An Ecomusicological Analysis of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "The Tempest"

Abstract

Listening to the environment is becoming even more urgent to deeply grasp the gravity of the climate crisis. Ecomusicology brings together music studies and ecocriticism to raise public awareness for environmental sounds. This paper aims at contributing to this field with a study of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest. An ecomusicological analysis was conducted on these two works, taking theatrical, literary, and musical aspects into consideration. The results show that the two plays base the interaction between body and environment on sounds, and that they problematize the binary human/non-human, immersing every biological and non-biological element in a common soundscape. They also tackle the concepts of ecophobia and anthropocentrism in acoustic terms, connecting them with noise and with the abuse of the power of music. These results suggest that the two plays, in virtue of the early modern epistemology on which they are based, can be instrumental in rekindling the attention towards the various voices of the world, and in reviving the wonder for the eloquence of the environment.