Abstract Recent developments in renaissance and early modern ecocriticism, since surveys by Karen Raber and Sharon O'Dair, have made the field discursive. Some critics maintain that ecocriticism, ecostudies or environmental studies must be self‐consciously activist and presentist. Others practise a more historicist approach, which is only implicitly activist, if at all. This article considers the recent environmental criticism of renaissance literature and Shakespeare – in its place on the spectrum of presentism and historicism – and argues that the field's discursiveness is a positive development, which will lead to a growth of ecocritical work in the period. Recent relevant work in environmental history is introduced and a case made for a greater engagement with it in literary ecocriticism.