The Ecologies of Dress in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

[headline]Offers an ecocritical approach to understanding dress in early modern plays and performance This volume posits that clothing in the early modern period was conceived of as the prime interface between the human body and its multiple environments. Both a second skin and a human-made artefact, dress can indeed be considered as the most immediate site for the elaboration of any sort of ecology, in its etymological sense of a 'discourse' of the oikos, or of the place we inhabit. This collection shows how early modern English literature, and drama in particular, interrogates the crucial relationship between humans and the world that surrounds them in its staging of dress. It also argues that the theatrical productions of the time derived much of their creative energy from this process, by which climates and their effects were translated and embodied through dress on the mediating stage. Its various chapters study early modern clothes in their ecosystems and challenge the inside/outside, natural/artificial and body/environment binaries. [bio]Sophie Chiari is Professor of Early Modern English Literature at Université Clermont Auvergne, France. Her recent works include Shakespeare's Representation of Weather, Climate and Environment (2019) and Shakespeare and the Environment: A Dictionary (2022). She has edited or co-edited various collections of essays including Performances at Court in the Age of Shakespeare (with John Mucciolo, 2019) and The Experience of Disaster in Early Modern English Literature (2022). Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise is Professor of Early Modern English Literature and Cultural Studies at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, France. Her monograph on George Herbert, Le Verbe fait image was published in 2010. She has also co-edited a volume of Shakespeare's poetry in French (2021), Marlowe's Massacre at Paris with Christine Sukic (forthcoming) and is currently working on a new French edition of Twelfth Night.