Titania's warning to America

Following a summer of record-breaking temperatures, scholar Harry R. McCarthy looks to Shakespeare—someone who also lived through climate change—and finds lessons for our own time. From Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to shipwrecked twins in Twelfth Night and The Comedy of Errors, Pericles, and the courtiers in The Tempest, Shakespeare’s characters remind us in catastrophic times of the power in turning “our thoughts to the collective over the individual.”

AT THIS LANDMARK MOMENT IN AMERICA’S HISTORY, I find myself thinking, perhaps surprisingly, of Shakespeare’s Titania. In her first appearance in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Queen of the Fairies chides her menacing husband, Oberon, for the role both rulers have played in some highly significant, and disturbing, changes:

Though they initially place the blame squarely on Oberon’s shoulders, by the end of this extraordinary speech Titania’s admonishments accept that it is the couple’s “debate” and “dissension” as much as Oberon’s “brawls” that have wreaked havoc on the local environment: plants are withering, lands are flooding, and the seasons have altered beyond all recognition, leaving the “human mortals” of the “mazèd world” victim to a “progeny” of environmental evils.

I can’t stop thinking of Titania’s words as I look upon an America increasingly characterized by “brawls” and “dissension”—and that is to put it mildly. Her acknowledgement of the environmental consequences of the kind of self-interest that characterizes her husband’s sporting—and, I would argue, the American present—rings harshly true at moment where the United States has, for the second time,  exited the Paris climate agreement; where resource-hungry data centers endlessly spring up, depriving entire communities of potable water as America’s tech billionaires (and trillionaire) proudly boast a lack of interest in such a luxury commodity as not dying of thirst; and where temperatures continue to rocket all over the world (as I write this sentence, my home country—and Shakespeare’s—of England has recorded its hottest summer ever with London temperatures reaching 38.1°C, or 100.6°F). As far as a Shakespearean play is concerned, it can often feel like we are living in America’s Act 5, Scene 4, with very little time to turn back the clock. How many of us, after all, have seen a TikTok commentator, in the wake of yet another bill, riot, or outburst, suggesting that “America can’t come back from this”? On an existential level, they appear not to be being dramatic: climate scientists—deemed by the current administration to be a bunch of hoaxers—predict we have less than three years left to save humankind from the worst effects of the situation Titania describes to her husband.

These, of course, are the legacies of the violently extractive European colonization, in the Americas and elsewhere, which was spearheaded in Shakespeare’s lifetime and in which his works, with their tacit or indeed explicit endorsement of imperialist venture (hi, Henry V) have often been wielded as a weapon. The Shakespeare who has had meaning in America in its first 250 years has often been valued for his individualistic excellence and endorsement of the American values of self-betterment at the expense of the collective. It was out of an American institution, after all, that Harold Bloom formulated the claim that Shakespeare “invented” the individuated human subject—a subject whose whiteness and maleness went largely unremarked. Yet Shakespeare also derives his contemporaneity and salience for the American population from speeches like Titania’s, driven by a fear for an entire population in the face of environmental catastrophe.

Titania’s speech points to a perhaps surprising climate literacy on the part of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Indeed, it was probably quite hard for Shakespeare to imagine meaning anything in 250 years given the acute crises he and his country were facing, including environmental ones: his was an age characterized by soaring population growth, failed harvests, deforestation, and the beginning of the turn towards fossil fuels. Of the precious few facts we have about Shakespeare, among the more regrettable is how, during one such time of food scarcity, Shakespeare hoarded the valuable commodity of grain for resale at a marked-up price to his neighbors. It is a sobering thought to imagine Shakespeare, were he alive during the Covid-19 pandemic, piling his shopping cart high with toilet paper. Appalling though the thought is, given his shrewd investments and rise to wealth through property, such self-interest in the face of collective need and struggle suggests that he might have been quick to invest in AI (itself now wreaking havoc on the universities that help maintain the Shakespeare industry, not to mention on the planet). Perhaps the garden at his large property in Stratford, New Place, would have had a little data center of its own.

Yet Shakespeare’s works also give us multiple presentations of characters who find themselves subject to the whims and threats of the environment—we need only think of the menacing seas which lead to the shipwrecks of Viola, of the Antipholi and the Dromios, of Pericles, and of the band of courtiers in The Tempest. Following Professor Emma Smith’s showstopping Shakespeare Birthday Lecture at the Folger earlier this year, we might properly think of these characters as climate migrants—whose numbers, in our own moment, are set to rise exponentially in the coming years. When these characters fall victim to climate catastrophe, they may not directly acknowledge it as such—early moderns were not super-precise when it came to rising temperatures or sea levels; there was no policy to reach “Ye Nette Zeroe” by 1650—but they are often aware of its very real threat, and of human insufficiency in the face of it: the Boatswain in The Tempest, while accusing his aristocratic passengers of “assist[ing]” the “storm,” knows that it is “the elements” who run this show (1.1.14, 1.1.22). And, when they find themselves needfully transported to new environments, more often than not these climate migrants are not met with hostility, are not blamed for the problems plaguing their new host country. They are welcomed into households, enfolded into working structures, given community. There is a sharp lesson there for the nation currently swept up in the celebrations of its 250^th birthday.

What role, then, should Shakespeare play in America once these celebrations have passed? Put bluntly, in 250 years’ time, America may not be here. But while it remains, his works might help to remind us to set aside our “brawls” and dissension,” to turn our thoughts to the collective over the individual, and to attend more closely to our “mazèd world” and the rapidly shifting threats to the “human mortals”—all “human mortals”—who inhabit it. For there to be an America in which to engage with Shakespeare in 250 years’ time, it is high time it heeded Titania’s warning.

>> Explore more of our series in which Folger Director Dr. Farah Karim-Cooper asks American Shakespeareans what role Shakespeare will play in the next 250 years of the American story

About the author

Harry R. McCarthy is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern California and a Long-Term Fellow at the Folger Institute (2026–27). He is the author of Performing Early Modern Drama Beyond Shakespeare: Edward’s Boys (2020), Boy Actors in Early Modern England: Skill and Stagecraft in the Theatre (2022), and a new critical introduction to Titus Andronicus for the Oxford World’s Classics New Oxford Shakespeare (2025). He is now working on a book titled Tender Age: Early Modern Childhood and the Engendering of Difference.