By Professor Liz Schafer, Department of Drama and Theatre
Relevant United Nations’ SDG goals:
With COP 27 being held in Egypt, a country dependent in so many ways on the river Nile, the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal 6: to ‘Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all’ – must surely resonate. In Egypt, according to Mark Antony in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra,
they take the flow o’the Nile
By certain scales i’the pyramid; they know,
By the height, the lowness, or the mean, if dearth
Or foison follow. The higher Nilus swells,
The more it promises: as it ebbs, the seedsman
Upon the slime and ooze scatters his grain,
And shortly comes to harvest.
Shakespeare can be erratic in matters of geographical fact – he locates a shipwreck off the coast of landlocked Bohemia in The Winter’s Tale – but Mark Antony’s comments on measuring the Nile flood levels probably derive ultimately from the Roman historian Pliny and may look back to actual ancient practices that attempted to predict whether harvests would be good or bad.
There is much evidence that Shakespeare was very attentive to matters such as river floods, ‘dearth or foison’ and climate disruption. He was a country boy from a market town, Stratford-upon-Avon, working in the big smoke. In the early modern period the increased use of coal as a fuel meant that London really was turning into the big smoke. Shakespeare’s theatrical career took place during climate chaos, caused by the first major deforestation in Europe as forests were felled to build homes and ships, and to provide fuel for rapidly developing industries such as glass and gunpowder. Shakespeare’s observations of the misery this entails appear in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when the fairy queen, Titania, delivers what is nowadays routinely called her climate catastrophe speech (2.1.88-114). Rivers are flooding because the winds
have sucked up from the sea
Contagious fogs which, falling in the land,
Have every pelting river made so proud
That they have overborne their continents.
In this bleak world, fields are ‘drownèd’, and ‘The seasons alter’ and ‘change/ Their wonted liveries’. There is no more fun: ‘The human mortals want [lack] their winter cheer’. A popular game, where a giant playing board was cut into the village green, is unplayable; ‘The nine man’s morris is filled up with mud’. Titania’s images of mud-clogged human misery seem eerily prophetic today even if her analysis – it’s because of her row with her husband, the fairy king, Oberon – is unscientific.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of Shakespeare’s most frequently performed plays. For over 400 years, Titania has been telling audiences, and readers, about the misery of soggy, waterlogged climate catastrophe. Last year she was backed up by the Foreign Minister of Tuvalu, Simon Kofe. In a poignant piece of eco-performance, Kofe addressed COP 26 via a video in ‘business as usual’ mode, besuited and at a lectern.
The camera then pans back to reveal that Kofe is standing in water, in the ocean that is nibbling away at his country. In Tuvalu people are only too aware of ‘the height, the lowness, or the mean’ level of water. We need to listen more respectfully to Kofe, and to Titania. We need to act, to dump ‘business as usual’, to counter the oil lobbyists crowding around the negotiating tables at COP27, to work for a post-petroleum world, and begin managing the world’s most precious, and dangerous, commodity, water, sustainably.