Green Worlds: Shakespeare’s Plays and Early Modern Imagery
If Iago’s famous words to Othello defining jealousy as “the green-eyed monster” (3.3.170) clearly associate green with bilious envy, Cleopatra’s reference to her “salad days” (Antony and Cleopatra, 1.5.72) tends to equate ‘greenness’ with fresh innocence. This paper will seek to explore how such flu...
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| Udgivet i: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/erea, |
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| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Sprog: | Anglais |
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E-rea
2015
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| Online adgang: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Summary: | If Iago’s famous words to Othello defining jealousy as “the green-eyed monster” (3.3.170) clearly associate green with bilious envy, Cleopatra’s reference to her “salad days” (Antony and Cleopatra, 1.5.72) tends to equate ‘greenness’ with fresh innocence. This paper will seek to explore how such fluctuations of meanings correlate with the varied and contradictory visions of nature, youth, and decay prevailing at the time. Significantly, in Jean Robertet’s L’exposition des couleurs (c. 1435-1502), green could serve as an allegory of both vice and virtue, evil and joy, and thus also represent transience and versatility. Once the colour of chivalry, it came to be disparaged, but Vert gai’s vibrant hues and vert perdu’s darker ones still coexisted in proverbs, plays or works of art. Shakespeare’s worlds, even in the very heart of pastoral comedies (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Winter’s Tale, As You Like It or The Tempest), reveal the same propensity to oscillate between the lightness of ‘gay green’ and the darker, disquieting vein of ‘lost green’. Being transient, changeable or threatening, green worlds are the very realms of ambivalence. |
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