the obstructed kidneys that stand in for the fens in H. C.’s Discourse, Striker is restored to top form by the purgative attentions of his hostile neighbor. The processes of drainage prove more than metaphorical or even humoral in the case of Tim Hoyden, who has come to London from the Levels of Somerset with the hope of claiming his status as a gentleman — his mother having told him on her deathbed that his natural father was a London gentleman. The name “Hoyden” itself means “clown” or “boor,” and Tim proves himself worthy of the name by putting up £400 to be transformed into a gentleman (2.1.251).74 Accompanying him is his savvier but even more rustic man Coulter, who speaks in a strong Somerset dialect (noted in the play chiefly by the substitution of z’s for s’s in his speech). Though he prides himself on his “downright country wit” (2.1.254), Tim falls prey to the bankrupt knight Moneylacks, who sees him as a “project” (2.1.236) and plots to take his £400 in installments in exchange for a fake course in social advancement. As the project unfolds, Tim picks up associations that link him alternately to the levels, their fauna, their other human

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inhabitants, and even the drainage projectors themselves. The debates I’ve just sketched, therefore, play out directly on Tim and his fortunes. In the end the project enacted on the young man proves both unsuccessful and unnecessary, redirecting our focus to its consequences along the way: the fraudulent investment, Tim’s weakened state from bleeding and undernourishment, and the substitution of public humiliation for “downright country wit.” To enlist the merchant John Brittleware as a co-projector in his project, Moneylacks urges, “We must make him one [a gentleman], Jack; ’tis such a squab as thou never sawest; such a lump, we may make what we will of him” (2.1.238). Moneylacks sees pure potential — a formable lump — in Tim, vowing to shape Tim and his fortunes into anything at all — the way that only money can make of something “what we will.” But Tim stands to be consumed in more than monetary ways. A “squab,” as Moneylacks calls him, Tim has been trapped like prey: “my Spring has seized upon him” (234). The epithet further links Tim to wetland customs, where fowlers used snares, nets, and birdlime to catch squab and other local birds.75 Later they call his skin a “hide” (2.1.317) and propose that he needs to “have a bath” and “be flead” (319, 320) before he can be a proper gentleman. These examples suggest that Tim is at once effortlessly fungible and stubbornly rustic; he incites the same dynamic of desire and disgust in these projectors that his countrymen — and his country — did in historical terms. Tim shares these characteristics with the play’s setting itself. The variety of licit and illicit interests that make the Asparagus Garden both “in request and fashion” also make it a highly profitable venture with considerable sway over its clientele. A gentleman complains of Martha’s inflated “Dutch account” for his asparagus and wine (3.1.429), and Gilbert and Walter know to seek Moneylacks (whom Martha calls “our gather-guest” [436]) there. Gilbert calls the Gardener and his wife “lord and lady of the new plantation” (440), and Walter adds “prince and princess of the province of Asparagus” to their titles (441). The garden, built on newly reclaimed land, cuts a concentrated figure of the lucrative reclamation projects in the English wetlands, but the activities it encourages cast doubt on the moral effects of such projects. If the Gardener and his wife profit extravagantly from their management of the garden, Brittleware and Moneylacks seek their fortune in

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transforming Tim into a gentleman. First they propose to remove his adoptive father’s rustic, swampy blood: “Yes, you must bleed; your father’s blood must out. . . . His foul rank blood of bacon and peaseporridge must out of you to the last dram” (2.1.285, 287). The drainage project they undertake is thus intended to have both physiological and cultural consequences. As another co-conspirator tells Tim, “Fear nothing, sir: your blood shall be taken out by degrees, and your veins replenished with pure blood still as you lose the puddle” (289). To replenish Tim’s drained blood with “pure,” the projectors propose feeding him on a luxury diet of asparagus: “at your going abroad the first air you take shall be of the Asparagus Garden, and you shall feed plentifully of that” (295). In this part of their scheme, Moneylacks will profit doubly — from the money he cajoles out of Tim and from his commission for bringing more customers to the garden. The need to expunge Tim’s environmentally inherited “puddle” links wetlands drainage to humoral ecology. The word “puddle” refers to water that is not clear but instead murky with soil or sediment.76 In psychological terms, as Paster describes it, it has to do with sin or excessive passions stirring up substances that cloud the exercise of reason. The material fact of Tim’s growing up in the Somerset Levels, then, has “puddled” him, making him a human bearer of wetland ecological truths, pease-porridge and all. The analogy works, Paster insists, not just as metaphor but also materially, indexing a relation between the body and the environments in which it circulates.77 We can read Tim’s squabbishness and his flea-ridden hide in similar terms: the full force of the wetlands’ ecological otherness intrudes on the urban space of London, not in the profitable controlled way of the Asparagus Garden — expertly maintained by its Dutch overseer — but in a way that urgently demands correction. Of course, the drainage project of Brittleware and Moneylacks is above all an endeavor to bleed Tim gradually of his £400 and, ultimately, leave him destitute. We get a sense that this outcome is in the offing when Moneylacks asks Tim, “how do you feel yourself, Master Hoyden, after your bleeding, purging, and bathing, the killing of your gross humours by your spare diet and your new infusion of pure blood by your quaint feeding on delicate meats and drinks? How do you feel yourself?” (3.1.576) Tim’s reply indicates that he is hungry: “my shrimp diet and sippings have almost famished me, and my purse

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too. ’Slid I dare be sworn, as I am almost a gentleman, that every bite and every spoonful that I have swallowed these ten days has cost me ten shillings at least” (577). Already cheated out of a quarter of his money and perhaps hearing all too clearly the pun on “spare diet” and “asparagus,” he longs for the comforts of his former country life, including its humble but nutritious fare: “my teeth do even water at the name of the sweet country dish you spoke of (bacon and bag-­ pudding).” At the same time, he is so keen to become a gentleman that he vows to “forbear it.” The play leaves little doubt that Tim’s acculturation will not be straightforward, no matter how firm his resolve. Nagged with hunger, he remains perplexed by how he will find his sustenance: “but you say I shall fill my belly with this new daintrel that you spake of — these sparrowbills, what do you call’em?” (589) Tim’s hunger links him to the unseemly poverty attributed to the displaced commoners who protested drainage projects. Following one such revolt in Norfolk, the Privy Council dispatched messengers to arrest the rioters and bring them before the Board of Sewer Commissioners, but they were reported to be “of so inferior and mean condition as are not fit to be brought up hither.”78 According to Lindley, the civil lawyer Dr. William Sammes “reported that those apprehended were ‘so miserable poor and base’ that they were beneath the board’s consideration.”79 Yet with the promise of filling his belly with “sparrowbills,” Tim is enlisted as a projector in his own drainage, fulfilling the pamphleteer H. C.’s desire that fenland commoners would see drainage as “best for themselues and their posteritie.”80 Further, Tim’s participation renders him coterminous not only with the amphibious landscape of Somerset but also with other wealthy projectors, including the Earl of Bedford, Sir Cornelius Vermuyden, and even the king himself. His willingness to cooperate with Moneylacks only results in bankruptcy and further humiliation. Ultimately Tim is carried off to his uncle Striker’s house not as a gentleman but as a gentlewoman — Brittleware and Moneylacks having stolen his new clothes right off his back. His feminine garb situates him right where he started, back in Somerset, as his brother Tom wonders, “Whoop, who comes here? My brother Tim dressed like Master mayor’s wife of Taunton Dean” (5.2.1270). In contrast with this level of humiliation, the play’s rebukes to swampy rusticity seem comparatively gentle. Yet the two go handin-hand, as Tim’s woman’s weeds signal his heightened vulnerability

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to being “ravish[ed],” like the displaced commoners, of both land and livelihood.81 While the projectors profit by starving and both literally and metaphorically fleecing Tim, his fellow Somersetshire men register the offense in their own way. Tim’s man Coulter, driven out at the behest of the projectors, expresses his regret that they have “blooded him” (683) and “spurged his guts out” (685). A new animal comparison turns Tim from potential prey of wild game into a prepared meal of domesticated livestock: “how like a scalded pig he looked,” Coulter ponders (687). Tom echoes that his brother has been “devoured” (5.1.1069). In the end, though Tim is recognized by his father (Samson Touchwood), who vows to “make him a new gentleman by new breeding, / Without the diet, bathing, purge, or bleeding” (1297), he remains manifestly out of place in the profiteering city environment, yet so depleted of resources that he can scarcely return to Somerset. As McRae observes in connection with Jonson’s The Devil Is an Ass, such projects “epitomize the exploitation of a preexistent rural order by the acquisitive ethos of the city.”82 If Brome stages a familiar satire against the social ambitions of rustic upstarts, he also quietly laments the accompanying loss of local specificity, “country wit,” and the unique landscapes and forms of habitation that Tim and his fellows from Somerset represent.83 The disappearance of Tom and Coulter from the play signals more than the tidy relegation offstage of minor characters; it testifies to the culturally homogenizing influence of the various projects in the play — projects that reduce human experience to economic striving (projective wits) rather than adaptive, resilient local habitation (country wit) — and to the ecologically homogenizing effects of land reclamation. As cosmopolitan and diverse as the burgeoning city of London was in the period, the speed at which local English customs were giving way to the modern commercial enterprise that fueled the city’s growth must have rattled a smart observer like Brome, who not only depicts the changing environments of early modern London but also reflects on its devouring effects on the English countryside. The humoral ecology of Brome’s The Sparagus Garden shows how economic and social systems collide with the scope of anthropogenic ecological change. The transformation of Tim Hoyden into a gentleman ultimately proves both incomplete and unnecessary and renders

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him dependent on an unfamiliar world of commercial exchange where his “downright country wit” has no place. So too, seventeenth century drainage projects made much land arable but deprived commoners of their livelihood, forcing them into unfamiliar roles in the changing economy. The greatest paradox of these drainage projects in the long term is perhaps their combination of insufficient and excessive effectiveness. In the seventeenth century, reclamation efforts fell far short of their projected goals in both dry land and revenue.84 Yet the drying out of fertile peatlands for food production required new irrigation mechanisms to restore water to the drained soil. Intensive cultivation diminished the soil quality and accelerated erosion.85 Over the long term, insufficient moisture levels in the substrate have resulted in peat shrinkage and subsidence, lowering the soil level and requiring increasingly aggressive forms of drainage to keep dry land dry.86 The final verse of “Powtes Complaint” anticipates this shift from too much to too little water when it warns Neptune that the projectors threaten the very seas themselves: “They mean thee to disease, and with Fen water choke thee: / But, with thy mace, do thou deface, and quite confound this matter; / And send thy sands, to make dry lands, when they shall want fresh water.” This prescient appeal to Neptune — to give the projectors more dry land than even they can desire — raises yet another inconvenient truth: by asserting control over water, it seems humans have only consolidated its capacity to destroy locales that, once identifiable for their ecological resilience, now are among the most vulnerable to destruction. In contrast, predrainage patterns of wetlands habitation work explicitly against the get-rich-quick schemes that Brome derides and against the broader capitalist logic of investment and return by paying greater attention to what the soil yields of its own accord. Wetlands, as it turns out, keep the very secret of soil: that it is not so solid as we suppose, and that modern notions of property and personhood that have their philosophical roots in the early modern period are built on a very limited understanding of what counts as “land” and what habitation involves.87 The literary history of land reclamation in seventeenth century England thus invites us to contemplate alternative forms of habitation —  patterns of settlement better attuned to the effects of an increasingly volatile climate on increasingly precarious geographies.

9 Manuring Eden Biological Conversions in Paradise Lost David B. Goldstein



Then to thy corn-fields thou dost go, Which, though well soiled, yet thou dost know That the best compost for the lands Is the wise master’s feet and hands. — Robert Herrick, “The Country Life”

“With His Own Hand Manuring”

For all his forthright interest in prelapsarian sex, Milton is famously noncommittal about whether Adam and Eve defecate in Paradise Lost.1 As Michael Schoenfeldt notes, although the two first humans generate excrement in the forms of sweat and hair, no dung of any sort seems to be produced before the Fall. When Adam talks of his and Eve’s “scant manuring,”2 he means the labor of the hand, or manus — the manual work of pruning the garden’s vegetation, which otherwise would grow unmanageable. Such a fecund environment requires no artificial inducements. Manuring works to restrain rather than spur growth, and it is an action, not a substance.3 Yet when the word recurs toward the end of the poem, it does so with a different force, more in line with the late seventeenth century understanding of the term, which encompassed both “tending by hand” and the application of various

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material incitements to growth — whether water, enhanced soils such as chalks and marls, nitrogen-rich salts, ashes, dung, urine, or a myriad of other forms of ordure. The difference between the first and second uses of “manuring” in the poem, and what that difference means for the various conversions of both humans and soils, are the subject of this essay. Just before the second use of the term in Paradise Lost, at the close of book 10 and the opening of book 11, Adam and Eve have begun the long process of repentance for their intemperate ingestions by turning to prayer. Adam, horrified by Eve’s suggestion of suicide, pleads with her to stop entertaining the “willful barrenness” of self-violence (10.1042), and instead to ask forgiveness. He then describes to Eve what sort of obeisance they must pay, noting, with the precision of a clergyman or a recipe writer, not only the position of their bodies, but also their actions and feelings: prostrate fall Before him reverent, and there confess Humbly our faults, and pardon beg, with tears Watering the ground, and with our sighs the air Frequenting, sent from hearts contrite, in sign Of sorrow unfeigned, and humiliation meek.

(10.1087–92)

A few lines later they do just this, with Milton employing a strange but moving Homeric echo in which the words find their way from Adam’s voice into the narration (1101–03). This exact repetition underlines both the earnestness of the gesture, and the transformation of what it means to tend a garden after the Fall — not restraining wanton growth, but encouraging tender shoots. Not the outer world but the inner. As an antidote to “willful barrenness,” prayer functions precisely as a way of tilling the ground of human existence for a new kind of fertility, achieved with hard but meaningful labor. As Barbara Lewalski argues, this georgic tending prepares the humans for Michael’s mission, which is “to cultivate the stony soil of a fallen human nature.”4 Now Adam and Eve must tend the garden of their hearts, nurturing contrition before they can begin the practical work of worldly repair. The repetition places this manuring of the heart at the center of the postlapsarian project. To work the land by the sweat of one’s brow, as Adam has been cursed to do, becomes the governing metaphor for all human growth.

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That Milton would draw an analogy between tilling the ground and tilling a soul is lyrical but in itself unremarkable; it has been ever thus. Yet Milton carries the parallel beyond metaphor and into the monist materiality of “one first matter all,” which infuses the relationship with new life and meaning. We know that the poem’s alimentary features, for example, are not just comparative but lived — Milton makes a digestive tract out of a universe, and a universe out of a digestive tract, in which ethics and politics are inseparable from its culinary and commensal aspects.5 The same is true of the poem’s relationship to ecology.6 But we have yet to recognize that the poem’s pedological elements are just as integral to its embodiments, and that we need to take account of them in order to articulate fully the postlapsarian architecture of both humanity and the evil packed at its roots.

Water

If we look more closely at Adam’s prescription for repentance, we note that it touches upon virtually all of the standard seventeenth century tropes of good husbandry. Early in the century, Sir Francis Bacon (whom John Evelyn was still assiduously quoting a half century later) divided the care of vegetation, or as he phrased it, the “Meanes of Accelerating Germination,” into three areas: “the Goodnesse and Strength of the Nourishment,” the “Comforting of the Spirits of the Plant,” and “the Making way for the Easie Coming to the Nourishment, and Drawing it.”7 By the first, Bacon means the kind of fertilizer applied — each plant requires a different treatment. By the second, Bacon means the position in which the plant is placed, especially in respect to heat, whether “warme vpon a Wall,” or against a chimney, or sheltered by boughs. By the third, he means loosening the dirt around the plant so that it can better access the nutrients around it. Of these nutrients, Bacon is unequivocal about which is most important: “the most admirable Acceleration by Facilitating the Nourishment” of plants, he writes, “is that of Water.”8 Of course, watering has always been a staple of farming knowledge, but Bacon’s insistence upon its primacy was new, and was further buttressed by scientific experiments throughout the century, some conducted by Robert Boyle, purportedly showing that plants took nourishment solely from the water added to them.9

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The intimacy and personification with which Bacon treats plants captures a standard Renaissance understanding of the vegetative. Plants and animals required more or less the same sorts of things. Plants breathed and had desires.10 Animals had the motor skills necessary to seek out those desires, while plants had to wait for them. Humans could both seek them out and reason about doing so, which is what made them human.11 So it is with Adam and Eve. To accelerate the germination of their souls, the humans themselves identify “the Goodnesse and Strength of the Nourishment” they require, “watering the ground” with their efficacious tears. They place themselves where their spirits may best be comforted: back at the scene of their judgment, prostrate, hoping to find again the warmth of God’s presence. (Interestingly, Adam leads up to this speech by spending several lines extolling the inventions of clothing and fire, which provide the physical warmth that will supplement their spiritual warmth — the humans are tucked up against the chimney in more ways than one.) And then, “Making way for the Easie Coming to the Nourishment, and Drawing it,” they break up the stony ground that has set around their souls, working it with “sorrow unfeigned, and humiliation meek” in order to let the nutriment enter where it will do most good. The emphasis on their breath reminds us of the ways early modern plants breathed: as John Woodward put it in a 1699 paper, “the greatest part of the fluid mass that ascends up into plants, does not settle there but passes through their pores and exhales up into the atmosphere.”12 Plants pray too, as in the opening of book 5, where the language of humans echoes and stands in for the quiet floral exhalations of Eden. Adam and Eve’s behavior becomes plantlike, as meek a subject position as humans can manage.13 If we doubt such a materialist reading of this passage, Milton gives us just that reading moments later, in the opening lines of book 11: Thus they in lowliest plight repentant stood Praying, for from the mercy-seat above Prevenient grace descending had removed The stony from their hearts, and made new flesh Regenerate grow instead.

(PL 11.1–5)

God’s response to human penitence is to manure it, to clear “the stony from their hearts” and prepare the ground in such a way as to allow the drawing in of comfort and nourishment. Like a good gardener, God

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anticipates the most favorable conditions for this germination, sending “prevenient” grace to convert stone to soil. The Son observes with approval this new dynamic between gardener and flora: See Father, what first fruits on Earth are sprung From thy implanted grace in man, these sighs And prayers, which in this golden censer, mixed With incense, I thy priest before thee bring, Fruits of more pleasing savor from thy seed Sown with contrition in his heart, than those Which his own hand manuring all the trees Of Paradise could have produced, ere fall’n From innocence.

(11.22–30)

In this passage we arrive at the second use of the term “manuring,” and we find that it carries a subtly different valence. The Son imagines that the works of repentance in which Adam and Eve engage produce better fruit than he could have managed by manuring every tree in paradise. But as we have seen, this is not quite what the action of manuring meant before the Fall. Humans were mostly engaged in managing growth rather than in promoting it. Even when they helped increase production, as in their tending of the fruit trees which would otherwise reach “over-woody” in “fruitless embraces,” they did so by pruning, not fertilizing (5.213, 215). Yet here, retrospectively, “manuring” takes on the postlapsarian valence of nourishing, bettering, increasing. The sense of “tending by hand” is maintained, but now with an additional connotation of contributing some material quantity that did not previously exist. This is what the term denoted by the late 1600s. Since the fifteenth century, manuring had meant tending to plant life in any way that involved manual labor. By the 1570s, it also referred transitively to the application of dungs and composts. During Milton’s time the term began to be used intransitively in the same sense.14 The vector of the term throughout the century, therefore, moves toward further imbrication between labor and dung. In his first use of the term, Milton reverses this vector; in the second, he acquiesces to it. This retroaction implies that even plants are no longer complete in themselves; they require “implanted grace” and active sowing in order to propagate. We are reminded of Bernard Palissy’s definition of manure, one that influenced most seventeenth century English discussions on the subject: “You will admit that when you bring dung into the field it

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is to return to the soil something that has been taken away.”15 Manuring, whether through dunging or other sorts of tending, gives back to the land something that has been removed from it. As Milton takes the task of manuring literally when applied to people, so seventeenth century agricultural writers took the hand of God literally when discussing plants. In 1636 John Shaw, introducing a treatise of various inventions to increase farming efficiency, reminds his readers that the “maine cause” of soil infertility “is the curse of God upon the Earth for Sinne.” And like Milton, Shaw insists that the cure for this is a combination of repentance and hard work. “In the sweat of our brows,” he writes, “wee may get our Bread out of the same; and therefore we are to endeavor, as much as lyeth in us, both to pacifie the wrath of God by our repentance and new ­obedience . . . and also to use the best meanes we can attaine unto to procure the Fertilitie of the same.”16 For Shaw, as for Milton, the manuring of land and the manuring of the heart are mutually enlaced. Repentance and labor are equally necessary for physical and spiritual fruitfulness. Other writers drew an even more pointed connection between manuring and the Christian condition. In The Surueiors Dialogue, the famous Elizabethan and Jacobean surveyor John Norden imagines a series of debates between a sophisticated surveyor and a benighted farmer (whose responses, befitting his antiquated perspective, are printed in blackletter). On the subject of manuring, the farmer ­protests: Admit, [if] no man did manure the earth, yet surely there be many grounds, in my conceit, would neuer become worse then they be. Surveyor: You are in a great error: for the freest grounds that you see, the fairest pastures, the greenest meddows, would become in short time, ouergrowen with bushes, woods, weeds, and things vnprofitable, as they were before they were rid, and clensed of the same by the industry of man, who was inioyned that care and tra­ uaile to manure the earth, which for his disobedience should bring foorth these things.17

Hoping, presumably, to reduce his workload, the farmer opines that not all grounds require the application of manure. He is promptly schooled. But the surveyor’s response goes beyond an agricultural argument to a theological one: we are “inioyned . . . to manure the earth” because of Adam’s curse. It is God’s will that we manure, and

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it is our obedient task to do it. In the seventeenth century, to manure is to acknowledge the condition of fallenness. The end of book 10 and the beginning of book 11 mark a turning point in which the humans begin to come to terms with their fallen condition and to work out solutions to it. But until Michael’s arrival and the vision of biblical history he imparts to Adam, neither the human characters nor the readers of the poem quite grasp the full extent of what this new manuring will entail. This is because Adam and Eve still act as if the garden is, as Amy Tigner puts it, “a closed ecosystem” — a circuit encompassing only themselves, animals, and divinity.18 As yet, manuring involves no actual manure. But as the reader knows, Sin and Death have now entered the world and will provide “draff and filth” aplenty (PL 10.630). The introduction of ordure into the sweetsmelling landscape of Eden is paradoxical, since, as Regina Schwartz argues, “Those sent by Satan to pollute are ultimately employed in the divine service to clean.”19 The filth that Satan, Sin, and Death make possible are destructive, but they are also necessary to the nourishment of repentance and human growth after the Fall. The eco-theology of Paradise Lost is both influenced by and comments upon an active debate in seventeenth century science: the role and efficacy of feces and other kinds of manure in agriculture, urban policy, and even military technology. This manure debate enters the narrative of Paradise Lost largely through the body of Satan, and especially through the abrupt disappearance of that body in the middle of book 10, just at the point where humans must begin to learn how to manure in a different way from how they did in prelapsarian Eden. Satan’s “fecopoetics,” to borrow a term from Susan Signe Morrison, directly transforms the poem’s account of the postlapsarian ethics and ecology of evil.20 If God is the great gardener, Satan is the great manurer, a role both unfortunate and essential. The composts he introduces into the terrestrial world can scorch, destroy, and leave a pernicious taint, but they can also produce real growth, repentance, and nourishment. Teaching humans how to manage that fecundity is the point of the archangel Michael’s biblical lesson, just as the point of Raphael’s visitation, though it fails spectacularly, is to teach Adam and Eve how to conduct a life that would render Michael’s lesson unnecessary.21 Milton’s attitude toward Satan and Sin’s excremental products is as ambivalent and complex as early modern feelings toward manure itself. Besides water, these attitudes

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cluster around three kinds of manure in the poem: saltpeter, ash, and human waste. Each substance finds its own poetic and phenomenological involvements, and each helps us to understand the complex status of fecundity in the poem. Urine and Dung

Of all the forms of fertilizer, human and animal waste are the ones we most closely associate with Satan and his league. Before the Fall, excrement in its most refined sense is associated positively with all aspects of the monist world, since “whatever was created, needs / To be sustained and fed,” and therefore must evacuate. Even angels have working digestive systems that “corporeal to incorporeal turn,” although the precise process by which this happens is not described (5.413–15). The Fall, however, introduces a welter of verbal and literal excrement, which has been meticulously anticipated by the manifold connections between Satan and scatology, and which is now almost exclusively linked to evil or to humankind. These references seem unrelentingly negative, encapsulated by the “draff and filth” that Satan’s hellhounds lick up from the reeking and sinful world.22 Yet Milton always considers excrement not only in its negative, wasteful mode, but also in its cyclical mode as manure. The transformation from prelapsarian to postlapsarian earth is from one in which no artificial manures are needed, to one in which it is an absolute necessity to convert filth into manure both to filter it and to encourage the growth of a now stunted environment. But in the course of that transformation, Milton recognizes the important role that manure and manuring must play: the action of human regeneration is the action of transforming, as it were, shit into gold, excrement into nourishment. It is in doing so that humans begin to accept and fulfill their crucial role in a fallen world. Whereas before, to be God’s gardener meant restraining nearly unmanageable growth, now it means converting waste into resources through difficult labor. (For a complementary reading of compost’s regenerative value, see Frances Dolan’s essay in this volume.) In order to answer the question of how postlapsarian excrement functions in the poem, it will be useful to address attitudes toward the use of human ordure on agricultural lands in the seventeenth century. Debates about the manuring and dunging of fields emerged in printed

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English agricultural treatises starting in the mid-1600s. Human manure proved the most controversial of the various available dungs, to be used studiously and with due regard for its dangers. One might expect to find an Eliasian “civilizing process” at work, in which writers on the subject become increasingly uncomfortable with the notion of proximity to and direct use of human refuse.23 Perhaps this is true of the longue durée, but English Renaissance discourse on the subject exhibits little of such a linear progression. This may be partly due to the influence of classical treatises, which extends in one form or another throughout the period, felt in terms of both specific advice and general techniques, approaches, and framing of issues. Mid-sixteenthcentury English agricultural writers relied heavily on Varro and Virgil, as well as the Geoponika, a Byzantine collection of husbandry writings, and Columella, whose De re rustica was one of the chief surviving Roman farming treatises.24 The works take up a number of themes that help to shape the debate on manure in the period and in Milton’s cosmology: the philosophical and material roles of fertilizer, the relative value of human manure in relation to other soil additives, and the manner of its application. Early Tudor agricultural writers agreed on the efficacy of dung, human and otherwise, but gave relatively scant advice for its use. John Fitzherbert, perhaps the first English author to address the subject directly in print, follows Columella and the Geoponika in suggesting mixing dung together with earth, and in privileging pigeon dung above all others, while dismissing horse dung as “the worst donge that is.”25 Thomas Hill made the first explicit attempt to absorb classical and postclassical sources, especially Varro, Virgil, and Columella, into English agricultural theory; Barnabe Googe’s widely read translation of the German agriculturist Conrad Heresbach performed a similar function.26 All these writers more or less follow Columella and the Geoponika in ranking human feces somewhere between bird guano and horse or mule dung, the Porsche and the Yugo, respectively, of classical composts. The Geoponika considers human feces second only to bird droppings for its ability to kill weeds, but cautions that human dung, among others, should not be applied directly to the soil, for fear of scorching the crops. Whereas ancient and continental writers included human dung unceremoniously and without apparent revulsion as part of a range of

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possible husbandry practices, English writers occasionally expressed discomfort when speaking of human excrement. Thomas Tusser advocates privy waste as a manure, but only with some embarrassment: “let night be appointed,” he cautions wittily, “such baggage to hide.”27 In Hugh Plat’s Diverse New Sorts of Soyle (1594), however, a new intensity of discourse appears, marrying classical authorities, early English husbandry writers, continental theorists, local knowledge, and Plat’s own experiments in order to forge a distinctly English approach to manuring. Plat’s detailed, learned, and straightforward account of the uses of human excrement and other fertilizers in farming set the terms for debates over manure throughout the seventeenth century, introducing issues such as the benefits and uses of different soils (including dungs, marls, and chalks), the hierarchy and categorization of particular dungs (in which he departs from classical authority), recipes for particular composts, and the best ways to recycle common wastes. Of all the issues upon which he focuses, two bear particularly upon the matter of manure in Paradise Lost: the question of whether some manures burn or scorch the vegetation unless they first receive proper processing, and what the active growth ingredient in manure might be. We will return to the second question shortly. The issue of which manures should be laid down fresh, and which required processing before use, formed one of the chief debates in seventeenth century agricultural science and policy. Writers agreed on little except the matter of its importance. Plat cautions that any manure whose humoral qualities include heat, such as marl and blood, might damage the soil. Yet human and animal dung should be laid fresh, or at least kept from rain while they dry out, because rain will wash away the salt and leave the dung ineffective.28 Other agricultural experts, chief among them Walter Blith, strongly advocated the use of fresh waste, whether animal or human, upon flora of all sorts.29 Still others equivocated; Samuel Hartlib maintained that while, on the one hand, “the Sun and dew engender a nitrous fatnesse, which is the cause of fertility”; on the other hand, “dung is exhausted by the Sun.”30 John Evelyn, while fully aware of the opinions of the ancient and early modern commentators on human manure, was more reserved and even squeamish on the subject of its application. In his paper on the subject for the Royal Society, A Philosophical Discourse of Earth, Evelyn warns against the use of any dung, human or otherwise, in all but

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the most controlled circumstances, urging his readers to “apply them with a skilfull and philosophical hand, without which they do alwayes more hurt than good.” Human feces in particular could “perniciously contaminate the odor of Flowers” and grapes.31 If used, Evelyn counseled that human dung should be dried out for a year or more before application, which would make it both milder and more concentrated. Whether Evelyn’s distaste for dung stems from a psychological disgust about its source in the animal body, or from scientific concerns about its composition, or a combination of both, he stands out among agriculturists of the period for his warnings about its power. Milton’s Satan is associated with manure almost from his first appearance in Paradise Lost, when, having broken or been freed from the “mineral fury” of the fiery lake, he alights on the “burning marl” that forms the soil of hell (1.235, 296). Marl, the clay soil found in riverbeds or derived from ancient underground alluvial deposits, was long considered an important source for compost.32 Plat, drawing on Palissy, gave it the first extended treatment in English, arguing that it was an extremely effective manure for “hungrie and barren groundes,” while cautioning that it had a reputation for “exceeding heat, whereby it burneth vppe the seede that is then sowne.”33 In Paradise Lost, marl becomes the fitting earth of hell both because it was dug from beneath ground or water, and because of a heat that, unchecked, might damage life. Thus Milton inaugurates a leitmotif of linking Satan to manures that threaten to scorch the very plants they are supposed to nurture — a leitmotif that also, as we have seen, occurs throughout seventeenth century farming treatises. The initial experience of satanic excrement applied directly to the human world is destructive and scorching. When Satan communicates his triumph to Sin and Death and sends them into the world, their entry into the empyreal skies causes just the sort of violence that Evelyn feared would occur from the application of fresh dung: they with speed Their course through thickest constellations held Spreading their bane; the blasted stars looked wan, And planets, planet-struck, real eclipse Then suffered.

(PL 10.410–14)

As Sin and Death sweep in, sowing violence, the universe responds as if burned by an excessive manuring. The hand that lays the compost is

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the opposite of “philosophical”; it is as indiscriminate as Death itself. It is interesting that Sin materializes as a physical body on earth as Satan vanishes from it (of which more below): “Sin there in power before, / Once actual, now in body, and to dwell / Habitual habitant,” replaces Satan, once actual, now to be embodied by “his works” (10.585–88; 12.394). Sin’s role is now to diffuse herself throughout the human body, becoming a kind of scorching manure for its interior just as her pass through the heavens scorches the exterior world: “Till I in man residing through the race, / His thoughts, his looks, words, actions, all infect, / And season him thy last and sweetest prey” (10.607–09). While Sin here becomes a cook, carefully seasoning the world for her ravenous son’s delectation, the meal she prepares features her own excrement as the symbolic if not literal seasoning.34 This extends the sub rosa metaphor of the human being itself as a site of agricultural or georgic labor, here destroyed by bad husbandry. Whereas prelapsarian humans could tend the garden of themselves with their own hands, now they are flooded with fertilizers whose job is not to nurture their sapience or maturity, but to fatten them for death’s maw. The idea that Satan, Death, and Sin spread a hot, dunglike compost over the world and within its beings is developed through God the Father’s discussion of worldly evil, but with an important change. Whereas, with his usual egotism, Satan takes full credit for the postlapsarian influx of excrement, God relocates its production to Adam and Eve:



See, with what heat these dogs of Hell advance To waste and havoc yonder world . . . . . . . . And know not that I called, and drew them thither My Hell-hounds, to lick up the draff and filth Which man’s polluting sin with taint hath shed On what was pure.

(10.616–32)

Having briefly touched on this passage above, we should note two further aspects of the speech that suggest an excremental manuring: first, the “heat” of those dogs, which parallels the scorching effect of the most dangerous manures, and second, the shift in focus to the humans’ “polluting sin” having been “shed” on the earth. Here at last, and most unfortunately, we can answer the question of what it means to excrete in paradise. The fecal matter of sin gets all over everything, producing nothing but more sin, which in turn is eaten up by base,

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s­ inful beings. It appears that God has created — or humans have created, and God and Satan have facilitated — an endless cycle of manuring, in which shit begets shit, until abruptly ended by the Second Coming, at which time, “at one sling” of the Son’s “victorious arm,” Satan and his relatives will be thrust back into hell. The single grand gesture of the Son’s mighty arm would seem to mitigate against any kind of gradual transformation of sin into productivity, of excrement into useful fertilizer. Yet throughout the last three books of the poem, a tension arises between two modes of triumph over Satan: the great battle, and the slow regeneration. Whereas in the above passage Satan is banished in a storybook, “once and for all” sort of way, Michael in book 12 is quick to caution otherwise: “Dream not of their fight, / As of a duel.” Victory will be achieved “Not by destroying Satan, but his works / In thee and in thy seed” (12.386–95). The internal, gradual elimination and refinement of satanic manure in the world parallels the ways in which soil science counseled the slow processing of dangerous manures in order to bring them to maximum effectiveness and minimum danger. This is especially true of the most harmful manure of them all, and the one with which Satan is most closely associated in Paradise Lost.

Saltpeter

The most dangerous and mysterious of the powerful salts that could create manures was almost certainly saltpeter. Saltpeter, or potassium nitrate, is one of the three primary ingredients (along with sulfur and charcoal) of gunpowder.35 Gunpowder, the “devil’s distillate,” had been associated with the infernal powers from the Middle Ages,36 so Satan’s close association with it is appropriate. In book 4 of Paradise Lost, prodded with Uriel’s spear while he is busy crouching at Eve’s ear and infecting her dreams with noxious humors, he leaps up “as when a spark / Lights on a heap of nitrous powder” (PL 8.112–13). In book 6, digging beneath heaven’s topsoil, he and the other rebel angels uncover Th’originals of nature in their crude Conception; sulfurous and nitrous foam They found, they mingled, and with subtle art, Concocted and adusted they reduced To blackest grain.

(6.511–15)

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Critics have noted this discovery’s excremental undertones. Kent Lehnhof, for example, argues that “Satan mines the digestive tract of heaven for intestinal gas and uses this volatile substance to create explosions that can be trained on the armies of God.”37 Yet saltpeter, the “nitrous foam” that forms the major ingredient of the new substance, was itself literally excremental, mined from the waste-filled margins of human settlement. Saltpeter, often but not always known as nitre,38 had long been viewed as an important fertilizer, but it was the arrival of gunpowder from the Orient in the thirteenth century that ignited interest in mining it on a large scale.39 England had no indigenous deposits of saltpeter, and as the English military diverted more of its resources to gunpowder-based weaponry, locating or producing it in quantity became a matter of national security. “It was the crucial link in the chain of chemistry and power,” writes David Cressy, “comparable in strategic importance to modern oil or uranium.”40 By the sixteenth century, it had been established that saltpeter could be made from a combination of dung, urine, lime, and sometimes wood ashes.41 This discovery touched off a hunt for saltpeter grounds in England that could supply its insatiable military needs, which continued until the crown secured a stable source of foreign saltpeter through the East India Company in the late seventeenth century. (For further discussion of the conflicts between military and agricultural interests produced by saltpeter mining, see Randall Martin’s essay in this volume.) The history of this hunt, narrated ably by Cressy, is by turns comic and violent, involving characters running the gamut from unsavory charlatans and thugs to scientists, nobles, and the monarchs themselves, and concerning “such matters as the calculus of cannonry and the economy of human waste.”42 Saltpeter mining required two things: the location of organic soils in which dung, urine, and lime had mixed over periods of a few months or more, and enough land around those areas to set up odiferous openair factories, called nitrebeds or saltpeter plantations, to sift and refine the soil into saltpeter.43 That the first was usually located on private property, and the second noxious to anyone in the vicinity, set the conditions for fierce clashes between state and householder. What we would now call NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) attitudes ran rampant, and the crown responded by investing great power of seizure in saltpetermen throughout England. Saltpeter foragers learned to look for

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“wall saltpeter,” formed when a wall built with some form of lime became the site of a latrine, and to dig in barns, dovecotes, and other areas rich in these ingredients.44 In one extraordinary case, the notorious Oxfordshire saltpeterman Nicholas Stephens tore up the seats of a parish church in Chipping Norton in order to dig for nitrogen-rich soil, thereby ruining the church floor and rendering both worship and burial next to impossible. “When the parish clerk objected that God’s house was no fit place for digging,” writes Cressy, “the workmen answered ‘with obscene jests, that the earth in churches is best for their turns, for the women piss in their seats, which causes excellent saltpeter.’ ”45 In another incident, when one Thomas Thornhill gave the order to dig out the dovecote of Dr. Christopher Wren, the three-foot-thick north wall of it promptly collapsed, freeing the pigeons. Wren, who had friends in high places, succeeded in suing the saltpeterman for damages. Whether his young son, the future architect Christopher Wren Jr., would later recall his father’s experience while rebuilding London after the Great Fire, has not been recorded.46 Saltpeter’s sinister associations thus exceeded gunpowder’s metaphoric links with devilry, for it also took a kind of devilry to wrest the stuff from the ground, causing disruption and conflict throughout Tudor and Stuart England. Yet at the same time that saltpeter was roundly acknowledged as a dangerous substance both militarily and socially, soil scientists were beginning to draw attention to its nitrogenic qualities, arguing that it might form a kind of superfertilizer — the archetype of all others. This belief may have originated with Plat’s attempts to discover the active ingredient in compost. Following Palissy, who believed that the essential element which, in Malcom Thick’s words, “gave fertility, life and structure to animate and inanimate objects,” was a kind of salt, which Palissy called a fifth element, Plat argued that this “vegetative salt” must be contained in all matter.47 “I tell thee,” he writes, “that there is not any one thinge in the worlde, which dooeth not participate of this salt, whether it be man, beast, tree, plant, or any other kinde of vegetable, yea euen the metals themselves, and that which is more, there is not any kind of vegetable whatsoeuer, that could growe or flourishe, without the action of salt.”48 For Plat, “salt” was itself a highly capacious concept: copper, saltpeter, and even sugar were all salts to him, and all contained the one essential salt that gave life and structure to all earthly

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matter. If water formed Bacon’s essential growth element, salt formed Plat’s — and indeed, salt was really a “generative water” that permeated the “common waters” more readily observable by humans.49 Of saltpeter itself, Plat has little to say in his agricultural treatise, pointing out that English saltpeter is so scarce that it can hardly be considered a viable compost for farming. He does, however, assert that the fifth element inheres in saltpeter, wherefore when saltpetermen have removed the substance from the soil, “both the ashes and the earth, out of which they haue now taken the salt, are altogither vnprofitable.” (He also takes a dim view of saltpetermen, whom he accuses of both corruption and ineptitude.)50 The fascination with saltpeter grew greatly, however, during Milton’s time, to the point that John Evelyn and the Royal Society began to wonder whether saltpeter itself might be identical with Palissy’s fifth element that catalyzed growth and stability in all matter. In A Philosophical Discourse of Earth, Evelyn lays out his argument for the primary nourishing importance of saltpeter. Following Plat and Palissy, Evelyn agrees that the central ingredient of fertilizer is salt, and that salt is in fact the chief generative principle, “the Original of all fecundity.”51 Evelyn, however, while acknowledging that this principle has not yet been isolated, cautiously identifies this salt with saltpeter. Beginning from the question, “whether any Salts do universally nourish all Plants alike,” he responds that in lieu of securely identifying the essential principle, “I firmly believe, that, were SaltPeter (I mean fictitious Nitre) to be obtain’d in Plenty, we should need but little other Composts to meliorate our Ground.”52 Whether all promotion of fertility is due to this “meer Salt, or spirituous Nitre,” he declines to say, but nevertheless suggests that upon further research it might be found to provide precisely the “promiscuously universal” compost that agriculturists seek.53 Evelyn’s treatise mentions only fleetingly the explosive properties of saltpeter, but he was assuredly aware of them. During the period in which he was at work on his agricultural theories, the Royal Society became passionately interested in saltpeter for its military uses.54 Saltpeter recipes had appeared in John Bate’s The Mysteryes of Nature, and Art in 1634 (subsequent editions in 1635 and 1654), and these recipes, as well as a great deal of debate about the chemical, appeared in Samuel Hartlib’s correspondence in the 1650s.55 In one letter, a

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­correspondent named Peter Smith muses, “I conceive that sheep-dung & pigeon mucke are much advanced in their worth by the shelter they have from moysture, the reason of my conceit is, because that drinesse conduceth much to the increase of Niter (which Bacon calls the Spiritt of earth) as may be demonstrated by the Saltpeter works.”56 On March 20, 1679, during a discussion regarding the ingredients of gunpowder, the Royal Society minutes reflect an intense interest in tracking down all extant books by Roger Bacon, who in the thirteenth century had published the first recipe for gunpowder in Europe, in hopes of uncovering further “curious and useful matters” related to this mysterious concoction.57 Given the government’s interest in procuring military supplies of saltpeter, scientific interest in the subject is expected. What is striking is that saltpeter attracted such intense interest simultaneously for its destructive and generative powers. The chief chemical of violence and death might also hold the key to life and growth. In Paradise Lost, saltpeter appears to hold only negative connotations — associated with Satan’s invention of gunpowder, it appears nowhere else in the poem. (Saltpeter is also treated negatively in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV, as Randall Martin’s essay in this volume demonstrates.) But the scientific concept held so dear by Palissy, Plat, and Evelyn that there might be some central element in noxious materials that, if located and isolated, could provide nearly limitless fertility, forms the core of God’s triumph in the poem’s depiction of the Second Coming. The key to achieving purity in the postlapsarian world is not the destruction or denial of Satan, but the reformation of the satanic principle. Here we return to Michael’s vision of the final triumph not as a battle but as a process: “Not by destroying Satan, but his works / In thee and in thy seed” (PL 12.394–95). Why this is important is explained a few moments later: “That all this good of evil shall produce, / And evil turn to good” (12.470–71). The materials of human regeneration are already present in satanic substance. What humans require is the means of transforming that evil into nourishment and productivity. Once they have achieved this, they will have paved the way for the final transformation: Last in the clouds from Heav’n to be revealed In glory of the Father, to dissolve Satan with his perverted world, then raise

188  David B. Goldstein From the conflagrant mass, purged and refined, New heav’ns, new earth, ages of endless date Founded in righteousness and peace and love To bring forth fruits, joy and eternal bliss.

(12.545–51)

Satan does not disappear at the end of history. Rather, his essence becomes refined, a chief element of new and ageless fecundity, from which grows endlessly nourishing produce. As with Evelyn’s vision for saltpeter, an evil substance becomes an agent of fertility, the “original of all fecundity,” the source of godly growth. Satan’s association with saltpeter, which seems entirely negative in book 6, nevertheless lays the groundwork for a material transformation of the scorched postlapsarian world into a justly husbanded paradise. Ash

We last hear from Satan in Paradise Lost under ignominious circumstances: in the middle of book 10, he leads his devils to a simulacrum of the fruit tree to which he lured Eve. There they devour the lovely fruits, which turn to ash in their mouths: greedily they plucked The fruitage fair to sight, like that which grew Near that bituminous lake where Sodom flamed; This more delusive, not the touch, but taste Deceived; they fondly thinking to allay Their appetite with gust, instead of fruit Chewed bitter ashes, which th’ offended taste With spattering noise rejected: oft they assayed, Hunger and thirst constraining, drugged as oft, With hatefullest disrelish writhed their jaws With soot and cinders filled.

(10.560–70)

Although Satan reemerges somewhat abstractly at the requisite moments of Michael’s historical narrative in book 12 — as the serpent, or as “works” rather than a body (12.394) — after the incident of the ashen fruits he no longer participates as a physical character in the poem. He gives no speeches and makes no appearances in the poem’s present tense.58 In a narrative that “justifies” the judgment of the Fall, what just deserts are served by the disappearance of that narrative’s main antagonist at this moment, a few pages after the ­forbidden fruit itself vanishes down the general human esophagus? Does Satan’s exit

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follow a Shakespearean model, in which a significant character —  Lear’s fool, Lady Macbeth, Adam in As You Like It — is dismissed or killed after fulfilling its dramatic function? Or does the very disappearance of Satan at this moment serve a particular narrative and ethical end? Denise Gigante, in a powerful reading of the poem’s digestive economy, argues the former position. “Having been purged in the constitutive act of creation,” she writes, Satan “remains in circulation within a more ‘general’ cosmology that includes God at his radical limits: God and the ‘Infernal dregs’ he has had to repress . . . in order to establish a world of tasteful, waste-free circulation.”59 While the idea of Satan as a kind of “inassimilable waste” within the world’s monist flow of matter makes intuitive sense, the opposite is equally true: at the same time that Satan as a character is banished to the edge of the Miltonic universe, what we might call the satanic principle — the worldly fact of sin, suffering, and death — relocates itself at the center of human creation. The last three books of Paradise Lost depict a world in which Satan and his wasting spawn inhabit every aspect of earthly life. Evil is hardly banished to the farther reaches of the universal digestive system; it is indeed all too well digested, becoming an integral part of the human condition it helped create. Evil becomes, in effect, the compost in which the trauma of human history grows and is nourished. That ash effects this transition is, from the perspective of early modern soil science, all too logical. First, ash was an important, if supplementary, ingredient in the weaponizing of saltpeter. Peter Whitehorne’s 1562 treatise on Elizabethan warfare recommended flushing saltpeter though “ashes of old oak” in order to remove impurities, while other military engineers experimented with adding ash to help keep the saltpeter dry for ease of transportation and storage.60 Thus if Satan’s greatest pedological achievement is the discovery of saltpeter, the fact that his pyrrhic victory over humans comes in the form of a mouthful of ashes shows how much his command of soils has degraded. From making the bowels of heaven rumble, he and the devils are reduced to becoming a repository and filtration system for that great and terrible chemical reaction. They even become a kind of cauldron that converts living organic matter to burnt, dead matter, since the passage ­emphasizes the transformation of the fruit not only into ashes but also

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into “soot” and “cinders” — near synonyms that emphasize the action of fire upon wood. If ash played a supporting role in saltpeter production, it was of central importance as a compost in Renaissance husbandry. Readily available, rich in organic matter, ash, soot, and cinders were considered powerful all-purpose manures, whether alone or mixed with other substrates. Plat, who attributes the power of ashes to the same life-giving salt found in other manures, devotes several pages of his treatise to the benefits of soap ashes, which are created when a forest fire burns several kinds of trees “by a more violent kind of fire, beeing forced to a fusion.” This ash is so effective that some “esteeme it much aboue any dung,” and Plat quotes Barnabe Googe as claiming that it is especially good for growing vegetables such as artichokes.61 In The English Improver Improved, Walter Blith attributes to ashes “a secret vertue and operation” and to soot “a vertue of Fruitfulnesse,” though he considers human urine and animal dung to be the more powerful fertilizers.62 Soot, ashes, and cinders also figure prominently among the composts recommended both by Bacon and, following him, Evelyn.63 These waste products were universally acknowledged for their nutritive powers in the period. That fire’s destructive force could give rise to health-giving organic compounds was a point of fascination for these agriculturists. We might object that in the episode of the ashen fruits, Milton is not thinking of ash as a kind of manure but as a kind of unregenerative waste that is the precise opposite of organic growth — more akin to the punishment of Tantalus than to the manuring of plants. Milton apparently underlines this interpretation by linking the scene explicitly to its primary source, the fruit that was known to grow near the Dead Sea, “that bituminous lake where Sodom flamed.” The reference comes from Josephus, who describes the Dead Sea as being full of bitumen, whose excrementality is verified by the fact that when it sticks to ships it can be loosened only “by the tearmes [menstrual discharge] or vrine of a woman.” The fruits of Sodom, once healthy, now bear the traces of the “Divine fire” that destroyed the region in Genesis, “which fruit to the eye seemeth like vnto other fruits; but if you handle them they fall into ashes, and smoake.”64 Immediately recognizable to educated readers, and especially to those versed in

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soil husbandry, the allusion even shows up in Plat’s treatise when he discusses the generative power of salt, adducing the Dead Sea as the single exception to the ability of salt to encourage life.65 The reference in the poem thus seems to indicate that from these ashes nothing good or productive can emerge. It is true that the ashen fruit clearly means both to mirror the unproductive eating of the forbidden fruit itself, and to serve as a punishment whereby the devils are robbed of the pleasure they might have derived from the fruit’s “gust.” Yet as with other ways in which “Satan with his perverted world” will be dissolved only to be “purged and refined,” the episode has a double function — not only to punish but also to begin the transformation of Satan himself, as body and principle, into the manure that will, however ironically, nourish the world. This happens in the episode in a variety of ways. First, the ingestion of the ashen fruits locates this powerful compost within the mouths and bellies of the devils; they are, like the humans on whom they prey, manured from within. Second, when they speak, they “spatter,” a decidedly stercorary sound that suggests the spewing out of feces.66 Third, Milton refers to the action as a “purchase,” which can mean “annual return or rent from land,” thus emphasizing that the very repetition of this punishment, to which they are “yearly enjoined” (10.575), functions as a return to an agricultural landscape that the devils unwittingly manure in a yearly cycle.67 The episode thus forms part of the poetics of manuring that underlies and fulfills the disappearance of Satan as a character from the poem. “Homeward Returning”

If book 5 of Paradise Lost might be thought of as a treatise on how to eat in a just world, books 11 and 12 are a sort of guide to manuring the fallen one. Book 11 argues for the new necessity of such activity, while book 12 gives some inkling of how to do it. In the beginning of book 11, we have seen how both Adam and Eve and the Son begin to refigure human bodies as sites not only of agricultural labor but also of material tending, which through careful manuring can produce positive and healing growth. A few lines later, as God prepares to cast the humans out of paradise, he converts this material growth into a

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principle: “And send him from the garden forth to till / The ground whence he was taken, fitter soil” (11.98–99). The phrase’s triple ­meaning — that nonutopian soil is more fit for Adam’s labor now that he too is fallen; that it is fitting he work the soil from which he was created because he will now, because he is subject to death, return to it; and that he himself has become a soil fit for tilling — communicates that the earth will now become a primary literal and figurative site of transformation. Adam’s curse becomes not just a punishment but also a salvational directive: yes, you must now work the soil by the sweat of your brow, but it is this activity and its spiritual cognates that will help engineer a “renovation of the just” (PL 11.65). Likewise, at the beginning of book 12, Michael pauses “betwixt the world destroyed and the world restored,” as if to emphasize the laboriousness of that process, that it comes not instantaneously but only after long labor. The scorching “draff and filth” that the Fall brings into the world can, as with the most virulent manures of husbandry, become powerful sources of productivity and nourishment, if processed over long periods of time and measured “with a skilfull and philosophical hand.” To paraphrase Duke Senior in As You Like It, human gentleness shall force more than sheer force move to gentleness. Battles alone will not conquer excrement. In order to “raise / From the conflagrant mass, purged and refined, / New heav’ns, new earth” and “to bring forth fruits” from that new earth, humans are going to have to learn what it means to manure in the fullest and most spiritual sense. In this context, Michael’s insistence that if humans “only add / Deeds to thy knowledge answerable, add faith, / Add virtue, patience, temperance, add love,” to wisdom, then they “shalt possess / A Paradise within thee, happier far,” sounds like a recipe for a devotional compost to be packed around the heart, nurturing the garden within (12.581–87). It stands in the poem as the ultimate Christian recipe for manuring both soul and world. As if to underscore the material truth of this learning, book 12 is bookended with images and textures of agricultural labor. When Michael pauses “betwixt” the two books, he does so “as one who in his journey bates at noon,” as if he were a laborer stopping at a tavern for sustenance. And as the cherubim descend at the end of the poem to close the gates of Eden, they do so, famously, “as ev’ning mist / Ris’n

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from a river o’re the marish glides / And gathers ground fast at the laborer’s heel / Homeward returning” (12.629–32). Critics have noted that here “Milton’s myth spills out into everyday reality,” and have pointed out the symbolic power of the heel that will bruise the head of Satan.68 But by drawing our attention to the space between the heel and the field over which it walks, and to the mist that gathers between them, Milton evokes the very texture of the land — the physical reality of the soil which, well nurtured, watered, and manured, may produce the good growth so essential for a renovating age.

Afterword Sharon O’Dair

With roots in strands of classical and early modern thought, a gaggle of (what some have called) nonphilosophies structure today’s ecocriticism and a goodly portion of early modern studies. Lucretius has become a star, receiving that imprimatur from the star of early modern studies, Stephen Greenblatt; Spinoza continues his reign as the seventeenth century philosopher perhaps most relevant to us, influencing Gilles Deleuze and ecomaterialist political philosopher Jane Bennett, among others. Continuing the work of poststructuralism, these nonphilosophies bolster the decentering of the human, demoting us to the coequal, at best, of the nonhuman, of matter, of objects. For Bennett everything is atomistically alive! For the object-oriented ­ontologists — for Graham Harman, its leading theorist, and for Timothy Morton, perhaps its leading promoter in literary study — objects arrive at center court, promoted from the sidelines, and everything exists in equal status: a tennis ball, a painting, olives, dirt, this short essay, a human being. Ground-Work: Soil Science in Renaissance ­Literature does not dispute the decentering, the recentering, or the need for collaboration with the nonhuman; by this point in postmodernity, to do so would be court mockery. But Ground-Work does push back; its distinguishing mark in this intellectual milieu is to insist that early modern humans were already decentered, even if agential: the essays here discover a “buried contest of ideas about land use, habitation, politics, and aesthetics,” including especially about the “role of human agency in making, improving, cultivating, [or] tending [the land].”1 The discovery of this contestatory “Renaissance soil science” leads, naturally enough, to another pushback, this time oriented 195

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toward the present, toward critique, toward the question of just what is to be done in another contest of ideas about land use, habitation, and politics, a contest occurring right now, as we face potentially apocalyptic climate change. Here editor Hillary Eklund invokes Srinivas Aravamudan’s essay in Diacritics, “The Catachronism of Climate Change,” which argues that “the rhetorical appeal” of critique, and hence of action on climate, “depends on the prediction of an open rather than determined future,” depends, that is, on philosophical underpinnings of the Enlightenment, its demonstration that “the modern subject can fashion its historical agency,” can “wrest freedom from necessity.”2 For Aravamudan, the “creeping catastrophism” of “inexorable” climate change, of the Anthropocene, to which “all resistance . . . might just be futile,” effectively reverses the Enlightenment’s strong advance into human agency and freedom, pushing us to “reunite . . . with abandoned conceptions of human finitude from a past rich with apocalyptic nightmares.”3 Resisting the embrace of human finitude, of the catachronism of climate change, requires some defense of the Enlightenment, but what’s crucial is Aravamudan’s suggestion that critique, and hence action on climate, also depends upon it. Critique requires, that is, a certain skepticism about the “deadly tranquility at the heart of OOO” and other nonphilosophies insistent upon a world without subjects. “Climate change is all about politics,” Aravamudan explains, but in a world inhabited only by “objects that are animated,” imbued by “magical properties,” from whence arises political drive? Or the “stomach” for political action? It may not arise at all, Aravamudan fears, not at all in a world of coequal objects moved by “the sorcerer’s apprentice.”4 That this once-vanquished past of human finitude and apocalyptic nightmares likely includes the early modern is a point not to be missed. It should not surprise that Aravamudan would consider early moderns to be undergirded by the “operational assumptions of a theological grasp of time, whereby anticipation, belief, and application on the present are integrated as inexorably leading to a known and inevitable outcome,” the same operational assumptions he thinks undergird the catachronism of the Anthropocene, of inexorable climate change.5 But it is tricky to denote a point when humans ceased to hold such operational assumptions, or began to insist upon historical agency, as Aravamudan doubtless knows. What ­Ground-Work

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knows, or perhaps, discovered, is a “dense concentration of meanings within soil,” which, Eklund observes, is “reflected in the sheer number of terms that refer to it . . . . compost, dust, earth, filth, ground, home, land, landscape, manure, muck, mud, and so on.” Such a ­concentration of meanings “endows [soil] with the signal feature of the literary — ­interpretability. . . . Soil is thus both a primal site of reading and a frequent occasion for representation.”6 As with literary texts, interpretation of the soil varies from observer to observer, suggesting contestation and agency but also collaboration with, or even subjection to, the nonhuman. Early modern readers and writers, Renaissance soil scientists, take for granted human imbrication with the soil, their abilities to read it not only as metaphor but also as material to think with and through. Renaissance soil science thus can offer us, twenty-first century readers, writers, and citizens, a new direction for ecocritical thinking, away from both familiar ecocritical claims for stewardship and the nonphilosophies’ insistent materialism, its desire almost to wallow in the muck, in Armavudan’s “deadly tranquility.” Bonnie Lander Johnson, for example, in her essay in this volume on Shakespeare’s Richard II, sees an “almanac vision” in the play, one that argues against the stark ecophobia posited for early modern people by Simon Estok in his Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia. Johnson writes, “Richard II’s characters do not express fear or contempt for the earth as such. Rather, their idealization of and disappointment in nature express a belief that England’s soil ought to care for their particular cause, that it belongs to them, and a simultaneous anxiety that in fact nature controls humans.” Johnson goes further in her questioning of early modern ecophobia, suggesting that the play, and its association of the body with soil, reveals more than anxiety about nature’s power; it reveals an acknowledgment of it.7 An association of the body with soil suggests to several of GroundWork’s contributors the fact or the problem of labor, human labor; it is no coincidence that this collection’s title does, too. Johnson argues that Richard II reveals as futile our work, our labors to control nature. Randall Martin’s essay also reveals our efforts as futile, or simply damaging. Martin focuses on two sorts of growth, in population and in military conquest, arguing that both placed great pressure on the health of the soil, the former in the form of increased food production and the latter in the form of mining for saltpeter, an essential ingredient in

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gunpowder. Saltpeter mining literally undermined urgent local needs for food and fuel; “organic energy flowing through the nitrogen cycle was diverted into the combustible energy of gunpowder.” For this and other reasons, “the ambivalent outcomes of Henry V,” Martin argues, “[call] into question the classical ecology of war and agrarian redemption,” the peace dividend of farming restored; and “Shakespeare seems to foresee Britain’s modern history of progress being redefined by technologically enhanced but ecologically unsustainable conquest.”8 But revolutionaries like John Milton and Gerrard Winstanley insist that the labors must be done anyway, that farming must be restored; if control is impossible, restoration or regeneration can occur through labor. David Goldstein, in the collection’s final essay, on Paradise Lost, observes that Milton structures the postlapsarian earth as one requiring strenuous and nearly unending labor: “by drawing our attention to the space between the heel and the field over which it walks, and to the mist that gathers between them, Milton evokes the very texture of the land — the physical reality of the soil which, well nurtured, watered, and manured, may produce the good growth so essential for a renovating age.”9 Milton’s contemporary, Gerrard Winstanley, becomes in Keith Botelho’s reading an eco-reformer aiming for civic restoration through work, through labor. As Botelho puts it, for Winstanley and the Diggers, “barrenness emerges from inaction, fruitfulness from action.” Indeed, in a positioning that seems oddly contemporary, Winstanley insists on action, lambasting those who speak and write but fail to “ ‘act and practice’ their platform.”10 Frances E. Dolan, in contrast, finds early modern writing to be very much an activity, very much an action. Her essay “Compost/Composition” happily and persuasively insists upon the work, the “necessarily collaborative and protracted” work, of both composition and “the composing [of] fertile earths.”11 We think we know, Dolan explains, that early modern culture disparaged sexual and social mixing — “adulteration, mixture, and bastardization.” But truly, “early modern England had a culture of recycling, with flourishing markets in secondhand clothes, metals, ritual objects, building materials and architectural ornaments, and even ‘broken victuals’ or leftover foodstuffs.”12 Even much writing, such as the commonplace book or plays and poems, might constitute a form of recycling and make of their authors agents of recycling.13

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Dolan rightfully emphasizes the slow practice, the craft of our labors in both forms of composing, of words and earth. Craft and practice are one way to move this discussion toward Ground-Work’s second challenge to the catachronism of climate change, the question of how we, twenty-first century citizens, address land use, habitation, and politics. This question is one Hillary Eklund addresses in her contribution to Ground-Work, an essay that reads a little-known play, The Sparagus Garden, along with debates about wetlands reclamation in the seventeenth century. While literary scholarship tends to agree that the early modern English consistently judged wetlands negatively, Eklund disagrees, pointing to a range of texts that sustain ambivalence about wetlands, gathering “numerous and often contradicting associations: desert waste and fertile field, sickness and hardiness, indolence and labor, rebellion and loyalty.” Like Dolan’s compos(t)ing, which asks us to reimagine the ways we live and work by grounding ourselves in the recyclable, Eklund’s recovery of a debate about early modern wetlands can today invite us “to contemplate alternative forms of habitation — patterns of settlement better attuned to the effects of an increasingly volatile climate on increasingly precarious geographies.”14 Unquestionably, in the Anthropocene, our challenge is to change the ways we live and work, to contemplate alternative forms of habitation. An even bigger challenge is how to do so, and how to do so on an appropriate scale. In a recent essay on emerging trends in ecocriticism, Lawrence Buell observes that “nothing generated within ecocriticism thus far comes close to matching intellectual historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s brilliant short polemic, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses.’ ” This essay, writes Buell, “reflects on the irony of the complex interactions between the rise of post-Enlightenment democratic institutions and the advent of what today is increasingly being claimed as the Anthropocene Age.”15 By invoking ironies and complex interactions, Buell suggests that, brilliant though it is, Chakrabarty’s essay does not fit easily into ecocriticism’s embrace of environmental justice or the postcolonial. For, in thinking about climate, both in “Four Theses” and in his follow-up, 2014’s “Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories,” Chakrabarty questions several tenets of post­ colonial and globalization theory, in particular those about the roles of

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capitalism — evil — and population growth — benign — in creating the difficult ecological and economic conditions under which we all live. “As the [climate] crisis gathered momentum in the last few years,” he writes, “I realized that all my readings in theories of globalization, Marxist analysis of capital, sub-altern studies, and postcolonial criticism over the last twenty-five years, while enormously useful in studying globalization, had not really prepared me for making sense of this planetary conjuncture within which humanity finds itself today.”16 As Chakrabarty puts it in the follow-up essay, “the analytics of capital (or of the market), while necessary, are insufficient instruments in helping us come to grips with anthropogenic climate change.”17 Difficult advice though it may be to follow, Chakrabarty suggests we consider “the elephant in the room in discussions of climate change,” which is population. In his own consideration, Chakrabarty heads not toward Thomas Malthus or Garrett Hardin but toward a reconsideration of one of our operating assumptions: the responsibility of “a predatory and capitalist West” for population growth when “neither China nor India pursued unbridled capitalism while their populations exploded.”18 What might this mean? And what might this: if the human history of the last 250 years has seen the progressive extension of freedom to more and more, to billions of people — what Buell calls “the rise of post-Enlightenment democratic institutions” — that extension has been accompanied by a shift from the use of “wood and other renewable fuels to large-scale use of fossil fuel — first coal and then oil and gas”? The extension of freedom, along with population growth, “stands on an ever-expanding base of fossilfuel use.”19 Freedom, by this light, and as Buell says, ironically, fuels the Anthropocene, because freedom is fueled by carbon. Dystopic novels and films hypothesize with some regularity a catastrophic end to the Anthropocene, including catastrophic ends for billions of people. An especially germane example is Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, which follows the fortunes of a group of musicians and thespians 20 years after such a catastrophe, one that ended a world very much like the author’s — or ours. Offering some works of Shakespeare and bits of classical music, the Traveling Symphony walks around the Great Lakes of North America performing to small groups of survivors, inhabitants of settlements, arbitrarily arranged.20 Early modernist Ken Hiltner argues that we have seen a

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version of this scenario before. Air pollution from the burning of coal in London reached unhealthy levels in the seventeenth century but likely would have done so much earlier, in the fourteenth century, had England’s population not been decimated by plague.21 Less chillingly, but more crucial for us, as we face the catachronism of climate change, Hiltner identifies John Evelyn’s 1661 Fumifugium — the “first work to take as its subject modern air pollution” — as the work that solved a particular problem, that is, how to talk about an environmental crisis that “no one wishes to acknowledge because everyone is in fact its cause.”22 What Evelyn did was to pioneer a move some environmentalists and indeed almost all of us continue to use: he shifted blame from “everyone” to a few, from consumers to industrialists, because he and other early moderns had “difficulty confronting their own questionable behavior.”23 Is it possible to characterize the embrace of a world without subjects by ecocritics and early modernists as another such shift, one that allows them (or us) to avoid confronting questionable personal behavior? Perhaps; and I suspect those readers who turned to Ground-Work to find the alien phenomenology of soil or the agency of humus have been disappointed by this volume. But I was not disappointed. I find hope in Ground-Work, in a set of essays that brings to light “a contest of ideas about land use, habitation, politics, and aesthetics.”24 I find hope in these essays because they suggest that political action on the environment can work, messy and complicated though it be. It is not mere coincidence that as Ground-Work took its final shape, on its way to undergo the labor of copyeditors and printers, a long essay appeared in the London Review of Books about farming, population growth, the European Union, agricultural subsidies, and the aesthetics of the environment. In it, James Meek describes the choices facing Britons — and all of us — in thinking about population and farming, both chemical and organic, and in particular the significantly lesser yields of the latter: One interpretation — the raise-up interpretation — is that the protection of the environment is no less vital to the wellbeing of the poorest than their daily bread, and that countries like Britain should follow that philosophy both for its own people’s benefit and as an example to the world. The other way of looking at it, the level-down version, is that feeding the less well-off at all levels — the relatively poor of Britain, the absolutely poor of the world — takes precedence

202  Sharon O’Dair over all else, and to restrict farmers’ ability to do this is elitist at home, selfish abroad.25

Decisions must be made — even if they are not so stark as level up or level down. Decisions must be made about forms of habitation better suited to fragile lands, seas, and wetlands. Decisions must be made, and only humans, not humus, can make them.

Notes Notes to Introduction 1. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition, 2nd ed., ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus (1997; repr., New York: Norton, 2008), 1.2.70–73. Subsequent quotations from Shakespeare’s plays are from this volume, hereafter cited in the text of the introduction. 2. On Hamlet’s and Gertrude’s evolving attitudes toward decomposition, see Randall Martin, Shakespeare and Ecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 134–65. 3. Ibid., 144. 4. Dan Brayton, Shakespeare’s Ocean: An Ecocritical Exploration (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 18. 5. Cheryll Glotfelty, “Introduction: Literary Criticism in an Age of Environmental Crisis,” in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, xv–xxvii (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), xix. 6. Steve Mentz, “Brown,” in Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 193–212 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 194. 7. Chris Arsenault, “Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues,” Scientific American, December 5, 2014, accessed March 3, 2015, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-­ farming-left-if-soil-degradation-continues. 8. United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, “Desertification,” accessed July 21, 2015, http://www.un.org/en/events/ desertificationday/background.shtml. 9. See Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Rebecca Bushnell, Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); Jennifer Munroe, Gender and the Garden in Early Modern English Literature (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008); Joanna Picciotto, Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Amy Tigner, Literature and the Renaissance Garden from Elizabeth I to Charles II: England’s Paradise (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2012).

203

204  Notes to Pages 3–5 10. See, for example, Steve Mentz, At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean (New York: Continuum, 2009); Brayton, Shakespeare’s Ocean; Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed., Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects (New York: Punctum, 2012); Vin Nardizzi, Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013); Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed., Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). 11. “soil,” n. OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2016, accessed October 26, 2016, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/183967. 12. Sir Philip Sidney, “The Defence of Poesy,” in Sidney’s “The Defence of Poesy” and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. Gavin Alexander, 1–54 (New York: Penguin, 2004), 35; italics mine. 13. Critics of early modern literature have long considered the complex relation between human bodies and the worlds they inhabit. Michael Schoenfeldt describes subjective interiority as a product of careful mediation of the body’s porous boundaries; Gail Kern Paster proposes a “humoral ecology” wherein human bodies, their health, and their moods operate in a reciprocal relation of influence with their environments. Both of these critics anticipate Stacy Alaimo’s more recent argument that “understanding one’s self as interconnected with the wider environment marks a profound shift in subjectivity.” Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 7; Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 18; Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 20. 14. See Leonard Lutwack, The Role of Place in Literature (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1984), 27–73. 15. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 17, 236. 16. See, for instance, John Fitzherbert, The Booke of Husbandry, Very Profitable and Necessary for All Maner of Persons (London, 1568); Thomas Tusser, Fiue Hundreth Points of Good Husbandry (London: Richard Totell, 1573); Barnabe Googe, Foure Bookes of Husbandry, Collected by M. Conradus Heresbachius, Counseller to the Hygh and Mighty Prince, the Duke of Cleue: Conteyning the Whole Arte and Trade of Husbandry, with the Antiquitie, and Commendation Thereof (London: Richard Watkins, 1577); Gervase Markham, The English Husbandman (London, 1613). 17. Joan Thirsk, ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 4, 1500–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967); McRae, God Speed the Plough; Wendy Wall, “Renaissance National Husbandry:

Notes to Pages 5–8  205 Gervase Markham and the Publication of England,” Sixteenth Century Journal 27, no. 3 (Autumn 1996): 767–85. 18. Timothy Sweet, “Economy, Ecology, and ‘Utopia’ in Early Colonial Promotional Literature,” American Literature 71, no. 3 (September 1999): 400. 19. Karen Raber, Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 15. 20. Picciotto, Labors of Innocence, 8–10. 21. Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 22. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Routledge, 1966), 2. 23. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 20. 24. “mould,” n., OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2016, accessed October 26, 2016, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/122805. 25. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 39. 26. Bennett’s Vibrant Matter traces how nonhumans, nonsubjects, and the inanimate act on the world and assert a kind of agency that lies beyond the bounds of human intention or control. Alaimo, Bodily Natures, and elsewhere, proposes a theory of object entanglement that locates permeable human bodies in complex relations with the nonhuman world. Mentz’s At the Bottom, and Brayton’s Shakespeare’s Ocean bring Shakespeare’s maritime knowledge to bear on a “blue cultural studies” (Mentz’s term) that challenges ecocriticism’s previously “terrestrial bias,” which Brayton explores (18–19). Nardizzi’s Wooden Os explores the multivalence of timber in English economic, ecological, and aesthetic contexts, and Cohen’s Stone employs a strategy of enchantment to uncover the affective and agentive power of stone. These studies join two volumes edited by Cohen — Animal, Vegetable, Mineral and Prismatic Ecology — in arguing for ecological reading practices that resist the tendency of “green” environmentalism to see the natural world as a romanticized space apart from and radically subject to an anthropocentric culture. Mentz’s “Brown” urges consideration of soil as a hitherto neglected element and also as an intellectual catalyst: “brown captures a connecting opacity at the heart of ecological thinking. It comes at us from both sides of our world, the living and the dead” (193). Mentz’s invitation to get productively stuck in the mud, as it were, confronting soil’s challenging and hybrid materiality, is one the present volume gladly accepts. And while this book is obviously joining an ongoing elemental and eco-material conversation, it makes its own claims and enjoins discussion somewhat further afield. 27. Srinivas Aravamudan, “The Catachronism of Climate Change,” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 41, no. 3 (2013): 21.

206  Notes to Pages 9–12 28. We find this view amply supported by evidence from the period in a range of scholarly works, including Thomas, Man and Natural World; Ken Hiltner, What Else Is Pastoral?: Renaissance Literature and the Environment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); Simon C. Estok, Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia (New York: Palgrave, 2011). 29. Estok, Ecocriticism and Shakespeare, 4. 30. Raber, Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture, 81. 31. Ibid., 79. 32. Ibid., 27. 33. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, x. 34. Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 20. 35. Latour, Never Been Modern, 31–32; Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 4. 36. The field of early modern ecocriticism has been broadly elaborated by Gabriel Egan’s Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism (New York: Routledge, 2006); Robert M. Watson’s Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Ivo Kamps, Karen Raber, and Thomas Hallock, eds., Early Modern Ecostudies from Florentine Codex to Shakespeare (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Estok, Ecocriticism and Shakespeare, and Lynne Bruckner and Daniel Brayton, eds., Ecocritical Shakespeare: Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011). 37. See Watson, Back to Nature, 77–107; Louise Noble, “ ‘Bare and desolate now’: Cultural Ecology and ‘The Description of Cookham,’ ” 99–108, and Amy Tigner, “The Ecology of Eating in Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst,’ ” 109–19, both in Ecological Approaches to Early Modern English Texts: A Field Guide to Reading and Teaching, ed. Jennifer Munroe, Edward J. Geisweidt, and Lynne Bruckner (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2015). 38. See Bushnell, Green Desire; Munroe, Gender and the Garden; Tigner, Literature and Renaissance Garden; and Charlotte Scott, Shakespeare’s Nature: From Cultivation to Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) 39. Scott, Shakespeare’s Nature, 17, 25. 40. Garrett A. Sullivan Jr., The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property, and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 12. 41. Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 51–62. 42. Ibid., 56. 43. Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 16.

Notes to Pages 12–22  207 44. Morton, Ecology without Nature, 95. 45. Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 1–2. 46. Ibid., 3. 47. Ibid., 4–5. 48. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 2. 49. Aravamudan, “Catachronism of Climate Change,” 17–18. 50. Ibid., 25. 51. Ibid., 9. 52. Latour, Never Been Modern, 137.

Notes to Dolan, “Compost/Composition” I am grateful to audiences at the Renaissance Society of America, the Modern Language Association of America, and Ohio State University for helpful questions and suggestions and to Tiffany Werth, Valerie Traub, Margaret Ferguson, Hillary Eklund, and the other contributors to this volume for inspiration and advice. 1. See this course description for “Vermiculture Furniture” at Ohio State University: http://artandtech.osu.edu/vermiculture_furniture. 2. Gervase Markham, The Inrichment of the Weald of Kent (London: Eliz. Purslow, 1649), sigs. B2v, B3. 3. Ibid., B2r. On this optimism, see the invaluable chapter on husbandry manuals in Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 135–68, esp. 158–59. See also Wendy Wall, “Renaissance National Husbandry: Gervase Markham and the Publication of England,” Sixteenth Century Journal 27, no. 3 (Autumn 1996): 767–85; and Hillary Eklund, Literature and Moral Economy in the Early Modern Atlantic: Elegant Sufficiencies (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015). 4. Albert Howard, The Soil and Health: A Study of Organic Agriculture [1945] (University of Kentucky Press, 2010). Dan Barber calls Howard “the father of compost” in The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (New York: Penguin, 2014), 88. 5. In Mille plateauz: Capitalisme et schizophrenie (Paris: Minuit, 1980), Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari propose the rhizome as a model for a nonlinear, nomadic process of extension that allows for violent ruptures or cuts as occasions of regeneration and accounts for growth that is not exactly progress: “A rhizome does not begin and does not come to an end, it is always in the middle, between things”, according to the translation by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Why Study the Past?,” Modern Language Quarterly 73, no. 1 (March 2012): 8–9.

208  Notes to Page 22 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), proposes a “hauntology” — an attention to, even a call to engagement with, the unbidden, baffling spectral presence of the past. For a helpful discussion of Derrida and Walter Benjamin’s theorizations of how the past bears on the present, see Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 138–73. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 112, argues that because our pasts never disappear, “we live in time-knots” in which multiple periods are contemporaneous. Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 60, 61, enlist the crumpled handkerchief as one way of visualizing how once-distant points in space/time can suddenly be superimposed on one another. Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 16, proposes the palimpsest, holding two or more texts in tension, “compress[ing] different times in one surface,” to describe an “anachronic affinity” — rather than identity — between past and present or between different times and places. Eve Keller also talks in terms of “affinities” between past and present in Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves: The Rhetoric of Reproduction in Early Modern England (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007), 15, 32. In Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550–1719 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), Steve Mentz employs the trope of the shipwreck to “pluralize and therefore weaken . . . the familiar story of the once-and-for-all epistemological break known as ‘early modernity’ ” (7). He also argues that “a new cultural imagination” emerges from “composting ancient discourses with newer ideas” (8). On the “problem of the leftover,” see Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 136–62, esp. 141. 6.  The figuration that most informs my emphasis is a tad messier than some of the others: in Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology, and Renaissance Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), Julia Reinhard Lupton chooses “afterlife” to mean both “the halflife of radioactive decay, or the bacterial decomposition of dead matter” and a “ ‘side effect,’ the disturbing symptoms brought about by the work of cultural symbolization” to describe how “one layer [of sedimented time] can contaminate, wrinkle, or undermine a contiguous one. One era can obdurately survive into the period that has supposedly surpassed it” (xxxi, xxx). This aligns with Mentz’s emphasis on “accumulation and ­composture” (9).

Notes to Pages 22–25  209 7. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les lieux de mémoire,” trans. Marc Roudebush, Representations 26 (1989): 20; hereafter cited in the text by page number. 8. Robert Herrick, “The Country Life,” in Seventeenth-Century British Poetry, 1603–1660, ed. John P. Rumrich and Gregory Chaplin (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 210–12, lines 23–24. David Goldstein’s essay in this volume uses these lines from Herrick as its epigraph. 9. For the origins of this expression in Aristotle and Xenophon and its status as “an axiom among English gentlemen in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,” see Joan Thirsk, “Plough and Pen: Agricultural Writers in the Seventeenth Century,” in Social Relations and Ideas: Essays in Honour of R. H. Hilton, ed. T. H. Aston, P. R. Coss, Christopher Dyer, and Joan Thirsk, 295–318 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 298. See also the website of the Matthiasson winery, https://www .matthiasson.com/vineyards. 10. Markham, Inrichment of the Weald of Kent, title page. As Thirsk (“Plough and Pen,” 303) points out, Markham does not claim to have written The Inrichment of the Weald of Kent but rather to have midwifed it into publication. Similarly, Thomas Tusser’s One Hundred Good Pointes of Husbandrie (London, 1557) eventually expanded to  Fiue Hundreth Points of Good Husbandry (London: Rychard Totell, 1573). I am grateful to Hillary Eklund for pointing this out. The title page of Markham’s Farewell to Husbandry similarly describes it as “for the fourth time revised, amended, and corrected.” 11. For ongoing reassessments of these writers, see Rebecca W. Bushnell, Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 161–68; Deborah E. Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); Wendy Wall, Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Malcolm Thick, Sir Hugh Plat: The Search for Useful Knowledge in Early Modern London (Devon, UK: Prospect Books, 2010); and John Bowle, John Evelyn and His World: A Biography (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981). 12. William Lawson, A New Orchard, and Garden; or, The Best Way for Planting, Graffing, and to Make Any Ground Good, for a Rich Orchard (London, 1683), sigs. A3r-v. This text went through numerous editions. 13. Joan Thirsk, “Making a Fresh Start: Sixteenth-Century Agriculture and the Classical Inspiration,” in Culture and Cultivation in Early Modern England: Writing and the Land, ed. Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor, 15–34 (Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 1992), esp. 22. The quotation is from Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella, Of Husbandry (London 1745), book 2, chapter 15, “Of the several Kinds of Dung,” 91.

210  Notes to Page 26 14. Gervase Markham, Markhams Farewell to Husbandry; or, The Enriching of All Sorts of Barren and Sterile Grounds in our Kingdome, to Be as Fruitfull in All Manner of Graine, Pulse and Grasse, as the Best Grounds Whatsoever (London, 1649), sigs. E8v, E7v. 15. See, among many others, Adolphus Speed, Adam Out of Eden; or, An Abstract of Divers Excellent Experiments Touching the Advancement of Husbandry (London, 1659), sigs. I2r–I5r, concluding with the encouragement to include “whatsoever you shall think in your own judgement to be helpful and advantagious thereunto” (sig. I5r); and John Worlidge, Systema Agriculturae: The Mystery of Husbandry Discovered (London, 1669), sigs. N3r–O4r. On Sir Hugh Platt’s expansive lists, see Ayesha Mukherjee, “ ‘Manured with the Starres’: Recovering an Early Modern Discourse of Sustainability,” Literature Compass 11, no. 9 (September 2014): 602–14, esp. 608. 16. See David Cressy, “Saltpetre, State Security, and Vexation in Early Modern England,” Past and Present 212 (August 2011): 73–111, on how saltpeter, a crucial ingredient in gunpowder, was “extracted at high cost from soil rich in dung and urine” (74–75), leading to proposals for a “command economy of excrement and urine, centrally mobilized for the kingdom’s security. . . . At the heart of the matter lay the vitalizing power of urine and excrement, and the miracle of nitrous-rich soil” (105, 111). On saltpeter, see also Randall Martin’s and David Goldstein’s essays in this volume. According to Donald Woodward, “ ‘Swords into Ploughshares’: Recycling in Pre-Industrial England,” Economic History Review n.s. 38, no. 2 (May 1985): 175–91, “Through the provision of night-soil, men, women, and children could join the ever-turning circle of production in agriculture which was so central to the life of pre-industrial society” (189). 17. The first appears in Ephemerides, (1657) which is variously described as Hartlib’s unpublished diary or commonplace book (part 2, May 1657–December 1657) and the second in a letter from Sir Cheney Culpeper to Hartlib in 1656. Both can be found easily in the Hartlib Papers online, ed. Mark Greengrass, Michael Hannon, and Michael Leslie, HRI Online Publications, Sheffield, 2013, http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/ hartlib. See also Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie, and Timothy Raylor, eds., Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 18. Walter Blith, The English Improver Improved; or, The Survey of Husbandry Surveyed Discovering the Improveableness of All Lands . . . (London, 1652), 3rd impression, “much augmented,” sig. V4r. 19. Hugh Plat insists bluntly that “muck heaps ought to be covered” and offers advice for how to keep them covered without too great expense in The Jewel House of Art and Nature, ed. Arnold de Boate (London: Elizabeth Alsop, 1653), sigs. O3v, R1r. Pits are recommended in John Shaw, Certaine Helpes and Remedies vnder God to Prevent Dearth and Scarcitie (London: B. Alsop, 1638), which includes a second title page, Soli

Notes to Pages 27–30  211 Gloria Deo: Certaine Rare and Nevv Inventions for the Manuring and Improving of All Sorts of Ground (London: Bernard Alsop and T. Fawcet, 1636); and in Richard Bradley, Ten Practical Discourses: Concerning Earth and Water, Fire and Air, as They Relate to the Growth of Plants. with a Collection of New Discoveries for the Improvement of Land, Either in the Farm or Garden (Westminster, UK: J. Cluer and A. Campbell, 1727). 20. Columella, Of Husbandry, book 1, chap. 6, 36–37. 21. John Evelyn, Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets (London, 1699), sigs. K2v–K3r, K3r. 22. John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, ed. Leah S. Marcus (London: Bloomsbury Arden, 2009), 2.1.77, 144–46. 23. Markhams Farewell to Husbandry, sig. B2v. 24. Lawson, A New Orchard, sig. A3r. 25. William Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). In the scene from The Duchess of Malfi I cite above, attitudes toward grafting align with attitudes toward social mixture: the Duchess praises grafting as “a bettering of nature” (2.1.151), while Bosola expresses contempt for trying “To make a pippin grow upon a crab, / A damson on a blackthorn” (2.1.152–53). 26. John Evelyn, A Philosophical Discourse of Earth, Relating to the Culture and Improvement of It for Vegetation, and the Propagation of Plants, &c. as It Was Presented to the Royal Society, April 29, 1675 (London, 1676), sig. C8v. 27. Ibid., sig. F8v. 28. Donald Woodward, “ ‘An essay on manures’: Changing Attitudes to Fertilization in England, 1500–1800,” in English Rural Society, 1500– 1800: Essays in Honour of Joan Thirsk, ed. John Chartres and David Hey, 251–78 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 265. 29. Evelyn, Philosophical Discourse, sigs. G1v, E6v. In another moment of registering some unease about soil amendment, Evelyn explains that surface mold, “having never been violated by the Spade, or received any foreign mixture, we will call the Virgin-Earth” (sig. A7r). 30. Blith, English Improver Improved, sig. T3r. 31. Speed, Adam Out of Eden, sig. I3v. Composting follows the logic of Galenic medicine, by which opposites need to balance each other, rather than that of Paracelsian medicine, by which like cures like. I’m grateful to Sarah Neville for pointing this out. 32. Wolfram Schmidgen, Exquisite Mixture: The Virtues of Impurity in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), xi, xiii. 33. William Leigh, Great Britaines, Great Deliverance, from the Great Danger of Popish Powder (London: T. Creede, 1606), sig. E. 34. George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston, Eastward Ho!, in English Drama 1580–1642, ed. Charles Frederick Tucker Brooke and

212  Notes to Pages 30–32 Nathaniel Burton Paradise, 397–434 (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1933), 1.2.51–54, 2.1.71–74. 35. Philip Massinger, A New Way to Pay Old Debts, in Brooke and Paradise, English Drama, 1580–1642, 4.1.224–27. William N. West, “ ‘But This Will Be a Mere Confusion’: Real and Represented Confusions on the Elizabethan Stage,” Theatre Journal 60, no. 2 (2008): 217–33, discusses John Lyly’s prologue to Midas, describing the play as a gallimaufry, mingle- mangle, and hodgepodge. As West shows in the service of an argument that Elizabethan theater ran on confusion, Lyly describes plays as “confounding,” “literally a mixing together of things” (219). On the English language itself as a hodgepodge, see Margaret W. Ferguson, “Thomas Nashe: Cornucopias and Gallimaufries of Prose,” in Teaching Early Modern Prose, ed. Susannah Brietz-Monta and Margaret W. Ferguson, 199–213 (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2010); Jenny C. Mann, Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare’s England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012); and Jeffrey Masten, Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare’s Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 36. Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 5; see also 276n12. On the early modern conceptualization of miscegenation, see also Margaret W. Ferguson, “News from the New World: Miscegenous Romance in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and Widow Ranter,” in The Production of English Renaissance Culture, ed. David Lee Miller, Sharon O’Dair, and Harold Weber, 151–89 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). 37. Barbara Sebek, “ ‘More Natural to the Nation’: Situating Shakespeare in the ‘Querelle de Canary,’ ” Shakespeare Studies 42 (July 2014): 106–21, esp. 115. 38. Laurie Shannon, “Nature’s Bias: Renaissance Homonormativity and Elizabethan Comic Likeness,” Modern Philology 98, no. 2 (November 2000): 183–210, esp. 186; cf. Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friend­ ship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 56. 39. Natasha Korda, Labors Lost: Women’s Work and the Early Modern English Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Will Fisher, Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 40. On an early modern economy of recycling, see Donald Woodward, “Recycling in Pre-Industrial England”; and Sara Pennell on “the recycling of foodstuffs and meals” (242) in “ ‘Great Quantities of Gooseberry Pye and Baked Clod of Beef’: Victualling and Eating Out in Early Modern London,” in Londinopolis, c. 1500–c. 1750: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London, ed. Mark S. R. Jenner and

Notes to Pages 32–33  213 Paul Griffiths, 228–49 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000). 41. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. William H. Gass (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001), 1.2.2.1:225. 42. See Joan Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England: Phases, Fads, Fashions, 1500–1760 (London: Hambledon/Continuum, 2006). 43. Wall, Recipes for Thought; see also David B. Goldstein, Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), esp. 139–70. 44. Scholars including Mary Carruthers and Ann Blair have discussed early modern memory practices. On the particular role of writing, breaking texts down, and memory, see Richard Yeo, “Notebooks as Memory Aids: Precepts and Practices in Early Modern England,” Memory Studies 1, no. 1 (January 2008): 115–36; and Adam Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Smyth describes commonplace books as “always unfinished, indeed unfinishable, texts — as manuscripts forever in the process of being made” (152). “To read a commonplace book today is to encounter a text which is not only unfinished, but which possesses a quality of existing, very vividly, in the present tense — awaiting the next pointing hand to be drawn in the margin. As a text that appears to be ongoing, the commonplace book collapses past, present, and future: the current reader continues the process of making, instigated by the former compiler, who recycled words from earlier texts” (154). Wall (Recipes for Thought, 198) describes some recipe compilations as “storage sites” where not only memories but also negotiations over what was worth remembering were recorded for posterity. On Bibles, books of hours, and childbirth books as sites for storing family histories, see William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 59–60. While Nora (“Between Memory and History,” 18) refers to the “manuals, dictionaries, testaments, and memoranda drafted by heads of families in the early modern period for the edification of their descendants” as functional sites of memory, we might add to Nora’s list the maternal legacies, recipe compilations, and annotations in family Bibles that women created and maintained as sites of collective memory. In contrast, Yeo (“Notebooks as Memory Aids,” 117) argues that notebooks were not storage sites but, rather, “prompts for material that should be stored in memory. Moreover, they were regarded as tools for training and improving recall from memory.” 45. The crucial roles of writing and placing in early modern memory practices worked the lived environment as a site of memory by, for instance, pasting printed tables condensing the wisdom of huge books onto the walls. See Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 217–53. 46. Richard Yeo, Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 113–23.

214  Notes to Pages 33–35 47. Sherman, Used Books, 128. 48. Jeffrey Todd Knight, Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 8, 13. Patricia Fumerton, “Remembering by Dismembering: Databases, Archiving, and the Recollection of Seven­ teenth-Century Broadside Ballads,” in Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, ed. Fumerton and Anita Guerrini, 14–34 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), argues that early modern consumers gathered “associational assemblages” around particular tunes, images, and topics (25). See also the essays in The Renaissance Collage: Toward a New History of Reading, ed. Juliet Fleming, William Sherman, and Adam Smyth, a special issue of Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 45, no. 3 (2015). 49. Smyth, Autobiography. On identity as an assemblage, see also Drew Daniel, The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the English Renaissance (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). Daniel describes Jacques in As You Like It, for instance, as presenting himself as “a hybrid construction formed out of disparate, found sources” (7). David Goldstein (Eating and Ethics, 11) likewise argues that “a human being is a mixed bag, a surfeit of scraps, comprising both inwardness and exteriority.” In the idea of the self as an assemblage, we see the intersection between early modern scholarship on material culture and the history of the book and the work of Bruno Latour on “actor networks” and Gilles Deleuze on assemblages, among others. We also see the figural resonances and theoretical implications of early modern material practices of compiling and combining. 50. See Smyth’s list (Autobiography, 128–29) of what commonplace culture can tell us about reading and writing practices. Smyth emphasizes “an interest in crumbling texts into parts, and in the production of new texts out of old parts” (128). 51. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text: Essays Selected and Translated by Stephen Heath, 142–48 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 146. 52. Harkness, Jewel House, 196. 53. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, “Democritus to the Reader,” 25, 115. 54. Margaret Cavendish, “A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding, and Life” (1656), in Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader, ed. Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2000), 59. Despite her claims to be “singular,” recent scholarship on Cavendish documents her embeddedness in her cultural moment and the many sources from which she drew. 55. Ibid., 309. 56. Edward Rainbowe, Lord Bishop of Carlile, A Sermon Preached at the Funeral of the Right Honorable Anne, Countess of Pembroke, Dorset,

Notes to Pages 36–42  215 and Montgomery (London, 1677), sig. E4r–v. Clifford died in 1676 at 86 years old. For how other women made their chambers into commonplace installations, see Frances E. Dolan, “Reading, Work, and Catholic Women’s Biographies,” English Literary Renaissance 33, no. 3 (Autumn 2003): 328–57. 57. Evelyn B. Tribble, Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), uses this approach to understand how actors mastered their parts, but it is also useful for thinking about how Anne Clifford worked her closet. 58. Timothy Rogers, The Character of a Good Woman, Both in a Single and Marry’d State . . . Occasion’d by the Decease of Mrs. Elizabeth Dunton . . . with an Account of Her Life and Death, and Part of the Diary Writ with Her Own Hand (London, 1697), sig. e4r. 59. Evelyn, Acetaria, sig. G6r–v. 60. I quote Milton as Evelyn does. The passage is in Paradise Lost, book 5. See Goldstein’s discussion in this volume of postlapsarian manuring in Milton’s Eden as a spiritual practice that both acknowledges the fallenness of creation and works to correct it. 61. Harkness (Jewel House) and Thirsk (“Plough and Pen,” 299) both emphasize the relationship between doing and writing for figures such as Plat.

Notes to Badcoe, “Richard Carew and the Matters of the Littoral” 1. Richard Carew, “The First Booke,” in The Survey of Cornwall (London: S. Stafford for John Jaggard, 1602), sig. C2r. In this and in all subsequent quotations I have lightly modernized the text and removed italics. 2. Ibid., “Second Booke,” sig. Qq3v. 3. Ibid., “To the Honourable, Sir Walter Raleigh Knight, Lord Warden of the Stannaries, Lieutenant Generall of Cornwall, &c.,” sig. ¶3r. 4. Ibid., “First Booke,” sig. Q2r. Here, Carew quotes a section of a poem that he says was shared with him by William Camden. Camden also includes the same extract, from John of Hauville’s twelfth century poem Architrenius, which is presented with an alternative English translation in the English edition of Camden’s Britannia. See William Camden, Britain; or, A Chorographicall Description . . . , trans. Philémon Holland (London: George Bishop and John Norton, 1610), sig. Q1v. 5. Carew, “First Booke,” sig. B3r. 6. Ibid., “To the Reader,” sig. ¶4r. 7. Wendy Wall, “Renaissance National Husbandry: Gervase Markham and the Publication of England,” Sixteenth Century Journal 27, no. 3 (Autumn 1996): 770.

216  Notes to Pages 42–45 8. Ibid., 783. 9. Carew, “Second Booke,” sig. Ee3r. For an extended meditation on the relationship between matter and the imagination, see Gaston Bachelard, Earth and Reveries of Will: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, trans. Kenneth Haltman (Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 2002). 10. Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor, eds., introduction to Culture and Cultivation in Early Modern England: Writing the Land (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992), 4. 11. Ibid., 4. 12. Carew, “First Booke,” sig. Q2r. 13. For a survey of the topics covered by Carew’s discussions of the Cornish economy, see John Chynoweth, “Introduction: Richard Carew and Tudor Cornwall,” in Richard Carew’s The Survey of Cornwall, ed. John Chynoweth, Nicholas Orme, and Alexandra Walsham (Exeter: Devon and Cornwall Record Society, 2004), 10–11. For historical approaches to early modern Cornwall that refer to Carew’s Survey, see also A. L. Rowse, Tudor Cornwall: Portrait of a Society (London: Jonathan Cape, 1941); and Mark Stoyle, West Britons: Cornish Identities and the Early Modern British State (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002). 14. Carew, “First Booke,” sig. B1r. 15. Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, Dire Straits: The Perils of Writing the Early Modern English Coastline from Leland to Milton (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 100. 16. Carew, “First Booke,” sig. B2r. 17. Ibid., sigs. C2r, C4v, F3r, Gg2v. 18. Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 136. See also P. W. Hasler, ed., The House of Commons, 1558–1603, 3 vols. (London: H.M.S.O. for the History of Parliament Trust, 1981). For more on Carew as a chorographer, see Alexandra Walsham, “Introduction: Richard Carew and English Topography,” in Richard Carew’s The Survey of Cornwall, ed. John Chynoweth et al., 17–41 (Exeter:  Devon and Cornwall Record Society, 2004), 29–33. 19. Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 252. See Carew, “Second Booke,” sig. Dd3r. 20. McRae, God Speed the Plough, 252. 21. Carew, “First Booke,” sigs. C1v–C2r. For how this compares with other regions of England, see “The South West,” in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 4, 1500–1640, ed. Joan Thirsk and H. P. R. Finberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 71–76. 22. Steve Mentz, “After Sustainability,” PMLA 127, no. 3 (May 2012): 586, 591.

Notes to Pages 45–49  217 23. Simon C. Estok, “Narrativizing Science: The Ecocritical Imagination and Ecophobia,” Configurations 18, nos. 1–2 (2010): 141. 24. John R. Gillis, “Not Continents in Miniature: Islands as Ecotones,” Island Studies Journal 9, no. 1 (May 2014): 155. I am grateful to Keith Botelho for his suggestion that I think about Carew’s littorals using such terms. As Steve Mentz also suggests in “Brown,” in Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 193–212 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), within the spectrum of a prismatic ecology the brown hue of littoral spaces “blends liquid and solid, washing the inhuman fluidity of blue oceans into the purported stability of green land” (194). 25. Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structure of Alchemy, trans. Stephen Corrin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 9. 26. Walter M. Kendrick, “Earth of Flesh, Flesh of Earth: Mother Earth in The Faerie Queene,” Renaissance Quarterly 27, no. 4 (1974): 546. 27. Carew, “First Booke,” sig. C3v. 28. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980), 30–31. 29. Charles Fitzgeoffrey, “Cenotaphia,” in Caroli Fitzgeofridi affaniae (Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1601), sig. M5r. The translation is taken from the online critical edition of Fitzgeoffrey’s work by Dana F. Sutton, accessed October 6, 2014, http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/affaniae. 30. Carew, “First Booke,” sig. C3v. 31. For a sustained discussion of the “idea of nature as female” and the “association between artifex and masculinity,” see Mary D. Garrard, Brunelleschi’s Egg: Nature, Art, and Gender in Renaissance Italy (Berke­ ley: University of California Press, 2010), vii, 25. 32. Carew, “First Booke,” sig. C3v. 33. Lodowick Lloyd, The Consent of Time: Disciphering the Errors of the Grecians . . . (London: George Bishop and Ralph Newberie, 1590), 219. 34. Carew, “First Booke,” sig. C3v. 35. Philip Schwyzer, Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 2. 36. Carew, “First Booke,” sigs. C3v and C4r. 37. See Merchant, Death of Nature, 29. 38. Carew, “First Booke,” sig. D2v. 39. Ibid., sigs. C4v–D1r. 40. Eliade, Forge and the Crucible, 53, for example, observes that the mining cultures of many European countries believed that it was the role of “gods and divine creatures” to reveal the locations of mines. 41. Carew, “First Booke,” sig. D1r. 42. Ibid., sigs. D3r, D3v. 43. Kendrick, “Earth of Flesh,” 546.

218  Notes to Pages 50–53 44. Ovid, The xv. Bookes of P. Ouidius Naso, Entytuled Metamorphosis . . ., trans. Arthur Golding (London: Willyam Seres, 1567), sig. B3r. 45. Carew, “First Booke,” sig. C4v. 46. Ibid., sigs. D1v, D2v. 47. Mentz, “After Sustainability,” 588. Mentz comments that the “intellectual frameworks for postsustainability appear in the two modeling sciences whose names are built on the Greek root oikos: economics and ecology” (587). 48. See David Childs, Tudor Sea Power: The Foundation of Greatness (Barnsley, UK: Seaforth, 2009), 61–64. Carew, “First Booke,” sig. C3v. 49. John Fortescue and Thomas Fortescue Clermont, The Works of Sir John Fortescue, Knight, Chief Justice of England and Lord Chancellor to King Henry the Sixth, Now First Collected and Arranged by Thomas (Fortescue) Lord Clermont (London, 1869), 246. This is also quoted by Childs, Tudor Sea Power, 61. Historically, the word “brass” was the general name for all alloys of copper with tin or zinc. See “brass,” n., OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2015, accessed May 12, 2015. 50. See Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 52–55. I am grateful to Randall Martin for suggesting this context for my reading of Carew’s work. 51. Carew, “First Booke,” sig. B1v. 52. Ibid., sig. F3r. 53. Ibid., sig. F3v. 54. Camden, Britain, 184. Although Carew also goes on to write about the application of “Orewood” to the soil, he first notes the way that “Beatboroughs,” or cut pieces of turf that are reduced to ashes, are ploughed into the soil as preparation for the growing of oats and wheat, giving “heate to the roote of the Corne” (sig. F3v). The process of burning beat, which is described by Gervase Markham in Markhams Farwell to Husbandry (London, 1620), sig. D2r, as “the Burning of Baite,” is also described in the first of Virgil’s Georgics, The Bucoliks of Publius Virgilius Maro . . . , trans. Abraham Fleming (London: Thomas Orwin, 1589), sig. A4v, when the poet describes ways to renew the travailing earth. 55. “Glebe,” n.; “reate,” n.; “rank,” adj. and adv.;  “battle/battel,” adj., OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2014, accessed June 9, 2014. 56. Eliade, Forge and the Crucible, 8. 57. For a reading of agriculture as “a set of colonizing interventions, linking social objectives to the changing of biophysical processes,” see Marina Fischer-Kowalski and Helga Weisz, “Society as Hybrid between Material and Symbolic Realms: Toward a Theoretical Framework of Society-Nature Interaction,” in Advances in Human Ecology 8 (1999): 215–51.

Notes to Pages 53–57  219 58. Markham, Markhams Farwell to Husbandry, sig. K3r. 59. Carew notes that the seaweed is sometimes burnt, but that the “noysome sauour” generated by this process “hath cursed it out of the country” (“First Booke,” sig. H3v). The Cornish practice of using “Orewood, Sea-sand, and Sea-slubbe for soylings” is also commented upon by William Folkingham in his surveying manual, Feudigraphia: The Synopsis or Epitome of Surveying Methodized (London: William Stansby, 1610), sig. C3v, when he records how seaweed is rotted down for “soyling” in Ireland and reduced to ashes by inhabitants of the Isle of Jersey, suggesting local variations in coastal customs. 60. Carew, “First Booke,” sig. H3r. 61. Ibid., sig. H3v. See also Thomas Browne’s chapter concerning the proposition “That all Animals of the Land, are in their kinde in the Sea,” in Pseudodoxia Epidemica (London: Thomas Harper, 1646), book 3, chap. 24, 169–71. 62. Carew, “First Booke,” sig. G1r. 63. Ibid., sigs. H2v–H3r. 64. T. E. Tomlins and John Raithby, eds., The Statutes at Large, of England and of Great Britain: From Magna Carta to the Union of the Kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland, 20 vols. (London: G. Eyre and A. Strahan, 1811), 3:115–16. 65. Carew, “To Sir Walter Raleigh,” sig. ¶3r. As lord warden of the Stannaries, Raleigh was responsible for overseeing the Stannary Courts, which looked after the interests of the tin miners; as Carew explains, the title comes from “the latine word Stannum, in English Tynne.” See Carew, “First Booke,” sig. F2r. 66. Ibid., sig. H3r. 67. From Richard Johnson, The Second Part of the Famous History of the Seaven Champions of Christendome (London, 1597), sig. D3v. 68. Eliade, Forge and the Crucible, 8. 69. Anglicus Bartholomaeus, Batman uppon Bartholome His Booke De Proprietatibus Rerum, trans. John Trevisa, rev. Stephen Batman (London: Thomas East, 1582), fol. 233v. 70. Gerald MacLean, Donna Landry, and Joseph P. Ward, eds., introduction to The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550–1850, 1–23 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 7. 71. Carew, “First Booke,” sig. B3r. 72. As Walsham comments, the “most immediately striking feature of the Survey is the present-centred tone of its analysis” (“Introduction,” 33). 73. Carew, “Second Booke,” sigs. Gg2v–Gg3r. 74. F. E. Halliday, introduction to Richard Carew of Antony: The Survey of Cornwall &c. (London: Andrew Melrose, 1953), 49. 75. For a discussion of the charged relationship between romance and colonialism, see Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance

220  Notes to Pages 58–69 and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). 76. Carew, “To the Reader,” sig. ¶4r. 77. Carew, “Second Booke,” sig. Ss3v. Notes to Johnson, “Visions of Soil and Body Management” 1. Amy Tigner, Literature and the Renaissance Garden from Elizabeth I to Charles II: England’s Paradise (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012). 2. Wendy Wall, “Renaissance National Husbandry: Gervase Markham and the Publication of England,” Sixteenth Century Journal 27, no. 3 (Autumn 1996): 767–85. 3. Rebecca Bushnell, Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); Diane Kelsey McColley, Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007); Leah Knight, Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England: Sixteenth-Century Plants and Print Culture (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2009). 4. William Shakespeare, King Richard II, ed. Charles R. Forker (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2002), 1.3.125–28; hereafter cited in the text. 5. James R. Siemon, “Landlord Not King: Agrarian Change and Interarticulation,” in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer, 17–33 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). 6. Robert N. Watson, Back to Nature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 77, 5. 7. Simon C. Estok, Ecocriticism and Shakespeare (New York: Palgrave, 2011). 8. Peter Ure (ed.) King Richard II (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1956), li–lvii. 9. William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1997), 4.6.120. 10. Shakespeare, King Richard II, ed. Andrew Gurr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 153n63. 11. For recent arguments about the gardener’s skill and the degree to which Richard might have succeeded as monarch had he followed the gardener’s wisdom, see Rebecca Laroche and Jennifer Munroe, “On a Bank of Rue: Or Material Ecofeminist Inquiry and the Garden of Richard II,” Shakespeare Survey 42 (2015): 42–50; and Hillary Eklund, Literature and Moral Economy in the Early Modern Atlantic: Elegant Sufficiencies Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 196. 12. For recent work in these fields, see Bushnell, Green Desire; Leah Knight, Of Books and Botany; Ken Albala, Eating Right in the

Notes to Pages 71–78  221 Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Margaret Pelling and Frances White, Medical Conflicts in Early Modern London: Patronage, Physicians, and Irregular Practitioners, 1550–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003); Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (1993; repr., Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Mary Ann Lund, Melancholy, Medicine and Religion in Early Modern England: Reading “The Anatomy of Melancholy” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 13. Adam Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). See also Bernard S. Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs, 1500–1800 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), and Louise Hill Curth, English Almanacs, Astrology and Popular Medicine: 1550–1700 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2007). 14. Abigail Shinn, “ ‘Strange Discourses of Vnnecessary Matter’: Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar and the Almanac Tradition,” in Literature and Popular Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield, 137–50 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009); Meredith Molly Hand, “ ‘More Lies than True Tales’: Scepticism in Middleton’s Mock-Almanacs,” in The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton, ed. Gary Taylor and Trish Thomas Henley, 312–29 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 15. Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press, 60. 16. John Cipriano, A Most Strange and Wonderfull Prophesie upon This Troublesome World Calculated by the Famous Doctor in Astrologie, Maister John Cypriano, trans. Anthony Hollaway (London: A. Jeffes, 1595). 17. Jeffery Neve, A New Almanacke and Prognostication, with the Forraine Computation Seruing for the Yeere of Our Lord and Sauiour Jesus Christ M.DC.V . . . (London: Stationers Company, 1605). 18. Cited in Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press, 147. 19. Forker, King Richard II, 55–64. 20. By the seventeenth century, the wretchedness of almanac writers’ rhyming verse was widely known, but by contrast Elizabethan compilers were largely university educated and their verse, though not considered literature, was nonetheless respectable. Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press, 225–37. 21. Gabriel Frende, A New Almanacke and Prognostication, for the Yeere of Our Lorde God. M.D.XCIII (London: Richarde Watkins and Iames Robertes, 1593). 22. Jan Knott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, trans. Taborski Boles­ law (London: Methuen, 1967), 6.

222  Notes to Pages 79–83 Notes to Reid, “Unsoiled Soil and ‘Fleshly Slime’ ” 1. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (New York: Longman, 1977), 3.3.53; hereafter cited in the text. 2. Kent R. Lehnhof, “Britomart and the Birth of the British Empire in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene,” in (M)Othering the Nation: Constructing and Resisting National Allegories through the Maternal Body, ed. Lisa Bernstein (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), 12. 3. On “married chastity,” see Richard Mallette, Spenser and the Discourses of Reformation England (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 84–112. 4. William Benham, ed., The Prayer-Book of Queen Elizabeth, 1559 (Edinburgh: J. Grant, 1911), 122. 5. Tom MacFaul, Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England: Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne and Jonson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 95. 6. Joseph Campana, The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 210. 7. On The Faerie Queene’s allegorical cores, see C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (1936; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 371–450, esp. 417. 8. Marjorie Swann, “Vegetable Love: Botany and Sexuality in Early Modern England,” in The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, ed. Jean E. Feerick and Vin Nardizzi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 141. While the concerns of this piece resonate with many of the issues raised throughout The Indistinct Human, Swann’s work has been foundational for my thoughts on soil and botanical imagery in Spenser. In an argument complementary to my own, Swann deals extensively with the presumed asexuality of plants during this period, probing literary allusions to this belief with particular regard to Andrew Marvell. 9. Swann, “Vegetable Love,” 141. 10. Elizabeth A. Spiller, “Poetic Parthenogenesis and Spenser’s Idea of Creation in The Faerie Queene,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 40, no. 1 (2000): 73. 11. “Pierced by the sun,” as Barbara L. Estrin puts it, “she flowers”: The Raven and the Lark: Lost Children in Literature of the English Renaissance (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1985), 86. Theresa M. Krier, Gazing on Secret Sights: Spenser, Classical Imitation, and the Decorums of Vision (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), presents a similar reading of this passage, suggesting that Chrysogone “is assimilated into the natural world when the ground welcomes her, one of the flowers spread naturally to the sun” (138). 12. Rebecca Bushnell, Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 136.

Notes to Pages 83–89  223 13. Hillary M. Nunn, “On Vegetating Virgins: Greensickness and the Plant Realm in Early Modern Literature,” in Feerick and Nardizzi, The Indistinct Human, 159. 14. Later, Spenser develops the more metaphorical — yet still horticulturally inspired — image of this nubile young girl’s “fresh flowring Maidenhead” using like terms: the “dainty Rose,” or “flowre” of her virginity, is transplanted — by none other than “Eternall God” — from “Paradize” to be carefully “tendered” in Belphoebe’s “brest,” where it will bear the “fruit of honour and all chast desire” (3.5.54, 51–52). 15. As Maureen Quilligan once put it, “the only slime” that the twin girls escaped “was a mortal, human fatherhood”: Milton’s Spenser: The Politics of Reading (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 191. 16. C. W. Lemmi, “Monster-Spawning Nile-Mud in Spenser,” Modern Language Notes 41, no. 4 (April 1926):  234–38. The Ovidian derivation of this image seems to have been first recognized in modern scholarship by W. P. Cumming in “Ovid as a Source for Spenser’s Monster-Spawning Mud Passages,” Modern Language Notes 45, no. 3 (1930): 166–68. 17. I here cite the Latin text of the Metamorphoses from Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” Books 1–5, ed. William S. Anderson (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 1.416–26. I cite Arthur Golding’s translation from Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”: The Arthur Golding Translation of 1567, ed. John Frederick Nims (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2000), 1.495–507. All further references to the Latin and English translation are from these editions, hereafter cited in the text. 18. Jon A. Quitslund, Spenser’s Supreme Fiction: Platonic Natural Philosophy and “The Faerie Queene” (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 198. 19. Mary Thomas Crane, “Illicit Privacy and Outdoor Spaces in Early Modern England,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 9, no. 1 (2009): 9. 20. It is the religious resonances of this tale that have attracted the most scholarly attention. Assertions that Belphoebe’s birth is meant to parallel (and perhaps parody) Christ’s are ubiquitous in Spenser scholarship. See, for example: James Nohrnberg, The Analogy of “The Faerie Queene” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 532–33; James W. Broaddus, Spenser’s Allegory of Love: Social Vision in Books III, IV, and V of “The Faerie Queene” (Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995), 61–70; Lauren Silberman, Transforming Desire: Erotic Knowledge in Books III and IV of “The Faerie Queene” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 43; and Carol V. Kaske, Spenser and Biblical Poetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 176–79. 21. Mary Ellen Lamb, “Gloriana, Acrasia, and the House of Busirane: Gendered Fictions in The Faerie Queene as Fairy Tale,” in Worldmaking Spenser: Explorations in the Early Modern Age, ed. Patrick Cheney and Lauren Silberman (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 81.

224  Notes to Pages 90–96 The relationship of Chrysogone’s tale to the Sleeping Beauty tradition is briefly treated by Linda Woodbridge in “Amoret and Belphoebe: Fairy Tale and Myth,” Notes & Queries 33, no. 3 (September 1986): 340–42. 22. My synopsis of “L’histoire de Troylus et de la belle Zellandine” derives from “The Complete Tale of Troylus and Zellandine from the Perceforest Novel: An English Translation,” trans. Susan McNeill Cox, Merveilles & Contes 4, no. 1 (1990): 118–39. 23. My synopsis of Giambattista Basile’s “Sole, Luna, e Talia” derives from the translation in Folk and Fairy Tales, 3rd ed., ed. Martin Hallett and Barbara Karasek, 20–24 (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2002). 24. Northrop Frye, Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Renaissance Literature, ed. Michael Dolzani (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 44. 25. I cite this description of Venus as a “bold-faced suitor” from the text of William Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis in The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition, 2nd ed., ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 2008), 6. All further references to Shakespeare’s work are from this edition, hereafter cited in the text. 26. I borrow this term “chaste blason” from Michael O’Connell, Mirror and Veil: The Historical Dimension of Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 101. 27. Belphoebe’s name, of course, also links her with her foster mother, Diana (also known as Phoebe), who is Apollo’s twin sister and thus perhaps also Belphoebe’s genetic aunt. 28. I cite the Latin text of Virgil’s Aeneid from Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I–VI, ed. H. R. Fairclough, rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 1.326–27. I have reproduced Stanley Lombardo’s English translation in Aeneid (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005). All further references to the Aeneid are from these editions, hereafter cited in the text. 29. Harry Berger Jr., “Actaeon at the Hinder Gate: The Stag Party in Spenser’s Garden of Adonis,” in Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature, ed. Valeria Finucci and Regina Schwartz (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 97. Perhaps the most extreme example of just such an interpretation can be found in Richard J. Berleth’s “Heavens Favorable and Free: Belphoebe’s Nativity in The Faerie Queene,” ELH 40, no. 4 (1973): 479–500, in which the author drew on “the science of nativities familiar to many sixteenth-century readers” and used his own powers of academic divination to read Belphoebe’s horoscope as an affirmation that “her birth is an event of historic magnitude” (481, 491). 30. Berger, “Actaeon at Hinder Gate,” 99. 31. I cite both the Latin text and English translation of Ovid’s Ars amatoria from The Art of Love and Other Poems [1929], 2nd ed., trans. George Patrick Goold and J. H. Mozley (1979; repr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 1.633; hereafter cited in the text.

Notes to Pages 96–103  225 32. Berger, “Actaeon at Hinder Gate,” 99. 33. Richard T. Nuese, “Adonis, Gardens of,” in The Spenser Ency­ clopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton (1990; repr., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 9. Notes to Wakeman, “Groping Golgotha” 1.  As Joan Thirsk writes, enclosures were erected with “ruthless disregard for the rights and interests of the smaller farmers and cottagers, and were the cause of much misery and social unrest.” Thirsk’s survey of the pamphlet literature identifies five main strands of protest: enclosure, engrossment, emparkment, the keeping of cattle for fattening, and the keeping of a large number of sheep. But, as Joyce Youings notes, the efforts of reformers “did little to remedy a situation whose causes were deeper than mere avarice.” Thirsk, “Farming Regions of England,” in Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 4 (1500–1640), ed. Joan Thirsk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 65; Youings, Sixteenth-Century England (Middlesex: Penguin, 1984), 51. See also Thirsk, “Enclosing and Engrossing,” in Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 4 (1500–1640), ed. Joan Thirsk, 238–39 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967); A. T. Thacker, J. W. Laughton, and J. I. Kermode, “Later Medieval Chester, 1230–1550,” in Victoria History of the Counties of England: A History of Cheshire, vol. 5, pt. 1, ed. C. P. Lewis and A. T. Thacker, 34–89 (London: Boydell and Brewer, 2003); J. L. Bolton, The Medieval English Economy, 1150–1500 (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1980), 134; for information on Chester’s agro-economic relation to Wales, especially to Flintshire, see Frank Emery,“The Farming Regions of Wales,” in Thirsk, Agrarian History, 23–29. Historical, economic, political, and literary analysis of enclosure and engrossment abounds. For material especially relevant to the Chester Shepherds’ Play and sixteenth century Chester and its foodshed, see Robert Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe,” in The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Devel­ opment in Pre-Industrial Europe, ed. T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin, 39–48 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Lisa J. Kiser, “ ‘Mak’s Heirs’: Sheep and Humans in the Pastoral Ecology of the Towne­ ley First and Second Shepherds’ Plays,” JEGP, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 108, no. 3 (July 2009): 336–59; Norman Lowe, The Lancashire Textile Industry in the Sixteenth Century (Manchester: Printed for the Chetham Society by Manchester University Press, 1972); Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 23–57; Ronald Stewart-Brown, ed., Lancashire and Cheshire Cases in the Court of Star Chamber (Manchester: Printed for the Record Society, 1916), 94–104.

226  Notes to Page 103 2. It is a mistake to assume that the playwrights of the shepherds’ plays anglicize the setting solely to make the story of the adoration of the shepherds accessible to sixteenth century audiences. The idea that the work of biblical drama is only to make timeless spiritual concerns accessible dismisses how invested these plays are in the politics of their present moment. As Greg Walker argues in “The Cultural Work of Early Drama,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, 2nd ed., ed. Richard Beadle and Alan J. Fletcher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), What a close reading of the plays in their historical contexts suggests is that the contemporary abuses represented were not simply an illustration of the problem: they were the problem. A playwright wrote an extended, compassionate complaint about rural poverty not because it provided a useful metaphor for a spiritual condition that was his real theme, but because he was genuinely concerned about the poverty he saw around him, and about the social abuses he believed were its cause. That these things also exemplified a wider truth about the human condition gave added resonance to the discussion, but it was not alone sufficient to prompt it. (87–88) In his highly influential reading of religious drama’s conception of “medieval time and English place,” V. A. Kolve argues in The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966), that much of the use of “dramatic anachronism involves conscious artistic intention. It is used, for instance, in the service of the medieval poor, registering the wrongs they suffer within the context of an Advent that will ultimately damn their oppressors forever. The two Towneley shepherds’ plays, preeminently, are entered in that cause, and they are darkened (to their artistic advantage and their greater social use) by a body of social protest that is anachronistic but in no sense careless or unintended” (104). In a separate context, Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), nicely states the cultural function of dramatic anachronism and anachorism: “vernacular religious drama [was] not only shaped by local facts and expectations, but served an active function in shaping them as well. The incarnational drama of the late Middle Ages was transformed by the local likeness at the same time that it helped make that local community identity recognizable and coherent. Medieval community theater in this sense both defined the social structure and celebrated it” (40–41). 3. Although Corpus Christi plays in Chester date to 1422, the first reference to the Chester Shepherds’ Play in the historical record does not occur until 1516. Lawrence Clopper argues that around this time the Chester Corpus Christi celebration expanded from a set of plays narrowly focused on the Passion to a full Creation-to-Doomsday cycle. Without evidence to

Notes to Pages 103–05  227 the contrary, we must consider the Chester Shepherds’ Play as a sixteenth century work. All five extant manuscripts of the Chester cycle postdate the suppression of the cycle in 1575. Similarly, consensus is building around the dating of the Towneley manuscript (Huntingon MS HM1) to the Marian period of the mid-sixteenth century. At present, it is impossible to date the performance of the First and Second Shepherds’ Plays with any precision. The Towneley manuscript is now generally thought to be a collection of biblical plays from various locations in the West Riding, Lancashire, and Westmorland, collected sometime during the reign of Queen Mary (1553–58). The two Towneley shepherds’ plays reference the geography around Wakefield, but as Barbara Palmer shows, there are no definitive records of dramatic performance in Wakefield before 1550 and, as others have shown, the themes are readily identifiable with the Tudor enclosure crisis. See Barbara D. Palmer, “ ‘Towneley Plays’ or ‘Wakefield Cycle’ Revisited,” Comparative Drama 21 (1987–88): 318–48; Barbara D. Palmer, “Recycling the Wakefield Cycle,” Research Opportunities in Medieval and Renaissance Drama 41 (2002): 88–130; Theresa Coletti and Gail McMurray Gibson, “The Tudor Origins of Medieval Drama,” in A Companion to Tudor Literature, ed. Kent Cartwright, 229–41 (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); Lynn Staley, The Island Garden: England’s Language of Nation from Gildas to Marvell (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 108–09; Kiser, “ ‘Mak’s Heirs,’ ” 336–59. 4. All citations from the Chester cycle are from Robert Mayer Lumiansky and David Mills, eds., The Chester Mystery Cycle, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), line 197; hereafter cited as CSP in the text, followed by line number(s). 5. The parable of the sower, with its metaphor of “good ground” as being necessary for the planting of the seedlike Word of God, is recorded in Matthew 13:1–23, Mark 4:1–20, and Luke 8:1–15. Thomas Norton’s 1561 translation of John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion is especially explicit in its exegesis of the parable of the sower: “For as sede, if it fall vpon a desert and vntilled pece of grounde, will do nothyng but die: but if it be throwen vpon arable lande well manured and tylled, it wyll bryng foorth her fruite with very good encrease: so the word of God, if it light vpon a stiffe necke, it will growe barrein as that whiche is sowen vpon sande: but if it light vpon a soule manured with the hande of the heauenly Spirite, it will be moste fruitefull.” John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Thomas Norton (London: Reinolde Wolfe and Richarde Harison, 1561), IV.xiv.f94; my emphasis. Paul uses similar husbandry language in 1 Corinthians 3:1–10. 6. Sally-Beth MacLean, “In Search of Lord Strange: Dynamic Patronage in the North West,” Medieval English Theatre 29 (2007): 42. 7. The Origo Mundi is the first play in the Ordinalia, a biblical cycle trilogy written in Middle Cornish usually dated to mid-to-late fourteenth century. The Ancient Cornish Drama, 2 vols., ed. and trans. Edwin Norris

228  Notes to Pages 107–09 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1859); hereafter cited in the text as COM, followed by line number(s). 8. All citations from the Towneley plays are from Martin Stevens and A. C. Cawley, eds., The Towneley Plays, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); hereafter cited in the text as TFSP (First Shepherds’ Play) and TSSP (Second Shepherds’ Play), followed by line number(s). 9. OED, “seely,” adj., and “silly,” adj,. 2a. Cf. Martial Rose, ed., The Wakefield Mystery Plays (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961); John C. Coldewey, ed., Early English Drama: An Anthology (New York: Garland, 1993); John Gassner, ed., Medieval and Tudor Drama (New York: Applause, 1987); and The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 1, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006). 10. J. W. Robinson, Studies in Fifteenth-Century Stagecraft (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1991), 117–18. Both the Wycliffe Bible and the Douay-Rheims translate “de limo terrae” as “slime of the earth.” 11. When Gyb says he is as “heuy as a sod,” he compares himself to a thick patch of earth on which grass grows. Turf is substantially heavier when waterlogged. This use of “sod” is one of the earliest recorded in English, supporting a late fifteenth century to mid-sixteenth century date of composition. The OED lists no definition of “sod” before 1475. 12. “Sich,” adj. and “slike,” n., OED. Stevens and Cawley gloss “slyke” as a variant of “siche,” i.e., “such,” which the playwright made to rhyme with “dyke” in line 135. The passage would thus read, “The world is such [as this]; there is no help here.” 13. John Fitzherbert, Here Begynneth a Newe Tracte or Treatyse Moost Profytable for All Husbande Men and Very Frutefull for All Other Persones to Rede, Newly Correcte and Amended by the Auctour, with Dyuerse Other Thynges Added Thervnto, LIIIr. 14. Bernard of Clairvaux, Medytac[i]ons of Saynt Bernarde, trans. Wynkyn de Worde (Westminster, 1496), B1r. 15. Ibid., B3r. 16. In TFSP, Slawpase quotes from Isaiah’s messianic prophecy (cf. Isa. 11:1) at 491–503, and in TSSP, Gyb restates the same prophecy at 972–84. The relationship between Isaiah and the Nativity is made explicit in other medieval drama as well. Isaiah delivers a prophetic prologue at the start of the Nativity play in the Coventry Shearmen and Taylors’ Pageant. The N-Town Jesse Root also stages Isaiah’s messianic vision. In the Chester cycle, the role of messianic prophet falls to Balaam in the Cappers’ Play of Moses and the Law and of Balaack and Balaam; the Magi later recount the fulfillment of Balaam’s prophecy in the Mercers’ Play of the Offering of the Three Kings. It should also be noted that the Towneley manuscript contains a prophets’ play with no mention of Isaiah, but this play is very different in tone, style, and meter from those plays (including the two Towneley shepherds’ plays) most frequently ascribed to the playwright

Notes to Pages 109–13  229 conventionally known as the Wakefield Master and is very possibly by a different author. My analysis of the language of Isaiah and the CSP, TFSP, and TSSP is indebted to J. W. Robinson’s reading in Studies in Fifteenth-Century Stagecraft, 87, of the shepherds as “criers in the desert.” However, Robinson does not explore the ecological implications of the book of Isaiah’s vision. 17. I quote from the Wycliffite Bible because that is the translation Fitzherbert used in his Boke of Husbandry, published in 1523, 12 years before Myles Coverdale’s translation of the book of Isaiah, the first English translation since the Wycliffite Bible. Tyndale was executed before he finished his translation of the Hebrew Bible. 18. Beginning with Myles Coverdale’s 1535 translation of Isaiah, the same passage in the Latin Vulgate, “omnis caro faenum,” was translated as “All flesh is grass.” Coverdale’s translation deemphasizes the idea that all flesh is animal fodder but grass and hay are synonymous in many husbandry manuals. 19. McRae, God Speed the Plough, 18. McRae also notes that the “complaint texts rarely admit the possibility that in certain instances enclosure may actually improve conditions for tenants, or that in many places — on manors enclosed for over a century, or in the disparate economies of the forests and fens — it will be an irrelevant issue” (44). 20. A hundred sheep would be a medium-sized flock. Large flocks in Norfolk had over 2,000 head of sheep. K. J. Allison, “The Sheep-Corn Husbandry of Norfolk in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Agricultural History Review 5, no. 1 (January 1957): 18. H. A. Eaton iden­ tifies the folktale of the “Madmen of Gotham,” in which shepherds argue over an imaginary flock of sheep, as a possible source for the TFSP. Stevens and Cawley argue that the tale of the “Madmen of Gotham” “has a realistic background in the endless disputes over rights of common that are recorded in the manor-court rolls of the period.” Horace A. Eaton, “A Source for the Towneley ‘Prima Pastorum,’ ” Modern Language Notes 14, no. 5 (May 1899): 265–68; Stevens and Cawley, Towneley Plays, 485n146. 21. As K. J. Allison writes, “The owners of foldcourses normally gave a tenant compensation for obliging him to leave his strips fallow during any one year, compensation taking the form of demesne land offered in exchange, a temporary reduction in rent, or an increased number of animals which the tenants might put into the lords’ flocks. But the tenants, in some townships at least, were obliged to make an annual payment for each acre that benefited from tathing by the lords’ flocks.” Allison, “Sheep-Corn Husbandry,” 20. 22. Thomas Tusser, Fiue Hundreth Points of Good Husbandry (London: Richard Tottel, 1573), 59r–59v. 23. Ibid., 59v. 24. The phrase “lord of the soil” is an epithet for the owner of an estate. OED, “soil,” n. 3 and 5a.

230  Notes to Pages 114–16 25. “Now A Dayes — The Ballad,” in Ballads from Manuscript, vol. 1, ed. Frederick James Furnivall (London: Printed for the Ballad Society by Taylor and Co., 1868), lines 157–68. 26. See also Lynn Staley, The Island Garden: England’s Language of Nation from Gildas to Marvell (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 96–98. Staley describes the “elegiac” tone of Henry VIII’s statutes against the pulling down of towns, noting that “the effects of enclosure” were the “fracturing [of] community.” In the 1515 statute, “honest labor of the village community is made visually available and is anchored to past practice — not simply two hundred persons, but men, women, children, and ancestors, out of tyme of mynde, were daily occupied with specific agrarian tasks. It is that picture of communal and agrarian labor that is lamented as having disappeared from England’s countryside, a communal labor that maintained churches, market towns, and prayers for the dead, and a labor that is linked to an ancient idea of the commonweal, semienclosed but not isolated.” 27. Louth might refer to County Louth in Ireland, directly across the Irish Sea from Chester, or Louth, the chief market town of the Lincolnshire wolds, some 166 miles east of Chester. 28. Suzanne Speyser claims that only when the herd is taken as an allegory or “metaphor for fallen humanity” does the flock acquire “significance as well as substance.” A. C. Cawley and Alicia K. Nitecki characterize the tone of the shepherds’ opening monologues as “grumbling.” Nitecki’s characterization of Gyb’s monologue is decidedly muted, calling it “a lament about being down on his luck. The speech reflects his determination to better his life materially, not his destitution and helplessness.” She thus argues that the shepherds’ complaints about wages, wethers, and weather are meant to be taken satirically, an “antitheatrical prelude to the joy attendant on the birth of Christ.” Suzanne Speyser, “Dramatic Illusion and Sacred Reality in the Towneley Prima Pastorum.” Studies in Philology 78, no. 1 (Winter 1981): 10; A. C. Cawley, “The Wakefield First Shepherds’ Play,” In Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society 7, no. 2 (December 1953): 114; Alicia K. Nitecki, “The Sacred Elements of the Secular Feast in Prima Pastorum,” Mediaevalia: A Journal of Mediaeval Studies 3, no. 1 (1977): 229. 29. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 144. For Donna Jeanne Haraway’s definition of “naturecultures,” see The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), 3. 30. Julian Yates, “Counting Sheep: Dolly Does Utopia (Again),” Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 8 (Spring 2004), 27, accessed October 26, 2016, http://www.rhizomes.net/issue8/yates2.htm. 31. James Maxwell Miller, A History of Ancient Israel and Judah (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1986), 49–51; Morris Silver,

Notes to Pages 117–19  231 Prophets and Markets: The Political Economy of Ancient Israel (Boston: Kluwer-Nijhoff, 1983), 15–16, 75, 144; Lester L. Grabbe, A History of the Jews and Judaism in the Second Temple Period, vol. 1, Yehud: A History of the Persian Province of Judah (London: T&T Clark, 2004), 202, 203, 264. Although Daniel Sperber, “Trends in Third Century Palestinian Agriculture,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 15 (1972): 227–55, focuses on late Roman Palestine, his research does look back to biblical Judea as well (238, 245). Notes to Botelho, “Winstanley and Postrevolutionary Soil” 1. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography notes that Winstanley has remained “an icon of the left” and is presented on the Internet “as an early environmentalist as well as a socialist.” “Gerrard Winstanley,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, September 2014, accessed May 10, 2014, http://oxforddnb.com/view/­ article/29755. See also Daniel Johnson, “Winstanley’s Ecology: The English Diggers Today,” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine 65, no. 7 (December 2013): 20–31. 2. For more on the making of the film, see Eric Mival’s documentary, It Happened Here Again (Other Cinema, 1976). 3. Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 129. 4. Vin Nardizzi, “Greener,” in Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 147–69 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 148. 5. Dan Brayton, “Shakespeare and the Global Ocean,” in Ecocritical Shakespeare, ed. Lynne Bruckner and Dan Brayton, 173–92 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), 173. A sampling of recent titles of early modern criticism that support this claim include Todd A. Borlik, Ecocriticism and Early Modern English Literature: Green Pastures (New York: Routledge, 2012); Rebecca W. Bushnell, Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); Gabriel Egan, Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism (New York: Routledge, 2006); and Robert Watson, Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 6. Steve Mentz, “Toward a Blue Cultural Studies: The Sea, Maritime Culture, and Early Modern English Literature,” Literature Compass 6, no. 5 (September 2009): 1007; see also his At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2009), 96–99. 7. Bruce Smith, The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 1. 8. Steve Mentz, “Brown,” in Cohen, Prismatic Ecology, 193.

232  Notes to Pages 119–21 9. Ibid., 206. 10. I am here referencing Jane Bennett, who in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), advocates for a vital materiality that permeates both human and nonhuman. She discusses Darwin’s observation of worms and how they enable and contribute to human history and culture, which is “the unplanned result of worms acting in conjunction and competition with other (biological, bacterial, chemical, human) agents” (96). 11. John Gurney, Brave Community: The Digger Movement in the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007): 180. 12. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1975): 110. 13. Gerrard Winstanley, A Watch-Worde to the Citie of London, in The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley, vol. 2, ed. Thomas N. Corns, Ann Hughes, and David Loewenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 85. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Winstanley’s works are from this edition. 14. Robert N. Watson, Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 77–78. 15. Peter Lindenbaum, Changing Landscapes: Anti-Pastoral Sentiment in the English Renaissance (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 2, 12. 16. Anthony Low, The Georgic Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 7, 12. 17. Winstanley, An Humble Request to the Ministers of Both Universities, 259, 263. 18. Ibid., 267. 19. Winstanley, An Appeal to All Englishmen, 248. 20. John Taylor, preface to The True Levellers Standard Advanced, in Winstanley, Complete Works, 2:3; and Winstanley, A Letter to the Lord Fairfax, 44. 21. Winstanley, A Declaration of the Bloudie and Unchristian Acting, 60. 22. Gurney, Brave Community, 177. 23. Winstanley, A New-Yeers Gift, 146. Earlier in the text, he asks, “Why do you send your Souldiers to beat a few naked Spademen off from digging the Commons for a livelihood?” (134). 24. See “tumble,” v, 6, 9b, OED Online, Oxford University Press, 2014, accessed May 14, 2014. 25. Winstanley, England’s Spirit Unfoulded, 162. 26. Winstanley, New-Yeers Gift, 111, 120–21. 27. Winstanley argues in his pamphlets that “social transformation was a necessary reward for ordinary men and women who had contributed money to the defeat of the King, as well as those who had fought

Notes to Pages 121–25  233 in Parliament’s armies.” Quoted in The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley, vol. 1, ed. Thomas N. Corns, Ann Hughes, and David Loewenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 7. Also see The Eclogues of Virgil, trans. David Ferry (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), where in Eclogue 1 Tityrus exclaims, “Have we done all this work / Upon our planted and fallow fields so that / Some godless barbarous soldier will enjoy it? / This is what civil war has brought down upon us” (9). 28. Winstanley, An Appeal to the House of Commons, 69–70. 29. Winstanley, New-Yeers Gift, 135, 139. 30. Winstanley, Fire in the Bush, 215. See also Randall Martin’s essay in this volume for an insightful discussion of fraternal rivalry, land, and husbandry in As You Like It. 31. Winstanley, Appeal to All Englishmen, 243. 32. Winstanley, Letter to Lord Fairfax, 53. Earlier in the same text, Winstanley writes that the Diggers are motivated “to have food and raiment free by the labour of his hands from the earth” (46). 33. Winstanley, Humble Request, 269. 34. Winstanley, Watch-Word, 82. 35. Winstanley, Appeal to All Englishmen, 249. 36. Ibid., 243. 37. Ibid., 243–44. 38. McRae, God Speed the Plough, 196–97. 39. Winstanley, The Law of Freedom, 357, 355. Winstanley looks to Genesis, with its command “to subdue the Earth,” which, he says in Humble Request, implies plowing, digging, and manuring (258). 40. Ibid., 290. Such practices also echo Aldo Leopold’s idea of a land ethic, which foregrounded responsible and ethical human relationships with and obligations to the land. 41. Winstanley, Watch-Word, 80. 42. Winstanley, Letter to Lord Fairfax, 44. 43. Winstanley, The True Levellers Standard Advanced, 13. Even Walter Blith, in his 1652 The English Improver Improved, would write that there were “thousands of places more capable of Improvement.” And in the film Winstanley, a soldier sent from Lord Fairfax to the Digger community comments, “You won’t grow anything here, not in this dust.” (29:32). 44. These representative examples come from Humble Request, 263; Watch-Word, 90; New-Yeers Gift, 147; True Levellers Standard Advanced, 18; and Humble Request, 261, respectively. In The Law of Freedom, Winstanley would come to call the land “Commonwealths Land,” which included the commons and wasteland in addition to land newly acquired by army victories — “Parks, Forests, Chases, and the like” (291). 45. Winstanley, Law of Freedom, 281. 46. Winstanley, Appeal to the House, 69. 47. Winstanley, A Declaration of the Bloudie and Unchristian Action, 61.

234  Notes to Pages 125–30 48. Winstanley, True Levellers Standard Advanced, 13. 49. McRae, God Speed the Plough, 128. 50. Winstanley, True Levellers Standard Advanced, 18–19. 51. Winstanley, A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England, 33. 52. Winstanley, Letter to Lord Fairfax, 46. 53. Winstanley, Humble Request, 255. 54. As Corns, Hughes, and Loewenstein write in their introduction, “The years 1646–1650 saw the worst run of bad harvests in the seventeenth century and the lowest real wages” while “starvation was reported in the north of England” (Winstanley, Complete Works, vol. 1, 27–28). 55. Winstanley, New-Yeers Gift, 113. 56. Ibid., 113. 57. Winstanley, Law of Freedom, 338. 58. Ibid., 292. 59. Ibid., 371. 60. Winstanley, Letter to Lord Fairfax, 47. 61. These repetitions and Virgilian variations appear in New Yeers Gift, Appeal to All Englishmen, Humble Request, and Law of Freedom. See also Randall Martin’s essay in this volume on the swords into ploughshares paradigm in the second tetralogy. 62. Winstanley, Letter to Lord Fairfax, 48, 49. 63. Winstanley, Watch-Word, 89. See also Charlotte Scott’s astute discussion of how husbandry was central to the terms of both war and peace in the sixteenth century, pointing to late Elizabethan acts that called for “the restoring of the English landscape on the basis of the security of the commonwealth” and to Shakespeare’s Henry V, where Burgundy draws on the image of the plough, “summoning husbandry as a vital means of restoration” in the aftermath of war. Charlotte Scott, Shakespeare’s Nature: From Cultivation to Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 84, 94, 111. 64. Hill, World Turned Upside Down, 113. 65. See McRae, God Speed the Plough, esp. 110–32. 66. Winstanley, Law of Freedom, 310. 67. Interestingly, the OED cites the first usage of this word as occurring in the 1640s. Notes to Martin, “Fertility versus Firepower” I want to thank Tamsin Badcoe, Keith Botelho, Hillary Eklund, and Rebecca Totaro for their rewarding suggestions for this essay. 1.  John Fitzherbert, Booke of Husbandrie (London, 1534, 1598); Thomas Tusser, A Hundredth Good Pointes of Husbandrie (London, 1557); Fiue Hundreth Points of Good Husbandry (1573); Conrad Heresbach, Foure Bookes of Husbandry, trans. Barnabe Googe (London, 1577).

Notes to Pages 131–34  235 2. Hugh Plat, The Jewell House of Art and Nature (London: Peter Short, 1594), D3r, B4r–v, D4v–G2v, H1v–H2v. 3. Bernard Palissy, Discours admirables, de la nature des eaux, et fonteines . . . des metaux, des sels & salines, des pierres, des terres, du feu & des emaux (Paris, 1580); translated into English by Aurèle La Rocque as The Admirable Discourses of Bernard Palissy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1957). Palissy’s empirically oriented Discourses takes the form of dialogues between “Theory” and “Practice.” Plat’s section, “A Philosophicall Discours vpon Salt” (B1v), acknowledges and translates part of Palissy’s chapter, “On the Various Kinds of Salts” (Admirable Discourses, 127–35). 4. Plat, Jewell House, C4v–D1v. 5. Gervase Markham, The English Husbandman (London: John Browne, 1613), F4r–v. 6. Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 7. William Shakespeare, As You Like It, in The Complete Works, 2nd ed., ed. Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett, and William Montgomery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2.6.96–99. All Shakespeare quotations are from this edition unless otherwise noted. 8. That is, one in which the physical labor of husbandry is elided and abstracted as the social ideal of pastoral retirement — a process founded on the value-transformation of gold itself, as Timon of Athens illustrates (4.3.26–45). Graham Harman explores the economic and ideological implications of gold as “congealed human labor” in “Gold,” 106–23, Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 107. 9. Steve Mentz, “Brown,” in Cohen, Prismatic Ecology, 193–212. 10. See too Orsino, who assures Viola in Twelfth Night that his desire for Olivia “Prizes not quantity of dirty lands”; i.e., has no designs on her productive soils (2.4.80). 11. Compare the biblical rhetoric of Gerrard Winstanley’s protests against the private enclosure of common land — the “ ‘King of Righteousnesse . . . made the Earth for All’ . . . [but] the ‘weaker brother [is] shut out of the Earth’ ” (page 122 of this volume). 12. Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300– 1850 (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 23–32, cited in Robert Markley, “Summer’s Lease: Shakespeare in the Little Ice Age,” in Early Modern Ecostudies: From the Florentine Codex to Shakespeare, ed. Ivo Kamps, Karen L. Raber, and Thomas Hallock, 131–42 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 135. 13. Henry IV, Part Two, ed. René Weis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). All quotations from this play are from this edition unless otherwise indicated.

236  Notes to Pages 134–36 14. Joan Thirsk, “Enclosing and Engrossing,” in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, 8 vols., ed. H. P. R. Finberg and Joan Thirsk, 200–55 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967–2000), 4:221, 233; James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (New York: Harper Collins, 2005), 109–11, 233–34. 15. See Hillary Eklund, “Revolting Diets: Jack Cade’s ‘Sallet’ and the Politics of Hunger in 2 Henry VI,” Shakespeare Studies 42 (2014): 51–62. 16. McRae, God Speed the Plough, 13, 58–59. 17. Stephen Inwood, A History of London (London: Macmillan, 1998), 269; Charles Nicholl, The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street (London: Allen Lane, 2007), 100–08, and throughout. 18. Plat’s and Markham’s empirical innovations in soil management complemented the new generation of county maps and chorographies, or place descriptions, that constructed England’s identity on the basis of the composite richness of its natural and built landscapes (e.g., Richard Carew’s Survey of Cornwall [1602] in Tamsin Badcoe’s essay in this volume). Shakespeare invokes this equation of sovereign power and terrain diversity when Henry IV, anxious to unite the country after his usurpation and murder of Richard II, publicly observes Sir Walter Blunt “new lighted from his horse / Stained with the variation of each soil / Betwixt that Holmedon and this seat of ours” (1H4, 1.1.63–65). Shakespeare confirms London audiences’ knowledge of national soil types by linking them with regional sites such as the white chalky soils exposed by the Dover cliffs overlooking the English Channel, or the marl of the English midlands in which Shakespeare and his family owned land, or with imagined colonial terrains, such as the “unwholesome fen[s]” on Caliban’s island that implicitly invite future plantation husbandry (H5, 5.2.335–36; Ado, 2.1.56; Tmp., 1.2.324). 19. John Walter and Keith Wrightson, “Dearth and the Social Order in Early Modern England,” Past and Present 71 (May 1976): 22–42. 20. Alec Ponton, “Editorial,” Pherologist 4, no. 3 (2001): 2, cited in Patrick Curry, Ecological Ethics, 2nd ed. (London: Polity, 2011), 254. 21. Mathis Wackernagel and William E. Rees, Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth (Philadelphia: New Society, 1996). 22. Victor Skipp, Crisis and Development: An Ecological Case Study of the Forest of Arden, 1570–1674 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). 23. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162, no. 3859 (December 1968): 1243–48. 24. C. S. Holling, “Resilience and the Stability of Ecological Systems,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4 (1973): 1–23; L. H. Gunderson, “Ecological Resilience — in Theory and Application,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 31 (2000) 425–39; “Ecological

Notes to Pages 136–39  237 Resilience,” Wikipedia, accessed February 20, 2016, http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Resilience_(ecology). 25. See Vin Nardizzi, ‘ “There’s Wood Enough Within’: The Tempest’s Logs and the Resources of Shakespeare’s Globe,” in Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 112–35. 26. Peter Whitehorne, Certaine Waies for the Ordering of Souldiers . . . and . . .How to Make Saltpetre, Gounpouder and Diuers Sortes of Fireworkes . . . (London: Thomas East, 1588), F4–G3v. 27. James B. Nardi, Life in the Soil: A Guide for Naturalists and Gardeners (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 4; “Nitrogen Cycle,” Wikipedia, accessed March 17, 2016, http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Nitrogen_cycle. 28. Palissy, Admirable Discourses, 130–32; Plat, Jewell House, D4v– E1r, H1v. 29. John X. Evans, “Shakespeare’s ‘Villainous Salt-Peter’: The Dimensions of an Allusion,” Shakespeare Quarterly 15, no. 4 (Autumn 1964): 451–54; Richard Winship Stewart, The English Ordnance Office, 1585–1625: A Case Study in Bureaucracy (Woodbridge, UK: Royal Historical Society, 1996), 65–88; Brenda J. Buchanan, “ ‘The Art and Mystery of Making Gunpowder’: The English Experience in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in The Heirs of Archimedes: Science and the Art of War through the Age of Enlightenment, ed. Brett D. Steele and Tamera Dorland, 233–74 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 235–40; David Cressy, “Saltpetre, State Security and Vexation in Early Modern England,” Past and Present 212 (August 2011): 73–111. 30. Hugh Plat, A Discoverie of Certaine English Wants (London: Peter Short, 1595), K4v. Also Thomas Nashe, An Almond for a Parrot (1590), in Works, 5 vols., ed. R. B. McKerrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1904–10), observes, “saltpetermen . . . vndoing of poore men by dygging up their floars and breaking down their wals” (3:355). 31. Plat, Jewell House, F4v. 32. The conflicts are similar to those explored by Badcoe in her discussion of Richard Carew’s Survey of Cornwall, which defends local soils and shorelines against state-sponsored degradation by tin mining, part of the Tudor government’s effort to build up a national armament industry and global exports. See chapter 2 in this volume. 33. Plat, Discoverie of Certaine English Wants, K4v. 34. They must nonetheless have been dramatically recognizable, perhaps by their paper commissions (see the quotation that follows) and by emblematic spades. 35. Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, A Fair Quarrel, ed. Roger Victor Holdsworth (London: Ernest Benn, 1974), 1.1.236–55. 36. Cressy, “Saltpetre, State Security,” 99.

238  Notes to Pages 140–43 37. Tobias Menely and Margaret Ronda, “Red,” in Cohen, Prismatic Ecology, 22–41. 38. The production of saltpeter paralleled the early modern commodification of freshwater in schemes such as the 1605–13 project by Edmund Colthurst and later Thomas Middleton to divert water from the River Lea into a privately owned waterway, New River, running from Hertfordshire to London. Shakespeare alludes to this environmentally controversial proj‑ ect in Coriolanus 3.1.99–100. 39. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 145–46; Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 51–53. 40. Cressy, “Saltpetre, State Security,” 107–08. 41. Whitehorne, Certain Waies, was later appended to Whitehorne’s translation of Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Arte of Warre (1574), which was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, and Shakespeare possibly knew. See also Plat, Jewell House, B4v. 42. Cited in Cressy, “Saltpetre, State Security,” 80. 43. Nardi, Life in the Soil, xvi–xvii, 20, 30. See also David Goldstein’s essay, chapter 9 in this volume, for discussion of later scientific investigations of saltpeter’s elusive “fifth element.” 44. Stewart, English Ordnance Office, 82, citing Public Record Office, State Papers 14/1/64, petition dated April 1603. 45. “Inward bruise” may slyly allude to venereal diseases from the outward wounds of sexual and military violence, as Thersites relentlessly satirizes in Troilus and Cressida. 46. “Spermaceti,” Wikipedia, accessed March 11, 2016, en.wikipedia .org/wiki/Spermaceti. 47. Shakespeare attributes Hotspur’s victory at Holmedon (Humbleton Hill) against the Scots to fierce “discharge of . . . artillery” (1.1.57) and the “guns” reported by the unnamed lord (1.3.56, 63), whereas Holinshed says that the “violence of the English shot” was decisive. Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958–74), 4:183. Shakespeare changed the weaponry from archery to firearms, thereby topicalizing the narrative in terms of modern gunpowder warfare familiar to Elizabethan spectators. 48. James C. Bulman, “Shakespeare’s Georgic Histories,” Shakespeare Survey 38 (1986): 37–47. 49. Compare Charlotte Scott’s argument that Henry turns war into an aggressively masculinist form of “cultivation.” “Henry V: Humanity and Husbandry,” in Shakespeare’s Nature: From Cultivation to Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 83–120.

Notes to Pages 143–47  239 50. Andrew Wear, “Making Sense of Health and the Environment in Early Modern England,” in Medicine in Society: Historical Essays, ed. Andrew Wear, 119–48 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 127. 51. “Bounce” (273; i.e., bang!) echoes the fashionable word for firepower, which the Bastard mocks in King John, 2.1.463. 52. Alastair Fowler, “Georgic and Pastoral: Laws of Genre in the Seventeenth Century,” in Culture and Cultivation in Early Modern England: Writing the Land, ed. Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor, 81–88 (Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 1992); Clifford Chalmers Huffman, “Burgundy’s Speech and France: A Note on Shakespeare’s Sources,” English Language Notes 9, no. 1 (September 1971): 12–18; and John H. Betts, “Shakespeare’s Henry V and Virgil’s Georgics,” Notes and Queries 223 (April 1978): 134–36, examine links between Burgundy’s speech and Virgil. See also Bulman, Shakespeare’s Georgic Histories, 43–44. 53. Hamlet similarly knows that throwing compost on weeds will make them “rank” (i.e., excessive but unproductive for direct consumption) (Ham., 3.1.47). 54. “How [much] a good yoke of Bullocks at Stamford Fair? . . . How a score of ewes now?” (2H4, 3.2.35–36, 46–47). 55. Henry IV, Part Two, Will Squele, a Cotswold man (3.2.18–19); Stamford Fair, Lincolnshire (3.2.36); Hinckley Fair (5.1.21); William Visor of Won’cot and Clement Parks o’th’Hill (5.1.33–34); Bar’son (5.3.89). 56. Falstaff’s recruits have names like Shadow, Wart, and Feeble. Bullcalf’s cold (2H4, 3.2.173–75) reflects the play’s wider context of ill health. For weather, see, e.g., “We see th’appearing buds, which to prove fruit / Hope gives not so warrant as despair / That frosts will bite them” (2H4, 1.3.39–41); conversely, hot weather (2H4, 3.2.90). 57. Possibly the First Folio compositors did not recognize the rural word “hade” and substituted the spatially general “head.” Or possibly Shakespeare decided to revise this more “countrified” vocabulary in the Folio version. William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part Two, ed. A. R. Humphreys (London: Methuen, 1966), notes to 5.1.12, 14, p. 158. 58. Aldo Leopold and Charles Walsh Schwartz, A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches from Here and There (1949; repr., New York, 1987), 216–17; Amy Stewart, The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2004). 59. Heise, Sense of Place, 52–62; Lawrence Buell, “Space, Place, and Imagination from Local to Global,” in The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 62–96. 60. Ronald Wright, “Fool’s Paradise,” in An Illustrated Short History of Progress (Toronto: House of Anansi, 2006), 73–107.

240  Notes to Pages 149–50 Notes to Eklund, “Wetlands Reclamation” 1. William Howarth, “Imagined Territory: The Writing of Wetlands,” New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 30, no. 3 (July 1999): 513. 2. Marion Stange, “Governing the Swamp: Health and Environment in Eighteenth-Century Nouvelle-Orléans,” French Colonial History 11 (2010): 3–4. 3. On waste, improvement, and early modern agrarianism, see Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Charlotte Scott, Shakespeare’s Nature: From Cultivation to Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Hillary Eklund, Literature and Moral Economy in the Early Modern Atlantic: Elegant Sufficiencies (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 91–156. 4. The fens, lying mainly around the Wash and the estuary of the Humber in the east (Norfolk, Suffolk, and Cambridgeshire), witnessed most of the drainage activity in the medieval and early modern periods. Adjacent to the fens lie the coastal marshlands of Lincolnshire to the north, Essex and Kent to the south. These feature well-watered clay soils and ample grazing grounds. The levels of Somerset, near Sedgemoor and Bridgewater in the southwest, are the largest marshland area on the west coast of Britain. While some drainage occurred here, it was less extensive than that of the fens. In the fens, as in the levels, large quantities of water drain from the uplands into large, flat basins of peat soils floored by clay. A higher rim around the coast impedes the outfall of the water, which thus forms large lakes or meres. Seasonal fluctuations in rainfall, together with the constant shifts of silt deposits, make for a dynamic, amphibious geography — one that is also vulnerable to saltwater floods from coastal surges. See Joan Thirsk, Agricultural Regions and Agrarian History in England, 1500–1750 (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1987), 44; Michael Williams, The Draining of the Somerset Levels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), xiii; Robin Butlin, “Drainage and Land Use in the Fenlands and Fen-Edge of Northeast Cambridgeshire in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Water, Engineering, and Landscape: Water Control and Landscape Transformation in the Modern Period, ed. Denis E. Cosgrove and Geoffrey E. Petts, 54–77 (London: Belhaven Press, 1990), 56–57. 5. Howarth, “Imagined Territory,” 520. 6. William Camden, Britain; or, A Chorographicall Description of the Most Flourishing Kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland . . ., trans. Philémon Holland (London: F. Kingston, R. Young, and I. Legatt, 1637), 499. 7. As Watson argues, the very notion of an autonomous individual depends on a destructive ecological fantasy, “an enclosure crisis of the human self.” Robert N. Watson, “The Ecology of the Self in Midsummer

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Notes to Pages 151–52  241 Night’s Dream,” in Ecocritical Shakespeare, ed. Lynne Bruckner and Dan Brayton, 33–56 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 47, 53. 8. As the English economic historian E. P. Thompson argues, “custom” is “a field of change and of contest, an arena in which opposing interests made conflicting claims.” Custom, therefore, does not imply a stable set of traditions summarily displaced by the law but, rather, a constant process of negotiation among mutually interdependent inhabitant stakeholders. In both the eighteenth century British context of Thompson’s study and the seventeenth century English wetlands one, local ­custom — including local knowledge, adaptive material practices, and a sharing economy  —  wrestles with the growing hegemony of the state as a legal apparatus and as economic organizer. E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: New Press, 1991), 6, 9, 12. 9. Butlin, “Drainage and Land Use,” 54. Quotation from Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy, 1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 52. 10. Overton, Agricultural Revolution, 52. 11. Thirsk, Agricultural Regions, 54–55. For more on the use of stilts, see Camden, Britain, 491. 12. Butlin, “Drainage and Land Use,” 58. 13. Williams, Draining of Somerset Levels, 26–29. 14. Butlin, “Drainage and Land Use,” 58. 15. In his chapter “Of Political or Civil Society,” John Locke describes the formative conditions of a political society in terms of an individual’s voluntary resignation of his “executive power of the law of nature” to the public; civil society arises, therefore, when the collective assumes and asserts control over the natural world. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), 46–48. 16. Nicola Whyte, Inhabiting the Landscape: Place, Custom and Memory, 1500–1800 (Havertown, PA: Windgather Press, 2009), 2. 17. Scott, Shakespeare’s Nature, 30–31. 18. John F. López, “ ‘In the Art of My Profession’: Adrian Boot and Dutch Water Management in Colonial Mexico City,” Journal of Latin American Geography 11 (January 2012): 45. 19. Ibid., 38. William Dugdale mentions these efforts in his own history of drainage, published in 1642. William Dugdale, The History of Imbanking and Drayning of Divers Fenns and Marshes (London: Alice Warren, 1662), 14. 20. Garrett A. Sullivan Jr., The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property, and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 19. 21. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 17.

242  Notes to Pages 153–55 22. Simon C. Estok, Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 4. 23. As Mentz argues with respect to The Pilgrim’s Progress, “The drainage project Help imagines would convert brown swamp into rich soil, extending in a spiritual dimension the seventeenth-century project of salvaging agricultural land from English Fens, as recorded by Bunyan’s contemporary William Dugdale. If swamp embodies the fallen world, fen-draining represents salvation.” Steve Mentz, “Brown,” in Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 193–212 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 201. 24. All quotations from Shakespeare come from The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd ed., ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: Norton, 2008). 25. John Smith, The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, vol. 2, ed. Philip L. Barbour (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 161. 26. Ibid., 163. 27. William Wood, New England’s Prospect, ed. Alden T. Vaughan (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977), 33, 62–63. “Quaking bogs” quote from William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 28–29. 28. Wood, New England’s Prospect, 35. 29. See Cronon, Changes in the Land, 53. Timothy Sweet, “Economy, Ecology, and ‘Utopia’ in Early Colonial Promotional Literature,” American Literature 71, no. 3 (September 1999): 400, describes how environmental encounters like these real and imagined scenarios shaped European political and ecological ideas, giving rise to a theory of economics based on environmental carrying capacity. Stange observes how many “settlers felt the necessity to adapt the environment to their specific needs in order to protect their health and to create stable living conditions” (“Governing the Swamp,” 4). Perhaps as often as they adjusted their own practices to the demands of a new environment on their bodies, settlers sought to change their environments to bring them more in line with their perceived corporeal dispositions and their avowed economic intentions. 30. Todd Andrew Borlik, “Caliban and the Fen Demons of Lincolnshire: The Englishness of Shakespeare’s Tempest,” Shakespeare 9, no. 1 (April 2013): 44. 31. Camden, Britain, 529–30, 220, 69, 491. 32. Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion: A Chorographicall Description of Great Britain (London, 1622), 42. 33. Camden also notes how changing patterns of habitation and land use have already altered the landscape of some wetland areas. The southern parts of Cambridgeshire, for example, are “better manured, and therefore more plentifull.” Here, periodic inundations of barley fields,

Notes to Pages 155–58  243 together with adaptive harvest techniques, yield “the best barly,” which, processed into malt, can be profitably traded to neighboring countries (Britain, 485). 34. Drayton, Poly-Olbion, 46–47. 35. Williams, Draining of Somerset Levels, 19–21, 67, 75. 36. Drayton, Poly-Olbion, 47. 37. R. H. Tawney, introduction to Fenland Farming in the Sixteenth Century, by Joan Thirsk (Leicester, UK: University College of Leicester, 1953), 4. 38. H. C., A Discourse concerning the Drayning of Fennes and Surrounded Grounds in the Sixe Countreys of Norfolke, Suffolke, Cambridge with the Isle of Ely, Huntington, Northampton, and Lincolne (London: T. Cotes, 1629), A3v. 39. Ibid., C3r–v. 40. As the author of an early history of the drainage writes, the Great Level “in all probability, as appears by Historians and the relations following, was once firm dry Land, and not annoyed with any extraordinary Inundation from the Sea, or Stagnation of the fresh water.” Anonymous, The History of the Great Level of the Fenns, Called Bedford Level (London: Moses Pitt, 1685), A4 r–v. For more on restoring the fens to a prelapsarian state of agricultural wholeness, see Eric Ash, “Amending Nature: Draining the English Fens,” in The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialisation, ed. Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer, and Peter Dear (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 2007), 125–26. 41. See McRae, God Speed the Plough; Scott, Shakespeare’s Nature. For more on the persistence of negative attitudes toward wetlands into the nineteenth century, see Williams, Draining of Somerset Levels, chaps. 5 and 6. 42. On the crown’s investment in drainage projects, see Williams, Draining of Somerset Levels, 86. 43. Engineers also frequently gained legal immunity from litigation in the event of disaster. López, “ ‘Art of My Profession,’ ” 45. 44. Margaret Albright Knittl, “The Design for the Initial Drainage of the Great Level of the Fens: An Historical Whodunit in Three Parts,” Agricultural History Review 55, no. 1 (January 1, 2007): 27. 45. Ben Jonson, The Devil Is an Ass (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1994); hereafter cited in the text. “Dotterel” is also a fenland bird, described by Isaac Casaubon after he visited Ely in 1611: “The Otus or Otis, indeed, is a bird less than a partridge, and a mimic, wont to be beguiled and caught by silly imitation. Great men and kings are keen in the case of this bird. It furnishes very delicate meat, if my palate is sufficiently instructed. I have also seen them alive. They say that if the fowler lifts one of his feet the bird does the same, if he extends an arm the bird extends a wing, and imitates all his actions.” Qtd. in Ian

244  Notes to Pages 158–63 D. Rotherham, The Lost Fens: England’s Greatest Ecological Disaster (Stroud, UK: History Press, 2013), 81. 46. For a reading of The Devil Is an Ass in connection with the discourses of improvement, see McRae, God Speed the Plough, 104–09. 47. Overton, Agricultural Revolution, 89–90. 48. For more on the undertakership and its vicissitudes, see Knittl, “Design for Initial Drainage.” 49. Butlin, “Drainage and Land Use,” 61, 66. 50. Cornelius Vermuyden’s new plan, written and presented to King Charles in 1638, was published as A Discourse Touching the Draining of the Great Fennes . . . (London: Thomas Fawcet, 1642). 51. Joan Thirsk, “Vermuyden, Sir Cornelius  (1590–1677),” in  Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online ed., May 2006, accessed April 21, 2015, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/28226. 52. Williams, Draining of Somerset Levels, 19–21. 53. Ibid., 85. 54. Overton, Agricultural Revolution, 158. 55. Anonymous, The Anti-Projector; or, The History of the Fen Project (1646), 8. 56. H. C., Discourse, B2r. 57. Keith Lindley, Fenland Riots and the English Revolution (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1982), 87. 58. Williams, Draining of Somerset Levels, 88–89. 59. Lindley, Fenland Riots, 94. 60. H. C., Discourse, B2r. 61. Andrewes Burrell, An Explanation of the Drayning Workes Which Have Beene Lately Made for the Kings Maiestie in Cambridge Shire . . . (London, 1641), 8–9. 62. Andrewes Burrell, Exceptions against Sir Cornelius Virmudens Discourse for the Draining of the Great Fennes, &c . . . (London: T. H., 1642), A2r. 63. Anonymous, Anti-Projector, 1–2. 64. Ibid., 2. 65. Ibid., 6–7. 66. As Mark E. Kennedy, “Fen Drainage, the Central Government, and Local Interest: Carleton and the Gentlemen of South Holland,” Historical Journal 26, no. 1 (March 1983), writes, “The shift from a pastoral to an arable economy, the loss of byproducts of the fens, and the appropriation of a large portion of the common were sources of tension and conflict for the rest of the sixteenth and throughout the seventeenth centuries” (35). 67. Ash, “Amending Nature,” 119. 68. Dugdale, History of Imbanking, 391. 69. Ibid., 392.

Notes to Pages 163–70  245 70. Writing in a period of rapid cultural change, Brome stages new forms of social mobility whereby, for instance, “a middle-class son could go up or down in the social scale depending on his choices. He could exhaust his patrimony in London and end up déclassé or he could elevate himself to the nobility by diligence or craft.” Ralph James Kaufman, Richard Brome, Caroline Playwright (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 2, 11. 71. Ibid., 30, 58–59. 72. I am using Julie Sanders’s superb edition of The Sparagus Garden prepared for the Humanities Research Institute’s Richard Brome Online project. All subsequent citations will appear parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and speech. Richard Brome, The Sparagus Garden (1640), in Richard Brome Online, ed. Julie Sanders (Humanities Research Institute, 2010), accessed October 21, 2014, http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/brome/ viewOriginal.jsp. 73. Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 21. 74. “hoyden,” n. and adj., OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2016, accessed October 11, 2016, http://www.oed.com.huntington.idm.oclc.org/view/Entry/89055. 75. Rotherham, Lost Fens, 73. 76. See Paster’s reading of the word as Desdemona applies it to Othello in Humoring the Body, 60–76. 77. Paster, Humoring the Body, 27. 78. Qtd. in Lindley, Fenland Riots, 92. 79. Ibid. 80. H. C., Discourse, B2r. 81. Anonymous, Anti-Projector, 67. 82. McRae, God Speed the Plough, 105. 83. It may well be that in choosing protagonists from Somerset (and not from the fens where, by 1635, considerable drainage had already taken place), Brome was inviting his audience to take a more skeptical look at not just the financial motivations of projectors but also at the ecological and human costs of their expensive schemes. 84. Williams, Draining of Somerset Levels, 173–76. 85. Natural England, “National Character Area Profile: 46. The Fens,” Natural England — Access to Evidence, March 26, 2013, 3, accessed February 26, 2015, http://publications.naturalengland.org.uk/publication/6229624. 86. Ibid., 2–3. In the nineteenth century, the combination of peat cutting and planned flooding lowered turbary (the level of the soil) by 7 or 8 feet, and in some cases up to 14 or 15 feet, making the land even more susceptible to flooding. Williams, Draining of Somerset Levels, 177. 87. See Michele Currie Navakas, “Liquid Landscape: Possession and Floridian Geography,” Early American Literature 47, no. 1 (2012): 91.

246  Notes to Pages 171–73 Notes to Goldstein, “Manuring Eden” 1. William Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of “Paradise Lost” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 210. 2. John Milton, Paradise Lost, in The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, ed. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen M. Fallon (New York: Modern Library, 2007), 4.626. Unless otherwise noted, all references to Milton’s works are taken from this edition, and will henceforth appear in the text. 3. Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 143. 4. Qtd. in Karen L. Edwards, “Eden Raised: Waste in Milton’s Garden,” in Renaissance Ecology: Imagining Eden in Milton’s England, ed. Ken Hiltner, 259–73 (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2008), 264. 5. See especially Robert Appelbaum, Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections: Literature, Culture, and Food among the Early Moderns (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Norman O. Brown, The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (New York: Random House, 1959); Stephen M. Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Denise Gigante, Taste: A Literary History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); Kerrigan, Sacred Complex; Maggie Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); Michael Lieb, The Dialectics of Creation: Patterns of Birth and Regeneration in “Paradise Lost” (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970); Michael Lieb, “Further Thoughts on Satan’s Journey through Chaos,” Milton Quarterly 12, no. 4 (1978): 126–33; John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves; Regina M. Schwartz, Remembering and Repeating: Biblical Creation in “Paradise Lost” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 6. See especially Karen L. Edwards, Milton and the Natural World: Science and Poetry in “Paradise Lost” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Ken Hiltner, Milton and Ecology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Barbara K. Lewalski, “Paradise Lost” and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); Diane Kelsey McColley, Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007); Amy L. Tigner, Literature and the Renaissance Garden from Elizabeth I to Charles II: England’s Paradise (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2012). 7. Francis Bacon, Sylua Syluarum; or, A Naturall Historie in Ten Centuries (London, 1627), 111.

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Notes to Pages 173–78  247 8. Ibid. 9. Of these experiments, Edward J. Russell, Soil Conditions and Plant Growth, 4th ed. (London: Longmans, Green, 1921), observes delightfully, “in no other subject is it so easy to overlook a vital factor and draw from good experiments a conclusion that appears to be absolutely sound, but is in reality entirely wrong” (3). 10. John Evelyn, A Philosophical Discourse of Earth (London: John Martyn, 1676), explaining plant habitats, adduces as reasons “the niceness of their palates, and fondness to their own homes, and to live some in confort, some in solitude” (115). McColley, in her survey of “hylozoic” poetry, finds a wide range of seventeenth century poets “drawing on natural philosophy to represent energy, purpose, and responsiveness in plants, animals, and the elements themselves, with vitality directed toward a telos of their own, not necessarily subservient to man” (Poetry and Ecology, 117). 11. The ultimate authority for early modern thinking about plants, animals, and humans as connected by desire, appetite, motion, and reason was Aristotle’s De anima, 2.3 (414b). 12. Russell, Soil Conditions, 4. See also, e.g., PL 5.481–82. 13. For a similarly materialist reading of the relation between plant growth and narrative description in the poem, see McColley’s arborist reading of Raphael’s speech in 5.404–33 (Poetry and Ecology, 122–25). 14. “Manure,” v., OED Online, Oxford University Press, 2000, accessed October 30, 2014, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/113792. 15. Russell, Soil Conditions, 1. On Palissy’s influence over English agricultural writers, see Donald Woodward, “ ‘An Essay on Manures’: Changing Attitudes to Fertilization in England, 1500–1800,” in English Rural Society, 1500–1800: Essays in Honour of Joan Thirsk, ed. John Chartres and David Hey, 251–78 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 255. 16. John Shaw, Soli Gloria Deo: Certaine Rare and Nevv Inventions for the Manuring and Improving of All Sorts of Ground (London: Bernard Alsop and T. Fawcet, 1636), 2. 17. John Norden, The Surueiors Dialogue (London: William Stansby, 1610), 182. 18. Tigner, Literature and the Renaissance Garden, 215. 19. Schwartz, Remembering and Repeating, 16; qtd. in Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, 156. 20. Susan Signe Morrison, Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 21. David B. Goldstein, Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 201–02. 22. On the positive portrayals of excrement in the poem, see Kent Lehnhof, “Scatology and the Sacred in Milton’s Paradise Lost,” English Literary Renaissance 37, no. 3 (November 2007): 429–49.

248  Notes to Pages 179–84 23. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978). 24. Verena Winiwarter, “The Art of Making the Earth Fruitful: Medieval and Early Modern Improvements of Soil Fertility,” in Ecologies and Economies in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Studies in Environmental History for Richard C. Hoffmann, ed. Scott G. Bruce, 100– 06 (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Woodward, “ ‘Essay on Manures,’ ” 256–57. 25. John Fitzherbert, Here Begynneth a Newe Tracte or Treatyse Moost P[ro]fytable for All Husba[n]de Men and Very Frutefull for All Other Persones to Rede, Newly Correcte [sic] [and] Amended by the Auctour, with Dyuerse Other Thynges Added Thervnto (London, 1530), fol. xi r. 26. Woodward, “ ‘Essay on Manures,’ ” 253–4; see also Malcolm Thick, Sir Hugh Plat: The Search for Useful Knowledge in Early Modern London (Devon, UK: Prospect Books, 2010), 81. 27. Thomas Tusser, Fiue Hundred Pointes of Good Husbandrie (London: Henrie Denham, 1580), fol. 25v. 28. Hugh Plat, Diuerse New Sorts of Soyle Not Yet Brought into Any Publique Use, for Manuring Both of Pasture and Arable Ground, with Sundrie Concepted Practices Belonging Therunto (London: Peter Short, 1594), 15, 21, 60. 29. Walter Blith, The English Improver; or, A New Survey of Husbandry . . . (London, 1649), 100, 120. 30. Samuel Hartlib, The Compleat Husband-Man; or, A Discourse of the Whole Art of Husbandry (London: J. Wright, 1659), 34. 31. Evelyn, Philosophical Discourse of Earth, 118. A similar sentiment is expressed in Hartlib, Compleat Husband-Man, 11. 32. “Marl,” n., 1, OED Online, Oxford University Press, 2000, accessed January 29, 2015, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/114210. 33. Plat, Diuerse New Sorts, 21. 34. On Sin as cook, see Goldstein, Eating and Ethics, 190. 35. Wayne D. Cocroft, Dangerous Energy: The Archaeology of Gunpowder and Military Explosives Manufacture (Swindon, UK: English Heritage, 2000), 1. I am extremely grateful to Yelda Nasifoglu to alerting me to the importance of saltpeter as an excremental manure. 36. Jack Kelly, Gunpowder — Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics: The History of the Explosive That Changed the World (New York: Basic Books, 2009), ix. 37. Lehnhof, “Scatology and the Sacred,” 431. 38. “Nitre | Niter,” n., OED Online, Oxford University Press, 2003, accessed February 1, 2015, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/127328. Plat, for example, lists saltpeter and niter as two different chemicals in his soil treatise (Diuerse New Sorts, 10). 39. Kelly DeVries, “Sites of Military Science and Technology,” in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3, ed. Katharine Park and Lorraine J. Daston, 306–19 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 307.

Notes to Pages 184–89  249 40. David Cressy, “Saltpetre, State Security, and Vexation in Early Modern England,” Past and Present 212 (August 2011): 75. 41. Alan R. Williams, “The Production of Saltpetre in the Middle Ages,” Ambix 22, no. 2 (July 1975): 127. 42. Cressy, “Saltpetre, State Security,” 110. 43. DeVries, “Sites of Military Science,” 311. 44. Williams, “Production of Saltpetre,” 127. 45. Cressy, “Saltpetre, State Security,” 94. 46. Ibid., 97–98. 47. Thick, Sir Hugh Plat, 83. 48. Plat, Diuerse New Sorts, 10. 49. Ibid., 25; qtd. and discussed in Thick, Sir Hugh Plat, 83. 50. Plat, Diuerse New Sorts, 47, 12, 54. 51. Evelyn, Philosophical Discourse of Earth, 105. 52. Ibid., 109–10. 53. Ibid., 111–13. 54. A. Rupert Hall, Science and Society: Historical Essays on the Relations of Science, Technology, and Medicine (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1994), 126. 55. John Bate, The Mysteryes of Nature, and Art Conteined in Foure Severall Tretises, the First of Water Workes the Second of Fyer Workes, the Third of Drawing, Colouring, Painting, and Engrauing, the Fourth of Divers Experiments, as Wel Serviceable as Delightful: Partly Collected, and Partly of the Authors Peculiar Practice, and Invention by I. B. (London: Thomas Harper, 1634), 54–57. 56. Copy letters in scribal hand A, Peter Smith to Beale?, “67/23/5B,” in The Hartlib Papers, ed. Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie, and Michael Hannon (Sheffield, UK: HRI Online Publications, 2013), http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/hartlib. 57. Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London for Improving of Natural Knowledge, from Its First Rise: In Which the Most Considerable of Those Papers Communicated to the Society, Which Have Hitherto Not Been Published, Are Inserted . . . as a Supplement to the Philosophical Transactions, vol. 3 (London: A. Millar in the Strand, 1757), 470. 58. One possible exception to this rule is the Crucifixion, an act that “Shall bruise the head of Satan” (PL 12.430). But here too Satan functions more as symbolic and textual reference, a fulfillment of the Adamic curse, than as a specific being. 59. Gigante, Taste, 31; see also Denise Gigante, “Milton’s Aesthetics of Eating,” Diacritics 30, no. 2 (2000): 88–112. Gigante’s invocation of the unbounded “ ‘general’ cosmology” is, as she explains, derived from Georges Bataille’s notion of the general economy. The general economy encompasses any number of restricted economies, which maintain artificial limits and which therefore can purge themselves of excess resources.

250  Notes to Pages 189–99 See Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991); Georges Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). 60. Peter Whitehorne, Certain Waies for the Orderyng of Souldiers in Battelray . . . (London, 1562), fol. 28; qtd. in Cressy, “Saltpetre, State Security,” 79; DeVries, “Sites of Military Science,” 310. 61. Plat, Diuerse New Sorts, 11, 53, 52. 62. Walter Blith, The English Improver Improved; or, The Survey of Husbandry Surveyed Discovering the Improveableness of All Lands . . . (London, 1652), 150. 63. Evelyn, Philosophical Discourse of Earth, 83. 64. Flavius Josephus, The Famous and Memorable Workes of Iosephus, a Man of Much Honour and Learning among the Iewes, trans. Thomas Lodge (London: Peter Short, 1602), 688–89. 65. Plat, Diuerse New Sorts, 6. 66. See also Gigante, “Milton’s Aesthetics of Eating,” 97–98. 67. See Kerrigan et al., Complete Poetry, note on the line, p. 568, which in turn quotes Fowler’s edition. 68. See ibid., 12.631, p. 629. Notes to O’Dair, “Afterword” 1. See Hillary Eklund’s introduction to this volume. 2. Srinivas Aravamudan, “The Catachronism of Climate Change,” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 41, no. 3 (2013): 9, 12. 3. Ibid., 9. 4. Ibid., 20, 19, 16, 19. 5. Ibid., 8. 6. Eklund, introduction to this volume. 7. Bonnie Lander Johnson, “Visions of Soil and Body Management: The Almanac in Richard II,” chapter 3 of this volume. 8. Randall Martin, “Fertility versus Firepower: Shakespeare’s Con­ tested Soil Ecologies,” chapter 7, this volume. 9. David B. Goldstein, “Manuring Eden: Biological Conversions in Paradise Lost,” chapter 9, this volume. 10. Keith M. Botelho, “Winstanley and Postrevolutionary Soil,” chapter 6, this volume. 11. Frances E. Dolan, “Compost/Composition,” chapter 1, this volume. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Hillary Eklund, “Wetlands Reclamation and the Fate of the Local in Seventeenth Century England,” chapter 8 of this volume.

Notes to Pages 199–202  251 15. Lawrence Buell, “Ecocriticism: Some Emerging Trends,” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 19, no. 2 (2011): 101. 16. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 199. 17. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories,” Critical Inquiry 41, no. 1 (2014): 4. 18. Ibid., 11. 19. Chakrabarty, “Climate of History,” 208. 20. Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2015). 21. Ken Hiltner, What Else Is Pastoral?: Renaissance Literature and the Environment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 97. 22. Ibid., 96. 23. Ibid., 123–24. 24. Eklund, introduction to this volume. 25. James Meek, “How to Grow a Weetabix,” London Review of Books, June 16, 2016, 16.

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About the Contributors Tamsin Badcoe is a lecturer in English at the University of Bristol. Her research explores the representation of space and place in literature. Her current book project, Spenser and the Romance of Space, considers how Edmund Spenser and his contemporaries used the representation of space to configure models of the learning process, producing narratives shaped by error, folly, and disorientation. She has published articles in Modern Philology and Renaissance Studies. Keith M. Botelho is associate professor of English at Kennesaw State University. He is the author of Renaissance Earwitnesses: Rumor and Early Modern Masculinity and has published articles and chapters on a range of topics from credibility in Oroonoko to beasts in The Merchant of Venice. He is completing his second book, Little Beasts: Cultures of the Hive in Renaissance England, and coediting an essay collection, Lesser Living Creatures: Insect Life in the Renaissance. Frances E. Dolan is distinguished professor of English at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of four books, most recently, True Relations: Reading, Literature, and Evidence in SeventeenthCentury England. For students, she has edited numerous Shakespeare plays for the classroom as well as writing Twelfth Night: Language and Writing. She is currently working on Digging the Early Modern: How Alternative Agriculture Remembers the Seventeenth Century. Hillary Eklund is associate professor at Loyola University New Orleans. She is the author of Literature and Moral Economy in the Early Modern Atlantic: Elegant Sufficiencies. Her work has also appeared in Shakespeare Studies and the collection Ecological Approaches to Early Modern English Texts. Her current research focuses on wetlands and ecological approaches to time.

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286  About the Contributors

David B. Goldstein is associate professor of English at York University in Toronto. He is the author of Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England and two volumes of poems. He has also published two coedited essay collections: Culinary Shakespeare (with Amy L. Tigner) and Shakespeare and Hospitality (with Julia Reinhard Lupton). His writings on Renaissance and modern literature and culture, food and ecology, and the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas have appeared in journals and magazines across North America. Bonnie Lander Johnson is fellow, lecturer, and director of studies at Selwyn College, Cambridge University. She is the author of Chastity in Early Stuart Literature and Culture and journal articles covering material from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to Jane Austen and the reception of Shakespeare in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is currently editing a volume of interdisciplinary essays on blood in European thought, 1400–1700, and writing a monograph on Shakespeare and early modern botany. Randall Martin is professor of English at the University of New Brunswick. His research interests include English Renaissance drama, culture, and ecology, early modern women’s writing, and bibliographical and textual studies. He is the editor of Henry VI, Part Three, for the Oxford Shakespeare, and coeditor with Katherine Scheil of Shakespeare/Adaptation/Modern Drama. He is the author of Women, Murder, and Equity in Early Modern England and Shakespeare and Ecology. Sharon O’Dair is professor of English at the University of Alabama. She is the author of Class, Critics, and Shakespeare: Bottom Lines on the Culture Wars, editor of “Shakespeareans in the Tempest: Lives and Afterlives of Katrina,” a special issue of Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, and coeditor of The Production of English Renaissance Culture. She has published numerous essays on early modern ecocriticism. Lindsay Ann Reid is a lecturer in English at the National University of Ireland, Galway. She is the author of Ovidian Bibliofictions and the Tudor Book: Metamorphosing Classical Heroines in Late Medieval

About the Contributors  287

and Renaissance England. She has also published work in Translation and Literature, Early Modern Literary Studies, and Spenser Studies. Rob Wakeman is a postdoctoral Fellow in English at the University of South Florida. His research centers on medieval and early modern drama, animal studies, and food studies. His current book project is “Eating Animals in Tudor and Stuart Theaters.” He has published articles on medievalism in the Reconstruction-era South and on grease as a medium for transformation in Merry Wives of Windsor.

Index Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets (Evelyn), 37 Adam: in Origo Mundi, 105–08; in Paradise Lost, 171, 172–74, 192 Adam Out of Eden (Speed), 29 Adonis, and Venus, 92, 99–100 Aeneid (Virgil), 93–94 Afterlives of the Saints (Lufton), 208n6 agency, human, 66, 195–97, 201 agriculture, 3, 38, 46, 120–21, 201–02; demand for greater food production from, 5, 130; difficulty of, 52, 125, 234n54; effects of changing climate on, 133–34; georgic, 144–46; implements of, 127; innovations in, 38, 114; labor in, 5–6, 54, 132, 192–93, 198, 230n26; land for, 111–13, 151, 157–58, 160, 170; military vs., 146, 197–98; peace dividend in following war, 143, 198; saltpeter production vs., 137–39; use of human ordure in, 178–81. See also husbandry; soil Alaimo, Stacy, 10, 12, 204n13, 205n26 Allison, K. J., 229n21 almanacs, 69–77, 221n20 Anatomy of Melancholy (Burton), 34 Animal, Vegetable, Mineral (Cohen), 205n26 animals, 174 Anthropocene era, 12–13, 196, 199–202 The Anti-Projector; or, The History of the Fen Project, 161–62 Apollo, 83, 92–96 An Appeal to All Englishmen (Winstanley), 122 An Appeal to the House of Commons (Winstanley), 121, 124 Aravamudan, Srinivas, 8, 14, 196–97 Ars amatoria (Ovid), 96 Ash, Eric, 162 astrology, 69–70, 95 As You Like It, 131–32 At the Bottom (Mentz), 205n26 Bacon, Francis, 140, 173–74 Bacon, Roger, 187

Barthes, Roland, 34 Bates, John, 186 Beck, Ulrich, 136 Bedford, Earl of, 158–59, 168 Bellamy, Elizabeth Jane, 43 Bennett, Jane, 7, 10, 195, 205n26, 232n10 Berger, Harry, 95 Bernard of Clairvaux, 108 Bible, 116, 229n17; English dramas based on, 226n2, 226n3; shepherds’ plays references to, 103–05, 107, 109–10, 113–15, 227n5, 228n16; Winstanley’s references to, 124–26 bioregionalism, 146–47, 150–51 birth, 81–84, 99 Blith, Walter, 26, 29, 180, 190, 233n43 blood: in compost, 25; danger of using on crops, 180; seasonal letting of, 66, 72, 75; soil receiving, 59, 61, 63, 66, 73, 76, 78 bodies, 204n13; almanacs and, 60, 71–73; desire to control, 60, 62, 66, 71–72; gardens as female, 63, 65; soil and, 1–2, 61–63, 66, 69; working of, 77 Bodily Natures (Alaimo), 205n26 Boke of Husbandry (Fitzherbert), 105, 108, 229n17 Borlik, Todd, 154 Boyle, Robert, 173 Brayton, Dan, 2, 118, 205n26 Britannia (Camden), 154 Brome, Richard, 150–51, 163–70, 245n70 Brownlow, Kevin, 117 Buell, Lawrence, 199–200 Bulman, James C., 142–43 Burrell, Andrewes, 161 Burton, Robert, 32, 34 Bushnell, Rebecca, 83 Camden, William, 6, 52, 215n4; on wetlands, 150, 154–56, 242n33 Campana, Joseph, 81 capitalism, effects of, 130, 133, 199–200

289

290  Index Carew, Richard, 6, 52; concern about displacement of earth, 54–55; on sea materials in soil amendment, 53–54; Survey of Cornwall by, 41–44, 57–58; on tin mining, 46–51, 54 carrying capacity, 134–35, 145 “The Catachronism of Climate Change” (Aravamudan), 196 Cavendish, Margaret, 34–35 Cawley, A. C., 108 censorship, 141 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 199–200, 207n5 change, 42–44, 46 Charles I, 159, 168 Charleton, Walter, 35 chastity, 79, 101 Cheshire, shepherds’ plays in, 105, 115 Chester: Corpus Christi plays in, 226n3; Shepherds’ Play, 103–05, 113–14, 226n3, 228n16; shepherds’ plays, 106–07. See also Shepherds’ Play Chrysogone, in Faerie Queene, 81–85, 100; babies compared with Ovid’s nova monstra, 87–88; compared to Garden of Adonis story, 97–98; impregnation of, 83, 88–90, 95–96; paternity of twins of, 92–96; rape of, 95–96 civil war, England’s, 117, 119–20, 126, 232n27 Clifford, Anne, 35–36 “Climate and Capital” (Chakrabarty), 199–200 climate change, 3, 14, 133–34, 196, 200 “The Climate of History: Four Theses” (Chakrabarty), 199 Clopper, Lawrence, 226n3 Columella, 5, 24, 25, 27, 179 common lands, 128, 135; enclosure of, 110–12, 114, 119–26, 135, 151; rights to, 131, 135, 151–52; in wetlands, 151–52, 160, 170 commonplace books, 32–36, 213n44 composition, 37, 45; composting compared to, 24, 29, 38, 198–99; as mixture, 32–34; as textual recycling, 33–36 compost, 177; as collection of ingredients, 23–25, 29–30; components of, 25–26, 28, 190; relation to manure and dung, 25, 37–38; resonances of word, 23–24; search for active ingredient in, 185–86; squeamishness about, 27–28; uses of, 26, 133

composting, 37, 211n31; agency involved in, 27–28; composition compared to, 24, 29, 38, 198–99; effects of, 22, 26–27; interest in, 21, 24 compost piles, 22–23, 26–27 cooking, 32, 34–35, 37 Corineus, myth of, 43–44 Cornwall, 41–46, 52, 54, 56 Crane, Mary Thomas, 88 Cressy, David, 139, 184–85, 210n16 cultural studies, 118–19 culture, and nature, 8–9, 115 Dade, John, 71–72 decay, 7, 22, 69, 108, 136 A Declaration of the Bloudi and Unchristian Action (Winstanley), 125 deforestation, 3 Deleuze, Gilles, 140, 195, 207n5 De re rustica (Columella), 5, 25, 179 Derrida, Jacques, 207n5 deterritorialization, 140, 143, 147, 150–51 The Devil Is an Ass (Jonson), 158–59, 164, 169, 243n45 Digger movement, 117–26, 198, 233n32 dirt, 6, 108, 113; in shepherds’ plays, 104, 107, 113. See also soil Discourse concerning the Drayning of Fennes (H. C.), 161 Discoverie of Certaine English Wants (Plat), 137 Diverse New Sorts of Soyle (Plat), 180 domination, theology of, 5 Douglas, Mary, 6 drainage projects, 240n4; economy of, 158–59, 163–70; effects of, 159–60, 169–70, 245n83; the Great Level, 158–60, 163, 243n40; justifications for, 156–58, 163; resistance to, 160–63, 168; satirized in The Devil Is an Ass, 158–59; in Somerset, 159–60; in The Sparagus Gardens, 163–70; support for, 161, 242n23 Drayton, Michael, 6, 155–56 The Duchess of Malfi (Webster), 28 Dugdale, William, 162–63 dung, 108, 182; application of, 175–76, 179–81; relation to manure and compost, 25, 37–38; in shepherds’ plays, 104, 107 Dunton, Elizabeth, 36–37 dust, 1–2

Index  291 earth, 10–12, 61; displacement of, 54–55; generative power of, 84, 86; mining as violation of, 46, 50; as mother, 59–60, 62–64 Eastward Ho! (Chapman, Jonson, and Marston), 30 ecoactivism, 117, 128 eco-cosmopolitanism, 12, 146 ecocriticism, 2, 132, 195, 199–200 Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia (Estok), 197 ecology, 8, 116, 129; anthropogenic changes in, 169–70; brown vs. green, 2, 7, 205n26; dark, 12–13; theopolitical, 106–07; vulnerability of, 46, 135; of war, 198 economy, 136, 151, 234n54; of drainage projects, 158–59, 163–70; effects of capitalism in, 130, 133, 199–200; effects of saltpeter production on, 137–39 ecophobia, 9, 62, 153, 197 ecopoetics, 3 ecosystems: resilience/recovery of, 135–36; saltpeter production interfering with, 140–41; in shepherds’ plays, 106–07, 115–16 Edward, Lord Bishop of Carlisle, 36 Elizabeth, 70, 73, 134, 141 enclosure, 103–04, 114, 151, 225n1; effects of, 110, 230n26; opposition to, 119–20, 235n11; proponents of, 112, 135, 229n19 England, 129, 226n2, 236n18; agriculture in, 114, 130–31, 180; as body, 61, 66; changing climate of, 133–34; drainage projects in, 152, 159–60; economic conditions of, 105, 114; history of, 78–79; land of, 61–62, 120–21; population of, 134, 201; prophesy of destruction of, 76, 78; virtues of mixtures for, 29–30; weapons and, 140, 184; Winstanley’s program for restoration of, 118–19, 121–23, 125, 128 The English Husbandman (Markham), 131 The English Improver Improved (Blith), 26, 190 environment, 117; humans’ interactions with, 105–06, 126, 204n13; protection of, 54–55, 201–02 environmental awareness, 11 environmental degradation, 14, 201 environmentalism, 118–19

erosion, 136 Estok, Simon E., 9, 45, 62, 153, 197 Evelyn, John, 27–30, 37, 180–81, 186, 201, 247n10 excrement, 138, 177–81, 184. See also manure Explanation of the Drayning Works . . . (Burrell), 161 Exquisite Mixture (Schmidgen), 29–30 Faerie Queen (Spenser), 87, 223n14; Amoret in, 81–85, 87–88, 92–96, 99; Belphoebe in, 81–85, 87–88, 92–96, 99; birth in, 81–84, 99; compared to tale of Sleeping Beauty, 89–90, 96; Garden of Adonis in, 97–101; rapes in, 90–91; reproduction in, 79, 81–85; sexuality in, 79, 88–89 A Fair Quarrel (Middleton and Rowley), 138–39 Falstaff, in Henry IV, 138, 142, 144–46 feast scenes, 113 fens. See wetlands fertility, 80, 108, 131; of earth, 82–83; evil matter transformed into, 187–88; humans’, 135; measured by profit, 131; of soil, 132–33, 137–39, 176; of wetlands, 151 fertilizer, 175, 180–81, 185–86 First Shepherds’ Play (Towneley), 107–11, 113; Gyb in, 109–11, 230n28; John Horne in, 107–08, 111 Fitzgeoffrey, Charles, 46 Fitzherbert, John, 105, 108, 179, 229n17 food, 113 Food and Agriculture Organization (UN), 3 food production, 130, 133, 151, 197, 201–02 food shortages, 134, 138, 145 food webs, 116, 140–41 Forest of Arden, 135 Fortescue, John, 51 France, drainage projects in, 152 Frende, Gabriel, 74 Frye, Northrop, 90–91 fuel, 138, 151, 200 Fumifugium (Evelyn), 201 Garden of Adonis, in Faerie Queene, 97–101 gardens, 11, 66; before vs. after Fall, 171–72, 175, 177; as female body, 59, 63, 65; humans’ control over, 67–68; political world as, 62–63, 67 gender, 46–47, 59–60, 83 Geoponika, 179

292  Index georgic language, 120, 131 Georgics (Virgil), 5, 142–43 Gibson, Gail McMurray, 226n2 Gigante, Denise, 189, 249n59 globalization, 199–200 Glofelty, Cheryll, 2 God, 61–62, 69, 174–75 God Speed the Plough (McRae), 44, 229n19 Gogmagog, in myth of Corineus, 43–44 Goldstein, David, 214n49 Googe, Barnabe, 179, 190 government, 137, 139–41, 187, 237n32 Great Level, the (drainage project), 158–60, 163, 243n40 Greenblatt, Stephen, 195 Guattari, Félix, 140, 207n5 gunpowder, 140, 144, 147, 183–88. See also saltpeter Gurr, Andrew, 65 Halliday, F. E., 57 Hamlet, 1–2 Haraway, Donna, 115 Harington, John, 137 Harkness, Deborah, 34 Harman, Graham, 195 Harris, Jonathan Gil, 13, 207n5 Harrison, Thomas, 33 Hartlib, Samuel, 26, 180, 186–87 Heise, Ursula, 12 Helgerson, Richard, 44 Henrician Reformation, 103 Henry IV, King, 236n18 Henry IV, Part 1 (Shakespeare), 129, 141–42, 145 Henry IV, Part 2 (Shakespeare), 129, 130, 138, 239n57; Burgundy in, 144; on England’s changing climate, 133–34, 145; Gloucester in, 133–34; Gloucestershire scenes of, 143–45; Mouldy in, 138; Shallow in, 145–47 Henry V (Shakespeare), 142–43, 146 Henry VIII, King, 54–55, 132, 230n26 Heresbach, Conrad, 179 Herrick, Robert, 23–24 Hill, Christopher, 119–20 Hill, Thomas, 179 Hiltner, Ken, 200–01 history, 71–72, 76–79 History of Imbanking and Drayning Divers Fenns and Marshes (Dugdale), 162–63 Holland, Philémon, 52 horticulture, 77 Hotspur, in Henry IV, Part 1, 141–42 Howard, Albert, 22

Howarth, William, 149–50 humans, 81, 108, 195, 214n49; control over gardens by, 67–68; in fallen world, 178; interactions of with environment, 106; nature’s control over, 62, 65–67, 69; need of to reconsider habitation, 201–02; power of over nature, 151, 154; regeneration of, 187–88; relationship of to nonhumans, 9–10; return of to earth, 61, 64 An Humble Request (Winstanley), 122 A Hundredth Good Pointes of Husbandrie (Tusser), 105 husbandry, 116, 123, 135, 143; manuals, 11, 60, 130–31, 179; repentance echoing, 173; strengthening nitrogen cycle, 136–37; in war and peace, 143–46, 234n63. See also agriculture; stewardship The Inrichment of the Weald of Kent (Markham), 21 irrigation, 170 James I, King, 141 The Jewell House of Art and Nature (Plat), 131 Johnson, Bonnie Lander, 197 Jonson, Ben, 158–59, 164, 169, 243n45 Keller, Eve, 207n5 Kendrick, Walter M., 46 Kennedy, Mark E., 244n66 The Key of Green (Smith), 119 Knight, Jeffrey, 24, 33–34 Kolve, V. A., 226n2 Korda, Natasha, 31 labor, 44, 68, 72, 138; Adam and Eve’s, 171–72, 175, 192; in agriculture, 54, 132, 198, 230n26; in augmenting soil, 25, 45, 53, 175–77; in composting, 22, 27–28; in Paradise Lost, 171–73, 175, 178; soil as topos for, 5–6; of tin mining, 45, 47–51; value of, 120, 235n8; Winstanley promoting, 122–23 Lamb, Mary Ellen, 89 land, 45, 61, 114, 149; arable, 134–35; Henry VIII selling churches’, 132; loss of fertility of, 124, 135; reclaimed, 159, 166, 170; reclamation projects, 149, 152, 156, 160–62, 170; regeneration of,

Index  293 109–10, 129; relationship of with sea, 42–43, 45, 47–48, 52–53, 55; soil vs., 2. See also drainage projects; enclosure; land use landscapes, 11–12, 43, 114, 156; homogenization of, 152–54, 169–70; in shepherds’ plays, 109–10 land use, 135; competition over, 111–13, 137–39; freedom of, 118–21; of reclaimed land, 159, 166, 170 Latour, Bruno, 8, 15, 115 The Law of Freedom (Winstanley), 123, 126, 233n44 Lawson, William, 24, 28 Legend of Chastity (Spenser), 79–80, 93, 101; Artegall in, 80; Britomart in, 79–80, 83, 91–92 Lehnhof, Kent R., 79, 184 Lemmi, C. W., 85 Leslie, Michael, 43 Lewalski, Barbara, 172 “L’histoire de Troylus et de la belle Zellandine,” 90 Lindenbaum, Peter, 120 literature, 6, 24, 71 Locke, John, 241n15 Lodge, Thomas, 133 love, vs. sexuality, 80 Low, Anthony, 120 Lucretius, 195 Lufton, Julia Reinhard, 208n6 MacFaul, Tom, 81 Mandel, Emily St. John, 200 manure, 25; in Paradise Lost, 177, 181–82; Satan associated with, 181–82; in squeamishness about compost, 27–28; use of human, 178–81. See also dung; excrement manuring, 123, 179–81; labor in, 176–77; in maintaining soil fertility, 132–33; in Paradise Lost, 171–72, 175–76, 183, 191 Markham, Gervase, 60, 130–31; on composting, 21, 25–26, 28; on soil improvement, 5, 24, 53, 236n18 Markhams Farewell to Husbandry (Markham), 25–26 marl, 131, 133, 180, 181 marriage, 30–31 Martin, Randall, 2, 51 Massinger, Philip, 30 materiality, of mold, 7–10 McRae, Andrew, 110, 169; God Speed the Plough by, 44, 229n19; on soil, 5, 131; on Winstanley, 118, 125 Meek, James, 201–02

memory, 22–23, 33, 35–36, 213n44 Mentz, Steve, 45, 118–19, 207n5; on brown vs. green ecology, 2, 7, 132, 205n26; on wetlands, 150, 242n23 Merchant, Carolyn, 46 metallurgy, 46 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 85–87, 96 Middleton, Thomas, 138–39 Midland riots (1607–08), 135 military. See gunpowder; saltpeter; weapons Milton, John, 171, 173, 198. See also Paradise Lost minerals and metallic ores, 46, 50 mining, 46, 50, 54. See also tin, mining of mixtures, 37, 212n35; beneficial vs. dangerous, 29–32, 198; compositions as, 32–33 mold, 7–10 Mollo, Andrew, 117 Morrison, Susan Signe, 177 Morton, Timothy, 10, 12–13, 195 Mother Earth, 125 The Mysteryes of Nature (Bates), 186 Nardizzi, Vin, 118, 205n26 nationalism, 60, 71, 69, 79, 156 nature, 63, 78; attitudes toward, 9, 62, 153; culture and, 8–9, 115; cycles of, 65, 68–69, 71, 75–77; desire for control of, 62, 65, 67, 71, 77; human improvements on, 28–29, 52–53; humans’ power over, 5, 56, 151, 154; power over humans, 66–67, 69, 197 Neve, Jeffery, 73 A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, Called the Metamorphosis of Ajax (Harington), 137–38 New Historicism, 10, 13 A New Way to Pay Old Debts (Massinger), 30 New World, 152–54 An New-Yeers Gift (Winstanley), 120, 125 nitrogen, 27, 136, 140, 185–87 Nixon, Rob, 14, 152, 160 Nora, Pierre, 22–23, 213n44 Norden, John, 176 “Now a Dayes” (ballad), 114 Nuese, Richard T., 98 object entanglement, 8, 10 Olio (Cavendish), 35 Origo Mundi, 105–07, 227n7 Ovid, 85–87, 96–99

294  Index Palissy, Bernard, 175–76, 185–86, 235n3 Palmer, Barbara D., 226n3 Paradise Lost (Milton), 171, 187; agricultural labor in, 192–93; ash in, 188–91; Eve in, 172, 174–75; human regeneration in, 187–88; manure in, 178, 181; manuring in, 171–72, 183, 191; repentance in, 172–76; Satan in, 181, 188–89; Sin and Death in, 181–82 Parker, Patricia, 30–31 past, 38, 207n5 Paster, Gail Kern, 164, 167, 204n13 Perceforest, 90 Perkins, William, 70 A Philosophical Discourse of Earth (Evelyn), 186, 247n10 Picciotto, Joanna, 6 place, 10–12, 44 plants, 52, 99, 247n10; care for, 94–95, 173–74, 180–82; people vs., 65–66, 81, 83; reproduction, 80–81; tears and, 59, 61, 66–67, 75 Plat, Hugh, 130–33, 180, 236n18; on compost, 181, 185–86, 190–91; on saltpeter, 137–38 The Play Called Corpus Christi (Kolve), 226n2 pollution, 3, 201 Poly-Olbion (Drayton), 155–56 population growth, 197, 200 postcolonialism, 199–200 “Powtes Complaint,” 163, 170 Prismatic Ecology (Mentz), 119 private property, 121, 123–24, 128, 133, 184–85 profit, 131 property rights, 139 Provincializing Europe (Chakrabarty), 207n5 psychological materialism, 164, 167 Quitslund, Jon A., 87 Raber, Karen, 9 Ralegh, Walter, 55 Ranger, Philip, 73 rape, 83, 90–92, 95–96 Raylor, Timothy, 43 recycling, 31–36, 198 reflexive modernization, 136 repentance, 172–76 reproduction: in Faerie Queene, 79, 81–86; in Garden of Adonis, 97–101; in Legend of Chastity, 80–81; of plants, 80–81; Spenser’s conflicting narratives about, 100–01

Richard II (Shakespeare), 197; almanac reading in, 62, 74–77; Bolingbroke in, 61, 63, 66, 75–78; cyclical nature in, 60–61; desire for control in, 62, 69, 71; earth as mother in, 59–60, 63–64; gardener in, 68, 74–75; language of, 73–74; Richard II in, 65–69, 72, 75–78 Richard III (Shakespeare), 143 riots, 134–35, 168 Robinson, J. W., 107 Rod of Jesse, 104, 109 Rogers, Timothy, 36–37 Rosalynde (Lodge), 133 Rowley, William, 138–39 Royal Society, 186–87 saltpeter: effects of mining, 137–40, 197–98, 210n16; investigation of by Royal Society, 186–87; nitrogen in, 130, 185–86; opposition to agents for, 141, 237n30; opposition to production of, 141–42; production of, 137–40, 184–85; statesponsored expropriation of, 129; understandings of, 140, 186–87; weaponization of, 136, 186–87, 189 Satan, in Paradise Lost, 177, 191; associated with excrement, 178, 181–82; associated with gunpowder, 183–88; disappearance of, 188–89; introducing Sin and Death, 181–82; need to reform principles of, 187–88 Schmidgen, Wolfram, 29–30 Schoenfeldt, Michael, 171, 204n13 Schwartz, Regina, 177 Schwyzer, Philip, 47 science, 6 Scott, Charlotte, 234n63 sea, 55, 118; land’s relationship with, 42–43, 45, 47–48, 52–53; materials used in soil amendment, 53–54 Second Shepherds’ Play (Towneley), 107, 109 sexuality: in England’s past and Tudor present, 79–80; in Faerie Queene, 88–89; in Legend of Chastity, 80–81; Spenser’s conflicting narratives about, 80, 100–01; of Venus, 99–100 Shakespeare, William, history plays of, 77–78, 134, 142–43; language of, 73–74, 141; topics of, 71, 129, 133–34, 238n47. See also specific play titles Shakespeare’s Ocean (Brayton), 205n26 Shannon, Laurie, 31 Shaw, John, 176

Index  295 sheep, 111–12, 115–16, 229n20, 230n28 Shepherds’ Play, 103–05, 113–14, 226n3, 228n16. See also Chester shepherds’ plays, 103, 105, 226n2, 230n28; biblical references in, 114, 227n5, 228n16; exchange among taxa in, 106–07, 111–12; references to book of Isaiah in, 109–10, 113–16; religious symbolism in, 115–16; Rod of Jesse in, 104, 109; theopolitical ecology in, 106–07 Sherman, William, 33–34 Shipwreck Modernity (Mentz), 207n5 Sidney, Philip, 30 Siemon, James R., 61 Smith, Bruce, 119 Smith, John, 153 Smyth, Adam, 33–34, 213n44 social justice, 118, 121–22, 126–28, 226n2 soil, 45; agency over, 60, 66, 75; animals’ and worms’ effects on, 5–6; bodies and, 1–2, 61–63, 66, 69; in brown ecology, 132, 205n26; as common resource, 131–32; compared to nationhood, 6; composition of, 5, 7; conservation of, 135, 137; destructiveness of, 63; Digger movement focused on, 119, 124, 128; disappearance of, 3; early modern understandings of, 4–5; England’s restoration based on, 118–19, 122–23, 125, 128; Englishing of, 60; fertility of, 24, 64, 128, 129, 130; formation of, 13; humans’ return to, 64, 128; literary terms referring to, 4; management of, 67, 71–72, 130, 146, 236n18; materiality of, 118; meanings and connotations of, 4–6, 59, 63–64, 66, 197; as mud, 118, 125; need for periodic flooding of, 162–63; as political, 61; reproduction and, 80–81, 85, 86; as site of human activity, 11–12; teleological purpose of, 104–06; temporality and, 13–14, 47, 61; types of, 236n18; working of, 5–6, 77, 192. See also soil amendment soil amendment, 29, 52; benefits of, 53, 132–33; in coastal regions, 53–54; importance of, 24, 38, 123; labor in, 45, 53, 176–77; methods of, 5, 21, 26, 110, 130–31, 171–72, 178–81 “Sole, Luna, e Talia” (Basile), 90 Somerset, 159–60

The Sparagus Gardens (Brome), 150–51, 163–70; Coulter in, 163–64, 165, 169; the Gardener in, 164, 166; John Brittleware in, 166–68; Martha in, 164, 166–67; Samuel Touchwood in, 164–65; Sir Hugh Moneylacks in, 165–68; Striker in, 165; Tim and Tom Hoyden in, 150–51, 163–70; Walter Chamlet in, 164, 166 Speed, Adolphus, 29 Spenser, Edmund, 87–88, 97–98, 100–01, 223n14. See also Faerie Queene Speyser, Suzanne, 230n28 Spinoza, 195 St. George’s Hill, 117–21, 124 Stange, Marion, 242n29 Stanley, Henry and Ferdinando, 105 Station Eleven (Mandel), 200 Stephens, Nicholas, 185 Stevens, Martin, 108 stewardship, 12, 105, 128, 133, 146 Stone (Cohen), 205n26 Sullivan, Garrett, 152 Sundrie New and Artificiall Remedies against Famine (Plat), 137–38 The Surueiors Dialogue (Norden), 176 Survey of Cornwall (Carew), 41–44, 57–58 sustainability, 118 Swann, Marjorie, 81, 222n8 Tawney, R. H., 156 technology, 158–59 temporality, 12–15 theater, 115–16, 226n3, 227n7 The Theater of Devotion (Gibson), 226n2 Thick, Malcolm, 185 Thirsk, Joan, 24–25, 151, 225n1 Thompson, E. P., 241n8 Thornhill, Thomas, 185 Tigner, Amy, 59, 177 time/temporality, 12–15, 36, 38, 47, 61; assumptions about, 196–97; in composting, 22–23, 27; cycles of, 22, 72 tin, 46–47, 51; mining of, 45, 47–51, 237n32 Towneley: exchange among taxa in, 106–07, 111–12; shepherds’ plays in, 104–05, 226n2, 226n3. See also First Shepherds’ Play; Second Shepherds’ Play Tribble, Evelyn, 36 Tusser, Thomas, 5, 105, 112, 180

296  Index United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, 3 Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Harris), 207n5 Ure, Peter, 62–63 Varro, 179 Venus: Adonis and, 92, 98–100; in Aeneid, 93–94; Chrysogone’s twins and, 81, 83–84, 90 Vermuyden, Cornelius, 158–59, 161, 168 Vibrant Matter (Bennett), 205n26, 232n10 Virgil, 5, 142–43, 179 Walker, Greg, 226n2 Wall, Wendy, 32, 42, 60, 213n44 war, 61, 63, 143–46 waste, 55 A Watch-Word to the Citie of London (Winstanley), 124 water, 161, 173, 238n38 Watson, Robert N., 62, 120, 150, 240n7 weapons: increasing use of gunpowderbased, 142, 184, 238n47; use of saltpeter in, 51, 130; use of tin in, 51, 237n32 Webster, John, 28 West, Vita Sackville, 35

wetlands: ambivalence about, 149, 155–57, 163, 199; customs of habitation in, 151, 154–55, 162–63, 241n8, 242n33; disease associated with, 149, 151, 154; drainage projects in, 152, 160–63; negative attitudes toward, 149, 153, 157, 199; in New World, 152–54; residents of, 156–57, 163, 167–70 Whitehorne, Peter, 140, 189 Whyte, Nicola, 151 Winstanley, Gerrard, 6, 117, 232n27, 235n11; advocating justice for the poor, 121–22, 126–28; Digger movement and, 117, 120–21, 198; goals of for Digger movement, 123–26, 233n32; on Mother Earth, 125; soil-based program of for England’s restoration, 122–23 Winstanley (film), 117–18, 233n43 The Winter’s Tale, 28–29 wood. See fuel Wood, William, 154 Wooden Os (Nardizzi), 205n26 Woodward, John, 174 The World Turned Upside Down (Hill), 119–20 Wren, Christopher, 185 Yates, Julian, 115 Yeo, Richard, 213n44