Endnotes

1  Celia Deane-Drummond defines eco-theology simply as a combination of “concern with the environment and an understanding of God” (x) in her preface to Eco-Theology. (London: Anselm Academic, 2008. x. Print.)

2  I allude to part of Hardy’s letter to Edmund Gosse, quoted in Tracy’s “Browning’s Heresies”: “The longer I live the more does Browning’s character seem the leading puzzle of the nineteenth century. How could smug Christian optimism worthy of a dissenting grocer find a place inside a man who was so vast a seer and feeler when on neutral ground” (610).

3  Brooke, Stopford A. The Poetry of Robert Browning. London: Ballantyne, Hanson, 1902, 83, mentioned in Thomas P. Harrison’s “Birds in the Poetry of Robert Browning.” The Review of English Studies. New Series. 7.28 (Oct. 1956), 393-405. Harrison makes mention of two additional early twentieth-century studies of Browning’s nature imagery, Elisabeth L. Carey’s “Browning and the Animal Kingdom” (The Critic, 43, 1903, 163-5); Esther Matson’s “A Triad of Symbols: The Bird, the Star and the Circle as Used by Robert Browning” (Poet-Lore. 21,1920, 284-90); and Leslie N. Broughton and Benjamin F. Stelter’s Concordance to the Poems of Robert Browning (2 Vols. New York: G. E. Stechert, 1924-5).

4  Harrison, Thomas P. “Birds in the Poetry of Browning.” Review of English Studies. New Series, 7.28 (Oct. 1956): 393-405. Harrison indicates Browning’s preference for passerines, which he was better at identifying than he was at seabirds or birds of prey (405).

5  I rely on Brooke’s study again for this catalogue of creatures in his chapter, “The Treatment of Nature,” 57-89.

6  Tracy, C. R. “Caliban upon Setebos,” 488.

7  In imagining his mother’s god, it is possible that Caliban reacts more to his mother’s death, to their relationship, or to his sense of maternal abandonment than he does to the idea of Setebos in his own right. His reactions to Prospero may also emanate from his experiences with his mother, Sycorax the witch, who punished one of her servants for disobedience by imprisoning him in a cloven pine for twelve years.

8  Caliban speaks of himself in third person, creating a split within his identity, like victims of psychological trauma do, to stave off his self-rejection. The split accomplishes a dual view of God represented by two different figures, Setebos, the anthropomorphic deity, and the Quiet, an unknowable, higher-level authority.

9  Jonathan Loesberg cautions against the tendency for critics to conclude from Caliban’s projection of his own characteristics onto Setebos that he is “subhuman, infantile or simply paranoid and disposed toward violence,” (871) urging instead to think of Caliban’s state of captivity on his own island as his template for understanding the deity. Although I disagree with Loesberg’s assertion that “Caliban” is not a poem about Browning’s own beliefs, I find his attention to Caliban’s state of mind as a slave to be valuable. Loesberg, Jonathan. “Darwin, Natural Theology, and Slavery: A Justificatino of Browning’s Caliban.” English Literary History. 75 (2008) 871-97.

10  Several scholars have noted specific laws in the Torah and other places in the Old Testament that directly benefit nonhuman animals. Betsey S. Hilbert (in “Beyond ‘Thou Shalt Not’: An Ecocritic Reads Deuteronomy.” Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism. Ed. Karla Armbuster and Kathleen R. Wallace. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2001. Print.), Ellen F. Davis in Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Print.), and Philip J. Bentley (in “Urban Planning in Jewish Environmental Law.” The Environment in Jewish Law: Essays and Responsa. Ed. Walter Jacob and Moshe Zemer. New York: Berghahn, 2003.

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