Weathering Shakespeare: Audiences and Open-air Performance

Description

Winner of the ASLE-UKI 2022 Book Prize From The Pastoral Players' 1884 performance of As You Like It to contemporary site-specific productions activist interventions, there is a rich history of open air performances of Shakespeare's plays beyond their early modern origins. Weathering Shakespeare reveals how new insights from the environmental humanities can transform our understanding of this popular performance practice. Drawing on audience accounts of outdoor productions of those plays most commonly chosen for open air performance - including A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest - the book examines how performers and audiences alike have reacted to unpredictable natural environments.

Evelyn O'Malley is Lecturer in Drama at the University of Exeter, UK.

For O'Malley, coming to terms with our connection to the world around us - to the atmosphere, the landscape and the creatures with which we share it - is crucial to combating the climate crisis. * Times Literary Supplement * Among the major merits of the work, together with its topicality, is the unprecedented choice of leaving room for the voice of the public through reports and direct testimonies, often absent from academic literature. * Mimesis Journal (trans. by Bloomsbury Academic) * Drawing on the latest developments in ecocritical theory and extensive fieldwork at outdoor theatres throughout the UK, O'Malley offers a savvy and hard-headed appraisal of open-air Shakespeare as a forum for ecological advocacy. This book advances numerous concepts and arguments that will have a decisive impact on the study of open-air performance in the Anthropocene. For anyone who plans to perform in or attend an outdoor production, Weathering Shakespeare is essential reading. * Todd Borlik, University of Hudderfsfield, UK * There are important familiar points to be made about the value of this book: its original focus on contemporary outdoor Shakespeare is a significant contribution to our understanding of theatre today. More important though, is its careful, slow, local and holistic attention to performance. By examining the creative worlding or collective weathering that goes on between players, audience, text and location, O'Malley's study is exemplary of what theatre scholarship should do in the age of ecological crisis. * Jennifer Mae Hamilton, University of New England, Australia *