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.

The new coronavirus is a frighteningly accelerated version of the incremental disruptions of climate change. Both are Anthropocene crises because they confound or collapse connections between local and global environments normally believed to be safely distanced and manageable. Here I'll explore how a COVID-19 context affects the roles of Jupiter and Giacomo, and alters the emotional – and potentially transformative -- impacts of the play’s tragicomedy.