The Forest has plenty of metaphorical meanings in Shakespeare's plays, but his depictions of the

natural world also speak to very real concerns about the environment in early modern England.

From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited.

I'm Michael Whitmore, the Folger Director.

There were no environmentalists in Shakespeare's day.

That's because the science and politics that created the modern environmental movement

would take another 300 years to come together.

But that doesn't mean that arguments over land use and wildlife conservation weren't raging

in Shakespeare's day.

Todd Andrew Borlick argues in his book, Shakespeare Beyond the Green World, that King James

took a particular interest in those arguments, in part because he was an avid hunter. And since Shakespeare

was attuned to the interests of the king, those conflicts show up in the plays Shakespeare wrote

during James's reign. Seen in this light, the plays addressed debates over the enclosure of land,

wildlife management, overfishing, and the fur trade,

sometimes in ways that serve the king's interests and sometimes subverting them.

Here's Todd Andrew Borlick in conversation with Barbara Bogave.

I was thinking as I started your book that it is natural to think that Renaissance England was a less polluted place than today's world, not plagued by the same environmental issues we face.

But that's not entirely true at all. Why don't you start with a snapshot of what they were dealing with back then?

Yeah, sadly, Shakespeare's England was dealing with a lot of the same issues that we're confronting today.

Climate change, overpopulation, dewilding and extinction. There's a lot of habitat destruction that's been going on really for centuries.

So Shakespeare's contemporaries didn't see themselves as sort of basking in this prelapsarian, pristine environment.

They saw themselves as living in an iron age where industrial technologies have been ravaging the planet for millennia.

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