ABSTRACT
Traditionally regarded as Shakespeare’s farewell to art, Prospero’s lines in The Tempest also speak to the current moment, to an anticipated moment of a global collapse: The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And … Leave not a rack behind. The Tempest. 1 4.1.152–56 This reminder of our frailty and insignificance – our little lives rounded with a long sleep – urges professional self-reflection about the scope and salience of the Global Shakespeare enterprise. This chapter considers the future – and the ethics – of Shakespeare performance and scholarship and does so by offering an ecocritical analysis of a recent post-apocalyptic adaptation of King Lear, Emily St. John Mandel’s novel, Station Eleven (2014). Station Eleven emphasizes the role of art in society before and after a plague-induced apocalypse that is also a carbon apocalypse, when people no longer can turn on lights or the sound system, when they no longer can travel easily by car or plane and must look, instead, to the past, to sun and candle, to horsepower and human power. Before that, I discuss briefly two disasters relevant to these concerns that took place on the Gulf Coast of the United States and that have affected all of that country and, indeed, the world.
