Writing the Forest in Early Modern England classes sylvan pastoral—that is, “pastoral or pastoral moments set in the wood” (5)—among the emergent discourses of modern English nationhood. This is so, in turn, because Jeffrey S. Theis sees “an intensified concern over forests” (9) as one of the defining features of early modern English life. According to this argument, as England's population expanded in the late Tudor and early Stuart periods so too did the pressure to exploit the realm's remaining natural spaces, and given their character as legally protected enclaves, the royal forests developed into an increasingly attractive site of undeveloped real estate. Thus, “while the rest of England mercilessly hacked away at much of its remaining woods, the sylvan character of royal forests abided both as a material resource as well as a tangible marker of the past” (12), and the stage was set for a literal and symbolic struggle over their cultural status in the seventeenth century.

Writing the Forest concerns itself with the literary manifestations of this struggle, which it approaches through six chapters organized into two sections of three chapters apiece. The chapters of the first section all deal with Shakespeare, focusing respectively upon his three most famous early period forest comedies: As You Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. For Theis, As You Like It gives voice to “a collective anxiety” about “forest settlers in particular” and more generally about any people “uprooted from their ‘proper’ place” (77) in the increasingly mobile society of late Elizabethan England. The result is a “polyvalent discourse” of sylvan pastoral in which individual characters “attempt to define and understand” the Forest of Arden “at their own peril” (42, 36). Likewise, A Midsummer Night's Dream presents the forest outside Athens as a site of great semiotic importance, “but we never get at the heart of the forest itself; its material, symbolic, and theatrical qualities invite but then reject any clarifying and unifying vision” (95). As for Merry Wives, it enacts patterns of poaching and trespassing upon royal forest land while promoting “a pastoral vision that relationships, nature, and social issues be seen dialectically and from multiple, nonessentialist perspectives” (153).

In the second half of Writing the Forest, Theis turns his attention to later, nondramatic works. Chapter 4 explores Gerrard Winstanley's Digger tracts and Andrew Marvell's country house poems, concluding that the former maintain “a multifold view on nature” as both “a valuable material resource” and a more “mystical, personalized” entity (188), whereas the latter give voice to “a cacophonous mix of multiple discourses” (193) whereby “the binaries of environmental degradation versus restoration as well as political retreat versus engagement with national issues” are confounded once again by the forest's manifold resonances (194). Chapter 5 in turn examines such royalist appropriations of forest writing as James Howell's Dendrologia and John Evelyn's Sylva, declaring the former to be “a polymorphous work that includes many countervailing genres and attitudes” while discovering in the latter a “juxtaposition of different attitudes” that suggests Evelyn's work to be “torn like its contemporaries between untenable definitions of nature that are either wildly optimistic or pessimistic” (238). The final chapter then approaches Milton's treatment of forests in A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle and Paradise Lost, concluding that “Milton values forests as part of an ecosystem interconnected and interdependent upon other regions” (284), a space whose inhabitants “are responsible for maintaining themselves and their environment” (277).

Theis is aware that early modern literature includes many sylvan-themed works not discussed in Writing the Forest, including such influential productions as Sidney's Arcadia, book 6 of Spenser's Faerie Queene, Drayton's Poly-Olbion, Tasso's Aminta, Guarini's Pastor fido, Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess, and Shakespearean plays such as Titus Andronicus, Macbeth, and Timon of Athens. Likewise, Theis understands that “Howell's forest political allegories are not sylvan pastorals per se” (214) any more than are Winstanley's tracts and Evelyn's Sylva. However, Theis argues that his focus on selected works in Writing the Forest “interrogates ways in which English writers deploy sylvan pastoral not only to represent early modern forest issues but also, more important, to construct competing and contested individual and communal identities as they are forged in woodland environments” (8). Generally speaking, Theis avoids the issue of defining pastoral, with the result that his work seems in the end less interested in literary genre than in a specific set of early modern ecopolitical issues.

Of the six core chapters in Writing the Forest, the fourth is perhaps the strongest, collecting much useful information about the status of England's forests during the civil wars and exploring a series of political tractates that have rarely received the attention of literary critics. The chapter on A Midsummer Night's Dream is probably the weakest, contributing little new to our understanding of the play in question. More broadly, Writing the Forest is at its best when describing the various issues—hunting and poaching, enclosure and squatting, timber extraction, and so on—that made England's forests a site of political and literary contention during the seventeenth century. On the other hand, the book is at its worst in displaying all the signature qualities of a revised dissertation: prolixity, repetition, clumsy syntax, pretentious vocabulary, and a constitutional aversion to taking clear positions on anything. In sum, Writing the Forest offers readers a fresh ecocritical perspective on representations of the forest in early modern English literature. But it would be 25 percent better if it were 25 percent shorter—provided, of course, that the author removed the right 25 percent.