Study of the sea--both in terms of human interaction with it and its
literary representation--has been largely ignored by ecocritics. In
Shakespeare's Ocean, Dan Brayton foregrounds the maritime dimension of a
writer whose plays and poems have had an enormous impact on literary notions of nature and, in so
doing, plots a new course for ecocritical scholarship.Shakespeare lived during a
time of great expansion of geographical knowledge. The world in which he imagined his plays was
newly understood to be a sphere covered with water. In vital readings of works ranging from
The Comedy of Errors to the valedictory The Tempest, Brayton
demonstrates Shakespeare's remarkable conceptual mastery of the early modern maritime world
and reveals a powerful benthic imagination at work.