‘Much virtue in “if”’: As You Like It

True to its title, As You Like It is a play that people tend to read as they like. Summaries typically highlight Rosalind and Orlando’s romance and tease out questions surrounding role-play and gender. Indeed, Shakespeare’s subversion of gender norms in As You Like It may reflect a broader questioning of ‘order’ itself, raising the question: Is there a natural order, or is change the touchstone of the world? Pamela Allen Brown and Jean E. Howard note that the best productions of the play invite the audience to suspend disbelief and explore ‘what if’ scenarios, a concept echoed in effective teaching methods. For example, Liam E. Semler advocates for classroom pedagogies driven by ‘if’ that he terms ‘Ardenspaces’ (see Reference Semler2013: 53–79). ‘Ardenspaces’ disrupt traditional teacher-to-student knowledge transmission and encourage critical and creative thinking. Here, I suggest similar pedagogies of possibility that can help students develop habits of mind that exercise the ‘virtue in “if”’ (5.4.106–107). This subsection first examines the play’s mirroring effects and Jacques’ ‘Seven Ages of Man’ set-piece which reframes conventional cosmologies of ‘worlds’ and ‘stages’. It then suggests strategies for incorporating scalable Collaborative Commonplace Book (CPB) assignments into lesson plans. Finally, it discusses how As You Like It’s satirical elements target Elizabethan censorship.

Given this play’s interest in the ‘virtue of “if”’ that extends through ninety-four repetitions of ‘if’, I should like to pose a question myself (my count; Shakespeare, Reference Shakespeare, Mowat, Werstine, Poston and Niles2024b). What if Shakespeare’s multiplication of doubling throughout this play – two settings, two pairs of two brothers, Rosalind’s two genders, two courtly romances, two pastoral romances and two satirists – extends beyond character development and comedy to engage the generative potential of arithmetic? Although mathematics is a discourse partially grounded in certainties like 2+2=4, it can also be positioned in the probable and the possible.

If the insistent doubling in As You Like It suggests a mathematical proposition, it may reflect Shakespeare’s curiosity about what can be learned from then-recent advances in measuring planetary parallax. As discussed in Section 1, parallax involves calculating distance from two perspective points, and it serves as a metaphor for understanding how two viewpoints can combine to provide a more accurate understanding of a third term. To illustrate parallax, try this exercise: cover one eye and observe the view, then cover the other eye and notice how the field of vision shifts. This experiment can also be done with auditory stimuli by covering one ear and then the other. What initially appears as a clear pattern of doubling becomes more complex, revealing variegated positions that challenge linear interpretation.

This multiplicity is mirrored in Shakespeare’s famous phrase, ‘All the world’s a stage’, and the ‘Seven Ages of Man’ set-piece (2.7.146–173). While the Four Ages of Man has circulated for millennia, Shakespeare’s departures from then-popular renderings, including Desiderius Erasmus’ The Praise of Folly, and Barnabe Googe’s translation of Palingenio’s Zodiacke of Life are noteworthy.Footnote ¹² Unlike Erasmus’ standard four ages of infancy, youth, maturity and second childishness, or Palingenio’s descriptive augmentation to five ‘miseries of man from birth to the grave’ (1588: 100), Shakespeare’s seven ages appear unique, especially insofar as they correspond with the then-known seven planets of the solar system and conclude in dissolution:Footnote ¹³

From the perspective of sixteenth-century popular astrology, and the associations of planets with personal characteristics, one may see how each age of humanity corresponds to a cosmological element. This tacit analogy between life stages and orbiting planetary bodies recognises the plurality of ‘worlds’ a single person might encounter on their journey through time. It also conveys a pluralistic interpretation of the planets from both pagan and Christian perspectives. ‘All the world’ clearly signals Earth. The infant child parallels the sun by taking advantage of the homonym ‘son’. The schoolboy is a novel addition to earlier models and can be associated with the Greek Mercury, who rules eloquence and communication. From here, the lover’s association with Venus, the soldier’s with Mars and the justice’s with Jupiter follow directly. The ‘slippered Pantaloon’ suggests an Ovidian kind of Saturn, past his prime and overthrown by his children (Kline, Metamorphoses Reference Kline2020: I.1–20). The final age, ‘sans everything’ is not necessarily nihilistic, or even bleak, but may signal the infinite possibilities that lie in the stars and space beyond Saturn, then the farthest planet yet identified in our solar system.Footnote ¹⁴

‘Worlds’ emerge here as both material entities and as determined by time and experience. Jane Hwang Degenhardt and Henry S. Turner have discussed theories of regionalism as a way of thinking about early modern worldmaking; regions are ‘not marginal to a centre nor are they central to a margin: they are worlds unto themselves always connected to other places but remaining distinct from them’ (Reference Degenhardt and Turner2021: 161). But these regions and worlds are not limited to geographical spaces, or for that matter, terrestrial spaces: ‘They are maintained through the circulation of people and objects … [of] stories of origin and belonging’ (Reference Degenhardt and Turner2021: 161). Worlds manifest as an element of personal selfhood, much as an individual’s identity contributes to worldmaking through their interactions in mutually recognised spaces and communities. Shakespeare explores how worlds are made and remade through the characters’ interactions in, across and through the worlds they encounter. If we think about what Semler calls the dynamic ‘linguistic architecture’ of if-clauses in As You Like It, we may see them as mirroring the changing architecture of the cosmos and begging questions about the possibilities that lie beyond singular conceptions of the ‘world’ (Reference Semler2013: 48).

Box 1.3Exploration: Collaborative Commonplacing

Collaborative Commonplace Book (CPB) assignments invite teachers to encourage students to practise intellectual risk-taking with peers in low-stakes assignments. Students respond to open-ended prompts by crafting multimedia responses in which they collect, reflect and question their findings. Students work in shared GoogleSlide decks, each contributing a slide. In addition to quoting or ‘snipping’ text, making observations and posing questions, students are invited to think creatively with visual media. These prompts encourage associative, generative thinking (see Supplementary Material, Appendix 1). In this spirit, one might think of these CPB assignments as dissolving the ‘spheres’ of linear discussion and exploring spaces of infinite possibility.

The peer-to-peer engagement in these shared slide decks can stimulate strong learning communities regardless of class size or teaching modality. Using the shared CPBs as a starting point for class discussions and response essays fosters a critical and creative collaborative space that can lead to promising and exciting insights. The following sample prompts may be recombined to elicit ‘what-if’ thinking in the classroom.

Getting Started

Pre-reading Prompt for Students

Your aim is to brainstorm how you might describe ‘the theatre of the world.’ Visit the Folger Shakespeare Library’s ‘Theatre of the World’ media group (https://digitalcollections.folger.edu/view/group/211754). This collection of images illustrates diverse perspectives surrounding the theatrum mundi. Look through the images and choose one that you find especially interesting. Paste it on your slide and make at least two observations about how it speaks to the ‘theatre of the world’ – you might start by thinking about the elements that make up a ‘theatre’ and the elements that make up a ‘world.’ Next, pose a question for class discussion.

This sample of student work emerged from an in-class exercise designed to introduce undergraduate students to the logistics of Commonplacing in GoogleSlides (Figure 4). Students had no prior knowledge about the ‘theatre of the world’; it was the first day of class. We discussed how to capture screen images using ‘snipping’ tools, how to use Alt-text to make images accessible for screen readers and how to cite sources.Footnote ¹⁵ The unpredictability of students’ contributions to the class CPBs has an added bonus: teachers learn new things as well. This group’s focus on the relationships between the audience and the stage helped me introduce these roles in the context of the ‘theatre of the world’, and led to a lively discussion about the attentiveness of judicial powers to the ‘performances’ they adjudicate.

Figure 4 Sample Commonplace Book slide.

Image reproduced with permission from Sabrina Grammatic, Sofia Wilson and Leighah Beausoleil.

Figure 4Long description

A text on the right reads A very large audience in comparison to the stage; many are not paying attention to the concert. Details lie in the audience, even as the stage is the focal point. Stage is such a strange shape, where is conductor? Very geometric. Questions: Why such a focus on the audience? Is the audience part of the performance? Why only two different string instruments?

Additional CPB prompts are listed next. I suggest following each by asking students to generate a question for class discussion. Students may find this last step the most challenging as it requires them to think through the implications of their observations, to test their premises and to reflect upon their own and others’ possible biases.

• Instruct students to select a quotation from the day’s reading that sparks their interest, or speaks to a concept you want them to think with. What interests them? Ask them to illustrate their selection as they envision it with an image from the wild (i.e. the internet).

• Ask students to choose a quotation or screenshot from a supplementary reading or video that is loosely related to the day’s assignment. Shakespeare Reloaded’s ‘Shakeserendipity’ activities offer terrific models (Reference Shakeserendipity2015). Teachers may also direct students to the Crash Course video series (Green and Green, Reference Green and Green2012) and select related episodes.

• Instruct students to illustrate the concepts they’re discussing with background images, memes, or other visualisations.

• Ask students to practise thinking with parallax and to generate observations about concepts that emerge from taking two perspectives into account.

• Ask students to illustrate how a line, scene or concept makes them feel using a meme, a .gif or a favourite song.

When generating a question for class discussion, less experienced students can benefit from recalling simple formulas like the journalist’s trick: ‘I want to know who/what/when/where/how/why’. Or, to encourage deeper critical thinking, Douglas Lanier’s ‘Definition questions’, ‘Comparison-contrast questions’, ‘Dramatic context questions’ and ‘Audience effect-questions’ provide excellent guidance (Reference Lanier2019: 140).

Question and Reflect

Capstone Portfolio Assignment: If one assigns regular CPBs, then a Capstone Portfolio Assignment with an accompanying metacognitive reflection encourages students to synthesise their learning of a unit or a course. For the portfolio, ask students to review the slides they generated throughout the term and to reorganise them into conceptual groups (e.g. time, gender or macrocosms). By outlining a rationale for their conceptual frame and reflecting on how their understanding of the course material changed over time, students reinforce their learning and realise a great sense of accomplishment.

Jacques’ juxtaposition of this ‘miserable world’ (2.7.13) with his laughter ‘sans intermission’ marks him as a satirist who delights in calling people out on their bad behaviour, even if he is sometimes a hypocrite (2.7.33). He covets Touchstone’s motley because it is the garb of the courtly licensed fool, and that licence gives permission to speak truth to power without repercussions. But in both the play and Shakespeare’s England, speaking freely was not always an option.

As You Like It has been identified as Shakespeare’s most topical play and one that engages directly with then-contemporary satire and literary politics. It was entered into the Stationer’s Register on 4 August 1600, on the heels of the 1599 ‘Bishop’s Ban’ that prohibited the publication of several named satires, including works by some of Shakespeare’s collaborators and all histories. As the list of prohibited literary genres proceeded, it grew so broad as to give censors the right to suppress nearly anything they liked.Footnote ¹⁶

When the Bishops targeted printed satire, they didn’t curtail its production, but redirected it into the theatres.Footnote ¹⁷ Celia’s and Touchstone’s exchange in the first act has one foot in fiction and another in Elizabethan London. In the play, Celia’s father, Duke Frederick, has usurped his older brother’s power, taken over the court and sent him into exile. Touchstone is Duke Senior’s licensed fool, but Celia warns him that his ‘licence’ has expired under the new regime:

When Celia warns Touchstone that he may be whipped for ‘taxation’, she describes the punishment he may incur if he speaks freely; here ‘taxation’ describes censure or reproof. Touchstone alludes to Erasmus’ Folly when he laments the suppression of satire: ‘fools may not speak wisely what wise men do foolishly’ (1.2.85–86). But it is Celia’s line, ‘since the little wit that fools have was silenced, the little foolery wise men have makes a great show’, that invokes London at the turn of the seventeenth century (1.2.87–88). As James Shapiro remarks, these lines provide a ‘rare piece of editorialising the ban and its aftermath’ (Reference Shapiro2006: 219).

Jacques paints a picture of this aftermath as he raises a question that is as pressing now as it was then:

Jacques’ overarching question here is: What kind of world is it when calling people out for bad behaviour has become worse than the behaviour itself? Today’s students are likely familiar with this problem and may pause to consider the socio-political repercussions of state-mandated censorship. What shared points of contact emerge between the world of As You Like It and their own? How might insights generated from Shakespeare’s play help one to navigate an emerging world ‘order’ that is characterised by political chaos?

As You Like It provides an opportunity to think about the ‘theatre of the world’ from near-infinite perspectives, including and importantly its origins in satire. Early renderings of the metaphor offered broad-stroke, Horatian-style satire that mirrored humanity’s common hypocrisies while reminding them that ultimate judgement awaited. For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, however, the theatrum mundi evolved to query both divine and mundane judicial systems. Simultaneously, satire had progressed into a genre that was no longer easily categorised. It too was adapting to changes in world order, not least of which included institutional censorship. Although here and in The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare openly engages the satirical elements of the theatrum mundi, as we shall see in Othello, his treatments following the ban are more oblique.

‘Which is the Merchant, which is the Jew’: The Merchant of Venice

As You Like It gives us Shakespeare’s most famous articulation of the ‘theatre of the world’, but he had already been thinking with the metaphor when writing The Merchant of Venice. From one perspective, this play grapples directly with John of Salisbury’s apposing descriptions of life in the theatrum mundi as a ‘comedy’ and as a ‘trial’ (1938: 171–172). For John, both life’s comedy and its trials are rooted in humanity’s bodily, earthly desires that controvert high-minded devotion to God and the afterlife. For Shakespeare, the relations between humanity and justice are not so clear-cut. This play raises questions about how the bodily ‘humours’ interact with the theatrum mundi’s associations with justice, as well as what constitutes equity in a cosmos governed by mutability.

The first part of this subsection invites students to explore the capaciousness of ‘comedy’ and provides pre- and post-reading activities to help students examine this play’s generic ambiguity. It then introduces early modern medical theories and explores the human body’s relation to earth, to the cosmos and to justice in the theatrum mundi, notably through the lens of the three main characters: Antonio, Portia and Shylock. Although some instructors avoid teaching this play because of its upsetting anti-Semitic attitudes, I follow Paula Marantz Cohen and believe that it provides ‘the very ingredients needed to defend against anti-Semitic thinking, though in a nuanced rather than a simplistic, finger-wagging way’ (Reference Marantz Cohen2021: 39). For example, Shylock’s famous ‘Hath not a Jew eyes’ speech provides an ideal opportunity to help students mark the turns of language and logic that he uses to construct his identity in relation to the Venetian Christians (Shakespeare, Reference Shakespeare and Marcus2006b: 3.1.48–60).Footnote ¹⁸ Attentive analysis of the play’s Jewish and Christian characters will fail to exempt any from deep shortcomings. Ultimately, this section aims to help students generate perspectives from which to consider how identity and justice are constructed by the interactions between individuals from dominant and marginalised cultures.

The Merchant of Venice’s generic designation of comedy is an uneasy one. This discomfort is partly because, as Lanier notes, ‘comedy and humour are not the same thing’ (Reference Lanier2019: 144). Additionally, during Shakespeare’s time, generic distinctions are markedly fluid, and better resemble the early modern humoral theories I discuss shortly than the clear-cut taxonomies that modernity retro-projects. Much as humoral fluids are impacted by interactions between an individual and their environment, genre can be informed by editors, performers and audiences as a play takes diverse forms over time. How do genre expectations inform one’s experience of a play, or literary work? What consequences might follow?

One approach to analysing the complex interactions between the theatrum mundi, early modern humoral theory and law in The Merchant of Venice is to trace how the first Act is characterised by disequilibrium. In either secular or devotional terms, the ‘comedy’ of life in the theatrum mundi emerges as the irony of humanity’s struggle to achieve harmony between body and mind, or in the context of early modern medicine, to maintain an equitable humoral balance. The play’s opening subverts equilibrium immediately when it introduces the titular merchant, Antonio, meditating on his melancholy:

Critics variously suggest that Antonio’s ‘unfocused depression’ foreshadows his later close call with Shylock, or results from his unrequited love for Bassanio (Cohen, 2021: 40). I see both in play and would encourage students to embrace these polyvalences. But self-knowledge and identity are also at stake in these opening lines. Antonio repeats: ‘I know not’ (1.1.1); he has become a ‘want-wit’ (1.1.6); he has ‘much ado to know [him]self’ (1.1.7). If consciousness is situated, as Matthew Steggle suggests, ‘in the warm and squishy tissues of the body and brain’, then the language of the humours provides a ‘potent metaphor for talking about, literally, the stream of consciousness that constitutes selfhood’ (Reference Steggle and Hirschfeld2018: 225). Antonio’s melancholy, or black bile, disrupts humoral flow and consequently compromises his sense of selfhood.

For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, humoral theory forwarded a cosmological approach towards understanding the relationship of an individual’s body to their health, temperament, complexion and personality. The four elements [air, fire, water and earth] corresponded to the four bodily humours [blood, phlegm, choler and melancholy]. Philip Moore’s Reference Moore1564 The Hope of Health elaborates:

Gail Kern Paster and others have persuasively demonstrated that ‘in this cosmology, the stuff of the outside world and the stuff of the body were composed of the same elemental materials’ (Reference Kern Paster2004: 4). According to this model, a healthy body and a ‘just’ (ad justiam) temperament depend upon humoral balance.Footnote ²⁰

If this system sounds primitive, Steggle reminds us that ‘in the twenty-first century we believe that everything in the material world, from dogs to pyramids, is built from varying proportions of the ninety-two (or so) elements of the periodic table’ (Reference Steggle and Hirschfeld2018: 221). The human body has long been understood as a microcosm of the elemental world, and medical astrologers extend this analogy to the macrocosm of the universe.Footnote ²¹ E.M.W. Tillyard cites ancient Pythagorean doctrine articulating the relation of the human to the cosmos: ‘Man is called a little world … because he possesses all the faculties of the universe’ (Reference Tillyard1959: 66). Laura Phillips develops this claim: ‘The correlation between the celestial and terrestrial spheres was more than analogic; it was physical. The movements of the celestial spheres were thought to move the humours in the human body’ (Reference Phillips2021: np). A ‘just’ humoral balance emerges from the harmony between these micro- and macrocosmic worlds.

As Antonio continues, he attributes his humoral imbalance to his role in the theatre of the world. When his friends try and fail to cheer him up, Antonio replies: ‘I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano, / A stage, where every man must play a part, / And mine a sad one’ (1.1.79–81). One never finds out why Antonio plays such a sad part on the world’s stage. As the play’s titular protagonist, his melancholy is unsettling.

Portia’s stage entrance similarly reflects her struggling with her role in the theatrum mundi: ‘By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is aweary of this great world’ (1.2.1–2). Portia echoes Antonio’s sentiments directly before wondering at her own humoral turmoil that puts reason and emotion at odds: ‘If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do … It is a good divine that follows his own instructions … The brain may devise laws for the blood, but a hot temper leaps o’er a cold decree’ (1.2.11–17). Portia’s melancholy stems from a familiar moral dilemma; she knows right from wrong but struggles with conflicting desires. She juxtaposes reason and desire with both humoural and legal language: ‘laws for the blood’, ‘hot temper’ and ‘cold decree’. Portia’s association of the law with both the brain and the cold casts it as phlegmatic: a wintry and wet humour that directly opposes Portia’s ‘hot temper’, or choleric temperament associated with springtime and youth. Unlike Antonio, however, Portia’s upset has a clear cause: her late father’s will has engendered her disequilibrium: ‘I may neither choose who I would nor refuse who I dislike, so is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father. Is it not hard, Nerissa, that I cannot choose one, nor refuse none?’ (1.2.20–22). The lottery-style casket test her father devised to select his daughter’s husband seems foolproof. Each suitor must select from gold, silver and lead containers; if they choose the one containing Portia’s portrait, they win her hand. The play dawdles over Portia’s discomfort as suitors Morocco and Aragon take their time choosing – incorrectly. When Bassanio’s turn comes, she wants him to succeed. She calls for music, a song that repeats rhymes suggesting the correct answer: lead. Portia has found her first legal loophole.Footnote ²²

Shakespeare does not construct a humoural profile for Shylock, but instead prompts questions that put pressure on the equity of historical constructions of socio-cultural identity and justice. From the outset, Shylock declares his hatred for the Christian Antonio who has damaged his business, spat on him and repeatedly called him ‘dog’. Antonio crudely claims that he would do it all again, but for now, he needs to borrow money. ‘Hath a dog money?’ Shylock asks (1.3.119). This question is the first in an interrogation of equivalencies that drive the larger questions about the relationship between socio-cultural identity and justice in the theatre of the world.

These equivalencies intersect prominently in Shylock’s demand for a pound of Antonio’s flesh as his ‘bond’ for a loan of 3,000 ducats. Shylock offers him terms ‘in kind’, famously demanding ‘an equal pound / Of your fair flesh, to be cut off and taken / In what part of your body pleaseth me’ (1.3.148–150). Later, when Salarino asks what Antonio’s flesh will be good for, Shylock replies: ‘To bait fish withal, if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge’ (Reference Shakespeare, Thompson and Taylor2006a: 3.1.44–45). Teachers can excerpt these exchanges that play on the word ‘kind’ and ask students to Freewrite and think associatively about how many senses the word can convey. Using a dictionary can help generate nuanced associations and recognise how ‘kindness’ signals not only equivalency, but carries polysemous associations with anthropology, mercenary exchange and generosity that are very much in conversation with the play’s investment in the construction of Jewish, Christian and gendered identities. The following activity provides an opportunity to explore Shylock’s theory of equivalencies and to reflect upon how one’s sense of self and identity evolves in relation to one’s socio-cultural status and environment.

Just as the interacting elements of the human body must maintain balance to be healthy, so too the law. In The Merchant of Venice, Rebecca Lemon recognises ‘the impossibility of invoking “law” as a stable category. To speak of “law” as a singular force is to collapse a set of diverse and often competing practices’ (Lemon, Reference Lemon and Kinney2012: 557). ‘Justice’ – then as now – is comprised of three key elements: the law itself, equity (fairness) and mercy (clemency). Like the bodily humours, these elements must be held in balance to deliver justice.

When Shylock refuses to accept late payment and resists Portia-as-Balthazar’s eloquent argument in favour of mercy (4.1.187–209), she does not simply pay back his mercilessness in kind, but ‘betters the instruction’ (3.1.60). Portia’s disquisition on mercy, much like Lorenzo’s on the ‘music of the spheres’ that follows (5.1.61–73), may have flattered some in Shakespeare’s Elizabethan audiences who gazed in this mirror and saw their cultural superiority reflected in Shylock’s sentencing. But modern audiences should not be swayed so easily. Portia’s merciless hypocrisy and Lorenzo’s condescending cruelty toward Jessica cannot be overlooked (5.1.77–95).Footnote ²³ Teachers can pair these scenes and ask students to analyse what shared points of contact emerge among bodies, law and harmony. How does the language of ‘justice’ take shape? Who determines what is ‘just’? This play also raises a question about the role of expertise in delivering judicial equity. After all, the ‘judge’ in Shylock’s case has been impersonated by a young woman with a vested interest in the trial’s outcome. What consequences might this manipulation of the legal system generate for Venetian justice in the future?

When Portia fails to move Shylock, she pivots from an appeal to pathos and overgoes him in logos. Lemon traces how Portia fraudulently ‘hooks’ Shylock ‘into a method of judicial interpretation that apparently favours him; but her method merely presages the radical literalism (flesh but no blood) that she will use against him in establishing the contract as unenforceable and forfeit’. This ‘kangaroo court’ invokes archaic Venetian laws to strip Shylock of his wealth, home and living before forcing his conversion to Christianity (Lemon, Reference Lemon and Kinney2012: 566). Broken contracts abound when Antonio and Gratiano are tricked out of their wedding rings only to have them restored amidst bawdy sexual innuendo in the final scene.Footnote ²⁴ Lemon’s observation that Shakespeare offers ‘a catalogue of the law’s prejudices, from construction to application to interpretation’ in Act 4 that extends through the play’s conclusion is spot on (Reference Lemon and Kinney2012: 566).

The Merchant of Venice is a difficult play to teach, but to my mind, that is why it should be taught. One cannot let Shakespeare off the hook for his anti-Semitic portrayals of the Jewish characters in this play. Instead, we can ask questions to better understand where the playwright was coming from, and how religious and racial prejudices have become institutionally ingrained and persist. Does the humoral imbalance that characterises Antonio and Portia from the play’s outset signal a schism in the dominant culture that requires resolution or condemnation? Although Shylock craves ‘the law’, was its final adjudication representative of justice? What distinguishes the Christian characters from the Jewish ones? Shakespeare’s intersecting frames that network bodily humours, identity and justice in the theatre of the world simultaneously generate distance and nuance from which to explore the complex adjudications of law, equity and mercy then and now. These questions surrounding cultural constructions of identity are prominent also in Othello, and the following discussion and activities can help students further explore Shakespeare’s complex characterisations.

‘Heaven is my judge’: Othello

Othello’s driving question is: how can one recognise the difference between ‘seeming’ and ‘being’ in the theatre of the world? This is a big question for anyone to consider, let alone students navigating what Thomas P. Mackey and Trudi E. Jacobson have declared ‘a post-truth world’ (Reference Mackey and Jacobson2019; see Prologue). Unlike As You Like It and The Merchant of Venice, Othello’s dramatisation of the ‘theatre of the world’ is not transparently obvious, but it is no less present. This play sets out twenty-six variants of the word ‘world’ and sixty-eight of ‘heaven’. According to Open Source Shakespeare, ‘heaven’ is nowhere repeated more in his entire corpus (my count; 2003).Footnote ²⁵ Throughout Othello, both the ‘world’ and ‘heaven’ flash in and out of comprehension, rarely holding fast to a singular connotation. One finds the hierarchy of judgement associated with the theatrum mundi dissolving amidst shifting micro- and macrocosmic perspectives that radically complicate discerning appearance from reality.

This subsection explores the theatre of the world from the perspectives of cartographic ethnography, optics and cosmography to explore how identities and worlds are not essential entities, but are socially and politically constructed. The following discussion and classroom activities can help students generate historical and contemporary perspectives surrounding these socio-political constructions. In closing, I invite comparison between Othello and its source, Giraldi Cinthio’s ‘The Moor of Venice’, in light of Shakespeare’s departure from his predecessor’s positioning of ‘heaven’ in relation to ultimate ‘justice’. The following discussion and activities support holding multiple perspectives in view as one enacts judgement in the theatrum mundi.

Othello is best known as Shakespeare’s greatest ‘race play’, but that does not mean that racial constructions in the period are black and white.Footnote ²⁶ Since before the turn of the twenty-first century, scholars have been discussing the complexity of ‘racecraft’ in premodern literature. ‘Racecraft’ broadly describes how language and historical conditions inform racist epistemologies that wrongly posit race as determined by biology or geography. For example, Kim F. Hall observes:

Ian Smith discusses how these literary tropes of blackness have been textually encoded and reified since ‘the moment in early modern history when the presence of blackness, in the form and person of Africans, entered the lives of white Europeans – whether through trade, travel and exploration, immigration and, perhaps most widely, through readings of various texts’ (Reference Smith2022: 1). Ambereen Dadabhoy and Nedda Mehdizadeh synthesise Hall’s and Smith’s arguments, observing that ‘racial difference was key to how the Other and self were made legible, yet race was not then – as it is not now – a stable category or descriptor; it was in the process of being formed’ (Reference Smith2023: 3).

Othello, Dadabhoy and Mehdizadeh argue, ‘is doomed from the start because his race “is the cause” (5.2.1) of his and the play’s bloody outcome’ (Reference Dadabhoy and Mehdizadeh2023: 3). Or, as Emma Smith declares: ‘Othello is the tragedy of a black man in a white world’ (Reference Smith2019: 211). Again, ‘blackness’ is a complex construction. Ian Smith describes how blackness can operate ‘too easily as the mark of unassailable difference’ and further explains: ‘Blackness … represents a body that bears within its material corporeality histories of domination, claims of illegitimacy and dispossession’ (Reference Smith2022: 160). These histories of domination are also deeply encoded throughout premodern cartography and raise a critical question: How do representations of the ‘world’ contribute to racial constructions?

In the play, Othello’s physical attributes are associated with stereotypes of Sub-Saharan blackness and combine with his geographical markers that magnify his cultural otherness. He is the Moor of Venice, a ‘wheeling stranger’ (Shakespeare, Reference Shakespeare and Hall2007b: 1.1.137) who has escaped enslavement from enemies to Christianity, and has encountered geographically diverse monstrosities, including cannibals and the terrifyingly headless Anthropophagi (1.3.136–172).Footnote ²⁷ As Valerie Traub observes, ‘Such cross-cultural encounters yield contradictory understandings of ethnicity, race, religion and nationality … relative degrees of civility and barbarism and the geohumoural connection between climate and complexion are projected, as they were on maps, through assumed analogies between habit and habitat’ (Reference Traub2016: 274). ‘Habit’ here refers to indigenous clothing and cultural customs associated with a given place; it is a central component of anthropological ethnography. For example, when Iago says ‘I know our country disposition well; / In Venice they [women] do let God see the pranks / They dare not show their husbands’, we see how Venetian geography is associated with the disposition of its female inhabitants (3.3.216–218). Iago’s pejorative assessment of women’s ‘habits’ is shaped by and supports stereotypes then associated with Italian culture.

Iago projects similarly disparaging geographically-informed dispositions onto Othello. Othello’s skin was black from the outset, but as the play progresses, Iago’s machinations elide his appearance with the monstrous ‘dispositions’ of his global adventures.Footnote ²⁸ As Michela Compagnoni contends, premodern cartographic imagery and narrative very often encode monstrosity into geographies.Footnote ²⁹ She explains that: ‘Monsters were specifically defined by the fact of living at the edges of maps but, at the same time, they re-fashioned those spaces as monstrous by inhabiting them … testifying to the power politics – invariably biassed and provisional – at work’ (Reference Compagnoni2022: 66). Both racial otherness and monstrosity emerge as forms of culturally produced fictions that privilege dominant perspectives – in the premodern world these are white, Christian viewpoints. Debapriya Sarkar explores these constructions in the context of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Antony and Cleopatra, but the questions she raises are just as relevant for classroom approaches to Othello, in particular: ‘How, then, might we think about natural and political geographies as mutually constituted entities that reinforce constructions of racial and cultural difference?’ (Reference Sarkar and Akhime2024: 56). We may think of maps as resources to get from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’, but Othello, like many early modern literary works, invites one to think about how they also are powerful rhetorical vehicles for conveying moral and ethical judgments.

It may be telling that the theatre of the world’s renewed popularity in sixteenth-century print culture coincides with a proliferation of maps, globes and atlases. Before the theatrum mundi metaphor made its way into the architecture of Elizabethan theatres, it was represented geographically through cartography. Abraham Ortelius’ 1570 Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, or ‘The Theatre of the World’, is coextensive with precisely the kind of Ciceronian cosmographical contemplation associated with the metaphor’s earlier moralising imperatives (Figure 5).Footnote ³⁰ Ortelius presents his readers with dual perspectives from which to contemplate what Cicero calls: ‘the disposition of the whole world’: The horse is created to beare & to draw: the ox to til & to labor the earth: the dog to hu[n]t and to gard the hovvs. But man to consider & contemplate with the eyes of his vnder-standing the disposition of the whole world (1601: Sig. A4 v). Cicero’s and, by extension, Ortelius’ anthropocentrism reflects a version of world ‘order’ whereby animals exist to ‘labour the earth’, serving the humans charged with contemplating ‘the disposition of the whole world’. This hierarchy that positions humans as superior to animals and the earth itself tacitly underscores how the terrestrial world was viewed as a way station to divine judgement.

Figure 5 Ortelius, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1606).

Photograph of item held by Harvard Map Collection.

Figure 5Long description

Figures of Asia, a light-skinned woman, and Africa, a black-skinned man, stand below on either side. Beneath the stage is America, pictured as a savage holding a white male European head as a trophy, while a woman’s head is in flames next to it.

Ortelian hierarchies are not limited to elevating humans at the expense of animals and the planet, but are deeply invested in exalting the virtues of Northern Europeans to the detriment of other peoples and places. Students can contemplate the title page and brainstorm what kind of visual argument it conveys.Footnote ³¹ Even a cursory examination of the allegorical figures personifying earth’s continents on Theatrum Orbis Terrarum’s title page can incite classroom conversations about constructions of culture and race. Ortelius sets his stage with a markedly Christian Europa surmounting a portico supported by persons ethnographically marked as Asia and Africa. The space beneath the ‘stage’ is populated by a native American depicted as a savage, holding a decapitated head – clearly of European origin – victoriously by the hair. This unsubtle association of native costumes and indigenous customs again underscores prejudicial and blatantly racist associations conveyed through habit and habitat. In the context of the theatrical metaphor, students might think about how early modern cartography sets the stage to generate perspectives that inform both characterisation (habit) and plot (habitat).

Maps in Shakespeare’s day and our own aspire to represent spatial forms found on earth and in the cosmos. The problem is, as Traub remarks, that an essential disparity exists between perception and representation. Much as we cannot see the earth’s sphere in its entirety, it is impossible to represent a three-dimensional object accurately in two dimensions (Traub, Reference Traub2016: 267). This perplexity raises the question: is there an inherent schism between ‘seeming’ and ‘being’? Taking maps as exemplary, how might one know the difference between what is represented and what truly exists? Perhaps the best one may do is to try and hold two perspectives in ‘view’ simultaneously. Again, parallax can provide an analogical frame that supports juxtaposing concrete and abstract concepts, and to recognise that any assessment of ‘character’ (or an object in space) will depend on the viewer’s position in the world (see Section 1). A parallax approach can help students realise that what seems to them might be to someone else, and that both propositions might be true at the same time. ‘Truth’, Jonathan Bate rightly argues, ‘is not singular’ in Shakespeare’s plays; that is not to say that it does not exist, but is relative to the conditions of perception and performance (Reference Bate1998: 327–330).

For Ortelius, ‘eyes’ are a dominant metaphor for knowledge-making; his illustrated geographies invite contemplation of space and scale. Each map is accompanied by a commentary about the demographics of a given region, as well as its crops and economies. John Gillies elaborates Ortelius’ perspective: ‘Geography … is imagined as an all-seeing eye commanding the spatial and temporal immensities of history [;] the map is imagined as a glass or means by which the god’s eye view of geography is accommodated to the limited perspective of human sight’ (Reference Gillies, Smith, Rowe and Hoenselaars2016: 71). But this ‘god’s eye view of geography’ is also a metaphor and cannot accommodate the limited perspective of human sight. Although maps and three-dimensional globes repeatedly aimed to render the ‘disposition of the whole world’, concurrent studies of perspective and optics suggest instead that our worldviews emerge from the ‘visual turbulence’ that characterises perspective and multiplies ad infinitum through space and time (Clark, Reference Clark2007: 5). To this day, epistemologies of visual cognition, much like their linguistic equivalents, emerge through relativity (Clark, Reference Clark2007: 5–7).

Early modern advances in optics and perspective contribute to the theatrum mundi’s evolution from a moralising metaphor to one that reflects scepticism about mythologies of world ‘order’ and ideals of justice. As Stuart Clark observes, ‘Human subjects “make” the objects they perceive, fashioning them out of the qualities that belong intrinsically to perception, not to the objects themselves’ (Reference Clark2007: 14). For example, Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors vivifies early modern thinking with perspective in the theatre of the world (National Gallery, 1533). The maps, globes, astrolabes, books and musical instruments in the painting signal intellectual aspiration, the hope of understanding the world and cosmos. The large anamorphic skull that can be seen only at an angle functions as a memento mori, a reminder of death designed – like early iterations of the theatrum mundi topos – to inspire virtue in this world by reminding viewers that judgement awaits in the next.

Of course, these chimerical phenomena are not limited to painting, but are vividly realised in the theatre. Wendy Beth Hyman reminds us of drama’s origins in the ‘amphitheatre’, etymologically a place of ‘seeing both ways’ (Reference Hyman2022: 402). The amphitheatre’s essential duality also parallels Aristotle’s theory of drama itself as generically mimetic. That is to say that drama imitates, and thus is always already a ‘seeming’. ‘Being’ is an interpretive challenge.

Throughout his plays, Shakespeare repeatedly interrogates the horizons of ‘seeming’ and ‘being’; Othello’s obsession about ‘ocular proof’ offers a case in point (3.3.377). One might pause to consider how the horizon itself is a matter of perception, defined as ‘that part of the earth’s surface visible from a given point of view; the line at which the earth and sky appear to meet’ (OED, horizon, n.1a). Like the amphitheatre, a horizon looks both ways, its vanishing point signals ‘the representation of space that is oriented in relation to its absence’ (Hyman, Reference Hyman2022: 403). In Othello, this phenomenon of absence is prominent, especially in Iago’s suggestive narrative that reorients the loss of Desdemona’s handkerchief as ‘proof’ of her infidelity. Iago’s narratives of seeming have been transformed into being, rather, perception has become reality.Footnote ³³

Othello’s driving interest in optics and the role of perception in identity construction and virtue is partly indebted to his source, Cinthio’s Gli Hecatommithi, ‘The Moor of Venice’ (Reference Cinthio2000). Shakespeare follows Cinthio’s plot quite closely, and echoes his predecessor’s deployment of visual and linguistic turbulence. Yet Shakespeare departs from his source’s moralising dramatisations of the theatrum mundi in his representations of heaven and ultimate justice.

Students can productively compare and contrast the two narratives to think about how Shakespeare innovates on his sources. Cintho’s narrative may be summarised as follows. A Venetian lady ‘Disdemona’ (Shakespeare’s Desdemona) marries a ‘Moor’ (Shakespeare’s Othello) with whom she is deeply in love. Cinthio’s ‘Ensign’ (Shakespeare’s Iago) serves the Moor, but lusts after Disdemona. He tries to seduce her with no success and convinces himself that she must prefer the ‘Captain’ (Shakespeare’s Cassio), failing to perceive that she truly loves her husband. Jealousy drives the Ensign to persuade the Moor that Disdemona has been unfaithful. He contrives the loss of Disdemona’s handkerchief to use as proof and convinces the Moor to murder his wife, and to make it look like an accident. The murder is grisly. The Ensign later will be tortured and killed for another crime, but the narrator suggests these are just deserts for what he has done to the Moor and his wife. The Moor himself mourns his wife’s loss desperately, but his penalty awaits: ‘Heaven, the just regarder of all hearts, willed not that so wicked a deed should go unpunished’ (2020: 10). Following a few more plot twists, the Signoria of Venice try the ‘barbarian’ Moor and torture him, but he will not confess. Ultimately, Disdemona’s kinfolk kill him and the story concludes by moralising: ‘Thus did Heaven avenge the innocence of Disdemona’ (2020: 11). First written in 1565, Cinthio’s Gli Hecatommthi retains a cosmographical perspective that fixes the Heavens to represent a sense of judicial equity. By contrast, Shakespeare’s Othello disintegrates associations between ‘heaven’ and ‘justice’.

Iago is the first in Othello to link heaven with judgement. Because he is the play’s amoral villain, its associations with integrity are immediately subverted:

Iago’s ‘Heaven’ is a supremely ambiguous judge. It is unclear whether he aims to dupe some kind of divine judge, or if ‘heaven’s’ judicial powers have dissolved, leaving nothing to fear. Teachers might usefully substitute the word ‘heaven’ for ‘world’ in Section 1’s Exploration: ‘What constitutes a world?’ Additionally, they may ask students to test different connotations that emerge from the following examples, or from using a concordance or other searchable text:Footnote ³⁴

Throughout Shakespeare’s works ‘heaven’ refers both to a realm of divine justice (Christian or pagan) and to the cosmos. If one approaches Iago’s statement in the context of the theatrum mundi, one might read the heavenly audience as capable of judgement, but perhaps as too apathetic or too dull-witted to discern between seeming and being, between good and bad actors.

In the context of the theatrum mundi, Othello finds cartographical perceptions of ‘habit’ (ethnography) and ‘habitat’ (geography) operating across both macro- and microcosmic scales of relation. Students can approach these concepts by thinking about how they might analogise literary conventions like ‘character’ and ‘setting’. Close analysis of the interactions between geographies and identities are, as Iago demonstrates, very often constructed by distorted perceptions and prejudices. At the same time, one finds Shakespeare asking: what constitutes the identity of the ‘theatre’ of the ‘world’? If our planetary world’s ‘habits’ are determined by its ‘habitat’, then how do our worlds emerge in relation to an infinite theatrical universe? This brief survey of Shakespeare’s thematic exploration of the theatre of the world in As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice and Othello aims to liberate the metaphor from cliché. It seeks to inspire teachers and students to join Shakespeare in questioning the factors that shape protean perspectives on justice, identity and perception. Next, I examine Shakespeare’s formal experiments reconstructing these dynamic perspectives in the context of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry V and Hamlet.

‘Mazèd World’: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, audiences find themselves in a time-wrinkled Athens populated by a mash-up of historical and fictional characters. They are then transported to a magical forest governed by capricious fairies where they discover that Queen Titania and King Oberon’s disputes have had disastrous impacts upon the environment (Shakespeare, Reference Shakespeare, Mowat, Werstine, Poston and Niles2024a: 2.1.84–120).Footnote ³⁷ Worlds, stages, settings and time are foregrounded in this dramatisation of plural world orders. This section provides two Explorations designed to help students apprehend the complexity of Titania’s ‘mazèd world’ (2.1.116). The first invites students to investigate how the play dramatises complex timescapes and settings as it multiplies world-systems and interpretive possibilities. The second provides a classroom adaptation of Urie Bronfenbrenner’s twentieth-century Ecological Systems Theory (EST). Bronfenbrenner visualises a cosmological analogue that supports recognising how interacting socio-political systems inform an individual’s development. EST lends itself directly to studying literary characters, but here I refigure it to de-centre humans so students may perceive how system interactions generate consequences that may not be immediately apparent, but are no less impactful. These Explorations can generate insight and context for contemplating one’s role in the theatrum mundi from micro- and macroscopic perspectives over time and at scale.

Thinking with scale in the classroom affords an opportunity to disrupt linear approaches to classroom knowledge-making. ‘Scale’ not only describes ‘difference’ but embodies it etymologically and as a homophone. From the Latin scala, or ladder, ‘scale’ initially conveys vertical hierarchies that are soon disrupted by the word’s polysemousness. One finds the ‘scales of justice’ weighing in to measure relative balances of law, equity, and mercy, even as the phrase slithers into biological connotations, describing the outer ‘skin’ of fish, reptiles, and some invertebrates.Footnote ³⁸ At the same time, musical scales invite thinking about arrangement and can set the stage for comprehending what Timothy Clark describes as scale’s inevitable derangement. For Clark, ‘derangement’ describes a loss of ‘linguistic and intellectual proportion’ when people speak of vast concepts like the environment (Reference Clark and Cohen2012: 150–151).Footnote ³⁹

Humans most often perceive scalar distance – or guess at it – through time.Footnote ⁴⁰ We experience time as linear, but the way humans mark it depends upon their location and perspective. Today, scientists debate how to measure time, specifically in relation to geological ages. The Holocene Epoch (Greek for ‘entirely recent’) that started 11,650 years ago recently has given way to the not unproblematic designation of the Anthropocene (Anthropos is Greek for ‘human’). The ‘Anthropocene’ marks the moment when human signatures emerge in the geological record (Lewis and Maslin, Reference Lewis and Maslin2015: 171).Footnote ⁴¹ This geological shift results from human activities like agriculture, deforestation, naval exploration and mining, from wars fought on land and at sea, plus the waste generated from these endeavours.

James C. Scott makes a strong case for recognising a ‘thin Anthropocene’ emerging from early hominid settlements around 12,000 bce that gave rise to many unintended environmental consequences long before the ‘thick Anthropocene’ that would date from geological radioactivity resulting from the first nuclear bomb blast (Reference Scott2017: 3, 19). Scott’s recognition of pluralised human signatures permits including another proposed start date for the Anthropocene: the 1610 ‘Orbis spike’.Footnote ⁴² The Orbis spike marks historically low levels of CO₂ that are concurrent with European colonial expansion in the Americas, and the deaths of millions of Indigenous people (Lewis and Maslin, Reference Lewis and Maslin2015: 174). Population estimates in the Americas before 1492 range from 54 to 61 million people. By 1650, these ‘numbers rapidly declined to a minimum of about 6 million people by 1650 via exposure to diseases carried by Europeans, plus war, enslavement and famine’ (Lewis and Maslin, Reference Lewis and Maslin2015: 175). Travis Weiland remarks that the Orbis spike ‘highlights power relations between peoples and their impact on the natural world. It also makes explicit the insidiousness of colonialism and its influence on the world’ (Reference Weiland, Wallace, Bazzul, Higgins and Tolbert2022: 186). Western-centric, dominant culture narratives frame early modern exploration as a celebrated endeavour, but with scalar perspectives afforded by hindsight, one may recognise how it also generated negative consequences for nearly all our planetary systems.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream provides an ideal opportunity for students to think about how international power relations and state-sanctioned acquisitiveness can impact both fictional and actual worlds. Titania directly recognises how her and Oberon’s ‘forgeries of jealousy’ contribute directly to what we now call climate change:

Titania directly attributes this rebellion of the natural world to her contentious relationship with Oberon. Since antiquity, humans have blamed natural disasters on divine displeasure with earthly events (Dilek and Kahya, Reference Dilek and Kahya2023: 819–828). Titania’s speech suggests that in Shakespeare’s time some blamed monarchs – those positioned as God’s representatives on earth – for climate disasters, plague and pestilence. As E.M.W. Tillyard observes, ‘it is a commonplace that the order of the state duplicates the order of the microcosm’ (Reference Tillyard1959: 88). That is not to say that people thought monarchs controlled the weather, but it was plausible to many that a ruler’s leadership had displeased their God. Shakespeare’s quarrelling fairies may be seen to either satirise superstitions about rulers’ influences on the natural world, or perhaps to underscore them. Either way, in a political climate of rigorous censorship, the fairy world provides a foil from which the play can engage with topical events from a position of relative safety.

The play’s fantastical setting also appears to question whether the natural world – in fairyland, or in Elizabethan England – adheres to some kind of orderly cosmological logic. Bottom’s dream suggests not. Awakening from a post-coital nap, Bottom’s bestial encounter with Titania seems unreal: ‘The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was’ (4.1.220–224). Bottom’s synaesthesia upon emerging from his drugged encounters with Titania is not just comedic; it enacts how dreams mirror disordered sensory and chronological information.

Shakespeare’s portrayal of dreamscapes adapts Thomas Nashe’s dream theories on offer in The Terrors of the Night. Here, Nashe associates the elemental collisions that combined to create our planet with those that engender dreams: ‘No such figure as the first Chaos whereout the world was extraught, as our dreames in the night. In them all states, all sexes, all places are confounded and meete together’ (Reference Nashe, McKerrow and Wilson1966: 356.11–14). In one sense, the modernised form of ‘meet’ means to encounter, but it also works as a homonym for ‘mete’, meaning to apportion reward or punishment (OED, mete, v.1), and as ‘meat’ or food for thought and for dreams. Bottom’s muddled dream directly enacts how ‘all states, all sexes, all places are confounded and meete together’ and raises a question that was as pressing for Shakespeare and his contemporaries as it is now: Does the disorder one experiences in dreams reflect that in the cosmos? According to Pythagoras in ancient Greece, ‘kosmos’ synonymised the ‘universe’ with ‘order’. (OED, cosmos, n.1, Etymology). Tillyard repeatedly asserts that ‘the conception of order is so taken for granted, so much a part of the collective mind’ of Elizabethans. But he struggles with the disorder one finds in Shakespeare’s and his contemporaries’ works and tries to explain it away as a kind of ‘queer regulation’ (Reference Tillyard1959: 9). Tillyard’s insistence on the Elizabethan belief in cosmic order seems like wishful thinking, especially when there is so much evidence to the contrary.

One funny-not-funny question the foregoing activity raises is: Are people essentially interchangeable? Some have argued that the lovers in the Forest are barely distinguishable from one another (Smith, Reference Smith2021: 87). But from the scale of the theatrum mundi, this question can be disturbing. Are people judged based on our individual merit? Or are we generalised into communities, social classes, generational age groups or species that are determined by time and place? Students might reflect upon how they are talked about as ‘Gen Z’ or as ‘Gen Alpha’. Are the generalisations applied to them fair? One big question arises: what implications might these formally overlapping elements have for the concepts of justice and equity in the theatrum mundi across time and space?

Titania’s ‘mazèd world’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream exemplifies the scale effects that emerge from asynchronously interacting world-systems, specifically those resulting from her conflict with Oberon. This ‘mazèd world’ emerges partly from meteorological and cosmological disruptions that mirror those actually impacting the northern hemisphere from the middle of the sixteenth century to the turn of the seventeenth. Extreme weather patterns may have favoured England when defeating the Spanish Armada in 1588, but in the mid-1590s, they led to ruined crops and famine for three years running – and that on the heels of plague and conflicts arising from European colonial expansion. How can teachers help students apprehend these moving pieces and their consequences?

At this point, I would like to introduce Urie Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory (EST) as an approach for analysing the roles of both human and non-human actors in the theatre of the world. Bronfenbrenner’s concentric model of an individual’s interacting ecosystems resonates directly with those of the early modern cosmos (see Stern et al., Reference Stern, Barbarin and Cassidy2021: figure 2, 12). This striking if serendipitous similarity urges one to think about how approaches toward tracing the complexity of human development analogise how early modern astronomers grappled with shifting understandings of the universe.

Bronfenbrenner’s work embraces the complex contexts that inform an individual’s growth. In 1965, he co-founded the Head Start program in the United States that aimed to inject positive turbulence into low-income areas and generate educational equity. From the outset, he recognises how race and class systemically impact a child’s development. He proposes EST to create an analytical framework that recognises how larger socio-political systems impact children from the outside-in and vice versa.

Interpersonal interactions remain central to current versions of EST, but I propose a flexible adaptation that can de-centralise humans. My goal is to help students realise how their understandings of the ‘theatre’ and the ‘world’ might be transformed from the perspectives of the organisms, plants, animals and elements that they interact with continually. This approach recognises ‘worlds’ as microcosms that emerge through interactions with larger macrocosms and supports students as they contemplate how complex systems work in literature and in life.

‘Complex’ in this sense does not simply mean ‘complicated’. A complicated system is mechanical; it may have a lot of moving pieces, but it is predictable and orderly. One of the key features of complexity, a term initially borrowed from the sciences, is ‘emergence’. Claire Hansen defines emergence as ‘the process by which a system produces new phenomena through the interaction of its parts’ (Reference Hansen2017: 11). Bronfenbrenner was interested in how a system’s ‘parts’, or individuals, interact with their settings to provoke emergence, or unpredictable outcomes. He recognises how changes in a person’s sense of selfhood emerge from their interactions with their proximal, or adjacent, systems, including their micro-, meso-, macro-, exo- and chronosystems. Ultimately, Bronfenbrenner aspires to create a manageable framework for cognitively grappling with how human activity on a massive scale impacts an individual and vice versa (Figure 6).

Figure 6 A figure showing Bronfenbrenner’s EST

(Abbeyelder, 2022).

Figure 6Long description

The individual is represented in the inner circle and is followed by the microsystem, the mesosystem, the exosystem, and the macrosystem.

What might Shakespeare’s ecological systems have looked like according to this model? Let’s focus on the London-based playwright in 1595, one proposed date for the composition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Broadly speaking, Shakespeare’s microsystem would include his direct interactions with others in a given setting. For Bronfenbrenner, this setting is usually the home environment. In 1595, Shakespeare lived in St. Helen’s parish, Bishopsgate. Footnote ⁴⁵ He likely rented a room in a boarding house where he would have known his fellow residents and taken meals. Although his family may not have been present, they also should be considered part of his immediate setting. The next sphere is the mesosystem; this includes the interactions between two different settings that contain the focal subject. Shakespeare’s mesosystem would include those in his microsystem, as well as the microsystems of those he interacted with, including his fellow actors and managers of The Lord Chamberlain’s Men and his family in Stratford. Next, the exosystem recognises how interacting social and political systems affect the focal subject. For example, poor harvests in the 1590s had led to exponential increases in food prices. In June 1595, anti-alien (immigrant) riots broke out in London, so too protests against rising fish and butter prices that resulted in Queen Elizabeth issuing a proclamation banning large gatherings in London (Colthorpe, Reference Colthorpe2017: 1595). Moving outward to Shakespeare’s macrosystem, one would find the systemic ideologies of cultures and subcultures that form his socio-political ecosystem. The Protestant Reformation and tensions throughout Europe would figure largely here. So too would colonial explorations like those of Sir Walter Raleigh to Guiana and South America. Shakespeare’s chronosystem would comprise the interactions among these ecosystems and the emergent changes they mutually produce over time. One might ask students: How might the consequences created by Shakespeare’s interacting ecosystems have informed his playwriting? How might these systems continue to exert influence now?

Box 1.9Exploration: Mapping Ecosystems

This Exploration provides a framework for thinking critically and creatively about how ecological systems interact to produce unpredictable results in the theatre of the world. Students analyse how a focal entity – an actor – interacts with both their immediate settings and larger interacting systems with which they share proximal links. The following sample model redefines Bronfenbrenner’s terminology in the context of the theatrum mundi. It aims to help students think across time and space as they analyse system interactions.

Getting Started

This sample activity explores ecological systems from the perspective of Corn in Titania’s reflection upon the ‘mazèd world’ (The Folger Shakespeare, Reference Shakespeare, Mowat, Werstine, Poston and Niles2024a: 2.1.84–116).

1. 1. What is the Focal Entity?

The focal entity analogises the role of the ‘actor’ in the theatre of the world. They both influence and are influenced by their surroundings.

Corn in Titania’s speech (see 2.1.97)

1. 2. Describe the elements that comprise the Microsystem.

The microsystem contains the stage business or immediate environment in which the ‘actor’ (focal entity) is engaged.

The ox, the field, the ploughman, rain

1. 3. Describe the elements that comprise the Mesosystem.

The Mesosystem analogises scenes on stage that may or may not include the ‘actor,’ but that represent the proximal interactions between those in different settings that both include the actor.

Hill, dale, forest, mead, paved fountain, the rushy brook, the beached margent of the sea, the winds, contagious fogs, pelting river, the ox, sheep (‘the fold’), crows, mazes, ‘the human mortals’ (2.1.104)

1. 4. Describe the elements that comprise their Exosystem.

The Exosystem represents one or more settings (setting = set of entities) that do not involve the ‘actor’ as an active participant. The interactions between these settings impact the actor.

Titania and Oberon’s ‘forgeries of jealousy’ (2.1.84)

1. 5. Describe the elements that comprise their Macrosystem

The Macrosystem comprises the cosmological environment. It can include large-scale systems and/or epistemologies that govern the formation and dissolution of communal interactions between entities. It can also represent dominant modes of knowledge-making and belief systems, empirical, philosophical or theological.

The Moon ‘governess of floods’; The seasons (‘the spring, the summer, / the chiding autumn, angry winter, change their liveries’) are not performing their ‘roles’ at their usual times.

1. 6. Describe the elements that comprise their Chronosystem.

The Chronosystem recognises how large-scale systems change over time and may subsequently transform communal patterns that impact the focal entity, both directly and by altering the configuration of ecological systems around it.

The Moon (‘pale in her anger’) informs Time in the play

Question and Reflect

Synthesis and Emergence

The last step is to analyse system interactions and see what emerges.

Starting with the ‘actor,’ select an element from another system and analyse the interacting systems that connects them and generate questions that might help one identify possible outcomes (emergence).

Moon│Corn: How does the moon’s asynchronous measure of time impact corn? How did the moon get out of synch? Titania is associated with the moon and she is upset with Oberon. What are the consequences? The corn dies, and the ploughman ‘loses his sweat’ (labour). Animals and people go hungry. What emerges? Corn has adopted a different role in the theatrum mundi. It no longer represents the fruit of the ox and ploughman’s labours and potential nourishment for their communities (‘mortal humans’) but is rotted food for crows. What consequences does Corn’s changed role generate among its proximal systems? (Figure 7).

Figure 7 Sample ecosystem as conceived by Olivia Copeland.

Figure 7Long description

It takes the model one step further by tracing what emerges from these interactions. Here, Corn emerges as an actor in the theatre of the world.

Question and Reflect

When I first experimented with this activity in class, students recognised how this model provided an opportunity to analyse what emerges from systemic interactions, whether they are adjacent or not. Here, thinking with the Moon and Corn led to the emergent recognition that Corn has adopted a different role in the theatre of the world. We contemplated what consequences Corn’s changed role generates among its proximal systems.

Teachers may introduce beginning students to thinking with ecosystems by populating a template and skipping to the final step in this exercise, ‘Synthesis and Emergence’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Then they may ask students to put different systems in conversation and think about the dynamic interactions that connect them. One can start with adjacent systems, or one might set students to generate hypotheses about the proximal interactions of two non-adjacent systems. More advanced students may start with blank templates and generate a map of system interactions independently or in groups.

The first students who tested this model were excited to work out the connections they discovered.Footnote ⁴⁷ But my favourite class sceptic wondered if Shakespeare ‘really’ cared about Corn. We embarked on research and enjoyed surprising (to us) results. First, in 1596, Queen Elizabeth levied two Proclamations that aimed to stabilise corn prices and redistribute grain to regions suffering a ‘dearth’. In this context, ‘corn’ refers to any kind of grain (OED, corn, n.1). The second vehemently proclaims against those ‘Badgers’ who had created a black market for corn. To those who withheld their stock to create increased demand and raise prices, she dictated that they should be ‘seuerly punished, to the terrour of others’ (Elizabeth I, Reference Elizabeth I1596). But the Crown struggled to enforce these proclamations throughout the country. In fact, Shakespeare appears to have been one of these ‘Badgers’; he was prosecuted in February 1598 for retaining eighty bushels of corn during a food shortage (Archer et al., Reference Archer, Thomas and Turley2015: 10).

Although ‘corn’ in the period is often synonymous with grains like wheat, rye and barley, the repetition of ‘maze’ in Titania’s speech cues us to think about its homonym maize, native to the Americas. Sir Walter Raleigh brought maize from America to England along with tobacco and potatoes in 1586; his cousin Sir Richard Grenville returned from a voyage with an Algonquin man from Roanoke whom he named ‘Raleigh’ (Watkins, Reference Watkins1792: 56–57). When we started thinking about the interacting systems that comprise the ‘mazèd world’ within and beyond the play, we did not expect to encounter evidence that exposes Shakespeare’s questionable ethics, or that engaged A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a vivid conversation with the Columbian Exchange.

More questions emerged. Does this play recast the theatre of the world as its near analogue in contemptus mundi – a metaphor that magnifies mediaeval Christian imperatives to hold worldliness in contempt?Footnote ⁴⁸ Enno Ruge sees sixteenth-century Calvinists adopting the contemptus mundi topos to place themselves ‘above’ the spectacles in the theatre of the world (Reference Ruge and Quiring2014: 32). How might this ‘contempt’ for the ‘world’ function as a rationale for colonial exploitation? Or, from a presentist perspective, how might this contempt play out in debates surrounding climate change?

A Midsummer Night’s Dream dramatises how diverse cosmological ecosystems interact across space and time. By exploring the play from non-human perspectives, one may see how ‘worlds’ might respond to their inhabitants’ contempt. This repositioning of focal entities can help students sustain lines of inquiry from radically unfamiliar and frequently marginalised perspectives. Perhaps the most exciting element students can take away from A Midsummer Night’s Dream is that it ‘opens at the close’ (Rowling, Reference Rowling2007: 134). That is to say, the close of one world-narrative opens another; every exit is an entrance to another place.Footnote ⁴⁹ Shakespeare continues in this vein of possibility in Henry V, a ‘Cronicle History’ that foregrounds the audience’s imagination as they are instructed to ‘entertain conjecture of a time / when creeping murmur and the poring dark / fills the wide vessel of the universe’ (Shakespeare, Reference Shakespeare, Mowat, Werstine, Poston and Niles2024g: 4.0.Sp1).

‘Conjecture of a Time’: Henry V

The Prologue-like Chorus (hereafter Prologue) of The Cronicle History of Henry V subverts vertical power hierarchies as it swivels perspectives from the theatrum mundi to the play’s performance space. The play’s overt metatheatricality creates layers of performance that beg questions about conventional understandings of the theatre of the world metaphor, especially its associations with mediaeval conceptions of the body politic and the divine right of kings.Footnote ⁵⁰ Consider the Prologue’s repeated similes and allusion to acting:

Repetition lends an epic tone to ‘Harry’s’ (King Henry V’s) apotheosis, his metamorphosis into the god of war. Yet ‘warlike’ and ‘like’ together undercut the transformation; Harry is himself and is not. He plays the part of Mars. His cloak of assumed divinity is a disguise, indistinguishable from what he wears among his men the night before the battle at Agincourt (see 4.1). A tacit question arises: is his Christian apotheosis and accession to the English throne also an act? This section’s Explorations are designed to help students interpret the competing voices in the play, first by using digital approaches to text-analysis, and then by analysing how Shakespeare augments his historical sources. Students are encouraged to think about how politics and theatre engage in conversation.

Henry V was composed and performed while England was at war on multiple fronts. Between 1585 and 1604, Queen Elizabeth’s privy council authorised the deployment of roughly 6,500 men per year, some to fight Spain in the Low Countries, others to colonise Ireland (Cahill, Reference Cahill2008: 13). Patricia Cahill notes that ‘virtually all able-bodied men who were not clergy and who were below the rank of baron and between the age of 16 and 60 were liable by statute for military service’. But in practice, it was the lower classes, ‘the poor, the old, and the unwell’ who were forced to serve Queen and country (Cahill, Reference Cahill2008: 14).Footnote ⁵² Students might reflect upon the demographics that comprise the military in their countries and how they are deployed. How would they feel if the draft were reinstated for all genders? Many have approached this play as an aspirational history that glorifies King Henry’s French victories. But such interpretations require one to ignore the epilogue’s reminder that monarchs die, and that hard-won lands are easily lost.

When the Prologue introduces ‘this scaffold’ as a synonym for the stage in Henry V, students can consider how it evokes the battles and casualties described both onstage and in the context of then-topical historical events. The Prologue’s request that audiences ‘judge’ this play also raises the spectre of punishment: ‘this scaffold’ could be a platform for the hanging, disembowelment and execution of criminals. As James Mardock observes, this association with public spaces where classes mix invites speculation by commoners, ‘while also suggesting that such speculation is itself transgressive’ (in Lyly, Reference Lyly and Mardock2025: para 2). As a pre-reading activity, students can create a rubric from which they may later assess Henry’s performance. What qualities does one value in a leader? They may compare their criteria with those on offer in Shakespeare’s sources, Edward Hall’s 1548 chronicles (see Para 5) and Raphael Holinshed’s later augmentations (Reference Shakespeare and Mardock2025). Should this play be judged in the context of the socio-cultural and political norms of mediaeval Europe? Those of Elizabethan England? Or, those of the twenty-first century?

Kristin M.S. Bezio recognises that leadership scholars generally have focussed on Henry’s positive attributes, his ‘rhetorical skill, personal accountability, self-confidence and affinity with the common man’ (Reference Bezio2013: 45). But, she suggests, they fail to recognise ‘Shakespeare’s awareness of the intricacies of leadership’ (Reference Bezio2013: 45). Bezio sees Henry engaged with performing leadership according to the moment he finds himself in. These performances suggest he is ‘a flawed king who nevertheless is able to achieve success because he does not rely on a presumption of absolute authority’ (Bezio, Reference Bezio2013: 54). Instead of ruling tyrannically, one finds Henry consulting others before making decisions, including his bishops, his soldiers, the French king and Catherine.Footnote ⁵³ Inviting students to take the foregoing considerations into account may help them push past simplistic binaries as to whether Henry is a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ king and realise the complex dynamics that inform leadership – especially when one is responsible for the health of a diverse body politic.

Whereas a Chorus might conventionally set out the arguments that follow in the drama itself, that is not what happens here. Instead, as James Shapiro suggests, Shakespeare makes ‘the alternation of the Chorus and the action rather than the rivalry of King Henry and the French Dauphin the main source of conflict’ (Reference Shapiro2005: 301). Before each act, they insistently juxtapose rhetorical questions with mandates that audience members supplement stage-business with their imaginations: ‘And let us, ciphers to this great account, / On your imaginary forces work’ (Pro.Sp1).Footnote ⁵⁴ They flatter, cajole and demand complicity as they ask audiences to adjudicate Henry’s justification for war and treatment of his subjects. Meanwhile, they lead audiences through labyrinthine timescapes: ‘now’, ‘here’, ‘there’, ‘o’er times’, ‘many years’, ‘hourglass’ and ‘history’:

Not only is ‘the labour of imagination’ thrust upon the audience, but so too judgement (Degenhardt, Reference Degenhardt2022: 200). Douglas Bruster and Robert Weimann claim that ‘this demand for the audience to ‘deck’ royalty points to the need for an act of cooperation; such an act sanctions a medium of perception hitherto unauthorised in the popular theatre’ (Reference Bruster and Weimann2004: 125). The phrase ‘kindly to judge our play’ may be an overused modesty trope but judgement is precisely what this Prologue sanctions. The question arises: Which monarch are audiences to judge?

Chronological distortions jump ‘o’er times’ to implicate both ‘Harry’ and the sitting monarch ‘now’. Should audiences judge Harry’s or the King’s actions in the context of twelfth-century history, or Queen Elizabeth’s in Shakespeare’s time? Those interested in textual transmission history can compare the 1600 quarto that omits the Choral roles with the 1623 Folio edition; both are readily available online.Footnote ⁵⁵ Without the Chorus figures, audiences may simply slip into the past and enjoy this historical narrative. But these figures repeatedly turn this theatrical mirror upon spectators and demand their presence in the present.

Box 1.10Exploration: Admit Me Chorus

This activity introduces students to distant reading practises using Voyant-Tools, an open-source text analysis platform with a short learning curve.Footnote ⁵⁶ Distant reading allows one to use computational tools to analyse vast amounts of text in a non-linear fashion. The first step in text analysis is simply to count words; Voyant-Tools will do that for you. Its default settings include a list of what are called ‘stop words’. These include function words like ‘the’, ‘to’ and ‘of’ as well as numbers and symbols. The programming has been designed to ‘stop’ counting these ‘words’ so users can focus on ‘contentful’ words (Froehlich, Reference Froehlich2019: np).

Getting Started

Upon uploading document(s), one may choose to work with an array of visualisations from the basic word cloud, trends, summary and words-in-context features, to a growing list of more sophisticated and evolving outputs.Footnote ⁵⁷

The following example models how one might analyse the data provided in the ‘Summary’ pane. Here, I used the Folger Shakespeare’s API (Application Program Interface) to create three documents for analysis (https://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/api). To extract these selections, I first selected ‘Text by character’ and chose the ‘Chorus’; this option gave me the Chorus’ lines from its ‘Prologue-like’ introduction through the epilogue; I used the same feature to extract King Henry’s lines. Next, I selected ‘Text, minus a character’s’ and again chose the Chorus, this time to remove their lines. I created three documents, respectively entitled: HV-Chorus, HV-Henry and HV-SansChorus (‘sans’ = without).Footnote ⁵⁸ Next, I uploaded all three extracts into Voyant-tools for comparison. I was curious to see whether there might be any statistical differences in the words used by the Chorus and those in the body of the play (Figure 8).

Figure 8 Voyant-tools visualisationFootnote ⁶⁰

Figure 8Long description

Statistics include the highest and lowest vocabulary density; the Chorus is highest at .460, whereas the play text without the Chorus comes in at .177. Most frequent words and distinctive words are also indicated.

Question and Reflect

Once you create a visualisation, the next step is to make observations and ask questions. In this case, it may be surprising that the Chorus’ vocabulary density is nearly triple that of the play-text alone.Footnote ⁵⁹ Vocabulary density measures the use and repetition of contentful words. The longer sentences and higher readability index scores numerically confirm that the Chorus’ language is significantly more complex than the rest of the play. Why are the styles of these two bodies of text so dramatically different? Students might observe that in the top ten distinctive words of the Chorus commands are prominent: ‘behold’ (9) and ‘suppose’ (2). How many imperative (command) verbs can they identify in the first Chorus? What are they (e.g. let, suppose, piece, divide, make, think, carry, jump, admit, hear, judge)? Additionally, students can compare the differences among distinctive words between the Chorus and the body-text. What themes emerge? If ‘France’ is a focal theme, then why does the Chorus alone redirect audiences to ‘London’ repeatedly? Ask students how language ‘works’ on them as the Chorus will later urge: ‘Work, work your thoughts’ (3.0.Sp1).

Finally, the most frequent distinctive words from the lines spoken by King Henry are surprising: ‘Kate’ and ‘love’.Footnote ⁶¹ Although Catherine of France and her nurse share a wonderful scene wherein she practises translating the names of body parts from French into English, only King Henry calls her ‘Kate’ and only in the final act of the play.Footnote ⁶² What might this repetition in conjunction with ‘love’ suggest? Is this romantic? Or, is it a form of linguistic coercion? Students and teachers might recreate these or other corpora and play more with Voyant-tools to see what other patterns may emerge.Footnote ⁶³ One might select scenes featuring the King and compare them with scenes where his soldiers from various regions take the stage. Or, one might dive deeply into topic-generated terminology surrounding justice, monarchy, bodies or love. Teachers can create a shared document to collect visualisations, hypotheses and questions that can help students identify emerging patterns of thought.

These competing bodies of text formally draw attention to the play’s anatomisation of the ‘body politic’, a mediaeval microcosm of the theatre of the world. Before I gloss this metaphor, one should recall that Shakespeare’s audiences likely would have been familiar with Prince Hal’s (Henry V’s nickname in the I Henry IV plays) early life as a wild child cavorting with Sir John Falstaff, Pistol, Bardolph, Nym and the Hostess from the two Henry IV plays. In Act 1, Canterbury describes the prince’s transformation upon his father’s death:

Anyone who has lost a parent has been transformed by the experience, but what Canterbury describes is supernatural. Not only is the King’s wildness exorcised, but so too is the ‘offending Adam’ and its associations with mortal bodies. According to the divine right of kings, Henry’s inheritance of the throne transforms him into a container for ‘celestial spirits’, the Christian God’s representative on earth. In this play, however, the Chorus figures remain sceptical about this transformation. Never do they refer to the King as ‘Henry’, but always ‘Harry’, a diminutive that indicates familiarity yet undercuts divinity. He may no longer be the wild ‘Prince Hal’ but from the Chorus’ perspective, nor is he an embodiment of God’s will.

These two sides of Henry/Harry, combined with the competing bodies of text, engage what Ernst Kantorowicz describes as the ‘two bodies’ metaphor. This concept, first documented in Edmund Plowden’s Reports, arose from a legal debate over a lease made by the underage Edward IV. To protect royal interests, Queen Elizabeth’s lawyers invented the idea of the ‘King’s Two Bodies’, distinguishing between the king’s natural body and his political body. The political body, unlike the natural body, is immune to physical defects and age, ensuring that actions taken in the king’s political capacity remain valid despite any limitations of his natural body (Kantorowicz, Reference Kantorowicz1957: 7). This duality challenges Elizabethan jurists to maintain both the unity and separation of these two bodies. Students can consider how Shakespeare’s linguistic representation of the play’s ‘two bodies’ supports or undercuts this metaphor.

Henry V thematically and formally puts pressure on ‘the body politic’ as a philosophical ‘proof’ that supports the divine right of kings and its vertical class hierarchies. This concept ties the well-being of a state directly to the orderly workings of its metaphorical head, arms, stomach, legs and feet. Christine de Pizan, a contemporary of the historical King Henry, emphasises these class hierarchies. According to de Pizan, ‘below’ the monarch, knights and nobles: ‘the other, common, people are like the stomach, feet and legs. For just as the stomach receives things procured by the head and the limbs, the deeds of princes and nobles will be for the good and love of the public; and just as the legs and feet support the actions of the human body, similarly the workers support all the other estates’ (Reference De Pizan1997: 203).Footnote ⁶⁴ Following John of Salisbury, de Pizan positions the torso, legs and feet as a capacious socio-cultural ‘other’, a subservient caste without social mobility or clear lines of communication to its head.Footnote ⁶⁵ When John describes the ‘feet’ of the republic, he does not sustain metaphorical humanity: ‘the number of feet in the republic surpasses not only the eight-footed crab, but even the centipede; one cannot enumerate them’. Although ‘inferiors must serve superiors’, John also maintains the opposite. The republic must keep their metaphorical feet in ‘shoes’. John concludes that ‘an afflicted people is like proof and irrefutable demonstration of the prince’s gout’ (Reference Nederman1990: VI.20.126). Gout is a disease brought on by over-indulgence in luxury foods and alcohol; it tends to manifest in foot pain and swelling.

John does not continue here to suggest that diseased ‘feet’ might lead to rebellion against the ‘head’ of the body politic. But Shakespeare’s Chorus appears to do just that:

Here, the problem is that England’s ‘body’ has produced ‘children’ who are neither ‘kind’ nor ‘natural’. On one level of interpretation, the Chorus sets the stage for the revelation and execution of the English traitors who conspired with the French to plot the King’s death. On another level, Henry is also a child of England’s body politic. Might the Chorus suggest that his person is somehow unkind or unnatural?

This moment is framed by two scenes in which the King has betrayed John Falstaff, his ostensible father figure in Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays. Act 2.1 recalls scenes from these plays, specifically ‘Prince Hal’s’ friendships with Falstaff, Bardolph, Nym, Pistol and the Hostess. When the Boy enters to tell them that Falstaff is seriously ill, the Hostess diagnoses his disease: ‘The King has killed his heart’ (2.1.Sp.26). Nym and Pistol also find the king responsible for Falstaff’s illness (2.1.Sp41-Sp42). When Henry became king, he turned his back on his close companion. Canterbury read this act as indicative of Henry’s divinity, yet his former friends see it as a betrayal.

Act 2.2 shifts to reveal the titled traitors in King Henry’s midst and his decision to execute them. ‘The mercy that was quick in us’ has dissolved. The King’s long speech reveals these betrayals as not only political but also personal. He bore Cambridge ‘love’, and Scroop ‘knews’t the very bottom of [his] soul’ (2.2.Sp25). ‘Touching our person’, Henry claims, ‘we seek no revenge. But we our kingdom’s safety must so tender’ (2.2.Sp30). This may sound big of him, but the placement of this scene combined with their summary execution is suspect. The very next scene reveals Falstaff has died. Turning his back on his friends when he becomes king not only signals Henry’s dubious character, but also can raise questions about his leadership. As head of England’s body politic, Henry is responsible for his metaphorical appendages. Or, in the context of Canterbury’s apiary metaphor, his ‘drones’ (cf. 1.2.Sp21). The Hostess’s address to her ‘honey-sweet husband’ situates Henry’s former companions in this essential yet paradoxically expendable class of English subjects.

Henry V’s anatomies of the body politic put pressure on the viability of a divine monarchy as a post-mediaeval political model. This play’s investment in anatomising the monarch’s role in the theatre of the world is underscored by Shakespeare’s generous augmentation of his sources. The following activity invites students to analyse how Shakespeare adapts and builds upon his sources to develop concepts which raise questions about leadership that remain not merely relevant, but urgent.

France was won and lost between the end of Act 5 and the Epilogue. The rival perspectives dramatised throughout Henry V draw attention to competing belief systems and raise questions about how justice is and should be adjudicated in times of change. Linear hierarchies and historical precedents surrounding the divine right of kings and their succession are simultaneously glorified and undercut. The play’s hyper-theatricality and enactment of plural world-systems of the Chorus and the playtext situate the King as an actor in the theatre of the world. As such, he will be judged both by God and by history. One wonders at the concurrence of the 1599 Bishop’s Ban on all history plays and performances of Henry V (See Section 2). To my mind, this play’s sceptical treatment of historical precedents clearly posed a threat to those protecting Queen Elizabeth’s position, not least because her reign was assured not by divine law, but by her father King Henry VIII’s will. Despite Hollywood and stage directors who insist this play enacts an epitome of patriotic glory, students might reflect upon what directors have had to cut to achieve that effect.

Just as the formal differences between the Chorus and play-text provide a parallax framework from which to compare competing versions of world order, so do the chronological microcosms that constitute each act and scene. As I discussed in Section 1, parallax provides a frame for thinking from two perspectives to discover a third. One finds Shakespeare continuing to experiment with these formal structures in Hamlet. In addition to the play’s transparent metatheatricality, Hamlet’s soliloquies similarly contrast with the action of the play-text to create multiple world-systems and to interrogate the relation of one’s inner world to those it interacts with.

‘This Distracted Globe’: Hamlet

Hamlet’s famous ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy raises complex questions about what it means to be an actor in the ‘theatre of the world’ (Shakespeare, Reference Shakespeare, Thompson and Taylor2006a: 3.1.55–88). One challenge is, much as we saw in Othello, that ‘seeming’ and ‘being’ are often at odds and defy clear distinctions. Hamlet’s soliloquy meditates how one should act in the ‘play’ of life as he wonders at his role beyond in the theatrum mundi. The ‘to be’ speech is marvellously provocative because it queries the role of the individual across different planes of ‘being’. Similarly, Hamlet’s ‘distracted globe’ emerges as a scalar device that challenges understanding one’s role on a world stage that emerges from relative perspectives.

This subsection’s Explorations ask students to hold two or more perspectives in mind and to consider what additional viewpoints emerge. The first provides a close reading exercise that recalls earlier discussions of parallax and introduces students to the literary figure ‘hendiadys’ in the context of the play’s textual variants. The second introduces accessible approaches to recognising the play’s metatheatrical elements, notably the play-within-a-play, that are scalable for different skill levels. If ‘all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players’ (Shakespeare, Reference Shakespeare, Mowat, Werstine, Poston and Niles2024b: 2.7.146), then Hamlet finds Shakespeare querying the reaches of an actor’s apprehension of world-systems in what he calls: ‘this distracted globe’ (Shakespeare, Q2, Reference Shakespeare and Bevington2024e: 782).

‘Distracted’ describes the senses of disintegration, dissolution and division that are consistent with Shakespeare’s sustained reflections on the untethering of terrestrial and cosmographical systems from ancient models (OED, distracted, v. and adj.). The play-text of Hamlet is also distracted, circulating in sundry variants. Printed in 1603, the first quarto (hereafter Q1) is believed to be a memorial reconstruction of the play, likely from the perspective of the actor Marcellus (Wells and Taylor, rpt. Reference Wells, Taylor, Jowett and Montgomery1997: 398; Thompson and Taylor Reference Shakespeare, Thompson and Taylor2006a: 12).Footnote ⁶⁶ This edition is shorter than and quite different from its successors; Zachary Lesser’s Hamlet After Q1 (Reference Lesser2015) details the nineteenth-century discovery of Q1 and its reception history. Hamlet was published again in 1604 (Q2). Q2 is longer and more polished than Q1, more closely resembling today’s popular editions.Footnote ⁶⁷ Exploring Hamlet’s textual history can help students engage with the play’s dramatisation of shifting perspectives that generate diverse epistemologies, or ways of knowing, for actors in the theatre of the world.

The following Exploration invites students to practise close reading as they pay special attention to the workings of a rhetorical form of parallax called hendiadys. Hendiadys describes how meaning emerges from the combination of two words: ‘O, ‘tis most sweet / When in one line two crafts directly meet’ (Shakespeare, Reference Shakespeare and Bevington2024e: 2576–2577).Footnote ⁶⁸ Both Frank Kermode (Reference Kermode2000: 101–102), and from a different perspective, Robert N. Watson, have discussed how Shakespeare employs hendiadys to generate novel linguistic combinations, whether for the sake of art or entertainment (Reference Watson, Saenger and Loehlin2014: 86–106). Here, parallax provides a framework that may help students reflect how two perspectives can combine to produce novel third terms. Slavoj Žižek’s arguments for dialectical materialism may be of interest to advanced students, but even beginners might appreciate his challenge to tidy approaches to semantic parallax (Reference Žižek2006: 4). If one approaches what Žižek calls the ‘parallax gap’ in a figure of paired words and/or concepts, one may discover Shakespeare subverting convention to again recall Touchstone and contemplate the virtue in ‘if’ (As You Like It, Reference Shakespeare, Mowat, Werstine, Poston and Niles2024b: 5.4.106–107). Some students may be tempted to ignore this linguistic doubling and get to a ‘point’ (Shakespeare, Ham., [1603] 2006: 7.115), but what if ‘one line’ of inquiry is not Shakespeare’s aim in his insistent appositions of similar-but-different words?

Hamlet’s ‘distracted globe’ manifests multiple connotations that collide across vastly different scales of relation:

‘Globe’ emerges here as a scalar device that simultaneously juxtaposes the macrocosm containing interacting systems that include heaven, earth and hell with Hamlet’s heart, sinews and skull: the container of his memory. ‘All you’ underscores plurality. Students can consider how Hamlet’s ‘globe’ is a metonymy for key themes in the play, not limited to ‘remembering’, but extending to cognition, conscience and cosmology.

This ‘distracted globe’ carries with it a ‘coincidence of multiple globes’ that invite reflection upon its scalar connotations (Goldberg et al., Reference Goldberg, Frank, Newman, Frank, Newman and Goldberg2016: 11). Gavin Hollis’s extension of Craig Dionne’s conception of the ‘sphere reflex’ is helpful here. One finds characters negotiating ‘views from above and from below’ in ‘global’ or ‘spherical’ terms: ‘they think with a small object – say an egg or a shell – in order to explain a larger phenomenon … or with a large object – say, a celestial body – to explain a more localised phenomenon … Thinking spherically becomes a gesture toward the comprehension of their world’ (Hollis, Reference Hollis2022: 248). The foregoing passage demonstrates Hamlet engaged in precisely this kind of cognitive activity as he tries to make sense of a universal ‘globe’ that paradoxically contains and looses heaven, earth, hell and a supernatural realm of ghosts.

Simultaneously, ‘this distracted globe’ links the ‘world of the mind’ to Shakespeare’s eponymous ‘Globe’ theatre (Goldberg et al., Reference Goldberg, Frank, Newman, Frank, Newman and Goldberg2016: 11). How does Hamlet’s ‘seat’ of memory, or ‘distracted globe’ extend from the Globe theatre in which the play might be performed to the theatre of the world? Do these multiple ‘globes’ collide randomly throughout the universe, or are they part of a macrocosmic whole?Footnote ⁷¹ Teachers might ask students to deliberate how ‘globe’ functions as what Roland Greene has called an ‘engine-word’ (Reference Greene2020: 163), and replace ‘world’ with ‘globe’ in the ‘What is a world?’ Exploration in Section 1.

Hamlet’s ‘distracted globe’ emphasises these associations of separation and totality through the play’s metatheatrical elements. Metatheatre, a term coined in the twentieth century, broadly refers to how plays highlight their own artificial nature through devices like the play-within-a-play.Footnote ⁷² In classroom settings, some of these discussions often get bogged down in overly detailed arguments that can be confusing. However, Stephen Purcell’s suggestion that Shakespearean metatheatricality operates similarly to a pun can help students recognise how metatheatre yokes different narrative planes together. Puns bring two distinct ideas into collision, relying on the reader’s ability to simultaneously recognise the coexistence of these ideas within the same utterance (Reference Purcell2018: 22). Purcell offers ‘a good pun is its own re-word’ as an example that recombines the cliché ‘virtue is its own reward’ with ‘re-wording’, or linguistic facility (Reference Purcell2018: 22). How many interpretations can students generate from the collision of ‘virtue’ and ‘words’? Parallax again provides a frame to think about what emerges from the gap between two separate ideas. One can apply a similar approach to interpreting the metatheatrical elements of Shakespeare’s plays.

In Hamlet, the famous line ‘the play’s the thing’ underscores the significance of theatrical performance, and the play-within-a-play draws attention to the tension between verisimilitude and artifice (Shakespeare, 2024d: 1644). This metatheatrical device creates a mirroring effect by staging a microcosm of the play’s central themes. Through this dramatic reflection, the audience is invited to scrutinize the characters’ performances. Within the satirical framework of the theatrum mundi, this mirroring aims to expose the hypocrisies of individuals, groups and governments, both among the actors onstage and the spectators observing them. Hamlet expresses this concept when he reflects:

He thus hatches a plot to test the ghost’s claim that Claudius murdered his father: ‘the play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King’ (Reference Shakespeare, Thompson and Taylor2006a: 2.2.539–540). By mirroring enactments of Claudius’ supposed crime onstage, Hamlet hopes to find his guilt or innocence reflected in his stepfather’s demeanour. One might ask students to imagine that they’re watching a favourite show with friends that features a scene that mirrors something they have done that makes them feel guilty or shameful. Would they fidget or laugh nervously? Might their face betray discomfort? With their responses in mind, do they think Hamlet’s strategy will work?

Ultimately, Hamlet demonstrates that knowledge – of the macrocosmic globe and microcosmic human – is more relative than fixed. Similar to Debapriya Sarkar’s claim about Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy, each play under discussion experiments with formal elements to envision ‘a reality that could be otherwise, suggesting a literary epistemology that understands knowledge as conceivable rather than verifiable’ (Reference Dadabhoy and Mehdizadeh2023: 2). If, as Harold Bloom claims, Hamlet ‘is theatre of the world’ (my emphasis, Reference Bloom1999: 383), then this rhetorical device emerges as a framework for testing and retesting characters’ performances from the several perspectives afforded by shifting stages. In a classroom, these stages might be the paper ones of variant texts and editions, or they may be vivified in performance. Hamlet cannot be tidily resolved, but instead requires readers and audiences alike to consider ranging possibilities. Like the rest of the plays under discussion here, Hamlet provides an opportunity to help students develop habits of mind from which they regularly will consider all possibilities and test hypotheses from multiple perspectives.