Article for 'Go Green'
On Easter Sunday, with an article and an editorial in the Sunday Times, three scholars at Aberystwyth University were plunged into the limelight with their new research on Shakespeare and the politics of food. Perhaps that sounds a little odd. But the ground-breaking work, led by literary scholar Dr Jayne Archer, showed how issues of food in Shakespeare’s day – its availability, its scarcity, and questions about who controlled food supplies – were crucial to both the playwright himself and to his plays.
According to Archer and her fellow researchers, Professor Richard Marggraf Turley (another literary scholar) and Professor Howard Thomas (a plant scientist), it seems that Shakespeare was a shrewd player in the food game, buying, storing and selling grain, and using the profits to scoop up prime crop-growing land. His dealings certainly brought him up against the law, which is where the accusations of grain hoarding and tax dodging come in.
But perhaps most importantly, Shakespeare’s personal involvement in the food supply chain found its way into his writing in striking ways. For example, according to the research, matters of food and hunger, of crops and the land on which they are grown are fundamentally important to the great tragedy King Lear. For the scholars, the drama of that particular play is rooted in nothing less than what they call a ‘resource war’ – a quarrel over who owns the land that can provide for the populations of both the present and the future.
News of the three scholars’ work has been picked up around the world, with the Sunday Times, the Daily Mail, the BBC, MSN News, Germany’s Der Tagesspiegel, the LA Times, and the Huffington Post being just some of the places where the story has been covered. Public reactions to news of their research have been mixed, ranging from “this story makes Shakespeare seem more human and accessible” to “Welshski kommies knock England’s national hero”. However, Marggraf Turley emphasizes that the heart of the team’s work is their attempt ‘to reconnect Shakespeare’s plays with the crisis of food supply, distribution and sustenance in the England of Shakespeare's own day – a crisis in which, through his business dealings, the playwright was himself a player.’
As an English literature graduate myself, such insights into our literary heritage are fascinating. But they are also vitally important, because they connect literature with questions that are crucial to our own cultural and environmental health. Specifically, they make us engage with questions of sustainability – questions about how our environment is used to provide for ourselves and others, about who controls the resources we need for our lives in the present, and about the fate and security of those resources moving into the future.
Novels, poetry and drama offer us a rich source of insights into the relationship that we have with the physical environments in which we live and work. There are a plethora of opportunities to explore the ways in which literary texts deal with environmental matters – how they do (or don’t) respond to things like green spaces, urban conditions, pollution, extinction, and resources. Exploring links between literature and sustainability has the potential to create new insights, even into authors and texts that have been pored over for generations. Sustainability is most famously defined as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (in the UN’s 1987 Brundtland report). This issue obviously has a high profile in Wales at the moment, as the Welsh Government pursues an important agenda of embedding concepts of sustainability into public life.
At the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, we set up INSPIRE to ensure that concerns about sustainability are embedded not only into how the University pursues its own business but also into the learning experience of all our students. From my perspective, applying a sustainability lens to a subject almost always throws up new insights. So it seemed a perfect opportunity to link up with ASLE-UKI – the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, UK & Ireland – to see if together we could provide a platform for literary scholars who are interested in looking anew at sustainability questions.
It’s been a really fruitful collaboration. INSPIRE and ASLE-UKI combined to put on a one-day symposium on literature and sustainability at TSD’s Lampeter campus in March which attracted attendance not just from Wales, but from the UK more widely, Ireland, the USA and South Africa. We created a public lecture competition on the same subject, with the prize being a slot to deliver the winning entry at this year’s Hay Festival. Judged by a small panel headed up by scholar Dr Adeline Johns-Putra (current Chair of ASLE-UKI and Reader in English at the University of Surrey), the winning entry was by the Aberystwyth team whose research has subsequently generated so much interest.
At INSPIRE, we are delighted to be playing a part in supporting the sort of scholarship that our winners have produced. Issues of sustainability are crucial to our own lives and to the lives of future generations, so it is fantastic when top quality scholarship gets to grips with the important questions that sustainability raises.
The lecture, ‘Reading with the Grain: Sustainability and the Literary Imagination’, the first INSPIRE Lecture on Literature and Sustainability took place on the Hay on Earth stage at this year’s Hay Festival. If questions of sustainability can push academics towards the sort of ground-breaking work that Jayne Archer, Richard Marggraf Turley and Howard Thomas are producing, then we really must listen to what they have to say. The sort of work they are doing can tell us more than ever before about how, historically, we have engaged with the environment in which we live and those new insights can help us as we try to move forward into a more sustainable future.
In January 2014, we will be announcing next year’s Literature and Sustainability competition. Wales is already renowned across the world for its international arts competitions with Cardiff Singer of the World, Artes Mundi and the National and International Eisteddfods. I hope that this exciting new collaboration between INSPIRE, ASLE-UKI and the Hay Festival will contribute towards Wales being recognised also for its commitment to creating a more sustainable future for its citizens.