Shakespeare's Wilderness

Shakespeare is often praised for his love and understanding of nature. Less has been written about how he acquired those qualities. Biographers assume they originated from a youth in the countryside around Stratford-on-Avon. Yet relatively few Shakespeare works are set in the settled English midlands. More are set in wild places: a French forest in "As You Like It," British heaths and moors in "Macbeth" and "King Lear," a Balkan seacoast in "The Winter's Tale," a Mediterranean desert island in "The Tempest."Shakespeare's evocations of these places are brief, as befits play scripts, but they are vivid and they often contain precise details about natural features as well as original, surprisingly modern, thoughts about the man-nature relationship. Did Shakespeare simply imagine wild places during a life spent commuting between Stratford and London? Or did he experience them, and if so, how? In "Shakespeare's Wilderness," one of America's leading nature writers tackles these questions. David Rains Wallace draws on his own experience of Shakespeare and nature, and on nature-related English literature from "Beowulf" to a twentieth century poet laureate, Ted Hughes, and comes up with some surprising answers. "In his masterpiece of a hybrid work of literary criticism and natural history... Wallace has seized on a bronco of a thesis statement and he's masterfully followed it through the entire Western Canon." Mark Anderson, author, Shakespeare by Another Name.