The Dissolution of the Engine of this World: The Decay of Nature as Ecology and Commonwealth

Justin Kolb

Francis Shakelton's pamphlet A blazyng Starre (1580) reads the English earthquake and comet of 1580 as omens of “the finall dissolution of the Engine of this worlde […] whiche by many manifest and inevitable reasons I gather, can not bee farre of.” A blazing starre is the first known instance of a peculiar sort of slow apocalypse: “The Decay of Nature,” a gradual dissolution that sees the world, infected by sin, gradually crumble into its constituent elements, order receding back into atomized chaos:

[I]t shall manifestly be proved that this worlde shall perishe and passe awaie, if wee doe but consider the partes whereof it doeth consist, for doe we not see the earth to be changed and corrupted: […] Doe wee not in some places also read that mountaines have falne doune, by reason of earthquakes: […] Also have ye not read, that seas have rebounded backe, overwhelmed whole Cittes, and utterly drowned whole provinces: And what are these strange alterations els, but evident arguments that the world shall one daie have an ende.

This world waiting to be put out of its misery would become a major strand in English intellectual culture in the first half of the seventeenth century, succinctly summarized by George Herbert’s poem “Decay”:

I see the world grows old, whenas the heat

Of thy great love once spread, as in an urn

Doth closet up itself and still retreat,

Cold sinne still forcing it, till it return,

And calling Justice, all things burn.

In this paper, I will examine an earlier response to the decay of nature. In William Shakespeare’s Richard II ­(1597) we see Gaunt’s “other Eden, demi-paradise / This fortress built by Nature for herself” (2.1.42-43) crumble, and Richard’s claims to command the stones prove groundless. But in Richard’s final scene, the play briefly re-imagines a decaying hierarchy as a dynamic commonwealth, nature as a republic of creatures who approach each other as equals, on grounds of sympathy and love, and exist in a constant state of negotiation. The constellations of kings, prisoners, horses, grooms, stones, and jacks o’the clock are in constant swerving motion. The mutability of the world becomes a sign of hope and vitality, rather than despair and decrepitude. It’s all too brief, but for a moment Richard manages to convene what Bruno Latour calls the Parliament of Things, an assembly of human and nonhuman actors combining to make a world.

Unfortunately, Richard’s new constitution arrives at five minutes to midnight and assassins cut him off. Nevertheless, the possibility he floats remains a vivid alternative to the despair usually prompted by the decay of nature. As our own warming world faces rising seas and crumbling shores, we might learn from this transitory commonwealth and consider turning away from apocalyptic despair and convening our own parliament of things.

Murray Bookchin. The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy. Oakland: AK Press, 2005.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

Jonathan Goldberg. The Seeds of Things: Theorizing Sexuality and Materiality in Renaissance Representations. New York: Fordham University Press, 2009.

Victor Harris. All coherence gone: a study of the seventeenth century controversy over disorder and decay in the universe. New York: Cass, 1966.

Julia Reinhard Lupton. “Creature Caliban,” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 51, No. 1. Spring, 2000: 1-23.

Bruno Latour. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Steven Shaviro. “Consequences of Panpsychism.” The Nonhuman Turn. Ed. Richard Grusin. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. 19-44.

George Williamson. "Mutability, Decay, and Seventeenth-Century Melancholy." ELH 2, no. 2 (1935): 121-150.

Justin Kolb is an assistant professor of English and comparative literature at the American University in Cairo 

I am currently at work on a book manuscript, Spongy Natures: The Inhuman Ecologies of Ben Jonson's London, which reads Ben Jonson's city comedies as applications of a variety of material praxes, ranging from humoural medicine to alchemy to magnetism, in an effort to create characters suited to the rapidly changing city of London. 

I have also published work on Jonson, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Bruno Latour, posthuman approaches to early modern English literature, and Islam in early modern literature.