The I/Eye of the Storm: Prospero’s Tempest

The Tempest (1611) is a play often quoted for its ecological significance: indeed, it is one in which Shakespeare once again addresses the question of climate and the four elements in his revisiting of the early modern travel narratives (in which, incidentally, the motif of the fiery ocean was a topos of the genre). In this rewriting of Virgil’s Aeneid not entirely devoid of Homeric reminiscences, the playwright returns to the initial questions of the Dream: can men and women rule the elements? If we trigger off a climatic disorder, can it be mended? And if we lose control, what may then ensue? The playwright thus reassesses the role of man’s ‘potent art’ (5.1.50) in the ordering of nature. Chapter 7 explores the idea of temperance in connection with that of temperate clime, and it shows that Prospero’s tempest, meant both as a form of revenge against Antonio and as a means of catharsis and rebirth, is deeply problematic as it oscillates between the illusory and the real, magic and science, the sublime and the mundane. Providing us with kaleidoscopic views, the play cogently explores the power of the elements and reaffirms that, for Shakespeare, what appears in the celestial sphere cannot be dissociated from what happens on earth.

‘Winter and rough weather’: Arden’s Sterile Climate

The third chapter turns to As You Like It (1599), a comedy obsessed with coldness and the winter gale which features an exiled Duke and a couple of lovers forced to make the best of a bad bargain in a freezing forest. Marked by a saturnalian atmosphere which favours melancholy and bitter-sweet songs to the detriment of the not-so-innocent games of love, the play alludes to several ritual times, themselves associated with various types of weather. However, coldness always prevails. Jolly and festive as the comedy may sometimes be, Arden’s air remains desperately frosty—a frostiness synonymous with sterility and tyranny. If springtime, ‘the only pretty ring-time’ (5.3.18), is duly announced, it never fully materialises at the end. As a result, even though the multiple marriages about to be celebrated apparently point to a satisfying resolution of the plot, the characters’ tirades, laden with clichés, still suggest frozen thoughts strongly reminiscent of Rabelais’s paroles gelées.

Othello: Shakespeare’s À bout de souffle

Chapter 4 shows that Othello (1604) is a play obsessed with breath and wind, a cosmological piece in which climate and air coalesce to make the Moor the victim of his own humours as much as of the satanic Iago. The importance given to cosmic elements as well as to the planets and their influence on men and women’s behaviour serves to elevate and magnify a play sometimes wrongly reduced to the genre of the domestic tragedy. Besides, the recurring imagery related to pneuma turns the scene into a dark carnival with its frightening disaster at the end epitomised by the image of the ‘tragic loading of [the] bed’ (5.2.374). If a providential tempest preserves Cyprus from the assaults of the Turkish fleet, Othello and Desdemona’s love quickly becomes a highly tempestuous affair that ends in tragic suffocation.

‘The pelting of [a] pitiless storm’: Thunder and Lightning in King Lear

King Lear (1605-06), where the vehemence of the old king’s defiant speeches is matched by the raging storm striking the heath, is what we may call a climatic play. If, in Of the lavves of ecclesiasticall politie (1593), Richard Hooker assumed that natural phenomena coincide with the voice of God, the playwright here questions the alleged divine origin of climatic manifestations in a dark and nihilistic vision of life. As Lear fights against the storm, superbly staging his own distress, he proceeds to an inverted exorcism, wishing he could destroy all forms of human life rather than recovering his mental sanity. This chapter argues that, influenced by Lucretius’ atomism, the play provides a truly epicurean vision of the skies makes an extensive dramatic use of the humoural and cosmological interplay of the four elements. Eventually, as gall invades Lear’s heart and eradicates both hope and tenderness, a disquietingly grotesque tonality pervades the tragedy and forces us to look at the title part’s internal turmoil.

‘[T]he fire is grown too hot!’: Romeo and Juliet and the Dog Days

In Romeo and Juliet (1595-96), weather and humoural determinism play a central role with the background references to the dog days that may, up to a certain extent, be held responsible for both plague and misrule so that, beyond bad luck or misfortune, the influence of the stars turns out to be preponderant in the lovers’ fate. In such a context, the play’s heavenly signs take on an importance almost equal to that of the earthly events, to the point that heat may be considered as a major actor in the tragedy. As an anagram of ‘hate’, ‘heat’ overdetermines the climate of the play. Both words foreshadow the flare up of violence in Verona, leading Romeo and Juliet to be trapped in an overall astronomical, humoural, and climatic pattern giving them virtually no chance to escape the stifling air of Verona. Besides, the chapter suggests that light and lightning, omnipresent in the tragedy, also emphasise the violence of passions and reinforce the inevitability of the lovers’ final death march inscribed in the sonnet prologue.

Introduction

Torn as they were between trying to control their own destinies and letting God shape their actions, the Elizabethan and Jacobean subjects still looked for answers in the skies while they were also anxious to fashion their own lives in more coherent or rational ways than before. This Introduction gives clear definitions of the concepts used in the book (‘climate’, ‘weather’, ‘environment’) and presents the various approaches to weather and climate that prevailed at the turn of the seventeenth century. It also explains how early modern writers capitalised on both traditional and innovative views of the sky and emphasises both the influence of classical thought and the harsh realities of what is now known as the ‘Little Ice Age’. It finally introduces weather issues in connection with early modern drama and shows that the Shakespearean skies, in particular, are much more than a mere reservoir of metaphors.

Conclusion: ‘Under heaven’s eye’

This General Conclusion argues that Shakespeare’s stance was of course not that of a would-be scientist, since what he was interested in was the representation of climate and its possible effects on a theatrical audience rather than trying to define its possible causes. To him, the various climatic manifestations and environmental phenomena were the ‘objective correlatives’ of his characters’ actions and emotions. The technical means then available served to reinforce these manifestations and turned them into material sensations that could instil surprise, terror or admiration in the spectators’ minds. In Shakespeare’s plays, climate/klima is to be taken as a liminal space that reveals tensions, anxieties, expectations, and oppositions. It is up to the present-day directors to turn this threshold zone into a dramatic locus where the trajectories, or fates, of the various dramatis personae may ultimately be grasped and mapped.

Clime and Slime in Anthony and Cleopatra

Chapter 6 analyses Anthony and Cleopatra (1606-07) in connection with the Lucretian philosophy already at work in King Lear. Indeed, Shakespeare’s ‘Epicurean’ (2.1.24) vision of the weather, which operates in the play’s subtext, suggests that the atomism already displayed in previous works underpins the playwright’s obvious concerns about climate and the environment. Questions such as the infinite, the void and the flux in particular are major concerns in this Roman play obsessed with shifting shapes and the dissolution of living beings. The destructive yet paradoxically creative power of the Nile provides a rich background for the tragedy, and it is in this hot and moist context that the playwright calls attention to Cleopatra’s intimate meteorology and bodily humours. While climate is mainly present in a number of geo-humoral features characterizing the lovers, a rich system of cosmological references runs through the text, suggesting that the title parts are not just lovers but also explorers of the world’s celestial forces. It is no mere coincidence that Anthony’s famous tirade on clouds, representative as it is of the centrality of celestial issues in this tragedy, should coincide with the poetic and dramatic climax of the play.

‘We see / The seasons alter’: Climate Change in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595-96), wetness informs the play as a whole. The moon spreads humidity in Athens while the weather turns rainy and cataclysmic, due to the unruly behaviour of Oberon and Titania who are the source of the general confusion turning the world upside-down. Their quarrel over the little Indian boy alters the cycle of the seasons and, as a result, the would-be paradise of the forest is ‘filled up with mud’ (2.1.91). If Titania’s lines on climatic ‘distemperature’ (2.1.109) certainly have some sort of topical relevance, reducing them to a mere commentary on the vagaries of the English weather in the 1590s would hardly do justice to the richness and complexity of Shakespeare’s festive comedy. This chapter shows that the Dream and its ever-shifting environment serve as an experimental ground to challenge medieval beliefs and to test fresh hypotheses, such as the idea that people’s attitudes may in fact be responsible for climatic imbalance.