It is not an exaggeration to say that storms have influenced the course of history, both in the period in which Shakespeare lived and today, in the ongoing storms associated with climate change. Without one notable thunderstorm in 1505, for example, it is conceivable that the entire modern era of the West would have been radically different. It was in the summer of that year that a young Martin Luther was caught in a violent storm and, fearing for his life, exclaimed the oath, ‘Help me, Saint Anna, and I shall become a monk’.1 A fortnight later, Luther entered the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt, thus beginning in earnest the theological life which would shape so much of the Reformation. If it is too much to say that the storm engendered religious upheaval, it must surely be acknowledged as a catalyst.
Unsurprisingly, just as the characters in Shakespeare’s plays offer different accounts of storms, descriptions of Luther’s experience vary. In 1581, the English theologian Robert Parsons wrote that ‘MARTIN LUTHER walking in his youth in a certain medowe, was stroken with a thunder boolt, & therupon sodaynlie for verie feare made hym selfe an Austen fryer’.2 The notion that Luther was actually struck by lightning lends an element of hyperbolic dynamism to a story hardly deficient in symbol. Thunder and lightning, figured since antiquity as the instruments of divinity, are constructed in Parsons’s description as capable of conferring divinity on their target. The speed, both literal and figurative, of lightning lends itself neatly to the apparent rapidity of Luther’s epiphany.
The storm of 1505 was not the only important storm of Luther’s life. It seems that he had a susceptibility to the weather and that it substantially affected his temperament. Whilst still a novice, in the chapel at Erfurt, during a service and whilst a storm raged outside, Luther fell to the floor in a fit, shouting ‘It is not I’ or, according to Parsons, ‘I am not, I am not dume, I wil speake yet unto the world’.3 The episode marked the end of Luther’s novitiate, and, at the invitation of Erfurt’s seniors, the beginning of his career in the priesthood. As the first storm had ushered his career towards religion, so the second refined that career and imbued it, crucially, with a public voice. As Nathaniel Pallone and James Hennessy remark, explanations of Luther’s experience vary according to ‘the theological vs. the psychopathological’.4 Pallone and Hennessy add to such variations with ‘neurochemical interpretation’: ‘Severe thunderstorms release vast quantities of nitrogen … among susceptible persons, such rapid infusion may trigger episodes of “nitrogen narcosis,” a short-lived condition resembling acute alcoholic intoxication’.5
The events of Luther’s life are a helpful way to think about what this book has shown. If one were imagining lost elements of Shakespeare’s life in order to read his works, then it would be tempting to speculate that he had experience, either direct or anecdotal, of some episode of nitrogen narcosis whilst working on King Lear. In reading the plays, however, such a conjecture would be less apposite for its explanation of Lear’s raging and hallucinations than for its implicit acknowledgement of the relationship between environment and identity. It is this relationship that Shakespeare’s storms highlight and elucidate.
Shakespeare probes the minutiae of the relationship between theatrical and meteorological understanding: the capacity for a character, or an audience member, simultaneously to represent or experience storms on several levels is part of the detailed complexity of Shakespeare’s dramatic meteorology. Whether in the extreme manifestations of weather in Lear which are matched with extremes of expression by the king, or whether, as in The Tempest, thunder and lightning act as a looking glass through which representations of the weather are examined, Shakespeare remains alive to the environmental conditions of human experience.
Crucially, as with Luther and nitrogen narcosis, those conditions accrue layers of interpretation. As Cicero remarks in Julius Caesar, in what amounts to a précis of much of Shakespeare’s storm dialogue, ‘men may construe things after their fashion | Clean from the purpose of the things themselves’ (1.3.34–5). During the early modern period, Luther was described approvingly as ‘that sonne of thunder’, and condemned as one who ‘hath stered a mighty storme and tempest in the chirche’.6 As we have seen, Shakespeare’s attention to the contradictions and mutability of weather interpretation is evident in all of his storm plays, and particularly in Julius Caesar. The relationship between human and environment, then, is understood not only as integral to expression, as in Lear, but subject to manipulation through that expression. Thus, the storm is a conduit for symbol, as when, for Cassius, Caesar is figured as ‘a man | Most like this dreadful night | That thunders, lightens, opens graves, and roars’ (1.3.72–4) or for Pericles’s Marina, ‘born in a tempest’ and for whom ‘This world … is as a lasting storm’ (4.1.18–19). It is the very protean nature of the Shakespearean storm that eludes critics who seek to integrate it into a comprehensive equation or code.7
Storms are an important metaphorical figure throughout Shakespeare’s plays, and especially for those characters who, like Cassius and Marina, are subjected to them. However, the poetic implications of storms are not the only reason for their recurrence. Shakespeare seriously considered the impact of the special effects of thunder and lightning when writing staged storms, whether creating the sense of the new Globe or using the Blackfriars’ to gull the audience.
Ultimately, Shakespeare is invested in the theatricality of the human apprehension of nature. Whilst theatre as a form is developing rapidly, he is aware of the codes of practice being established, and able to use them aesthetically and ironically. The recognition of audience expectation in Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre is, I believe, an area which merits a great deal of further work, and it is in such cases that Shakespeare’s storms are at their most intriguing. It is through the manipulation of the expected that Shakespeare achieves the unexpected. In the storms, we have inevitably found separation, violence, beauty and loss. What this book has demonstrated, however, is that the storms also show Shakespeare testing the limits of theatre and audience before those limits are established.