Weathering Shakespeare

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 results of tests performed on six different models of fiberglass-reinforced plastic (FRP) lighting standards are presented. Four parameters, including deflection of the pole tip under a specified bending load, ultimate bend strength, degradation of coating after 2,500 hours of accelerated weathering, and coating thickness, were evaluated. Results are compared to requirements in the California Department of Transportation 1992 Standard Special Provision 86.08.5 "Fiberglass Lighting Standards."

The Tempest is a comedy written by William Shakespeare. It is generally dated to 1610-11 and accepted as the last play written solely by him, although some scholars have argued for an earlier dating. While listed as a comedy in its initial publication in the First Folio of 1623, many modern editors have relabelled the play a romance.