Biophilic Shakespeare: Towards an Ecology of Form

This interdisciplinary project is the first to combine biophilic landscape pattern analysis to literature and performance and specifically, to Shakespeare’s text. Through examining Shakespeare’s thirty-eight plays and biophilic design’s hundreds of spatial ‘patterns’, it finds approximately 20,000 ‘biophilic’ references to the natural world within Shakespeare’s canon. These are applied to ecocritical case-studies and ecotheatrical performance in order to develop an original ecoformalist framework, or ‘ecology of form’. Uniting cognitive and affective ecology and ecomaterialism, research examines the manner in which mind, body and environment are interlinked through language and the possibilities for greater ecological impact within the environmental humanities.