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.

Shakespeare wrote for a theater in which the audience was understood to be, and at times invited to be, active and participatory. How have Shakespeare’s audiences, from the sixteenth century to the present, responded to that invitation? In what ways have consumers across different cultural contexts, periods, and platforms engaged with the performance of Shakespeare’s plays? What are some of the different approaches taken by scholars today in thinking about the role of Shakespeare's audiences and their relationship to performance? The chapters in this collection use a variety of methods and approaches to explore the global history of audience experience of Shakespearean performance in theater, film, radio, and digital media. The approaches that these contributors take look at Shakespeare’s audiences through a variety of lenses, including theater history, dramaturgy, film studies, fan studies, popular culture, and performance. Together, they provide both close studies of particular moments in the history of Shakespeare’s audiences and a broader understanding of the various, often complex, connections between and among those audiences across the long history of Shakespearean performance.

The Arden Research Handbook of Contemporary Shakespeare Criticism is a wide-ranging, authoritative guide to research on critical approaches to Shakespeare by an international team of leading scholars. It contains chapters on 20 specific critical practices, each grounded in analysis of a Shakespeare play. These practices range from foundational approaches including character studies, close reading and genre studies, through those that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s that challenged the preconceptions on which traditional liberal humanism is based, including feminism, cultural materialism and new historicism. Perspectives drawn from postcolonial, queer studies and critical race studies, besides more recent critical practices including presentism, ecofeminism and cognitive ethology all receive detailed treatment. In addition to its coverage of distinct critical approaches, the handbook contains various sections that provide non-specialists with practical help: an A–Z glossary of key terms and concepts, a chronology of major publications and events, an introduction to resources for study of the field and a substantial annotated bibliography.

This book explores how productions of Shakespearean plays create meaning in specific communities, with special attention to issues of access, adaptation, and activism. Instead of focusing on large professional companies, it analyzes performances put on by community theatres and grassroots companies, and in applied drama projects. It looks at Shakespearean productions created by marginalized populations in Greater London, Harlem, and Los Angeles, a Hamlet staged in the remote Faroe Islands, and eco-theatre made in California’s Yosemite National Park. The book investigates why different communities perform Shakespeare, and what challenges, opportunities, and triumphs accompany the processes of theatrical production for both the artists and the communities in which they are embedded.

Unpicking the ecopolitics of Shakespeare's plays at the Stuart court, Shakespeare Beyond the Green World establishes that the playwright was remarkably attentive to the environmental issues of his era. As a court dramatist, he designed his plays to captivate a patron deeply involved in both the conservation and exploitation of a burgeoning empire's natural resources. Spurred by James' campaign to unify his kingdoms, the Jacobean Shakespeare ventures beyond the green and pleasant lowlands of England to chart the wild topographies of an expansionist Great Britain: the blasted heath in Macbeth, the caves and mines of Timon of Athens, the overfished North Sea in Pericles, the Welsh mountains in Cymbeline, the Arctic fur country in The Winter's Tale, the fens in The Tempest, overcrowded London and empty Ulster in Measure for Measure and Coriolanus, and the night in Antony and Cleopatra and King Lear. While these plays often simulate a monarch's-eye-view of the natural world, t reveal that Crown policies were fiercely contested from below. In addition to trekking beyond verdant landscapes, Shakespeare Beyond the Green World seeks to mitigate the Anglocentric and anthropocentric bias of the archive by putting the plays into conversation with texts in which the subaltern wild growls back. Combining deep dives into environmental history with close readings of Shakespearean wordplay, original typography, and original performance conditions, this study re-wilds the Renaissance stage. It spotlights Shakespeare's tendency to humanize beasts and bestialize allegedly godlike monarchs, debunking fantasies of human exceptionalism. By clarifying how the Jacobean plays expose monarchical dominion as ecological tyranny, this study remains scrupulously historicist while reasserting Shakespearean drama's scorching relevance in the Anthropocene.

Anthropocene Theater and the Shakespearean Stage revises the anthropocentric narrative of early globalization from the perspective of the non-human world in order to demonstrate Nature's agency in determining ecological, economic, and colonial outcomes. It welcomes readers to reimagine theater history in broader terms, and to account for more non-human and atmospheric players in the otherwise anthropocentric history of Shakespearean performance. This book analyses plays, horticultural manuals, cosmetic recipes, Puritan polemics, and travel writing in order to demonstrate how the material practices of the stage both catalyze and resist early forms of globalization in an ecological arena. William Steffen addresses the role of an understudied ecological performance history in determining Shakespeare's iconic cultural status, and models how non-human players have undermined Shakespeare's authoritative role in colonial discourse. Finally, this book makes a celebratory argument for the humanities in the age of climate change, and invites interdisciplinary engagement a research community that is compelled to find strategies for cultivating a hopeful tomorrow amidst unprecedented anthropogenic environmental changes.

'We that are true lovers run into strange capers.' Four centuries after its publication in the Folio, As You Like It's capacity to entertain and instruct remains evergreen. This edition provides a friendly yet authoritative introduction to the play, upholding it as a crowning expression of the Elizabethan Renaissance while underscoring its appeal to twenty-first century readers as Shakespeare's most intrepid exploration of gender, sexuality, and the environment. Its double-cross-dressed heroine dominates the plot (and their love interest Orlando) to conduct a masterclass in gender fluidity. The melancholic Jaques unmasks the fundamental theatricality of existence and questions humanity's prerogative to displace and harm other species. Through the clown Touchstone, the comedy tests the possibility that we might laugh ourselves wise, especially when we learn to laugh at ourselves. In the Forest of Arden, we encounter Shakespeare's most beguiling vision of the natural world as a realm of serenity and harmony, while brushing up against the briars that puncture our fantasies of the simple life. The New Oxford Shakespeare offers authoritative editions of Shakespeare's works with introductory materials designed to encourage new interpretations of the plays and poems. Using the text from the landmark The New Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition, these volumes offer readers the latest thinking on the authentic texts (collated from all surviving original versions of Shakespeare's work) alongside innovative introductions from leading scholars. The texts are accompanied by a comprehensive set of critical apparatus to give readers the best resources to help understand and enjoy Shakespeare's work. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

This Element attends to attention drawn away. That the Globe is a 'distracted' space is a sentiment common to both Hamlet's original audience and attendees at the reconstructed theatre on London's Bankside. But what role does distraction play in this modern performance space? What do attitudes to 'distraction' reveal about how this theatre space asks and invites us to pay attention? Drawing on scholarly research, artist experience, and audience behaviour, This Distracted Globe considers the disruptive, affective, phenomenological, and generative potential of distraction in contemporary performance at the Globe.

During the early days of the professional English theatre, dramatists including Dekker, Greene, Heywood, Jonson, Marlowe, Middleton, and Shakespeare wrote for playhouses that, though enclosed by surrounding walls, remained open to the ambient air and the sky above. The drama written for performance at these open-air venues drew attention to and reflected on its own relationship to the space of the air. At a time when theories of the imagination emphasized dramatic performance's reliance upon and implication in the air from and through which its staged fictions were presented and received, plays written for performance at open-air venues frequently draw attention to the nature and significance of that elemental relationship. Aerial Environments on the Early Modern Stage considers the various ways in which the air is brought into presence within early modern drama, analyzing more than a hundred works that were performed at the London open-air playhouses between 1576 and 1609, with reference to theatrical atmospheres and aerial encounters. It explores how various theatrical effects and staging strategies foregrounded early modern drama's relationship to, and impact on, the actual playhouse air. In considering open-air drama's pervasive and ongoing attention to aerial imagery, actions, and representational strategies, the book suggest that playwrights and their companies developed a dramaturgical awareness that extended from the earth to encompass and make explicit the space of air.

This Element argues that the climate emergency requires a new approach to the study of theatre history – a suggestion that is developed through an analysis of the practice of theatrical revival during the Anthropocene era.