3
On 17 November 1606, at around ten o’clock at night, lightning struck the steeple of the church in the village of Bletchingly in Surrey. Simon Harward, a clergyman in Banstead, some nine miles away, heard rumours of the incident and was moved to visit Bletchingly, whose inhabitants had for many years shown him kindness. Harward’s fears were confirmed. The spire of the church, apparently as tall again as the tower which supported it, had been consumed by fire. In the space of three hours, that fire had destroyed the steeple, and caused to ‘melt to infinite fragments a goodly Ring of Bells’.1
Harward was obviously affected by the experience, as it moved him to write his pamphlet, A Discourse of the Several Kinds and Causes of Lightnings. The sympathy of the author, and his sense of wonder, is especially evident in his description of the bells which were ‘before a sweet ring, and so large, that the Tenor waighed twenty hundred waight’.2 Whilst some of the bells could perhaps be salvaged, others were ‘burnt into such cinders, or intermingled with such huge heaps of cinders as it will never herafter serve to the former uses of’.3 A clearer impression of Harwood’s response, though, is gained through the time it took to produce. The preface to the text is dated 20 November, just two days after Harward could have arrived in Bletchingly. Whether motivated by genuine compassion, commercial cynicism, or the opportunity to sermonise, Harward manages in that short gestation period to produce a neat comprehensive account of ancient and contemporary lightning theory. In 1607, the pamphlet was sold at the stall of Jeffrey Chorlton, near the North door of St Paul’s Cathedral. It is tempting to imagine that Chorlton’s sales patter made reference to a more famous lightning strike: that which destroyed the steeple of St Paul’s in 1561.
The causes of lightning are, for Harward, quite plain. Much of his pamphlet is given over to moralising through various examples of lightning strikes of the past. Hence, the ‘opinions of philosophers and astronomers’ on the ‘naturall cause’ of lightning are filtered into an appendix. More space is given to ‘The causes of the greivous harmes which are often caused by lightnings’ which ‘are of three sorts, the first judicial, the second instructive: and the third faticidall’. When Harward does outline the natural causes of lightning, though, he is clear:
First a viscous vapour joyned with a hot exhalation is lifted up to the highest part of the middle region of aire, by virtue of the Planets: then the waterie vapour by the coldnesse both of place and of matter, is thickened into a clowd, and the exhalation (which was drawne up with it) is shut within the clowd, and driven into straights.
This hotte exhalation flying the touching of the cold clowd, doth flie into the depth of the clowd that doeth compasse it about, and courseth up and downe in the clowd seeking some passage out[.]4
Lightning, then, like thunder, is seen as an exhalation, or rather a vapour joined with an exhalation. At this point, it is worth remarking that Harward here is, as others before him have done, effectively describing the way in which a cloud becomes electrically charged. If this seems naïve, it should be remembered that such a process cannot accurately be described (at least without disagreement) even by today’s meteorologists. Although the language of vapours and exhalations is peculiar, then, the idea that clouds are invested with a special and unusual energy before producing lightning is a curious anticipation of electricity. Moreover, the idea of the exhalation of lightning breaking through the cloud is analogous to lightning discharging its electrical energy:
[this hotte exhalation] maketh a way by force, and being kindled, by the violent motion it breaketh through the clowde. If the sides of the hollowe clowd be thicke, and the exhalation be drie and copious, then there is made both thunder and lightning: but if the clowd be thin, and the exhalation also rare and thin, then there is lightening without thunder.5
Harward’s pamphlet, then, details with concision the established explanation of the causes of lightning. There is little disagreement between early modern writers on this basic process, and the speed with which Harward outlined it suggests that this knowledge is hardly recherché. But if the fundamental principles of lightning are straightforward, the nuances in the detail are anything but. It is a familiarity with such nuances of the early modern understanding of lightning that enriches our reading of dramatic texts. Take, for example, this passage from Pericles, in which Helicanus recounts the deaths of Antiochus and his daughter to Escanes:
Even in the height and pride of all his glory,
When he was seated in a chariot
Of inestimable value, and his daughter with him,
A fire from heaven came and shrivelled up
Their bodies even to loathing for they so stunk
That all those eyes adored them ere their fall
Scorn now their hand should give them burial.
(2.4.6–12)
Although there are many storms throughout Shakespeare’s plays, and though some characters perish in shipwrecks, it is only in Pericles that anyone is killed by what seems to be a lightning strike. Even then, it seems unlikely that this speech is Shakespeare’s, as it bears the stylistic stamps of his collaborator or co-writer George Wilkins. Still, it is necessary to consider it here not only because of its unusualness, but also because it provides a platform from which to explore the various understandings of lightning available to an audience or reader in early Jacobean London.
There is a question, though, which threatens such exploration from the start: is this ‘fire from heaven’ lightning? A lightning bolt is, perhaps, the likely reasoning of a modern reader, but other fires from heaven appear in early modern accounts. Hence, for example, Juliet’s plea to Romeo, ‘Yond light is not daylight, I know it, I. | It is some meteor that the sun exhales | To be to thee this night a torchbearer’ (R&J 3.5.12–14). These are also the visions of Tamburlaine’s image: ‘So shall our swords, our lances and our shot | Fill all the aire with fiery meteors. Then when the Sky shal waxe as red as blood, It shall be said, I made it red my selfe’.6 For all of their symbolic charge, though, and whatever form they took, such fires – the early modern term used is generally ‘apparitions’ – were thought of as harmless.7 The fire that kills Antiochus and his daughter is not one of these apparitions, then, but a lightning strike.
This conclusion tallies with The Painful Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre (1608), Wilkins’s prose version of the story, in which the description is less ambiguous:
Vengeance with a deadly arrow drawne from foorth the quiver of his wrath, prepared by lightning, and shot on by thunder, hitte, and strucke dead these prowd incestuous creatures where they sate, leaving their faces blasted, and their bodies such a contemptfull object on the earth[.]8
Wilkins here lists the several parts of a thunderbolt’s action – thunder, lightning and the notion of striking – which are absent in the play’s ambiguous phrasing. Similarly, in John Gower’s poem, Confessio Amantis, the major source of the play:
That for vengance, as god it wolde,
Antiochus, as men mai wite,
With thondre and lyhthnynge is forsmite;
His doghter hath the same chaunce.9
Again, in Laurence Twyne’s adaptation of the story, The Pattern of Painful Adventures, ‘Antiochus and his daughter by the just judgement of God, were stroken dead with lightning from heaven’.10
Taking the meteorology into account, therefore, Helicanus’s ‘fire from heaven’ seems to be a bolt of lightning. But whilst this agrees with Wilkins’s prose and the poetic source material, it differs from the other main influence at work, the story of Antiochus IV Epiphanes in the Apocrypha of the Bible (hereafter Antiochus IV).11 The Biblical connection is evidenced by both the chariot and the stink of flesh, but distinguished by the cause of death: Antiochus IV ‘commanded his charet man to drive continually … But the Lorde almightie & God of Israel smote him with an incurable and invisible plague’, ‘and whiles he was alive, his flesh fel of for paine and torment, and all his armie was grieved at his smell’.12
By opting for lightning rather than plague, Wilkins, like Gower and Twyne before him, changes the moralisation of Antiochus’s death. The lightning strike – its absoluteness – ensures that Antiochus does not have the time for redemption for which Antiochus IV survives. All three writers figure the death as heavenly revenge or judgement: there is no space for Antiochus’s absolution. In the play we are told of ‘the most high gods not minding longer | To withhold the vengeance that they had in store’ (2.4.4– 5). In his Painful Adventures, Wilkins draws attention to what the lightning means for the victims and their fate: ‘twixt his stroke and death, hee lent not so much mercy to their lives, wherein they had time to crie out; Justice, be mercifull, for we repent us’.13
Antiochus IV has time to become wholly contrite, but Antiochus and his daughter have no time to speak at all. Part of the appeal of the lightning strike over the Biblical disease of Antiochus IV, therefore, is the rapidity of action. So often figuratively representative of anything swift or sudden, the reality of lightning when employed for these very qualities has the urgency that only a dramatically reclaimed and reified metaphor can assume.
Until now, I have been using ‘lightning’ to describe the ‘fire from heaven’. ‘Lightning’, however, is something of an umbrella term: as I have suggested, if its possible meanings are explored, then further nuances are revealed. Most of the meteorological texts classify separate kinds of lightning, but vary in their descriptions and nomenclature. The clearest available – and the text that seems to have influenced subsequent writers the most – is William Fulke’s Goodly Gallery. Fulke distinguishes four separate types of lightning: fulgetrum, coruscation, fulgur and fulmen.14 According to Fulke, fulgetrum, whilst ‘terrible to beholde’, is ‘not hurtful to any thing’, with the occasional exception being when ‘it blasteth corne, and grasse, with other small hurt’.15 Clearly, the fire which strikes Antiochus and his daughter is not recognisable in this description. Coruscation can also be discounted in this case, for it ‘is a glistering of fyre, rather then fyre in deade, and a glymmerynge of lyghtning, rather then lightning it self’.16 By Fulke’s description, fulgur comes closer to Pericles’s fire from heaven, as when the thunder ‘beateth against the sydes of the cloude, with the same violence, it is set on fyre, and casteth a great lyghte, whiche is séen, farre and neare’.17 Whilst there is a certain amount of violence mentioned in the definition, however, it is, like those listed before it, ‘more feareful then hurteful’.18 This leaves fulmen, which, Fulke posits, is ‘the moste dangerus, violent, & hurtfull, kinde of lightning’ and which ‘seldome passeth without som damage doing’.19
Bartholomaeus’s description of fulmen, as translated by Stephen Batman in 1582, agrees with that of Fulke: ‘this lyghtening smiteth, thirleth, and burneth things that it toucheth, and multiplyeth, and cleaveth and breaketh, and no bodilye thing withstandeth it’.20 Thomas Hill, with characteristic concision, names fulmen as ‘the perillousser lightning’, highlighting both its danger and extremity in comparison to other forms of lightning. 21
The danger perceived in fulmen resides chiefly in the belief that it is seen as the cause of the thunder-stone.22 Hill describes the process:
The fumous and somewhat black lightning, procéedeth of a verie earthly and obscure, yet a matter mightily burning, whose clowde, in that it containeth very much of the viscous moysture, is woont to fabricate or forme a black or yronnie stone, which in ye shot sent forth, burneth hastilye mightie bodyes of trées, and sundrie other most solide matters, without shewe or signe left behinde: yea, these and other matters this cleaveth, destroyeth, and utterly wasteth.23
The thunder-stone, then, is wholly destructive. The kind of devastation described by Hill is at stake when characters in the drama refer to this type of lightning. It is this level of danger, for example, which Cassius evokes in Julius Caesar as he brags, ‘I have bared my bosom to the thunder-stone’ (1.3.94). This boast is contingent on the idea that the thunder-stone is the ‘perillousser’ sort of lightning: Cassius is speaking in extremes.
For Fulke, then, fulmen is the only type of lightning which could possibly fit Helicanus’s description of the fire from heaven that kills Antiochus and his daughter. For other commentators, though, there is a further classification of lightning which is potentially deadly. Pliny termed this type clarum, which Holland translated as ‘Bright and Cleare’.24 Clarum does not appear in Fulke’s list, and is not so named by many other commentators, who nonetheless describe its qualities. As Heninger notes, ‘it accounted for many wonders popularly ascribed to lightning’.25 Bartholomaeus, who does name the lightning as clarum, claims that it ‘melteth golde and silver in pursses, and melteth not the pursse’.26 Hill makes the same claim, and offers further descriptions of clarum’s features, declaring that it ‘burneth man inwarde, and consumeth the bodie to ashes, without harming the garments, it slayeth the yongling in the wombe, without harme to the mother … it melteth the sworde the sheath being whole’.27 Harward, referring to ‘penetrans, a pearcing lightening’, also hints at its destructive properties: ‘It pearceth thorough the outward pores of the body and slayeth the vitall parts within’.28
Given two such deadly possibilities it would seem difficult to find a way of identifying which kind of lightning is responsible for the deaths of Antiochus and his daughter. La Primaudaye describes what happens when people are struck by lightning: ‘Those who are stroken … remain all consumed within, as if their flesh, sinews, and bones were altogether molten within their skin, it remaining sound & whole, as if they had no harme’.29 La Primaudaye here does not name the lightning, but his details match the penetrative effects of clarum. Conversely, as we have seen in Bartholomaeus’s account, ‘no bodilye thing withstandeth’ the power of fulmen. It may seem a minor distinction, but in Helicanus’s narrative, ‘A fire from heaven came and shrivelled up | Their bodies’. Here, the subtler effect of clarum is not in evidence. Moreover, the corpses in Pericles ‘so stunk’ that the citizens either refused to bury them, or bemoaned the responsibility. In Bartholomaeus’s text, the author lists as a property of fulmen that ‘where he burneth, he gendreth therwith full evill stench and smoak’.30 Helicanus’s fire from heaven is fulmen, or the thunder-stone.
Why does the type of lightning matter? Whilst the celerity of lightning is important in denying Antiochus time for repentance, the destructiveness is important in terms of what is left behind. Whereas a clarum strike could still be fatal, it would maintain the appearance of harmlessness: damaging within, but ‘never toucht therewith or burnt, nor any other shewe and token … left behind’, as Pliny puts it.31 Antiochus, a ruler who places great emphasis on appearances, is ‘seated in a chariot of inestimable value’ and he and his daughter are ‘both apparelled all in jewels’.32 In Painful Adventures, Wilkins goes further, in describing the couple as ‘gazing to be gazed upon’.33 Just as lightning leaves no time for repentance, this type of lightning leaves no space for these images of pompous indulgence. There is a further connection here with the Biblical account of Antiochus IV, who is castigated under similar conditions: ‘Howbeit he wolde in no wise cease from his arrogancie, but swelled the more with pride’.34 Like Antiochus and his daughter, Antiochus IV rides in his ‘charet that ran swiftely’.35 Furthermore, the moral distance between the two doomed Antiochus figures and their respective people is represented sensually: ‘no man colde beare because of his stinke, him that a litle afore thoght he might reach to the starres of heaven’;36; in Pericles, ‘so they stunk | That all those eyes adored them ere their fall | Scorn now’. And just as the striking of fulmen destroys the iconographic image of the incestuous couple of Pericles, so the divine plague affects the mind and belief of Antiochus IV as much as his body: ‘And when he him self might not abide his owne stinke, he said these wordes, It is mete to be subject unto God, & that a man which is mortal, shulde not thinke him self equal unto God through pride’.37 It is the capacity of fulmen to destroy Antiochus and his daughter, rendering their bodies the same state as the plague, but the symbolic resonance of lightning’s swiftness confirms that there is no possibility of salvation.
The classification of lightnings in relation to dramatic texts, then, may recover poetic subtleties that the modern reader may otherwise overlook. One more example is worth looking at briefly. In Cymbeline, Guiderius and Aviragus lament ‘Fidele’, in song: ‘Fear no more the lightning-flash, | Nor th’all-dreaded thunder-stone’ (4.2.270–1). The thunder-stone, as we have seen, is caused by fulmen, and is justifiably ‘all-dreaded’. Conversely, the lightning flash is harmless. In that it flashes, it fits most closely with coruscation, in Fulke’s phrase ‘a glymmerynge of lightning, rather then lightning it self’, but could also be, in Fulke’s words fulgetrum.38 It is manifestly not fulmen, the chief characteristics of which are its downward motion and its violent force. The harmlessness is the crucial quality of the song’s lightning-flash, the tendency to fear it being in its suddenness and shock value. Only with an acknowledgement of the classifications of lightning, can we appreciate that this phrase is suggestive of lightning’s two extreme manifestations: a wide range of occurrences, not a single storm. Seen in this way, the phrase integrates more comfortably with the reset of the song’s aesthetic, in which ‘the heat o’th’ sun’ is juxtaposed with ‘the furious winter’s rages’ and ‘the reed is as the oak’ (258–9; 267). Lightning, like the song’s other examples from nature, has a range of extremes, from the frightening to the utterly destructive. Indeed, its undamaging form is recalled by Cymbeline at the play’s end, as he notes that ‘Posthumus anchors upon Imogen; | And she (like harmless lightning) throws her eye | On him’ (5.5.394–6). This recalls the tame lightning of the lament, but also perhaps the beneficent thunderbolt thrown by the descending Jupiter in Posthumus’s dream (5.4.92sd).
Elsewhere, the diction describing lightning relates much more obviously to stage effects. In addition to re-establishing the nuance of seemingly simple terms, like ‘lightning’, an understanding of early modern meteorology helps to clarify the language of the plays. In Julius Caesar, for example, when Brutus is brought the letter in his orchard, he claims ‘The exhalations whizzing in the air | Give so much light that I may read by them’ (2.1.44–5). The word ‘exhalations’, is often glossed as ‘meteors’, rather than lightning.39 Given that ‘exhalation’ does, in early modern terminology, cover several types of weather, the assumption that Brutus is referring to meteors is problematic. Indeed, there is no particular cause for concluding that he is, but it is worth pointing out that in either case he is still commenting on the weather: meteors are meteorological by the same theory which holds that lightning is an exhalation. Even if we do assume that Brutus’s phrase refers to meteors, there is still, in early modern thinking, a stormy element to shooting stars:
For they say, that the starres fall out of the firmament, and that by the fall of them, both thonder and lyghtning are caused: for the lightening (say they) is nothyng els but the shyning of that starre that falleth, which falling into a watrie clowde, and being quenched in it, causeth that great thonder, even as whoat yron maketh a noyce if it be cast into colde water. But 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.40
Although William Fulke is not convinced by the theory that meteors can cause thunder and lightning, his description suggests that he is at odds with the popular belief. That belief is espoused to by Pliny, who holds that storms caused by falling stars are of a special providence.41 Despite the existence of this theory, Brutus’s word, ‘exhalations’, much more readily refers to lightning itself – or the phenomena in the category of apparitions – than to meteors. However, the most important point is that Brutus – as with the characters of the preceding scene – is calling attention to the stage effects. Hence ‘whizzing’, which is more evocative of the fireworks display of Act 1, Scene 3 than of any type of weather observed by early modern meteorologists. Of course, Brutus’s line is hyperbolic or comic: whether meteor or lightning, the light is impossible to read by. Like Casca and Cassius, though, his language – and the catchall term ‘exhalations’ – revels in the stage effects of the Globe playhouse.
Simon Harward, William Fulke and other writers of meteorological texts understood that some clouds are invested with a particular energy which results in lightning. But whilst the understanding of lightning in early modern England was broadly agreed upon, there is a wealth of poetic resonance in the detail. Writers have long called on lightning when an image of swiftness is required, and, of course Shakespeare and his contemporaries are no different. But just as the lightning in Homer is often literal and deadly, so the manifestations of it in early modern England were terrifying, as Simon Harward found. As I have shown, lightning is much more than a representation for speed, and whether harmless or destructive, metatheatrical or metaphorical, its range of meaning provided a wide resource for writers.