Playing Weather in Early Modern England

Playing Weather explores how early modern playwrights, players, and playgoers encountered and responded to diverse meteorological events.

Exploring early modern English theatre's encounters with and consciousness of weather, Playing Weather considers how playwrights, players, and playgoers encountered and responded to a diverse range of meteorological events, demonstrating that the drama of the period had a profound ecological – and, especially, atmospheric – enmeshment.Early modern English theatre encountered and reckoned with weather in myriad ways. Focusing on the period from 1563 to 1625, and using archival records, play-texts, and published accounts to trace theatrical histories of weather and weathering, Chloe Preedy considers how late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century players and playgoers might have reacted to extreme or everyday weather. Playing Weather explores individual playing companies' diverse experiences of and theatrical responses to specific meteorological phenomena: from Leicester's Men and a 1580 earthquake, to drought and the Queen's Men, floods and Strange's/Derby's Men, the King's Men and gale-force winds, and the freezing winters encountered by Lady Elizabeth's Men. Attending to the various imaginative, social, extractive, affective, and economic perspectives hinted at in extant performance records and in plays by authors including Shakespeare, Marlowe, Greene, and Beaumont and Fletcher, this approach reveals early modern theatre's profound ecological – and, especially, meteorological – enmeshment.