Shakespeare's Storms by Gwilym Jones;

Author:Gwilym Jones; [Jones;, Gwilym]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780719089381
Publisher: ManchesterUP
Published: 2015-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

7

Rain

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.

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