Tiffany Jo Werth explores early modern conceptions of the troubled “middle air,” a region that ambitious figures cross in their attempts to usurp heavenly power and authority. When Spenser’s Mutability seeks to shoulder Jove “from his right” in the “heauens hight,” she must first pass through the “region of the ayre,” which offers no resistance to her ambitious flight (The Faerie Queene 7.6). In Milton’s Paradise Lost, the fallen angels who become pagan deities are described as having “ruled the middle air” (1.516), a region later described as the “realm itself of Satan long usurped” (10.189). Ephesians 2.2 even calls Satan the “prince of the power of air.” The affective ecology of air, these examples suggest, prompts (or at least fosters) passions of ambition, strife, and rebellion. What was this “middle air”? Who inhabited it? How did one pass through it and why might such passage breach heaven’s authority? Werth explores how seemingly empty space assumes an elemental materiality, one whose unseen turbulence draws the earthbound to traverse it.

David Landreth moves us into the theater, considering how the medium of air becomes saturated with feeling in Macbeth and The Tempest—two plays that immediately pull audiences into their worlds through "Thunder and Lightning." His paper construes "atmosphere" as a harmonization of artificial, theatrical techniques, and shows how both plays thematize the affective immersiveness of playhouse atmospheres via their depiction of the subtle and diffuse influence of the supernatural on the plays’ characters. Where readings of The Tempest almost inevitably discuss its representations of the supernatural as an allegory of theatrical art, comparison to Macbeth re-centers both its magic and its theatricality as engagements with the materiality of air as medium of affect. The material world of Macbeth loathes and degrades humans because of what we are: lively, ensouled being is in itself an offense begrudged by this envious matter. But in Ariel, Shakespeare offers us a materiality that can at least begin to imagine forgiving us what we've done— to it, to each other, to our selves.

Allison Deutermann’s paper on drama's formal atmospherics begins by asking, what makes a play a “problem”? She argues that what makes so-called "problem plays" feel different in performance is their cultivation of unexpected aery conditions. Early modern drama repeatedly calls attention to the ways in which the playhouse air is conditioned by the breath and breathing of players and playgoers: the “smoky breath of the multitude” that Troilus and Cressida’s title page promises has not “sullied” the play was actually part of the show. Certain dramatic forms were thought to breathe a certain way, conditioning and structuring respiration through a combination of physical movement, special effects, and language and action. When a play departs from these expectations, the air itself changes. Examining Troilus and Cressida’s atmospheric conditions in relation to changing understandings of what and how a play thick with battles should breathe, Deutermann reaches back to the Henry VI plays and to the Henriad to make formal-affective claims about early modern performance.

Piers Brown explores a different interaction between air and audience, via the idea of the 'crowd-effect': movements on the surface of crowds that resemble the action of the wind on water. He focuses, in particular, on 'stir' or 'ruffle,' a disturbance that warns of agitation or distraction in the audience. These terms appear especially frequently in Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, where the unruly passions of the Roman populace are of particular concern. Using these plays as examples, he explores Shakespeare's awareness of and attention to crowd dynamics, showing how reading the surface of the crowd allows us to better understand the affective ecology of the early modern theater and its complex relationship with the natural environment.