Shakespeare, Climate Change and the Blue Humanities: Imagining an Oceanic Education

The blue humanities in Shakespeare studies shifts our attention to watery spaces, histories, experiences and ways of thinking. This chapter takes a blue pedagogical turn to consider how prioritizing the oceanic enables us to deepen students’ critical awareness of and engagement with Shakespeare, their changing climate and its blue spaces. Exploring Shakespeare’s oceanic education in The Tempest, this chapter identifies three ‘blue’ lessons on our relations with the more-than-human world. These include ways to respond to the scale of climate change, learning to dwell in the uncertain and to imagine multiple possibilities and futures, and finally, considering the relationship between emotions and blue ecologies, especially ecological grief or environmental guilt. These three lessons model ways in which Shakespeare pedagogy can respond to the oceanic turn.