Shakespeare’s Wild Places

Seona Anderson, November 2nd 2023

“Now by the ground that I am banish’d from,

Well could I curse away a Winters night,

Though standing naked on a Mountaine top,

Where byting cold would never let grasse grow,

And thinke it but a minute spent in sport.”

(HENRY VI, Part 2, Act 3, Scene 2: Suffolk)

In this scene Suffolk is about to be banished for his part in the death of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. Suffolk describes the most extreme situation he could endure and brushes it off as a trivial dare or a challenge. He is describing a situation of almost certain death: to be naked at the top of a mountain on a winter’s night where it is so cold that not even the most widespread of plants, grass, can survive. As well as the physical discomforts of freezing weather, with no clothes or shelter he would also be emotionally alone without the social support of any other human. He is parading his bravery in front of Queen Margaret and making light of the reality of banishment from everything and everyone he has known.

Suffolk’s wildest place is the top of a wintry mountain but there are many other physical and emotionally wild places in Shakespeare’s works. Mountains, deserts, forests, blasted heaths, bogs and fens are all used as wild places and they all have certain characteristics in common which define their wildness. They can represent lonely places without people or food or shelter, or lawless places where social rules and laws do not regulate behaviour, or dangerous places where there are fierce animals or malevolent spirits, or they are unhealthy and disease ridden.

Wetlands are always portrayed as dangerous, wild, unhealthy places in Shakespeare. Half of King John’s army are lost crossing the unpredictable Lincolnshire Washes. Caliban asks for “all the infections that the sun sucks up from bogs, fens, flats” to fall on Prospero. The draining of the fens of Eastern England to create agricultural land in the 1600s was one of the most prominent activities in the ongoing drainage of wetlands in Britain but there were many local and regional wetland draining activities throughout Britain in Shakespeare’s time and beyond. We are beginning to have a different relationship with wetlands in our modern world. The RAMSAR convention is an international framework established in Ramsar, Iran, in 1971 to identify and conserve wetlands and the biodiversity they support. In more recent decades wetland and peatland areas have become more valued for their role in carbon storage and as a tool in mitigation flooding and extreme weather. We are redefining our relationship with these wild areas in ways which would have seemed inconceivable in Shakespeare’s world.

Mountains have a more mixed representation in Shakespeare. They can be the desolate and dangerous places imaged by Suffolk or home to Olivia’s uncivilised wretches in Twelfth Night “fit for the mountains and the barbarous caves, whose manners ne’er were preached!”. They are home to ‘mountain foreigners’, ‘mountain goats’, and ‘cat-a-mountains’, but mountains can also be magnificent and aspirational, metaphors for size and greatness, and home to high status trees like mountain pines and cedars. In Henry VI Part I Mortimer claims “strong-fixed is the house of Lancaster, and, like a mountain, not to be removed.” The King of France imagines that Edward the Black Prince of Wales is watching the exploits of his son Henry V in France, “whiles that his mountain sire, on mountain standing up in the air, crowned with the golden sun, saw his heroical seed”.

Deserts and wildernesses are a different sort of wild place. In As You Like It the Forest of Arden is described as a desert by several of the characters. Morocco in the Merchant of Venice describes how distant and lonely places are becoming congested as suitors come to try and win Portia’s hand in marriage, “the Hyrcanian deserts and vasty wilds of Arabia are as thoroughfares now”. But wildernesses are not necessarily places without people they can also be places without laws. Henry IV worries that civil war will destroy England and its society and that “thou wilt be a wilderness again, peopled with wolves, thy old inhabitants”. Lucrece, attempting to stop Tarquin from raping her, “pleads in a wilderness where are no laws to the rough beast”. Titus Andronicus attacks the lawlessness of ancient Rome, the most populous city in the then world, “dost thou not perceive that Rome is but a wilderness of tigers?”.

The lawless, metaphorical wildernesses filled with savage beasts portrayed by Henry IV, Lucrece and Titus Andronicus are not in any way appealing. Forests in contrast are places which can be wild and ungoverned but they also places of escape and new possibilities, a social safety value for misfits of all varieties. Forests and their secret places are the scene of murder and rape in Titus Andronicus but the Forest of Arden in As You Like It is a place of escape from social and civil oppression. The exiled Duke has set up home in the forests and “many merry men with him: and there they live like the old Robin Hood of England.” In Midsummer Night’s Dream Hermia runs away to the woods near Athens to avoid having to marry her father’s choice of husband. Helena, her friend, betrays her by showing her unwanted fiancé where she has gone but Demetrius warns Helena that she is taking risks by going with him to the forest, “to trust the opportunity of night and the ill counsel of a desert place with the rich worth of your virginity.” The visit to the forest exposes the four young people to social censure from their community in Athens, and also to the mischief of the local fairies, but they survive and succeed in altering the course of their futures by risking the uncertainties of the wild wood.

Wild places are often dangerous and inhospitable in Shakespeare but also places of change and opportunity. Timon of Athens chooses to live a wild life in the hills in contrast to the life of luxury and excess in which he lived before. Valentine in Two Gentleman of Verona is forced into becoming the leader of a band of outlaws in the forest and begins to enjoy his new life, “how use doth breed a habit in a man! This shadowy desert, unfrequented woods, I better brook than flourishing peopled towns”.

The wild places of the land, sea and of the mind are a powerful theme in Shakespeare’s works. They can be dangerous, uncomfortable and unpredictable but they can also open up new possibilities, provide respite, and space to think and act differently. In the modern world we are also examining our relationship with the wild places, places which are both threatened and threatening. Maintaining wild places and the diversity of species, landscapes and ways of understanding the world which they provide has grown in importance as the wild places themselves have declined.

Global frameworks like the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and protected areas systems around the world provide some form of brake on this decline. More recently rewilding movements and organisations have emphasised the benefits of allowing space for the wild in many more places. The debates will continue about the benefits, the risks and the compromises but this is not a new dilemma. Shakespeare’s words show the ambiguous nature of engaging with wildness but also the richness and potential benefits. A world without wild places is a poorer, narrower, more constrained world.

More Information

Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Visit the CBD website

IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA) Visit WCPA

John Muir Trust Visit the John Muir Trust website

RAMSAR Convention on Wetlands Visit the Ramsar website

Rewilding Britain Visit the Rewilding Britain website

Wetlands International Visit the Wetlands International website

Ash, E, 2017 The Draining of the Fens. John Hopkins University Press Visit Book Press Release