2
Julius Caesar is a pivotal text, containing as it does Shakespeare’s first staged storm.1 In the time between the indelicate lightning of the Henry VI plays, the narrated sea-storm of A Comedy of Errors and this tragedy, the playwright has clearly developed a far more deft approach to the nuances of the device. It is in Julius Caesar that we find the underpinning of the later storms of King Lear, Macbeth and The Winter’s Tale, in which the portent and significance of the weather are debated. The Roman play, however, goes far beyond simple groundwork and, as with each of Shakespeare’s great storm plays, Julius Caesar emerges with a singular oragious identity. The chief characteristic of this identity, I will argue, is the play’s engagement with the spectacular, in which the storm itself plays a major part. The first part of this chapter will be concerned with questions about the staging of the storm, exploring the opening of the Globe, the legacy of theatrical storm effects and the evidence for their use in the original production of 1599. This section will address the considerable question, ‘why is Shakespeare’s first staged storm in this play?’ I will then look at the pertinent example of a noteworthy storm in London, 1599, and examine the ways in which it might have been interpreted. Finally, I will draw these two lines of inquiry together to investigate the ways in which Shakespeare depicts weather interpretation in the text of Julius Caesar.
To begin, then, with the spectacular. Julius Caesar contains several moments that encapsulate the importance of spectacle in gaining and consolidating power. Most obviously, perhaps, the corpse of the freshly dead Caesar becomes a contested prop; it is a battleground of interpretation for the conspirators and Antony. The conspirators ‘bathe’ their hands in Caesar’s blood to reinforce their cries of ‘Peace, Freedom and Liberty’ to the citizens (3.1.105–11). The self-dramatisation of Cassius which accompanies this act reinforces the significance of the spectacle: ‘How many ages hence | Shall this our lofty scene be acted over… ?’ (111–12). For the conspirators, Caesar’s blood is a sign that his physical body – and by implication his ambition – is ‘No worthier than the dust’ (120). Antony’s employment of the corpse, in contrast, is the climax to a crescendo of props. He enters with the body (3.2.40sd) and refers to it throughout his eulogaic speeches. But before the body is revealed, the people are shown the will of Caesar (130) and his mantle (168). To each of these props is given an interpretation, a narrative. Through Antony’s manipulation, the will of the people is driven by the production of display: ‘If you have tears, prepare to shed them now…’ (167), he says. But before removing the mantle from the corpse, Antony narrates the body’s significance and its signification: it becomes a symbol of the betrayal to which he has succumbed – ‘then burst his mighty heart’ (184) denotes a grieving, metaphorical death, rather than a literal one. Antony’s management of the stage spectacle outdoes the conspirators’ interpretation, so that he may name their crime: ‘bloody treason’ (190). In this way, we see that the power rests not simply in those who theorise the role of theatre in history, as the conspirators have done, but in the recognition of the potential of hierarchical exhibition – that is, the corpse is a more effective display than the conspirators’ ‘red weapons’ (3.1.109), especially when it follows the show of the will and the mantle. This efficacy is encapsulated by the First Plebian’s response: ‘O piteous spectacle’ (3.2.196).
Even without the storm, then, here is a play concerned with the influence of display, its interpretation and its language. The political implications of this quality have already been explored.2 This chapter however is more concerned with the ways in which the storm scenes fit into a wider reading of a further kind of display: the play’s advertising and empowerment of the new Globe playhouse. For in considering the storm and the spectacular in Julius Caesar, it is crucial to bear in mind that it was one of the first plays to be performed at the original Globe theatre, when it opened in the early summer of 1599.3 Whether it was indeed the playhouse’s opening play or not, it is certainly a work invested in the new theatre. Because of this, I want to consider Julius Caesar as a prime example of theatrical bravado: it is the work of a playwright with the keys to a new playhouse; one with a fresh and eager audience; the work of a playwright, as we shall see, who is invested in, and reliant upon, spectacle.
The need for an impressive opening show at the Globe is obvious enough. This was to be the third theatre on Bankside alone, an area also accommodating other public ‘entertainments’, such as bear-baiting. Although the Swan had been forbidden a permanent company since 1597, it still produced plays, and likely hosted touring productions. Closer to the Globe was the residence of the Admiral’s Men, the Rose; the two theatres, indeed, were around 50 yards apart. In addition, there were numerous emergent theatres, both around and within the City – some inns and others full-sized playhouses. Furthermore, as James Shapiro notes, ‘troubling still was word that, after a decade’s hiatus, the boys of St Paul’s would shortly resume playing for public audiences at the Cathedral’.4 Another company of boy players would soon be resident at the indoor venue Blackfriars. Nor was the Globe a tentative measure for the Chamberlain’s Men, but a total commitment for the shareholders, the first group of actors to own their own permanent playing space. As Andrew Gurr makes clear, 1599 was, for those in the theatrical profession, ‘a time of high investment and high risk’.5 This was a period of great theatrical competition, especially for a budding venue, and there was no time for faltering starts.
In modern editions of Julius Caesar, little is made of the theatrical effect of the storm. Martin Spevack’s gloss of the first incidence of thunder is fairly typical: ‘Thunder was produced by rolling a cannon-ball down a wooden trough, the “thunder-run”, by drums or cannon-fire; lightning, by some kind of fireworks’.6 Often, mention is made of the prologue in Ben Jonson’s Every Man In His Humour, in which the playwright dismisses the ‘rolled bullet heard, | To say, it thunders, or tempestuous drum | Rumbles to tell you that the storm doth come’.7 It seems to me that none of the current editions capture the potential force of a display of theatrical storm. The quotation from Jonson, which is found in at least one edition of every play glossing Shakespeare’s thunder, does little to help this cause, as its tone is purposefully deprecatory and scornful of the practice of, it seems, anything which detracts from a playwright’s words. The same applies to the Induction of A Warning for Fair Women, which the Oxford Julius Caesar also quotes: ‘a little rosin flasheth forth, | Like … | … a boy’s squib’.8 This play was published anonymously in 1599, but we know from its title page that it was acted by the Chamberlain’s Men. The same is true of Jonson’s play, first published in quarto form in 1601, but likely first performed by the same company at the Curtain in 1598. Jonson’s prologue, however, with its dismissive lines was added only in the 1616 Folio text; it is inviting to speculate that both Jonson and the anonymous playwright of A Warning for Fair Women were mocking Shakespeare, their fellow Chamberlain’s writer, and his fondness for fire and noise.9 However, not every playwright wrote about fireworks in the same way, and, although it is a later play, the Prologue of the anonymous Two Merry Milke-Maids (1619) offers some context:
How ere you understand’t, ’Tis a fine Play:
For we have in’t a Conjurer, a Devill,
And a Clowne too; but I feare the evill,
In which perhaps unwisely we may faile,
Of wanting Squibs and Crackers at their taile.
But howsoever, Gentlemen I sweare,
You shall have Good Words for your Money here.10
Here, it is acknowledged that ‘Squibs and Crackers’ guarantee a degree of audience satisfaction, and that their absence is ‘unwise’. Indeed, the Red Bull playhouse, the venue for which this speech was written, had built a reputation around its penchant for the spectacular, of which the fire effects mentioned were a key component. The reasons that an audience being promised ‘Good Words’ instead might find the resulting drama deficient, or ‘wanting’, become obvious when the evidence for special effects is examined. For it must be made clear that thunder and lightning in an Elizabe-than theatre had the potential to be a hugely impressive and noisy affair, with rockets, fireworks, drums and squibs providing noise and spectacle. It is probable that a cannon, or some other piece of heavy ordinance would also have been discharged to simulate the sound of thunder along with the thunder-run, which itself would make a great deal of noise.11
It is, perhaps, no accident that fireworks and other pyrotechnic effects should be used to simulate lightning on the early modern stage. As we have seen, the meteorological explanation of thunder requires that a hot exhalation is trapped in the cloud. Moreover, when it escapes as lightning it is ‘flying fire’.12 The main way of creating lightning on the stage was through using what was known as, or at least subsequently came to be called, a swevel. This device is similar to a modern firework rocket, though, as John Bate describes, it also had a guiding mechanism:
Swevels are nothing else but Rockets, having instead of a rod (to ballast them) a little cane bound fast unto them, where through the rope passeth. Note that you must be carefull to have your line strong, even & smooth, and it must be rubd over with sope that it may not burn. If you would have your Rockets to returne againe, then binde two Rockets together, with the breech of one towards the mouth of the other, and let the stouple that primeth the one, enter the breech of the other.13
Bate, like his fellow firework writers, markets his book for those interested in ‘Triumph and Recreation’; fireworks had become a form of niche theatre in their own right.14 Rockets, if not on cords, had been employed in civic pageants at least as far back as the 1530s,15 but the use of swevels in the representation of storms also had a long history. Here is a description from the architect Serlio:
You must draw a piece of wyre over the Scene, which must hang downewards, whereon you must put a squib covered over with pure gold or shining lattin which you will: and while the Bullet is rouling, you must shoote of some piece of Ordinance, and with the same giving fire to the squibs, it will worke the effect which is desired.16
Serlio, an Italian, died in 1554, but swevels found their way onto the English stage before his work was translated in 1611. As Philip Butterworth notes, they were evident in France, as ‘during the performance of … Antichrist in 1580, it is recorded that “they shall project fireworks in the air and along the cord.”’17 The royal entertainment at Elvetham in 1591 had ‘many running rockets upon lines, which past between the Snail Mount and the castle in the Fort’.18 The companies of the public playhouses in London, too, were certainly aware of the technique of swevels, and so were their audiences. In Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s The Roaring Girl (1611), Moll refers to a ‘rogue [used] like a fire-worke to run upon a line betwixt him and me’.19 Dekker, indeed, seems to have had a fondness for the image, and used it figuratively in several plays. He also employed the technique itself: thus, in If it Be not Good, the Devil is in it (1612), when the stage direction calls for ‘Fire-workes on Lines’, swevels would have been ignited by an offstage hand.20 When lightning was being created, the line ran from the heavens down to the stage.21 As with several examples of theatrical pyrotechny of the period, the effect is mirrored in the language of characters: indeed in Dekker’s play, the swevels are directed by a character, Ruffman, a disguised demon in the court of Naples. Ruffman dismisses the efforts of the human courtiers – ‘the toyes they bragged of (Fire-works | and such light-stuffes)’ – before offering his own:
RUFFMAN you shall see
At opening of this hand, a thousand Balles
Of wilde-Fire, flying round about the Aire – there.
Fire-workes on Lines
[ALL] Rare, Rare.22
Whilst swevels, as this example shows, could be employed for a variety of special effects, their use in signifying lightning was well established. John Melton, in 1620, refers to Marlowe’s still-popular Doctor Faustus in his refutation of the claims of ‘astrologasters’ (those who use astrology to predict the weather, amongst other things):
Another will fore-tell of Lightning and Thunder that shall happen such a day, when there are no such Inflamations seene, except men goe to the Fortune in Golding-Lane, to see the Tragedie of Doctor Faustus. There indeede a man may behold shagge-hayr’d Devills runne roaring over the Stages with squibs in their mouths, while Drummers make Thunder in the Tyring-house, and the twelve-penny Hirelings make artificial Lightning in their Heavens.23
Even as Marlowe’s play approached its thirtieth birthday, the staging of it was still something to ‘behold’. Melton’s writing, moreover, shows how natural it was to conflate dramatic pyrotechny with genuine thunder and lightning. Whilst the effects in amphitheatres might not have been realistic, there is no confusion that in the play they represented storms.
An extensive storm, then, such as that in Julius Caesar, would have included quite a display of fireworks to represent lightning. Thunder, however, was heard and not seen. The chief means for producing the effect involved a heavy cannonball, and during archaeological excavations a cannonball was found at the site of the Rose playhouse.24 At its most simplistic, the method involved rolling the ball on the floor of the heavens, to vibrate the wood and produce a thundering sound. Also available was the ‘thunder run’, nomenclature which postdates the drama, though early evidence for the mechanics of the ‘run’ is well established.25 The device is a very simple one. A wooden trough, either on a fulcrum or sloping along the floor, contains a cannonball which, when see-sawed or released, rolls. Different levels may be built into the trough, to enable separate thunderclaps to be sounded when the ball drops down.26 In early modern texts, the reference to use of the run is usually confined to a ‘rolling bullet’, as in Jonson’s prologue. The effect of the run is pleasingly convincing. This realistic aspect, though, may diminish when, as suggested by Serlio, Jonson and Melton, drums contributed to the noise. All of these writers point towards the storm as a cumulative theatrical effect of fire and noise, and faithful representation of the environment is apparently less important than the production of a grand spectacle.
As I have said, Julius Caesar is Shakespeare’s first staged storm. In the context of the theatrical competition and the financial risks of the new playhouse, the reasons for the storm’s emergence at this point in the playwright’s career become clearer. The fact that all the fire effects in the early modern playhouses appear to have been carried with scant regard for health and safety – as of course evidenced by the fire, ignited by the use of stage cannon, which destroyed the Globe in 1613 – indicates just how seriously the playing companies took the impact of their fire and sound. There must have been a tangible strain of fear in the audience, especially if the well-documented early modern anxiety over fire is taken into account.27 By turns, then, electrifying and terrifying, the noise and the sight of banging and fizzing effects would have been accompanied by a strong smell of gunpowder; truly an assault on the senses. This was certainly a feat which could not be matched by the boys in St Paul’s Cathedral and, very likely, was not to be found, at least on the scale of Julius Caesar, anywhere else in or around the City. Of the plays being staged in June 1599, most are lost, but none of those extant match Shakespeare’s enthusiasm for thunder and lightning.28 It can be concluded, then, that part of Shakespeare’s purpose in writing a storm might well have been to maximise the full sensory impact of the venue and create the impression, and the hype, of the Globe as a vibrant and exciting new theatre with an effects department to outmatch its rivals.
The nearest of those rivals, and the most fierce, were the Admiral’s Men at the Rose. That playhouse, as I have mentioned, was less than 50 yards from the Globe. A loud noise from one amphitheatre would have been easily audible in the other. All plays began at 2pm. It is therefore possible, or even likely, that the audience and the players at the Rose would have been disrupted and intrigued by the violent sounds coming from nearby. This point extends to audience cheering and applause: it would have been very easy for an audience member, especially one in the yard, to decide that the other playhouse sounded more entertaining and to make the short journey across the road. Of course, there is no evidence that such behaviour took place, but the sound of the Globe’s cannon and rockets yards away would at least arouse the curiosity of those at the Rose. The new playhouse was still announcing its presence to the audience at its chief and nearest rival.
The storm is the most obviously spectacular element of the play’s staging, but there is further evidence that Shakespeare was utilising the capability of this new theatre in his description of flourishes and alarums. The battle scenes of Act 5 of Julius Caesar as read in the stage directions show a sensitivity for distance which had not been evident in the playwright’s earlier work, written for other playhouses. For example, in Titus Andronicus, a play performed at the Rose, there are eleven battle calls and flourishes, none distinguished by volume level. In 1 Henry IV, probably first staged at the Theatre, the final act stipulates seven calls for trumpets, specified by type (e.g. ‘Alarum’ (5.3.0) or ‘retreat’ (5.4.157) but, again, not by loudness. The instruction ‘Alarum afar off’ in 3 Henry VI (5.2.77) appears in the 1623 text, but not in the 1594 text of the play. The same applies to the direction ‘Drum afar off’ in Richard III, which is missing from the pre-1623 quartos, which nonetheless include ‘The clocke striketh’ in the same scene (5.3.338; 277). The early modern trumpet lacks the subtlety of the modern version, and its theatrical use was restricted to flourishes and battle calls.29 Only in Julius Caesar, though, does Shakespeare begin to write directions such as ‘Low alarums’ (e.g. 5.5.23).
Shakespeare’s interest in dictating the sound levels of the plays, then, starts to be expressed only once he has begun to write for the Globe. Whether this is coincidence, or slight evidence of some kind of backstage muting area in the playhouse, we may never tell. Certainly such distinctions in musical directions had been rare in drama before 1599. Only two similar instances are extant: in Edward III (1596) and Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1592). In the former, the direction for ‘The battle heard afar off’ (3.1.117) does not mention trumpets, and it is conceivable that the effect could be achieved with careful swordplay, especially as the ‘Shot’ and ‘Retreat’ which follow are not ascribed volume levels (122, 132). Nevertheless, it would be unwise to draw conclusions on a text which is notoriously erratic and peculiar.30 With Kyd’s play, performed at the Rose, ‘a tucket afar off’ (1.2.99) does refer to a trumpet. This is the sole instance in many extant Rose plays, several of which include less specific trumpet calls, as we have seen with Titus, and as can also be found in George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar, which calls for trumpets seven times. If, in the performances of Kyd’s play, the trumpet was sounded ‘afar’, then Shakespeare’s interest in the technique, like that of other playwrights, only emerged at the opening of the Globe.
Indeed, Shakespeare seems to have taken on the idea of distant battles from Julius Caesar onwards, soon including far off sounds in Hamlet and All’s Well. In Hamlet, ‘A march afar off’ signifies the approach of Fortinbras (5.2.332); In All’s Well, ‘A march afar’ accounts for the imminent arrival of ‘Bertram, Parolles and the whole army’ (3.5.37; 74). These uses, coming as they do, swiftly after Julius Caesar, lend weight to the argument that the Globe’s building – or at least the fact of writing for a new playhouse – influenced Shakespeare’s stage effects, and that the stage directions are not later additions.31 Following Julius Caesar, other playwrights also apparently employed the effect, and it is evidenced in plays by Robert Armin, John Marston and Thomas Dekker.32 Later in Shakespeare’s Globe career, the nuance of battle sounds becomes even more developed and we find very specific sound directions, as in Antony and Cleopatra ‘Alarum afar off, as at a sea fight’ (4.12. 0sd ). It might seem distinctly un-spectacular to us. Indeed, there is something of a contradiction in the concept of an auditory spectacle. Yet if we are to hold the oft-repeated dictum that an early modern audience went to hear a play, as we go to see a play, we must also hold that variations in sound effects, especially ones as novel as this seems to be, would have been remarkable, even spectacular. Julius Caesar marks a development in Shakespeare’s variations of sound distance: the audience, perhaps for the first time, experienced their battles in a fully multi-dimensional soundscape.
Shakespeare’s first staged storm, then, is one of a wider set of directions pointing towards an increased interest in the non-textual elements of his dramaturgy. This interest coincides with the advent of the new Globe playhouse. Either the Globe offered new capabilities for the production of special effects and sound, or Shakespeare was influenced enough by the prospect of a new theatrical space that he reconsidered his plays at a fundamental dramatic level. Whichever is the case, the Globe prompts a demonstrable shift in Shakespeare’s approach to sound. The storm is one consequence of this shift and, as with the distanced sound directions, it is one that reoccurs and develops for the rest of Shakespeare’s career.
If the Globe prompts a new approach to sound, then, how does this approach affect the language of the play? As we have seen, the actors in Act 1, Scene 3 would, following the stage direction for Thunder and Lightning enter to a cacophony of fireworks and sound effects. Given that thunder and lightning effects in early modern drama tend to occur alongside the depiction of supernatural events, whether of gods descending from the heavens or devils rising from the traps, an audience watching Julius Caesar might think that the characters should be worried, as Casca seems to be. But whilst he fears the ‘gods [may] send destruction’, no such gods appear. Rather, the stress in Casca’s speech is on the novelty of this experience:
O, Cicero,
I have seen tempests when the scolding winds
Have rived the knotty oaks, and I have seen
Th’ambitious ocean swell and rage and foam
To be exalted with the threatening clouds;
But never till tonight, never till now,
Did I go through a tempest dropping fire.
Either there is civil strife in heaven,
Or else the world, too saucy with the gods,
Incenses them to send destruction.
(1.3.4–14)
Instead, in relation to special effects, a striking detail emerges. The fieriness of Casca’s description matches the effects of the swevels. The focus of Casca’s speech – and of Cassius’s when he enters – is fire, quite reasonably, as fire is indeed ‘dropping’ around the actors. Casca’s lines do not suggest that the stage effects are a convincing simulation of a storm; instead, they revel in their unusualness: ‘never till tonight, never till now | Did I go through a tempest dropping fire’. Throughout the scene, moreover, references to the pyrotechnics continue. The phrases of Cassius, for example, which depict the ‘very flash of it’ (52), the ‘sparks’ (57) and ‘all these fires, all these gliding ghosts’ (63) all draw attention to the stage effects. For not only is Shakespeare advertising the new playhouse as a venue for spectacular effects, he is also writing into the play images which underscore those effects. We have here, then, a stark example of environmental irony. The effects on the stage are unlike a real storm and the language of the characters celebrates their theatricality and, in the case of Casca’s speech, contrasts the sights and sounds of the stage with the ostensibly real tempests ‘I have seen’. This irony is surely comic. When Brutus, in the following scene, claims that ‘The exhalations whizzing in the air | Give so much light that I may read by them’, the irony persists, even if the rockets do not (2.1.44–5). Similarly, when the fireworks appear again, with the thunder and lightning of the next scene, so too does the metadramatic language, this time through the medium of Calphurnia: ‘Fierce fiery warriors fight upon the clouds’ (2.2.19), ‘ghosts … shriek and squeal’ (19) and, evoking the sound of the drums, ‘The noise of battle hurtle[s] in the air’ (22).
Much has been written on the self-consciously theatrical element of the play, with a particular emphasis on Cassius’s lines over Caesar’s corpse: ‘How many ages hence | Shall this our lofty scene be acted over | In states unborn and accents yet unknown?’ (3.1.111–13). Anne Barton, for example, writes that the passage ‘serves, pre-eminently, to glorify the stage’.33 The play, as I mentioned in beginning, is invested in the interpretation and re-interpretation of spectacle, especially as a means to gaining or consolidating power and authority. In the storm, Shakespeare takes this process one level further, both in terms of the metatheatrical and the theme interpretation. The language of the play brazenly refers to the stage effects of the new playhouse. The audience is given a spectacle the like of which, the implication is, they could not have seen elsewhere: the authority of the new playhouse is foregrounded. But alongside this advertisement, the storm is taken up as something to interpret. This starts with Casca fretting about the gods, but the process is quickly co-opted by Cassius: ‘No could I, Casca, name to thee a man | Most like this dreadful night | That thunders, lightens, opens graves and roars’ (1.3.72–4). The second half of this chapter will concentrate on the possibilities of interpreting storms, as we see Shakespeare’s play fitting into the dramatic and real environments of early modern London.
Those audience members at the opening of the Globe who were familiar with Thomas North’s 1579 translation of Plutarch (there would have been several) or even the basic story of Julius Caesar (which would have been most)34 would know that a great many unusual portents were said to have preceded the assassination. Plutarch, in North’s translation, writes:
Certainly destiny may easier be foreseen than avoided, considering the strange and wonderful signs that were said to be seen before Caesar’s death. For, touching the fires in the element and spirits running up and down in the night, and also the solitary birds to be seen at noondays sitting in the marketplace – are not all these signs perhaps worth the noting, in such a wonderful chance as happened?35
‘Touching the fires in the element’ is as close as Plutarch, Shakespeare’s principal source for the play, comes to reporting a storm.36 Indeed, the description is as close to a theatrical storm – heavy on gunpowder and flames – as it is to an actual tempest; the playhouses might have had rockets for lightning, but relied on poetry for rain, which is notably absent in Julius Caesar.37 It is from this passage that Shakespeare takes material for Casca’s speech in the storm. The playwright was, in all probability, also drawing on other descriptions here. Ovid and Lucan both describe the scene, as does Virgil:
Nere flew more lightning through a welkin faire,
Nor mo portentous comets filled the aire.38
It is clear, then, that Shakespeare was not the first writer to make use of thunder and lightning when listing his ominous signs. Literate members of the audience would have expected storms as a result of this. It is, therefore, perhaps already unwise to assume Thomson’s conclusion that an audience would expect the supernatural when hearing the sounds of thunder, when the play is an adaptation of Caesar’s story. And yet there is such a theatrical legacy of the two being paired that surely for some the expectation was still there.
As we see in Casca’s speech, the storm may be taken as a fearful thing, not only in itself, but in what it portends. In this regard, as I have noted, it fits in with the recurrence of the interpretation of spectacle in the play. But it is also illustrative of another wider concern of Julius Caesar, for this is a play which comments on the strange nature of prognostication and its obsessive desire to look forward. Brutus’s soliloquy depicts not Caesar, but the Caesar that may come: ‘And therefore think him as a serpent’s egg | Which hatched, would as his kind grow mischievous, | And kill him in the shell’.39 The grim accuracy of the Soothsayer’s date compares starkly with the ambiguity of the storm interpretations offered by the characters who appear whilst the thunder is staged. This ‘strange-disposed time’ of the play extends to the crowd’s response to Antony’s funeral speeches, in which the resonant words suggest all of past, present and future simultaneously: ‘We will hear the will’. But what of the prognostication based on the storm itself? How might a contemporary audience have reacted to a storm? How would their reaction to a staged storm be different from that to a real storm?
As has been made clear, an early modern audience who heard theatrical thunder and saw theatrical lightning would probably expect some kind of dramatic manifestation of the supernatural. Before addressing the question of this expectation, though, it is important to relate the audience’s experience of the natural, especially with regards to this play. In March of 1599, whilst the Globe was being built and Julius Caesar was very likely being written, there was a storm in London which would find a place in the writings of several contemporary chroniclers. Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, was departing the city with his officers and cavalcade.40 This was the first stage in the Earl’s journey to Ireland, where he aimed to crush the rebellion of Tyrone. The fluctuating relationship between Devereux and Queen Elizabeth had resulted in the Earl’s appointment to this challenging and dangerous role. There had been some delay in his departure and the rebellion was gathering strength; put bluntly, this was an eagerly anticipated moment of great significance. There would have been many who wished Devereux success, and many who hoped that his ambition, if not his life, be curtailed by the enterprise. The historian John Stow (1525–1605) provides the most complete contemporary description of the day’s events:
The 27th of March, about two of the clock in the afternoon, the right honourable Robert earl of Essex, lieutenant general, lord high marshall, etc. departed from Seething Lane, through Fenchurch Street, Grace Street, Cornhill, Cheap, etc. towards Sheldon, Highgate, and rode that night to St. Albans, towards Ireland, he had a great train of noble men, and gentlemen, on horseback before him, to accompany him on his journey, his coaches followed him. He had also (by the pleasure of God) a great shower, or twain, of rain and hail, with some claps of thunder as he rode through the city.41
Stow’s language evokes a great spectacle. There is a certain reverence in his listing of Devereux’s titles, of his companions and of the streets through which they passed. The description of the weather employs a similar syntax and thereby hints at a similar reverence. It is made explicit in the parenthetical ‘by the pleasure of God’; the display is a divinely staged backdrop to the hero’s departure. Note also the phrase ‘He had’, which, being echoed in the description of the weather from that of the company, goes further to consolidate the notion that the environment (and, therefore, God) is on the Earl’s side. If there is portent to be found in this weather, it seems, Stow would have it be positive. For the sake of contextualising Stow’s comments, we may contrast this description with his account of a ‘tempest of wind’ in November 1574:
The eighteenth day at night, were very stormy and tempestuous winds out of the south … These are to be received as tokens of God’s wrath ready bent against the world for sin now abounding, and also of his great mercy, who doth but only show the rod wherewith we daily deserve to be beaten.42
Here, we may see that Stow’s accounts of storms are, at least occasionally, dependent on his interpretation of God’s intentions as manifest in the weather. Although both storms are unexpected, they are both harmless and Stow records no damage caused by them.43 Nonetheless, the two storms are presented very differently. There is certainly no mention of God showing ‘the rod’ in the Devereux account, nor indeed, any of ‘grace’ in the earlier narrative. It does not seem sustainable, in light of this, that Stow wished Devereux anything bar support and admiration. It is significant that one writer should appraise two harmless storms so differently. The fickle character of weather interpretation seldom depends solely upon that weather but is bound up within broader issues: from the political to the religious, the literal climate is invariably aligned with a metaphorical climate. Stow’s description of the sudden storm of Devereux’s departure tells us about the weather, but his inclination to view it as bountiful tells us about his veneration of, or hope for, the Earl of Essex. Even if Stow is writing ironically, or with political reasons in mind, the point is largely similar: the description would simply be a more nuanced account of the popular apprehension of Devereux’s spectacle. As Shakespeare has Cicero remark when Casca is harbouring the doom of the storm: ‘men may construe things after their fashion | Clean from the purpose of the things themselves’ (1.3.34–5). Cicero’s comment reinforces what the Stow reports confirm: meteorology is malleable in highly idiosyncratic ways and empiricism has only a minor role to play.
Stow, with his religious language, was hardly being unusual in his descriptions. It is the significance attributed to these storms which is important. As in the play, the important thing is not only the spectacle, but also the way in which it is interpreted and symbolised as a means of consolidating and/ or troubling authority. Even if there is no religious quality to the attributed significance, there is invariably still a superstitious perspective involved. An example of such superstition is provided by Leonard Digges, writing in his Prognostication Everlasting of Right Good Effect:
Some write (their ground I see not) that Sunday’s thunder, should
bring the death of learned men, judges and others.
Monday’s thunder, the death of women.
Tuesday’s thunder, plenty of grain.
Wednesday’s thunder, the death of harlots, & other bloodshed.
Thursday’s thunder, plenty of sheep and corn.
Friday’s thunder, the slaughter of a great man, and other horrible murders. Saturday’s thunder, a general pestilent plague & great death.44
Digges’s suspicion of such beliefs (‘their ground I see not’) is clear, but the fact that he records them regardless is significant, and suggests that they have not vanished completely.
Another writer who notes superstitions based on thunder is Thomas Hill, whose Contemplation of Mysteries was published in 1574. The work is a compilation of the meteorological observations of many thinkers, edited by Hill, who notes:
The learned Beda wryteth, that if thunder be first heard, comming out of the East quarter, the same foresheweth before the yere go about or be ended, the great effusion of bloud.
That if thunder first heard out of the West quarter, then mortalitie, and a grievous plague to insue.
That if thunder be first heard out of the South quarter, threatneth the death of many by shipwrack.
That if thunder be first heard out of the North quarter, doth then portend the death of wicked persons, and the overthrowe of many.45
Again, death is the main emphasis here; thunder portends bloodshed or disease whichever direction it comes from. Hill, in a later work on dream interpretation, writes as though to confirm the above passage: ‘besides wheresoever the fyre [in the skye] shalbe or where it is carried up, as from ye North, South, West, or East, & from thense enemyes come, or els neare those regions or countryes, dearth shall be’.46 Those who feared the omens of storms and dreams of storms cannot have been calmed by the progress of Devereux, whose crossing to Ireland was beleaguered by tempest. The superstitions outlined by Digges and Hill, and others like them, were surely held by many as parameters of the thunder that accompanied the Earl’s march, whilst others would have adopted the sceptical position of Digges himself. Among the superstitious, moreover, was the possibility of taking the day’s weather to be a good omen or one of evil.47 Like all good prognostications, clarity can be safely achieved in hindsight, as with Francis Bacon who, writing many years afterwards, said that the storm ‘held an ominous prodigy’ and that he ‘did plainly see [Essex’s] overthrow chained by destiny to that journey’.48
The combination of strange weather and significant event ensures that both are more likely to be remembered. As Shapiro writes, the afternoon’s weather:
made so powerful an impression on the translator John Florio that, over a decade later, he included it in a dictionary as the definition of the word ‘Ecnéphia’: ‘a kind of prodigious storm coming in summer, with furious flashings, the firmament seeming to open and burn as happened when the Earl of Essex parted from London to go for Ireland’.49
Nor does it appear to concern Florio that the storm by which he defines the word does not come in summer – a condition of the definition – but in March. This is testament not only to the impression that the storm made on Florio but also that which he implicitly acknowledges it has made on his reading public. It makes much more sense to use an example that is ingrained in living memory, whether or not it fits in snugly with the definition. Such is the power of remarkable weather, especially when it occurs at dramatic moments which can be easily recollected by witnesses.
Writing in his casebooks of Devereux’s departure, Simon Forman gives the scene a rather different description:
[I]t began to rain and at three ’till four there fell such a hail shower that was very great, and then it thundered withal and the wind turned to the north and after the shower was past it turned to the south-east again, and there were many mighty clouds up, but all the day before one of the clock was a very fair day and clear, and four or five days before bright and clear and very hot like summer.50
Here, the veneration Stow displays for Essex’s progress is absent. Instead, the emphasis is on the strangeness of the weather in the episode. From the description, it seems that Forman found this particular piece of weather more remarkable than did Stow. There is no divining of meaning from the sky, merely exact description. Weather does not have to be ascribed meaning to be noteworthy, even when celebrity aristocrats are marching out to preserve the outposts of Elizabeth’s empire. Unexpected weather has a hold on the human imagination and this has continued into the twenty-first century; even when the weather has little consequence beyond its surprise factor, we find front-page headlines such as ‘After the Sunshine, Bolts from the Blue’, reporting unexpected lightning.51
Regardless, then, of how it was construed by those who observed it, here was certainly a piece of weather which, by virtue of its suddenness, its scope and its timing, inhabited the imagination of Londoners and remained there for some time. In short, there could not have been a better time for Shakespeare to take theatrical thunder to hitherto unexplored realms of expression and symbolic resonance. We will likely never be certain that he saw, or did not see Devereux’s cavalcade, but it is certain that many of the play-going public experienced the storm and debated its significance, and even more would have heard about it. As the storm of 27 March 1599 shows, however the weather is interpreted, and with whatever omens it is said to bring, there is likely to be disagreement. Furthermore, there is always the likelihood that the weather will be remembered long after those interpretations and omens have faded from memory. This notion has its parallel in the extended use of special effects in Julius Caesar, which must at least in part have been written to ensure the lasting reputation of the Globe as an exciting venue.
Early modern theatrical orthodoxy suggests that thunder and lightning provide the backdrop for heavenly or hellish creatures. In Julius Caesar, of course, no such creatures appear: this is a play concerned with the human interpretation of weather, just as it is concerned with the human interpretation of other properties – the will, the mantle, blood or a corpse. From the accounts of Stow, Digges, Hill, Bacon and Forman, we know that weather, especially when strange and dramatic, is held to be a significant background to important events and that interpretations of that significance can vary widely. In Julius Caesar, the same phenomenon is displayed. The very process of divining interpretation according to status is made explicit:
CAESAR Yet Caesar shall go forth, for these predictions
Are to the world in general as to Caesar.
CALPHURNIA When beggars die there are no comets seen;
The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.
(2.2.28–31)
The storm, and indeed the numerous portents that are listed by Calphurnia are not specific enough to persuade Caesar of his fate. ‘The world in general’ is subject to thunder and lightning. This is why Caesar has his ‘priests do present sacrifice’ (2.2.5); there is purpose only in reading futures if one knows whose future is being read. Calphurnia’s objection is designed both to flatter Caesar and reinforce the hierarchy inherent in such a brand of divination. Observers, likewise, feared or celebrated for Devereux: it is not surprising that there are no examples of the observers regarding that storm as significant for themselves. Just as Calphurnia elevates Caesar to be associated with the portents, so, in a different way, does Cassius:
you shall find
That heaven hath infused them with these spirits
To make them instruments of fear and warning
Unto some monstrous state.
Now could I, Casca, name to thee a man
Most like this dreadful night
That thunders, lightens, opens graves, and roars.
(1.3.68–74)
The play, then, utilises the practice of individual weather interpretation – the like of which we have observed in the accounts of Devereux – and the subjectivism of such interpretations is dramatically effective. Cassius’s rhetoric is one aware of the metaphorical potency which the storm provides. As Calphurnia interprets the storm as foretelling Caesar’s death, so Cassius views it as presaging Caesar’s life; the storm is too sudden and slippery a sign to be construed evenly by each character. What is also happening here, however, is that the audience witnessing the stage effects of the storm are being reminded of the symbolic weight of expectation which those effects have been shown to carry. Cicero’s remark, ‘men may construe things after their fashion | Clean from the purpose of the things themselves’ (1.3.34–5), may be seen to function as a caveat to the audience. Similarly the phrase of Casca’s to which Cicero is replying, ‘let not men say | “These are their reasons, they are natural”’ (29–30) keeps alive the possibility of the supernatural, but also stages the anticipation of the supernatural which is allied to theatrical storm.
Although I do not wish to enter the debate on how Julius Caesar and Henry V may be read together, particularly with regards to Devereaux’s biography, the plays share many inviting qualities. One that emerges here concerns the quality of greatness verging on tyranny, and its figurative alignment with the storm. Henry’s wrath is described: ‘Therefore in fierce tempest is he coming | In thunder and in earthquake, like a Jove’ (2.4.99–100). Henry is oragious, just as Caesar is figured: ‘a man | Most like this dreadful night | That thunders, lightens … ’ (1.3.71–3). Later in his career, Shakespeare would again write from this viewpoint with Isabella in Measure for Measure:
Could great men thunder
As Jove himself does, Jove would never be quiet,
For every pelting petty officer
Would use his heaven for thunder, nothing but thunder.
(2.2.112–15)
Isabella makes the relationship between storm, violence and power simultaneously extremely vivid and utterly vacuous. Considered alongside Henry, the images of Angelo and Caesar are damning ones and are commentaries on the storminess of tyranny. Again, we see the protean nature of the storm and are reminded that the ways of thinking about Shakespeare which it provides are never straightforward. Hence my inclination to avoid the life of Essex in reading Julius Caesar, however well those examples may function with his story as context. Texts as complex as Julius Caesar invariably demand that we look beyond these parallels with Elizabethan society if we are to draw conclusions about what, and how, the plays signify. Indeed, as Andrew Hadfield puts it, such parallels ‘were routinely made in the drama of the 1590s and would have done little on their own to distinguish the play from numerous other works competing for the attention of the theatregoing public’.52 What does distinguish this play is, as we have seen, the extended staged storm and Shakespeare’s arrangement of sound.
The storm in Julius Caesar, then, may be read as metatheatrical, a self-aware, self-aggrandising moment of theatre in which poetry reflects material practice. And yet there are far subtler poetic resonances in the lines. For example, a transition takes place from supernatural judgement – that feared by Casca – to human punishment by vigilante. Just as Cassius has ‘bared [his] bosom to the thunder-stone’ (1.3.49), so Brutus, attempting to swear his constancy, says:
When Marcus Brutus grows so covetous,
To lock such rascal counters from his friends,
Be ready gods with all your thunderbolts,
Dash him to pieces!
(4.3.79–82)
Brutus’s lines recall the rallying cry of the vigilante Plebians who set upon Cinna the Poet in Act 3, Scene 3. ‘Tear him to pieces’, says one, ‘Tear him, tear him!’ another, and ‘Come, brands, ho! Firebrands! To Brutus’, to Cassius’, burn all!’ say all together (3.3.28; 35–6). Thunderbolts and fire have been physically – visually – conflated on the stage, to the extent that one may stand for the other. Thus Brutus and Cassius, in calling upon the storm to prove their justifiability, slip into a category error: the thunder they invoke is explicitly supernatural, yet there is a viscerally functional human thunder in the frenzied crowd. Casca is frightened about what the storm portends, and Cassius is empowered: each crucially misreads the environment as something other than natural. The dramatic irony noted above is therefore deeper than it first appears. In a play that is often strikingly aware of the potential of theatre, the conspirators, though explicitly aligned with the creation and the action of the drama, are represented through a naïve and basic audience response: storm equals supernatural. Julius Caesar, as well as delighting in, and drawing attention to, its own special effects, is a comment on this response, its crudity and its dangers, most severely in the death of Cinna. In this way, as much as in the use of spectacular effects, it establishes the basis of the rest of Shakespeare’s storms.
Should an audience at the Globe have assumed the arrival of the supernatural with the sound effects of thunder, then, such assumption would have gradually eroded in the action of the play. The killing of the innocent Cinna does more than signify the extremity of mob violence: it stages the claim of the crowd to wield fire and consequently, thunder and lightning. It stages, that is, the absence of the supernatural as associated with storm. Thus the Globe’s opening figures the new playhouse not only as stage for the spectacular, but also as a place in which the expected is not given. Rather than the association of storm and the supernatural, storm is explicitly linked to human violence. In this way, it takes on board the resonances of determinism that structure all of the plays of Shakespeare that are based on historical narratives.