Cosmic Ecology: Rethinking the storm in King Lear

Jennifer Hamilton is a PHD student exploring the use of storms as a narrative device in Shakespeare. In this seminar Hamilton gives examples of her work by using King Lear and Sarah Kane’s 1995 play Blasted. She utilises Speech Act Theory and Ecocriticism and tries to explain the way the storm is treated as a metaphoric significant within a narrative. Speech Act Theory argues that the words we speak are not merely words. It seeks to find the connections between the words being used and the nature of how they are being spoken. The meaning of the spoken expressions can be explained in terms of the rules governing their use in performing various speech acts. She states the poetic function of a storm has come to the point of cliché and can tend towards being arbitrary rather than integral. Hamilton gives a close reading of King Lear to investigate the way Lear’s experience of the storm’s chaos is acted out through the narrative structure of the play.
Certain King Lear Adaptations tend to focus on specific Shakespearean ecologies. The use of the storm in King Lear adaptations will often take on either a literal or a metaphoric use. Traditional studies of King Lear tend to use a Pathetic Fallacy in the analysis of the storm (pathetic in this context meaning capable of feeling) by reflecting Lear’s mood into an inanimate object whereas Hamilton is trying to look at the storm as an “object rather than a thing.
She also uses Blasted to show the relationship between a meterological metaphor and the structure of a narrative. After the first and second scenes set in a hotel in Leeds the set is literally blasted apart to reform in a Bosnian warzone as the sound of summer rain is heard in the background. At the end of each subsequent scene the sound of spring, autumn and winter rain is heard. Hamilton argues that Kane is evoking a “broader environmental ecology” at the end of each scene. A way of soothing the pain from the intense subject matter.
Broadly put Ecocriticism is reading texts from an environmental viewpoint. Ecocriticism looks at the underlying ecological values within a given text and the way nature or the environment is uses in either a literal or metaphoric sense. Hamilton’s work is searching for an ecological understanding and in the case of King Lear how the storm is structured in order to provide a particular narrative. It is not only taking the obvious example of Lear’s descent into madness connected with the storm but also the way certain speech acts within the play are connected to the role of the storm. Whilst she does see the storm as an event she is taking some minor ideas from Actor Network Theory by placing agency in the non human of the storm.
In other work Hamilton explores the discourse of climate change and how it changes poetic representation in relation to the weather. She uses her literary background to engage with people from scientific and engineering backgrounds in order to greater a greater discourse surround the issues of climate change and how that can relate back to the specific fields of science, technology and the arts.