Shakespearean performances. All the World's a (Wet) Stage

Lowell Duckert is Associate Professor of English, specialist of early modern drama and environmental criticism (University of Delaware, USA).

En résumé

Actors in Pericles (1607-8) and The Tempest (1611) do not merely act drenched during their stormy scenes. Stage directions call for the players to literally “enter wet.” Why not dry? William Shakespeare’s plays ponder the turbulent relationship between oceans and humans in the early seventeenth century. In this podcast, I will discuss how water’s physical presence invited audiences to question the separation between human and nonhuman, dry subject and wet object. When watery bodies materialize on the early modern stage, they indicate fluid kinds of embodiment in which water and the human are enmeshed. To “enter wet” is to enter into slippery alliances leading to both catastrophe and joy. The plays’ overlooked stage directions prove that Shakespeare thought deeply about the ecological uncertainties of his time—and by returning to them, I suggest, we may reimagine our own interactions with the world’s unsteady waters.