Notes

Introduction

1 Although the chronology of the plays is a contentious topic, the plays in question are relatively widely spaced. The only sticking point is in the order of The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. I have opted for a more conservative arrangement, in which The Tempest is later, in agreement with Oxford and Arden editors.

2 A similar effect is achieved in Twelfth Night: ‘Sebastian, are you? … How hast thou made division of yourself ?’ (5.1.217–19).

3 Perhaps there is even a little signal of mortality in Shakespeare’s diction. The playwright uses ‘bodkin’ only three times including here. Each time there is a certain conflation of danger and death involved: (‘Dumaine: The head of a bodkin. Berowne: A death’s face in a ring’; ‘he himself might his quietus make | With a bare bodkin’. Love’s Labour’s Lost 5.2.607–8, Hamlet 3.1.75–6).

4 See, for example, H. H. Huxley, ‘Storm and Shipwreck in Roman Literature’, Greece and Rome 21:63 (Oct. 1952), 117–24.

5 Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, trans. R. E. Latham (London: Penguin, 1951), p. 60.

6 Miguel de Montaigne, Essays done into English, according to the last French edition, by John Florio (London: Melch. Bradwood for Edward Blount and William Baret, 1631), p. 443.

7 Ibid., p. 443.

8 Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck With Spectator, trans. Steven Rendall (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), p. 26.

9 Ibid., p. 64.

10 Though I am using examples from the third Globe to illustrate this principle, it applies of course to any open-air performance.

11 In the performance I saw (18 July 2012), this too was greeted with laughter and applause, and I’m confident that it got the same response in each of its early performances. The weather – which finally (though briefly) became warmer on 21 July – had been something of a national joke for several months. Clearly, this encouraged the response.

12 Leslie Thomson, ‘The Meaning of Thunder and Lightning: Stage Directions and Audience Expectations’, Early Theatre 2 (1999), 11–24 (11).

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Not least in the work of James VI and I. See below, p. 90.

16 See Philip Butterworth, Theatre of Fire: Special Effects in Early English and Scottish Theatre (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1998), pp. 41–53.

17 Barnabe Barnes, The Divils Charter a Tragedie (London: G. E. for John Wright, 1607), sig. A2v

18 Ibid., sig. A2v (my emphases).

19 Ibid., sig. A2v.

20 Ibid., sigs. G1v–G2r; M2v.

21 Ibid., sig. B1v.

22 Ibid., sig. D3v.

23 Ibid., sig. D3v.

24 In David Bevington et al. (eds), English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology (New York: Norton, 2002), pp. 134–83.

25 Robert Greene, Friar Bacon 11.76.

26 Ibid., 9.83.

27 The authorship of the play has been the subject of much debate – it was, for example, first published as ‘written by W. S.’ and included in an impression of the third Folio edition of Shakespeare’s works – but has most recently been included as one of Thomas Middleton’s works. See Gary Taylor et al. (eds), Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 509–43.

28 W. S., The Puritaine (London by G. ELD., 1607), sig. G2v.

29 Thomson, ‘The Meaning of Thunder and Lightning’, p. 18.

30 R[obert] A[rmin], The Valiant Welshman, or, The True Chronicle History of the Life and Valiant Deeds of Caradoc the Great, King of Cambria (London: George Furslowe for Robert Lownes, 1615), sig. A4r.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid., sig. F1r.

33 Ibid.

34 See Ibid., sigs. F1v and G1r.

35 Thomas Dekker, If it Be not Good, the Devil is in it, 4.2.33.

36 John Fletcher, The Mad Lover, in Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Comedies and Tragedies (London, 1647), fols. 1–23 (fol. 19).

37 Ibid., fol. 19.

38 Only The Iron Age Part II lacks the stage direction.

39 Thomas Heywood, The Golden Age. Or The Lives of Jupiter and Saturne, with the Defining of the Heathen Gods (London: William Barrenger, 1611), sig. K2v.

40 Ibid., sig. K2v.

41 Thomas Heywood, The Silver Age (London: Nicholas Okes, 1613), sig. C3r.

42 Thomas Heywood, The Brazen Age (London: Nicholas Okes, 1613), sig. L3r.

43 Thomas Heywood, The Iron Age (London: Nicholas Okes, 1632), sig. H4r. This text contains both parts of the play.

44 Heywood, The Iron Age, sig. H4r.

45 Thomson claims that ‘only once is the effect [thunder] for weather only: “It snows, and rains, thunders”‘. See Thomas Drout, The Life of the Dutches of Suffolke (London: A. M[atthews] for Jasper Emery, 1631), sig. F2v; Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thomson, A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama 1580–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 230. In attributing the quotation to Thomson, I am following the note in her essay, 22n2.

46 Heywood, The Iron Age, sig. H4v.

47 Edward Burns (ed.), Henry VI, Part 1 (London: Thomson Learning, 2001), 1.4.97sdn.

48 See ibid., pp. 33–7.

49 Ibid., p. 33.

50 The mention of the Ghosts is a reminder that the scene is already suffused with supernatural context, the spirits having entered to ‘Solemn music’ (30), which, as in the above examples, may function in a similar way to the storm effects.

51 Thomson relies partly on a perceived difference between the direction for storm and that for thunder and lightning. Storm, Thomson argues, ‘however accidentally’ illustrates that the effect called for is one of bad weather, rather than one to be associated with supernatural activity. In the case of Lear, then, ‘the use of “storm” in the stage direction implicitly confirms that Lear is wrong to assume supernatural intervention; it is only a storm – even if thunder and lightning are among the special effects at this point in the play’ (p. 16, Thomson’s emphasis).

52 Sharon O’Dair, ‘Is it Shakespearean Ecocriticism if it isn’t Presentist?’, in Lynne Bruckner and Dan Brayton (eds), Ecocritical Shakespeare (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 71–85 (71).

53 Ibid., p. 75.

54 The 2007–09 RSC production, dir. Trevor Nunn, for example, had both stage rain and thunder.

55 Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 17.

56 Simon C. Estok, Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 1.

57 Simon C. Estok, ‘Afterword: Ecocriticism on the Lip of a Lion’, in Bruckner and Brayton (eds), Ecocritical Shakespeare, pp. 239–46 (240).

58 See Morton, The Ecological Thought.

59 Ibid., p. 17.

60 Robert N. Watson, Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

61 Ibid., p. 5.

62 Ibid., p. 6.

63 Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 204.

64 Gabriel Egan, Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), p. 139.

1 Thunder

1 OED fig. calm before the storm (also tempest). The instance given is from Sutton’s Disce Vivere, 1602.

2 See R. W. Dent, Shakespeare’s Proverbial Language: An Index (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981), C24; S908. According to Dent, ‘After a storm comes a calm’ is proverbial from 1538 onwards, whilst ‘After a calm comes a storm’ started to appear in 1572.

3 In sixteenth-century continental Europe, there were various moves to elaborate upon or counter Aristotelian meteorological theories with alchemical and other practices: a true challenge to Aristotle’s work. Writers of meteorological texts in England, however, continued to conceive of weather within the confines of an Aristotelian framework, and that is the framework subscribed to by England’s creative writers in the period. For a detailed account of the development of continental meteorology and its relationship with natural philosophy, see Craig Martin, Renaissance Meteorology: Pomponazzi to Descartes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).

4 Aristotle, Meteorologica, trans. H. D. P. Lee (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1952). For the initial outlining of the arguments on exhalations and vapours, see 340b. The terminology used by Aristotle varies, and at various points the terms ‘vapour’ and ‘exhalation’ can be misleading. For my purposes, the distinction as I outline it is sufficient. For a more detailed discussion, see Martin, Renaissance Meteorology, pp. 6–8.

5 See Aristotle, Meteorologica, 371b.

6 S. K. Heninger, A Handbook of Renaissance Meteorology, with Particular Reference to Elizabethan and Jacobean Literature (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), p. 12.

7 Ibid., p. 72.

8 William Fulke, A Goodly Gallery with a most Pleasant Prospect (London: William Griffith, 1563), fol. 101.

9 Pliny, the Elder, Natural History, trans. H. Rackham (Bury St Edmunds: Loeb, 1997), 2:43; Aristotle, Meteorologica, 346b–347a.

10 Pliny, Natural History, 2:21.

11 Aristotle, Meteorologica, 340a.

12 Fulke, A Goodly Gallery, fol. 50.

13 Aristotle, Meteorologica, 369a–b.

14 See, for example, Pliny, Natural History, 2:43. Pliny differentiates storms caused by falling stars from those which result from exhalations trapped in clouds: the latter ‘are accidental – they cause mere senseless and ineffectual thunder-claps, as their coming obeys no principle of nature – they merely cleave mountains and seas, and all their other blows are ineffectual; but the former are prophetical and sent from on high, they come by fixed causes and from their own stars.’ See below, p. 57.

15 Fulke, A Goodly Gallery, fol. 8r.

16 See below, pp. 52, 87ff.

17 The Hebrew word  (qol, or kole) can be used to mean voice and sound, but also thunder.

2 Storm and the spectacular: Julius Caesar

1 Though debates on the plays’ chronology have raged for many years and will rage for many more, this viewpoint should find few opponents. David Daniell terms it ‘Shakespeare’s first extended thunder’ (Julius Caesar, Arden 3rd Series (London: Thomson Learning, 2005)), p. 3. All quotations are taken from Daniell’s text, unless otherwise indicated. I have also made use of A. Humphreys (ed.), Julius Caesar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) and Martin Spevack’s New Cambridge edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). I have departed from Daniell in preferring the spelling of ‘Casca’ over ‘Caska’, for no other reason than I find the latter jarring. Daniell is of course correct that ‘Caska’ is the version in the 1623 Folio, but I’m comfortable extending the modernisation of the Folio’s spelling to include names. One further caveat: my argument in this chapter concerns stage directions and possible theatrical practices of the Elizabethan playing companies and there will be a necessary amount of speculation. I assume, for example, that the stage directions in Julius Caesar are at least descriptive of the 1599 production of the play, rather than being additions made for the text’s only publication in the Folio. I contend that the Globe playhouse allowed for certain possibilities in terms of theatrical effect which were not available in earlier auditoria, and that the stage directions of Julius Caesar show these possibilities being realised in a play written for a particular place. Although my speculations will be fairly self-evident, I will highlight them as they become important, and I will explain my reasons for supposing them to be true.

2 See, for example, Richard Wilson, ‘“Is this a Holiday?” Shakespeare’s Roman Carnival’, English Literary History 54 (1987), 31–44.

3 See, for example, Steve Sohmer, Shakespeare’s Mystery Play: The Opening of the Globe Theatre 1599 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), passim. Sohmer’s compelling argument concludes that the most likely date of the theatre’s opening is 12 June 1599 (Julian) and explores the many fragments of evidence suggesting the play was Julius Caesar.

4 James Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (London: Faber, 2005), p. 126.

5 Andrew Gurr, ‘The Condition of Theatre in England in 1599’, in Jane Milling and Peter Thomson (eds), The Cambridge History of British Theatre, Volume 1: Origins to 1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 264–81 (273).

6 Julius Caesar, ed. Spevack, p. 67. David Daniell, it seems, is alone amongst modern editors in stating that the thunder is imitated ‘by metal thunder sheets.’ I suspect that the thunder-sheet is, in fact, a device that postdates Shakespeare by at least several decades, although confirmation is hard to come by. The OED’s first usage of the term is dated 1913.

7 See, e.g. Julius Caesar, ed. Humphreys, p. 119.

8 Ibid.

9 Given that by the time of Every Man In His Humour’s publication in quarto, this fondness would have manifested itself only in Julius Caesar and the much earlier histories, but by 1616 would have accounted for every one of Shakespeare’s major storms, this is not too far-fetched. Jonson, by report, was certainly comfortable enough mocking the dialogue of Julius Caesar.

10 Anon. (J. C.) A Pleasant Comedie Called The Two Merry Milke-Maids or The Best Words Weare the Garland (London: Bernard Alsop for Lawrence Chapman, 1620), sig. A2v.

11 Modern replicas of thunder-runs are relatively common (there is one, for example, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London). The noise of the reproductions is both convincing and impressively loud. When the acoustic qualities of a playhouse – rather than the museum isolation in which these replicas are found – are taken into account, it is not difficult to imagine the imposing sound which would result from its use at the Globe. Those acoustic qualities were capitalised upon in the reconstructed Globe, when, in the 1999 production of Julius Caesar, the thunder was created by the offstage cast and backstage crew rattling and dragging chairs around the heavens.

12 See above, p. 28 and below, pp. 51–2.

13 John Bate, The Mysteres of Natvre and Art: The Second Booke, Teaching Most Plainly, and Withal most Exactly, the Composing of all Manner of Fire-works for Triumph and Recreation (London: Ralph Mab, 1634), fols. 76–7. Bate’s work is the earliest entry for Swevel in the OED: I use the term as a matter of convenience to distinguish from those rockets and squibs that are not run along lines.

14 See Butterworth, Theatre of Fire, pp. 99–129.

15 The London Midsummer pageants of 1535, for example, required rockets. See Martin Wiggins (ed.), British Drama 1533–1642 A Catalogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), vol. 1, p. 26.

16 Quoted by Butterworth, Theatre of Fire, p. 44.

17 Ibid., p. 44.

18 Ibid., p. 44.

19 The Roaring Girl, sig. K2r.

20 Thomas Dekker, If it Be not Good, the Devil is in it (London, 1612), sig. E2r. This play, acted by Queen Anne’s company at the Red Bull, provides one example of what the Company of Revels later attempted to ‘reform’. The identity of those charged with lighting the rockets is uncertain – only Melton describes them as ‘hirelings’ (which simply means ‘hired actors’ i.e. not belonging to the core of the company).

21 See, for example Serlio, above, and John Melton’s hirelings (see below, p. 36) who are ‘in their Heavens’.

22 Dekker, If it Be not Good, the Devil is in it, sig. E2r. If the lines which follow this extract are taken literally, then these swevels were ignited from below the stage: ‘King: from whence flew they? Brisco: Hell, I thinke.’

23 John Melton, The Astrologaster, or, the Figure-caster (London: Barnard Alsop for Edward Blackmore, 1620), fol. 31.

24 I am grateful to Julian Bowsher for pointing this out to me. As Bowsher catalogues the find: ‘Stone cannon ball … Diam 6in (150mm), weight 10lb (4.53kg). Almost certainly a 16th-century cannon ball, probably to be fired from a perier or a culverin … Its presence on the playhouse site is puzzling.’ Julian Bowsher and Pat Miller, The Rose and the Globe – Playhouses of Shakespeare’s Bankside, Southwark. Excavations 1988–90 (London: Museum of London, 2009), p. 218.

25 See Butterworth, Theatre of Fire, p. 152 n25.

26 See Bernard Hewitt (ed.), The Renaissance Stage: Documents of Serlio, Sabbattini and Furttenbach, trans. Allarryce Nicoll, John H. McDowell and George R. Kernodle (Miami: University of Miami Press, 1958), p. 172. The stepped thunder-run is described by Sabbattini, whose work was published in Ravenna in 1638. It is unclear when the technique was known in England, although several of the techniques described by Sabbattini were used by Inigo Jones, if not before.

27 See Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), pp. 15–17 and passim.

28 Marlowe’s plays might have continued to play at the Rose until the Admiral’s Men moved to the Fortune. In addition to Doctor Faustus, there is a storm in Dido (3.4). I can, however, find no evidence of thunder and lightning in the extant plays that seem to have been new at around the same time as Julius Caesar. The Red Bull playhouse, eventually the pinnacle of spectacle, was not yet constructed.

29 I am grateful to Claire Van Kampen, former musical director of Shakespeare’s Globe, for clarifying this for me. For further elucidation see Bruce Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 219.

30 See Edward III, ed. Giorgio Melchiori (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 52–3.

31 Hamlet’s usage and stage direction date to the Second Quarto (1604–5).

32 See for example, R[obert] A[rmin], The Valiant Welshman: ‘a Trumpet within’ (2.1.48 and 4.1.52); Dekker, If it Be not Good, the Devil is in it: ‘Drommes afar off marching’, ‘Alarums afar off ’ and ‘A march afar’ (TLN 2039, 2145, 2321); John Marston, The Wonder of Women or The Tragedie of Sophonisba (London: John Windet, 1606), Act 5: ‘A march far off is heard’ (5.1.sd), ‘Cornets a march far off ’ (5.2.sd) and ‘The Cornets a far off sounding a charge; (5.3.sd).

33 Anne Barton, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962), p. 139. Cassius’s lines are hardly the play’s sole indicator of the metadramatic, nor do they exhaust the device’s possibilities. Richard Wilson, for example, contends that ‘The opening words of Julius Caesar seem to know themselves … as a declaration of company policy towards the theatre audience’ (Wilson, ‘Is this a Holiday?’, p. 32).

34 Caesar had long been represented in the public pageantry in England. See Clifford Ronan, ‘Antike Roman’: Power Symbology and the Roman Play in Early Modern England, 1585–1635 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), p. 47.

35 T. J. B. Spencer (ed.), Shakespeare’s Plutarch (London: Penguin, 1964).

36 Perhaps the effect of Shakespeare’s storm is too powerful on some, who contend that Plutarch does report lightning here. The Oxford editors, for example, write ‘As for the portents preluding Caesar’s murder (in 1.3 and 2.2) most are in Plutarch – thunder and lightning, fire-charged tempest …’, p. 28 (although they later gloss to the contrary (1.3.9–28n)). The closest I can find to confirming this is the report of thunder and lightning (along with earthquakes and other ‘wonders’) as portents of murder in Plutarch’s Cicero, but this has nothing to do with Caesar.

37 Perhaps the closest the play comes to mentioning rain is towards the very end, as Titinius mourns the loss of Cassius: ‘Our day is gone: | Clouds, dews and dangers come’ (5.3.61). There is no mention of precipitation during the storm and the word ‘rain’ does not appear in the play. This is quite unlike the rest of Shakespeare’s staged storms.

38 Thomas May, trans., Virgil’s Georgicks Englished (London: [Humphrey Lownes] for Tho. Walkley, 1628), fol. 24.

39 A language of ‘preemptive strike’, as Christopher Pelling has put it. See Maria Wyke (ed.), Julius Caesar in Western Culture (Oxford: Blackwell 2006), p. 4.

40 Many critics have drawn on the parallels of Essex’s biography and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and have attempted to pair that play with Henry V as commenting on the Earl. Whilst this has often proven fruitful ground, it is not my intention here: I wish only to draw attention to the storm and its interpretations. For readings on the play in light of Devereaux, see Julius Caesar, ed. Daniell, pp. 22–9; Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2003), pp. 68 and 149. For Julius Caesar and Henry V as companion pieces, see especially Judith Mossman, ‘Henry V and Plutarch’s Alexander’, Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994), 57–73. The parallels have been seen to extend to As You Like It, which Katherine Duncan-Jones reads as concerned with the Essex rebellion. Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes From His Life (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001), pp. 123–6.

41 John Stow, Annales (London: [Peter Short and Felix Kingston for] Ralfe Newbery, 1601), fol. 1304.

42 Ibid., fol. 1149.

43 Stow certainly relates far more damaging storms in his Annales. The comparison here is purely to judge the author’s tone with regards to harmless, but notable weather.

44 Digges, A Prognostication Everlasting of Right Good Effectt (London: Felix Kyngston, 1605), fol. 7. Incidentally, 27 March 1599 (using the Julian calendar) was a Tuesday, one of the two days not to bring death. The Ides of March, 44 B.C. would have been a Wednesday, not, as I’ll admit I hoped, a Friday. Not even Shakespeare’s Cassius would argue Caesar’s case as a harlot. Even so, a connection of thunder and premonitions of murder in early modern superstition here is clear.

45 Thomas Hill, A Contemplation of Mysteries (London: Henry Denham, 1574), fol. 52r.

46 Thomas Hill, The Moste Pleasuante Arte of the Interpretacion of Dreames (London: Thomas Marsh, 1576), p. 160.

47 See, for example, G. B. Harrison, The Life and Death of Robert Devereux Earl of Essex (London: Cassell, 1937), p. 216; R. Lacey, Robert Earl of Essex: An Elizabethan Icarus (London: The History Book Club, 1970), p. 190.

48 See Alison Weir, Elizabeth the Queen (London: Pimlico, 1998), p. 441.

49 Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, pp. 117–18.

50 Simon Forman (Bod. Ashmole. MS 219/31r) I am indebted to James Shapiro for supplying a transcription of this part of the text. Shapiro acknowledges Robyn Adams for locating the text and deciphering Forman’s hand.

51 Daily Mail, 13 June 2006.

52 Hadfield, Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics, p. 148.

3 Lightning

1 Simon Harward, A Discourse of the Severall Kinds and Causes of Lightnings (London: J. Windet, 1607), sig. A1r.

2 Ibid., sig. B1v.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid., sig. C3r.

5 Ibid.

6 Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine Part I, ed. David Fuller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 4.2.51–4. Experience of such phenomena does not always result in poetry. On 4 March 2012, the Kielder Observatory in Northumberland ‘reported the sighting of a “huge fireball” travelling southwards at 9.41pm. In a tweet, the observatory added: “Of 30 years observing the sky #fireball best thing I have ever seen period.”’ (www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/mar/04/meteor-fireballnight-sky-uk).

7 See OED, Apparition, n.8: ‘That which appears: an appearance, especially of a remarkable or unexpected kind; a phenomenon.’ For other examples of what might constitute a ‘fire from heaven’, see Heninger, A Handbook of Renaissance Meteorology, pp. 91–101.

8 George Wilkins, The Painfull Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre, ed. K. Muir (London: T. P. for Nat Butler, 1608), sig. D3r.

9 John Gower, Confessio Amantis, in The Complete Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macauly (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899), Vol. 3. Book II, 998–1001.

10 Laurence Twyne, The Pattern of Painefull Adventures (London: Valentine Simmes for the Widow Newman, 1594), sig. E3r.

11 Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), p. 689.

12 II Maccabees 9:5; 9:9.

13 Wilkins, The Painfull Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre, sig. D3r.

14 Fulke, A Goodly Gallery, fols. 26–8. Not every commentator uses the same system of classifications as Fulke, nor distinguishes by the same features of lightning. I have chosen Fulke’s system to highlight here because it represents an advancement on classical writers such as Pliny, Seneca and Aristotle, and is the most descriptive and exact in its categorisation.

15 Fulke, A Goodly Gallery, fol. 26r.

16 Ibid., fol. 27v.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid., fol. 28v.

20 Anglicus Bartholomaeus, Batman uppon Bartholome his Booke De Proprietatibus Rerum, Newly Corrected, Enlarged and Amended, trans. Stephen Batman (London: Thomas East, 1582), fol. 164r. To thirl is to ‘pierce, to run through … to perforate’ (OED, thirl v1), and also ‘to enslave’ (v2) and ‘to hurl’ (v3).

21 Hill, A Contemplation of Mysteries, fol. 54v.

22 For a discussion of thunder-stones, see Matthew R. Goodrum, ‘Questioning Thunderstones and Arrowheads: The Problem of Recognising and Interpreting Stone Artefacts in the Seventeenth Century’, Early Science and Medicine 13 (2008), 482–508. Goodrum traces the scepticism of thunder-stones and the process by which the stones were recognised as human artefacts.

23 Hill, A Contemplation of Mysteries, fols. 54r–55v. Gower also includes a description of thunderstones, although they don’t appear to be nearly as dangerous. VIII.337–41.

24 Pliny, Natural History, 2.52. For Pliny, this is the third and final variety of thunderbolt, after those ‘that come with a dry flash [and] do not cause a fire but an explosion [and those that] do not burn but blacken.’

25 Heninger, A Handbook of Renaissance Meteorology, p. 78.

26 Bartholomaeus, Batman uppon Bartholome, fol. 165v.

27 Hill, A Contemplation of Mysteries, fols. 57r–58v.

28 Harward, A Discourse, sig. B2v. The long s and f are extremely similar in the type used in the Harward text (see, e.g. ‘should shake iron fetters’, sig. B3r.) and ‘slayeth’ could conceivably be intended ‘flayeth’.

29 Quoted by Heninger, A Handbook of Renaissance Meteorology, p. 79.

30 Bartholomaeus, Batman uppon Bartholome, fol. 164r .

31 Pliny the Elder, The History of World Commonly called, the Naturall Historie of C. Plinius Secundus, trans. Philemon Holland (London: Adam Islip, 1601), sig. D1r.

32 According to the Oxford text, at least. The phrase ‘both … jewels’ is inserted from Painful Adventures into line 9.

33 Wilkins, The Painfull Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre, sig D3r.

34 II Maccabees 9:7.

35 Ibid., 9:7.

36 Ibid., 9:10.

37 Ibid., 9:12.

38 My conclusion here is possibly troubled by the stage direction in Philip Massinger’s The Unnatural Combat (c. 1624–25, first published 1639), which instructs that Malefort is ‘killed with a flash of lightning’ (5.2.306). However, this is more practical than poetic: it is likely that a pyrotechnic effect is called for here. It seems, indeed, that Massinger’s lightning can also be classified as fulmen: Malefort’s corpse is commented on by witnesses, who note both its smell and altered appearance (338–40).

39 See, for example, Daniell (ed.), Julius Caesar 2.1.44n, RSC, 2.1.44n and Norton, 2.1.44n

40 Fulke, A Goodly Gallery, fol. 8r.

41 Pliny, Natural History, 2:43 p. 00.

4 King Lear: storm and the event

1 All references to King Lear are taken from R. A. Foakes’s 1997 text, reprinted as the Arden 3rd Series (London: Arden, 2007), unless otherwise noted, and are included in the text. I have also made use of the Oxford edition, based on the Quarto text, ed. Stanley Wells (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) and Kenneth Muir’s 2nd Series Arden text (Methuen, 1952).

2 Thomson, ‘The Meaning of Thunder and Lightning’, 11–24 (14).

3 OED, Event n., 1a.

4 OED, Event n., 4.

5 Quoted by Nicholas Royle, in ‘Derrida’s Event’, in Simon Glendinning and Robert Eaglestone (eds), Derrida’s Legacies: Literature and Philosophy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), pp. 36–44 (38).

6 Ibid., p. 39.

7 Perhaps an alignment brought out as Cornwall blinds Gloucester: ‘Lest it see more, prevent it’ (3.7.82; emphasis added).

8 OED, Event v2.

9 See for example, George W. Williams, ‘The Poetry of the Storm in King Lear’, Shakespeare Quarterly 2:1 (1951), 57–71; E. Catherine Dunn, ‘The Storm in King Lear’, Shakespeare Quarterly 3:4 (1952), 329–33; Josephine Waters Bennett, ‘The Storm Within: The Madness of Lear’, Shakespeare Quarterly 13:2 (1962), 137–55.

10 I am thinking of positions such as that held by Terence Hawkes, who has expressed his view that there is ‘no such thing as the “real” or the “right” version of the play: not even ‘Shakespeare’s’ version could make that claim.’ See Terence Hawkes, William Shakespeare: King Lear (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1995), p. 62.

11 Ibid., p. 62.

12 James Ogden, ‘Lear’s Blasted Heath’, in James Ogden and Arthur H. Scouten, eds. Lear from Study to Stage: Essays in Criticism (London: Associated University Presses, 1997), pp. 135–46; Henry S. Turner, ‘King Lear Without: The Heath’, Renaissance Drama 28 (1997), 161–93.

13 Jonathan Dollimore. Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 3rd edn, 2004), p. 186.

14 Hugh Grady, ‘On the Need for a Differentiated Theory of (Early) Modern Subjects’, in John J. Joughin (ed.), Philosophical Shakespeares (London; Routledge, 2000), pp. 34–50 (47).

15 Arthur Kirsch, ‘The Emotional Landscape of King Lear’, Shakespeare Quarterly 39:2 (1988), 154–70 (160).

16 Ian W. O. House, ‘“I know thee well enough”: The Two Plots of King Lear’, English 170:41 (1992), 97–112 (110).

17 See, for example, Estok, Ecocriticism and Shakespeare, p. 24.

18 Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 2004), p. 358.

19 Banishment itself being subject to a strange logic of displacement from an early point in the text: ‘Freedom lives hence and banishment is here’ (1.1.182).

20 Greenblatt also mentions the heath in his introduction to the play text in The Norton Shakespeare (New York; London: Norton, 1997), the so-called ‘International Student Edition’, p. 2311.

21 See Turner, ‘King Lear Without’, p. 176.

22 Ibid., p. 176.

23 Admittedly, this evaluation is based on what, in our twenty-first-century apprehension, are currently called tragedies. To those plays, the First Folio adds Cymbeline and Troilus and Cressida. The latter two characters both have soliloquies, but Cymbeline does not.

24 See Hamlet 4.5.16–75 and 160–93 and Macbeth 5.1.36–71.

25 See 3.4.45–179 and 3.6 passim.

26 See 3.1, 3.2 and 3.4 passim. The night is another event in King Lear which might justifiably be seen, like the storm, as an organising principle of the play. The two are often juxtaposed (‘what i’th’storm, i’th’night, | Let pity not be believed!’ 4.3.29– 30), but each has various subtle idiosyncrasies. It is notable, moreover, that, although the night is virtually as insistent in the storm scenes as the storm itself (the stage effects excepted) the work of the night in the play is underestimated by critics. Shameful though the irony is of confining this statement to a note, there is not sufficient space in this chapter to give the night the attention it merits.

27 It is hard not to think of Hamlet’s speeches here, which are imbued with his particular sense of place: ‘Horatio: Where, my Lord? Hamlet: In my mind’s eye, Horatio’ (1.2.183–4).

28 I have departed from Foakes here in calling the character ‘Gentleman’. As used in both the Quarto and Folio texts, it makes more sense to me than Foakes’s substitution of ‘Knight’.

29 There are ten such cases: 3.1.32; 3.6.88; 3.7.18, 50–4, 93; 4.1.45, 58.

30 A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985), pp. 213–14.

31 Ibid., pp. 214, 212, 213.

32 Alan C. Dessen, Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 84.

33 Ogden, ‘Lear’s Blasted Heath’, p. 137.

34 Ibid., p. 137.

35 Ibid., pp. 138–44.

36 To quote the credit: ‘Cover design: interbrand Newell and Sorrell. Cover illustration: The Douglas Brothers.’

37 Matthew 4:1–11; Mark 1:12–13; Luke 4:1–13.

38 Genesis 7:4. Also, Moses remains on Sinai for the same length of time (Exodus 24:18), after ‘God appeareth unto Moses upon the mount in thunder and lightening’ (Exodus 19: argument). Forty days is also the time allotted to Pericles by Antiochus, during which the first storm of the play occurs.

39 OED, Heath. By ‘the Christian readings’, I mean, chiefly, works which figure the play as illustrative of the power of redemption through suffering as thereby related to the teaching of Christ. Such works are too numerous to list fully, but an illustrative roll might include G. Wilson Knight’s Principles of Shakespearean Production with Especial Reference to Tragedies (New York: Macmillan, 1937), in which each Shakespearean tragic hero is viewed as ‘a miniature Christ’; J. Dover Wilson, Six Tragedies of Shakespeare: An Introduction for the Plain Man (London: Longmans, 1929), pp. 32–46; J. F. Danby, ‘King Lear and Christian Patience’, Cambridge Journal 1 (1948), 305–20; Robert G. Hunter, Shakespeare and the Mystery of God’s Judgements (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1976), pp. 183–96; Herbert R. Coursen, Christian Ritual and the World of Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1976), pp. 237–313.

40 Jeremiah 17:5–6.

41 Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism: The New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 59.

42 Ibid., p. 59.

43 Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, pp. 189–203.

44 Garrard, Ecocriticism, p. 59.

45 See Morton, Ecology Without Nature.

46 Steve Mentz, ‘Strange Weather in King Lear’, Shakespeare 6:2 (2010), 139–52 (140).

47 Williams, ‘The Poetry of the Storm in King Lear’, p. 65.

48 Dunn, ‘The Storm in King Lear’, p. 331.

49 Martin Rosenberg, The Masks of King Lear (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), p. 188, my emphasis.

50 Stephen Booth, King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition and Tragedy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 18.

51 To read, as Kenneth Muir did, outscorn as outstorm is tantalisingly helpful in thinking about the performative quality of Lear in the storm: the notion that Lear attempts to become greater than that which he is implicit in creating, by creating it, is a fascinating one. It must be said, though, that outscorn makes perfect sense, and the editorial substitution is superfluous, but for the fact that it highlights an attractive response to our reading of Lear’s character.

52 It is not possible to know if a unique effect is called for here, but the stage direction ‘storm and tempest’ can be read as implying two types of sound at once. Certainly the direction is unique in Shakespeare’s works, and there is no other instance of it in the extant plays dating 1580–1642. See also Thomson, who notes that ‘eight plays [from the period] have a signal for storm.’ See p. 23 n14.

53 Any interval posited after the end of Act 2 severs this continuity. Foakes, for example has written ‘an interval may be inserted here to allow Lear a respite before his rages in the storm scenes’ (‘Performance and Text: King Lear’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 17 (2005), 86–98 (86)). The very point, I propose, is no respite at all.

54 Lear uses ‘bid’ again later, albeit somewhat fallaciously, ‘when the thunder would not peace at my bidding’ (4.6.101–2).

55 See Williams, ‘The Poetry of the Storm in King Lear’, p. 65. Whether they believed in these powers or simply saw their potential in their image-making is debateable.

56 Hill, A Contemplation of Mysteries, fols. 57r–58v. See also above, p. 55.

57 Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 110. See also Rosenberg, The Masks of King Lear, pp. 191–2.

58 William R. Elton, King Lear and the Gods (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1966).

59 Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, p. 112.

60 In G. Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), Vol. 7, pp. 337–402. Leir was probably revived around the time of its publication, having been performed at least as early as 1594.

61 Elton, King Lear and the Gods, p. 67.

62 Psalms 83:14–16.

63 See above, p. 23.

64 Elton, King Lear and the Gods, p. 203.

65 Ibid., p. 262.

66 The complex relation of storm and the Christian god is explored in Chapter 8.

67 This instance is only in the Quarto text. The Folio (and Foakes) has ‘Never afflict yourself to know more of it.’

68 Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett and William Montgomery (eds), William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd edn, 2005), p. 194.

69 Compare, for example, ‘is this the promised end?’ (5.3.261).

70 Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, p. 186.

5 Wind

1 Aristotle, Meteorologica, 349a.

2 For a discussion of various attributes of winds, and literary uses, see Heninger A Handbook of Renaissance Meteorology, pp. 109–28.

3 OED, Storm n1.

4 The most familiar of these scales are the Beaufort scale, which ranges from completely still (0) to hurricane (12) and the Saffir-Simpson, which categorises hurricanes from minimal (1) to catastrophic (5). Several other scales are in use, especially outside of the Atlantic and East Pacific, the areas covered by the Saffir-Simpson.

5 As Pliny puts it, ‘wind is understood to be nothing else than a wave of air and in more ways as well’, Natural History, 2:44.

6 Aristotle, 360a–b.

7 Pliny, Natural History, 2:44. Philemon Holland translated the passage in question as ‘there be certaine caves and holes which breed winds continually without end’. Holland, trans. (London, 1601).

8 Pliny, Natural History, 2:44.

9 Fulke, A Goodly Gallery, fol. 18r.

10 Ibid., fol. 18v.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid., fols. 18r–18v.

14 Fulke, A Goodly Gallery, fol. 31.

15 Ibid.

16 See above, p. 51.

17 See Heninger, A Handbook of Renaissance Meteorology, pp. 109–10.

18 Ibid., p. 110.

19 Peter Holland, ‘Coasting in the Mediterranean: The Journeyings of Pericles’, in Neils B. Hansen and Sos Haugaard (eds), Angles on the English-Speaking World (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2005), pp. 11–31 (15). Holland understandably wishes to ignore the possibility that Marina is mistaken in her assertion (see p. 28 n9). Happily, Marina is not the only character to note the direction of the wind, as Gower prefaces the scene of Marina’s birth with ‘the grizzled north | Disgorges such a tempest forth’.

20 Pericles, ed. Doreen DelVecchio and Antony Hammond, 4.1.50n.

21 The other examples given by DelVecchio and Hammond are from Troilus and Cressida (5.1.18), Coriolanus (1.4.30) and Cymbeline (2.3.131; 4.2.349). These examples are ambiguous: the first two seem more readily to stem from the notion in early modern England that Italy and especially Naples was rife with venereal disease (these could possibly be spread by wind, but wind is hardly the emphasis in these instances). The second example of Cymbeline sees the South itself as ‘spongy’, but without the connotation of disease or storm and, again, without characterising the wind, merely the area. If the South carries the negative associations the Cambridge editors’ claim in Pericles, then it is arguably more to do with connotations of venereal disease (given Marina is soon to be forced into a brothel) than the wind.

22 Pericles, ed. Warren, 3.0.47n.

23 Barnabe Barnes, Parthenophil and Parthenophe (London: J. Wolfe, 1593), Sonnet LXXXV.

24 Richard Hakluyt (ed.), Principal Navigations (London: George Bishop, 1599–1600), p. 189.

25 Ecclesiasticus 43:17.

26 Nicholas de Nicolay, The Navigations, Peregrinations and Voyages, made into Turkie, trans. T. Washington (London: Thomas Dawson, 1585), p. 123.

27 William Webbe, A Discourse of English Poetrie (London: John Charlewood for Robert Walley, 1586), sig. E3v.

28 Zechariah 9:14. See also Job 37:9: ‘The whirle winde cometh out of the South, and the colde from the North winde.’ The marginal note glossing this passage reads ‘in Ebrewe it [the South] is called ye scattering winde, because it driveth away the cloudes and purgeth the ayre.’ Examples of other winds being stormy are also available in the Bible, such as: ‘Terrours shal take him as waters, and a tempest shall carie him away by night. The East wind shal take him away, and he shal departe: and it shal hurlle him out of his place’ Job 27:20–1.

29 Simon Harward, Harward’s Phlebotomy: or, A Treatise of Letting of Bloud (London: F. Kingston for Simon Waterson, 1601), p. 97. See also Nicholas Gyer, The English Phlebotomy (London: William Hoskins and John Danter for Andrew Mansell, 1592), p. 84.

30 Pliny, The History of World 16:34 (trans. Holland, p. 471).

31 Exodus 10:19; 10:13. See, for example, William Charke, An Answere to a Seditious Pamphlet (London: Christopher Barker, 1580), sig. D8r. Thomas Adams, The Devills Banket (London: Thomas Snodham for Ralph Mab 1614), p. 70; Thomas Granger, Pauls Crowne of Rejoycing (London: T. S for Thomas Pauier, 1616), p. 36.

32 Homer’s Odysses. Translated according to ye Greeke by. Geo: Chapman (London: Rich Field for Nathaniell Butter, 1615), p. 57. Heninger locates a separate Greek and Latin tradition, owing to the mountains in the west of Greece (p. 113).

33 Thomas Dekker, 1603. The Wonderfull Yeare (London: N. L. and Thomas Creede, 1603), sig. B1v.

34 Luke 12:54. Shower, here, is sometimes translated as storm or a variant (see, for example, John Prideaux, Certaine Sermons (Oxford: Leonard Lichfield, 1636), sig. AA4r).

35 William Philip (trans), The Description of a Voyage Made by Certaine Ships of Holland into the East Indies (London: John Wolfe, 1598), sig. L4r.

36 Thomas Hill, The Profitable Arte of Gardening (London: Henry Bynneman, 1574), p. 49.

37 John Deacon, Dialogicall Discourses (London: George Bishop, 1601), p. 160 (emphasis in original).

38 For an overview, see Heninger, A Handbook of Renaissance Meteorology, pp. 107– 28.

39 Bartholomaeus, quoted by Heninger, ibid., p. 114.

40 Proverbs 25:23. For use in sermons, etc. see, for example, William Burton’s eighth sermon in Ten Sermons (London: Richard Field for Thomas Man, 1602), p. 216; Robert Bolton, Some Generall Directions for a Comfortable Walking with God (London: Felix Kyngston for Edmund Weaver, 1626); John Robinson, Obervations Divine and Morall ([Amsterdam]: [successors of Giles Thorp], 1625); Thomas Taylor, Christs Combate (Cambridge: Cantrell Legge, 1618). The verse in Proverbs is not entirely about weather: ‘As the Northwind driveth away raine, so doeth an angrie countenance ye sclandering tongue.’

41 Barnabe Barnes, A Divine Centurie of Spirituall Sonnets (London: John Windet, 1595), Sonnet LXXXXV.

42 Julius Caesar (1.3.1–84 & 2.2.1–38) are clear examples of the same interest in practice.

6 Macbeth: supernatural storms, equivocal earthquakes

1 From ‘De la littérature considéré dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales’, in Jonathan Bate (ed.), The Romantics on Shakespeare (London: Penguin, 1992), pp. 80–1. All quotations from Macbeth, unless stated otherwise, are from A. R. Braunmuller’s edition (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

2 William Haughton’s Grim the Collier of Croydon or The Devil an His Dame (acted by the Admiral’s Men, c. 1600) stages thunder and lightning very soon after the opening of the play, in a dream of Dunstan’s. The Devil’s Charter, by Barnabe Barnes, which dates from just after Macbeth also has thunder and lightning just a few lines in, and in its dumb show before the play. See above, pp. 11–12.

3 Ronald Watkins and Jeremy Lemon, In Shakespeare’s Playhouse: Macbeth (London: David & Charles, 1974), p. 35.

4 Especially since, as we have seen, drums were used as part of the thunder effects. See above, pp. 33–6.

5 See Taylor et al. (eds), Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, pp. 1165–201. It is perhaps simply a coincidence that the two plays of Shakespeare in which witches accompany thunder and lightning (the other being 2 Henry VI) are two of that group which have obvious multiple authorial hands.

6 Of Shakespeare’s characters who speak in couplets of trochaic tetrameter, only the Duke in Measure for Measure has no affinity with magic or the supernatural (4.1.254–75). I am discounting fools’ songs in this assessment, but including Edgar as Poor Tom, whose use of verse forms is part of the linguistic disguise which also sees him allude to the foul fiend and witches (see e.g. Lear 3.4.113; 121) and claim a familiar (137).

7 James Stuart, Daemonologie in Forme of a Dialogue (Edinburgh: Robert Walde, 1597), p. 46.

8 William Perkins, A Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft (Cambridge: Cantrel Legge, 1608), pp. 173–4.

9 Alexander Roberts, A Treatise of Witchcraft (London: Nicholas Oakes for Samuel Man, 1616), sigs. D2r–D2v.

10 Reginald Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft (London: William Brome, 1584), p. 2. Also found, without the chapter title, in H. R. Williamson’s edition (Arundel: Centaur Press, 1964).

11 Ryan Curtis Friesen, Supernatural Fiction in Early Modern Drama and Culture (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2010), p. 147.

12 We might think of Gothic fiction, here, or indeed horror films, in which the storm is often indicative of the workings of the supernatural. The connection is not confined to the clumsy symbolism of Hammer horror, but can be found in more complex and effective works, such as Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980).

13 See, for example, Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, pp. 281–3.

14 It may seem that this division ignores Christian belief. However, the meteorological texts which explicate the ‘natural’ causes of weather never fail to make it clear that God is responsible for each of those processes. Thus, when weather is ‘supernaturally’ caused, it is an interruption or invasion of God’s power.

15 Stuart, Daemonologie, p. 46.

16 We have already seen, for example, the storm which offered a backdrop for the Earl of Essex’s departure to Ireland; p. 42.

17 Greenblatt, Will in the World, p. 346. Halloween 1590 postdates James’s storm-struck return – the ‘witches’ were apparently gathering for another purpose – but the use of the sieves is still significant.

18 Further credence to the argument that Shakespeare was alive to contemporary reference for this scene is lent by the name of the ship, the Tiger. See M. A. Taylor, ‘He That did the Tiger Board’, Shakespeare Quarterly 15 (Winter, 1964), 110–13; H. N. Paul, The Royal Play of Macbeth (London: Macmillan, 1950), pp. 302–3.

19 See, for example, Alan Sinfield, ‘Macbeth: History, Ideology and Intellectuals’, Critical Quarterly 28:1 (1986), 63–77.

20 I have departed from Braunmuller’s text here, and have followed Gary Taylor in inserting ‘strike’ (instead of ‘break’) where the Folio text seems to be missing a word. See Taylor (ed.), p. 693. Braunmuller does not depart from the Folio, and takes line 27’s ‘come’ to be understood as applying to ‘thunders’. I think a violent verb is more likely, for the reasons outlined above, pp. 28–30.

21 See OED, Reflection 4.c (which cites the Captain’s use): ‘The action of turning back from some point; return, retrogression’.

22 Pliny, Natural History, 2:45.

23 Greenblatt, Will in the World, p. 349.

24 Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, p. 281. For other instances, see H. Hawkins, Strange Attractors: Literature, Culture and Chaos Theory (Hertfordshire: Prentice Hall, 1995), p. 80.

25 Abraham Fleming, A Bright Burning Beacon (London: Henry Denham, 1580), sig. E1v.

26 See R. Mallet, Catalogue of Earthquakes from 1606 B.C. to 1755 (London: John Murray, 1853), p. 61 which lists other, more localised English earthquakes. It is possible also that Shakespeare would have been in London for the earthquake which struck the city on Christmas Eve, 1601. Fleming lists eight other writers who published ‘reportes’ of the ‘Easter Earthquake’, some of which are now lost. Furthermore, it is likely that many others wrote about the phenomenon after Fleming had printed his work, as he published it in 1580, when contemporary reports might not have reached him, or not yet been completed.

27 See, for example, Naseeb Shaheen, ‘Shakespeare’s Knowledge of the Bible – How Acquired’, Shakespeare Studies 20 (1988), 201–14.

28 Matthew 27:50–2.

29 Fleming, A Bright Burning Beacon, sig. E1v.

30 Revelations 6:12

31 Joel 2:1–2.

32 See Macbeth, Arden 2nd Series, ed. Kenneth Muir (London: Methuen, 1959), p. 72, n.7.

33 Quoted in Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, Vol. 7, pp. 483–4.

34 For an investigation of telepathy in Shakespeare, see Nicholas Royle, Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), in which Royle offers ‘the irresistible hypothesis: Shakespeare is telepathy’ (p. 158). See also Royle’s ‘The Poet: Julius Caesar and the Democracy to Come’, Oxford Literary Review 25 (2003), 39–62.

35 Joel 2:10. Published in 1580, The Order of Prayer was ordered by Elizabeth I and the Privy Council. In addition to Joel, it is comprised of Isaiah 58, two prayers, a ‘godlie admonition for the time present’ and several psalms (including Psalm 46: ‘Therefore wil not we not fear, though the earth be moved, and thogh the mountains fall into the middes of the sea; Thogh the waters thereof rage and be troubled, and the mountains shake at the surges of the same’ (2–3). It also contains Arthur Golding’s report of the earthquake, but does not print Golding’s name.

36 Fleming, A Bright Burning Beacon, sig. E3r. Cf. Joel 2:30–1.

37 Ibid., sig. B3v.

38 A. Golding, A Discourse upon the Earthquake (London: Henry Bynneman, 1580), sig. B1v.

39 Pliny 2:81, The History of World (trans. Holland, p. 37).

40 Harward, A Discours, sig. C3r.

41 The Fairie Queen 1.8.76–9; Thomas Dekker A Strange Horse-Race (London: Joseph Hunt, 1613), sig B1v.

42 Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead, 1998), p. 525.

43 Booth, King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition and Tragedy, p. 93.

44 Furthermore Macbeth is responsible for the death of two of the other characters who invoke God: Banquo and Lady Macduff: see 2.3.126 and 4.2.59. The other incidences are Malcolm, the Doctor, the Gentlewoman and Siward.

45 Booth, King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition and Tragedy, p. 97.

46 Heninger, A Handbook of Renaissance Meteorology, pp. 128–9. Heninger cites Seneca’s Naturall Questions as a source for this fear.

47 It may also remind us that Macbeth is divided into clean and filthy air, just as it is split into natural and supernatural weather.

48 Golding, Discourse, sigs. B2r–B2v.

49 Fleming, A Bright Burning Beacon, sig. B3v.

50 Kinki Abenezrah, An Everlasting Prognostication of the Change of Weather (London: M. Sparke, 1625), sig. A4r.

51 Aristotle, Meteorologica, 366a. See also Pliny, Natural History, 2:81. Aristotle does allow for earthquakes that occur ‘when a wind is blowing’, but (eds). that they ‘are less violent’. His description would seem to exclude winds of the force mentioned by Lennox.

52 For an account of Macbeth’s violence and its relation to the state, see Sinfield, ‘Macbeth: History, Ideology and Intellectuals’, passim.

53 See Greenblatt (ed.), The Norton Shakespeare 2.1.59n.

54 Macbeth, ed. Braunmuller, 2.1.59n.

55 See, for example, Frank L. Huntley, ‘Macbeth and the Background of Jesuitical Equivocation’, PMLA 79:4 (Sept. 1964), 390–400; William O. Scott, ‘Macbeth’s – And Our – Self-Equivocations’, Shakespeare Quarterly 37:2 (Summer, 1986), 160–74.

56 See Huntley, ‘Macbeth and the Background of Jesuitical Equivocation’, p. 390.

57 For notes on the uncommonness of speaking stones, see Macbeth, ed. Braunmuller, p. 141 n.58.

58 II Esdras 6:14.

7 Rain

1 Shakespeare has no stage directions for rain, but three plays from the period do. It is unclear what sort of effect was called for in such instances. See Dessen and Thomson, A Dictionary of Stage Directions, p. 175.

2 Fulke, A Goodly Gallery, p. 49.

3 Ibid.

4 Bartholomaeus, Batman Uppon Bartholome, fol. 159.

5 Aristotle, Meteorologica, 347a.6 William Shakespeare, The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke (London: I.R., 1604), sig. C1r.

8 Pericles: storm and scripture

1 I am operating on the necessarily simplistic assumption that George Wilkins is responsible for all of the first two acts and the Chorus to the third, with Shakespeare responsible for the rest. Whilst this conforms with critical consensus it does not take into account the minutiae of the collaborative process – whether one author amended the other’s sections, and so forth – which will forever remain the subject of speculation. As we shall see, the use of the storm is clearly different in each section, and operates according to two distinct aesthetics, and I am content with conclusions based on this, if nothing else. DelVecchio and Hammond’s edition is an exception to the consensus I have noted. For a comprehensive study of the authorial hands in the play, see MacD. P. Jackson, Defining Shakespeare: Pericles as Test Case (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

2 See above, pp. 52–6.

3 G. Wilson Knight, The Shakespearian Tempest (London: Methuen, 1953), p. 218.

4 Bradin Cormack, ‘Marginal Waters: Pericles and the Idea of Jurisdiction’, in Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein (eds), Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 155–80 (157).

5 To avoid confusion, I will refer to the poet himself as John Gower throughout, using ‘Gower’ to refer to the character in Pericles.

6 Exodus 9:19; 23.

7 Exodus 9:14.

8 John Gower, l. 999.

9 Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays, p. 690.

10 One of the occurrences listed by Shaheen in Ibid. – Luke 9:54 – is an allusion to this episode, and not itself an instance of lightning.

11 II Kings 1:10.

12 For ‘consumed’ or ‘cosumed’, see the Miles Coverdale 1535, Great Bible 1540, Thomas Matthew 1549 and Bishops’ Bible 1568. The Thomas Matthew and Bishops’ versions both also use ‘burnt up’ in verse 14.

13 II Kings 1:2.

14 II Kings 1:13–14.

15 T. G. Bishop, for example, notes a ‘coded hint of just the kind of violent and incestuous rape that has occurred’. Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 96.

16 Pericles, Arden 3rd Series, ed. Suzanne Gossett (London: Thomson Learning, 2004), p. 177 n8.

17 See above, p. 55.

18 Richard Huloet, Huloets Dictionarie Newelye Corrected (London: Thomas Marshil, 1572), fol. 203v.

19 I have altered Gossett’s text slightly here, removing her full stop after ‘see clear’, and replacing with the Quarto’s colon. See below, pp. 115–16.

20 See, for example, C. Relihan, ‘Liminal Geography: Pericles and the Politics of Place’, Philological Quarterly 71:3 (1992), 281–99; Cormack, ‘Marginal Waters: Pericles and the Idea of Jurisdiction’; Holland. ‘Coasting in the Mediterranean: The Journeyings of Pericles’, pp. 11–31.

21 The conflation of sexual violence and storm is by no means unique to Pericles. Of course, the figure of Jove, and Zeus before him, is testament itself to this. George Sandys’s 1628 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses makes the link explicit:

A Virgin, for a Virgins rape, let fall

Her Vengeance, to Oileus due, on all.

Scattered on faithlesse Seas with furious stormes,

We, wretched Graecians, suffer’d all the formes

Of horror: lightning, night, showres, wrath of skies,

Of Seas, and dire Capharean cruelties. (p. 401).

22 Pericles, ed. Warren, p. 42.

23 Pericles, ed. Gossett, 3.1.1–14n; Raphael Lyne, Shakespeare’s Late Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 58.

24 Similarly, in the storm in The Tempest, Gonzago says ‘I would fain die a dry death’ (1.1.67).

25 Ruth Nevo, Shakespeare’s Other Language (New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 45.

26 Gossett opts for Edmond Malone’s emendation: Q’s ‘left my breath’ altered to ‘left me breath’ and offers a sound argument (2.1.6n).

27 Dent, Shakespeare’s Proverbial Language, B641.1.

28 As in King Lear, ‘Lend me a looking glass | If that her breath will mist or stain the stone, | Why then she lives’ (5.3.259–61).

29 See above, p. 105.

30 Pericles, ed. Gossett, p. 222 n6. The word is used seven times.

31 George Wilkins, The Miseries of Inforst Mariage (London: [William Jaggard] for George Vincent, 1607), sig. G2v.

32 Pericles, ed. Gossett, p. 14 and 3.1.1–14n.

33 Lyne, Shakespeare’s Late Work, p. 58.

34 Aside from this juxtaposition, Gossett notes that the verse contains several ‘characteristic Shakespearean indicators, absent or infrequent earlier in the play, [which] include enjambments, doubled modifiers (deafening dreadful, nimble sulphurous), a complexly directed soliloquy, invocations of the gods alternating with calls to the offstage character’ (Pericles, ed. Gossett, p. 14). Clearly, the signature of Shakespeare does not inhere in simplicity.

35 Luke 8.24. See Pericles, ed. Gossett, 3.1.1n; Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays, p. 686.

36 Psalms 104: 6–7. See Pericles, ed. Gossett, 3.1.1n.

37 This was first noted by Norman Nathan. ‘Pericles and Jonah’, Notes & Queries (Jan. 1956), 10–11.

38 Jonah 1:11–12.

39 Jonah 1:13.

40 Jonah 1:4: ‘the Lord sent out a great winde into the sea, and there was a mightie tempest in the sea, so that the ship was like to be broken.’

41 Jonah 1:5; 10; 16.

42 In the margins of Jonah 1:5, Jonah is described, ‘As one that wolde have cast off this care and solicitude, by seking rest and quietnes’. When his past is made clearer to the mariners, his temper apparently remains even in the face of peril: ‘And he said unto them, Take me, and cast me into the sea: so shal the sea be calme unto you: for I knowe that for my sake this great tempest is upon you’ (1:12).

43 Jonah 1:5.

44 Jonah 1:10. cf. The Tempest. See below, p. 131.

45 Jonah 2.1.n.

46 See Heninger, A Handbook of Renaissance Meteorology, p. 221.

47 Richard Halpern, Shakespeare Among the Moderns (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 144–5.

48 See above, pp. 82–5.

49 Holland, ‘Coasting in the Mediterranean: The Journeyings of Pericles’, p. 12.

50 There is no occurrence of ‘wolt out’ in 3.1, for example, nor a whistle.

9 The Tempest and theatrical reality

1 1.1.35–6; 21. All quotations from The Tempest unless otherwise noted are taken from the Arden 3rd Series, ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (London: Cengage Learning, 1999). I have also made use of the Oxford edition, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) and the New Cambridge text, ed. David Lindley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

2 Watson, Back To Nature, p. 33.

3 Ibid.

4 Morton, Ecology Without Nature, p. 35.

5 Ibid., pp. 31–4. Morton writes, ‘There are six main elements: rendering, the medial, the timbral, the Aeolian, tone, and, most fundamentally, the re-mark. These terms overlap, and are somewhat arbitrary and vague’ (p. 34).

6 See Michel Chion, Audio-vision: Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 109–12.

7 Ibid., p. 109.

8 Ibid., p. 224.

9 Morton, Ecology Without Nature, p. 35.

10 Ibid.

11 This leaves room for an acknowledgment of the irony of the Boatswain’s phrase for an audience member who sees the play twice: ‘if you can command these elements’ has very different meanings depending on audience expectations.

12 Andrew Gurr, ‘The Tempest’s Tempest at Blackfriars’, Shakespeare Survey 41 (1989), 91–102.

13 Ibid., p. 102.

14 Sarah Dustagheer, ‘Repertory and the Production of Theatre Space at the Globe and the Blackfriars, 1599–1613’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of London, 2012), p. 181.

15 See The Tempest, ed. Vaughan and Vaughan, pp. 126–30.

16 Ibid., p. 130.

17 John Jowett, ‘New Created Creatures: Ralph Crane and the Stage Directions in The Tempest’, Shakespeare Survey 36 (1983), 107–20.

18 Gurr, ‘The Tempest’s Tempest at Blackfriars’, p. 95.

19 Ioris Staell, Strange Newes from Antwarpe, trans. I. F. (London: Ralph Blower, 1612), p. 4; John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (London: John Daye, 1583), p. 279; Leo Africanus, A Geographical historie of Africa, ed. and trans. John Pory (London: [Printed by Eliot’s Court Press] impensis Georg. Bishop, 1600), p. 43.

20 As such, the phrase allows for visible thunder, just as it does audible lightning: ‘where they sawe the thunder and lightning’. Such usage would indicate that the stage direction requires ‘noise’ and ‘heard’ to specify it as an auditory effect. Lloyd Lodowick, The First Part of the Diall of Daies (London: Printed for Roger Ward, 1590), fol. 164.

21 A. F. Falconer, Shakespeare and the Sea (London: Constable, 1964), p. 39. Falconer, himself a naval officer, also provides a detailed appraisal of the validity of the emergency procedures which the play’s crew attempt.

22 I have not been able to find any similar examples in extant plays of the period. It remains, of course, possible that texts that have not survived provided the same level of authentic nautical detail.

23 The most famous anatopism is in The Winter’s Tale (‘our ship hath touched upon the deserts of Bohemia’, 3.3.1–2) although The Two Gentlemen of Verona seems fancifully to suggest a naval route between Verona and Milan (1.1.71). And in The Tempest itself, Prospero’s Milanese bark that ‘Bore us some leagues to the sea’ (1.2.145), should be listed his greatest magical feat, though also the most injudicious. Shakespeare is careless with geography as he is accurate with naval manoeuvres.

24 Falconer, Shakespeare and the Sea, p. 39. There has been no discovery of the types of texts Falconer mentions since Shakespeare and the Sea was published.

25 See Ibid., pp. 36–40.

26 Quoted in Ibid., p. xii.

27 Morton, Ecology Without Nature, p. 35.

28 John Fletcher, The Sea Voyage in Comedies and tragedies written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (London: printed for Humphrey Robinson, 1647), fol. Aaaaa.

29 Gurr, ‘The Tempest’s Tempest at Blackfriars’, p. 100.

30 Christopher Cobb, ‘Storm versus Story: Form and Affective Power in Shakespeare’s Romances’, in Stephen Cohen (ed.), Shakespeare and Historical Formalism (Aldershot: Ashgrave, 2007), pp. 95–124 (103).

31 See above, pp. 2–4.

32 See above, pp. 88–9.

33 See above, pp. 11ff. Thunder and lightning do, of course, provide a backdrop for the ascent of Asnath in 2 Henry VI, and it is possible that the Witches in Macbeth entered from beneath the stage, thus perhaps providing a neat contrast to Edgar as Poor Tom in Lear.

34 Thomson, ‘The Meaning of Thunder and Lightning’, 11–24 (14).

35 Ibid., 20–1.

36 As chronology is uncertain, it is possible that The Winter’s Tale, Pericles or both may postdate The Tempest. However, the important factor is that both of those plays embody a particular dramatic tradition: they use the present tense, and employ extensive imagery and pathetic fallacy. This is the tradition that Miranda’s speech fits into, and which is avoided in the first scene. I have quoted from plays which, like The Tempest, date from towards the end of Shakespeare’s career, but other examples abound. See, for example, Julius Caesar 1.3.4–14; King Lear 3.1.8–15 and Othello 2.1.1–17.

37 The relevant sections of Strachey’s work are reprinted in The Tempest, ed. Vaughan and Vaughan, pp. 287–302. I quote here from page 290. For the most recent account of the evidence for Shakespeare’s reading of Strachey, see Alden T. Vaughan, ‘William Strachey’s “True Repertory” and Shakespeare: A Closer Look at the Evidence’, Shakespeare Quarterly 59 (Fall 2008), 245–73. As well as presenting a clear challenge to doubts over Shakespeare’s use of Strachey, Vaughan provides a thorough history of the debate.

38 Ovid, The XV Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, Entytuled Metamorphosis, Translated oute of Latin into English Meeter, by Arthur Golding Gentleman, a Worke very Pleasaunt and Delectable, trans. Arthur Golding (London: William Seres, 1567), sig T7r.

39 Ovid, The Three First Bookes of Ovid de Tristibus translated into English, trans. Thomas Churchyard (London: Thomas Marsh, 1580), sig. A6r.

40 The XV Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, Entytuled Metamorphosis ed. Golding, sig B5r. It is possible that Shakespeare had this passage in mind when writing this scene as, in preceding these lines in Golding’s translation, the South wind is described as having a ‘dreadfull face as blacke as pitch’. Along with the juxtaposition of sea and sky – and with their characterisation as Jove and Neptune in Ariel’s speech – this may seem only to be a coincidence of clichés. However, nowhere else does Shakespeare use ‘pitch’ in the description of a storm.

41 Falconer, Shakespeare and the Sea, pp. 39 & 105.

42 Egan, Green Shakespeare, p. 151. King Lear 3.2.4–5.

43 Gurr, ‘The Tempest’s Tempest at Blackfriars’, p. 95.

44 Both gunpowder and sulphur alone were used on the stage, depending on the effect required. See Butterworth, Theatre of Fire, pp. 230–1.

45 Of the other connotations of ‘sulphurous’, of course, most prominent is the suggestion of Hell.

46 Robert Egan, ‘This Rough Magic: Perspectives of Art and Morality in The Tempest’, Shakespeare Quarterly 23:2 (Spring, 1972), 171–82 (178).

47 I have opted to use ‘re-imagining’ here, as I think it suggests (more than, for example, ‘re-describing’) the process through which the audience is compelled to consider differently what has already been seen.

48 Egan, Green Shakespeare, p. 160. It helps Egan’s argument here that he quotes the lines from Stephen Orgel’s Oxford edition of the play, which moves the direction for thunder to the middle of the third line. In Orgel’s words, the Folio text ‘has this in parentheses as part of the opening stage direction, but it seems more likely to belong here: Caliban takes the thunder as a threatening response to his curse.’ See Orgel (ed.), 2.1.3n. My argument follows the Folio text for two reasons. Firstly, I hope to show that, whilst Orgel’s point is intriguing, the alteration of the Folio text is unnecessary, and it is equally illuminating to read Caliban’s curses as a response to the sound of thunder, rather than a prelude. Secondly, one of the singular characteristics of The Tempest is the detail adhered to in the stage directions: there is no direction in the play which could be moved without impinging on the subtleties of meaning in the lines.

49 Indeed, the curses of Caliban and Lear are very similar, a point often overlooked in current editions of The Tempest. See especially, King Lear 2.2.358–60: ‘Infect her beauty, | You fen-sucked fogs, drawn by the powerful sun | To fall and blister!’

50 See above, pp. 27–8.

51 For a fuller understanding, see Heninger, A Handbook of Renaissance Meteorology. Caliban’s lines quoted here are not the first example of his meteorological curse. At his first appearance, we have: ‘As wicked dew as e’er my mother brushed | With raven’s feather from unwholesome fen | Drop on you both. A southwest blow on ye | And blister you all o’er’ (1.2.322).

52 Egan, Green Shakespeare, pp. 160–1.

53 Thomson, ‘The Meaning of Thunder and Lightning’, p. 21.

54 Kiernan Ryan, Shakespeare (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2002), p. 149.

55 The Tempest, ed. Orgel, p. 49.

56 Compare, for example, Ryan’s utopian stance with Orgel’s more sinister take.

57 For the long history of critical approaches which relate the figure of Prospero and his magic to the art of the dramatist, see Vaughan and Vaughan (eds), pp. 62–73 and Lindley (ed.), pp. 45–53.

58 See Vaughan and Vaughan (eds), pp. 98–108 and Lindley (ed.), pp. 33–5. Both editions also explicate the varying trends of theatrical productions to bring out colonial elements in the text, via the portrayal of Caliban.

59 See Egan, Green Shakespeare, pp. 148–71. For a lengthier exploration of the relationship between empire and deforestation, see Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilisation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

60 See also Prospero’s later speech: ‘to the dread-rattling thunder | Have I given fire and rifted Jove’s stout oak | With his own bolt’ (5.1.44–6).

61 Concerning the ‘catalogue of tricks’ in Act 5, Scene 1, Gabriel Egan contends that ‘there seems little possibility that an audience will take it seriously’ (Egan, Green Shakespeare, p. 167). However, in figuring Ariel both as lightning and as imprisonable by oak, the play establishes a range of lightning power.

62 The power of Prospero is apparently reflected by animals in his similar lines to Caliban: ‘I’ll rack thee with old cramps, | Fill all thy bones with aches, make thee roar, | That beasts tremble at thy din’ (1.2.370–2). The natural, it seems, is subject to the supernatural at every level.

63 Watson, Back to Nature, p. 90.

64 Ibid., p. 104.

65 Ibid., p. 106.

66 It is remarkable that, despite all of The Tempest’s magic, and the characterisation of Caliban as a ‘thing’ or a ‘monster’, this is the play’s only instance of ‘unnatural’, possibly suggesting that the word has been saved for the very irony I have pointed out.

67 Watson, Back to Nature, p. 324.

68 Gabriel Egan addresses this issue from a different angle, pointing to the archaeological discovery of a thermoscope in Jacobean Jamestown, remarking that ‘somebody there was experimenting with devices that were used to measure and predict the weather, and which certain showmen claimed could be used to control the weather’, Green Shakespeare, p. 153. See also B. J. Sokol, A Brave New World of Knowledge: Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Early Modern Epistemology (Madison NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), pp. 97–124.

69 The Tempest, ed. Vaughan and Vaughan, p. 285n.

70 See above, p. 88.

71 The Tempest, ed. Orgel, p. 204n.

72 Egan, ‘This Rough Magic’, p. 172.

73 The Tempest, ed. Orgel, p. 204n.

74 A parallel may be found in The Taming of the Shrew, as Petruchio, detailing to the audience his extreme plans for Katherina, demands: ‘He that knows better how to tame a shrew, | Now let him speak: ’tis charity to show’ (4.1.198–9). These lines, the closing ones of the soliloquy, are often said with an inviting or soliciting tone by actors in modern productions, who then linger in the inevitable silence. The 2006–7 Propeller production, dir. Edward Hall and the 2008–9 RSC production, dir. Conall Morrison are two recent examples.

Conclusion

1 See, for example, Thomas M. Lindsay, Luther and the German Reformation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1913), p. 30.

2 Robert Parsons, A Defence of the Censure (London: R. Parsons, 1582), p. 45. Parsons goes on to question the validity of this version of events, citing the writers Charke, who disagrees with it, and Lyndan and Prateolus, who do not. Prateolus, it seems, included in his account the death, by lightning, of Luther’s companion: see p. 49.

3 Ibid. ‘It is not I’ is the more common account of Luther’s exclamation. See, for example, E. H. Erikson, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Norton, 1958), p. 23.

4 Nathaniel Pallone and James Hennessy, ‘Luther’s Call and Nitrogen Narcosis’, Current Psychology 13:4 (Winter, 1994–95), 371–4 (372).

5 Ibid.

6 John Boys, An Exposition of the Festiuall Epistles (London: Edward Griffin for William Aspley, 1615), fol. 1328; John Fisher, The Sermon of Joh[a]n the Bysshop of Rochester made Agayn the P[er]nicious Doctryn of Martin Luther (London: Wynkyn de Worde, [1527?]), p. 3.

7 For example, Knight in The Shakespearian Tempest, passim, and Ted Hughes in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), pp. 382–417.