Eco-Imaginaries from Shakespeare to Tang Xianzu

This article proposes an intercultural model of ecological poetics by placing Shakespearean theatre in dialogue with Tang Xianzu’s Kunqu opera. While Shakespeare often explores ecological rupture and human-nature conflict through dramatic intensity and elemental disruption, Tang approaches ecological imagination through a metaphysical lens, evoking cycles of emotion, seasonality, and spiritual entanglement. Together, their eco-poetic visions offer complementary modes of engaging with more-than-human worlds via rupture and renewal, crisis and attunement. Through close readings of both playwrights’ works, this paper develops the concept of ‘entangled ecologies’: an aesthetic mode in which human and nonhuman forces, affect, and ethics interact dynamically. By tracing how Shakespeare’s storm scenes and Tang’s seasonal dreamscapes differently negotiate environmental vulnerability, the study suggests that cross-cultural performance analysis can expand Shakespeare studies beyond Anglophone traditions, contributing to a pluralistic and relational ecological poetics in the Anthropocene.