This is a past event
Wednesday 16th October
1-2 pm. MacRobert 266 (and live broadcast via Blackboard Collaborate)
Chloe Preedy (Exeter), 'The Mists of Error': Predicting Disaster on the Early Modern Stage'
In early modern England, moral and medical understandings of pollution often converged. As a result, errors in judgment or character might be figured through references to smoke, mist, or fog. In Thomas Middleton’s city pageant The Triumphs of Truth (c. 1613), for instance, a character called Error enshrouds the London streets in ‘a thick, sulphurous darkness… being a fog or mist’ (495–6). Bruce Boehrer has intriguingly related this allegorical episode to the early modern city’s actual experience of air pollution, at a time when the increased consumption of fossil fuels resulted in progressively worsening atmospheric conditions. Such considerations are equally applicable to the contemporary dramatic representation of prophetic events, which typically involved the onstage production of dark, sulphurous emissions. With atmospheric disturbances often connected to other forms of natural disaster, including famine and airborne plague, these aerial prodigies reinforced the notion that smoky fumes could signal an impending crisis – one that the complacent onstage observers typically ignore, with deadly consequences. Thus, although early modern attitudes did not amount to what we might now consider eco-consciousness, the popular theatrical representation of comets, storms, and “speaking heads” (a mechanical prophetic device) spoke to wider cultural concerns about human interactions with the natural world, perhaps hinting at a correlation between air pollution and disaster. My paper will explore these connections to ask whether, or to what extent, these early dramatic episodes might have anticipated later concerns about the deadly consequences of excessive fuel consumption, and what they might suggest about how Elizabethan and Jacobean authors responded to an emerging contemporary consciousness of and anxiety about urban air pollution.
Chloe Kathleen Preedy is a Senior Lecturer in Shakespeare & Renaissance Literature at the University of Exeter, based at the Penryn campus in Cornwall. She is the author of Marlowe's Literary Scepticism: Politic Religion and Post-Reformation Polemic (Arden, 2013) and various articles on early modern drama, including most recently ‘The Smoke of War: From Tamburlaine to Henry V’. She is currently leading an AHRC-funded project investigating how open-air theatre performances might influence playgoers’ awareness of their aerial environment, potentially raising awareness of air quality and pollution, and working on a related monograph about aerial imagery in early modern drama.
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Link for this talk:
https://eu.bbcollab.com/guest/66ae108bf73c4958864431b15ae3ed5b
- Speaker
- Chloe Preedy
- Venue
- MacRobert Building - MR266