On the eve of the winter solstice, Cymbeline in the Anthropocene project leader Randall Martin reflects on the theatrical brilliance and the ecological revelations that glinted through another dark year.  2021 brought many hard lessons to the world, to theatre artists, and to Cymbeline in the Anthropocene, but with these also came hope, innovation, and many an adaptation. 

As 2021 draws to a close, it is shocking to reflect on how tumultuous this year has been--theatrically, ecologically, and globally. Join us today as we take a month-by-month journey back through our blogs as we documented this chaotic and remarkable year. 

This week’s blog features some brilliantly inventive engagement with our project website by Cornell University students. Under the course leadership of Professor Theo Black, Cornell’s PMA 3801 acting ensemble, joined by two additional guest artists, have created a daring beautiful, rollicking, and provocative postmodern adaptation entitled “Once Upon a Time in … The Anthropocene.”

After last week’s post examined “Performing Shakespeare in a Time of Ecological Crisis: A Global Roundtable Session,” the Cymbeline in the Anthropocene wanted to highlight one more session from the Shakespeare Association of America’s 49th annual conference, which took place at the beginning of April. Chaired by Kim Hall, “Shakespeare Futures: Ecology and Pre-Modern Critical Race Studies” eschewed a conventional panel structure to create an innovative, jointly-authored collaboration between four scholars. To echo the collaborative structure of this important presentation, Cymbeline in the Anthropocene’s discussion of it is presented as a conversation between project leader Randall Martin and graduate researcher Rebecca Salazar. 

In April, Globe 4 Globe: Shakespeare and Climate Emergency became the first international symposium to address this increasingly pressing topic. Co-organized by Katie Brokaw, Paul Prescott, and the Research Department at Shakespeare’s Globe, the event brought together more than 30 theatre-makers, scholars, and sustainability experts, who presented culturally and theatrically diverse papers on eco-Shakespeare in performance, with a particular emphasis on its relationships with the deepening climate crisis. The breadth of artistic concepts and dramaturgical approaches makes it challenging to summarise the conference’s key takeaways. Nonetheless, three broad themes emerged: relations to place, sustainable practices, and environmental justice.

It is an auspicious coincidence that Earth Day and Shakespeare’s birthday fall back to back on the calendar every April. Today, we arrive at Earth Day 2021 after a tumultuous year, in which Covid-19 and its accompanying political crises have reminded us exactly how interconnected our local environments are with the rest of the globe. 

In our final blog entry of 2020, Cymbeline in the Anthropocene project leader Randall Martin delves into the textual allusions indicating Cymbeline was originally a Christmas play, signifying an existential turning between ages that was relevant to audiences in both 1610, the year of its first performance, and in 2020. At the end of a year dominated by global health, ecological, and social crises, Cymbeline's prophecies offer a wisdom we can take into a new year, and a new era, as the world continues to transform.

Following Cymbeline in the Anthropocene’s first planning meeting last February in Santa Barbara, California, our collaborators created a wordcloud of major terms that emerged from its conversations and workshops. After mulling in our collaborator’s minds and Twitter archives during these months of global pandemic lockdowns, the wordcloud has now found physical form in a embroidered rendition, hand-crafted by our project researcher and website manager, Rebecca Salazar. The embroidery, pictured above, represents all the terms in our wordcloud in shades of green and grey as they wheel around a central pink flower, with all elements joined by black vines over a black background.

It has been over three weeks since Black Lives Matter protests began after the killing of American George Floyd, and resistance to police violence and racism is growing across the globe, with demonstrations still going strong in all fifty American states, as well as in dozens of countries across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Though social movements such as Black Lives Matter are not usually seen to address climate crisis, there is a growing urgency to consider racism an ecological issue—including in the theatre, and in Shakespeare ecocriticism studies.

As COVID-19 has spread around the world, it’s been sad to see agencies such as the World Health Organization attacked for alleged shortcomings while it struggles to encourage coordinated action against this unprecedented crisis.