Acknowledgements
I am grateful to everyone at MUP for their help and understanding. The anonymous readers who provided comments on various stages of this book did so with enviable insight and I am very thankful.
Nicholas Royle’s encouragement has left a great impression on my work. I do hope it shows. Nick has been one in a long line of noteworthy teachers through my life: without Catherine Withers and M. Wynn Thomas, I would not have come this far, and I remember them with gratitude and affection.
I am grateful to my former colleagues and students at Queen Mary, from whom I learned a great deal. In particular, I am indebted to Warren Boutcher, who provided invaluable support and advice throughout the project. I am grateful to William McEvoy and Mark Robson for their careful reading of the original thesis of this work, and for their judicious comments. I am also thankful to everyone at Shakespeare’s Globe, in particular to Farah Karim-Cooper for her guidance.
A great many people have been generous with their time and intellects: Thomas Alexander, Eve Dirago, Mark Doman, Sarah Dustagheer, Maya Gabrielle, Jennifer Mae Hamilton, Natalie Lane, Sophie Leighton-Kelly, Mark Morgan, Ryan Nelson, Claire Rakich, Nicholas Robins, Will Rutter, Glyn Samways, Patrick Spottiswoode – I am obliged to them all. I am also grateful to my brother, Gareth, for being a good example, as well as putting his energy into transcendental number theory and giving me a free run at the easy stuff.
The warmth, hospitality and generosity of my parents-in-law, Bridget and Doug Morgan, has bordered on the miraculous, and Los Altos, Truckee and Kauai have all proved excellent places to forget Shakespeare.
My wife, Molly – the staff of my age, my yoke-fellow, with whose help I draw through the mire of this transitory world – puts up both with my arbitrary periods of tempestuousness and my unmerited periods of calm. And chuckles at my overblown quotations.
I owe the greatest debt to my parents, Celia and David, the first in that line of teachers, and to their parents also. Without them, all of this would be utterly unthinkable.
Earlier versions of Chapters 2 and 9 have been published elsewhere. Chapter 2 here is published with the permission of Cambridge Scholars Publishing, and Chapters 2 and 9 with the permission of Arden Shakespeare, as an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, PLC. I am grateful to these publishers for their permission, and to Pascale Drouet, Farah Karim-Cooper and Tiffany Stern, the editors of the collections in which the chapters appeared.
Textual note
Unless stated otherwise, all Shakespearean quotations are from The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson and David Scott Kastan (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001) and line references included in the text. All Biblical quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from the Geneva text of 1560, reprinted in facsimile as The Geneva Bible: 1560 Edition (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2007).
When quoting directly from early modern texts I have altered i, j, u, v and vv where necessary, and included omitted letters where an elision is indicated, but otherwise preserved original spelling. So, for example, a phrase from II Kings 1:10 appears as ‘let fyre come downe from the heaven’ rather than ‘let fyre come downe frō the heauē’.
It is 1 May 2008, around 2:40 in the afternoon. I am standing in the yard of the reconstructed Globe playhouse in Southwark, watching the matinee performance of King Lear. For most of the first two acts, as the cast have been delivering a comic interpretation, the weather has been pleasant – a mild spring day. Now, though, as Goneril and Regan begin to trim their father’s retinue – ‘What, fifty followers? … What should you need of more?’ (2.2.429–30) – the skies above the open roof begin to darken. Some twenty-five lines later, when Lear’s company has been whittled away entirely – ‘What need one?’ (455) – some fine raindrops begin to fall. As Lear delivers his impassioned but impotent reply, the rain grows faster and steadier. There is a rustling flurry in the yard, as the standees pull on their waterproof clothing. At Lear’s exit, Cornwall’s line is greeted with a warm laugh: ‘Let us withdraw; ’twill be a storm’ (476). The daughters and Gloucester debate Lear’s destiny briefly as the rain gets heavier still. As they exit, the slam of the door prompts the first burst of staged thunder, and an almighty deluge falls. As Kent appears – ‘Who’s there besides foul weather?’ (3.1.1) – the yardlings divide, some pressing towards the stage, and some towards the seating bays, all trying to try to squeeze under the slim overhangs of thatch. A wide strip of concrete in the yard is exposed, the thick downpour skipping on its surface. The actors are virtually inaudible; Lear really is contending with the fretful element. I am heavily soaked, and pressed against the wooden divide between the yard and the front row of the seated audience. Behind me are two elderly ladies, leaning forward incredulously. As I pull my drenched hair away from my ears, I hear one say to the other, ‘how are they doing this?’
I was, and am, delighted by this question. How better to illustrate the irreducible difference between performance conditions for early modern audiences and for our own? But though it may seem innocent, it is also a reminder that Shakespeare’s storms have so far been misread, if not ignored. Taking this as my cue, I ask similar questions of those storms. What did Shakespeare understand weather to be? How do the storms affect current critical discourses, and change the way we experience early modern theatre? And yes, how did they do it?
Storms of separation and spectatorship
We split, we split, we split!
The Tempest 1.1.62
Shakespeare was remarkably fond of storms, not only in the stage effects he so often calls for, but in the metaphors and similes he gives to his characters. Indeed, if such images are included, there is some instance of storm in every Shakespearean play. Moreover, the storm is a trope that has carried across literature from ancient epic to twenty-first-century narrative non-fiction, from Aenied to Zeitoun. Although there is scope for a study of Shakespeare’s storms that locates them in this literary tradition, my main emphasis is on the ways that the storm scenes can be read in the contexts of early modern theatrical practice, meteorological understanding and contemporary theory. This approach is inevitably exclusive and I have had to be selective. But whilst the details of individual plays are my focus, there is one panoramic view worth glimpsing.
If the storm in Shakespearean drama is to be thought of as functional, then its primary function is to separate characters. Most obviously, this separation is achieved with a shipwreck, as in The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, Pericles and The Tempest. In Othello, a storm splits the Venetian fleet without splitting the ships themselves, with the effect that characters are divided briefly. The sea is not necessary for a storm to separate – in King Lear, the weather divides characters into indoor and outdoor groups – but it is tempting to view the shipwreck storms as motifs. This temptation is amplified if we concentrate on The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night and The Tempest, and the chronological detail that these plays date from the beginning, middle and end of Shakespeare’s playwriting career. But these storms cannot be dismissed so neatly. Shakespeare, rather than re-use the same storm for each play, approaches each play with distinct requirements and concerns, made manifest in the texts and the storms themselves. What is ostensibly a recurring motif, then, reveals a progression from topos to topography, and concerns from the classical to the contemporary. Within this progression, too, is a pattern. If Shakespeare’s sea-storms are approached in chronological order then we see an increasing interest in bringing the storm into a more immediate, and thereby dramatic and threatening, presentation. In the development of Shakespeare’s storms, there is, indeed, a calm before the storm. To illustrate this, here are those storms in the order in which they were written.1
In Egeon’s narration in The Comedy of Errors, the storm is long in the past. It is digested and given narrative structure with a definite beginning, middle and end. Thus, Egeon starts his story: ‘In Syracusa was I born’, before eventually devoting thirty lines to the storm and subsequent shipwreck (1.1.36; 61–91). Compelling though Egeon’s story may be, he has over four fifths of the lines in the scene. It is perhaps unsurprising that Shakespeare presents the next storm of separation differently. In Twelfth Night the fallout of the shipwreck is still happening: it is staged. The narrative is fragmented and the narrators unsure: ‘Perchance he is not drown’d: what think you sailors?’ (1.2.5). Rather than discover the characters’ situations before they appear, as in The Comedy of Errors, we see them in the immediate aftermath, washed ashore and separated. Indeed, so great is the emphasis on the present as presented, that we are not told what caused the shipwreck: we tend to assume it is a storm, I suspect because of those in other plays, but an assumption it remains. Instead we have the lived experience of the survivor. In Othello, this immediacy is taken one step further: The sea-storm is happening, off stage. Again the narrative is fragmented, but is now also unfinished. For the first time, the sea-storm has spectators, both in the characters and in the audience themselves. Next comes Pericles, and the process of bringing the storm closer to the dramatic action continues. In Act 2, Scene 1, we have spectators in the Fishermen, and Pericles enters ‘wet’ (2.1.0sd). In Act 3, Scene 1, the sea-storm is staged. Here, the audience experiences the storm, and the separation of characters, along with the characters involved. When we come to The Winter’s Tale, we find the sea-storm happening, off stage. The increasing immediacy peaked with Pericles, but this is partly the point. The separation of characters in the play is not a consequence of the storm, but rather is figuratively reinforced by the storm: ‘In my conscience, | The heavens with that we have in hand are angry | And frown upon’s’ (3.3.4–6). The separation has already happened – the audience have seen it unravel in detail – the storm is a staged consolidation of it. In any case, the storm is quite immediate: although the shipwreck is not staged, it is foreseen from dry land, which is a novelty (3.3.3; 8–11). Again, there is a spectator, the Clown, who provides the story of the death of those on the ship. In his phrases, the immediacy is emphasised: ‘Now, now: I have not winked since I saw these sights: the men are not yet cold under water’ (102–3). Finally, in The Tempest is the conflation of everything we have seen so far. The sea-storm is staged, the mariners wet. The ship is wrecked before our eyes: ‘We split, we split, we split!’ Afterwards, several narrators give slightly different versions of the wreck, and each in turn different from the version seen by the audience. There are survivors, of course, who are separated. The play’s opening storm consolidates each element of Shakespeare’s earlier storms of separation. In Chapter 9, I argue that The Tempest goes further still. Ariel acts as a personification of theatrical storms, a move that has profound implications for the play’s representation of environment.
Shakespeare, then, is not simply deploying the storm functionally, but is, rather, invested in developing its dramatic immediacy. From the earliest, though, the device also contains the symbolic possibility of separation from oneself. In The Comedy of Errors, once Egeon has narrated the story of the storm, Antipholus of Syracuse is introduced:
I to the world am like a drop of water
That in the ocean seeks another drop,
Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,
Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself.
So I, to find a mother and a brother,
In quest of them unhappy, lose myself.
(1.2.35–40)
The divisions that Antipholus notes here are the result of the storm which the audience learns of in the first scene, so it is particularly apt that his imagery is focused on the ocean. The sea, having been complicit in the separation of Antipholus from his ‘fellows’ is now the only medium for imagining the scale of that separation. And yet the argument is not related to the sense of division from others, but from himself: ‘a drop … confounds himself. So I … lose myself’. It is especially touching that a twin emphasises his loss of self by constructing his identity as ultimately inseparable from countless identical others. Moreover, his speech, a soliloquy, is delivered after Antipholus has parted company with a merchant with the phrase ‘Farewell till then. I will go lose myself’ (30). From the outset, then, before any literal confusion of identity, the concept of individuality is troubled and elusive.
Whilst Antipholus of Ephesus appears self-assured and sociable in comparison with his brother, he has a similar sense of insecurity thrust upon him by his wife Adriana:
O how comes it
That thou art then estranged from thyself? –
Thy ‘self’ I call it, being strange to me
That, undividable, incorporate,
Am better than thy dear self’s better part.
Ah do not tear away thyself from me;
For know, my love, as easy mayst thou fall
A drop of water in the breaking gulf,
And take unmingled thence that drop again
Without addition or diminishing,
As take from me thyself, and not me too.
(2.2.128–32)
As Adriana here mistakes her brother-in-law for her husband, the sense of self-loss is compounded for Antipholus of Syracuse, whose own simile is reconstructed for him. In his own terms, he is ‘confounded’; his identity lost because of his proximity to an unknown other. The sense of confusion on Antipholus’ part is evident. He is:
As strange unto your town as to your talk,
Who, every word by all my wit being scanned,
Wants wit in all one word to understand.
(151–3)
A loss of identity, then, which is so severe that it cannot comprehend the same construction of self which its speaker narrated ‘but two hours’ ago. The echo of simile is, in this respect, an auditory and linguistic confusion of identity to parallel the visual elements on which the farcical comedy of the play relies.2
The storm, then, continues to carry its work out after it has passed. In The Winter’s Tale, this figurative power is more important than the practicalities of separating characters. In the play, we encounter the storm through the experience of the participants – Antigonus and the Mariner – but the shipwreck through the account of the spectator, the Clown. The Clown characterises the storm with classical paradigm: ‘I have seen two such sights, by sea and by land! But I am not to say it is a sea, for it is now the sky: betwixt the firmament and it you cannot thrust a bodkin’s point’3 (3.3.82–5). The confusion of sea and sky in a storm is a poetic device as old as poetry itself.4 In expanding on this, however, the Clown incorporates something that is quite new in Shakespeare’s plays and worth quoting at length:
I would you did but see how it chafes, how it rages, how it takes up the shore! But that’s not to the point. O, the most piteous cry of the poor souls! sometimes to see ’em, and not to see ’em: now the ship boring the moon with her main-mast, and anon swallowed with yest and froth, as you ’d thrust a cork into a hogs-head. And then for the land-service, to see how the bear tore out his shoulder-bone, how he cried to me for help and said his name was Antigonus, a nobleman. But to make an end of the ship, to see how the sea flap-dragoned it: but first, how the poor souls roared, and the sea mocked them: and how the poor gentleman roared, and the bear mocked him, both roaring louder than the sea or weather. (87–100)
The spectator of the shipwreck, although not as familiar as the sea/sky confusion, is also a classical commonplace. Compare this passage, for example, with the opening of Lucretius’ second book of De Rerum Natura:
What joy it is, when out at sea the stormwinds are lashing the waters, to gaze from the shore at the heavy stress some man is enduring! Not that anyone’s afflictions are in themselves a source of delight; but to realise from what troubles you yourself are free is joy indeed.5
It is likely that Shakespeare would have encountered at least this passage from De Rerum: the first two lines (of the original poetic form) are quoted by Montaigne, whose essays are a key source of the playwright’s imagery, phrasing and philosophical development at the time of The Winter’s Tale. Florio’s translation of Lucretius (via Montaigne) differs somewhat from the modern one quoted above: ‘’Tis sweet on graund seas, when windes waves turmoyle, | From land to see an others greevous toyle’.6 The context in which Montaigne quotes Lucretius is an apposite one for the first half of Shakespeare’s play:
Our essence is symented with crased qualities; ambition, jealosie, envy, revenge, superstition, dispaire, lodge in us, with so naturall a possession, as their image is also discerned in beasts: yea and cruelty, so unnaturall a vice: for in the middest of compassion, we inwardly feele a kinde of bitter-sweet-pricking of malicious delight, to see others suffer.7
Regardless of how much familiarity Shakespeare had with Lucretius’s ideas, the passage from The Winter’s Tale embodies the principles of the philosopher poet. The qualification of Antigonus as ‘a nobleman’ is indicative of the distance the Clown feels from him: not only physical and emotional but social too. The scene marks the transition in the play from tragedy to comedy; the abandonment of Perdita is a curse for Antigonus, a blessing for the family. The quotation also expresses the shift from courtly tension to the Epicurean fulfilment that characterises the fourth act and is also the defining feature of Lucretius’ poetic philosophy. As Hans Blumenberg puts it, ‘the advantage gained through Epicurean philosophy is solid ground’.8 Each of these shifts, then, is embodied by the movement from shipwreck to spectator – most fundamentally differentiated in the modulations of focus from pain to pleasure, from winter to spring and from death to life.
By extension, we might read the metaphorical values of this scene into the play’s finale, as Leontes finds redemption in an act of spectatorship. Just as the Clown is aware of his own inability to transcend his position of spectator (‘I would you had been by the ship side, to have helped her: there your charity would have lacked footing’ betrays that understanding as much as a comic touch. 3.3.7–9) so Leontes revels in it: ‘What you can make her do, | I am content to look on’ (5.3.91–2). Equally, the king is conscious of the state which his experience of the ‘statue’ leaves him in, and a dialogue of spectatorship is imagined: ‘does not the stone rebuke me | For being more stone than it?’ (37–8) It is this realisation, of the effect of the power of his beholding, that prompts his own inward looking: ‘There’s magic in thy majesty, which has | My evils conjur’d to remembrance’ (39–40). The influence of spectatorship is also encapsulated by Perdita, in her final words: ‘So long could I | Stand by, a looker on’ (85). In considering such language here, it should be remembered, of course, that the very action of the play depends entirely on the spectatorship of Leontes in the opening act. From the outset, the king is invested in and affected by the processes of spectating:
But to be paddling palms, and pinching fingers,
As now they are, and making practis’d smiles
As in a looking-glass; and then to sigh, as ’twere
The mort o’th’deer – O, that is entertainment
My bosom likes not, nor my brows.
(1.2.115–19)
Here, Leontes builds up his jealous rage; he conflates the emotional and the bodily both in the object of his vision and his own subjectivity. This is the same empathetic vision he experiences in the finale (‘being more stone than it’). The Winter’s Tale, then, may be seen as punctuated by crucial acts of spectating. The conversation between the three Gentlemen in Act 5 is another notable example. The First Gentleman notes the limits of spectatorship: ‘the wisest beholder, that knew no more but seeing, could not say if th’ importance were joy or sorrow’ (5.2.17–19). The debate on spectating is maintained when the two other Gentlemen appear: ‘Did you see the meeting of the two kings?’ asks one (40–1). Upon the reply, he follows with ‘Then you have lost a sight which was to be seen, cannot be spoken of’, before spending over one hundred words speaking of it (43–59). In his speech, the issue of spectatorship and report is implicitly linked to the limitations of theatre, for which a compromising line must inevitably be drawn between what can be staged and what must be related through exposition. The figure of shipwreck with spectator in the midst of the storm is an integral part of the same structure.
It is the approach to issues of spectatorship that allows the play to develop themes found in Pericles. As I have mentioned, the first shipwreck of that work also receives comment from witnesses, albeit in a scene attributed to George Wilkins. As in The Winter’s Tale, there is a notable comedic vein attributed to the role of spectator, as the fishermen joke and pontificate whilst discussing the storm: ‘I am thinking of the poor men that were cast away before us even now’ moves seamlessly to ‘I marvel how the fishes live in the sea’ … ‘as men do a-land: the great ones eat up the little ones’ (2.1.18–24). The shipwreck spectators of both plays speak in calculatedly rustic prose. Similar instances of the use of opposites and moral platitudes characterise their conversation. They are, in short, quite alike, although the Clown is somewhat more energetic and moved by what he has seen. Where Winter’s Tale builds on Pericles’ foundations of spectatorship is in the respective resurrections of heroines. Thaisa is revived almost immediately following her ‘death’, whilst Hermione’s reintroduction is saved for the finale of the play. In the case of Pericles, then, the audience’s spectatorship is removed from that of Pericles and Diana themselves when their reconciliation finally occurs; the work of dramatic irony is to alter the position of spectatorship. In contrast, the audience of The Winter’s Tale is emotionally aligned with Leontes in the witnessing of his wife’s revival. Just as Leontes is a spectator, so are the audience – both of Hermione’s reappearance and Leontes’ observation. The development made in the later play, is, therefore, that the representation of spectatorship is more closely aligned with the aesthetic experience of drama itself. As Blumenberg has remarked, the conflation of the nautical and the theatrical ‘is entirely plausible if the interiorized double role of the single subject – on the one hand tossed about by storms and threatened by death, on the other, reflecting on his situation – is to be presented’.9 In The Winter’s Tale, we have the case of this ‘double role of the single subject’ in the figures in the storm. We also find the figure of Leontes presenting a complementary kind of interiorised spectating as the revival of his wife becomes the platform for his reflection: ‘No settled senses of the world can match | The pleasure of that madness’ (5.3.72–3). It is the very maddening pleasure of spectating which the experience of The Winter’s Tale relies upon; indeed, the very maddening pleasure of theatre itself. It is, perhaps, for this reason that Shakespeare’s sea-storms tend towards increasing immediacy: the audience are made spectators of the storm, rather than listeners, as in The Comedy of Errors, or late witnesses, as in Twelfth Night. Spectatorship is the achievement of the storm of separation. But as we will see throughout this book, ideas of spectatorship are constantly probed and reworked in Shakespeare’s storms. Indeed, the storms are dependent on Shakespeare’s understanding of the expectations of his audience, and the ways in which those expectations can be avoided, subverted or exceeded.
Shakespeare’s storms in theatrical context
The anecdote with which I began this book illustrates an important point about the storms of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Performances at the Globe – whether in seventeenth-century or twenty-first-century Southwark – are open to a particular kind of dramatic irony: that of the environment. All performances take place on a stage, and for an audience, subjected to the elements.10 When an actor delivers lines that prompt the audience to imagine the elements of the play-world, an automatic ironic relationship with the elements of the real world is established. In the case of that particular performance of Lear, the rain, remarkably, stopped at the interval at the end of Act 3, and the sun persisted for the second half. Almost every reference to the weather in Acts 4 and 5, however separate from the action or tone of the scene itself, was met with laughter and applause (in particular the Gentleman’s lines describing Lear’s halting convalescence, ‘You have seen | Sunshine and rain at once’, 4.3.17–18). The play’s treatment of weather need not be as exhaustive as that of King Lear, of course. The damp summer months of 2012 saw the opening of the Globe’s Richard III, in which Richard asks ‘who saw the sun today’ to which Ratcliffe replies ‘Not I, my Lord’ (5.3.78).11 Of course, the real weather need not match the play’s weather for this environmental irony to be available. Francisco’s ‘’Tis bitter cold’ can generate laughter in a heatwave, just as it can on a chilly day (Hamlet, 1.1.7). Obviously, there is no way of ascertaining whether or not Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences recognised or responded to environmental irony in the same way as modern theatregoers do. What we can say, though, is that Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights wrote for a form of playhouse in which environmental irony was conceivable and it is instructive to read plays of the period in light of this. Shakespeare’s storms are always in a flux in performance, for no two sets of performance conditions are the same.
This environmental irony notwithstanding, however, it is possible to trace certain trends in the dramatic context of Shakespeare’s writing life. Of all the critics who have written on storms in early modern drama, only Leslie Thomson has attempted a comprehensive study stretching across playwrights, in her essay, ‘The Meaning of Thunder and Lightning: Stage Directions and Audience Expectations’. Thomson’s argument is that ‘“thunder and lightning” was the conventional stage language – or code – for the production of effects in or from the tiring house that would establish or confirm a specifically supernatural context in the minds of the audience’.12 Given that the essay’s focus is ‘Elizabethan and Jacobean plays’, the argument is, broadly, well founded, and supported by several examples. And yet if this ‘specifically supernatural context’ was indeed convention, then it was a convention subject to many variations and some subversions. There are numerous examples of Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights teasing nuances out of this basic expectation. The examples of Shakespeare suggest that, faced with the effects of the staged storm, the audience should rarely have been confident in expecting anything conventional.
Thomson’s argument relies, in part, on the assumption that rather than being ‘theatrical in origin’, ‘the [thunder and lightning] effects were a theatrical representation of unnatural disruptions generally believed to accompany the appearance and actions of figures such as witches, devils, and conjurers in the real world of the audience’.13 Moreover, the widespread belief in such figures ‘meant less disbelief to be willingly suspended’.14 The connection between the paranormal and storms is, of course, well established: Thomson cites Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft to support the claim, but there are several other sources with which it may be reinforced.15 Less clear is whether the tradition of using storm effects to create a supernatural context can be ascribed to this popular belief, or whether it grew from a similar theatrical practice. Both angels and devils were directed to use fire effects, similar to those used for lightning, in mystery cycles and earlier Tudor secular plays.16 Although the connection of witches and magi with violent weather can be traced to superstition, then, the similar connection of the forces of heaven and hell with storm has deep theatrical roots by the late sixteenth century. Of the examples cited by Thomson and others alluded to in her essay, there are just as many instances of thunder accompanying the descents of gods and ascents of devils as there are which accompany the specific act of conjuring. This would indicate, then, that whilst Elizabethan and Jacobean stage thunder panders to or reflects popular belief, it also operates as the successor to a more specific tradition of the theatre in which thunder and lightning is conflated with heavenly or hellish figures rather than the earthly beings who conjure them.
Thomson’s essay supports its assertions with examples from several early modern plays in which the stage effects of thunder and lightning serve to establish a supernatural context, and there are many more examples that can be added. The Devil’s Charter, by Barnabe Barnes, is a work that tells a fantastical version of the life of Pope Alexander VI and, in so doing, revels in the connection between storm effects and the supernatural. First performed c. 1606, the play embodies all of Thomson’s arguments, several times over in spectacular detail. In a preludic dumb-show, a Monk draws circles on the stage, ‘into which (after semblance of reading with exorcismes) appeare exhalations of lightning and sulphurous smoke in midst whereof a divil in most ugly shape’.17 This direction alone is enough to establish the familiar idea, but the dumb-show is emphatic in this point. Roderigo, who wants a particular quality of spirit, turns his face from the devil,
hee beeing conjured downe after more thunder and fire, ascends another divill like a Sargeant with a mace under his girdle: Roderigo disliketh. Hee discendeth: after more thunder and fearefull fire, ascend in robes pontificall with a triple Crowne on his head, and Crosse keyes in his hand: a divill him ensuing in blacke robes.18
The repetition of the special effects reinforces the conflation beyond doubt. When the dumb-show is finishing, there is one final direction, ‘this donne with thunder and lightning the divills descend’.19 In the dumb-show, then, the thunder, lightning and fire function as a symbolic definition of the liminal points between worlds. This function is re-employed later in the play to spectacular effect: ‘Fiery exhalations lightning thunder ascend a King, with a red face crowned imperiall riding upon a Lyon, or dragon’; ‘The divell descendeth with thunder and lightning and after more exhalations ascends another all in armor’; ‘Devill desendeth with thunder &c.’; ‘Thunder and lightning with fearefull noise the divells thrust him downe and goe Triumphing’.20
Barnes’s play was performed by the King’s Men. This company – for whom Shakespeare acted and wrote – were in an enviably secure position by this point. It is tempting to imagine that their properties really did include both a lion and a dragon, and that the King’s ascent could thereby vary with each performance. But Barnes’s use of the effects goes beyond those mighty set pieces. In addition to being used in the entrance and exits of the spirits, the effects are also recalled in the language of the play:
With golden majesty like Saturnes sonne
To darte downe fire and thunder on their foes.21
Or later:
For beare your violence in the name of God:
Fearing the scourge, and thunder from above,
Our offers are both just and reasonable22
When the stage effects are as insistent as in The Devil’s Charter, then these verbal reminders are resonant, particularly when ‘the name of God’ is juxtaposed for contrast, and a dialectic of good and evil established. Perhaps the most significant verbal instance in the play comes at its finale:
Dead, and in such a fashion,
As much affrights my spirits to remember,
Thunder and fearfull lightning at his death,
Out cries of horror and extremity.23
The death in question – that of Alexander at the hands of the devils – is the self-stated subject of the play, and this quotation follows the last incident of thunder and lighting, which it describes. There is, then, a definite closure of the play that echoes the way in which it began: with the thunder and lightning related to otherworldly characters. Moreover, the double meaning of ‘spirits’ here has the effect of adding human emotion to the fusion of storm and the supernatural, thus further, and finally, consolidating the notion of thunder and lightning as the sound of a boundary between mortal and immortal dimensions. Although Barnes’s play is mostly known for its elaborate stage directions, it establishes a poetics of storm to complement its fiery effects.
Further examples of storm effects accompanying the supernatural abound. We might thinks of Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c. 1589).24 The brazen head, created by the magician Bacon, ‘speaks and a lightning flasheth forth’.25 Perhaps the same effect is required earlier, as ‘Bungay conjures, and the tree appears with the dragon shooting fire’.26 In any case, the notion that lightning is linked with conjuration is explicit. But there are also more subtle employments of the effect. In The Puritan, which was first performed in 1606, there is a definite ironic tone.27 In this play when thunder is signalled Idle uses the convenient sound to reinforce the effect of his fraudulent conjuring of a devil. The sound effect is enough to convince the onlookers, one of whom comments: ‘Oh admirable Conjurer! has fetcht Thunder already’, shortly before another says ‘O brother, brother, what a Tempest’s ith’Garden, sure there’s some Conjuration abroad’.28 Thus the correlation of storm and the supernatural is staged and used metatheatrically: the gulls are, in effect, a naïve audience, operating on a basic level of understanding. Thomson notes the irony on which this episode relies, but does not examine it in detail.29 Crucially, the characters’ error is an aural one – they only see Idle through a keyhole, and the ‘devil’ is ‘conjured’ with a fake voice – for it is the sound of thunder even more than the flash of lightning which seems to establish the theatrical context of the supernatural. It is also a demonstration of the dramatically ironic reifying of theatrical effect: the audience understand that the staged sound is ‘real’ because the gulls understand it as supernatural. Hence layers of irony cover any possible deficiency in stage mechanics. As with my account of the performance of King Lear, all performances are open to environmental irony. As plays such as The Puritan demonstrate, the differentiated levels of weather can be stratified beyond a simple real/theatrical binary.
Other plays of the period also employ storm effects subtly. In Robert Armin’s The Valiant Welshman (c. 1612), there is no sound directed to accompany the entrance of Fortune at the beginning of the play: ‘Fortune descends downe from heaven to the Stage, and then shee cals foorth foure Harpers, that by the sound of their Musicke they might awake the ancient Bardh’.30 Although thunder and lightning often occurs simultaneously to descents from the heavens, then, Fortune here apparently enters in silence, especially if ‘and then’ is taken literally. Despite the obvious supernatural context of the scene, it is the music that seems to cue the magic: ‘The Harpers play, and the Bardh riseth from his Tombe’.31 Later in the play, however, as the Witch, her son and the evil Gloster plot the latter’s revenge, the son conjures a spirit to ‘havocke all the borderers of Wales’.32 As he casts the spell, off stage, ‘Thunders and Lightning’ is directed, which the Witch comments on:
Now whirle the angry heavens about the Pole,
And in their fuming choler dart forth fires,
Like burning Aetna, being thus inraged
At this imperious Necromantike arte.33
Thunder also sounds when the spirit enters, in the form of a serpent, both in this scene and later in the play.34 Evident in the play, therefore, is the connection between storm and evil magic, to the extent that the latter is distinguished by stage effects whereas other supernatural events are staged in silence or with music. Similarly, Thomas Dekker’s If it Be not Good, the Devil is in it (c. 1611), begins with the entrance of Pluto and Charon, ‘at the sound of hellish musick’, but the effect of ‘Rayne, Thunder and lightning’ is saved for Lucifer’s entrance, with devils.35 Again, the storm effects’ correlation is with the specifically evil, rather than more broadly supernatural. The shifts between thunder and music are also evident in John Fletcher’s play The Mad Lover (1617). Thunder is directed shortly before Venus descends. However, three lines after the direction for thunder comes the following: ‘Musicke. Venus descends’.36 It is possible that there is a scribal error in the Quarto text, and that only one sound effect was meant for performance. If, however, the transcription is accurate, then the thunder acts as a signal of the supernatural rather than as its accompaniment. Chilax responds to the visit of Venus, ‘I’le no more Oracles, nor Miracles |…| Am not I torne a pieces with the thunder?’ Later in the scene, the same character has the line ‘No more of that, I feare another Thunder’, to which the response, ‘We are not i’th’ Temple man’ reinforces the notion that thunder is only possible in the rarefied and magical setting of invocation.37 As with Armin and Dekker’s plays, the expectations of what thunder and lightning portend are troubled.
The most sustained engagement with storm effects in the period probably belongs to Thomas Heywood, who uses thunder in four of the five plays of his sequence, The Ages.38 In the first of these plays, The Golden Age (c. 1610), Jupiter is presented with ‘his thunder-bolt’, yet the sound effects are reserved for Neptune, whose epithet, ‘Hee can make Tempests, or the waves appease’, is carried through in the stage direction which follows: ‘Sound, Thunder and Tempest’.39 The episode, although similar to other examples, has the attraction of staging the meteorological understanding of its audience. Thus, a thunderbolt is construed as quite distinct from a tempest, which in turn, is separate from wind: ‘Enter at 4 severall corners the 4 winds: Neptune riseth disturbed: the Fates bring the 4 winds in a chaine, and present them to Æolus, as their King’.40 Whilst the scene might be said merely to depict the attributes of the classical gods, the delineation of those attributes speaks to a meteorological model which had remained largely unaltered since the classical period. The sound effects of the storm, then, are still linked with the supernatural, but in a way that also enacts an allegorical template for the natural philosophy-based understanding of the Jacobean audience. At the beginning of the next play in the sequence, The Silver Age (c. 1611), the familiar formula is again revisited, free from any meteorological overtones: ‘Thunder and lightning. Jupiter discends in a cloude’.41 The effect is repeated several times in similar contexts through the play, most notably as Jupiter burns Semerle to death. Most dramatically of all, however, The Brazen Age (c. 1611) stages the death of Hercules: ‘Jupiter above strikes him with a thunder-bolt, his body sinkes, and from the heavens discends a hand in a cloud, that from the place where Hercules was burnt, brings up a starre, and fixeth it in the firmament’.42
As with the other plays discussed, though, there is more to these examples than the spectacular. This becomes apparent if the plays are viewed as a cohesive sequence. The descending of gods through The Ages becomes increasingly less prominent, just as their influence on the drama decreases. It is no coincidence that the fourth play, The Iron Age Part 1, contains no directions for thunder, or that in Part 2, we find only the following: ‘They both wound him, at which there is a greate thunder crack’.43 The victim here is Agamemnon, whose dying speech reminds the audience of the difference between this thunder and that in the plays which have gone before:
This showes, we Princes are no more then men.
Thankes Jove tis fit when Monarches fall by Treason,
Thunder to all the world, would show some reason.44
Despite Thomson’s claims, this passage cannot be held up as a supernatural scene.45 There is no descent of god here, nor ascent of devil, no conjuration or invocation of spirits. It is surely more fitting to read the episode in light of there being no supernatural intervention, when the three plays quoted above all use thunder differently. Agamemnon’s lines might allude to Jove, but their purpose is to draw attention to his lack of intervention on the stage. Heywood here subverts the storm/supernatural relationship he elsewhere maintains, and does so with the effect of highlighting the sheer lack of influence held by the mortal characters. The lines quoted might just as easily represent the willingness of the human to ascribe deep importance to random weather events, subverting the tradition in order to mark that randomness more starkly. The audience expectations of which Thomson writes are also staged in the aftermath of Agamemnon’s death: ‘Prodigious sure, | Since ’tis confirmed by Thunder’.46 The idea in Pyrrhus’s lines that the thunder invests the situation with a specific level of meaning is related to the way in which Thomson claims the contemporary audiences generally thought. As we have seen, however, this level of meaning is not manifested in the play; indeed, it gradually diminishes over the course of the sequence.
The examples I have given do not contradict the notion that a playhouse audience would expect some sort of supernatural element when storm effects were staged. They do, though, show some of the ways in which the expectation itself was not the end point, but rather a platform on which to build dramatic subtleties, whether poetic, ironic, thematic or sonic. Far from being an awkward and limited cliché, the storm effects and their accompanying associations could be worked and reworked for many differing nuances. It is, perhaps, this quality of theirs which so attracted Shakespeare – for the storms in Shakespeare’s plays constantly shift in the way that they present the supernatural, or its absence. From his earliest thunder and lightning – in the Henry VI plays, to his latest – in the romances and Two Noble Kinsmen – the audience could rarely have been long in a position to interpret what they saw and heard decisively. For there are orthodox descents of supernatural figures (Jupiter in Cymbeline, Ariel in The Tempest) but there are also gods who do not come down, no matter how loud the effects, or the invocation. There are witches who enter to, or conjure with, the sound of thunder (2 Henry VI, Macbeth) but there are also characters for whom the effects are all too visceral, all too real. If there is anything approaching a constant in Shakespeare’s staged storms, it is variability.
The question of which of Shakespeare’s storm effects is earliest would doubtless be a contentious one, were it prized as highly as other Shakespearean puzzles. It is not simply a matter of the difficulty of claiming with any certainty which of the two contending plays was written first, 1 or 2 Henry VI, for it is generally agreed that Shakespeare is one of several authorial hands in each. Are any of the scenes in which the effects are staged actually by Shakespeare? Could it be that he wrote the scene in Part 1 (5.2) in which Joan Puzel invokes the spirits to the sound of thunder, but not that in which Talbot swears vengeance (1.4)? Could it have been the other way around, or did he write both or neither? Was Act 4, Scene 1 of Part 2, if that is Shakespeare’s, earlier in any case? I am content to let such questions rest, and to concentrate instead on the plays as we have them, for the sake of space if not of sanity. Because the episode in Part 2 offers illuminating connections with Macbeth, I will discuss it in Chapter 6. The storm effects in Part 1, however, are best discussed in light of the examples from Shakespeare’s contemporaries that I have given above.
After Salisbury and Gargrave are shot on the turrets, Talbot swears revenge:
He beckons with his hand and smiles on me
As who should say, ‘When I am dead and gone,
Remember to avenge me on the French’.
Plantagenet, I will […]
Wretched shall France be only in my name.
Here an alarum and it thunders and lightens
What stir is this? What tumult’s in the heavens?
Whence cometh this alarum and the noise?
(1.4.91–8)
Talbot’s initial response is enough to allude to the notion that the weather is responding to his oaths, or to the death of Salisbury. Although there is a hint of a connection between the storm and some sort of cosmic justice, there is no theophany. Here, then, the human apprehension of weather may allow for the possibility of the supernatural, but an apprehension only it remains. Talbot is not, apparently, soliloquising; Glansdale is still on stage. But for his questions concerning the noise to be answered, there is an entrance. Rather than a god or a devil, though, it is a messenger. We can read or hear the Messenger’s lines either as an answer to Talbot’s questions, or as an unrelated communication:
My lord, my lord, the French have gathered head.
The Dolphin, with one Joan de Puzel joined –
A holy prophetess, new risen up –
Is come with a great power to raise the siege.
(99–102)
Having had the opportunity to understand the storm effects in the context of Talbot’s oaths the audience is immediately given a fresh perspective. If we hear the Messenger’s lines as answers to Talbot’s questions, then the thunder and lightning become signifiers of maleficent forces – a cosmic rumble to complement the French alarum – a holy prophetess with a great power. In the space of a few moments the play’s weather seems to echo Talbot’s call for revenge and then change sides. If the audience recall the sound of the shot that kills Salisbury and Gargrave, which is also a pyrotechnic effect, then it too may retrospectively take on a sinister character. There is certainly nothing fixed here, and the audience is surely left in a state of doubt. As Edward Burns puts it, ‘Is this gunfire, a natural storm of a presage of witchcraft? The ambiguity is particularly effective in the context of the English paranoia in the face of (historically) superior French firepower and what seems like magic’.47 This paranoia is both represented and questioned from the start of the play, at Henry V’s funeral, as Exeter asks ‘shall we think the subtle-witted French | Conjurers and sorcerers, that afraid of him | By magic verses have contrived his end?’ (1.1.25–7). Exeter’s question is paralleled by that which the audience asks of the staged thunder and lightning – with all of its dramatic connotations – three scenes later.
The climax of this process is at the end of the play. Joan Puzel’s encounter with the ‘fiends’ who join her on stage in Act 5, Scene 3 has been an uncomfortable one for critics, who see it as reductive.48 Critical discussion tends to emphasise the frequent accusations of witchcraft levelled at Joan through the play. But whilst the scene does suggest ‘that Talbot was right all along’, it does so in a way more subtle than generally acknowledged.49 For it is not simply the slanders of the English knights that Joan’s invocations confirm: it is also the play’s signification of thunder. By staging a generic pairing of thunder and fiends, the scene suggests that the storm has been supernaturally charged throughout. Joan is depicted as living up to expectations – expectations that have been augmented throughout the play. The thunder that accompanies Talbot’s oaths is the same noise as that which brings Joan’s spirits on to the stage. In this scene, we see the ‘great power’ the Messenger warns Talbot of. But we also see that power abandon Joan. The actions of the fiends mark their rejection: ‘They hang their heads […] They shake their heads […] They depart’ (5.3.38–44sd). The scene reifies the superstitions hinted at by Exeter, but also indulges in the fantasy that any French victory was brought about by dark magic. The association of storm and the supernatural means that that dark magic can be heard throughout the play, but its presence confirmed only at the finale. For this, the storm effects are required not only to suggest the supernatural, but also to raise doubt.
It is doubt, indeed, that persists through Shakespeare’s storms. There are unambiguous instances: in 2 Henry VI and Macbeth, as we will see, and in Cymbeline, ‘Jupiter descends in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle: he throws a thunderbolt. The Ghosts fall on their knees’ (5.4.93).50 But generally the storm effects in Shakespeare’s plays that are far less straightforward, and even Macbeth, as I will show in Chapter 6, is not as direct as it may appear. Perhaps Ariel’s descent in The Tempest seems similar to Jupiter’s: ‘Thunder and lightning. Enter Ariel, like a harpy’ is directed shortly after ‘Solemn and strange music, and Prospero on the top, invisible. Enter several strange shapes’ (3.3.53; 19). But, as I will argue in Chapter 9, the scene is a culmination of the play’s treatment of storm, a treatment which depends on the effects being able to suggest very different things. Rather than the direct correlation of storm and the supernatural, Shakespeare insists more habitually on staging the human interpretation of the weather. Take, for example, Julius Caesar. As in 1 Henry VI, the meaning of the weather (in addition here to the other ‘prodigies’) is debated: ‘let not men say | “These are their reasons, they are natural” | For I believe they are portentous’, runs Casca’s argument. Cicero’s response is ‘men may construe things after their fashion | Clean from the purpose of the things themselves’ (29–30; 34–5). These lines are a rebuttal both of Casca’s point and of the dramatic tradition with which Casca’s position coincides. Whilst there is a definite custom of theatrical signification that would suggest concurrence with Casca’s reaction, it is not the driving force of the scene. Shakespeare, rather, stages ‘the things themselves’ and allows for, or indeed encourages the variety of possible responses. Hence in, for example, King Lear, Othello, Pericles and The Winter’s Tale, the emphasis is on the human experience of the storm, rather than on the effects as a flat background for supernatural entrances.51 Moreover, even in plays which do conflate the storm and the supernatural – Macbeth and The Tempest, say – there are characters voicing responses to the weather that are at odds with that conflation.
As I have been demonstrating, Shakespeare’s storms can be read alongside a wide range of storms written by his contemporaries. Several of these other playwrights engage with audience expectations just as Shakespeare does, and utilise them for aesthetic effect. The basic storm/supernatural axis is a formula which we will continue to see Shakespeare complicate throughout this book. For when it comes to Shakespeare’s plays, any audience alive to what Thomson calls ‘the specific meaning of the use of thunder’, is surely left wondering what that meaning specifically is.
Shakespeare’s storms and ecocriticism
I think that I have already failed the test. In the title of her essay, Sharon O’Dair asks ‘Is it Shakespearean Ecocriticism if it isn’t Presentist?’, and soon enough we are told that the ‘short answer … is “no”’.52 Readers will have noticed, I am sure, my privileging of Globe productions, as though forming a theatrical hierarchy based on performance conditions. My notes betray an even more suspicious tendency, full as they are with signatures and folios and the names of booksellers who traded on stalls and not online. I suspect that I may be accused of coding ‘presentists … as unscholarly’ and will be eyed warily by self-proclaimed ecocritics as a result.53
I do, however, think we can get along. Partly this is because I value the Globe not for its putative historical authenticity (which, in any case, would quickly see me thrown out of the historicist club too) but for its capacity to illustrate that Shakespeare’s plays are living artefacts, always subject to reimagining anew, often accidentally. Partly it is because the juxtaposition of the historical perspective and modern lived experience is illuminating. I’m not writing this book because the world is ending, but I do think that it has implications for those who want to read early modern drama in that way. For example, another important idea raised by that overheard question in the Globe – how are they doing this? – is the notion that the weather in theatres can be controlled. It is hardly so farfetched: audiences in indoor theatres will often see manufactured rain in Lear’s third act, or whenever else it is deemed appropriate, and thanks to modern sound technology will hear recordings of thunder too.54 The question, then, was one that came from a familiarity with the theatre, however anachronistic it may have been at the Globe. The will to control, or fantasy of controlling, weather is surely of interest to many ecocritics, and can be read through performance studies just as it can in Lear’s lines. Similarly, by acknowledging the environmental irony of Shakespeare’s plays, we can come to appreciate Timothy Morton’s contention that ‘A more honest ecological art, would linger in the shadowy world of irony and difference’.55 Chapter 6 shows that Macbeth stages different concepts of the weather – natural and supernatural – and keeps them ironically separate. An activist might insist that this aesthetic move finds remarkable analogies in positions propounded by climate change deniers, and that Duncan notes the sweetness of the air up to the point that Macbeth, of the filthy air, kills him. But the play does not need to be brought into the present for its ecology to ring true to us: its ‘shadowy world of irony and difference’ is unavoidable once brought into the light.
Of chief importance, though, is the fact that ecocriticism can benefit from historicist perspectives. There is little in the way of advocacy or activism to be found in my arguments, and so I also fall foul of Simon C. Estok’s criteria for ‘Doing Ecocriticism with Shakespeare’.56 However, Estok’s work on theorising ‘ecophobia’ would be stronger for a little historical awareness. The knowledge, for example, that the actor playing Lear would be seeing real fire spitting when he said ‘Spit fire’ on the early modern stage is surely crucial to Estok’s claims. The concept of ecophobia would thereby have to take on board the ways in which an audience could be excited, scared and alienated simultaneously by the stage effects of the playhouse as well as the poetry of the play. Indeed, as terror or phobias surely reside in the blurring of distinctions between real and imagined threats, the hyper-real representation of lightning on the early modern stage may be seen as a necessary adjunct to all that is terrifying or phobic about nature in King Lear or any other stormy play. A historically informed criticism – one that places at its centre the material context of production in the early modern playhouses – is therefore necessary if presentist approaches are to develop their theories fully, just as present concerns shape the interests of historicist critics. Evidence and discussion of material practices of renaissance theatre can enrich ecocritical thinking, whether it ‘counts’ as ‘doing ecocriticism’ or not. Estok claims that ‘It is the activist ambitions that have differentiated us [the ecocritics] and what we seek to do from the legions of staid thematicists who muse endlessly as the world smolders to an end’.57 In so doing, he misses the intersections of thematic and activist criticism and, curiously, figures the former as the passive spectator. As we have seen, Shakespeare’s storms amount to a career’s worth of engagement with the idea of spectatorship. Thematic studies can teach us not only what to look at, but also how to look at ourselves looking. The greatest activist ambition that literary ecocritics can pursue is that of convincing readers to think more carefully about – and hence to be more careful with – the environment. But the environment is a sociocultural construction, as well as anything that it is in manifest reality or scientific evidence.58As such it is understood as forged by the circumstance of thought, belief, art. For Shakespeare, the environment is theatre, and theatre environment. Convincing Shakespearean readers and audiences to think more carefully about the environment, therefore, requires an exploration of its theatricality.
The understanding that our representations of weather are fundamentally affected by the real weather, and that our experience of the real weather is fundamentally aesthetisced by dramatic weather prompts us to remember that activism is about changing minds, not actions. We are allowed to consume carbon fuels, fill land with rubbish, factory farm other sentient beings and so forth, precisely because our understanding of our relationship with the environment is aestheticised. As Morton puts it, ‘democracy is well served by irony, because irony insists that there are other points of view that we must acknowledge’.59 Those points of view may even be our own. Any encounter with environmental irony, whether storms by Shakespeare, or, say, silence by John Cage, makes us briefly uncannily aware of our latent environmental attitudes. Understanding and exposing the means by which Shakespeare stages these uncanny moments requires an approach grounded in a thorough appreciation of early modern theatre. Any ecocritical thinking must be shaped by our understanding of the past, as well as the threat of any putative, punitive, future. Just as we cannot totally shake off present concerns when uncovering historical contexts, nor can we fully explicate our understanding of the present without examining its foundations, available to us in cultural, societal, religious or artistic artefacts. This examination must take into account the material circumstances of production if the subsequent understanding is to be informed. One thing environmental irony does is remind us that storms in the early modern playhouses are invariably open to the metatheatrical, and Shakespeare’s storms in particular are always alive to this possibility. Again, for Shakespeare, theatre is environment, environment theatre. An awareness of this brings the two critical approaches of ecocriticism and theatre history together. Theatre history stands to gain an appreciation of the ways in which its discoveries of material practice can be brought to bear on current events or movements in theory. Scholars of performance must acknowledge the importance of special effects not only for the sake of drawing faithful reconstructions but also as evidence of early modern fears, desires, superstitions and expectations. Ecocriticism, meanwhile, stands to gain an understanding of the representations of the environment that are rooted in early modern theatrical practice.
Of the work that brings an ecological approach to early modern literature, still the most wide-ranging and ambitious is Robert N. Watson’s Back to Nature.60 Watson argues that the origins of the modern ideas of nature as sacrosanct are located in the ‘Late Renaissance’, and his book examines ‘artistic responses to the nostalgia for unmediated contact with the world of nature’.61 Back to Nature amounts to an anatomy of early modern epistemology, drawing on several areas of anxiety – theological, political, economic, scientific – to explain ‘nostalgia for Eden, for the Golden Age, for an idealized collective agrarian feudal England, and for a prelinguistic access to reality’.62 In not knowing themselves, then, the Late Renaissance subjects Watson pieces together provoke the idea of nature as a truthful and direct experience. The consequences of this idea have been outlined in great detail by Morton, whose Ecology Without Nature argues that any notion of ‘nature’ is essentialising and deeply troubling for the ecological: ‘to contemplate deep green ideas deeply is to let go of the idea of Nature, the one thing that maintains an aesthetic distance between us and them, us and it, us and “over there”’.63
How to reconcile such approaches with a study of Shakespeare’s storms? In staging thunder and lightning which is not an indication of supernature, but a representation of natural phenomena, Shakespeare’s plays offer a critique of the relationship between human beings and their environment. Taking Leslie Thomson’s conclusion, Gabriel Egan argues that the fact that the storm in King Lear ‘is only a meteorological phenomenon, is a trap that the character and the playhouse audience are led into’.64 Leaving aside the troubling notion that a character can be tricked by a device that operates on audience expectations, let us concentrate on what such a conclusion means. Firstly it surrenders the idea that the audience are familiar with plays such as Julius Caesar in which the origins and meanings of thunder and lightning are debated without supernatural figures. Secondly it assumes that, having listened to, for example, Lear’s first two speeches in the storm, an audience would still expect a god to descend. In every example we have seen in which the storm and the supernatural are conflated, the amalgamation happens very quickly – within the space of a few lines – if not simultaneously. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, Egan’s argument loses sight of the environmental question. King Lear need not rely upon theatrical traditions of thunder and lightning and spirits. Rather, Shakespeare stages the problems of constructions of nature as other. In the widespread juxtaposition of storm and the supernatural, is the implicit notion that weather is to be treated with suspicion and to be feared, or else revered. Also, and crucially, it conceives the weather as to be controlled. In Shakespeare’s play, storm and the psyche are figured as interdependent in Lear’s speech:
Thou think’st ’tis much that this contentious storm
Invades us to the skin. So ’tis to thee;
But where the greater malady is fixed,
The lesser is scarce felt. Thou’dst shun a beat,
But if thy flight lay toward the roaring sea
Thou’dst meet the bear i’th’ mouth. When the mind’s free,
The body’s delicate. This tempest in my mind
Doth from my senses take all feeling else
Save what beats there: filial ingratitude.
(3.4.6–14)
Here, the separation of body and mind is remarkable for many reasons, though perhaps most importantly, for not being a separation of body and soul. The speech figures the mind as enabling the organs of awareness, ‘my senses’ to apprehend the weather: ‘When the mind’s free, | The body’s delicate’. The weather, then, depends upon the human perception of it. The important storm in this respect, therefore, is not the one suggested by the stage effects, but the figurative one which interrupts that human perception: ‘This tempest in my mind’. These different storms operate as an allegory of the human relationship to the environment. Watson’s work is illuminating here: the ‘prelinguistic access to reality’ of the free mind which is the essentialising drive towards the experience of Nature is offered linguistic capability by that experience: the external storm allows for the creation of the internal. Nature remains as ‘outside’ here, therefore, even in the most extreme representation of its proximity. This is equally clear in the idea that Lear’s speech creates the storm just as Lear responds to it. The weather in Lear exists only in the apprehension of those who are involved in it, just as we in the audience or as readers must surely realise that we are involved in climate change, just as we constantly refine and redefine our notions of what climate change is and how we are to deal with it. I return to the performativity of storms – their creation through language as well as through stage effect – in particular when dealing with King Lear and Macbeth. It should be remembered then that the questions I raise in such an approach are necessarily ecological as well as thematic. Chapter 4, on King Lear, speaks to ecocritical ideas about wilderness and shows that the play’s representation of nature has been misunderstood. Chapter 6, on Macbeth, details the way in which early modern anxieties about the supernatural allow for, or prompt, a play with discrete weather systems. Pericles, too, is a divided play, and in Chapter 8, I show that its ‘lasting storm’ is a performance aesthetic that bridges the divisions and allows us to think more carefully about them.
This, then, is a book that uses the discourses of performance history and ecocritisim to argue that Shakespeare’s storms have so far been misread or ignored. The storms represent changing theatrical and technical practices. These practices are the focus of Chapter 2, which argues that Shakespeare’s investment in storm in Julius Caesar is a canny, financial one, for Shakespeare seriously considered the impact of the special effects of thunder and lightning when writing staged storms. In the case of Julius Caesar, this amounted to an attempt to create the sense of the new Globe as an exciting venue, where poetic eloquence is matched with spectacular display, one designed to generate an instant reputation for the playhouse. That playhouse, I argue, had a capacity for special effects that can be mapped onto the text of the play.
The storms also represent the evolving understanding of meteorological phenomena in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. I therefore include chapters on thunder, lightning, wind and rain. These phenomena are so familiar that we take for granted our understanding of them. In so doing, we lose sight of poetic nuances, some of which I hope I recover. Finally, in Chapter 9, I show that The Tempest has something to offer for each of the approaches I take throughout the book. Ultimately, Shakespeare’s representation of storms is one of character, as Ariel becomes the storm he narrates. Ariel is the ultimate pathetic fallacy, the personification of the storm as a character. Fundamentally, The Tempest highlights the dramatic quality of its presentation of nature. In order to achieve this, the storm in the first scene must be rendered convincingly, for only then is the theatricality of the human apprehension of nature exposed. In order to make this move work, the play has to draw on highly unusual staging practices – practices that find their most lucid conceptualisation in current ecocriticism.