Charles Whitney (English) wrote an essay, "Green Economics and the English Renaissance: From Capital to the Commons," that appears in Shakespeare and the Urgency of Now: Criticism and Theory in the 21st Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). This essay links the 16th-century assault on commons rights to today's assault on the environmental commons and juxtaposes the present historical moment to the moment of Shakespeare's play As You Like It. The study traces parallels between traditional, morally-inflected economic attitudes and practices of the Renaissance and today's so-called "new economics," which aims "'to transform our fossil fuel-powered, finance-bloated, inegalitarian economy into one that is resilient, just, and sustainable in the environmental and economic transition given true urgency by climate change.'"
