War Pastoral: Martial Eco-spaces in Early Modern Literature Open Access
Duquette, Kelly (Spring 2023)
Abstract
In War Pastoral, I reconceptualize the early modern pastoral. Often defined as an urban genre that depicts the simplicity of rural life, I show how deeply this genre is marked by a concern with the imprint of warfare on the natural environment. In other words, while the period’s literary fantasies of pastoral leisure are usually read as Edenic landscapes representing proximity to a “Golden Age,” a time when humans lived in harmony with nature, I argue that early modern texts—among them, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s Othello and 1 Henry VI, and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine – describe spaces made by warfare. By intervening in ecocritical conversations, then, I show that the battlefield should be imagined as a “green world” and terms like “environment” and “nature” cannot be fully understood without accounting for early modern military histories marked by gender and racial stratifications. In short, early modern pastoral texts are not only about war; they also reflect an environmental ethos founded upon the extractive processes promoted by a proto military-industrial complex. As I trace what I call war pastoral, then, I show that what this literature idealizes is not nature but natural resources – not a Golden Age, but gold itself. In offering a new approach to a familiar literary form, I bring ecocriticism together with premodern critical race studies, queer theory, and disability studies. War pastoral thus offers a framework for reading environmental injustice during a period of unprecedented cultural and geopolitical change.
To prepare for war, modern militaries extract massive stores of natural resources and consume vast amounts of energy. Today, the CO2 emissions of the largest militaries are greater than many of the world’s countries combined, contributing significantly to climate change. While warfare ecology is considered a “modern” concept, early modern literature documents the environmental impacts of war over a much longer history. Certainly, scholars have begun to attend to early modern warfare ecologies in critical literary analysis. But much more work is needed, not least because this scholarship has not sufficiently attended to race, gender, disability, and class. In neglecting these alternative imaginaries, early modernists risk getting trapped in what Caribbean poet M. Nourbese Philip has recently described as the “impossible choices” a global pandemic makes evident: this is the dilemma of the desire to return to “normal” and the knowledge that “normal” has meant the plunder of the earth’s resources, the wars for these resources, and the practices that destroy and dehumanize life in its myriad forms on this earth.
Table of Contents
Introduction
War is Hell: Climate Change in the Early Modern Archive ... 6
Chapter 1
Queer Shepherds and Wolfish Women: Gendering the Field in the Henry VI Plays ... 29
Chapter 2
Pastorella Captive: Deforestation and Spenser's Logic of Extraction ... 65
Chapter 3
"The Steel Couch of War:" Pastoral Rest in Othello ... 110
Chapter 4
Military Mining: Playing at Pastoral in Tamburlaine I and II ... 146
Conclusion
Pastoral Lost? Milton and the Military-Industrial Complex ... 181
Bibliography ... 201
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