When Anne Barton died in late 2013, The Shakespearean Forest was not yet ready for publication. The subject of talks that Barton delivered in 1994 and in 2003, the second time as Trinity College's Clark Lecture series, the materials that would become The Shakespearean Forest—“electronic versions and … many printouts, some annotated” (xv)—were given, in 2014, to Hester Lees-Jeffries, who describes Barton as her “first patron in Cambridge, in the best sense” (xvi). Lees-Jeffries edited these files for publication, and she discovered, presumably to her surprise, that Barton had already “completed the bulk of her work on The Shakespearean Forest by 2005” (xv). About the task she undertook, which included some re-sequencing of text in chapter 1, but not very much direct intervention otherwise, Lees-Jeffries observes, “The work I have done in preparing this book for the press is not a labour of love, but rather of profound gratitude—not simply for what Anne did for me, but for the work she has left us, and for her example as a scholar, critic, writer and teacher” (xvi). On behalf of scholars working in early modern drama, ecocriticism, and environmental literary history, I'd like to express profound gratitude to Less-Jeffries for shepherding The Shakespearean Forest into print.

In a different world, The Shakespearean Forest would have been published about twelve years earlier, just as a generation of scholars, including myself, was beginning to examine early modern English literature and culture from ecocritical perspectives. There were precious few models for us to follow, and we would have undoubtedly benefited from consulting Barton's elegant, erudite, and often witty book. Some moments in The Shakespearean Forest intimate that Barton would have welcomed such ecocritical engagement: near the end of chapter 6's discussion of As You Like It’s Jaques, she writes, for example, “Hermits, solitary old religious men and such convertites to their way of life as the former Duke Frederick are likely to be less ecologically damaging” than the hunters and shepherds living in Arden (135). Wisely, Lees-Jeffries closes The Shakespearean Forest with a generous “bibliographical essay” that describes “the rise of eco-criticism and the new nature writing” in early modern English studies and so situates Barton's book as a participant in this conversation (159).

Of her book's broadest argument, Barton says in chapter 1, “It deals with forest symbolism, with ideas of the forest as a sentient being, capable of listening and even responding to some of the things humans do and say in it, and with the relationship, sometimes harmonious, more often troubled, between the forest and its neighbor and opposite, the city” (20). Five short chapters follow, each a distillation of archival research and wide reading. Chapter 2 concerns a matter close to my heart—the staging of “arboreal effects” (30)—and considers the problem posed by the performance of a play's forest or tree in a range of theatrical venues. Chapters 3 and 4 explore the stage history of some of the drama's non-arboreal figures: the wild man and Robin Hood, respectively. Chapter 3 usefully links Shakespeare's Timon of Athens to a tradition of staging the wild man (63–66), while chapter 4, which is, to my eyes, a standout, charts characters in the drama and “real individuals who insist upon re-enacting specific parts or circumstances of the Robin Hood story” (78). For Barton, Robin Hood has a “featureless, almost anonymous, quality” in “the traditional stories,” which “made it easy” for him “to be absorbed” into other theatrical traditions and impersonated by a range of historical people (75). Chapter 5 takes up the relation between the forest and the city, and in it Barton provocatively suggests that the typical figuration of forests as female, which is evident in texts such as Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion, “may help to explain why, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, both in England and France, men trying to defend a particular forest against government legislation designed to exploit it and restrict its traditional common use often felt impelled to signal their identification with the place by disguising themselves, on their protest outings, as women” (112). Chapter 6 surveys forest plays, mainly Shakespearean, and concludes with a reading of Macbeth’s Birnam Wood, which she calls a “sentient forest” that proves “a punitive but also an autonomous, just and ultimately benevolent judge” (137).

The Shakespearean Forest features an afterword by Peter Holland. It's a detailed account of Barton's life and works, but it also rehearses a couple of injudicious observations about Barton's personal appearance and style. In light of how this volume has been framed, their inaptness raised this reader's eyebrows.