The Blount Auditorium at Rhodes College’s Buckman Hall was packed with people last Friday afternoon for the much-anticipated “Green Shakespeare” symposium.
The opening lecture by Dr. Robert Watson, an English professor at 
UCLA , was entitled “The Ecology of Self in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Watson presented a thought-provoking perspective that looked at the play as a “prescient allegory” of the human body and its copious daily interactions with nature. As an example, Watson quoted a recent issue of the scientific journal Nature:
”The human gut is a virtual zoo, full of a wide variety of bacteria, a new study found. And scientists say that’s a good thing. The first results of an international effort to catalog the millions of non-human genes inside people found about 170 different bacteria species thriving in the average person’s digestive tract…More than 99 percent of the different types of genes in our bodies are not in fact human, but come from microbes.”
Because A Midsummer Night’s Dream is probably the comedy with which Shakespeare infused the most elements of nature, Watson feasted on the numerous instances within the play in which nature & the characters’ relationships with it played a role in the actions they took on the stage. In addition, he made a number of insightful observations relating human biology to the action on the stage, positing the idea that the fairies within A Midsummer Night’s Dream are the playscript counterparts to the variety of microbes and biochemicals within the body that can change the way we feel at a given moment. Watson went on to mention some of Shakespeare’s effects on biology as well, noting that, for example, there are genes found in fruit flies which must be adjacent to each other in the genetic sequence so that the flies’ hearts are not literally torn apart, and these genes are abbreviated “pyr” and “ths,” subtle tributes to the story of Pyramus and Thisbe that is recounted in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
In closing, Watson reiterated his thought that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is really a medium through which Shakespeare is trying to convince us that as we go about our daily lives, there are many smaller interactions we have with nature that we don’t seem to notice, and that those small exchanges can play a big role in governing our emotions and the way we live. Whether or not the audience agreed is hard to say, but given the considerable amount of applause offered to Watson after he finished, it’s not a stretch to say his speech was received well.
After the lecture, Watson participated a panel discussion on “The State of the Field of Ecocriticism.” Joining Watson for the talk were scholars Daniel Brayton (Middlebury College), Sharon O’Dair (University of Alabama), Karen Raber (University of Mississippi) and Simon Estok (Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea). The post-panel reception even utilized a unique brand of eco-friendly drinking cups to emphasize the importance of the ‘green’ element of the symposium.
All in all, it was an enjoyable convergence of scholarly research and environmental awareness. Hopefully there will continue to be strong Shakespeare and ‘green’ presences in the Memphis area going forward.
