Abstract
In his comprehensive work "Shakespeare’s Storms," Gwilym Jones notes that if metaphors and similes are included, there is “some instance of storm in every Shakespearean play” (2015, p. 2). So too there is some instance of the sea in every Shakespearean play. Even non ‘blue world’ works harness the maritime trope—we encounter, for instance, "Much Ado About Nothing’s" wide sea, The Merry Wives of Windsor’s “golden shores” and "Love’s Labour’s Lost’s" “salt wave”. The nautical imbues mind, body and landscape in an ‘interlapping’ conception of watery selfhood as Shakespeare invites us to think with the sea (with my mind / As with the tide swell’d (Henry IV, Part 2 )) and the sea (“I am the sea” Titus Andronicus)). How do Shakespeare’s oceans unite word and world and what may this suggest about our species’ biological past and our blue planet’s rapidly deteriorating ecological future? Research into Homo sapiens’ ancestral environment of evolutionary adaptation suggests that our “earliest home” was potentially a sort of Eden located near a sea or lake (Beery et al., 2015, p.115).
This presentation examines the continued cognitive, physiological and potential ecological impact of Shakespeare’s plays situated by, with and as the sea in light of evolutionary psychology. It applies research into the cognitive and physiological affects of oceanic patterns and principles, based on biologist E. O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis (1984) and subsequent biophilic landscape studies (Kellert 2018; Browning et. al. 2022). Harnessing an original framework scaffolding cognitive ecology, ecological aesthetics and affective material ecocriticism, it argues for paying closer attention to Shakespeare’s direct, indirect and symbolic maritime cues for affective but also potential in an age of environmental crisis.