While our physical surroundings fashion our identities, we, in turn, fashion the natural elements in which or with which we live. This complex interaction between the human and the non-human already resonated in Shakespeare's plays and poems. As details of the early modern supra- and infra-celestial landscape feature in his works, this dictionary brings to the fore Shakespeare's responsiveness to and acute perception of his 'environment' and it covers the most significant uses of words related to this concept. In doing so, it also examines the epistemological changes that were taking place at the turn of the 17th century in a society which increasingly tried to master nature and its elements. For this reason, the intersections between the natural and the supernatural receive special emphasis. All in all, this dictionary offers a wide variety of resources that takes stock of the 'green criticism' that recently emerged in Shakespeare studies and provides a clear and complete overview of the idea, imagery and language of environment in the canon.

With the recent turn to science studies and interdisciplinary research in Shakespearean scholarship, Shakespeare and Science: A Dictionary, provides a pedagogical resource for students and scholars. In charting Shakespeare's engagement with natural philosophical discourse, this edition shapes the future of Shakespearean scholarship and pedagogy significantly, appealing to students entering the field and current scholars in interdisciplinary research on the topic alongside the non-professional reader seeking to understand Shakespeare's language and early modern scientific practices. Shakespeare's works respond to early modern culture's rapidly burgeoning interest in how new astronomical theories, understandings of motion and change, and the cataloging of objects, vegetation, and animals in the natural world could provide new knowledge. To cite a famous example, Hamlet's letter to Ophelia plays with the differences between the Ptolemaic and Copernican notions of the earth's movement: “Doubt that the sun doth move” may either be, in the Ptolemaic view, an earnest plea or, in the Copernican system, a purposeful equivocation. The Dictionary contextualizes such moments and scientific terms that Shakespeare employs, creatively and critically, throughout his poetry and drama. The focus is on Shakespeare's multiform uses of language, rendering accessible to students of Shakespeare such terms as “firmament,” “planetary influence,” and “retrograde.”

Shakespeare lived when knowledge of plants and their uses was a given, but also at a time of unique interest in plants and gardens.His lifetime saw the beginning of scientific interest in plants, the first large-scale plant introductions from outside the country since Roman times, and the beginning of gardening as a leisure activity. Shakespeare's works show that he engaged with this new world to illuminate so many facets of his plays and poems. This dictionary offers a complete companion to Shakespeare's references to landscape, plants and gardens, including both formal and rural settings.It covers plants and flowers, gardening terms, and the activities that Shakespeare included within both cultivated and uncultivated landscapes as well as encompassing garden imagery in relation to politics, the state and personal lives. Each alphabetical entry offers an definition and overview of the term discussed in its historical context, followed by a guided tour of its use in Shakespeare's works and finally an extensive bibliography, including primary and secondary sources, books and articles.

This encyclopaedic account of animals in Shakespeare's plays and poems, provides readers with a much-needed resource by which to navigate the recent outpouring of critical and historical work on the topic. This dictionary extends its coverage to include insects, fish and mythic creatures, as well as the places, practices and lore pertaining to all animal-oriented experiences of early modern life. It emphasizes the role of animality in defining character, and is attentive to the instabilities of the human-animal boundary as they were theatrically represented, exploited and interrogated, but it is also concerned with the material presence of animals on stage and in everyday life in Shakespeare's world. The volume is a new tool for instructors, but is also a resource for critics and scholars in the many disciplines engaged with animal studies, posthumanist theory, ecostudies and cultural studies.

The first comprehensive history of Byzantine warfare in the tenth century

Shakespeare / Nature sets new agendas for the study of nature in Shakespeare's work. Offering a rich exploration of the intersections between the human and non-human worlds, the chapters focus on the contested and persuasive language of nature, both as organic matter and cultural conditioning. Rooted in close textual analysis and historical acuity, this collection addresses Shakespeare's works through the many ways in which 'nature' performs, as a cultural category, a moral marker and a set of essential conditions through which the human may pass, as well as affect. Addressing the complex conditions of the play worlds, the chapters explore the assorted forms through which Shakespeare's nature makes sense of its narratives and supports, upholds or contests its story-telling. Over the course of the collection, the contributors examine plays including Macbeth, Julius Caesar, The Tempest, The Taming of the Shrew, Othello, Love's Labour's Lost, Hamlet, Timon of Athens and many more. They discuss them through the various lenses of philosophy, historicism, psychoanalysis, gender studies, cosmography, geography, sexuality, linguistics, environmentalism, feminism and robotics, to provide new and nuanced readings of the intersectional terms of both meaning and matter. Approaching 'nature' in all its multiplicity, this collection sets out to examine the divergent and complex ways in which the human and non-human worlds intersect and the development of a language of symbiosis that attempts to both control and create the terms of human authority. It offers an entirely new approach to the subject of nature, bringing together disparate methods that have previously been pursued independently to offer a shared investment in the intersections between the human and non-human worlds and how these discourses shape and condition the emotional, organic, cultural and psychological landscapes of Shakespeare's play worlds.

Reprint of 1902 ed Every word in the plays and poems is defined and located