Rupert Smith Twitter: @RupSmit Email: r.smith28@lancaster.ac.uk Website: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rupert-smith-actor-writer/ Thesis: Tract: an experimental novel Institution Lancaster University

Rupert Smith’s Yale University conference paper on Shakespeare’s King Lear explored the disorientation and dislocation of human elements and those of Nature. It sought ways to best interpret the entangled connections between them. 
There are two important learning outcomes. The first concerns ecocritical readings of King Lear, and how they might be seen as generative in terms of the possibilities of us all having a personal stake in public events. What is revelatory in King Lear are the potent ripple effects of a symbolic act: a monarch’s tearing up of a map of a kingdom into fragments. It appears to set in motion the simultaneous dissolution of relationships between humans, plants and animals. A similar story of exploitative cause and effect was integral to the conference keynote speech, with its account of a remote indigenous Amazonian tribe slowly dying due to mercury poisoning in the lakes and rivers. It became one of performative lament. 
There is a new appreciation of what these in-depth readings of King Lear potentially yield: that even from Shakespeare’s early seventeenth-century perspective (which stemmed from an awareness of heightened food anxiety), ecosystems of human and plant and animal are inextricably knotted together. It could be seen to extend from the heart of Lear’s royal court to facets of disrupted Nature and its anomalies. It is not simply that the uncovering of ecocritical readings of the play is surprising but that an ontological framework is evident between apparently unrelated and disparate voices. The act of writing a paper to clarify these concepts within a constricted time frame reflected such a gossamer-like entanglement. It represented an act of assembly, light-touch weaving in academic references and literary allusion.  
The second point of learning centres on the realisation of how the pushing of language to the limit in the play provides a barometer for the Earth’s descent and degradation. In light of this, the challenge for Rupert Smith is how to write his way forward in his creative practice. Language in King Lear shows itself to be an inadequate container, or tool, for expressing grief and trauma over the need to control Nature’s wild spaces and over exile from the self. One breakthrough in the research was a fresh understanding of how cries of lament and notes of hope are intertwined. A counterpoint to this was the polyphony of contributions from other conference presenters and the focus on the religious dimension of prayerful lament present in King Lear despite the descent into tragedy. 
Lastly, the performative act of bringing to speech the words on the page is beneficial for the growth of the written project and vice versa. One vital strand of this creative practice is the orality and performance of future academic papers and new King Lear mythologies. It is hoped that this writer’s bringing of speech to the limit and the shedding of language in all its forms onto receptive ears will represent the growth of an ecosystem in words.
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