A University of Sussex DPhil thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://eprints.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details Shakespeare’s Storms Gwilym John Jones Thesis written towards the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex I hereby declare that this thesis has not been and will not be submitted in whole or in part to another university for the award of any other degree. Signed…………………………………………. i Table of contents Acknowledgments ………………………………………………………….. ii Abstract ………………………………………………………………………iii Introduction …………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter 1 Storm and the Spectacle: Julius Caesar……………………………………...38 Chapter 2 King Lear and the Event of the Storm ……………………………………… 67 Chapter 3 Macbeth: Supernatural Storms, Equivocal Earthquakes……………………...97 Chapter 4 ‘The Powers above us’: Storm, Scripture and Collaboration in Pericles…….120 Chapter 5 The Tempest: Storm and Theatrical Realtiy ………………………………… 147 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………178 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………..184 ii Acknowledgements I am grateful for the help of many people, and not least for that of Nicholas Royle, whose erudite supervision has left a great impression on my work. Nick has been one in a long line of teachers through my life: without Catherine Withers and M. Wynn Thomas, I would not have come this far and I remember them with gratitude and affection. I am thankful for the chance to work at Shakespeare’s Globe, largely because it gave me the opportunity to learn from helpful people such as Claire Daniel, Farah Karim-Cooper, Ryan Nelson and Penelope Woods. In particular, Sarah Dustagheer, Maya Gabrielle and Sophie Leighton-Kelly have all been generous with their time and their intellects. The warmth and generosity of my future parents-in-law, Bridget and Doug Morgan, has bordered on the miraculous, and Los Altos, Truckee and Kauai have all proved excellent places to forget Shakespeare. I am grateful for the love and support of my fiancée, Molly Morgan, who put up both with my arbitrary periods of tempestuousness and my unmerited periods of calm. I owe the greatest debt to my parents, Celia and David, the first in that line of teachers, and to their parents also. Without them, all of this would be utterly unthinkable. Textual Note. Unless stated otherwise, all Shakespearean quotations are from The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson and David Scott Kastan eds. (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001) and are included in the text. All Biblical quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from the Geneva text of 1587. iii Abstract This thesis seeks to provide a new perspective on storms in Shakespeare. Rather than a recurrent motif, the storm is seen as protean: each play uses the storm in a singular way. The works of Shakespeare’s contemporaries are explored for comparison, whilst meteorological texts and accounts of actual storms are examined for context. Using close reading and theories of ecocriticism throughout, I show that Shakespeare’s storms are attentive to the environmental conditions of experience. Although the dominant practice of staging storms in early modern England is to suggest the supernatural, Shakespeare writes storms which operate quite differently. I argue that this is a compelling opportunity to see Shakespeare develop a complex engagement with audience expectations. Five plays are explored in separate chapters, each with respect to performative conditions and through close reading of the poetry. Firstly, I argue that the Globe’s opening in 1599 demanded a spectacular showcase, to which Julius Caesar responded, shaping the play’s language and staging. With King Lear (c.1605), the traditional, non-Shakespearean location of the heath betrays a tendency to misread the play in terms of location rather than event. King Lear’s storm withholds the supernatural, a manifestly different approach from that in Macbeth (c.1606); Shakespeare both adheres to and resists convention in this respect. The relationship between storm and the supernatural in Macbeth is shown to be fundamental to the play’s equivocation. Shakespeare’s next storm is in Pericles (c.1608), which also contains a storm by George Wilkins. The two writers’ approaches are explored with respect to the Bible, alluded to extensively throughout the play. Finally, with The Tempest (c.1611), I argue that Shakespeare’s manipulation of audience expectation through the storm demands a reading which combines the metatheatrical and the ecocritical. Foregrounded as expressions of dramatic and environmental awareness, I bring new insights to Shakespeare’s storms. 1 Introduction. Shakespeare’s storms are an ostensibly straightforward topic for a critical study. Familiar to the most casual reader, the raging of King Lear, the shipwreck of The Tempest and the Witches of Macbeth are received emblems, part of the cultural furniture in the halls of canonisation. Like all such texts, they are experienced through the mediation of tradition and repetition; like all such texts, they repay close attention on their own terms. In this focus, the storms of Shakespeare are less familiar and less straightforward. They retain their capacity to surprise. Shakespeare seems to have been remarkably fond of storms, not only in the stage effects he so often calls for, but in the metaphors and similes he gives to his characters. Indeed, if we include such images, we may say that there is some instance of storm in every Shakespearean play. Given this completeness, and the impossibility of addressing all of the storms in detail, I have chosen to concentrate on five plays in particular: Julius Caesar, King Lear, Macbeth, Pericles and The Tempest. In these plays, we will not find all that the Shakespearean storm can do, and so I will, of course, be drawing on the other instances in my reading. However, these plays seem to me to represent a vast range of possibilities in this narrow topic, and each one justifies the attention I will give it. Before the discussion of individual plays, however, it will be worthwhile to explore some of the contexts in which those plays will be examined. In this introduction then, I will consider, in turn, meteorology, theatrical expectation, the ecocritical and what I propose to call the storm of separation. The plays I have mentioned will then be discussed in the order in which they were written. Early Modern Meteorology. Many can brook the weather, that love not the wind. Love’s Labour’s Lost, 4.2.34. Although storms, thunder and lightning, and the associated phenomena of high winds, rain and raging seas are all used frequently by early modern writers as metaphors or similes, the extent to which those images are grounded in contemporary meteorology is 2 extraordinary. It is surely not possible for a reader today to witness a storm – whether theatrical or natural – through an early modern system of understanding. Such would be the requisite leap of imagination, for example, to think of lightning as something other than electrical. However, as much of Shakespeare’s use of weather imagery, and especially storms, is determined by the prevalent Elizabethan and Jacobean modes for understanding the weather, it is important to familiarise ourselves with the details of those modes. Such familiarisation will enable close reading of the plays and poems to reveal connotations which are normally invisible in the 21st century. In exploring this subject, I am particularly indebted to S. K. Heninger’s work, A Handbook of Renaissance Meteorology (1968), which addresses the whole gamut of early modern weather with enviable deftness. Meteorological principles in early modern England were largely derived from the work of classical philosophers. Of these works, the first to attempt to unify a theory of the weather into one system was Aristotle’s Meteorologica. In the Meteorologica, Aristotle explains atmospheric phenomena in a way which is recognisable to any reader of similar texts from Elizabethan and Jacobean England: a system of ‘exhalations’ and ‘vapours’, together known as ‘evaporations.’1 Aristotle’s theory states that the sun draws these exhalations upwards, potentially through three regions of the air, during which process, they account for all various types of weather. Vapours, warm and moist, are drawn from bodies of water, rivers, bogs and marshland. The exhalations, in contrast, are hot and dry, and drawn from the earth. As the evaporations rise, they change in temperature – caused by the air’s different regions, proximity to the sun or the varying temperature of the sun itself – and this change is manifested in different types of weather, or meteor. Which meteor occurs depends on the mixture of evaporations and how their temperature is altered. From vapours come rain, snow, clouds, hail, frost and mist, whilst exhalations produce thunder and lightning, winds, comets and earthquakes as well as the occasional airborne fireball. Our modern notion of a storm, then, with rain, thunder, lightning and wind, requires several simultaneous evaporations producing discrete meteors. Many other 1 Aristotle. Meteorologica, trans. H. D. P. Lee (Portsmouth NH: Heinemann, 1952). For the initial outlining of the arguments on exhalations and vapours, see page 21. 3 atmospheric phenomena are accounted for by the reflection of sun, moon or stars, in configurations of airborne vapours. This group, which include rainbows and multiple suns, are known as ‘reflections’.2 Although meteorological theory in early modern England was based on the principles outlined by Aristotle, it was more specifically derived from the Roman thinkers who translated the texts from the Greek.