Aerial Environments on the Early Modern Stage

Abstract

Abstract 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 the air through which its staged fictions were presented, plays written for performance at open-air venues frequently draw attention to that element’s theatrical significance. This book considers the various ways in which the air is brought into presence within early modern drama. Analysing more than a hundred works that were performed at London’s open-air playhouses between 1576 and 1609, I evaluate how the various textual, theatrical, and staging effects used by early modern dramatists and those presenting their plays might have foregrounded the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre’s relationship to and impact on the actual air. I conclude that open-air drama’s ongoing attention to aerial imagery, actions, and representational strategies reflects an emerging dramaturgical consciousness that extended from the earth to encompass and make explicit the space of the air.