Shakespeare’s Theater of Nature Science, Religion, and the Orders of Mimesis in Early Modern Europe

Shakespeare’s Theater of Nature argues that Shakespeare combined art and nature in new ways while experimenting with relations between words, images, and objects as sources of knowledge and pleasure.  Shakespeare’s re-centering of nature as a source of theatrical representation in a range of plays follows debates in natural philosophy and theology about how to understand divinity in and through the order of nature (ordo creationis). Early chapters analyze early modern reframing of nature by printed books of botany, cosmology, and history—as well Tudor interludes that center nature as a subject—while later chapters offer readings of eight plays by Shakespeare that draw on classical, medieval, and early modern debates in natural philosophy and theology to create new modes of dramatic mimesis. 

1. Introduction.- 2. Representing Nature.- 3. Staging Nature.- 4. Natural Idolatry in Two Gentlemen of Verona.- 5. Visualizing Nature in the History Plays.- 6. Natural Medicine in All's Well that Ends Well and Macbeth.- 7. The Nature of Divination in Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra.- 8. King Lear and the Orders of Nature.- 9. Epilogue: Rethinking Nature.

Aaron Kitch is Associate Professor of English at Bowdoin College, USA, and the author of Political Economy and the States of Literature in Early Modern England (2009). Together with Jennifer Rust, he is the co-editor of Rethinking Science and Religion in Early Modern Culture (2025) and has published articles in Studies in English Literature, Religion and Literature, Shakespeare Quarterly, Modern Philology, and Configurations, among other journals.