Dan Brayton Shakespeare's Ocean

Annotation

<p><p>Study of the sea--both in terms of human interaction with it and its literary representation--has been largely ignored by ecocritics. In <i>Shakespeares Ocean,</i> Dan Brayton foregrounds the maritime dimension of a writer whose plays and poems have had an enormous impact on literary notions of nature and, in so doing, plots a new course for ecocritical scholarship.</p><p>Shakespeare lived during a time of great expansion of geographical knowledge. The world in which he imagined his plays was newly understood to be a sphere covered with water. In vital readings of works ranging from <i>The Comedy of Errors</i> to the valedictory <i>The Tempest,</i> Brayton demonstrates Shakespeares remarkable conceptual mastery of the early modern maritime world and reveals a powerful benthic imagination at work.</p></p>