7
The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath
The Merchant of Venice 4.1.182–3
The meteorological phenomena that I have examined so far – thunder, lightning and wind – are all the result, in Aristotelian terms, of exhalations. Of the various elements which we now consider to make up storms then, only rain and the related hail or snow, are categorised as vapours. Perhaps it is this irregular status that ensures that rain alone never stands for a storm in Shakespeare’s work. Another element is required to form a compound image of a storm, as in, for example, ‘the to and fro conflicting wind and rain’ of King Lear (3.1.11). For this reason, I will not dwell on it for as long as I have the other parts of a storm. It is, however, still worth looking at briefly.1
If rain is invoked alone, then it is usually moderate or, as in Portia’s speech above, an image of gentleness. Most often of all, rain is part of the poetic commonplace of tears as rainy or tempestuous (as in King Lear’s ‘he holp the heavens to rain’ or 3 Henry VI’s ‘And when the rage allays, the rain begins | These tears are my sweet Rutland’s obsequies’ (3.7.61; 1.4.146–7). Rain, therefore finds itself part of a remarkable range of figures, from the deeply embedded pathetic fallacy, through nourishment and replenishing, to wild storms. This quality, I will argue, is attributable not only to the variety of rains to which England was – and is – exposed, but also to the way in which rain itself is understood.
As with thunder and lightning, rain was known to result from clouds:
After the generation of cloudes is wel knowen, it shall not be hard to learn, from whence the rayne commeth. For after the matter of the cloud being drawen up, and by cold made thick (as is sayde before) heate followynge, which is moste commenlye of the Southerne wynde, or any other wynde of hotte temper, doth resolve it againe into water, so it falleth in droppes.2
Some heat, then, normally from wind, is needed to produce rain, as it melts the cloud. Fulke’s model of the weather explains neatly why storms should include rain. He views storm winds as ‘very whote and drye’, and so it is no surprise that rain should accompany them if rain is ‘resolved … again into water’ by warm air. The same process outlined here accounts for hail, snow and dew, depending, as each does, on the temperature of the region of air.
As Fulke continues, the simplicity of the meteorology of rain is evident:
There bee small showers, of small, drops, & there be great stormes, of great drops. The showers with small drops, proceede eyther of the small heate that resolveth the clouds, or else of ye great distance of the clouds from the earth. The streames with great drops, contrariwise doe come of great heate, resolving or melting the cloud, or else of small distance from the earth.3
There is no inherent complexity in rain, nor is there any ferocity. The other stormy elements are forceful and violent: we have seen thunder rattling and breaking, lightning piercing and striking, wind disgorging. Rain simply resolves itself. Alone, then, it is beneficial and only when joined with other weather phenomena is to be feared:
Also a cloud is profitable to the earth, when he is resolves and fallen into raine. But hée is full gréevous and noisfull when he tourneth into winde: for then he gendereth groan tempest both in sea and in lande.4
The idea of a rain being a ‘resolution’ of itself fits in with the overarching theory of Aristotle. In describing the ‘cycle of changes’ that accounts for the air’s moisture he gives this image:
One should think of it as a river with a circular course, which rises and falls and is composed of a mixture of water and air. For when the sun is near the stream of vapour rises, when it recedes it falls again. And in this order the cycle continues indefinitely. And if there is any hidden meaning in the ‘river of Ocean’ of the ancients, they may well have meant this river which flows in a circle round the earth.5
Rain is a crucial element of the replenishing sequence of order which characterises Aristotle’s system of understanding.
The language used to describe rain is more well-known outside of its meteorological context, though, as it forms a familiar editorial crux. In the 1604 Quarto of Hamlet, we find ‘O that this too too sallied flesh would melt, | Thaw and resolve it self into a dewe’.6 When using the Quarto as a base text, editors frequently change sallied to sullied (Hamlet, 1.2.129). As such, Hamlet’s flesh is contaminated, and the possibility of resolving to dew figures both cleansing and annihilation into the metaphor. In the Folio text, however, sallied is replaced with solid: vapour, that is, that has formed together into something tangible. In this case, Hamlet’s wish is to ‘return’ to water (rather than ‘become’ it), which makes the image slightly more in tune with meteorological language. Moreover, his flesh in this description is, by implication, figuratively a cloud. Such an image resonates with the Claudius’s parting statement:
in grace whereof
No jocund health that Denmark drinks today
But the great cannon to the clouds shall tell,
And the King’s rouse the heaven shall bruit again,
Re-speaking earthly thunder.
(1.2.123–8)
The fantasy of becoming dew is simultaneously the wish to not become implicit in Claudius’s threatened thunder. Either rendering of the text gives a self-sustaining image, then, but the Folio version offers a meteorologically sound counterpart to Claudius’s bombast. Such is the equalising nature of rain in early modern imagery.