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Tree-Becoming: Gender, Race, and Trauma on Shakespeare's Stage

Tree-Becoming: Gender, Race, and Trauma on Shakespeare's Stage

by Kelley, Shannon
No customer reviews yet ISBN 9781501787300

Trees abound in Shakespeare's plays, and in Tree-Becoming, Shannon Kelley explores how he uses his characters' identification with cypress, balsam, bay laurel, myrrh, and pine trees as metaphors to express emotional distress. Opening new avenues for investigating knowledge of the plant world in early modern literature, Kelley traces the Ovidian conceit of arboreal transformation in A Midsummer Night's Dream, King Lear, Othello, and The Tempest.

Through the recurring motif of tree-becoming, in which characters who can no longer endure painful feelings align with or are imagined as trees, Kelley proposes a radical reading of Shakespeare's depiction of trauma's lingering impact on the body and psyche. These arboreal moments resist resolution and resist healing, offering instead a vision of survival and endurance. Bringing Shakespeare in conversation with insights from critical plant and trauma studies, Tree-Becoming honors survivors of trauma as they are, not as we would have them be: they become trees--different but not less than.

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Pub dateJun 15, 2026
ISBN-101501787306
ISBN-139781501787300
LanguageEnglish
Last updated 2026-06-16 04:38
$40.67
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