Shakespeare's Representation of Weather, Climate and Environment by Sophie Chiari

Author:Sophie Chiari
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

‘What is the cause of thunder?’

In Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois, the deadly fight between Bussy and the valiant warrior Barriso, which is reported onstage by a messenger, leads to a desire for revenge rendered through the image of a brooding thunderstorm comparable to the tense atmosphere which prevails at the onset of Shakespeare’s tragedy: ‘Sorrow and Fury, like two opposite fumes / Met in the upper region of a cloud’ (2.1.110–11). However, in Chapman’s play, the storm is a simple comparison, while Lear’s fury keeps building up until it gives way to a formidable storm. The old king’s many harsh ‘words and looks’ pave the way for the real ‘cataracts and hurricanoes’ (3.2.2) that will spout and spurt down from the heavens to wreak havoc and cause apocalyptic conditions on earth.7 Interestingly, Lear associates the ‘sulphurous and thought-executing fires, / Vaunt couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts’ (3.2.4–5) with women’s ‘sulphurous pit’ (4.5.123), that is, to the vagina, which he presents as being ‘all the fiend’s’ (4.5.122). Such a correlation brands women as devilish creatures and establishes a link between cosmic phenomena at large and female anatomy and sexuality.8

While thunder had natural causes in classical meteorology – Aristotle claimed that it arose from a ‘collision’ between dry and moist exhalations9 – God’s wrath, as we have seen, was often invoked in order to account for the occurrence of natural calamities.10 Theologians like Calvin did not think otherwise regarding thunder and lightning. The French theologian did acknowledge though that the thunder proceeded from a collision between ‘cold and humid vapors’ and ‘dry and hot exhalations’ and he did not question the veracity of such theories. Yet, for him, if meteorological phenomena had natural ‘intermediate or secondary causes’, they also had a primary cause since God is the origin of all things.11 So, Lear’s question to Edgar disguised as Poor Tom, ‘What is the cause of thunder?’ (3.4.143), would certainly have been regarded by Calvin as a rather provocative one. To him, the answer was simple: ‘[t]he Thunder is termed the voyce of God’ and therefore ‘[t]he Thunder and lightning make vs vnexcusable if we do not thereby both know, feare, and magnifie God’. Detecting God’s power in nature, Calvin asserted in his sermons that ‘[t]he Thunder maketh even the Reprobates and Atheistes to knowe and confesse that there is a God’.12 Obsessed with meteorological phenomena, the French reformer systematically interprets them as divine messages addressed to men. If thunderstorms in particular have attention called to them in his sermons, it is because they are considered the most direct, or tangible, expression of God’s presence. God’s followers must therefore understand that furious weather conditions reveal His existence and, as a consequence, noisy as it may be, a thunderstorm should not be presented as a source of terror:

Looke upon a despiser of God, which trampleth all religion under foote: he is carried away with a divelish rage: he shaketh off al difference of good and evill: and yet not withstanding he is inforced to be afraid of the thunder, insomuch that he is as it were out of his wittes and in a traunce [.

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