6
Witchcraft is in itself much more terrible in its theatrical effect than the most absurd dogmas of religion; that which is unknown, or created by supernatural intelligence, awakens fear and terror to the highest degree: in every religious system whatever, terror is carried only to a certain length, and is always at least founded upon some motive: but the chaos of magic bewilders the mind.
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël, 18001
Macbeth’s storms are reminiscent of storms elsewhere. In the play, we have the meaning of remarkable weather, signs and portents debated, as in Julius Caesar; we have magical, conjured thunder and lightning, as in The Tempest; we have, as in King Lear, the intimation of apocalypse and fatalistic doom. But this familiarity is misleading, for there is something peculiarly unsettling, subversive even, about Macbeth’s incidences of storm. As suggested in the epigraph above from de Staël, this unsettling quality can be traced to the play’s treatment of magic. The debates of remarkable weather follow the rebellious murder, rather than forewarn it. The conjurers do not renounce their art.
The play exhibits the familiar and obvious relationship of storm and the supernatural. Macbeth exploits this relationship in its staging, with stage directions for Thunder and Lightning for each entrance of the Witches. It is also present in the play’s meteorology, which suggests supernatural origins for the remarkable weather. The distinction between a natural and a supernatural storm is, I will argue, critical in a meteorological reading of Macbeth. And yet, in an important sense, that relationship remains secretive: at the conclusion of the play, the magic is not only un-renounced but defiant, furtive, even victorious. The incidents in Macbeth of weather being attributed to natural causes are invariably from characters who are not involved with the Witches. The naivety of the surviving characters on the battlefield at the end of Macbeth can be seen as reflected in their inability to recognise the supernatural identity of the weather. In this chapter, I will show how this conclusion is prefigured throughout the play. Macbeth stages storms that conform to the theatrical status quo, in that they provide a backdrop for the supernatural figures. It is then, more widely, the sense of the supernatural storm which I will examine, along with the alternative meteorologies propounded by the characters who do not meet or know of the Witches. The constant tug between these extremes is reminiscent of the play’s renowned espousal of equivocation and, as my chapter title suggests, this can be viewed in relation to a particularly violent phenomenon: the earthquake. As we shall see, the early modern distinction between storm and earthquake is not a decisive one; the two phenomena are fundamentally related.
Macbeth’s stormy opening is an obvious place to begin. Perhaps less obvious is the extent to which these familiar lines, along with their concurrent effects, constitute a distinctly strange instance of storm:
Thunder and lightning. Enter three Witches
1 WITCH When shall we three meet again?
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
(1.1.1–2)
The use of thunder and lightning to open a play is unusual. This is Shakespeare’s first such usage and The Tempest is the only other. Nor is there a great deal of precedent for such an opening: Macbeth is the earliest extant play in English to begin with the stage direction.2 Perhaps Shakespeare, after writing Lear, once more recognised the dramatic potency of the stage effects and thought the idea of a loud, pyrophoric assault an excellent attention grabber. Perhaps the playwright saw the implicit connection of storm with the battleground of the following scene, as Ronald Watkins and Jeremy Lemmon have suggested:
The noise of storm, the cries of the familiar spirits that attend upon the Witches, above all the dialogue of the Witches themselves invest the battle of the play’s opening with a greater and more fateful significance than the simple issue of military victory and defeat.3
The relationship of storm and battle is intriguing, and may offer an insight into why Shakespeare opens with the storm. The noise of thunder and that of the battle drums must have sounded fairly similar,4 and, as we shall see, the Captain in the second scene explicitly likens the battle to a storm. Although I will offer possible answers, the question as to why Shakespeare decides to open with storm effects is not one which we can answer with certainty. What we can say, however, is that from this arresting opening, the storm is explicitly linked with the supernatural. In this, Macbeth is already qualitatively different from the other plays which we have thus far examined.
It may be that the play’s orthodox pairing of storm and the supernatural is the result of Thomas Middleton’s revisions to the text; and the scenes with the Witches do seem to be the ones on which Middleton concentrated his efforts.5 Even if Middleton is responsible for all of these scenes, the Witches exhibit a tendency of Shakespeare’s other supernatural characters by speaking in rhyming trochaic tetrameter. The verse form is itself evocative of the workings of magic: we might remember that the same poetic structure characterises, for example, the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘I do wander everywhere, | Swifter than the moon’s sphere; | And I serve the Fairy Queen, | To dew her orbs upon the green’ (1.2.6–9). In The Tempest, Prospero’s epilogue takes the form, as does some of Ariel’s speech and that of Juno and Ceres (4.1.44–8; 106–17).6 To the sound of staged lightning and thunder, then, is added the sound of a verse form which is recognisably other. In beginning with a storm and with the incantatory chants of the Witches, Shakespeare (or Middleton) is drawing on a vein of reference which immediately contextualises the thunder and lightning. The weather is constructed as supernatural from the outset. That the connection of storm and the supernatural is common adds to the effect of its strangeness: the storm is thereby both usual, in that the audience recognise the context, and unusual, in that it begins the play, and in that the remarkable weather is not treated as supernatural by any of the other characters.
The use of the verse form intensifies the connection of storm and magic. As I have already noted, evil spirits and supernatural events on the Renaissance stage are frequently accompanied by thunder and lightning. I have been arguing that Shakespeare’s plays do not automatically engage in the relationship of storm and the supernatural, but it must be said that Macbeth is not the first instance in which we find the correlation at work. Indeed, the connection is made in one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, Henry VI, Part 2 (another play with several authorial hands). During the play, as Roger Bolinbroke summons the spirit Asnath through the witch, Margery Jordan, the spirit is accompanied by one of the earliest examples of storm in Shakespeare’s work:
The time when screech-owls cry and ban-dogs howl,
And spirits walk, and ghosts break up their graves;
That time best fits the work we have in hand …
Here do the ceremonies belonging, and make the circle; Bolingbroke or Southwell reads, ‘Conjuro te’, etc. It thunders and lightens terribly, then the Spirit riseth.
(1.4.17–21)
If this is Shakespeare’s first staging of thunder and lightning, then, he immediately endows storm with a sense of the supernatural. When this sense is problematised it is done so vigorously and for aesthetic effect. Asnath is an explicitly evil spirit, as evidenced by his name and the ‘burning lake’ from which he arises (37). The structure of the renaissance playhouse is applicable here, divided as it is into three sections: the Earth of the stage between Heaven and Hell. Evil spirits, as in these examples, nearly always rise from below. Margery Jordan, though the text names her as a witch, invokes ‘the eternal God’ to persuade Asnath to answer (24). Though a conduit for an evil spirit, then, and thereby associated with storm, the witch is seen to contain the evil which the presence of the spirit threatens. Asnath speaks on her terms, and on those of God. This is manifestly different from the Witches of Macbeth who are very quickly established as servants to their spirits: ‘I come, Grimalkin’, ‘Paddock calls’ (1.1.7–8) and who certainly do not appeal to God, but who do have an oragious entrance of their own.
The connection between storm and the supernatural, then, a staple of early modern theatre, is made explicit from the beginning of Macbeth. While we cannot, of course, expect characters in plays to be ‘aware’ of the theatrical conditions of their representation, part of the method of Macbeth is to draw attention to the different levels of meaning between characters, and indeed, audience: again, the storm brings out dramatic irony in Shakespeare’s play. It is often commented that the Witches’ ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’ (1.1.12) is echoed by Macbeth’s ‘So foul and fair a day I have not seen’ (1.3.36). Such an echo is indicative both of the pervasive effect of the Witches on the climate and of the invisibility inherent in their conjuring. Macbeth ‘has not seen’ such weather, but also ‘has not seen’ a source for such weather. Indeed, with Banquo and, indirectly, Lady Macbeth, he is one of the people who do see this cause. All other characters ‘have not seen’ and are not capable of seeing; the supernatural identity of the catalysts of the play’s action remains invisible. This is a very precise dramatic irony given that the connection between storm and the supernatural had been truly visible on the stage for many years before Macbeth.
Of course, the alliance of supernatural and storm is not solely the preserve of the dramatic. Indeed, it seems likely that the above stage instances were inspired and informed by popular belief. King James, famously, was suspicious of witches (I shall explore a particular manifestation of this suspicion later) and wrote weighty and detailed works against them. In his Daemonologie (1597), he writes ‘They can rayse stormes and tempestes in the aire, either upon Sea or land, though not universally, but in such a particular place and prescribed boundes, as God will permitte them so to trouble’.7 William Perkins (1558–1602), in drawing the difference between a ‘bad witch’ and ‘good witch’ notes that the former can ‘raise tempests by sea and by land’.8 In A Treatise of Witchcraft (1616), Alexander Roberts concludes: ‘[As f]or the Elements, it is an agreeing consent of all, that they can corrupt and infect them, procure tempests, to stirre up thunder & lightning, move violent winds, destroy the fruits of the earth’.9 Reginald Scot, a noted sceptic, begins his Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) with the subtitle An impeachment of Witches power in meteors and elementary bodies, tending to the rebuke of such as attribute too much unto them. Scot’s lengthy work, then, is itself testament to the belief in the meteorological power of witchcraft, and he makes the point clear in his opening chapter, which is labelled ‘Credulitie’. ‘But let me see’, writes Scot ‘anie of them all rebuke and still the sea in time of tempest, as Christ did; or raise the stormie wind, as God did with his word; and I will believe in them’.10 Such seeing – every sensationalist aspect of it – was clearly happening in the theatres of London whether Scot would have approved or not. Yet Macbeth’s figures are not necessarily typical stage witches. Ryan Curtis Friesen has contended that they are ‘demonic and existing in ambiguous domains reachable only through acts of tyranny’ and contrasted with, say, Middleton’s witches who are ‘a brand of entertainment industry, easy to locate and cheap to bargain with’.11
Given this contemporary climate, then, in the playhouses and in literature, the association of witches and storm in Macbeth is not surprising. Critics have long argued over what power exactly the Witches possess but they are at least constructed as being something other by the effects of light and sound. The fact that the Witches and thunder and lightning always appear at the same time suggests an early modern signifier – which has kept some of its identity, if not its potency – of the supernatural.12 This, furthermore, in a play run through with storm and wind imagery.13 If the play does not require the question to be answered of what the Witches are, it at least demands that we inform any reading of the play’s weather with an acceptance of their role in it. In answering the questions ‘what are the implications of the storm in figuring the theistic identity of the Witches?’ and ‘how are those implications to be read in the rest of the play?’ it is crucial to bear in mind the supernatural force of weather which proves an immediate point of reference. Whatever power the Witches have, the extensive correlation of their appearance and the thunder and lightning identifies both them and the storm as supernatural. As we have seen, this correlation is not solely a dramatic construct. However, it is also important to remember that, for the Jacobean, weather may be thought of as being caused by either natural or supernatural causes.14 ‘Natural’ causes – those attributable to ‘meteors’ – were deemed explainable by science or natural philosophy, which of course, witchcraft was not. Although they may have portended the same omen, storms were frequently attributed to one source or the other; the two weather systems seemed to have been imagined to work in tandem, without functioning at the same time. Hence, when King James describes the storms for which witches are responsible, he declares they are
verie easie to be discerned from anie other naturall tempestes that are meteores, in respect of the suddaine and violent raising thereof, together with the short induring of the same. And this is likewise verie possible to their master to do, he having such affinitie with the aire as being a spirite, and having such power of the forming and mooving thereof, as ye have heard me alreadie declare.15
As I have noted, this distinction between a natural and a supernatural storm is important in a meteorological reading of Macbeth. Although James thinks it ‘verie easie’ to distinguish between the two, there were no clear guidelines offered by the king or his contemporaries and there are certainly accounts of storms both ‘suddaine’ and ‘short induring’ which were not deemed supernatural.16 However, as has been made clear by many critics, the presence of witches and storms in Macbeth may well reflect a very particular resonance for James. In 1589 Anne of Denmark was due to sail to Scotland to marry the king. This plan had to be abandoned when a tempest struck. James, in the autumn of that year, set sail in the opposite direction to complete the marriage, and stayed at the Danish Court throughout the winter. When the newlyweds sailed for Scotland in the spring, their ships were again subject to storms – one ship was lost – and witch-hunts on both sides of the North Sea began. As Stephen Greenblatt has written, ‘One of the accused, Agnes Thompson, confessed to the king and his council that on Halloween 1590 some two hundred witches had sailed to [North Berwick] in sieves’.17 It seems likely that Shakespeare had heard of this incident, or read about it in the pamphlet News from Scotland (1591), for when the Witches in Macbeth are plotting their sea-tempest on the Tiger, one says ‘in a sieve I’ll thither sail’ (1.3.7). 18 Numerous critics have remarked on the relationship between the king and the Witches.19 The important point here is that storms may be understood by Jacobeans to be the result of supernatural or natural causes. The language and the actions of the Witches in Macbeth, dramatic and memorable as they may be, are only one side of this dichotomy.
The incarnations of the Witches and their relation to the weather dominate the opening and the third scene. In the intermediate scene, however, a different stance is taken:
As whence the sun ’gins his reflection,
Shipwrecking storms and direful thunders strike,
So from that spring whence comfort seemed to come,
Discomfort swells.
(1.2.25–8)20
The Captain here is relaying to Duncan the story of the battle. At this point in his narration, Macdonald has been slain – the ‘comfort’ in the simile – and the Norwegian lord is about to begin his ‘fresh assault’ (33). The imagery the Captain uses to introduce this assault is strictly meteorological: the storms are natural. The ‘reflection’ of the sun refers to its return from the zenith of the spring equinox;21 spring is used here to mean both the season and origin. At this point in the year, it was believed that violent weather should be expected. This belief extends at least as far back as Pliny: ‘Moreover also the parts of some constellations have an influence of their own – for instance at the autumnal equinox and at mid-winter, when we learn by the storms that sun is completing its orbit’.22 Rather than the immediate pleasantness of late spring and summer, then, there is a likely period of chaos. In addition this meteorological expectation reinforcing the reading of the line, the Captain’s phrasing still makes use of a kind of poetic truth. Thus, ‘As whence the sun ’gins his reflection | Shipwrecking storms and direful thunders strike’ implies that this process is a given – a received truth which the audience will recognise and upon which an extended metaphor can be established.
Although the Captain is using the belief as an elaborate trope, and the elucidation of summer storms is not his aim, there is a subtle significance to his speech. Implicit in the understanding of weather systems on display here is the notion that storms and thunders are predictable. The equinox is a reliable, immovable point in the year and, therefore, so is the weather that it is thought to generate. In this way, storms become to some extent foretold, which is to say that, rather than making predictions based on the portent of thunder, thunder is already thought to have been in place. The equinox is a regular, calculable event and an equinoctial storm should therefore engender few predictions, because it would have occurred when expected. This is a far cry from the thunder and lightning of the Witches, whose weather is grounded in its sense of confusion and paradox: ‘fair is foul and foul is fair’. Indeed, part of the fearfulness of the weather of the Witches is in its unpredictability and its capacity to alter the environment suddenly. Moreover, if the Captain’s meteorology is descriptive and inherited, there is space in the text, surely, for a reading of the Witches’ thunder and lightning as performative storms. ‘I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do’ (1.3.9). It is this performative aspect of the Witches’ weather, this promise of storm, which endows their identities with further supernatural power. Although the drums, the thunder-run and the fireworks begin the Witch scenes, it is their language which continues to perform the storm, ‘In thunder, lightning or in rain’, ‘fair is foul’, ‘I’ll give thee a wind’, ‘tempest-tossed’. Their capacity to perform this storm in language sets them apart from Margery Jordan, for example, who does not maintain the oragious character of her magic in her speech. Macbeth’s Witches are in complete control of the weather, and this is consolidated in their use of language to perform the storm.
The difference between the Captain’s storm and those of the Witches might be neatly defined in their origins, but they have the same effects. Indeed, the use of the modifiers ‘direful’ and ‘discomfort’ are indicative of the place of thunder in Macbeth’s aesthetic: even the most predictable storm does not lose its prophetic implications. Greenblatt has contended that, in engendering the language of Macbeth with storms and magic
Shakespeare was burrowing deep into the dark fantasies that swirled about in the king’s brain. It is all here: the ambiguous prophecies designed to lure men to their destruction, the ‘Shipwrecking storms and direful thunders’ that once threatened Anne of Denmark.23
As we have seen, however, the storms that Greenblatt cites here are manifestly different from those that led to James’s honeymoon witch hunt. The Captain explicitly mentions a natural reason for the bad weather, however dangerous (shipwrecking) and terrible (direful) it might be. Although James’s ships set sail from Denmark at around the spring equinox of 1590, the storms that sank one of them and endangered the rest were immediately attributed to witches in Denmark and soon after in Scotland. Put bluntly, the Captain’s storms are natural; King James’s storms are supernatural. This is not to say that Greenblatt is mistaken in his appraisal of James’s ‘dark fantasies’: from the available evidence on James it seems likely that the king would have found Macbeth unsettling, and clearly leapt to conclusions about storms and witches. The dramatic irony discussed above, then, must have been especially poignant for James, for the unnatural or supernatural malicious sorcery of the Witches remains as an undercurrent to all but a few characters of the play. A reading of the Captain’s imagery which, like Greenblatt’s, concentrates on James’s reaction, misses this irony. The Captain’s understanding of storms is very different from James’s, especially as these are shipwrecking storms. The construction of these as natural, given that James contends the opposite, creates a tension not resolved until the Witches are seen, in the following scene, plotting a shipwreck. For those characters, like the Captain who do not encounter the Witches, storms remain calculable phenomena, attributable to natural origins. This suggestion is analogous to the fact that the Witches are not even acknowledged, let alone punished in the play’s conclusion: their powers and their efforts, meteorological or otherwise, are undisclosed to any character still living at the end.
The incidents in Macbeth of weather being attributed to natural causes come from characters who are not involved with the Witches. The Captain speaks of equinoxes resulting in storms, and yet those storms retain a certain foreboding quality. Similarly, Lennox, upon reaching Macbeth’s castle after Duncan is murdered, does not leap to conclusions about the causes of the remarkable weather, yet is fearful of what it might portend:
The night has been unruly: where we lay,
Our chimneys were blown down, and, as they say,
Lamentings heard i’th’air, strange screams of death
And prophesying with accents terrible
Of dire combustion, and confused events,
New hatched to th’woeful time. The obscure bird
Clamoured the livelong night. Some say, the earth
Was feverous, and did shake.
(2.3.50–7)
It is not uncommon for critics, presumably encouraged by this description, to note that there was a ‘frightful hurricane of the night when Duncan was murdered’.24 The connection between storm and omen is, of course, nothing new, as we have seen. The link is most explicitly drawn in Julius Caesar, in which Casca, in the midst of a storm, is troubled that ‘prodigies | Do so conjointly meet’ (1.3.28–9). In the same scene, Casca, like Lennox, seems to report an earthquake: ‘all the sway of earth | Shakes like a thing unfirm’ (3–4). Despite appearing in both plays, of all of the prodigies which Lennox lists, this last is surely the most unusual, if not the most fearful. In early modern England, an earthquake was thought to prognosticate a time of terrible upheaval. As Abraham Fleming wrote in 1580:
But of what sorrowes to come are Earthquakes foretokens? First, to beginne, of warres, whereby it is most certaine pestilence and famine are ingendered: pestilence by the aire poisoned with the stinch of dead carcasses lieng unburied: famine by reason of husbandrie, when plough landes lie unmanured: besides other calamities full of feare, horror, and desolation.25
It is clear, then, that earthquakes are not to be taken lightly, whether obscure birds are clamouring or not. Although they are hardly common, it is quite possible that Shakespeare would have experienced an earthquake himself: the earthquake of 6 April 1580, which prompted Fleming and many others to write, was apparently felt throughout England.26 Perhaps a more immediate source of reference for the significance of earthquakes, though, was the story of Jesus on the cross. If, as has been argued, Shakespeare had access to the Geneva Bible,27 in it he would have read:
Then Jesus cryed againe with a loude voice and yelded up the gost. And beholde, the vaile of the Temple was rent in twayne, from the top to the bottome, and the earth did quake, & the stones were cloven, and the graves did open them selves, and many bodies of the Sainctes whiche slept, arose.28
Fleming interprets earthquakes, not unreasonably given this context, as a sign of ‘the wrath of almightie God, therewithall admonishing us to amende our evill life’. The same had been said of thunderstorms by contemporary commentators, but, as Fleming goes on to demonstrate, the Biblical allusion imbues the theory with a grim authority:
otherwise such sorrowes are like to light upon us, as shall turne to our most miserable overthrowe and lamentable destruction: and here upon it came to passé, that when our Lord Jesus Christ was crucified, the earth quaked and trembled.29
Such a parallel, of course, is even more relevant when, as in 1580, the earthquake occurs in the week of Easter. Nor is Matthew’s account the only Biblical reference to earthquakes; in Revelations, the apocalyptic imagery is thick with them: ‘And I behelde when hee had opened the sixt seale, and loe, there was a great earthquake, and the sunne was as blacke as sackecloth of heare, & the moone was like blood’.30 This same darkening of the sun precedes the earthquake in the Book of Joel, where we find ‘the day of the Lord cometh, for it is nigh at hand: A day of darkness and of gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness’.31 Indeed, this darkening of the sun will have an eerie familiarity to those who recall Ross’s words in Macbeth:
Thou seest the heavens, as troubled with man’s act,
Threatens his bloody stage. By th’clock ’tis day
And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp.
(2.4.5–7)
Ross here is responding to the Old Man, who, like Lennox, is in the unfortunate position of noticing prodigious ‘things strange’ in hindsight rather than premonition. The sun, the travelling or travailing lamp,32 is subsumed by the night, in the exact way which the Bible shows should be treated as foreboding. Drawing carefully from Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles, Shakespeare took as his model for Duncan’s murder that which Donwald arranges of King Duff. Consequently, then, after Duff’s murder, ‘there appeered no sunne by day, nor moone by night … and sometimes such outragious windes arose, with lightnings and tempests, that the people were in great fear of present destruction’.33 Again, then, the portents appear rather too late. In Macbeth, the Witches seem able to foresee many things, and create storms, and so their supernatural qualities are augmented by the fact that most characters – ‘natural’ characters – display knowledge of meteors only in hindsight. And yet the Witches remain silent on the subject of the darkness which foretells an earthquake. Indeed, if anyone in the play shows prescience of this, it is Lady Macbeth:
Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, To cry ‘Hold, hold’.
(1.5.48–52)
It might be argued that Lady Macbeth here is implicitly linked with the Witches, in that she calls upon the heavens to align themselves to her own malicious purposes. This invocation of deviant darkness resonates with the supernatural and evil, especially in the light (so to speak) of its Biblical precedents. It is not too much to say that Macbeth is linguistically integrated in this effect later in the play, when he echoes the summons: ‘Come, seeling night, | Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day’ (3.2.46–7). In case this ricochet of syntax is not enough, Macbeth, telepathologically perhaps, constructs the opposite of his wife’s ‘thick night’ as a threat to their dynasty: ‘Light thickens’ (50).34
After the earthquake of 1580, the Church of England published The Order of Prayer, and other Exercises, upon Wednesdayes and Frydayes, to Avert and Turne Gods wrath from us, Threatened by the Late Terrible Earthquake: to be used in all parish churches and housholdes throughout the realme. This document contained the Book of Joel, in which can be found ‘The earth shall tremble before him; the heavens shal shake, the sunne and the moone shalbe darke, and the stars shal withdrawe their shining’.35 Presumably from reading Joel or from hearing these state-ordered sermons, Fleming goes on to write:
Before the end of the world come (saith Christ) iniquitie shall abound, there shalbe rumors of wars, there shalbe Earthquakes, there shalbe famine & troubles: all which if they be but the beginnings of sorrowes, alas what calamities will followe?
The Prophet saith that Before the great and terrible daie of the Lord come, wonders shalbe seene in the heauens and in the earth, bloud and fire, pillers of smoke, the Sunne darkened, and the Moone turned into bloud, &c.36
Fleming’s work, like the Church pamphlet and several contemporary writings on the earthquake, contains a prayer specifically designed to be enunciated in times of disaster. Indeed, although Fleming’s work contains passages which attempt to elucidate the causes of earthquakes rather than what they signify, it is clear that so-called ‘naturall reasons’, in the case of the quake of 1580, give way to an interpretive emphasis on the will of God. In none of the extant documents relating to the earthquake does the author contend that the disaster is down to natural causes (to the extent that the natural can be distinguished from the divine) although the majority of them list what these ‘natural’ causes – in the case of other earthquakes – must be. In Lennox’s speech, the adjective ‘feverous’ is most telling: the earthquake is understood to be of natural origin. There is no element of the supernatural here, nor mention of God or the Bible, although both would offer a fearful context in which to understand the earthquake. It must also be pointed out that, for early modern thinkers, an earthquake was not due to plate tectonics. Rather, following thinkers of the Classical era, the earthquake is considered a form of storm. The general principle upon which the theory of earthquakes is based is that wind, trapped beneath the surface of the earth, rushes and swirls underground, causing the earth to shake. As Fleming writes, a natural cause of an earthquake would be ‘all the winds being gotten into certeine veines, holes, and caves of the earth, and there moove by there secrete rusling’.37 Likewise, Arthur Golding notes that
naturally Earthquakes are sayde to be engendred by winde gotten into the bowels of the earth, or by vapors bredde and enclosed within the hollowe caves of the earth, where, by their stryving and struggling of themselves to get oute, or being haled outwarde by the heate and operation of the Sun, they shake the earth for want of sufficient vent to issue out at.38
Just as the wind struggles to leave the earth, the element of fire, trapped in the watery and airy vapour of a cloud, is compelled by friction to be discharged as lightning. Pliny contends that
Neither is this shaking in the earth any other thing, than is the thunder in the cloud: nor the gaping chinke thereof ought els, but like the clift whereout the lightening breaketh, when the spirit enclosed within, struggleth and stirreth to goe forth at libertie.39
For the sake of comparison, to see how closely the descriptions match, here again is Simon Harward’s description of thunder and lightning:
This hotte exhalation … courseth up and downe in the clowd, seeking some passage out, which when it cannot find, it maketh a way by force, and being kindled, by the violent motion it breaketh through the clowde.40
This was not simply a scientific analogy confined to the natural philosophers, but found its way into literature. In Thomas Dekker’s A Strange Horse-Race (1613), we are told of ‘thundring velocity, lightning-like violence, and earthquake’. In Edmund Spenser’s The Fairie Queen, we find the description ‘trembling with strange feare, did like an earthquake show. | As when the almightie Jove in wrathfull mood | … Hurles forth his thundering dart’.41 What we have, then, is an event rich in ecclesiastical resonance and which might carry such meaning for anyone who experiences or hears of it. Rather than drawing upon this resource, however – and with the implications of the death of Christ and the apocalypse, it is a rich one – the earthquake is constructed as natural. As Harold Bloom has written: ‘Macbeth rules in a cosmological emptiness where God is lost, either too far away or too far within to be summoned back’.42 Booth notes that Macbeth, in contrast to young Siward, is denied expository rites.43 God is almost absent from Macbeth or, perhaps, Macbeth eradicates belief: ‘I could not say “Amen” | When they did say “God bless us”’, he says of the guards he kills (2.2.31–2).44 The impact of the earthquake cannot be free from Biblical overtones: we might call to mind one of the play’s allusions: the Captain describes Macbeth and Banquo, who ‘meant to bathe in reeking wounds | Or memorise another Golgotha’ (1.2.39–40). Booth writes that the Golgotha image is a ‘stylistic analogue to the perverse meteorological commonplace’ of the Captain’s equinoctial storm.45 Of course, meteorological is a narrower term now – as Booth uses it – than it had been, but once included earthquakes. Golgotha, the site of Christ’s crucifixion, which is to say, an earthquake’s epicentre, is indelibly linked with violence and with death but also the heroism of victorious leaders. Despite occurrences such as this, however, there is something quite systematic about the absence of faith in the text. Indeed the lack of any mention of God in relation to the storms and the earthquake, if anything, augments the supernatural power of the Witches to command the elements and to see the future.
The idea that earthquakes were the result of the trapping of winds was evidently a theory to which Shakespeare gave credence. In Venus and Adonis, lines describing the goddess’s feelings on seeing the injured youth display both the early seismology and the emotions which earthquakes engender in the victims. Venus
quakes;
As when the wind, imprisoned in the ground,
Struggling for passage, earth’s foundation shakes,
Which with cold terror doth men’s minds confound.
(1045–8)
Lennox’s ‘feverous’ is indicative that he is subscribing to the scientific explanation of the earthquake, rather than attributing it to supernatural causes. The personification of the Earth was a common notion, with its fever’s symptoms being the trapped wind and the shaking. We find the same personification, and fever, articulated in 1 Henry IV:
GLENDOWER I say the earth did shake when I was born.
HOTSPUR And I say the earth was not of my mind,
If you suppose as fearing you it shook.
GLENDOWER The heavens were all on fire, the earth did tremble –
HOTSPUR O, then the earth shook to see the heavens on fire,
And not in fear of your nativity.
Diseased nature oftentimes breaks forth
In strange eruptions, oft the teeming earth
Is with a kind of colic pinch’d and vex’d
By the imprisoning of unruly wind
Within her womb, which for enlargement striving
Shakes the old bedlam earth, and topples down
Steeples and moss-grown towers.
(3.1.18–30)
Although Glendower’s aggrandising of the portentousness of this earthquake is met with mockery by Hotspur, the latter’s comments still betray something of the fear of the earthquake phenomenon. The ‘colic’ and ‘unruly wind’, as well as aligning Hotspur’s speech with Lennox’s ‘feverous’, point towards a fear arising from the meteorology of earthquakes. As S. K. Heninger puts it, ‘not the least terror invoked by earthquakes was the possibility that stagnant infectious airs … might be released by this rending of the earth’s surface’.46 This calls to mind that phrase of Fleming’s, ‘most certaine pestilence … is ingendered’.47
However, if we are to take the influence of contemporary meteorology into account, we must also point out that there is still something rather unusual about Lennox’s description. To illustrate this, here are some quotations concerning the weather conditions which were thought to accompany a feverous earth:
Againe, wheras in Earthquakes that procéede of naturall causes, certaine signes and tokens are reported to go before them, as, a tempestuous working and raging of the sea, the wether being fair, temperate, and unwindie, calmenesse of the aire matched with great colde: dimnesse of the Sunne for certaine dayes.48
[T]he earth is never wont to quake, but when the sea is so calme, and the aire so still, that nether ships can saile, nor birdes flie[.]49
If any earthquake bee at hand, the Sea will give manifest tokens thereof unto the skilfull Marriner, for though no wind be stirring, the sea will swell and mount with billowes and great waves as in a Tempest and storme[.]50
These writers are, again, extending a tradition dating back to Aristotle, who contends that ‘the majority of earthquakes and the greatest occur in calm weather. For the exhalation being continuous in general follows its initial impulse and tends either to flow inwards at once or all outwards’.51
It is clear that for these thinkers the air must be still for the earth to quake, whilst the sea either rages in the still air or remains still itself. Nowhere in contemporary theories of earthquakes is there any parallel to Lennox’s opening gambit: ‘The night has been unruly’ or ‘chimneys were blown down’ and certainly not anything approaching the ‘hurricane’ of Bradley. Indeed, the very opposite is almost always the case. Motionlessness, silence, immobility. Lennox’s earthquake, then, is a kind of hyperstorm. That which afflicts the earth and makes it feverous has also afflicted the air. Neither element is safe. The chimneys that were blown down, the ‘Lamentings heard i’th air; strange screams of death’, the ‘accents terrible | Of dire combustion and confus’d events’, this is not the calm of which the natural philosophers write. The images are vivid enough for a modern audience to appreciate, but for a Renaissance audience, who believed their wind to be moving through one realm at a time, the impact of the final omen of the earthquake must have been truly apocalyptic. Casca, in Julius Caesar, had the words to express this impact: ‘Let not men say | “These are their reasons”, “they are natural”’ (1.3.29–30). This is not expressed as succinctly in Macbeth, but is shown through the overwhelming horror of Lennox’s description. Lennox’s ‘natural reasons’, though he strives to maintain them, are undone by the completeness of the disasters he describes. The dramatic irony of the Witches’ complicity in the weather – the fact that there are two meteorological levels of meaning in the text – allows, or even persuades the audience to dismiss Lennox’s naivety: these storms, like the events they relate to, are strictly supernatural in their origin. Whilst in Julius Caesar, the possibly supernatural storm is eventually understood not to be betokening a spirit, devil, a god or God, in Macbeth the opposite is the case: the ostensibly natural storms in descriptions are troubled by the supernatural storms on stage.
In Lennox’s speech, this strange sense of augury after the fact is deeply ironic. For him, ‘th’ woeful time’ is indeed one of violence and rebellion, but Macbeth, through his violent prowess, is the curtailer of rebellion, not its instigator.52 In the face of all of the portents he lists, then, Lennox must feel secure to reach the castle of the king’s most celebrated defender. This irony, obvious though it is, is nonetheless underlined by Macbeth’s lines as he leaves the stage to kill Duncan:
Now o’er the one half-world
Nature seems dead[…]
Thou sure and firm-set earth,
Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear
The very stones prate of my whereabout,
And take the present horror from the time,
Which now suits with it.
(2.1.49–50; 56–60)
These lines offer a complete contradiction to Lennox’s. Nature seems dead: the silence that is described here is, as we have seen, that very state which is opposed in Lennox’s description. Furthermore, the speech has several more quiet qualifiers: ‘stealthy’, ‘Moves like a ghost’, ‘Hear not’ and ‘Hear it not’ are all within the space of ten lines (54–63). Moreover, ‘present horror’ is generally taken to be indicative of ‘terrible stillness’:53 Braun-muller glosses the phrase as ‘the silence that would be broken by speaking stones’.54 The sounds that Macbeth mentions – the wolf and the bell – both act as ‘alarum’ calls (53, 62) for him to act. There is nothing, to use Lennox’s vocabulary, strange or clamouring about these noises. Rather, they have a direct and specific purpose. Even more brazen than these oppositions, however, is the image of the ‘firm-set earth’. In the history of Macbeth criticism, a well-worn theme is that of equivocation.55 The equivocality of the earthquake is explicit in the examples of the speeches of Macbeth and Lennox: the earth described as firm-set and simultaneously as shaking. Equivocation, like the earthquake, can be construed as a catalyst of terror. The infamy of the gunpowder plotters and their equivocal defence is generally taken to be the foremost reason behind the play’s concern with the equivocal.56 If we take the earthquake lines to be indicative of Lennox’s fear of the ‘woeful time’, then it is clear that Macbeth is speaking out of ‘fear’ of the very portent of which Lennox has heard. That Macbeth should mention the earth in his expression of this fear is distinctly unusual, as earthquakes and speaking stones are particularly rare.57 When Macbeth delivers his lines, if dwelled upon, they seem strange and curious. Prating stones? Macbeth’s plea for silence rests on ordinary things: an earth which doesn’t move, a night which is quiet, stones which don’t gossip easily. Lennox’s speech is characterised by the unusual, particularly the noisy unusual. His description seems to will the very silence which Macbeth is invoking. Yet for all of Macbeth’s fear, even the exact opposite of the climate he wished for has betrayed neither his intentions nor his actions. The earth has shaken and he is undiscovered. Curiously, this might call to mind another Biblical verse: ‘There shal come as an earthquake, but the place where thou standest, shall not be moved’.58 Macbeth, with his supernatural seismograph alert, has enough foresight to fear the prognosticatory potential of the earthquake but does not feel its effect, either literally or metaphorically. The action which the audience understands to cause the earthquake requires a firm-set earth.
The contrast with Lennox’s speech is profound and yet, the effect of that contrast rests on the order of the statements: had Lennox’s lines been placed before Macbeth’s, the result would be noticeably different. The firm-set earth is innocuous, it is lodged at the end of a highly decorative speech, a part of Macbeth’s self-propagandising invective, and the audience may be forgiven for still musing on the phantom dagger. This would not be the case if Lennox had already mentioned the earthquake. Context and linearity here are crucial. And yet Macbeth’s ‘firm-set earth’ does provide a context in which to hear of Lennox’s portents. Aside from the contradiction of the description of the earth itself, Lennox’s words are haunted by Macbeth’s. The virtue of the steadiness of the thane’s lines, their calm decisiveness, their unshakeability. Macbeth’s phrase has the effect of a ghostly presence, haunting the invocation of the earthquake. Macbeth himself opens the possibility of the firm-set earth being disrupted, being shaken, being heard again in a new context. Macbeth is portrayed as requiring an inhabiting of the equivocal in order to bring himself to regicide: ‘The eye wink at the hand. Yet let that be | Which the eye fears when it is done to see’ (1.4.52–3). The full impact of the earthquake, then, might be felt in the extent to which Macbeth succumbs to meteorological equivocation, seeming to will the earth to be still as it is later said to be shaking. The thrill of this particular case is that we are carried along on Macbeth’s firm-set earth, only afterwards to be exposed to the fissures and faultiness of his tumultuous quake.
Lest this is thought slender textual evidence or merely a solitary chance reference, we see that later in the play, when Macbeth himself is shaking, he once more invokes the surety of the earth: ‘Then comes my fit again: I had else been perfect; | Whole as the marble, founded as the rock’ (3.4.20–1). Yet the ambiguity is also apparent later in the same scene: ‘Stones have been known to move, and trees to speak’ (122). The distinction between the shaking earth and the founded is one of the many things over which Macbeth loses control.
When the Witches vanish before Banquo and Macbeth, the former’s thought is a line which is eerily informed by the science of the earthquake: ‘The earth hath bubbles, as the water has, | And these are of them’ (1.3.77–8). Science in Macbeth is established in opposition to the supernatural, or indeed God. The pull of equivocation permeates the language of the play in this opposition as well as the other, more notable equivocal instances. Here, however, the scientific cause is given a supernatural flavour – not one of wrath or benevolence, but one of knowing, of disappearance, of something to come: the storm of the Witches in the air, but then the sea and then the ground. They continue to perform their storm, even in the language of characters who do not know of their existence. An iterable storm. A storm to transcend elements. This troubling, unsettling quality of the storm in Macbeth is, indeed akin to the quality of equivocation which has been shown to characterise the play. Banquo’s shift from a witness of the Witches to a victim of their supernatural directive is, appropriately enough, finalised in a weather-based phrase: ‘It will be rain tonight’ (3.3.16). The reply he receives from his unseen audience, the murderers, is one which furthers, or re- iterates, the malevolence of Macbeth’s storm, one which fulfils Banquo’s part in the Witches’ prophecy, one which modifies Banquo’s naturalistic meaning and draws blood: ‘Let it come down’. Weather dominates Macbeth; and its origins, its effects and its meaning are always subject to the equivocal play of terror.