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Book Cover for: Weathering Shakespeare: Audiences and Open-air Performance, Evelyn O'Malley

Weathering Shakespeare: Audiences and Open-air Performance

Evelyn O'Malley

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.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
  • Publish Date: May 19th, 2022
  • Pages: 240
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 9.21in - 6.14in - 0.51in - 0.76lb
  • EAN: 9781350202443
  • Categories: ShakespeareTheater - History & CriticismSubjects & Themes - Nature

About the Author

O'Malley, Evelyn: - Evelyn O'Malley is Lecturer in Drama at the University of Exeter, UK.
Kerridge, Richard: - "Richard Kerridge is a nature writer and ecocritic who leads the MA in Creative Writing and co-ordinates research and postgraduate studies in English Literature and Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, UK. His works include: Cold Blood: Adventures with Reptiles and Amphibians (2014), J. H. Prynne's place-based poem-sequence The Oval Window, in collaboration with the late N. H. Reeve (2018), Writing the Enviornment (1998) and his other nature writing has been broadcast and published in BBC Wildlife, Poetry Review and Granta. He was awarded the 2012 Roger Deakin Prize by the Society of Authors, and has twice received the BBC Wildlife Award for Nature Writing. He was founding Chair of ASLE-UKI and has been an elected member of the ASLE Executive Council. With Greg Garrard he is co-editor of the Bloomsbury Academic series 'Environmental Cultures' - the first series of monographs in the Environmental Humanities to be published in Britain and he is a member of the steering committee of New Networks for Nature."
Garrard, Greg: - Greg Garrard is Associate Professor of Sustainability at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is the author of the bestselling book Ecocriticism (2nd edition, 2011) and editor of The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism (2014).

Praise for this book

"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