As part of our course, students were asked to come up with ideas for staging an ecocriticism-informed production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and one student, Cooper Hoeksema, had a particularly compelling suggestion. He read Puck’s near-final lines in the epilogue — “Give me your hands” (5.1.454) — as an opportunity to commit to action rather than a bid for applause, a space where audience members could be invited to pledge support, to “give their hands,” to fight the climate crisis. This reading has made us further consider how teachers and students of Shakespeare can give their hands to environmental activism.

In one of the most vivid scenes in the production, Calphurnia (Amy Kim Waschke) warned Caesar (Armando Durán) not to go the Senate, arguing that the unnatural storm of the night before foretells something bad happening to him: “When beggars die there are no comets seen; / The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes” (II.ii.30-31). Set in and around Caesar’s bath, this scene fittingly included the only three-dimensional natural element of the production: Water, into which a fully-dressed Calphurnia plunged in her effort to persuade Caesar to stay at home.

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