1

Thunder

Pyrrhus stood,

And like a neutral to his will and matter,

Did nothing.

But as we often see against some storm

A silence in the heavens, the rack stand still,

The bold winds speechless, and the orb below

As hush as death, anon the dreadful thunder

Doth rend the region; so, after Pyrrhus’ pause

Aroused vengeance sets him new awork[.]

Hamlet 2.2.481–9.

The Player’s speech seems to glorify delay. Pyrrhus’s pause has a purpose: to arouse vengeance. That vengeance, thunder-like, contrasts, of course, with the inaction of Hamlet, who listens to this speech. Here the delay is a means to aggrandise the action: there is a kind of potential energy in the image throughout. It is apparently a coincidence that the Oxford English Dictionary’s first noted instance of the phrase ‘the calm before the storm’ is nearly contemporaneous with Hamlet.¹ The idea had been in currency for several years previously, and the phrase ‘after a storm comes a calm’ for decades before that.² In Hamlet, the idea resonates with the play’s theme, and its fatal dénouement. I offer it here, though, as it is specifically concerned with thunder. In this brief chapter, I will outline the meteorological understanding of thunder in early modern England, before examining the ways in which such understanding helps us to read lines like the Player’s.

Meteorological principles in early modern England were largely derived from the work of classical philosophers. Of these works, the first to attempt to unify a theory of the weather into one system was Aristotle’s Meteorologica.³ In the Meteorologica, Aristotle explains atmospheric phenomena in a way which is recognisable to any reader of similar texts from Elizabethan and Jacobean England: a system of ‘exhalations’ and ‘vapours’, which are together best understood as ‘evaporations’.⁴ Aristotle’s theory states that the sun draws these evaporations upwards, potentially through three regions of the air, during which process, they account for all various types of weather. Vapours, warm and moist, are drawn from bodies of water, rivers, bogs and marshland. The exhalations, by contrast, are hot and dry, and drawn from the earth. As the evaporations rise, they change in temperature – caused by the air’s different regions, proximity to the sun or the varying temperature of the sun itself – and this change is manifested in different types of weather, or meteor. Which meteor occurs depends on the mixture of evaporations and how their temperature is altered. From vapours come rain, snow, clouds, hail, frost and mist, whilst exhalations produce thunder and lightning, winds, comets and earthquakes as well as the occasional airborne fireball. Our modern notion of a storm, then, with rain, thunder, lightning and wind, requires several simultaneous evaporations producing discrete meteors. Many other atmospheric phenomena are accounted for by the reflection of sun, moon or stars, in configurations of airborne vapours. This group of phenomena, which includes rainbows and multiple suns, are known as ‘reflections’.⁵

Although meteorological theory in early modern England was based on the principles outlined by Aristotle, it was more specifically derived from the Roman thinkers who translated the texts from the Greek. Within the works of Plutarch, Seneca and, in particular, Pliny the Elder, exhaustive summaries are available of Aristotle’s system and the additions made by subsequent generations. As the Roman thinkers collected and commentated on meteorological theories, the empiricism of Aristotle was ‘embellished with … many elements of wonder and even superstition’.⁶ Both of these elements, as we shall see, are found in many of the meteorological writings of Elizabethans and Jacobeans, whether scientific text or artwork.

Fortunately for our purposes, the Elizabethan and Jacobean meteorologists clearly found thunder and lightning fascinating. As S. K. Heninger writes, ‘[n]o phenomenon, in fact, was more carefully and variously explained – by the meteorologian, the astrologer, and the merely superstitious’.⁷ Whilst Aristotle’s model of the processes by which thunder and lightning are produced still held firm for such writers, the opportunity to expound it in fresh language was clearly appealing to, and popular with readers. A common feature of the weather phenomena I will be examining is that each was thought to come from clouds. A brief description of clouds is therefore an appropriate starting point:

A Cloude is a vapor cold and moist, drawen out of the earth, or waters by the heate of the sunne, into the middle region of the ayre, where by colde it is so knit together, that it hangeth untill either y^e waight or some resolution cause it to fall downe.⁸

This description is taken from A Goodly Gallery, a work of meteorology by William Fulke first published in 1563. Fulke’s text was a great success, and was reprinted in varying editions at least five more times in the following eighty years. That success cannot be attributed to novelty: Fulke’s theory here is essentially the same as one of Pliny’s, just as Pliny’s is elicited from Aristotle.⁹ Yet what Fulke lacks in innovation, he makes up for in concision. Pliny is concerned with the height of clouds, and discusses the matter in some detail.¹⁰ Aristotle tries to solve the puzzle of why – if cold forms clouds – there are no clouds in space.¹¹ Fulke, though, simply accounts for the processes behind meteorological phenomena; his inquisitiveness is directed at those processes, and no further. For Fulke, the cloud is vapour held together by cold, and contains the potential energy to fall.

When the condensed vapour of a cloud traps an exhalation, then thunder can result:

Thonder is a sound, caused in ye cloudes by the breaking out of a whote & dry Exhalation, beating against the edges, of the cloude … but when the whot Exhalation cannot agrée with the coldnes of ye place, by this strife being driven together, made stronger and kendled, it wil neades breake out which soden & violent eruption, causeth ye noyse which we cal thonder.¹²

As with his explanation of clouds, Fulke’s account of lightning can be traced back to Aristotle.¹³ Although the Roman commentators do broadly accept the same explanation, however, other, more fanciful theories are advanced alongside. A falling star, for example, might cause thunder and lightning if it strikes a cloud. ¹⁴ These theories are outlined but rejected by Fulke. However, whilst Fulke’s default position is Aristotelian, his method of reasoning is not. He counters the theory of falling stars in an explicitly Christian way: ‘it is evident that ye starres of the firmament can not fall, for God hath set them fast for ever, he hath geven them a commaundement whiche they shal not passe’.¹⁵ This argument highlights a curious aspect of early modern meteorology: God rarely features in explanations of the weather. Meteorological phenomena are generally explained as natural processes, with two exceptions. Either God interferes directly or some dark supernatural power subverts the natural order. There are examples of both of these exceptions in Shakespeare’s plays, and they are discussed below.¹⁶ The grey area between these exceptions and the natural processes is, of course, substantial and there are examples throughout this book of it being exploited. Thunder might be the result of an exhalation trapped in a cloud, but that same thunder could equally be interpreted as the voice of God¹⁷ or the work of a witch, depending on the vested interest of the interpreter. Alongside this is the shifting body of superstitions to consider. In this wide opportunity of interpretation, perhaps, lies the appeal of weather as metaphor.

How does an understanding of the basic meteorology of thunder contextualise the reading of dramatic poetry? Fulke’s description of thunder is typical in that it stresses the fierce nature of the phenomenon: breaking, beating, strife, violent eruption. That sort of evocative diction is found in all meteorological descriptions of thunder from the period. The storm is necessarily vicious before the effects are seen or heard. Although thunder is simply a noise, then, and the truly damaging potential of a storm lies in lightning, wind and heavy rain, thunder itself is conceived as violent.

Hence in the Player’s speech, it is the thunder that is damaging: ‘anon the dreadful thunder | Doth rend the region’. Rather than being a signal that destruction is about to occur, the thunder is itself part of that destruction. Similarly, Volumnia’s call to Coriolanus ‘To imitate the graces of the gods | To tear with thunder the wide cheeks o’ the air’ has implied devastation before the ‘bolt | That should but rive an oak’ (5.3.152–4). Such images are not based on thunder being a violent noise, but the received understanding that it is a destructive process.

Whilst the connotations of violence attached to those images stem from contemporary meteorology, thunder is also a commonplace metaphor for loud volume. Here, as with meteorology (perhaps even more so) it is difficult for the twenty-first-century reader to imagine fully the differences between our experience and that of an Elizabethan. Late sixteenth-century England was a much quieter place, without traffic and aircraft noises or cinema or volume controls. Hence, the loudness of thunder is often mentioned (Prospero’s ‘dread rattling thunder’, for example (The Tempest 5.1.44). But also, the available metaphors for loud volumes are limited in number, and it is not surprising that thunder should occur so often in this context. Cleomenes’s speech in The Winter’s Tale is a good example:

But of all, the burst

And the ear-deaf’ning voice o’th’Oracle,

Kin to Jove’s thunder, so surpris’d my sense,

That I was nothing.

(3.1.8–11)

Here the loud noise of the oracle’s voice is suited to the comparison with thunder, as it lends each a heavenly or otherworldly context. The same might be said of Pericles’s exhortation to ‘thank the holy gods as loud | As thunder threatens us’ (5.1.199–200). But the metaphor is also found in more earthly contexts. Take, for example, the terrified question normally ascribed to Gertrude: ‘Ay me, what act | That roars so loud, and thunders in the index?’ (Hamlet 3.4.52–3). Other loud noises open to experience for Shakespeare’s audience include artillery, trumpet alarums and drums, all of which could be encountered in the open-air playhouses of London. Indeed, as we shall see in Chapter 2, those battle noises were a constituent part of dramatised thunder and so perhaps it is unsurprising when the two noises are connected. This is the case, for example, in King John, as the Bastard boasts of a drum that ‘shall | As loud as thine rattle the welkin’s ear | And mock the deep-mouth’d thunder’ (5.2.171–3). Frequently, images of thunder involve the conflation of violence and volume, as when Petruchio promises to tame Kate: ‘For I will board her though she chide as loud | As thunder when the clouds in autumn crack’ (The Taming of the Shrew 1.2.94–5). In this image, the loudness and the cracking belong to Kate, but Petruchio’s threat is to overcome both. Elsewhere the volume level is enough to understand what type of prediction is meant: ‘’tis like to be loud weather’, notes the Mariner in The Winter’s Tale (3.3.11).

There is a great deal more to Shakespeare’s engagement with thunder than I have outlined here. As well as the basic meteorology, there are superstitions; in addition to imagery, we find the sound effects of the stage. These will be addressed in the following chapter, on Julius Caesar. Even with the cursory sortie into thunder above, though, we can find points of contrast between early modern understanding and experience of thunder, and our own. Those distinctions show that thunder is not as familiar as we might casually think. Thunder is not simply loud, but is a touchstone of loudness. It is not just a metaphor for violence but is conceived as violent in and of itself. Such contrasts must be attended to when dealing with the storms of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.