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.

‘Fusing theatre history and forensic climatology, Chloe Preedy's new study reveals that Elizabethan touring companies did not merely weather through the meteorological turbulence of the Little Ice Age: they also simulated it on the stage. Preedy collates travel itineraries with weather diaries and performance records to document how allusions to earthquakes, heat waves, extreme cold, plagues, and floods would have evoked real-world conditions outside the playhouse and raised climate consciousness among early modern playgoers.'

Todd Andrew Borlik - Clinical Assistant Teaching Professor, Purdue University, Indianapolis

‘Playing Weather is an impressive book, bringing together environmental humanities with theatre history to rethink early modern drama and its staging. Numerous plays are illuminated afresh, from the most canonical to the wrongfully overlooked. It is as elegantly written as it is thoughtful and deeply researched.'

Simon Smith - Associate Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama, Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham