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Abstract: This essay draws from recent atmospheric research (in philosophy, ecology, geography, and performance studies) to posit the air as archive. I outline some of the key principles by which early modern natural philosophy and drama instruct in the perception and interpretation of what I call the performance "airchive." I focus on two examples from Shakespeare's plays: the "remarking" of unmarked "sighs and groans and shrieks that rend the air" in Macbeth ; and the sensate atmosphere of a supposedly "senseless Ilium" that brings air's vulnerability into focus as a precondition for its archival legibility in Hamlet . Comparing the first player's speech with Hamlet's advice that the actors not "saw the air," I consider provocations to register in Pyrrhus's pause a challenge both to the logic of the revenge plot and to the archival mnemonics that admit air into historical memory only through the violent rupture of atmospheric unconsciousness.
Stephanie Shirilan (Sat,) studied this question.