Shakespeare under the Weather
Forecasting what Shakespeare was thinking, via almanacs and climate...
I’ve been trying to get inside Shakespeare’s head lately. It’s a tricky and largely imaginative exercise, as for so many historical subjects of the period who, like the playwright, left no obvious autobiographical traces. Sometimes the best that can be done is to think from the outside in, via the world and the culture around the person, and use our own human and subjective intuition about how this might inform their perspective. (Yet another reason why AI could never properly do this stuff.)
In true British fashion, a good place to start is the weather. I’m currently refining a chapter that recreates a day-in-the-life for Shakespeare in 1598, one of the rare dates we know exactly where he was. Here in today’s London, in the past week alone we’ve had rain, hail, unseasonably chilly days and nights, and are about to plunge into a 30 degree celsius + heatwave. Naturally, I wonder: what might Shakespeare expect when he set off from his lodgings in 1598?
The first place I turn is to an almanac. These were among Elizabethan England’s most popular printed forms. Behind religious literature like sermons, almanacs were the bestsellers of the age.
Almanacs compiled key information about seasons, dates, sunset and sunrise, lunar cycles, biblical and astrological readings, and general life or dietary advice: “Shear sheep, [when] the moon [is] increasing” (from Gray’s 1571 almanac); “Good meats breed good blood / If that necessity urge thee / Let blood by counsel, / Or by some medicine purge thee” (from Watson’s 1598 almanac). In this, they’re a little like today’s themed calendars or diaries with a daily quote or glimmer of inspiration. Some were specialised for particular regions or towns. Many were printed under the almanac-writer’s name as a regular annual, and it’s easy to imagine individuals or families having their favourites in the vein of a preferred brand.
Elizabethan England set particular store by Easter, a moveable feast that determined other important calendar periods (for instance, when Advent or Rogationtide began—crucial knowledge if you were planning on getting married, given such ceremonies were forbidden during these moments). Almanacs gave a quick rundown of these important dates, sometimes on the very first inside page. Curiously, historians of the period have our own scholarly equivalent in the form of Cheney and Jones’s indispensable Handbook of Dates (which includes a table that shows Easter dates by year).
Almanacs also predicted the weather. Take this month but back 428 years ago in 1598, when Shakespeare was working up in Shoreditch. According to one prognosticator, we might expect a similar pattern to the London of the past three weeks: a run of “white racking clouds,” “winds aloft,” and “wet day[s],” giving way to cooler series of days and “better weather,” and then “dropping” (’twas ever thus) to damper, darker weeks. Beach weather notwithstanding, some of these predictions (perhaps like the shipping forecast today) offer unlikely lyrical turns: on the 21st May, expect “diverse coloured clouds rolling the sky.”
It’s likely Shakespeare engaged with such texts, given their dominance of the cheap print market. Though, as with so many things, it’s tricky to say for certain. For biographers, it’s something of a shame that no annotated copy survives in Shakespeare’s hand. Almanacs invited autobiographical engagement and included space for adding in one’s own reflections, thoughts, recipes or salves, or for diarising in various fashions. His marginal notes on a copy for 1598 might well have brought us closest to his own sense of “life-writing,” as it were, as the Chamberlain’s Men underwent a transition phase and the Globe playhouse project got underway.
His plays and poetry, though, unsurprisingly make numerous nods, implicit and explicit, to such texts. Most obviously, surely the witches of Macbeth were attentive almanac-readers? “When shall we three meet again? / In thunder, lightning, or in rain?” There’s one way to figure out that rendezvous…
They were also stage properties in themselves. After all, they’re a kind of cultural textual wallpaper or baseline layer, an un-extraordinary feature of everyday life—a true background prop. Ben Jonson (see another discussion here) included a full consultation of an almanac on stage in 1599 in Every Man Out of His Humour (likely including Shakespeare among its cast, as its prequel certainly did). Characters tease a farmer for his investment in almanacs, wondering “what prognostication raps him so?”. He reads through the nearly incantatory list of weather effects as he ponders when best to sow the seeds in his field… “‘Twenty-ninth inclining to rain’. Inclining to rain? That’s not so good, now.”
Such practical concerns pretty much sum up the genre. But, as seen in their spiritual and astrological guidance, almanacs are an excellent example of the overlapping energies and belief systems that characterise the early modern period, pairing superstition and proto-scientific precision.
Shakespeare draws these together in his meditation on fate in sonnet 107:
Not mine own fears nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come
Can yet the lease of my true love control,
Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom.
The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured,
And the sad augurs mock their own presage;
Incertainties now crown themselves assured,
And peace proclaims olives of endless age.
He concludes (as so many of the sonnets do) that his own verse serves as the best guarantor of endurance among this era of spurious promises and predictions. The almanac writers get it wrong: the moon survives its eclipse and any of the “sad augurs” said to attach to certain weather phenomena “mock their own presage” or, in short, are shown to be nonsense. Who trusts a weather forecast? Read poetry.
The sonnet links the these weather-watchers and astrological writers with pamphlets that wear their “prophetic souls” more visibly on their sleeves. Some commentators urged their peers to recognise increasingly unusual or bizarre weather events precisely as signs of a “confined doom,” as Shakespeare drily put it. In 1583, Thomas Day warned that
The Lorde hath forewarned us a great while, & yet doth not cease, so to doe still, first by his Law, then by his gospel, thirdly by the benefits, that we have continually received of him, fourthly by his creatures, and miraculous tokens, strange monsters, blazing comets, unwanted enumbrations of waters, strange fishes, perilous wars, earthquakings, and last of all, fiery constellations . . . .
Mend your ways, Day urged. The lesson applied not only to the population’s spiritual behaviours but to the treatment of the natural world.
This was not only a “little ice age,” as this era of European climate is now widely known, but a period of increasing climate devastation across city and country (a new database has tracked these extreme weather events). Shakespeare knew this, both through Stratford’s countryside (during a decade or more of serious food shortages and crop failures alongside enclosures) and through his workplaces in Shoreditch, where steady urban growth went hand-in-hand with various noisome and noxious manufacturing industries, along with London’s increasing reliance on coal power. And so the weather was odd…
TITANIA. Contagious fogs which, falling in the land,
Hath every pelting river made so proud
That they have overborne their continents. […]
The seasons alter […] The spring, the summer,
The chiding autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world
By their increase knows not which is which.
(A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2.1.90-113)
Almanacs may well get it wrong. As I get my shorts ready for a blistering hot bank holiday weekend here, I’ll also be packing a couple of jumpers… May has always been changeable. But we surely sympathise with Day’s concerns about freak weather incidents and Titania’s picture of climate change wreaking seasonal havoc. In the UK, we’re going from the coldest May of recent memory to perhaps the hottest on record. These things might not be spiritual, but they are a consequence of human activity. As Lear recognises, self-destructively, when raging at the storm on the heath, nature might well “crack” and “spill” the seeds “That makes ingrateful man” (King Lear, 3.2.10-11).
On the 22nd May 1598, Shakespeare wasn’t facing howling winds. He could expect the weather to be so-so, “sometimes dropping.” It was a Monday and Rogationtide had begun yesterday. Back in Stratford and elsewhere, these few days before Ascension meant communal festivities and often a “beating of the bounds” (where the parish boundaries were walked around, still sometimes observed today). It became broadly regarded as “perambulation day.” Perhaps he went on his own walk, up towards the playhouses in the parish of St Leonard’s, Shoreditch, which may well have been undertaking its own perambulation of its limits. Could this be the “mazed world” of Titania’s vision, first proclaimed to the suburb a few years earlier: a corner of the city poised between industrial expansion and bucolic surrounds, by turns hilly and boggy, with the playhouses nested within. We can’t quite get inside Shakespeare’s head via the weather, granted. But we can certainly imagine him getting the temperature, surveying the scene, the summer rain falling periodically and “diverse coloured clouds rolling in the sky.”
All good except for the spurious comments about the weather in Stratford which further obfuscates Shakespeare’s identity. Surely the pamphlets we’re not reaching the back woods? It would be more honest to reference London in this case.