The Theatres of Eighteenth-Century Weather Spectacle and Climatological Reckoning in English Drama

While British drama of the long eighteenth century remains largely unexamined as registering ecological fears, its visual spectacle and settings allow the audience to grasp threats to environments across the globe. In plays from 1682-1799, The Theatres of Eighteenth-Century Weather: Spectacle and Climatological Reckoning in English Drama examines how the “little world” of the theatre enables the British to conceptualize and experience how scientific and technological innovations, industrialization, imperial enterprises, and the increasing scale and reach of the British military affect the climate. In fact, the book attributes the drama of Aphra Behn, Susanna Centlivre, Joseph Addison, Nahum Tate, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and other playwrights as pivotal to maintaining an audience’s discernment of climatological processes and variability.

Chapter 1 - Introduction.- Chapter 2 - “The Rareness of the Figures”: Air and Accessibility in Aphra Behn’s Emperor of the Moon and Elkanah Settle’s The World in the Moon.- Chapter 3 - “Storming at Heav’n and Thee!”: Ecological Wastelands in Addison’s Cato.- Chapter 4 - “I’ll have none of these airs”: The West Indies and British Inertia in Mary Pix and John Gay.- Chapter 5 - “Art against art”: Sentimentality, Mid-Century Drama, and the North American Crises”.- Chapter 6 - “A Winter Drama”: Decolonizing South America and Environmental Restoration in Sheridan’s Pizzaro.-  Chapter 7 - Epilogue : “‘Lucretius Englisht’: Nahum Tate’s Ecophobic Adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.

Denys Van Renen is Professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, USA, and the 2023-2024 Distinguished Professor of English at the United States Air Force Academy. His previous three books include The Other Exchange, Nature and the New Science, and Environmental Justice and the Scottish Picaresque. Van Renen has also co-edited a collection, Beyond 1776: Globalizing the Cultures of the American Revolution.