Reading the Early Modern Energy Crisis through Shakespeare: A Cultural History of Coal
Résumés
Cet article est consacré à un thème encore peu exploré de l’histoire de l’Angleterre de la première modernité et du corpus shakespearien en particulier, celui de la production de charbon minéral et de charbon de bois au tournant du XVIIe siècle. Au cours de la première modernité, le mot « coal » (« charbon »), dûment mentionné dans les pièces et les poèmes de Shakespeare, désigne aussi bien le charbon minéral que le charbon de bois mais, dans la plupart des cas, le dramaturge utilise en réalité « coal » comme synonyme de « charcoal ». De ce constat découlent deux questions : pourquoi le dramaturge continue-t-il, dans son œuvre, à faire référence au charbon de bois plutôt qu’au charbon minéral à une époque où la pollution causée par les fumées du charbon domestique et industriel devient véritablement perceptible ? Que nous apprend son usage du mot « coal » sur les problématiques énergétiques de la première modernité, alors marquée par une importante pénurie de bois ? Pour y répondre, je souhaite mettre en lumière ce que le dramaturge dit du charbon de bois, un sujet intrinsèquement lié à celui de la déforestation, et ce qu’il en fait. Shakespeare évoque un certain nombre de sujets socio-économiques relatifs à l'utilisation du charbon (de bois ou de terre) : on trouve ainsi dans son œuvre la figure récurrente du charbonnier qui donne lieu à une série de jeux de mots dans les échanges entre Sampson et Gregory dans l’ouverture de Roméo et Juliette. On discerne par ailleurs dans ses textes un lien encore sous-exploité entre le charbon minéral et les nécessités induites par l’industrie de la guerre d’une part, et celle du théâtre (où l’on retrouve canons, poudre à canon et pétards pour le besoin des effets spectaculaires sur scène) de l’autre. Il faut dire que la production de charbon de bois, à la fin du XVIe siècle, va de pair avec une crise énergétique sans précédent. Alors que l’abattage de bois pour produire du charbon est soumis à une régulation de plus en plus stricte en raison de la disparition des forêts du royaume, de nouvelles stratégies voient le jour et le recours au taillis (une méthode mentionnée dans Peines d’amour perdues) permet, par le biais d’un recépage périodique, d’obtenir du charbon de bois sans enfreindre la loi. Ces considérations économiques et matérielles ne doivent néanmoins pas faire oublier le rôle dévolu au charbon de bois dans le domaine esthétique et cosmétique : si, dans The Rape of Lucrece, le poète montre une connaissance très fine des techniques relatives à la peinture, il pointe aussi à l’occasion le maquillage charbonneux de ses acteurs, dans Titus Andronicus ou dans Othello. Cet article vise principalement, in fine, à retracer les liens entre passé et présent par le biais de la représentation du charbon de bois (qu’il faut relier à celle du charbon minéral) dans l’œuvre de Shakespeare, et à engager une réflexion tant écocritique qu’esthétique sur la manière dont le dramaturge perçoit et traduit la crise énergétique de son temps.
Entrées d’index
Mots-clés :
arbres, bois, charbon de bois, charbon minéral, charbonnier, industrie de la guerre, pollution, Shakespeare (William), taillisKeywords:
charcoal, coal, collier, coppice, pollution, sea-coal, Shakespeare (William), trees, war industry, woodPlan
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- 1 Alfred Kentigern Siewers, “Trees” in Inhuman Nature, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Washington, D. C., O (...)
- 2 Vin Nardizzi, Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees, Toronto, University of Toronto (...)
- 3 Ibid., p. 21.
1According to Alfred Kentigern Siewers, “trees living or dead still shape our lives and often form our houses and furniture and landscapes. […]. We still live in [trees]–physically and imaginatively, root and branch, leaf and page, virtual or not.”1 In the tree-focused economy of Shakespeare’s England, trees entirely conditioned the lives of the inhabitants, be they rural or urban ones. In his now seminal anti-anthropocentric reading of early modern English culture, Wooden Os, Vin Nardizzi explains that “wood”, then, “knew no social boundaries: every English person required it to sustain a minimal subsistence and maintain a modicum of shelter and warmth especially during the winter months.”2 As a result, timber, logs, trunks and bark are referred to everywhere in the literature of the period. “Shakespeare routinely conscripted the structural woodenness of the theatre to perform the role of tree, woods, forest, orchard, and park,” Nardizzi remarks.3
- 4 Charles H. Parker, Global Interactions in the Early Modern Age, 1400-1800, Cambridge, Cambridge Uni (...)
- 5 Paul Edmonson, Kevin Colls, William Mitchell, Finding Shakespeare’s New Place: An Archaeological Bi (...)
2This pre-industrial, or wooden era, was no golden age: it entailed dire consequences for the environment. By the end of the seventeenth century, woods occupied no more than ten percent of England and Wales,4 and, by the end of the nineteenth century, woodland cover in England was under five per cent. Then as now, oak was considered the most useful tree, not only for ship or house building, but also for charcoal making. At Shakespeare’s New Place, the charcoal which was found in the course of recent garden excavations showed that several tree species native to Britain, including oak, ash and willow/poplar, had been exploited.5
- 6 The aim is to remove unwanted elements, such as water, creosote and tar and to leave pure black car (...)
- 7 It is now acknowledged that even so-called “renewable” charcoal has a detrimental effect on the env (...)
3Charcoal, both a killer and a saviour, is produced by the incomplete combustion of wood in a furnace where air is restricted in order to reduce the rate of burning.6 Today, it is often perceived as a renewable resource. There is a difference, however, between renewable charcoal that is primarily produced through the farming of trees, and non-renewable charcoal, produced through deforestation.7 In sixteenth-century England, the issues of woodburning and forest depletion were narrowly interrelated. As woodburning and charcoal depleted the woodlands, coal was increasingly mined, but the real turn to fossil fuel began in the course of the seventeenth century. Sea-coal, a mineral picked up off the coasts of Northumberland or Wales, was then increasingly shipped to London: the English capital had sea-coal brought in by boat in order to supplement its stock of wood. The origin of the term “sea-coal” remains uncertain. It may have first been used to refer to the coal extracted along the Northumberland coast, because it was usually shipped by sea. It seems more likely, however, that sea-coal was first discovered washed up on the beaches of northern England, since the coal seams there extend in submarine deposits.
- 8 On this original meaning, see also Richard Rhodes, Energy. A Human History, New York, Simon and Sch (...)
- 9 In The Winter’s Tale, remembering the eyes of his wife which looked like shining stars, Leontes exc (...)
- 10 William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, ed. Peter Holland, London, Bloomsbury, 2013.
4Against all odds, charcoal remained omnipresent and did not disappear with the advent of mineral coal, even though the latter was definitely cheaper to extract and to carry. In his works, Shakespeare resorts to “coal” rather than “charcoal”: the word “coal” then variously denoted mineral coal and charcoal, and more frequently the latter than the former. The first meaning given by the OED indeed relates to a “a glowing ember” (in a fire or a furnace), so that coal was thus first and foremost “a piece of carbonized fuel burning or smouldering without flame” (OED 1.a).8 The word “coal”, for Shakespeare’s contemporaries, could also more specifically allude to “a burnt or partially burnt piece of carbonized fuel which is not now glowing or burning; esp. a partially consumed piece of fuel that retains sufficient carbon to be capable of further combustion” (OED 1.b.).9 Occasionally, it also pointed to “[t]he result or residue of combustion; cinders; ashes; charred remains” (OED 1.†c.), a sense now obsolete that crops up in Coriolanus: “If he could burn us all into one coal, / We have deserved it” (4.6.140-41).10
- 11 Stephanie Pain, “Power Through the Ages”, Nature 551, S134-S137, 29 November 2017, doi: https://doi (...)
5Such references linked to wood, fire and combustion more generally reflect the early modern uses of the word “coal” and they enable us gain insight into a very specific energetic dependency. The term occurs twenty times in Shakespeare, not to mention other references related to the uses of coal. Only two of these occurrences obviously designate sea-coal (i.e. mineral coal), in 2 Henry IV and The Merry Wives. The rest probably point to charcoal: Shakespeare, like many of his fellow playwrights, was certainly more familiar with the economy of charcoal than with the relatively new fashion of mineral coal – one had to wait until 1620 to see half of England’s energy come from coal11 – even though these two different energy regimes could exist simultaneously. I would therefore like to show that it is mainly, albeit not exclusively, the aesthetics of charcoal which subtly informs the work of Shakespeare.
- 12 I am paraphrasing here the famous formula coined by the media theorist Marshall McLuhan, “The mediu (...)
- 13 Todd Andrew Borlik (ed.), Literature and Nature in the English Renaissance: An Ecocritical Antholog (...)
6When read from an ecocritical perspective, his plays can be said to shed light on the various facets of the charcoal economy, especially through the figure of the collier. The playwright also discusses the issue of energy production, and repeatedly points to the production and domestic usage of charcoal, emphasizing the specificities of the Elizabethan and Jacobean context. He even suggests, in a restricted number of plays, the growing importance of sea-coal at the turn of the seventeenth century. However, beyond the energy crisis that deeply affected the playwright’s proto-industrial England, I argue that the very materiality of charcoal was to become a powerful source of inspiration for Shakespeare. In a narrative poem like The Rape of Lucrece, the medium, i.e. burnt wood, even becomes the message, i.e. the burning city of Troy.12 Taken together, the production, economy, and aesthetics of blackness as depicted on the early modern stage allow me to trace silent connections between past and present: by paying attention to its emergence in Shakespeare’s canon, I hope to throw light on – “rather than disregard, or greenwash” – the salient features, and sometimes the “alterity”, of Shakespeare’s England.13
The Charcoal Economy through Shakespearean Drama: Warming Pans and Colliers
7Before the advent of coal, wood was the primary source of heat for Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Most cooking was done over an open fire of wood or charcoal with a large pot which either stood on legs in the fire or was suspended over it.
- 14 Sandra Clark, “Coal, sea-coal” in Shakespeare and Domestic life: A Dictionary, London, Bloomsbury, (...)
- 15 Katherine Duncan-Jones and H. R. Woudhuysen (eds.), The Rape of Lucrece, in Shakespeare’s Poems, Lo (...)
- 16 S. Clark, op. cit., 2293/12155.
8Besides such common daily uses, charcoal also found its way in some intensely moving passages of Elizabethan literature. As Sandra Clark puts it, “[d]ying coals create emotional images.”14 In The Rape of Lucrece, the comparison of “[d]ying eyes” with “dying coals” (1378-1379) stands out in the poem’s ekphrasis.15 The victims’ looks strike the heroine and help her find faces “where all distress is stelled” (l. 444) so that she can identify herself with the agonizing Trojans. The coal imagery present in the narrative poem also echoes, to some extent, “the grief-stricken exclamation of Leontes at recalling the face of his dead wife”, which, according to Clark, is “the most poignant example of fire imagery”16: “Stars, stars, / And all eyes else, dead coals” (The Winter’s Tale, 5.1.67-68). Here, it is precisely the absence of any hint of life in the beloved’s eyes that reveal the perpetual winter of Leontes’s private life, dead coals suggesting deprivation of both light and warmth.
9On a more practical level, the use of charcoal was part of the anchor habits of Shakespeare’s predecessors and contemporaries, for keeping one’s body sufficiently warm was vital during the Little Ice Age. In a history play like Henry V, objects related to wood and charcoal hint at the daily lives of Elizabethans:
Boy: Mine host Pistol, you must come to my master, and you, hostess. He is very sick and would to bed. Good Bardolph, put thy face between his sheets and do the office of a warming-pan. Faith, he’s very ill. (2.1.82-85)
- 17 See Jeanne Jones, Stratford-upon-Avon Inventories, 1538-1699, 2 vols., Stratford-upon-Avon, Dugdale (...)
- 18 See the website: https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/blogs/shakespeare-100-objects-w (...)
10The Boy here makes a humoristic link between Bardolph’s red bloated nose, a symptom of his dissolute lifestyle, and the red-hot warming pan. Warming pans appear frequently in the inventories of the period.17 Indeed, a cold bed necessitated the use of a warming pan with a long handle, to ensure that a safe distance was kept from the hot contents of the pan at the end, which had a copper bottom and a brass hinged lid. The pan would be filled with hot coals and placed between the sheets, the large copper bottom ensuring effective heat transfer from the hot ashes inside the pan to the bed clothes.18
- 19 Richard Rhodes, Energy. A Human History, New York, Simon and Schuster, 2018, p. 8.
11While the flame of the open fire was not always sufficient to warm the room, it tended to be associated with a pleasant and cheerful occasion. It was, in fact, the very opposite of “the acrid and sulphurous stench” of burning coal which, so far, “had not encouraged its domestic use in houses devoid of chimneys where meat was roasted over open fires”.19
12Charcoal was not just synonymous with domestic comfort; it was also indicative of healthy lodgings. Writers of the time generally advocated the use of charcoal fires, as in the following example, lifted from a 1594 treatise:
- 20 An., Present remedies against the plague, London, [By J. Danter] for William Barley, 1594, STC (2nd (...)
Ayer your seuerall roomes with Charcole fiers, made in stone pans or Chaftingdishes, and not in Chimneys: set your pans in the middle of the roomes: ayer euerie roome once a weeke (at the least) and put into your fire a little quantity of Frankinsence, Iuniper, dryed Rosemary, or of Bay-leaues.20
13The process of burning charcoal, with the addition of aromatic herb to alter the smell of a room, here clearly points to a medicinal use as its ultimate purpose is to prevent the plague.
- 21 T. W. Craik (ed.), op. cit., note to 3.2.46, p. 207.
- 22 Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Cent (...)
- 23 William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, ed. Keir Elam, London, Cengage Learning, The Arden Shakespeare, (...)
- 24 R. W. Dent, Shakespeare’s Proverbial Language: An Index, Berkeley, University of California Press, (...)
14On a more global scale, charcoal burning was already shaping the cultural landscape of England, where charcoal burners were known as wood colliers. In Henry V, the Boy ironically declares: “Nym and Bardolph are sworn brothers in filching, and in Calais they stole a fire-shovel. I knew by that piece of service the men would carry coals” (3.2.44-46). Despicable individuals to the Boy’s eyes, Nym and Bardolph would “endure insults without retaliation.”21 The expression “carry coals” was then proverbial.22 Fetching charcoal, firewood, etc., was the office of the lower servants in the household: as a result, it was tempting to hurl insults at simple coal carriers who had a reputation for cheating in Shakespeare’s times – as in Twelfth Night, when Sir Toby associates Satan with a dirty coal carrier and exclaims: “Hang him, foul collier!” (3.4.113-14).23 Such an association with the devil due to the black faces of coal carriers, was also proverbial: “like will to like, quoth the devil to the collier.”24
15The above-mentioned passage from Henry V echoes the opening scene of Romeo and Juliet with its series of puns on “coals,” “collier,” “choler” and “collar”:
- 25 William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. René Weis, London, Bloomsbury, 2012.
Sampson
Gregory, on my word, we’ll not carry coals.
Gregory
No, for then we should be colliers.
Sampson
I mean, an we be in choler, we’ll draw.
Gregory
Ay, while you live, draw your neck out of collar. (1.1.1-4)25
16In the tragedy, coal is part of a determinist humoral pattern linking choler and fire and accounting for the stifling atmosphere of Verona in summer times. In this scene, these servants who are left with the petty chores to be carried out in the house of Capulet refuse to be insulted for doing mean or dirty work and reject any association with such ugly, devilish creatures as colliers.
- 26 Robert Greene, A Notable discovery of cozenage, London: Printed by John Wolfe for T.N., 1591. URL: (...)
- 27 On this, see Christina Luckyj and Niamh J. O’Leary, The Politics of Female Alliance in Early Modern (...)
- 28 Ibid., p. 24.
- 29 Ibid.
17This profession features rather negatively in the literature of the time. In “A pleasant discovery of the cozenage of colliers,” inserted in A Notable discovery of cozenage,26 Robert Greene tells the story of a suburban flax wife who discovers that she and her neighbours have been cheated by the local collier.27 The dishonesty of charcoal colliers is constantly emphasised in this pamphlet in which the collier is finally caught red-handed and admonished as follows by the flax wife: “We have no pillory for thee, nor cart to whip thee at, but here I do award that thou shalt have as many bastinadoes as thy bones will bear, and then to be turned out of doors without sacks or money.”28 The I narrator approves of this punishment, certain as he is of the “deceitful and disordered dealings” of colliers in general.29
- 30 For further details on this poem, see Heidi C. M. Scott, “Charcoal: Firing Early Industry. The Coll (...)
18Greene’s short prose fiction was to be followed by other texts indicting coal carriers even more bluntly. A 1622 poem by Patrick Hannay, extracted from his Songs and Sonnets,30 records the intertwined diabolical and racial associations applied to colliers by the residents of Croydon, an industrial zone now long engulfed by sprawling London:
- 31 Quoted in T. A. Borlik (ed.), op. cit., p. 478.
In midst of these stands Croydon, clothed in black,
[…]
And those who there inhabit, suiting well
With such a place, do either Negroes seem,
Or harbingers for Pluto, Prince of Hell,
[…]
Their sight would make a soul of hell to dream,
Besmeared with soot, and breathing pitchy smoke,
Which (save themselves) a living wight would choke.31
- 32 Ibid.
- 33 Ibid., p. 477.
- 34 Later in the seventeenth century, see also Grim the Collier of Croyden; or, The Devil and his Dame: (...)
19The poem’s coal-carriers are said to “cut down” and “scar their groves” and to “burn” their “arbours”.32 The mention of these cut-down groves makes it clear that the poem dwells on the enduring charcoal trade, which was responsible for the destruction of many a grove. As noted by Todd Andrew Borlik, the poem as a whole defines “charking” (i.e. burning to charcoal) as a particularly “filthy trade.”33 In comparing colliers with Pluto, the god of the underworld, Hannay not only remarkably features their filth and materialist motivations, but he also blames them for their polluting activities. His text is what we would today call an eco-conscious poem, powerfully invoking early modern anxieties about a receding nature at the hand of industrial spoilers.34
Shakespeare and the Environmental Crisis: from Charcoal to Sea-coal
- 35 On the issue of overpopulation in connection with environmental crisis, see Todd Andrew Borlik, Sha (...)
- 36 William M. Cavert, “Prologue,” in The Smoke of London. Energy and Environment in the Early Modern C (...)
- 37 Ibid., op. cit., p. 21-22.
20Already at the end of the sixteenth century, pollution was a tangible, physical, environmental phenomenon. London was grappling with an unprecedented ecological crisis: quick population growth produced rampant pollution, and the city’s growing demands for fuel depleted the nation’s natural resources.35 The real transition to coal (or sea-coal) in England started “in the years before 1600.”36 Sea-coal, William M. Cavert asserts, “became London’s fuel exactly when contemporaries believed that wood’s availability had become threatened, and the frequent governmental attention to wood supplies of the 1550s to 1570s diminished exactly when London switched to coal.”37
- 38 Calendar of Close Rolls, Edward I (1302-7), p. 537. Quoted by William H. Te Brake, “Air Pollution a (...)
- 39 Ibid., p. 338.
- 40 Quoted in Peter Brimblecombe, The Big Smoke. A History of Air Pollution in London since Medieval Ti (...)
21The most severe pollution of the English capital dates back to this period. It is thus associated with the use of mineral coal – much more, in any case, than with charcoal. The threat of mineral coal had already been noticed centuries before the switch to coal, albeit on a far smaller scale. As early as 1307, King Edward I issued a royal proclamation prohibiting use of sea-coal in kilns, because “an intolerable smell diffuse[d] itself throughout the neighbouring places and the air [was] greatly infected.”38 Two weeks later, this was followed by another royal commission on the same topic, which targeted offenders who persisted in using sea-coal. The source of such air pollution was thus clearly identified as sea-coal, “a very soft, sulfurous, low-grade coal” that emitted continual smokes when it burned. William H. Te Brake explains that “[i]n contrast, the traditional and preferred fuel, firewood (and especially its derivative, charcoal), gave off relatively small quantities of smoke and fumes.”39 As more homes in London began to burn mineral coal, the quality of the city’s air steadily began to decline. In 1578, Elizabeth I in person claimed to be “greatly grieved and annoyed with the taste and smoke of sea-coales.”40 This smoke mostly came from breweries and, following the Queen’s complaint, the Company of Brewers undertook to use only firewood in and around London.
- 41 Hugh Plat, A nevv, cheape and delicate fire of cole-balles wherein seacole is by the mixture of oth (...)
22In 1603, Hugh Plat published a pamphlet entitled A nevv, cheape and delicate fire of cole-balles41 in order to promote his invention of a processed “coal ball” for cleaner burning. Plat’s new method consisted in reducing the smoke produced by coal by fashioning coal and straw briquettes, a technique that unfortunately failed, so that charcoal remained a much less polluting material than coal. Yet, because it was processed from wood through combustion, the use of this traditional resource was restricted. An English law of 1558 prohibited the felling of wood for charcoal, citing the nuisance of the voluminous smoke created by hundreds of colliers, and the fears of scarcity, since wood remained essential for house building and ship construction. As this law seems to have been mostly ignored, English forests were further depleted.
- 42 V. Nardizzi, op. cit., p. 10.
- 43 W. M. Cavert, op. cit., p. 20-21.
- 44 Shakespeare owned lands close to a forest and had important familial ties to the forest of Arden. H (...)
23In 1581, another law was enacted that “touched iron-mills near unto the city of London or the suburbs of the same” wherein woods could not be felled for making charcoal, because timber and sellable woods serving for fuel were becoming scant.42 The situation was worsened by the fact that, in the late sixteenth-century, a number of landowners converted “former woodlands to agricultural production,” because “[f]elling trees, especially during a period of rising wood prices, was one of a few ways a landowner could gain much-needed cash”: “converting cut lands to arable farming” was an efficient means to get “continued revenues,” and this definitely “worked against the practice of sustainable forestry.”43 A landowner himself,44 Shakespeare must have been acutely aware of such commercial practices.
- 45 Brinley Thomas, “Was There an Energy Crisis in Great Britain in the 17th Century?”, Explorations in (...)
24The prospect of abundant woodlands thus receded in Shakespeare’s England. In Coriolanus, Menenius refers to “a pair of tribunes that have wracked for Rome, / To make coals cheap” (5.1.16-17). In this sarcastic remark, Rome stands for England and coals designate charcoal, which will soon be affordable because, once destroyed, Rome will be reduced to a heap of charcoal and smouldering ruins. In other words, the Roman people will no longer need to buy charcoal because they will be able to warm themselves at their own hearth as their houses are burning down. This implies is that charcoal was far from cheap in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England: its market value “tripled from 1590 to 1690.”45 Menenius’s barb may thus be seen as an indirect comment on the rising cost of wood and charcoal in Tudor and Stuart England.
25Fuel demand was so high that it led to the implementation of specific forest management strategies and that, as a result, charcoal gradually became a renewable resource. Indeed, in order to provide a sufficient supply of charcoal, woodlands in England were managed with a coppice rotation system. Trees were generally harvested in rotation cycles lasting from 7 to 25 years (a practice which lasted until the early twentieth century). Needless to say that charcoal made out of coppice wood was processed near the source because the transportation of the lighter, finished product was then made much easier.
- 46 Deborah Mary Frances Bartlett, “The History of Coppicing in South east England in the Modern period (...)
26Deborah Mary Frances Bartlett reminds us that “Tudor ironworks have been calculated to have required 900,000 acres of regularly coppiced woodland […] with similar demand assumed for other mineral processing activities, from the tin mining in the South West to the lead smelting in Derbyshire.”46 The word “coppice” dates back to the fifteenth century but it did not feature much in the English language until Tudor times, when the uses of the term suddenly came to a climax. Coppicing is a technique that creates a crop of small diameter poles by cutting maiden trees to the ground, so that they sprout and re-grow with multiple stems before being then cut again. In Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, it is the Forester which, appropriately, points to a “coppice” at the beginning of act 4:
- 47 William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. H. R. Woudhuysen, London, Thomas Nelson and Sons, 19 (...)
Princess
The, forester, my friend, where is the bush
That we must stand and play the murderer in?
Forester
Hereby, upon the edge of yonder coppice,
A stand where you may make the fairest shoot. (4.1.7-10)47
- 48 Andrew MacRae, “Tree-felling in Early Modern England: Michael Drayton’s Environmentalism”, The Revi (...)
27The Princess and her ladies are thus supposed to shoot at deer from a coppice, which is part of a park also including a sycamore tree, a lodge, a hill, a bush, a thicket, and a curious knotted garden. Shakespeare describes an environment entirely fashioned by man, one upon which intense pressure is put to meet the demands of the realm of Navarre in the context of the comedy. Bred in the bustle of a Midland market-town between coppice and pasture, the playwright knew what all this was about. His conception of nature confirms what Andrew McRae writes in an essay devoted to tree-felling in early modern England: “There were no English woods unexposed to human uses: trees were felled for timber, woods were coppiced for a variety of uses and trees and hedges were routinely pruned for firewood.”48
- 49 Katherine Duncan-Jones and H.R. Woudhuysen (eds.), Venus and Adonis in Shakespeare’s Poems, London, (...)
- 50 Ibid., p. 256, note to l. 259.
28In Venus and Adonis, which celebrates the various forms of life found in nature, the poet writes: “But lo, from forth a copse that neighbours by, / A breeding jennet, lusty, young and proud, / Adonis’ trampling courser doth espy” (l. 259-261).49 In the Quarto version of the poem, “copse” is spelt “copp’s,” “suggesting the syncopated from of ‘coppice’, a thicket of small trees whose wood is cut down from time to time,” Katherine Duncan-Jones and H.R. Woudhuysen explain.50 Being less dense than a forest, the copse gives Venus the perfect opportunity to wrest Adonis from his stallion as it technically enables both the young man’s “trampling courser” (l. 262) to spot immediately the mare in heat while allowing the “breeding jennet” (l. 260) to rush forth without difficulty. This area of timber supply, managed by men and as such symbolizing a form of domination over nature, presumably liberates desire: the whole passage is meant to teach the effeminate Adonis to be ruled by his natural, carnal appetites, and to yield to Venus’s male-like sexual advances.
29Odd as it may seem, the presence of a coppice in the poem’s sexualised landscape corroborates what we have already observed in Love’s Labour’s Lost: while nature plays an important role in Shakespeare’s writings, it is more often than not commodified and regarded in an economic perspective. Nature is valued insofar as its animals can be killed and eaten, its trees felled, its lands seized, its rivers tamed. In early modern texts in general, the control of the environment is often presented as a source of intense satisfaction.
- 51 A. MacRae, op. cit., p. 415-6.
- 52 N. D. G. James, A History of English Forestry, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1981, p. 166. Quoted in A. (...)
- 53 A. MacRae, op. cit., p. 416.
30This utilitarian perception of nature is of course inherent to the context of the period. Under Elizabeth and James, several surveys of the woods were undertaken and James was even more active in this than Elizabeth had been. In 1607 for example, “a commission was ordered to investigate the country’s woodlands and the following year a survey was established of timber growing in royal forests.”51 In 1607, commissioners were asked to catalogue “the number of coppice woods; how many acres each coppice containeth; and of how many years’ growth the same is; what every coppice is worth by the acre.”52 As Andrew McRae explains, such surveys enabled massive sales of timber as well as “the creation of enclosures in forests, and the leasing out of coppicing rights”.53 However, coppice wood remained largely insufficient to supply the needs of the nation and it did not prevent the drastic decrease of woodlands by the turn of the seventeenth century.
- 54 Quoted in T. A. Borlik, op. cit., p. 259.
- 55 See William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, ed. Giorgo Melchiori, Walton-on-Thames, Thomas (...)
31As a result, Shakespeare must have witnessed the increasing use of mineral coal, or sea-coal both in the domestic space and in the industrial one. In his Annales (1615), John Stow remarked that “[s]ea coal and pit coal is become the general fuel of this Britain Island, used in the houses of the nobility, clergy and gentry, in London and in all other cities and shires of this kingdom”.54 The fumes of burning fuel now had to find their way out through available openings: chimneys grew taller and testified to this new fuel economy. No wonder if in The Merry Wives of Windsor one of the children is assigned the role of the chimney spirit at the end of the play.55
32Shakespeare more explicitly records this transition from wood to mineral fuel in the domestic sphere. In 2 Henry IV, probably written sometime around 1596 or 1597, the Hostess launches into a long speech about the exact setting, day and time when Falstaff proposed to her:
- 56 William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part 2, ed. James C. Bulman, London, Bloomsbury, 2016.
Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet, sitting in my Dolphin chamber at the round table by a seacoal fire upon Wednesday in Wheeson week, when the Prince broke thy head for likening his father to a singing man of Windsor–thou didst swear to me then […] to marry me[.] (2.1.85-90)56
- 57 Georgianna Ziegler, “Mistress Quickly: From Hostess in Henry IV Part 1 to Fairy Queen in The Merry (...)
33This passage contains the earliest recorded use of “seacoal fire”. The details of the Hostess’s description clearly “point to a woman who keeps a good tavern; she can afford a gilt goblet, a separate room for special entertaining, and a sea-coal fire”.57 In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Hostess Quickly is once again delighted by the perspective of yet another “sea-coal fire”:
Rugby I’ll go watch.
Quickly Go; and we’ll have a posset for’t soon at night, in faith, at the latter end of a sea-coal fire. (1.4.6-8)
- 58 Randall Martin, op. cit., p. 40. I refer, more generally, to Martin’s first chapter, “Localism, Def (...)
- 59 On this, see also Randall Martin, “Shakespeare, Ecology, and the Environment”, Folger Shakespeare L (...)
- 60 William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, op. cit., note to 1.4.8, p. 154.
- 61 David Everett Blythe, “Mistress Quickly’s Sea-Coal”, Shakespeare Quarterly, 35. 4, Winter, 1984, p. (...)
- 62 W. M. Cavert, op. cit., p. 26.
- 63 Ibid., p. 27.
34The Hostess – whose “susceptibility to modern consumption trends” has been thoroughly analysed by Randall Martin58 – displays here a shrewd understanding of the economics of fuel.59 For her as for many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, sea-coal was the fuel with which the Elizabethans now heated their houses. In his edition of the play, Giorgio Melchiori explains that “sea-coal” points here to a “best-quality coal.”60 David Everett Blythe similarly asserts that the Hostess refers to a “high-class” sort of coal.61 Yet it is wrong to assume that such coal had a much higher value in London than prepared from wood: this source of energy was actually “the fuel of the poor” and, “for the rich, it complemented other varieties”.62 In the seventeenth century, the nobility consumed tons of coal out of necessity, but also wood fuels “including billets, faggots, and charcoal” out of choice.63
35Therefore, while brand-new markets for mineral coal were introduced in Jacobean and Carolean England, it still encouraged already older ones for woodland produce as exemplified in a 1628 treatise entitled The gunner shevving the vvhole practise of artillerie, in which Robert Norton, one of the King’s gunners and engineers, explains:
- 64 Robert Norton. The gunner shevving the vvhole practise of artillerie, London, Printed by A[ugustine (...)
There are fiue things especially to be regarded in casting of mettall. The first is to make the formes and moulds duely. The second that they be well nealed with Charcoales or dry wood. The third to place them well in the Pit. The fourth is to melt the mettall to runne well and fine. The fift to be sure to put asmuch mettall into the furnace as may be sufficient to fill the moulds[.]64
- 65 For further details on this issue, see K. Jan Oosthoek, “The Role of Wood in World History”, Octobe (...)
36War needed iron, and the early iron industry required a lot of charcoal. Iron was scarce and costly and its production was falling off because England’s forests could not supply enough charcoal for smelting the ore. Mineral coal being useless for iron smelting, the problem was that the industry desperately needed wood.65
- 66 David Cressy, “Saltpetre, State Security and Vexation in Early Modern England”, Past & Present, 212 (...)
37The war industry did not simply feed on iron, it also fed on gunpowder which was composed of saltpetre (potassium nitrate), sulphur, and carbon from charcoal. “The charcoal provided solid substance for combustion, the sulphur allowed immediate ignition, while saltpetre provided oxygen for the explosion,” David Cressy explains.66 In Romeo and Juliet, the image of an explosion due to the meeting of fire and gunpowder serves to describe in compelling terms the final kiss of death of the two lovers:
These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder
Which, as they kiss, consume. […] (2.6.9-11)
- 67 William Shakespeare, Macbeth, eds. Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason, London, Bloomsbury, 2015.
- 68 On this, see Jonathan Gil Harris, “The Smell of Gunpowder: Macbeth and the Palimpsests of Olfaction (...)
38These lines must have been especially resonant on the early modern stage: as an essential part of London’s growing entertainment industry, explosive devices such as fireworks made the plays genuinely spectacular. The opening of Macbeth, for example, calls for “Thunder and lightning” (1.1.1. s.d.).67 The standard stagecraft by which the noise and light of thunder and lightning was created was the squib, a firework made of dung and gunpowder. It is reasonable to surmise that, for Shakespeare’s audience, the scent of gunpowder was reminiscent of medieval stage devilry, with its its bad smelling smoke evocative of the foul fumes of hell.68
Shakespeare’s Materials of Writing and the Aesthetics of Charcoal
- 69 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, Duke University Press, 2010.
- 70 Ibid., p. 27. Bennett borrows this concept from Bruno Latour.
- 71 Juliet Fleming, “Graffiti, Grammatology, and the Age of Shakespeare” in Renaissance Culture and the (...)
- 72 See George Thomas Kurian, James D. Smith (eds.), The Encyclopedia of Christian Literature, Lanham, (...)
39Therefore, the playwright knew well that coal was, in the words of Jane Bennett, a “vibrant matter”69 that could also be an artistic resource, or an “actant” in the trades of theatre, writing and painting.70 Beyond the use of pyrotechnics, his contemporaries were accustomed to the presence of charcoal in early modern pictures or manuscripts, for instance. As Juliet Fleming has shown, “drawing and writing on walls was widely practised in Elizabethan and Jacobean England”, and ordinary people were happy to write with “charcoal, chalk, stone and pencil”.71 In certain circumstances, even eminent individuals relied on charcoal. When he was locked up in the Tower of London in the last year of his life (1534-1535), Thomas More used charcoal to write his Prison Letters when pen or ink were wanting, for example.72
- 73 Quoted in Ian Donaldson, Ben Jonson. A Life, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 371.
- 74 Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text”, Shakespeare (...)
40As a successful – and cautious – playwright, Shakespeare could afford to use ink. He may, from time to time, have used carbon inks, which were made from soot. This type of ink was easy to scrape off in order to make changes in a manuscript. Yet, we all have in mind what Ben Jonson famously wrote about his deceased friend and rival in Timber, or Discoveries (1630): “I remember, the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand.”73 If Jonson is right, we can actually surmise that Shakespeare generally resorted to a different type of ink, namely iron gall ink. Jonson may be wrong, however. In a seminal article, Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass have acknowledged the possibility that the playwright rewrote his scripts. While he was “once hailed as a spontaneous writer never stopping to blot his papers”, they explain, the repetitions and anomalies that characterize his variants now suggest that Shakespeare revised his texts “according to second thoughts, afterthoughts, and new theatrical circumstances.”74
- 75 Miles P. Grier, Inkface. Othello and White Authority in the Era of Atlantic Slavery –Writing the Ea (...)
41Incidentally, the rich brown ink which characterizes what is believed to be Shakespeare’s handwriting in the manuscript pages of the collaborative play Sir Thomas More happens to be an iron gall ink. Contrary to carbon ink, this type of ink – the one generally chosen in the Western world from medieval times until well into the nineteenth century – sticks to paper as it sinks in, making it indelible. Yet even though the playwright did not necessarily use carbon inks himself, it is likely that he had such inks in mind when he fashioned tragic figures like Othello for, as Miles P. Grier argues, Shakespeare created here one of his most compelling metaphors, namely that of coal-black skin as a readable, transferable ink.75
- 76 Henry Peacham, The art of dravving vvith the pen, and limming in water colours more exactlie then h (...)
- 77 E.g. sonnet 16: “Now stand you on the top of happy hours, / And many maiden gardens, yet unset, / W (...)
- 78 Virginia Mason Vaughan, Performing Blackness on English Stages, Cambridge, Cambridge University Pre (...)
42According to the OED, “coal” may refer to “[c]harcoal used for writing or drawing” (OED 2.B), a meaning attested as early as 1425. Albert Dürer used charcoal for many of his portrait drawings and Hans Holbein became famous for his drawings made with finely ground charcoal. In his 1606 Art of drawing, Henry Peacham mentions charcoal in connection with the art of portraiture: “(Now the painter of the towne to shew (as he thought) extraordinary art in shadowing, had laid with charcoale in a deepe blew the cheeks and eies of his picture).”76 We can presume that Shakespeare was acquainted with this technique, even though no evidence is available regarding his degree of familiarity with the art of drawing. The Sonnets, however, make it clear that he was inspired by the very instruments necessary for drawing and painting.77 He knew, perhaps, that charcoal was incorporated in the pigments used in the painting of early modern miniatures. Nicholas Hilliard’s five principal colours range between the poles of black and white and, in his Arte of Limning (c. 1601), “he describes black pigments made from burnt cherry stones, date stones, peach stones or charcoal.”78 One of these pigments was also made from burnt ivory and gum:
- 79 R. K. R. Thornton and T. G. S. Cain (eds.), A Treatise Concerning the Arte of Limning, Ashington, M (...)
Let it settle a whole afternoon, and pour from it the uppermost, which is but the gum and foulness, good to put among ink. The rest let dry, and keep it in a paper or box and use it aforesaid with soft grinding of it again.79
- 80 See also Edward Norgate, Miniatura or The Art of Limning, ed. Martin Hardie, Oxford, Oxford Univers (...)
- 81 The painting was destroyed in the fire of 1698. What is left of the cartoon is on display at the Na (...)
- 82 In 1571, Elizabeth I was presented with a portrait in charcoal of Henri III, based on a drawing by (...)
- 83 It was only in the twentieth century that it became commonly used as an art medium of its own.
43Burnt ivory80 was particularly expensive, and this example stands as an exception: charcoal was generally more easily accessible and cheaper and, in the early modern artistic sphere, it was frequently a means rather than an end. Indeed, just like pen and ink, charcoal was commonly used for preparatory drawings. Hans Holbein’s 1537 mural portrait of Henry VIII with his father Henry VII is a good example: the painter first had to make a cartoon in black ink and watercolour, which was then used to transfer the drawing on the wall of Whitehall Palace. The carton was pricked, charcoal dust was brushed into the holes, and this enabled Holbein to fill in his design.81 Charcoal was actually needed by many artists to create their preliminary sketches for fresco and panel paintings. It was thus marked by a sense of impermanence reinforced by the fact that, because of its tendency to smudge and to being easily erased (something which resulted in the rather poor preservation of charcoal drawings), it was not used as a legitimate medium.82 Artists needed it, above all, to outline their preliminary sketches before painting them over.83
44Just like Holbein, renowned sixteenth-century artists such as Michelangelo would use charcoal and chalk for their drawings on large paper sheets. They would prick holes along the drawn lines before placing the drawing over the surface which they were about to paint. Crushing the charcoal into a fine powder, they would then place it into a small linen-type bag and pounce the bag along the punctured, drawn lines. The charcoal dust would filter through the bag and the holes transferring a dotted line reproduction of their drawing onto the surface to be painted. This unique method, representative of the artistic technologies then available, allowed painters to assign responsibilities to their apprentices: the transferred image, faithful to the master’s original concept and composition, could subsequently be worked upon by others in varying degrees.
- 84 Richard Meek, “Ekphrasis in The Rape of Lucrece and The Winter’s Tale”, Studies in English Literatu (...)
45Charcoal was thus a crucial material for early modern painters, which means that, even when mineral coal became more fashionable, charcoal production had to be maintained in order to foster the dynamism of the visual arts. With this in mind, it is tempting to associate the multiple references to charcoal in the ekphrastic passage of The Rape of Lucrece with Shakespeare’s keen interest in this particular issue. As Lucrece, in the poem, is looking at an artwork (a “conceit deceitful”, l. 1423) on the fall of Troy, she is struck by “the visual immediacy of the painting,”84 and, in the ruins of Troy, she recognizes her own body (or “temple”) “spotted, spoiled, corrupted” (l. 1172). Coal is first referred to in connection with the eyes of the dying victims, metaphorically depicted as the last embers of a dying fire:
Dying eyes gleamed forth their ashy lights,
Like dying coals burnt out in tedious nights.
(l. 1378-79)
- 85 See my analysis later in this development.
- 86 Edward Norgate, op. cit., p. 94.
- 87 Katherine Duncan-Jones and H. R. Woudhuysen (eds.), op. cit., note to l. 1435, p. 351.
- 88 Edward Norgate, op. cit., p. 94.
46Ground wood charcoal being both an ingredient of dark pigments and a widespread material in early modern portraits, the playwright may have kept this in mind when he composed these lines aimed at conveying the impressive talent of the anonymous painter. Coal is then materialized by the description of a “labouring pioneer” (l. 1380), i.e. of a low-rank soldier supposed to dig mines in the front line and whose face is “[b]egrimed with sweat and smeared all with dust” (l. 1381). The word “begrimed” comes from “grime” which refers to soot or coal-dust. The term only crops up twice in Shakespeare’s works, the second occurrence being found in Othello where it designates both the Moor’s skin colour and the actor’s make-up.85 As a result, it is probably of particular significance here and it may refer to the materiality of the painter’s colour palette (in order to “make Charcole Black,” Norgate recommended to “Grynd charcoal very small with water, lett it dry, and then grynd it with Oyle”).86 The pictorial process of staining, which evokes both Lucrece’s own sorry situation and the technique used by the artist whose painting is depicted by the poet, is then mentioned on line 1435 (“Like bright things stained, a kind of heavy fear”). While probably alluding to the chiaroscuro atmosphere of the artwork, according to the Arden editors,87 the stains noticed by Lucrece could also be evocative of charcoal smudges. Significantly, Hecuba is reduced to a “sad shadow” (l. 1457) and, if “shadow” here obviously means “picture”, one should also remember that charcoal was considered as especially relevant for the painting of subtle shadows.88 The body of Priam’s wife seems finally crisscrossed by black veins (“Her blue blood changed to black in every vein”, l. 1454), as if colour had entirely disappeared from her limbs and if only the blackness of charcoal could aptly suggest the cruelty of her plight as well as the long-burning flames of Troy. The painting medium, i.e. burnt wood, designed to roughen the surface finish, here becomes the topic of the painting, i.e. the burning down of Troy, as though the jaggedness characteristic of painter’s technique could entirely contaminate its eminently tragic topic.
- 89 On this, see also Ian Smith, Black Shakespeare. Reading and Misreading Race, Cambridge, Cambridge U (...)
- 90 Noémie Ndiaye, Scripts of Blackness. Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race, Phila (...)
- 91 Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage, (...)
47The “begrimed” pioneer depicted in The Rape of Lucrece is important because it also points to the prevalent use, in Shakespeare’s times, of coal and soot in order to recreate black skin on the early modern stage.89 As Noémie Ndiaye observes in Scripts of Blackness, medieval drama already represented the devil “in black-up” according to the evidence provided by the records of professional guilds performing the Coventry cycle plays. The practice survived in sixteenth-century England. For instance, “The ‘Drapers’ Company records from 1561 to 1579 list extra costs for ‘the blacckying of the sowles’ facys’.90 In Shakespeare Without Women, Dympna Callaghan suggests that actors probably used “charred cork mixed with a little oil”91 (as minstrels would later do), some combination of soot and grease, or, more basically, charcoal. A costlier option, more rarely used, was to burn walnut shells, or – even better – ivory, whose whiteness was paradoxically reputed to produce the most beautiful black colour.
- 92 Quoted in Virginia Mason Vaughan, op. cit., p. 11.
48This make-up was used on early modern English stages to embody black, or Afro-diasporic people, which linked the black colour to evil. “In the late 1580s when black Moors began to have speaking roles that a vizard would have impeded, actors probably concocted their own makeup materials”, Paul Henzer observes.92 Added to the use of charcoal were wigs made of stiff lambskin fur that were supposed to render the texture of natural black hair. The professional theatre’s pigments were usually cheaper and more accessible than burnt ivory, made of charcoal, lampblack, coal, and cork added to bases of animal fats, grease, tallow, water, and egg white. In an insightful analysis of the material reconstructions of blackness, Morwenna Carr associates the use of charcoal with the representation of evil and emphasizes the dehumanizing effects which this black make-up then had on the actors:
- 93 M. Carr, op. cit., p. 83.
Using soot not only leaves the “devil” in question blackened but also connects that body to the fires which produce soot, and thereby to the biggest fire of the early modern imagination – that of hell. Soot and coal render the person who has been crudely smeared with them unreadable; the application of these flat cosmetics renders the planes of the face stiff and without depth from reflections, thus obliterating both the features and delicate facial movements of anyone to whom they are applied.93
- 94 See William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate, London, Routledge, 1995. Titus: “Yet (...)
- 95 William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann, Walton-on-Thames, Thomas Nelson and Sons, 199 (...)
- 96 Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All, New York, Pantheon Books, 2004, p. 589.
- 97 “The deepest thing in man is the skin” (“ce qu’il y a de plus profond en l’homme, c’est la peau”), (...)
49The presence of soot and coal thus functioned as an intensifier on the early modern English stage: it made evil absolute, suggesting connections with the flames of hell. The use of black make-up is clearly referred to in some of Shakespeare’s tragic playtexts. In Titus Andronicus, the compound adjective “coal-black” is used twice in connection with the Moor Aaron (3.2.79; 4.2.101), which suggests that blackness is an onstage artifice, and that Shakespeare actually deals with the representation of blackness more than with blackness per se.94 In Othello, as Iago demonises the titular character by treating him like a beast and calling him “thicklips” (1.1.65),95 he actually comments on the theatrical materialisation of blackness and on the performance of the white actor Burbage, thus enacting a fantasy of black African masculinity. Emilia’s exclamation, at the end of the tragedy, implicitly associates the actor’s black make-up with his devilish behaviour: “O, the more angel she, / And you the blacker devil!” (5.2.128-29). As already noted above, the Moor acknowledges in a highly metatheatrical speech that his black make-up has soiled Desdemona’s clothes (“Her name, that was as fresh / As Dian’s visage, is now begrimed and black / As mine own face”, 3.3.389-91, my emphasis). So, like the pioneer’s face in the wall painting of The Rape of Lucrece, Othello’s face is covered by a thin layer of coal dust. In Shakespeare After All, Marjorie Garber convincingly presents the play as “a kind of dramatic reworking of this tale of Mars, Venus, and Vulcan.”96 The parallel with the blacksmith god (whose forge was set underneath Mount Etna) makes even more sense in connection with the sooty figure of the actor playing Othello who must have looked like a collier or a parodic blacksmith. Coal was also a marker of social class: while the nobility took great pains to keep its skin as fair (i.e. white) as possible, members of the lower classes had to cope with earth, dirt, and coal. In Shakespeare’s tragedy, we can presume that Othello’s skin colour, added to his incoherent ramblings, led to his demotion in the eyes of the Venetian elite. In the denouement, the Moor is no longer seen as a top-ranking officer, but as a mere “soldier” (5.2.259). His begging the devils to wash him “in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire” (5.2.278) should alert us to the ultimate step of his self-darkening process: while he was merely “begrimed” in 3.3, he is now ready to be turned into glowing embers, i.e. into burning coal. So his skin-deep blackness has finally worked its way inside.97
Conclusion: The Transition from Wood to Mineral Fuel
- 98 W. H. Te Brake, op. cit., p. 342.
- 99 Francis Bacon. Sylva sylvarum: or, a natural history in ten centuries, London, Printed by J. H. for (...)
- 100 D. E. Blythe, op. cit., p. 462.
50All these observations point to the fact that charcoal was an omnipresent, multi-dimensional commodity in the life of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. When charcoal gave way to sea-coal however, the aesthetic resonances of “coal” greatly diminished. While charcoal served a variety of purposes, was loaded with symbolical (and sometimes racial) associations with the fire of hell, and was reminiscent of a vanishing green world which gave more than it took, sea-coal was first and foremost a source of heat and a marker of a proto-industrialised world, and it needed many men and many victims as well, in order to be extracted from the underground. W. H. Te Brake makes it clear that “[l]ime burners and smiths were the first to use sea-coal for their fires. By the sixteenth century, the artisans of many other trades were also beginning to make the fuel substitution: brewers, brick and tile makers, salt makers, dyers, and malt dryers, to name a few.”98 Sea-coal burnt in the grate virtually flameless with a deep, non-smouldering, long-enduring white-glow. “Sea-Coale last longer then Char-Coale”, Francis Bacon wrote in Sylva sylvarum (1626).99 Its “nearly pure carbon constituence (90 %)”100 meant, however, that it was to become a major source of pollution: de facto, its advent coincided with the beginning of the Anthropocene.
- 101 Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, New York, Harp (...)
- 102 In 1550, Newcastle traded 51,000 tons of coal by sea, one-fourth of which found its way to London; (...)
- 103 On this, see Asta Moller, “Coal Mining in the Seventeenth Century”, Transactions of the Royal Histo (...)
51As sea-coal was slowly becoming the alternative to charcoal, Carolyn Merchant asserts that coal mining rose exponentially. Between 1540 and 1640, outputs from coal mines increased from a few hundred tons a year […] to 10,000-15,000 tons […] Coal shipped out of Newcastle-upon-Tyne to other parts of England rose sixteen-fold during this same period.101 So, while woodburning and charcoal diminished the woodlands, sea-coal was increasingly mined in England, and its exploitation ravaged the English subsoil.102 Coal use, which was regarded as a necessity more than a choice,103 outstripped wood use by around 1620 and, from the domestic sphere, it extended to the industrial one.
- 104 Vin Nardizzi, op. cit., p. 113.
52Shakespeare was not blind to such changes. This turn from charcoal to burning coal, a less expensive alternative, is suggested in his work which, on various scales, depicts diversity under threat, the commodification of land, and the fine line treaded between exploration and destruction. The Tempest is a case in point: on his remote island, Prospero stands both as an explorer and a destructive settler. The enslaved, indigenous Caliban is seen repeatedly cutting timber and carrying logs to comply with his master’s rule. Like Vin Nardizzi, we can speculate that land clearing and timber cutting here reflect England’s resource scarcity and subsequent proto-industrial shift, and that “the island’s logs emerge as a solution to the shortage of wood” which beset Jacobean England.104 Remarkably, however, the advent of domestic coal in the country did not entail the complete disappearance of charcoal: both energy regimes coexisted in the seventeenth century, and charcoal became especially appreciated by the happy few who could afford it.
- 105 I am here borrowing the words of Timothy Morton in Ecology without Nature, Cambridge, Mass., Harvar (...)
53In Shakespeare, it is definitely more complex and dramatic in essence than its cheaper, mineral counterpart: it is endowed with an agency of its own, and with an expressive power that engenders a specific theatrical force. Charcoal, in the plays and the poems of the early modernity, definitely has a poetry that sea-coal does not have. Perhaps because as an instrument, it points to the very frailty, or evanescence, of the artistic form, while as an eco-material, literary topic, it refers to an age of proximity, rather than distance, between human beings and nature, subjects and objects, mind and matter.105
Notes
1 Alfred Kentigern Siewers, “Trees” in Inhuman Nature, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Washington, D. C., Oliphaunt Books, 2014, p. 101-14 (p. 113).
2 Vin Nardizzi, Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2013, p. 9.
3 Ibid., p. 21.
4 Charles H. Parker, Global Interactions in the Early Modern Age, 1400-1800, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 162.
5 Paul Edmonson, Kevin Colls, William Mitchell, Finding Shakespeare’s New Place: An Archaeological Biography, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2016, p. 161.
6 The aim is to remove unwanted elements, such as water, creosote and tar and to leave pure black carbon. Charcoal burns hotter, longer, and with less smoke than wood, and it can be used where wood cannot: in high-temperature hearths, industrial furnaces, and in gunpowder. It is a slightly more concentrated fuel than bituminous coal, containing about a third more millijoules per kilogram. More importantly, it has twice the energy density of well-dried wood.
7 It is now acknowledged that even so-called “renewable” charcoal has a detrimental effect on the environment through the use of monoculture, which compromises biodiversity.
8 On this original meaning, see also Richard Rhodes, Energy. A Human History, New York, Simon and Schuster, 2018, p. 8.
9 In The Winter’s Tale, remembering the eyes of his wife which looked like shining stars, Leontes exclaims: “Stars, stars, / And all eyes else, dead coals!” (5.1.68). See William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. John Pitcher, London, Methuen Drama, 2010.
10 William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, ed. Peter Holland, London, Bloomsbury, 2013.
11 Stephanie Pain, “Power Through the Ages”, Nature 551, S134-S137, 29 November 2017, doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-017-07506-z (all web references last accessed 05/01/2026).
12 I am paraphrasing here the famous formula coined by the media theorist Marshall McLuhan, “The medium is the message”, in his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, New York, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964.
13 Todd Andrew Borlik (ed.), Literature and Nature in the English Renaissance: An Ecocritical Anthology, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019, p. 8.
14 Sandra Clark, “Coal, sea-coal” in Shakespeare and Domestic life: A Dictionary, London, Bloomsbury, 2018, Kindle, 2293/12155.
15 Katherine Duncan-Jones and H. R. Woudhuysen (eds.), The Rape of Lucrece, in Shakespeare’s Poems, London, Bloomsbury, 2007, p. 232-383. For a more detailed analysis of this passage, I refer to my third and last part in this article.
16 S. Clark, op. cit., 2293/12155.
17 See Jeanne Jones, Stratford-upon-Avon Inventories, 1538-1699, 2 vols., Stratford-upon-Avon, Dugdale Society, 2002.
18 See the website: https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/blogs/shakespeare-100-objects-warming-pan/ (all web references last accessed 05/01/2026).
19 Richard Rhodes, Energy. A Human History, New York, Simon and Schuster, 2018, p. 8.
20 An., Present remedies against the plague, London, [By J. Danter] for William Barley, 1594, STC (2nd ed.) / 5871.5., n.p.
21 T. W. Craik (ed.), op. cit., note to 3.2.46, p. 207.
22 Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1950, C 464.
23 William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, ed. Keir Elam, London, Cengage Learning, The Arden Shakespeare, 2008.
24 R. W. Dent, Shakespeare’s Proverbial Language: An Index, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1981, L287. Incidentally, Like Will to Like was also the title of a 1568 play by Ulpian Fulwell. See K. Elam (ed.), op. cit, note to 3.4.114, p. 281.
25 William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. René Weis, London, Bloomsbury, 2012.
26 Robert Greene, A Notable discovery of cozenage, London: Printed by John Wolfe for T.N., 1591. URL: http://oxford-shakespeare.com/Greene/Notable_Discovery.pdf.
27 On this, see Christina Luckyj and Niamh J. O’Leary, The Politics of Female Alliance in Early Modern England, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2017, p. 53.
28 Ibid., p. 24.
29 Ibid.
30 For further details on this poem, see Heidi C. M. Scott, “Charcoal: Firing Early Industry. The Collier” in Fuel. An Ecocritical History, London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, chap. 4, p. 95-118.
31 Quoted in T. A. Borlik (ed.), op. cit., p. 478.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid., p. 477.
34 Later in the seventeenth century, see also Grim the Collier of Croyden; or, The Devil and his Dame: with the Devil and Saint Dunston, a play of uncertain authorship, published in 1662.
35 On the issue of overpopulation in connection with environmental crisis, see Todd Andrew Borlik, Shakespeare Beyond the Green World. Drama and Ecopolitics in Jacobean Britain, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2023, esp. chap. 7, p. 167-192.
36 William M. Cavert, “Prologue,” in The Smoke of London. Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2016, p. xviii.
37 Ibid., op. cit., p. 21-22.
38 Calendar of Close Rolls, Edward I (1302-7), p. 537. Quoted by William H. Te Brake, “Air Pollution and Fuel Crises in Preindustrial London, 1250-1650”, Technology and Culture, 16.3 (1975), p. 337-359 (p. 340).
39 Ibid., p. 338.
40 Quoted in Peter Brimblecombe, The Big Smoke. A History of Air Pollution in London since Medieval Times, Oxon, Routledge, 2012 (Methuen, 1987), p. 30.
41 Hugh Plat, A nevv, cheape and delicate fire of cole-balles wherein seacole is by the mixture of other combustible bodies, both sweetened and multiplied, Imprinted at London, By Peter Short dwelling at the signe of the Starre on Bredstreet-hill, 1603.
42 V. Nardizzi, op. cit., p. 10.
43 W. M. Cavert, op. cit., p. 20-21.
44 Shakespeare owned lands close to a forest and had important familial ties to the forest of Arden. His mother, Mary Arden, had spent her childhood in Wilmcote, situated in the forest of Arden. Besides his 1597 purchase of New Place, Shakespeare also invested in 127 acres of land in 1602.
45 Brinley Thomas, “Was There an Energy Crisis in Great Britain in the 17th Century?”, Explorations in Economic History 23.2, 1986, p. 125, here p. 124-152. Quoted by V. Nardizzi, op. cit., p. 10.
46 Deborah Mary Frances Bartlett, “The History of Coppicing in South east England in the Modern period with Special Reference to the Chestnut Industry of Kent and Sussex”, Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, The University of Greenwich, June 2011, 43. URL: https://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/9085/5/Deborah%20Mary%20Frances%20Bartlett%202011%20-%20redacted.pdf.
47 William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. H. R. Woudhuysen, London, Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1998.
48 Andrew MacRae, “Tree-felling in Early Modern England: Michael Drayton’s Environmentalism”, The Review of English Studies, 63. 260, June 2012, p. 410-30, here p. 411.
49 Katherine Duncan-Jones and H.R. Woudhuysen (eds.), Venus and Adonis in Shakespeare’s Poems, London, Bloomsbury, 2007, p. 127-229.
50 Ibid., p. 256, note to l. 259.
51 A. MacRae, op. cit., p. 415-6.
52 N. D. G. James, A History of English Forestry, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1981, p. 166. Quoted in A. MacRae, op. cit., p. 416.
53 A. MacRae, op. cit., p. 416.
54 Quoted in T. A. Borlik, op. cit., p. 259.
55 See William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, ed. Giorgo Melchiori, Walton-on-Thames, Thomas Nelson and Sons, 2000: “Cricket, to Windsor chimneys shalt thou leap” (5.5.43).
56 William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part 2, ed. James C. Bulman, London, Bloomsbury, 2016.
57 Georgianna Ziegler, “Mistress Quickly: From Hostess in Henry IV Part 1 to Fairy Queen in The Merry Wives of Windsor”, Shakespeare & Beyond, September 10, 2019. URL: https://shakespeareandbeyond.folger.edu/2019/09/10/mistress-quickly-from-hostess-in-henry-iv-part-1-to-fairy-queen-in-the-merry-wives-of-windsor/.
58 Randall Martin, op. cit., p. 40. I refer, more generally, to Martin’s first chapter, “Localism, Deforestation, and Environmental Activism in The Merry Wives of Windsor”, p. 32-55.
59 On this, see also Randall Martin, “Shakespeare, Ecology, and the Environment”, Folger Shakespeare Library, Posted April 18, 2017, URL: https://www.folger.edu/blogs/shakespeare-and-beyond/shakespeare-ecology-environmental-earth-day/.
60 William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, op. cit., note to 1.4.8, p. 154.
61 David Everett Blythe, “Mistress Quickly’s Sea-Coal”, Shakespeare Quarterly, 35. 4, Winter, 1984, p. 462-63, here p. 462.
62 W. M. Cavert, op. cit., p. 26.
63 Ibid., p. 27.
64 Robert Norton. The gunner shevving the vvhole practise of artillerie, London, Printed by A[ugustine] M[athewes] for Humphrey Robinson, 1628, STC (2nd ed.) / 18673, p. 73.
65 For further details on this issue, see K. Jan Oosthoek, “The Role of Wood in World History”, October 15, 1998, https://www.eh-resources.org/the-role-of-wood-in-world-history/. See also Ian D. Rotherham and David Egan, “The Economics of Fuel Wood, Charcoal and Coal: An Interpretation of Coppice Management of British Woodlands” in History and Sustainability. Third International Conference of the European Society for Environmental History: Proceedings, eds. Mauro Agnoletti, Marco Armiero, Stefania Barca and Gabriella Corona, Florence, University of Florence/ESEH, 2005, p. 100-101.
66 David Cressy, “Saltpetre, State Security and Vexation in Early Modern England”, Past & Present, 212. 1, August 2011, p. 73-111, here p. 74.
67 William Shakespeare, Macbeth, eds. Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason, London, Bloomsbury, 2015.
68 On this, see Jonathan Gil Harris, “The Smell of Gunpowder: Macbeth and the Palimpsests of Olfaction” in Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010, p. 119-39.
69 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, Duke University Press, 2010.
70 Ibid., p. 27. Bennett borrows this concept from Bruno Latour.
71 Juliet Fleming, “Graffiti, Grammatology, and the Age of Shakespeare” in Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, eds. Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999, p. 315-352 (p. 315).
72 See George Thomas Kurian, James D. Smith (eds.), The Encyclopedia of Christian Literature, Lanham, Scarecrow Press, 2 vols., vol. 2, 2010, p. 474.
73 Quoted in Ian Donaldson, Ben Jonson. A Life, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 371.
74 Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text”, Shakespeare Quarterly, 44. 3, Autumn 1993, p. 255-283, here p. 279.
75 Miles P. Grier, Inkface. Othello and White Authority in the Era of Atlantic Slavery –Writing the Early Americas, Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2023.
76 Henry Peacham, The art of dravving vvith the pen, and limming in water colours more exactlie then heretofore taught, London, Printed by Richard Braddock, for William Iones, and are to be sold at his shop at the signe of the Gun neere Holburn Conduit, 1606, STC (2nd ed.) / 19500, p. 27.
77 E.g. sonnet 16: “Now stand you on the top of happy hours, / And many maiden gardens, yet unset, / With virtuous wish would bear your living flowers, / Much liker than your painted counterfeit: / So should the line of life that life repair, / Which this, time’s pencil or my pupil pen, / Neither in inward worth nor outward fair, / Can make you live yourself in eyes of men” (l. 5-12); and sonnet 101: “Truth needs no colour with his colour fixed, / Beauty no pencil, beauty’s truth to lay” (l. 6-7). See Katherine Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, London, Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, The Arden Shakespeare, 1997.
78 Virginia Mason Vaughan, Performing Blackness on English Stages, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 11.
79 R. K. R. Thornton and T. G. S. Cain (eds.), A Treatise Concerning the Arte of Limning, Ashington, Mid Northumberland Arts Group, 1981, p. 91. Quoted in Morwenna Carr, “Material / Blackness Race and Its Material Reconstructions on the Seventeenth-Century English Stage”, Early Theatre, 20. 1, 2017, p. 77-95, here p. 79.
80 See also Edward Norgate, Miniatura or The Art of Limning, ed. Martin Hardie, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1919, p. 15 and p. 93. URL: https://resources.warburg.sas.ac.uk/pdf/cmh150b2212594.pdf, last accessed 28/01/2026.
81 The painting was destroyed in the fire of 1698. What is left of the cartoon is on display at the National Portrait Gallery under the title King Henry VIII; King Henry VII (c. 1536-37), 2378 mm x 1372 mm.
82 In 1571, Elizabeth I was presented with a portrait in charcoal of Henri III, based on a drawing by François Clouet. In 1573, La Mothe Fénelon, who then served as ambassador to the Queen, reported in his correspondence that she had objected to the carbon medium of the drawing. See Bertrand de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon, Correspondance diplomatique, 7 tomes, Paris and London, 1838-1840, t. 4, p. 186. Many thanks to Anne-Valérie Dulac for bringing this reference to my attention.
83 It was only in the twentieth century that it became commonly used as an art medium of its own.
84 Richard Meek, “Ekphrasis in The Rape of Lucrece and The Winter’s Tale”, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 46. 2, Tudor and Stuart Drama, Spring 2006, p. 389-414, here p. 391.
85 See my analysis later in this development.
86 Edward Norgate, op. cit., p. 94.
87 Katherine Duncan-Jones and H. R. Woudhuysen (eds.), op. cit., note to l. 1435, p. 351.
88 Edward Norgate, op. cit., p. 94.
89 On this, see also Ian Smith, Black Shakespeare. Reading and Misreading Race, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2022, p. 137 ff.
90 Noémie Ndiaye, Scripts of Blackness. Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Press, 2022, p. 16. Charcoal black-up, Ndiaye also explains, was used not just in England, but in religious French theatre and in Iberian performances as well.
91 Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage, London and New York, Routledge, 1999, p. 78.
92 Quoted in Virginia Mason Vaughan, op. cit., p. 11.
93 M. Carr, op. cit., p. 83.
94 See William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate, London, Routledge, 1995. Titus: “Yet I think we are not brought so low / But that between us we can kill a fly / That comes in likeness of a coal-black Moor” (3.2.77-79); Aaron: “Coal-black is better than another hue / in that it scorns to bear another hue” (4.2.101-102).
95 William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann, Walton-on-Thames, Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1996.
96 Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All, New York, Pantheon Books, 2004, p. 589.
97 “The deepest thing in man is the skin” (“ce qu’il y a de plus profond en l’homme, c’est la peau”), Paul Valéry famously wrote in 1931. See Paul Valéry, L’idée fixe in Œuvres II, ed. Jean Hytier, Paris, Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1960, p. 216.
98 W. H. Te Brake, op. cit., p. 342.
99 Francis Bacon. Sylva sylvarum: or, a natural history in ten centuries, London, Printed by J. H. for William Lee, (1626), 1627, Century VIII, p. 201.
100 D. E. Blythe, op. cit., p. 462.
101 Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, New York, HarperCollins, 1980, p. 66.
102 In 1550, Newcastle traded 51,000 tons of coal by sea, one-fourth of which found its way to London; in 1683, Newcastle shipped 522,000 tons of coal, two-thirds of which went by water to London. See Brian Dietz, “The North-East Coal Trade, 1550-1750: Measures, Markets, and the Metropolis”, Northern History, 22, 1986, p. 280-294, esp. table 2, and p. 292.
103 On this, see Asta Moller, “Coal Mining in the Seventeenth Century”, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 8, 1925, p. 79-97.
104 Vin Nardizzi, op. cit., p. 113.
105 I am here borrowing the words of Timothy Morton in Ecology without Nature, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2007, p. 24: “The aesthetic is also a product of distance: of human beings from nature, of subjects from objects, of mind from matter. Is it not rather suspiciously anti-ecological?”
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Sophie Chiari, « Reading the Early Modern Energy Crisis through Shakespeare: A Cultural History of Coal », Études Épistémè [En ligne], 48 | 2025, mis en ligne le 16 mars 2026, consulté le 19 avril 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/episteme/21964 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/160fp
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