The Forest of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Randall Martin

In the Weeds

In our third episode on the forests of the Western imagination, I discuss A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Randall Martin, Professor of English at the University of New Brunswick and author of Shakespeare & Ecology.

Associated with the night, with dreams, the imagination, madness, and the theater itself, the forest of A Midsummer Night’s Dream - inhabited by fairies who delight in playing pranks on the Athenians who enter it - is not merely a passive backdrop but, rather, a potent realm that challenges many of the traditional categories of Western culture, including the distinction between humans and other living beings.

Randall Martin tells us about the actual forests of Shakespeare’s time and the emerging ecological problems of Early Modern England, which sound surprisingly familiar. Shakespeare, he tells us, has a “fantastic ability to mirror back to us our most recent ideas and concerns and emotions,” and, indeed, A Midsummer Night’s Dream turns up a whole host of environmental concerns that haunt us today, from climate change to worries about genetic engineering to invasive species.
For links and further information see https://in-the-weeds.net/podcast/the-forest-of-shakespeares-a-midsummer-nights-dream-with-randall-martin/