Climate change, urban sprawl, air pollution, deforestation, depleted fish stocks, biodiversity and species loss: these are not exclusively modern problems that only sprang up in the last few hundred years. In fact, the common but misleading phrase “industrial revolution” masks the long history of resource extraction and ecological degradation in the British Isles stretching back at least to the arrival of the tin-hungry Romans.
Renaissance England was reeling from the effects of all these problems. Often hailed as the golden age of English literature, the Renaissance was also the apex of the “little ice age”, in which a cooler climate produced poorer harvests.
These food shortages were especially difficult because England’s human population surged fourfold in the 16th century, while the enclosure of common lands forced more country-dwellers to flock to London. Given how heavily these environmental concerns weighed on a society coping with chronic scarcity, it should come as no surprise that we can find traces of them in the works of England’s greatest playwright.
