At the end of the sixteenth century, London was grappling with an unprecedented environmental crisis: rapid population growth produced rampant pollution, land mismanagement, and epidemic disease; entire species of fish disappeared from the Thames; and the city’s growing demands for food and fuel depleted the nation’s natural resources. This dissertation locates innovative responses to these new environmental pressures on the early modern stage. Shakespeare and his contemporaries, I argue, shaped early attitudes and expectations about the ecology of London and its sustainability. Each chapter of “Urban Ecology” focuses on a different resource problem plaguing early modern London—food scarcity, decayed waterways, air pollution and a shortage of space to bury the dead—and shows how groups of plays addressed them using the material and imaginative resources of dramatic form. In constructing stories in which these ecological issues figure prominently, and in offering their own creative responses to these problems, early modern playwrights display a nuanced understanding of London’s environment as a co-fabrication between human and nonhuman forces, even before the terms “ecosystem” or “ecology” had emerged in scientific discourse. To make this co-fabrication visible, “Urban Ecology” reads early modern plays alongside a rich archive of archaeological evidence that re-situates the theater industry as a both a product of and active participant in the London ecosystem. I show how playing companies contributed to urban air pollution by burning noxious sea coal to produce spectacular effects that attracted paying customers; the Bankside playhouses, located on reclaimed marshland, were vulnerable to the Thames and its patterns of tidal flooding; and food sourced from both local and global supply chains was regularly sold during performances. By reconstructing this complex interplay between drama and its environment, this dissertation begins to center the early modern theater industry in the history of ecological thought.

Poetry and romance in Shakespeare's non-historical plays have come into their own again with revivals of The Tempest directed by Margaret Webster and with the production of As You Like It, which features Katherine Hepburn. Unfortunately, the time limit of this paper has been set for the end of 1950, so it is only possible to mentin in passing Laurence Oliver's and Vivian Leigh's exciting and unique idea of presenting Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra on alternate nights. In spite of early curtains, which make it necessary for the theatre-goer to eat his dinner in a hurry, the two Cleopatras have been playing to packed houses, first in London, then in New York in 1951 and 1952. From 1750 to 1950, I should like to consider each of the history plays separtely and in detain, to show how and why their stars rose and fell upon the American horison.

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