• "Fools of Nature": Fear and Ecology in Hamlet

William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is an environmental text, at least in terms of content. Its titular character shows a great deal of attention both to the way in which environments can affect human behavior, notably during his encounter with the ghost in act 1, and to the participation of humans within biological processes of recycling. Nonetheless, ecocritic Simon C. Estok has recently identified Hamlet as a figure of “Ecophobia” (Shakespeare and Ecocriticism 86) someone who sees the natural world as “filthy and rotting, polluted beyond repair” (87). Yet it is not clear that fear is necessarily destructive of ecological thinking; When Horatio cautions Hamlet away from the sea in act 1 scene 4, it comes in the context of his recognition of the power of nonhuman space over human agency, his worry that the sea might deprive Hamlet’s “sovereignty of reason” (1.4.662). I suggest that fear in Hamlet constitutes a kind of affective turn towards recognizing the independent and withdrawn nature of nonhuman things. While ecocritical scholars tend to valorize a love of nature or “biophilia” over other emotive responses to the nonhuman world, our ongoing climate crisis is increasingly placing human beings into antagonistic relationships to nonhuman space. The historic number of wildfires in my home country of Canada thus far in the summer of 2023 constitutes a sign of the increasing hostility to human life of many once familiar environments. Acknowledging our fear means recognizing that the nonhuman environment doesn’t exist only for human enjoyment; ultimately I suggest that the fear responses of the characters within Shakespeare’s Hamlet toward the nonhuman environment prevent the text from fitting nonhuman life or space into any exploitative or anthropocentric framework.