5

Wind

There are some who say that wind is simply a moving current of what we call air, while cloud and water are the same air condensed; they thus assume that water and wind are of the same nature, and define wind as air in motion. And for this reason, some people, wishing to be clever, say that all the winds are one, on the ground that the air which moves is in fact one and the same whole, and only seems to differ, without differing in reality, because of the various places from which the current comes on different occasions: which is like supposing that all rivers are but one river. The unscientific views of ordinary people are preferable to scientific theories of this sort.

Aristotle¹

Perhaps Aristotle tempted the ‘ordinary people’. As this epigraph suggests, there was a good deal of disagreement over the causes of wind. Rather than provide an undisputed framework for future generations, though, Aristo-tle’s theories remained in competition with those from other voices, who continued to propound the theories Aristotle here rebuts. Moreover, when the basic causes or nature of wind itself are contested, the finer points of understanding become an inconclusive mess. As we will see, the question of wind became a question of character. Aristotle supposed that winds were analogous to rivers in that each was a largely contained system with its own idiosyncrasies. Rather than detail exactly the way in which winds move and gain in strength, therefore, writers in early modern England followed their Classical predecessors in ascribing particular characteristics and names to each wind, often contradicting each other. The resultant confusion is made worse when, in retrospect, readers oversimplify their responses on the basis of one contested interpretation (whether ‘unscientific views of ordinary people’ or ‘scientific theories’). I will come to such responses below, with an example from Pericles.²

Within the wider context of my study, the exploration of wind is complicated by a further peculiarity. Today, wind is seen as a constituent part of a storm. If we think of the most extreme storms of recent years, they are likely to be ones characterised by high winds – hurricanes, cyclones or gales. In the destructive face of these phenomena, lightning, if it occurs, is a lesser concern than the force of the wind; thunder even less so. Hence, the OED has wind as the defining feature of a storm: ‘A violent disturbance of the atmosphere, manifested by high winds, often accompanied by heavy falls of rain, hail, or snow, by thunder and lightning, and at sea by turbulence of the waves’. ³ To measure the strength of a storm is to measure its wind speed, whether in units per hour or against a predefined scale.⁴ Wind is a quantifiable phenomenon.

In early modern texts, however, the emphasis is rather different. Wind was far from being an element of the definition of storms as in today’s language. Instead, ‘storm’ and ‘tempest’ are commonly employed as intensifying nouns (‘a storm of thunder’, for example, or ‘a tempest of lightning’), especially in factual accounts. Moreover, when winds are described meteorologically, it is often the case that storm winds are not given specific attention, and there is no consensus that one wind is more associated with storms than the others. This has led to a remarkable variability in the ways in which the wind’s characteristics are employed by creative writers.

Even when winds were described in meteorological terms, there was a dispute over the basic principles, as inherited from the Classical texts. As is evident in the above quotation from Aristotle, one existing theory was that wind was simply ‘air in motion’. That notion, found in Hippocrates, continued to hold sway after Aristotle’s contention that wind is an exhalation.⁵ Aristotle’s view follows from the notion that air is made up of vapour and smoke: ‘being composed, as it were, of complementary factors … because the exhalation continually increases and decreases, expands and contracts, clouds and winds are always being produced in their natural season’.⁶ When Pliny the Elder came to describe wind, he added a further theory: ‘So again are caverns … from which, if you throw some light object into it, even in calm weather a gust like a whirlwind burst out’.⁷ Moreover, ‘windings of mountains … and the hollow recesses of valleys … are productive of winds’.⁸

These competing theories were resolved by William Fulke. Whilst Fulke generally accepts, and slightly embellishes inherited ideas throughout The Goodly Gallery, his reasoning on wind is an impressive act of imaginative diplomacy. Essentially, Fulke’s solution is to allow for each theory to apply: Aristotle’s in general, and the others in specific situations. Hence for Fulke, in most circumstances: ‘The wynd is an Exhalation whote and drie, drawne up into the aire by the power of the sunne, & by reason of the wayght thereof being driven down, is laterally or sidelongs carried about the earth, & this definition is to be understanded, of general winds that blow over all the earth’.⁹

Fulke’s view is that the Hippocratic wind that Aristotle complains of ‘is but a soft gentile and coole moving of the ayre, and commeth from no certaine place (as the generall wind doth)’.¹⁰ Fulke goes on to describe the pleasantness of this wind, which seems to be what we would now call a summer breeze. This phenomenon, then, is not stormy in any way; indeed, is ‘properly no wind, but a moving of the ayre by some occasion’.¹¹ The remaining type of wind, however, is problematic. For Fulke, the Plinian cave theory is best understood as the idea that there are localised winds in certain countries, or areas: ‘this aire that cannot abide to be pinned in, findeth … as it were a mouth to breake out of, and by this meanes bloweth vehemently: yet that force & vehemency extendeth not farre’.¹² This helps explain the observation that wind in some areas ‘is very violent & strong, in so much, that it overthroweth both trees and houses, yet in other countries, not very farre distant, no part of that boysterous blast is felt’.¹³

It is, therefore, difficult to conclude from Fulke’s descriptions whether he believes that the high winds we now associate with storms are of the Aristotelian, exhalation group or the localised Plinian group. We might assume that Fulke would contend that storm winds might occur in any location, but this is not made explicit until much later. Only when he has fully explained thunder and lightning, does Fulke define ‘Storme wynde’, as ‘a thycke Exhalation violently moved out of a cloude without inflammation or burning’.¹⁴ The reasons for this order of the text are made clear, as Fulke likens the storm winds to lightning itself, ‘all one with ye matter of lightening, that hath béen spoken of: namely it is an Exhalation very whot and drye, and also grosse and thycke, so that it wyll easely be set on fyre, but then it hath another name, & other effectes’.¹⁵ This reasoning shows that it is not unlikely for storm winds and lightning (which, as we have seen, was acknowledged as producing thunder) to occur in close proximity.¹⁶

Fulke’s approach to the causes of wind seems to have persuaded his contemporaries and followers. Perhaps this is because it allows for the combination of competing theories, or perhaps it is simply that Fulke’s default position is Aristotelian. Disagreement persisted, however, in the idea of particular characters being ascribed to particular winds. From the Classical period onwards, writers have disagreed about the names and features of each wind, and even the number of winds which might, or should, be distinguished.¹⁷ Each of the four winds of the main compass points was popularly linked to one of the four elements: south and air; east and fire; west and water; north and earth. As such, attributes of the elements – moist or dry, hot or cold – were readily matched with the wind in question. There, however, the similarities in interpretation between writers tend to become less consistent, especially with the notion that one wind in particular might result in storms. It is this notion, more than the debates on the origins of all winds, that is especially relevant in reading dramatic or poetic texts of the period (or, as Aristotle might have it, ‘the unscientific views of ordinary people’). Heninger contends that ‘Each wind had definite characteristics, attributes, and associations, so that an author wishing to use a wind for literary purposes necessarily took great care in choosing the proper one’.¹⁸ However, as I will argue, the process is not so nearly refined as Heninger suggests.

To illustrate this, here is an example from Pericles. Unlike the almost silent daughter of Antiochus, Marina, lost daughter of Pericles, is verbose in the face of adversity. Her seemingly absent-minded conversation with Leonine draws on the story of her birth:

MARINA Is this wind westerly that blows?

LEONINE South-west.

MARINA When I was born the wind was in the north.

(4.1.49–50).

The direction of this wind and its significance has resulted in confusion amongst commentators. In an attempt to unravel the play’s geography, Peter Holland, not unreasonably, writes: ‘a north wind cannot blow a ship travelling from North Africa to somewhere close to Tarsus … It is a navigational impossibility’. ¹⁹ It is, of course, no surprise to find Shakespeare careless with cartography, and within the context of the play at least, Marina is accurate: ‘The grizzled north | Disgorges such a tempest forth’ (3.0.47–8). Doreen DelVecchio and Antony Hammond assert that ‘the south and south-west winds had negative associations for Shakespeare’.²⁰ This notion finds support in 2 Henry IV (‘the south | Borne with black vapour’ 2.4.363–4) and The Tempest (‘A southwest blow on ye | And blister you all o’er’ 1.2.324–5) among other plays. However, if this idea is not as firmly established as DelVecchio and Hammond contend, then it is contradicted entirely in The Winter’s Tale by Florizel’s ‘a prosperous south-wind friendly’ (5.1.160). ²¹

Roger Warren glosses Gower’s note of the wind’s direction as ‘north wind (bringer of storms)’.²² It is certainly true that many examples, from both poetic and factual sources, support Warren’s supposition. Barnabe Barnes, in a sonnet of 1593, writes: ‘The North whence stormes, with mistes and frostes proceede’.²³ In Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, a voyage to Tripolis is described as troubled by tempest, as ‘presently there arose a mighty storme, with thunder and raine, and the wind at North’.²⁴ Nor is the connection a novel one, for in the Biblical Apocrypha we find ‘The sounde of his thonder beateth the earth: so doeth the storme of the North’.²⁵ However, the notion that the north wind is the ‘bringer of storms’ is undermined by at least as many incidents as support it. Taking the south wind as an example, Nicolas de Nicolay, recounting explorations of Turkey, recalls Plutarch’s conviction that the desert was formed by ‘sand being moved with a storme which blew out of the south’.²⁶ In a 1586 work of criticism, William Webbe cites Virgil: ‘Looke how the tempest storme when wind out wrastling blowes at south’.²⁷ And the idea that the north wind is particularly tempestuous is not a Biblical one, for the south is just as dangerous: ‘And the Lord shalbe seene over them, and his arrowe shal go forthe as the lightning: and the Lord God shal blowe the trumpet, and shal come forthe with the whirlewindes of the South’.²⁸ Clearly, then, the characterisation of winds is not as simple a process as we might casually have thought, and is further complicated by several other possibilities. The direction of the wind might, for example, be seen to have medical significance, as in this extract from Simon Harward: ‘Fernelius sayth, The north wind utterly forbiddeth letting bloud, only the south wind doth best admit it in the cold time of winter’.²⁹ Clearly, although this quotation is from a medical text, the letting of blood in Act 4, Scene 1 has other connotations, Leonine having agreed to stab Marina.

There is a symbolic resonance to the wind in Marina’s enquiry – ‘is this wind westerly that blows’ – owing to a tradition of the wind’s agreeable, or even fertile nature. For Pliny, it is ‘that spirit of generation which doth breath life into all the world’.³⁰ During the plagues of Egypt, the west wind is sent by God to rid Egypt of the locust (or grasshopper in the Geneva text) just as He sent them with an east wind. This was often recalled in sermons and religious tracts of the early modern period.³¹ But just as with the north wind, the tradition finds itself at odds, whether in poetry or experience. In the Odyssey, then, ‘The old Sea-tell-truth leaves the deepes, and hides | Amidst a blacke storme, when the West wind chides’.³² In Thomas Dekker’s account of the plague year of 1603, the author opines ‘O world of what slight and thin stuffe is thy happinesse! Just in the midst of this jocund Hollday, a storme rises in the West’.³³ And in the Gospel of Luke, it is taken as a given that ‘when ye se a cloud rise out of the West, straightaway ye say, A shower commeth: and so it is’.³⁴ The southwest, meanwhile, also has its threats. This applies at sea: ‘the winde came Southwest, and with so great a storme, that we thought to have run upon the strand, and were forced to cut downe our maine maste’.³⁵ It also pertains on land: ‘And when the Southwest winde doth long blow about the ende of harvest, then those persons diseased with a long sicknesse, doe shortly after die’.³⁶ Traditions of a wind’s character, it seems, are increasingly exposed as naïve and problematic in the phenomenon of the early modern publishing industry, especially when that industry is so invested in travel narratives.

The north wind might be understood in another way, as shown by John Deacon in his 1601 work, Dialogicall Discourses. Deacon describes the way weather affects those suffering from melancholy madness, which ‘eftsoones is encreased in the spring, & in summer: yea, & it is then the extreamest of all when the north-winde blowes, by reason of the drines thereof’.³⁷ It is possibly this characteristic Hamlet alludes to: ‘I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw’ (2.2.315–16). The dryness of the north wind is part of the association of characteristics attributed to each wind by contemporary meteorology.³⁸ Like its corollary element, earth, the north wind was seen to be cold and dry as it ‘riseth out of watrie places, that bee froze and bounde, because they bee so farre from the circle of the Sunne’.³⁹ The idea of the dry north wind is expressed most clearly in the Proverb ‘the Northwind driveth away raine’, quoted by clergymen in sermons and repeated in ecumenical commentaries.⁴⁰ Given this, it might seem curious that a tempest should arise from a northerly wind. However, as is characteristic of early modern notions of wind, the equation is not so simple. The north wind, although dry, carries poetic associations of violence, as expressed in this sonnet of Barnabe Barnes:

That boystrous turbulence of North winds might

Which swels and ruffles in outragious sort:

Those chearefull Southerne showers whose fruitefull dew

Brings forth all sustenance for mans comfort[.]⁴¹

Here, the rain is not oragious, but refreshing – it is the south wind’s revitalising answer to the chaotic influence of the north’s. The ‘boystrous turbulence’ of the wind in Pericles is clear enough: Pericles prays to the ‘god of this great vast … | … that hast| Upon the winds command, bind them in brass’ (3.1.1–3). Indeed, the violence of the wind is the reason which Pericles’s crew demand that Thaisa be abandoned: ‘the wind is loud and will not lie, till the ship be cleared of the dead’ (3.1.48–9). The important characteristic of the north wind, then, both in the storm scene itself, and in Marina’s recounting of it, is not dryness, but chaos. Just as in the Barnes poem, the quality of the north wind is understood partly through its opposite, so in Pericles, the text creates its own weather dynamic. Far more important than the several cultural undertones of the particular wind is the construction established in the conversation. Although the wind in the scene is ‘South-west’, Leonine’s emphasis is on south, to qualify Marina’s suggestion that the wind is solely from the west. Marina associates the north wind with birth, then, whilst Leonine emphasises south, thereby implicating that wind in the scene with connotations of Marina’s death. In this way, opposites are used for symbolic effect: north/south, birth/death. Just as Marina connects the north wind with danger and futility (‘When I was born. | Never was waves nor wind more violent’ 4.1.57–8) so the other winds seem to maintain her sense of security (Lychorida seems still to live, for example, in Marina’s retelling). This sense, and the narrative which results, elevates the dramatic tensions of the passage. Shakespeare eschews the learnt associations of weather and portent, just as he does the conflation of storm effects and the supernatural. As elsewhere, he is more interested in the speed and certainty with which his characters tend towards symbolising weather.⁴²