Underground Shakespeare: The Extraction of Natural Resources

Today, appropriation of land and extraction are recognized as practices deeply correlated with racial, social, and environmental depredation. This chapter shows the relevance of energy humanities applied to early modern drama, how appropriation and extraction of natural resources emerged in Shakespeare’s England, and how the playwright wrote about them. I first shed light on the energy transition that Elizabethan England underwent from charcoal to sea coal, a term whose origin remains uncertain (it may first have been used to refer to the coal picked up along the shores of Northumberland, because it was usually shipped by sea). I then enlarge this discussion to examine how the mining efforts of the realm appear to be recorded in Timon of Athens. In the last part of the chapter, I aim to link this underground activity to the requirements of warfare. I examine military mines and countermines, and the way these were represented on the London stage. All in all, I intend to analyze what Shakespeare’s works tell us of the emergence of extraction, and to explain how the playwright shifted the audience’s attention from the productivity of nature to the very limits of natural resources.