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Climatic issues pervade early modern English drama, and three main reasons may be adduced for this. First, while in the first half of the 16th century Renaissance natural philosophers still felt compelled to acknowledge the accidental nature of weather‐related phenomena, in the second part of the century, new beliefs emerged and the dramatization of celestial events allowed for a more immediate access to the natural world. Second, then as now, Shakespeare's “sceptred isle” (Richard II) was often exposed to the wind, the rain and the freezing air, and such characteristics were believed to have a lasting impact on the habits of the English nation. Third, people then had to struggle against the adverse weather conditions characterized by what is now referred to as the “Little Ice Age.” As actor and playwright, Shakespeare saw the sky as a theatrical element. While his so‐called festive comedies appear far less festive if we pay attention to their climatic specificities, his tragedies offer interesting insights into the way the playwright associates heavens and humors on the one hand, climate and the planets on the other. I thus argue that climate was for Shakespeare a framing device giving coherence to his playtexts and providing the audience with a natural, elemental, and cosmic background. His interest in the way weather conditions affect human behavior prompted him to modify traditional points of view and, as a result, to foreground Man's ominous capacity to trigger climatic disorders. This article is categorized under: Trans‐Disciplinary Perspectives > Humanities and the Creative Arts

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.

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.

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.

International audience

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.

While ecocritical approaches to literary texts receive more and more attention, climate-related issues remain fairly neglected, particularly in the field of Shakespeare studies. This monograph explores the importance of weather and changing skies in early modern England while acknowledging the fact that traditional representations and religious beliefs still fashioned people’s relations to meteorological phenomena. At the same time, a growing number of literati stood against determinism and defended free will, thereby insisting on man’s ability to act upon celestial forces. Yet, in doing so, they began to give precedence to a counter-intuitive approach to Nature. Sophie Chiari argues that Shakespeare reconciles the scholarly views of his time with more popular ideas rooted in superstition and that he promotes a sensitive, pragmatic understanding of climatic events. She pays particular attention to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, Othello, King Lear, Anthony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest. Taking into account the influence of classical thought, each of the book’s seven chapters emphasises specific issues (e.g. cataclysmic disorders, the dog days’ influence, freezing temperatures, threatening storms) and considers the way climatic events were presented on stage and how they came to shape the production and reception of Shakespeare’s drama.

International audience; For all its Protestant mistrust of images, Elizabethan and Jacobean England was fascinated by the visual arts and, as Horst Bredekamp puts it, paradoxically "reinforce[d] what it reject[ed]" (2015, 169). While continental treatises like Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo's A tracte containing the artes of curious paintinge caruinge buildinge, translated by Richard Haydock in 1598, "introduced the English-reading public to the theory of linear perspective" (Elam 2017, 9), the first original texts in English on the arts of drawing and painting began to circulate in print. A man of his time, Shakespeare could hardly ignore these new discourses on pictures, as his frequent and expert use of iconographic references and technical terms testifies (ibid., 10). It is with this context in mind that I intend to reassess the style and aesthetics of Macbeth in connection with early modern pictorial techniques. "[W]hy do I yield to that suggestion / Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair [?]" (1.3.136-37, my emphasis), 1 Macbeth wonders after he has heard the predictions of the witches. Ghastly, albeit sophisticated, visual images abound in Shakespeare's Scottish tragedy. Overwhelmed by the evil forces that they have unleashed and that are now crushing them, the Macbeths are ironically reduced to miniatures in the last act of the play. As the plot thickens, they are indeed gradually downsized and seem hopelessly dwarfed in the end: "Now does he feel his title / Hang loose about him, like a giant's robe / Upon a dwarfish thief" (5.2.20-22), Angus says of the titular character. How then should we understand the idea of "miniature" in the early modern period? The word was first used by Edward Norgate in connection with "limning" in a treatise written around 1627, Miniatura or the art of limning. Yet, limning originally referred to a technique rather than to a small size painting and it designated "the cleanly, discreet art of watercolour" (Coombs 2009, 78), an art that took up "neither undue space nor time" (ibid.). Sixteenth-and seventeenth-century painters could rely on a number of treatises to improve their practice. In; Macbeth is a graphic work whose visual rhetoric mirrors the outside atmosphere of the Scottish heath and the inner psyche of the titular characters. This article explores the early modern visual praxis in Macbeth in connection with the art of limning to show that, against a dark background symbolizing evil, the playwright uses golden and gaudy hues as a mirror reflecting Macbeth's perturbed mind. Eventually, the colour spots in the play are "diapered over" by the white fog of the Scottish heath. Shakespeare thus resorts to specific colour codes in order to create a visual symphony where "foul" becomes "fair."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sophie Chiari opens the volume’s last section with an exploration of the technology of time in Shakespeare’s plays. For if the lower classes of the Elizabethan society derived their idea of time thanks to public sundials, or, even more frequently in rural areas, to the cycles and rhythms of Nature, the elite benefited from a direct, tactile contact with the new instruments of time. Owning a miniature watch, at the end of the 16th century, was still a privilege, but Shakespeare already records this new habit in his plays. Dwelling on the anxiety of his wealthy Protestant contemporaries, the playwright pays considerable attention to the materiality of the latest time-keeping devices of his era, sometimes introducing unexpected dimensions to the measuring of time. Chiari also explains that the pieces of clockwork that started to be sold in early modern England were often endowed with a highly positive value, as timekeeping was more and more equated with order, harmony and balance. Yet, the mechanization of time was also a means of reminding people that they were to going to die, and the contemplation of mechanical clocks was therefore strongly linked to the medieval trope of contemptus mundi.

Can art in general and literature in particular be really ‘made tongue-tied by authority’ as Shakespeare writes in Sonnet 66, l. 9? A single, straightforward answer to this complex question is certainly not possible, as the present volume argues. It all depends on the period, the place, the local culture and the nature of the political and/or religious forms of pressure on the part of the authorities, as well as on the goals pursued by the censors (which notoriously fluctuate throughout the ages), the personalities of the targeted writers and the desires and abilities of their various readers.

‘What is this thing called “science”?’ Sophie Chiari and Mickaël Popelard ask. In a detailed introduction which challenges the traditional literary/scientific divide and insists on the dynamic approach to the subject of ‘Shakespeare and Science’ promoted by the volume, the two editors introduce their topic. Contextualizing early modern science and showing how stagecraft and science echoed each other in Shakespeare’s England, they provide the readers with epistemological reflections on Renaissance scientific practices and discourses and present the contents of Spectacular Science, Technology and Superstition in the Age of Shakespeare.