Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory

Jennifer A. Munroe

Jennifer A. Munroe is a professor of English at UNC Charlotte.

Ecofeminism: A philosophical and political movement that combines ecological concerns with feminist ones and regards both as the results of male domination of society.

Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory considers how we might understand Shakespeare as immersed in an environment where men, women, nonhuman animals, and plants necessarily lived in relations that were at once symbiotic and in tension. By looking closely at Shakespeare’s works, Author Jennifer Munroe looks at both representations of “environment” that might provide insight into these relations in early modern English history — especially those related to gendered identity — and at how the way people understood their relationship to “environment” 400 years ago might help us redress our own environmental crises today.

Through fresh, detailed readings of Shakespeare’s poetry and drama, the authors articulate ways in which we can better understand the world of Shakespeare’s plays and the relationships between men, women, animals, and plants that we see in them.

Munroe co-wrote Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory with Rebecca Laroche who teaches Shakespeare, early modern women’s writing, and the environmental humanities at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.

Munroe is a professor of English at UNC Charlotte. She is a founding member of EMROC (Early Modern Recipes Online Collective), which is developing a public-access database of transcribed early modern manuscript recipes. She is working on an ecofeminist literary history of science titled, Mothers of Science: Women, Nature, and Writing in Early Modern England.

She also is the author of Gender and the Garden in Early Modern English Literature (Ashgate, 2008) and editor of Making Gardens of Their Own (Ashgate, 2007). Munroe was co-editor with Laroche of Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity (Palgrave, 2011), and co-editor with Lynne Bruckner and Edward J. Geisweidt of Ecological Approaches to Early Modern Texts: A Field Guide to Reading and Teaching (Ashgate, 2015).

For more information about the Personally Speaking series, please visit cws.charlotte.edu/stage-clas/ps.