The storm in lear

‘What is the cause of thunder?’
A Study of the Storm in King Lear
by
Jennifer Mae Hamilton
A thesis submitted for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
School of Arts and Media
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
University of New South Wales
5 October 2012

Abstract
This thesis offers a new interpretation of the storm in King Lear. The overarching argument is
that when the storm’s material presence in the drama and its cosmological implications are
given due consideration, both the play’s critical and performance history and the text itself are
meaningfully complicated. From this perspective, this thesis unearths an important historical
shift in interpretation: in 1606, the storm was a radical meteorological event that broke with
conventional representations of the weather and challenged the perceived relations between the
heavens and the earth. By means of a complex confluence of historical forces, it is now
considered a symbolic adjunct to an entirely human conflict. Through a review of the play’s
critical and theatrical history alongside a close reading of the text, this thesis approaches King
Lear from a transhistorical perspective in order to investigate the marked change in the
significance of the storm and reanimate its material function in the drama for today.
Part One maps changes in the meaning and representation of the storm between 1606 and 2012
with regard to the cultural and cosmological significance of the weather, as well as artistic tastes
and practices, in order to assess changes to the representation and interpretation of the storm on
stage. Drawing on the notion that the storm is a structurally integral meteorological event, Part
Two offers a reading of the storm’s material role in both the eponymous character’s journey and
in the overall drama. The storm is shown not to be a symbol of Lear's emotions or mental state;
instead, Lear's willing and shameless exposure of his mortal 'body natural' to the meteorological
storm facilitates his famous paroxysm. By demonstrating the storm’s structural centrality to the
drama, Part Two also argues that its role in triggering a crisis in the kingdom is akin to a
‘natural disaster’. By revitalising the storm’s significance as a meteorological event and
rethinking the meaning of Lear’s important question – ‘What is the cause of thunder?’ – this
thesis addresses an intriguing gap in Shakespeare scholarship at a time in history where the
causes of thunder are being questioned once more.

iii
Acknowledgements
This thesis would not have been possible without the professional, intellectual, financial
and emotional support of a range of different individuals, groups, institutions and
organisations. I want to take the opportunity to thank them all here. First and foremost, I
need to thank my supervisor, who unfortunately did not survive to see the completion of
this project. The late Associate Professor Richard Madelaine: thank you. You politely
forced me to take the path of least resistance on this journey into the messy history of
King Lear. I respect your scholarly rigour, your relentless questioning and dogged
attachment to the theatricality of Shakespeare’s work; without this, my thesis would not
be what it is today. Secondly, I would like to thank my co-supervisor, Dr Meg
Mumford, who stepped in after Richard’s passing and helped me to completion. Her
fresh eyes, careful reading and provocative questions came at an integral stage of the
process. Also, thank you to my proof reader, Dr John Golder.
I gave several work-in-progress presentations of this research that were integral in
shaping and refining my argument; I need to thank those who took time out to involve
themselves in my work. Firstly, thanks to the staff from the Department of English at
the University of New South Wales who attended my major seminar presentation. I
thank them for their interest in my topic despite discursive differences and their
energetic and erratic challenges to my thesis. Secondly, Dr Liam Semler and the
members of the Early Modern Literature and Culture group at the University of Sydney
for welcoming me into the fold and giving me timely feedback on my first chapter in
the final stages of this thesis. Thirdly, I would like to thank the members of EASLCE
and ASLE-UK who attended my presentations in Bath (UK) and Antalya (Turkey), their
attention to the environmental and non-human dimensions of the text proved to be a
source of encouragement on this unconventional path.
I would like to thank the staff of several archives where I spent countless hours
researching for the middle chapters of the thesis. Thanks to Christian from the Bell
Shakespeare Company, Cheryl from the Max Reinhardt Collection and Madeleine from
the Shakespeare Centre in Stratford-Upon-Avon. I would also like to thank Craig
Martin, who generously sent me the final proofs of Renaissance Meteorology before it
was published and whose work enriched the historical complexity of important parts of
my argument at a late stage. I would also like to thank the director Benedict Andrews
and the actor Greg Hicks for their insider comments on my work along the way.
My travel and research was funded by a series of bursaries from both ASLE-UK, the
Graduate Research School of UNSW and also a special prize from the UNSW research
centre. I would like to thank these organisations for their financial support, which
enabled me to pursue this project.
I also wish to thank my peers, colleagues and friends, who have supported me
personally throughout what has been a difficult time of life. Dr Carl Power bore the
brunt of the emotional, psychological and physiological challenge that is involved in
spending four years out in Lear’s storm; his ongoing commentary on the thesis, his
insistence on the value of brevity and his pursuit of clear expression of complex ideas is
part of the fabric of this work, and it is with much love and respect that I record my
thanks today. Drs Demelza Marlin, Michelle Jameison, Laura Joseph and Kate Livett
and Ms Viv McGregor have all influenced my work in powerful ways over the years

iv
and for that I thank them. Also, people who supported my ideas in other ways or
enabled me to pursue other dimensions of my work in a more creative or experimental
context I thank you: Daniel Brine, Bec Dean, Nat Randall, Bruce Cherry, Teik Kim-Pok
and Emma Ramsay (from Performance Space) Astrid Lorange and Aden Rolfe (from
Critical Animals) Leland Kean and Lucinda Gleeson (from the Tamarama Rock Surfers
Theatre Company) and Kate Blackmore, Frances Barrett, Pia Van Gelder, Tom Smith
and Marian Tubbs (from Serial Space). I would also like to thank my bike for helping
me to get to and from the office each day. Although it might seem strange to thank a
machine amidst a list of people, my bike occupies an important place in my life. The
energy, strength and vitality generated through my relationship with my bike made the
process of researching, writing, editing and refining this thesis physically possible.
Finally I would like to thank my family. To my mother, Maggie Hamilton: thanks for
your ongoing love and friendship and your energetic and passionate nature. This has
kept me strong throughout the course of this project and enabled me to stay on track
despite the adversity. Also thank you for all the dinners, breakfasts and lunches you
cooked me when I came to visit and work towards the end of this project. To my father,
JJ Hamilton, who died during the course of writing the thesis. Dad was not a Lear-like
father; in fact he demanded very little from me and used to take me out walking in
storms. I wish he could see the completion because he was the one who encouraged me
to love storms, to dance wildly in the mud and celebrate the majesty of wild weather.
Thanks to my maternal grandmother, May Schubert, who also died during the course of
this thesis just shy of one hundred. She was the matriarch in my life; she gave love
generously albeit conditionally, and constantly kept me on my toes. Thanks also to my
cousin, Rebecca Hamilton, whose work as a scholar, activist and journalist is a constant
source of inspiration. And finally, I am overjoyed to thank my one big love, Craig
Johnson, who I met during this project. I never thought I would have the privilege of
being so thoroughly enriched by love, let alone find it while surrounded by the death
and detritus of a thesis project on King Lear. I thank you CMJ, for being you, for
helping me through the end of this process and for so lovingly opening your life up to
me. I am excited to share the future with you.

v
This thesis is dedicated to the memory of my Supervisor, Associate Professor Richard
Madelaine (1947-2012), my maternal Grandmother May Schubert (1910-2010) and the
man who encouraged me not to be afraid of storms, my dear Father John James
Hamilton (1941-2009).
Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither;
Ripeness is all (5.2.9-11).

vii
Contents
Introduction ………………………………………………………………………. 1
The Distinction Between the Storm and Lear’s Mind
Part 1: A Historical Overview of the Storm
Chapter 1 …………………………………………………………………………. 20
A Cosmological Cataclysm: Early Modern Meteorology, Dramatic Weather and King
Lear’s Idiosyncratic Storm
1.1. Aristotelian Meteorology
1.2. Dramatic Meteorology
1.3. The ‘Storm and tempest’ in King Lear
1.4. The Purpose of the Storm
1.5. Shakespeare’s Idiosyncratic Storm
1.6. The Storm Scenes as a Representation of the Cosmic Paradigm Shift
1.7. The Changing Significance of the Storm
Chapter 2 ………………………………………………………………………… 80
The Meteorological Storm, 1606-1892: Theatre Technology, Populist Spectacles and
Nahum Tate
2.1. Nahum Tate’s Storm
2.2. The Jacobean Storm
2.3. The Restoration Storm
2.4. The Enlightenment Storm
2.5. The Restoration of Shakespeare’s Storm on the Victorian Stage
2.6. The End of the Meteorological Storm
2.7. Conclusion
Chapter 3 ……………………………………………………………………….. 130
The Modern Storm, 1908-2011: Making Sense of the Storm in an Infinite Cosmos
3.1. The Symbolic Storm
3.2. The Storm as Chorus
3.3. New Cosmic Storms
3.4. Making Sense of the Storm in an Infinite Cosmos
3.5. Conclusion

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Part 2: A New Interpretation of the Storm
Chapter 4 ……………………………………………………………………….. 174
Rethinking Lear in the Storm: Shame, Mortality and the King’s ‘Body Natural’
4.1. ‘Off, off, you lendings’
4.2. What Happens During the Storm?
4.3. Lear’s Shame
4.4. From Shameful Self-Consciousness to Shameless Self-Revelation
4.5. Ashamed Characters, Ashamed Critics
4.6. Conclusion
Chapter 5 ……………………………………………………………………….. 220
‘This pitiless storm’: King Lear as a Natural Disaster
5.1. Linking the Socio-Political Drama to the Storm
5.2. Where is the Storm?
5.3. Gloucester in the Storm
5.4. A Natural Disaster in the Kingdom
5.5. Conclusion
Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………… 246
• The Study of the Storm in King Lear
• A New Vision for King Lear
• Towards Ecocritical Literary Historicism
Works Consulted ………………………………………………………………. 260

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Illustration List
1. Joshua Reynolds, Study for King Lear, c.1770. Oil on canvas. Private collection.
Retrieved from
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Study_for_King_Lear_by_Joshua_Reynolds.j
peg, 6 October 2010.
2. George Romney, Head of Lear, c.1773-1775. Chalk on paper. Folger Shakespeare
Library Collection. Retrieved from http://www.folger.edu/, 6 October 2010.
3. James Barry, King Lear weeping over the dead body of Cordelia, c.1776-1778. Oil on
Canvas. Tate Britain. Retrieved from http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/barry-king-
lear-weeping-over-the-dead-body-of-cordelia-t00556, 6 October 2010.
4. Leonard Digges, The Geocentric Cosmos, 1592. Illustration in L. Digges, A
Prognostication eurlasting of right good effect, fruitfully augmented by the auctor,
contayning plaine, brief, pleasaunt, chosen rules to judge the weather by the Sunne,
Moone, Starres, Cometes, Rainebow, Thunder, Cloudes, with other extraordinary
tokens, not omitting the Aspectes of Planetes, with a briefe judgement for euer, of
Plenty, Lacke, Sickness, Dearth, Warres &c. opening also many natural causes worthy
to bee knowen, London, 1592. Retrieved from Early English Books Online,
http://eebo.chadwyk.com, 14 September 2011.
5. Oronce Finé, Two representations of the Sublunary Spheres, 1532. Reprinted in S.K.
Heninger, The Cosmographical Glass: Renaissance Diagrams of the Universe,
Huntington Library, San Marino, 1977, pp.32-3.
6. ‘The Sabbath’ from the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493. Reprinted in S.K. Heninger, The
Cosmographical Glass: Renaissance Diagrams of the Universe, Huntington Library,
San Marino, 1977, p.20.
7. Anonymous, The Last Tempestious Windes and Weather, 1613. Pamphlet Cover
Retrieved from Early English Books Online, http://eebo.chadwyk.com, 14 September,
2011.
8. William Shakespeare, The title page of the King Lear Quarto, 1608. Located in the
British Library, C.34.k.17. Retrieved from
http://www.bl.uk/treasures/shakespeare/kinglear.html 6 February 2012.
9. Thomas Digges, The Heliocentric Cosmos. Reprinted in S.K. Heninger, The
Cosmographical Glass: Renaissance Diagrams of the Universe, Huntington Library,
San Marino, 1977, p.50.
10. James McArdell, Mr Garrick in the character of King Lear, Act 3, scene 1, 1761.
Mezzotint. Victoria and Albert Museum, 2010EG8640. Retrieved from
http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1157982/print-mr-garrick-in-the-character/?print=1,
21 May 2012.
11. Edward Gordon Craig, The Storm in King Lear, 1920. Woodcut. Victoria and Albert
Museum, E.1146-1924. Retrieved from
http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O766388/print-the-storm-in-king-lear/ 6 February
2012.
12. Prompt copy, Act 3, scenes 1 and 2, König Lear, 1908. Directed by Max Reinhardt.
Max Reinhardt Collection, Binghamton Library, New York.
13. Isamu Noguchi, Design model for Act 3, scene 4, 1955. Photograph reprinted in B.
Rychlak, Isamu Noguchi: A Sculptor’s World, Steidl, New York, 2004. Retrieved from,
http://mondo-blogo.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/vintage-noguchi-in-color.html 7 April
2012.
14. Angus McBean, King Lear Act 1, scene 1. 1962 Royal Shakespeare Company
Production, directed by Peter Brook. Photograph. Original image located in RSC
Archives, Stratford-upon-Avon.

x
15. Peter Brook, Lear and Gloucester on the beach in Peter Brook’s 1971 film. Film Still.
Digital image captured from DVD.
16. Anonymous, Roger Blin as Hamm in the original Paris production of Beckett’s
Endgame (or Fin de Partie), which Blin directed in 1957. Photograph. Retrieved from
http://chagalov.tumblr.com/post/3286479136/roger-blin-as-hamm-in-fin-de-partie-
endgame, 6 February 2012.
17. Anonymous, Act 1, scene 1 of Blin’s 1957 Paris production of Fin de Partie.
Photograph. Retrieved from http://s.derbek.free.fr/beckett/Fin_De_Partie.jpg, 6
February 2012.
18. Angus McBean, Paul Scofield as King Lear. 1962 RSC Production. Photograph.
Located in RSC Archives, Stratford-upon-Avon.
19. Prompt copy, Act 2, scene 2, King Lear, 1962. Directed by Peter Brook. Located in
RSC Archives, Stratford-upon-Avon.
20. Manuel Harlan, Greg Hicks as King Lear. 2010 RSC production in Stratford-Upon-
Avon. Digital Photograph. Retrieved from http://www.rsc.co.uk, 7 April 2011.
21. Eddi, Arnar Jónsson as King Lear. 2010 National Theatre of Iceland Production. Digital
Photograph. Reykjavik Production. Retrieved from http://www.benedictandrews.com, 8
July 2011.
22. Johan, Persson, Derek Jacobi as King Lear. 2010 Donmar Warehouse Production.
Digital Photograph. Retrieved from
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/dec/08/review-king-lear-derek-jacobi, 7 April
2011.
23. Manuel Harlan, Greg Hicks as King Lear and Geoffrey Freshwater as Gloucester. 2010
RSC Production. Digital Photograph. Retrieved from http://www.rsc.co.uk, 7 April
2011.
24. George Hewitt Cushman, Mr. Edwin Forrest as King Lear. 1845 Touring Production.
Photograph. Retrieved from http://luna.folger.edu/ 12 September 2012.
Note on the edition of King Lear used in the thesis and referencing style:
Unless otherwise specified, references to Shakespeare’s plays are from Arden Shakespeare
Complete Works, R. Proudfoot, A. Thompson & D. Scott Kastan (eds), Methuen, London, 2001.
This is a conflated edition of the 1608 Quarto and 1623 Folio. However, lines found in Folio but
not in Quarto are marked with a superscript ‘F’ and those found in Quarto but not Folio with a
superscript ‘Q’.
While the vast majority of my references are in footnotes, references to citations from
Shakespeare’s plays are placed in the body of the text. I have kept those simple. For example,
the reference for Kent’s remarks at lines 60-62 of Act 3, scene 2—‘Alack, bareheaded? /
Gracious my lord, hard by here is a hovel: / Some friendship will it lend you ‘gainst the
tempest’—would appear as (3.2.60-62). The symbol / indicates a break between two lines of
verse.

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O, what a world’s convention of agonies is here! All external nature in a storm, all
moral nature convulsed, – the real madness of Lear, the feigned madness of Edgar, the
babbling of the Fool, the desperate fidelity of Kent – surely such a scene was never
conceived before or since!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge1
Fie on this storm.
Shakespeare2
We are not free. And the sky can still fall in on our heads.
Antonin Artaud3
1
S.T. Coleridge, ‘King Lear’ in J. Bate (ed.), The Romantics on Shakespeare, Penguin, London,
1992, p.393.
2
King Lear, 3.1.35.
3
A. Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, Grove Press, New York, 1958, p.79.

1
Introduction
The Distinction Between the Storm and Lear’s Mind
Shakespeare often made use of extreme weather in his plays, both as special
effects and plot devices. Thunder and lightning underscore the evil machinations of the
Witches in Macbeth. Offstage thunder accompanies Cassius’s appeal to Caska (sic) to
take part in the murder of Caesar: ‘Are you not moved, when all the sway of the earth /
Shakes like a thing unfirm?’ (1.3.3-4) in Julius Caesar. Sea storms play an important
dramatic role between scenes in Pericles, during the opening scene of The Tempest, and
prior to the opening of The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night. In each of these last
three instances it is the sea storm that delivers the principal characters on to the stage
and establishes the initial situation of the drama itself.
The storm in King Lear, however, differs from all these and very significantly
so. Not only is it the longest meteorological event of its kind in the playwright’s oeuvre,
it is central to the play’s structure, spanning eight scenes over Acts 2 and 3, three of
which are played out ‘in the rain’ (3.1, 3.2 & 3.4) and another in which the King is
sheltered in a hovel while the storm rages outside (3.6). It sits at the heart of
Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy while the king roams lunatic outdoors and his
kingdom descends into war. These scenes incorporate key speeches in which the
protagonist addresses the storm directly, reflects upon his exposure to the elements and
questions the relationship between the weather and his situation.
Nowhere else does a Shakespearean protagonist question and challenge the
nature and purpose of his place in the world as Lear does. Furthermore, however much
characters might want the storm to correspond with their situation and their worldview,
the storm is ultimately indifferent to human conflict and impervious to human desires.
In this respect, Shakespeare not only breaks his own rules with the storm in King Lear,

2
but he also departs from early modern convention in the representation of meteors. In
other words, the storm in King Lear is not only centrally significant, but
idiosyncratically so.
Paradoxically, despite the scale, duration, centrality and distinctiveness of the
storm to the drama, the storm tends to be marginalised in critical analyses of King Lear.
When the storm is mentioned, it is usually interpreted as either a metaphor for Lear’s
mind or a symbol for another theme, idea or emotion. This thesis challenges the default
understanding of the storm as a symbol and argues that it is primarily a meteorological
storm, the significance of which is derived from its physical presence in the human
drama, rather than its resemblance or similarity to it. That is, the storm is a violent
weather event that materially imposes itself upon the play. It is distinct from, albeit
related to, Lear and the other characters. But they are all forced to respond to the
storm’s meteorological force. Furthermore, it shall be argued that Shakespeare
harnessed the material violence of the storm in order to explore the relationship between
king, kingdom and cosmos at a historical moment when these relations were being cast
into doubt and that this cosmological reading of the storm itself can be reanimated in
our own contemporary situation.
This analysis is located in a long tradition of scholarship that explores
Shakespeare’s plays as both works of early modern drama, written for performance in a
particular context, and canonical works of English dramatic literature authored by a
playwright now considered iconic. In other words, this thesis considers both the
theatricality of the storm in performance and the poetry of the dramatic text. The main
body of the thesis uses a variety of different methodological strategies to extrapolate the
multifaceted significance of these important scenes. A wide-angle lens is used to bring
the historical conditions that gave rise to Shakespeare’s rewriting of the old Lear story

3
into focus, and also to observe the changing theatrical representation of the storm over
time. But equivalent critical value is placed on poetics of the dialogue itself and what
the words reveal about a particular character’s interpretation of the storm at a given
moment in the play. The aim of this Introduction, however, is to provide an overview of
the mainstream critical interpretations of the storm to date, because these conventional
understandings of the storm will come under challenge in the chapters that follow.
The storm is usually thought to have an exclusive relationship with Lear. Three
celebrated images of Lear, all of which were created in the late eighteenth century,
illustrate this idea: Joshua Reynolds’s Study for King Lear (Illus. 1), George Romney’s
Head of King Lear (Illus. 2) and James Barry’s King Lear weeping over the dead body of
Cordelia (Illus. 3). Predating the modern critical tendency to see the storm as a symbol
exclusively of Lear’s situation, these images, all of Lear’s windswept head, offer a
visual interpretation of the King’s turbulent emotional state.
This motif was developed by Reynolds and Romney in studies of Lear’s face,
but was picked up by Barry and turned into a full-scale neoclassical painting of the
play’s final scene, in which the storm still services the representation of Lear’s passions.
The painting depicts Lear with the dead body of Cordelia in his arms, the dead body of
either Goneril or Regan beneath his feet and the body of Edmund being carried off to
the left. The storm has passed, the skies are clearing, but Lear’s hair is blown by a wind
that does not seem to affect anyone else in the painting. Lear holds his hand to his head,
at once grief-stricken and protecting himself from the wind, which is represented in this
painting as a symbolic representation of his passions.

4
Illus. 1: Joshua Reynolds, Study for King Lear (top left).
Illus. 2: George Romney, Head of King Lear (top right).
Illus. 3: James Barry, King Lear weeping over the dead body of Cordelia (bottom).

5
Indeed in all these images, but especially in Barry’s, Lear’s passions are visually
expressed by the wind in his hair. But as a physical phenomenon, the wind is not
targeted or purposeful as it seems to be in Barry’s painting. Rather it is distinctively
imprecise and indiscriminate. Indeed, the wind in King Lear is part of a storm that is
decidedly unwieldy; in 3.1 a knight describes the wind as ‘impetuous’ (3.1.8), making
‘nothing of’ (3.1.9) Lear’s white hair. In contrast to the carefully targeted motif of the
magically windswept Lear, this thesis will show how the storm is a meteorological
event that affects more than Lear’s white hair.
In doing so I am writing against the grain of a long critical tradition. Since the
early nineteenth century, the dominant critical tendency has been to see the storm as not
in itself important. As the following will show, the storm is rarely understood as an
active part of the action itself and considered on those terms. There are subtle
differences in the ways in which the critics below characterise the relationship between
the storm and the drama, but in all these instances there is an avoidance of
understanding the meteorological storm as a meaningful part of the dramatic world,
either because the storm is deemed a distraction or it is seen as a symbolic expression of
the human drama. The following overview of the critical history serves to highlight the
pervasive historical construction of the storm as a metaphor for Lear’s mind or some
other aspect of the human drama, and illustrate the degree to which this view is
entrenched in the critical imagination.
One of the earliest critical reflections on the storm in King Lear is Charles
Lamb’s essay ‘On the Tragedies of Shakspeare: Considered with Reference to their
Fitness for Stage Representation’ (1810). When Lamb wrote this essay, Shakespeare’s
Lear had not been staged in full since the 1670s, having been replaced by Nahum Tate’s
Restoration adaptation The History of King Lear (1681). Lamb speculates on whether

6
Shakespeare’s version should be returned to the stage. ‘Lear is essentially impossible to
be represented on stage’, he concludes.1
For Lamb, the reason King Lear cannot be
staged is because the storm itself dwarfs Lear:
The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in
intellectual: the explosions of his passions are terrible as a
volcano; they are storms turning up and disclosing the bottom of
the sea, his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is
laid bare … On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities
and weakness, the impotence of rage; while we read it, we see
not Lear but we are Lear – we are in his mind, we are sustained
by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and storms.2
There is much more to be said about Lamb’s analysis in its particular historical context
and this shall be returned to in Chapter Two; for the moment I simply wish to highlight
the distinction drawn between Lear and the storm. What Lamb imagines he would see
on stage was a king dwarfed by a theatrical storm, utterly disempowered by a force
larger than himself. Conversely, what he reads on the page is a character with an interior
life and complex feelings about his situation. Lamb sees a distinction between the storm
and Lear, but also states a preference for probing Lear’s inner experience. He desires to
understand Lear’s point of view, and he argues that Shakespeare’s play should not be
staged because when we sit in the theatre overwhelmed by the stage spectacle of the
storm, we would be distracted from what really mattered, a proper understanding of
Lear’s magnificent mind. Conversely, this thesis revisits what, according to Lamb, is
the ‘painful and disgusting’3
fact of seeing an actor playing Lear utterly dwarfed by the
storm.
William Hazlitt’s 1817 reflection on King Lear is similar to that of Lamb. At
Hazlitt’s time of writing all productions of King Lear, whether Shakespeare’s or Tate’s,
1
C. Lamb, ‘On the tragedies of Shakspeare: Considered with Reference to their Fitness for
Stage Representation’ (orig. publ. 1810) in J.M. Brown (ed.), The Portable Charles Lamb,
Penguin, London, 1980, p.575.
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid., p.174.

7
were banned in England due to sensitivities around King George III’s insanity.4
Like
Lamb, Hazlitt hopes that Shakespeare’s play will never return to the stage: ‘We wish
that we could pass this play over, and say nothing about it’.5
For all that, he remains
interested in understanding Lear’s mind:
The mind of Lear, staggering between the weight of attachment
and the hurried movements of passion, is like a tall ship driven
about by the winds, buffeted by the furious waves, but that still
rides above the storm, having its anchor fixed in the bottom of
the sea; or it is like the sharp rock circled by the eddying
whirlpool that forms and beats against it, or like the solid
promontory pushed from its basis by the force of an earthquake.6
By likening Lear’s mind to a solid object that is buffeted about by wind and waves,
Hazlitt reifies Lear’s interiority and psychological complexity rather than exploring any
broader relation with the winds, waves, whirlpools or earthquakes that threaten to shake
it. For Hazlitt, the external events and forces are secondary to his interest in Lear’s
sublime psychological condition.
In Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) A.C. Bradley agrees with both Lamb and
Hazlitt that ‘King Lear is too huge for the stage’.7
But Bradley prefers to understand the
enormity of the drama by conflating the storm and the King’s emotional state:
The explosions of Lear’s passions, and the bursts of rain and
thunder, are not, what for the senses they must be, two things,
but manifestations of one thing. It is the powers of the tormented
soul that we hear and see in the ‘groans of roaring wind and rain’
and the ‘sheets of fire’.8
Bradley claims that the storm and Lear’s situation are one and the same, that the storm
is an expression of his emotions: a symbolic extension of his condition.
4
Depending on the source one consults, the ban was imposed in either 1810 or 1812. It was
lifted upon the King’s death in 1820.
5
W. Hazlitt, The Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, C.H. Reynell, London, 1817, p.153.
6
Ibid., p.154.
7
A.C. Bradley, ‘Lecture VII on King Lear’ in Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet,
Othello, King Lear and Macbeth, (orig. publ. 1904), The Echo Library, Fairford, 2006, p.135.
8
Ibid., p.146.

8
The diminishing of the storm itself continues in Harley Granville-Barker’s
famous preface to King Lear (1927):
The storm is not in itself, moreover, dramatically important, only
in its effect upon Lear. How, then, to give it enough
magnificence to impress him, yet keep it from rivalling him?
Why, by identifying the storm within, setting the actor to
impersonate both Lear and – reflected in Lear – the storm.9
For Granville-Barker the storm is a vehicle Shakespeare used to theatrically explore
Lear’s interiority, but he did not see it as having any other important dramatic purpose.
As far as Granville-Barker is concerned, Shakespeare only included a storm for Lear’s
emotional benefit. Indeed, he takes issue with Lamb and Bradley because he thought
that they had believed the play to be ‘too huge’ for theatrical performance because the
live theatre lacked the means to represent the storm as an extension of Lear’s mind.10
The latter issue will be pursued in full in Chapter Three, where Granville-Barker’s 1940
stage production of King Lear will be examined in relation to his critical views.
In ‘The Lear Universe’ (1930), G. Wilson Knight declared the play to be about
the entire universe, life and all the ages of man, and also that the entirety of the dramatic
action was enclosed in nature’s ‘earthly womb’.11
But even in his cosmic and corporal
interpretation of the play’s themes, he positions the storm in a symbolic relationship to
the rest of the drama:
The violent and extravagant effects of the storm-scene
kindle the imagination till it cannot watch, but rather lives
within, the passionate event. Then follows the extravaganza
of Lear, Edgar, and the Fool, with their variegated play of
the fantastic to the sound of thunder, lit by the nimble
9
H. Granville-Barker, ‘King Lear’ in Prefaces to Shakespeare: Hamlet, King Lear, The
Merchant of Venice, Antony and Cleopatra, Cymbeline, (orig. publ. 1927), Vol.. 1 of 5, B.T.
Batsford, London, 1964, p.266.
10
Ibid., p.267
11
G.W. Knight, ‘The Lear Universe’ in The Wheel of Fire, (orig. publ. 1930), Routledge,
London and New York, 2001, pp 201-234.

9
strokes of lightning. This is purely a phantasma of the mind:
Lear’s mind capering on the page with antic gesture.12
On the one hand, Knight claimed that the philosophy of King Lear is ‘firmly planted in
the soil of the earth’,13
but on the other that the very storm that turns that soil to mud is
just Lear’s neurological phantasm. Even in his book-length study The Shakespearean
Tempest (1932), he holds this position on the storm: ‘The tempest here both points [to]
the tempest in Lear’s mind and, more realistically, shows Lear as braving the cruelty of
nature as an anodyne to human unkindness.’14
In his seminal text The Elizabethan World Picture (1942), E. M. Tillyard takes a
position not dissimilar to Bradley’s. He describes the function of the storm as similar to
that of Lear’s inner tumult:
Lear’s first words in the storm invoke explicitly all four elements
in their uproars; and though these are presented not in abstraction
but as manifested in the concrete natural happenings, the basic
elemental conflict is as much a part of his thought as is the actual
violence of the weather.15
Tillyard’s book was incredibly influential and spawned a generation of Shakespeare
scholars interested in reading correspondences between the heavens and the earth.
Indeed, Tillyard’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s work also gave rise to the idea
that the storm was the macrocosmic reflection of the tumult in the microcosm. In 1951
George W. Williams argued that the human conflict and the heavens were in an
analogous relationship with each other:
The correspondence between the microcosm and the macrocosm,
macrocosmic violence in terms of the microcosm, suggests
additional and amplifying correspondences; the kingdom and
12
Ibid., pp.229-230.
13
Ibid., p.203.
14
G.W. Knight, The Shakespearean Tempest: with a Chart of the Shakespearean Dramatic
Universe, (orig. publ. 1932), Methuen, London, 1964, p.196.
15
E. M. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (orig. publ. 1942), Vintage Books, London,
2011, p.64.

10
family, the body politic and the body domestic, are caught up in
this mesh of interlocking connotations.16
So similar in shape are all the corresponding aspects of the play that the skies have the
same characteristics as individual sentences. Williams argued that the ‘most notable’
feature of Lear’s great ‘Blow winds’ speech (3.2) is the ‘frequency of fricatives and
stops in clusters of onomatopoetic vernacular words chosen to suggest the roughness
and harshness of the weather’.17
By focussing on the correspondences between the
storm and Lear, Williams imagines a near-perfect mathematical order in the Lear
universe, one in which each element of the world perfectly reflects another.
The idea of storm as a macrocosmic reflection of the chaos in the microcosm
held sway for many decades. In a 1952 response to Williams’s article, E. Catherine
Dunn agreed with his analysis of the correspondences between microcosm and
macrocosm, but took issue with his framing of the play as Christian. Williams argued
that Shakespeare’s choice of images—‘cataracts and hurricanoes’ and the cracking of
‘nature’s moulds’—invoked a Christian narrative of the Deluge and eschatological
destruction.18
Dunn countered with a Pagan reading of these correspondences and
within this explicitly described the storm as a metaphor. She linked up the daughters’
ingratitude with Empedoclean notions of Love and Strife and the conflict between the
four elements, earth, fire, water and wind, concluding that ‘ingratitude ... is crucial to
the interpretation of the storm metaphor, for it is that evil which breaks the heart of
Lear, shatters his reason, and bursts asunder the bonds of family affection in him. By
metaphorical extension it is ingratitude which breaks the tranquillity of nature and
16
G. W. Williams, ‘The Poetry of the Storm in King Lear’, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol.2, No.1,
1951, (pp.57-71) p.59.
17
Ibid., p.60.
18
Ibid., p.67.

11
causes the storm.’19
In 1972 Kenneth Muir also interpreted the storm in this way. Lear’s
‘refusal to ease his heart by weeping is accompanied by the first rumblings of the storm,
which is a projection on the macrocosm of the tempest in the microcosm’. 20
More
recently still, in Green Shakespeare (2006) Gabriel Egan argued that in the storm
scenes, ‘Shakespeare emphasized instead the other microcosmic/macrocosmic
correspondence: the weather is a version of the storm in Lear’s mind.’21
Egan has also
written more recently on the broader relevance of Tillyard’s methodology for today.22
This final example is especially surprising, because, while Egan’s branch of
Shakespeare scholarship is explicitly interested in revitalising and reanimating the
relations between the human world and the wider environment,23
the materiality of the
storm and its physical violence fail to play any significant part in his analysis. Because
it is understood to symbolise or correspond to other aspects of the drama and enhance
them by association, in none of these readings is the storm regarded as important in
itself.
More recent interpretations tend to collect all these subtly different perspectives
on the storm, that it is an extension of Lear’s mind or a reflection of the political strife,
and vaguely suggest that the storm symbolises all of these different things at once. In
the 2002 Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy, all storms are described as
generic symbols for change and confusion at all levels of the drama:
The great storm passages in Julius Caesar, Othello, and King
Lear, where ‘the conflicting elements’ (Tim. 4.3.231) are thrown
into wild disorder and function as central symbols for a pervasive
19
E. Catherine Dunn, ‘The Storm in King Lear’, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol.3, No.4, 1952,
(pp.329-333) p.329.
20
K. Muir, Shakespeare’s Tragic Sequence, Routledge, London, 1972, p.129.
21
G. Egan, Green Shakespeare: from Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism, Routledge, London and New
York, 2006, p.144.
22
See, for example his ‘Gaia and the Great Chain of Being’ in L. Bruckner and D. Brayton
(eds), Ecocritical Shakespeare, Ashgate, London, 2011, pp.57-70.
23
For more on this theoretical wing of Shakespeare scholarship, see the other contributions to L.
Bruckner and D. Brayton (eds), Ecocritical Shakespeare, Ashgate, London, 2011.

12
sense of violent change and confusion, a technique reinforced by
sustained use of elemental imagery elsewhere in each play.24
In 2003 R.A. Foakes likewise saw the storm as a symbol of a range of different kinds
of conflict in the drama:
The storm dramatized in King Lear functions in much greater
depth at the centre of the action, as an extension of the turmoil in
Lear’s mind, as a symbolic embodiment of the confusion and
discord in the kingdom, and potentially as an expression of the
anger of the gods. It also seems to spring from the violence Lear
has unleashed in his kingdom, and to gather up and reflect in its
fury the cruelty those in power inflict on others.25
As unwieldy as the storm appears for McAlindon and Foakes, the storm is not a storm,
it is a metaphor for multiple complexities in the human drama; the storm is a poetic or
dramatic by-product. Foakes’s claim that the storm seems to ‘spring from’ the violence
of the play is a synecdoche for this larger tradition. But as I see it, the storm does not
spring from the violence of the play, but rather brings its own violent material force to
the play. This distinction may appear subtle, but it is fundamental to my reading of the
storm’s meaning and function in the play. Over the course of the thesis I work against
the dominant interpretation of the storm as a symbol for Lear’s mind or a reflection of
the political conflict, and work to reintegrate the storm itself into an analysis of the
drama.
A new interest in the storm itself has emerged during this thesis project. In 2010,
both Gwilym Jones and Steve Mentz published work on the storm in King Lear. Jones
sees the storm as ‘just a storm’26
and Mentz sees it as a representation of ‘post-
24
T. McAlindon, ‘What is a Shakespearean Tragedy?’ in C. McEachern (ed.), Cambridge
Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, (pp.1-
22) p.6.
25
R.A. Foakes, Shakespeare and Violence, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003,
p.184.
26
G. Jones, Shakespeare’s Storms, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Sussex, 2010,
Sussex Research Online, retrieved from http://eprints.sussex.ac.uk, 19 August 2010, p.89.

13
equilibrium ecology’.27
The methods, aim and scope of their analyses differ quite
substantially to my own. Jones’s thesis is focussed on storms in several of Shakespeare’s
works and his chapter on King Lear considers the storm in relation to its location on the
heath. In contrast, Mentz uses the discourse of ecocriticism to characterise the storm
scenes as an example of the most up-to-date scientific understanding of the biosphere.
Conversely, this thesis takes a more conventional approach to the storm, by exploring
the history of the storm on stage and engaging in a close reading of the scenes. So, rather
than describing their arguments here, their research will be integrated into the thesis
where relevant.
In order to challenge the dominant critical understanding of the storm as a
symbol, this thesis is broken down into two parts. Part One, ‘A Historical Overview of
the Storm’, explores the likely significance of the storm in its seventeenth century
context and maps the changing significance of the storm on stage between early
seventeenth century productions and today. This long historical overview is designed to
highlight the ever-evolving significance of the storm. Part Two, entitled ‘A New
Interpretation of the Storm’, offers a close reading of King Lear taking into account the
physical force of the storm.
In Chapter One the storm is explored in its seventeenth-century historical
context, with a particular focus on general cultural ideas that likely informed
Shakespeare’s meteorological imagination. First, the Aristotelian roots of the early
modern understanding of the weather are highlighted in order to investigate how the
conventions for the dramatic representation of storms stem from this tradition. Second,
the storm is explored within its theatrical context to show how Shakespeare’s play not
only breaks with established dramatic conventions, but also opens up a new way of
27
S. Mentz, 'Strange Weather in King Lear', Shakespeare, Vol.6, No.2, June 2010, pp.139-152.

14
thinking about the relationship between humans and the weather. Third, the chapter
reveals how, along with the subplot and the tragic ending, the storm is one of
Shakespeare’s key innovations in his retelling of the old Lear story. As a whole, the
argument of this chapter is that Shakespeare’s version of the old tale references an
ancient tradition of philosophical speculation in the face of meteorological violence,
calls into question the correspondence between king, kingdom and cosmos and, at the
same time, reveals the complex and changing relationship between humans, political
systems and the weather in 1606.
While the meteorological storm takes on radical cosmological and historical
significance in Chapter One, we categorically do not view the storm in such terms
today. What changes between 1606 and today? How is it possible to lose sight of the
material force of a cataclysmic event that spans two acts and eight scenes of a drama? It
is impossible to answer these questions in full; the historical changes are too vast to
articulate. As such, Chapters Two and Three focus in on the theatrical history of King
Lear in order to map the evolution of its representation on stage. An overview of the
play’s production history between 1606 and 2012, focussing largely on British stagings
of the play, reveals the storm as an ever-evolving theatrical entity, the meaning of which
is not static over time. Indeed, the significance of the storm is entirely dependent upon,
and can only be understood in terms of, the dramatic story in which it is so spectacular a
feature. Thus, over the centuries the significance of the storm changed in line with both
adaptations to the performance text and, of course, a growing sophistication in stage
technology. To this end, Chapter Two reveals a fixation on the meteorological storm
from 1606 until the end of the nineteenth century, but largely it is part of Nahum Tate’s
1681 adaptation in which a heroic King Lear triumphs in the end. In Chapter Three the
storm on the modern stage is explored. We see how swiftly the storm becomes a

15
symbolic expression of either personal or political tumult. At the same time the critical
tendency to cast the storm as a symbol or metaphor evolves. Although I will show how
by end of the twentieth century a more complex vision of the storm is created on stage,
the critical tradition cares little for understanding the function and significance of the
storm beyond its relation to Lear.
Chapter Four begins the thorough rethinking of the storm’s function in King
Lear, that occupies the rest of the thesis. This chapter will explore how we understand
Lear’s situation differently if we account for the materiality of the storm itself. So,
instead of regarding the weather as symbolic of Lear’s mental tempest, Lear’s
experience both out in the storm and sheltering from the storm is revealed as a shameful
transformation brought about by the storm’s indifference. I characterise Lear as
ashamed of his mortality, complicate this in terms of the idea of ‘The King’s Two
Bodies’ and see Lear’s experience of exposure to the material event as compelling him
to confront and contend with the most shameful aspects of himself. This chapter is a
reading for today insofar as it is difficult and complex to reflect upon what it means to
be faced by an indifferent and hostile storm. Yet such traumatic reflection is what is
necessary if indeed we are to culturally process the climate that is changing despite our
desire for stability.
In my fifth and final chapter I continue to unfold the significance of the storm’s
materiality and indifferent presence by exploring it in relation to other aspects of the
drama. I use political philosophy and the idea of ‘natural disaster’ to reanimate the
materiality and physical violence of the storm in relation to the broader dramatic
situation. I explore the experience of other characters in the storm and the geopolitical
arrangement of Lear’s kingdom. In this chapter the storm is studied not only as an event

16
that relates exclusively to Lear, but also as an event that involves every inch of the
kingdom in the tragic conflict.
The most important point here is that my analysis positions the material storm as
indifferent to the human drama. In other words it is a material force to which the
characters are obliged to respond. But it is not the bearer of any explicit message or in
any way particularly concerned with the drama. I am not the first to suggest that the
storm is physically indifferent to Lear. Charles Lamb implied as much when he
observed how the powerless King was dwarfed by the storm, and Maynard Mack made
the point explicitly when he wrote that ‘nature proves to be indifferent or hostile’28
in
King Lear. But I am the first to consider this feature of the text in any detail and, in
short, I contend—and it is the overarching argument of the thesis as a whole—that its
complex relationship with the entire dramatic situation lends deep historical, social and
political significance to Shakespeare’s storm as a meteorological event.
There are some key terms used throughout the thesis that draw on archaic
definitions and need clarification from the outset. The first is ‘meteors’, frequently used
as a substitute for the word ‘weather’. In the Meteorologica Aristotle does not use the
word ‘weather’ as a general term for all atmospheric disturbances, but rather catalogues
various individual phenomena in the skies and classifies all of them as ‘meteors’.29
While today the word ‘meteor’ signifies a rock of extraterrestrial origin burning up upon
entering the Earth’s atmosphere, until the early nineteenth century a ‘meteor’ was not
just a shooting star, but an umbrella term for all kinds of meteorological phenomena,
28
M. Mack, King Lear in Our Time, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles,
1972, p.63.
29
All references are to Aristotle, Meteorologica, H.D.P. Lee (trans.), Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, Mass. Heinemann, London, 1952. Subsequent references will be placed in the body
of the text, giving section, chapter and line.

17
such as thunder, lightning, wind and rain. More to the point, the term ‘meteors’ is useful
for this thesis because, as will become clear in the first chapter, the term evokes the
extraterrestrial or cosmological dimension of the weather phenomena integral to early
modern meteorology.
Other significant words that appear frequently in the thesis are ‘cosmos’ (and
‘cosmology’, ‘cosmic’ and ‘cosmological’), which are used in place of the terms
‘universe’ and ‘worldview’. In the first chapter this word set has quite an obvious and
specific meaning. It is used to refer directly to classical ideas about the nature and shape
of the universe and how that relates to the world itself. But the word set is maintained
throughout the thesis to refer more generally to worldview or to indicate the whole
world as it is conceived or imagined by a character. When ‘cosmos’ or ‘cosmology’ is
referred to after the early modern period, it more specifically relates to the perceived
relationships between the human, the political or social systems that organise the wider
world.30
I retain the word cosmology because this helps maintain the logical link
between the weather and world beyond Lear’s mind, which is important for my
argument.31
Thus the words ‘meteors’ and ‘cosmos’ appear throughout the thesis
because they help reanimate the materiality of the storm.
30
The structure of this definition is inspired by Felix Guattari’s essay ‘The Three Ecologies’
(human subjectivity, social relations and the environment), a work of speculative philosophy
motivated by the radical hope that understanding the entanglement in his essay would
eventually ‘lead to a reframing and a recomposition of the goals of (all) emancipatory struggles’
(The Three Ecologies, Continuum, New York, 2000, p.49). I do not draw directly on this work
here, and although I might share the hope that a single essay would be able to catalyse such
change, I am not as optimistic; despite our differences, there are shared sensibilities between my
idea of the relationship between king, kingdom and cosmos and his modern theorization of the
entanglement between human, social and environmental spheres.
31
For work that explores cosmology in a modern context, using a range of different terms from
‘cosmology’, ‘worlding’ to ‘life worlds’, see M. Ohanian and J. Royoux (eds), Cosmograms,
Lukas and Sternberg, New York, 2005; J. Tresch, ‘Technological World Pictures: Cosmic
Things and Cosmograms’, Isis, Vol.98, 2007, pp.84-99; D. Harraway ‘Foreword: companion
species, mis-recognition and queer worlding’ in N. Giffney and M. Hird (eds), Queering the
Non/Human, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2008 (xxiii-xxvi), J. von Uexküll, A Foray Into the Worlds of
Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning, J. O’Neill (ed. and trans.), University of
Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2010.

18
Furthermore, I explore King Lear as a text of poetic dialogue with an
overarching dramatic narrative that is ultimately designed for performance in a theatre.
Thus, at times King Lear is referred to as having ‘poetic’, ‘dramatic’ and ‘theatrical’
properties respectively. A reference to the play’s ‘poetic’ features means the language
and structure of the dialogue itself is under analysis and that the idea represented therein
is not necessarily supported or validated by the dramatic narrative as a whole. A
reference to the ‘dramatic’ function of something signals its purpose and place in the
overall plot of King Lear. Finally, when the ‘theatrical’ aspect of the storm or a
character is mentioned, it indicates the analysis of its likely function or appearance for
an audience.

19
Part 1: A Historical Overview of the Storm

20
Chapter 1
A Cosmological Cataclysm:
Early Modern Meteorology, Dramatic Weather and King Lear's Idiosyncratic Storm
In the early modern period storms of great magnitude that caused extensive
damage and loss of life took on particular cultural significance, prompting zealous
pamphleteers to write lengthy tracts about them and religious scholars of various
denominations to interpret them as acts of God, punishments for man’s misdeeds.1
It is
within a world of deep anxiety and divided opinion about the cosmic significance of
meteorological violence that Shakespeare decided to retell the story of King Lear and to
set square in its centre as massive a storm as the early modern stage may yet have seen.
In order to move away from a reading that sees the storm solely in terms of Lear,
towards one that sees it tied to just about every facet of the play, this chapter begins by
sketching the cultural context within which Shakespeare imagined his storm. To
animate the material dimensions of early modern meteorology, we start with a
consideration of Aristotle’s meteorological model and the way in which that relates to
both the broader cultural understanding of the weather in the early modern period and to
the conventions for representing the weather in the theatre. Having established the key
aspects of Aristotle’s influential materialist philosophy, Shakespeare’s storm will be
explored in terms of how it references and departs from a classically inspired model of
meteorological representation and in crafting the storm in King Lear the dramatist
departed from the usual use of meteorological events within drama. Furthermore, in the
early seventeenth century the weather had a complex and very material link with the
cosmos – weather events were not just imagined as metaphorical signs from God, the
gods, devils or demons, but such ideas were physically structured into the dominant
1
For an extensive analysis of this aspect of early modern culture, see A. Walsham, Providence
in Early Modern England, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001.

21
geocentric worldview of the time. In other words, due to the perceived structure of the
cosmos, it was literally possible to imagine a supernatural being meddling with the
meteors. Thus, this chapter analyses the significance of Shakespeare’s storm within a
context in which storms were usually imagined to have some kind of divine or demonic
import, and theorise the radical and provocative historical implications of representing a
storm that is ultimately indifferent to the human beings and their petty conflicts.
1.1. Aristotelian Meteorology
Aristotle's Meteorologica (350 B.C.E.), generally recognised as the first
systematic study of the weather, dominated the natural philosophy of meteorology until
the late seventeenth century, long after Shakespeare’s death.2
In relation to his Poetics
and Physics, Meteorologica is one of Aristotle’s lesser-known works, but in the early
modern period university graduates were schooled in Aristotelian meteorology from the
thirteenth century onwards.3
Of course, Shakespeare was not schooled in this way, but
because Aristotle’s model was widely read, as I shall show presently, it influenced the
way poets and dramatists imagined the weather in a range of ways. In a more general
sense, the basic structure and vocabulary of Aristotelian meteorology also filtered down
from the educated elite, and formed part of the general cultural understanding of the
meteors during this period.4
On the one hand, the long description of the meteors that
ensues reveals a different model for thinking about the weather, which is important for
this chapter. But on the other hand, the description activates a materialist mode of
2
Aristotle, Meteorologica, H.D.P. Lee (trans.), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Heinemann, London, 1952.
3
C. Martin, Renaissance Meteorology: Pomponazzi to Descartes, Johns Hopkins University
Press, Baltimore, 2011, p.5.
4
S.K. Heninger, 'Meteorological Theory and its Literary Paraphrase' in A Handbook of
Renaissance Meteorology: with Particular Reference to Elizabethan and Jacobean Literature,
Duke University Press, Durham, 1960, pp.37-46.

22
thinking about the weather and animates its philosophical implications, both of which
are integral to the overall argument of the thesis.
Aristotle's meteorological system was linked to a geocentric cosmological model
that placed the earth as the fixed centre, around which the heavens turned; the meteors
occupied the space between the moon and the earth. Meteorological movement, he
argued, was generated by the rotations of the heavens around the earth: ‘The (terrestrial)
region must be continuous with the motions of the heavens, which therefore regulate its
whole capacity for movement: the celestial element as source of all motion must be
regarded as first cause’ (1.2.21-25). The spheres above the moon were known as the
celestial spheres; bodies in the celestial sphere were made up of one element only, ether.
The spheres below the moon were the sublunary or terrestrial spheres. The meteors are
found in these spheres and are the imperfect combinations of the four elements: earth,
fire, wind and water. The sublunary realm was stratified into distinct spheres, as shown
in the late sixteenth-century images of the geocentric cosmos (Illus. 4) and of the spheres
below the moon (Illus. 5). The first image below the lunar sphere is marked with a
crescent moon and the two spheres between the moon and the earth are the sublunary
spheres. This image captures the literal link between the earth, meteors and the heavens
and their spatial arrangement as parts of a whole cosmos. But also noteworthy is the
perceived scale of the sublunary spheres with regard to the rest of the heavens; although
today we think of the earth’s atmosphere as dwarfed by the enormous and infinite
universe, the sublunary spheres took up a significant portion of the whole geocentric
cosmos.

23
Illus. 4: A late sixteenth-century representation of the geocentric cosmos
Within this general cosmological framework, meteorology was the study of the
way in which the different meteors were produced. For Aristotle, ‘meteorology’ was the
study of ‘meteors’, literally meaning ‘something raised up’.5
While the study of
atmospheric disturbances and weather patterns is still called ‘meteorology’, the word
‘meteor’ refers today to just one atmospheric phenomenon, a small extra-terrestrial rock
5
Heninger, Handbook of Renaissance Meteorology, p.3.

24
that burns up upon entering the earth’s atmosphere. But until the eighteenth century the
word 'meteor' denoted a range of different atmospheric phenomena stemming from
Aristotle's original definitions: hurricanes, whirlwinds, thunder and lightning, rain, hail,
snow, rainbows, clouds, mist and dew. Other phenomena that no longer fall into the
study of modern meteorology, but were once classified as meteors include coastal
erosion, silting, the saltiness of the sea, comets, earthquakes and shooting stars.6
Meteors were imagined as complex combinations of the different elements and
their essential qualities, produced by such means as the relationship between the heat of
the sun and the rotations of the heavens around the earth. There were four qualities to
the elements: hot, dry, cold and moist. Each element had two essential qualities: earth
was cold and dry; air was hot and wet; fire was hot and dry, and water was cold and
wet. Although any meteor could be produced anywhere, given the right conditions, it
was thought that, in the sublunary spheres, the airy and fiery meteors, (lightning,
thunder, comets and shooting stars), were produced higher up and the earthy and watery
ones (coastal erosion, saltiness of the sea, wind, rain, snow, rainbows, clouds, mist,
earthquakes and dew) down closer to the earth. Meteors fell into two main categories:
vapours and exhalations: ‘Vapour is naturally moist and cold’, wrote Aristotle, ‘and
exhalation is hot and dry: and vapour is potentially like water, exhalation is potentially
like fire’ (1.3.27-29). Vaporous meteors were the various formations of water above the
earth responding in complex ways to the heat of the sun.7
Exhalations were a more
eclectic mix of hot and dry phenomena.8
6
From our modern perspective, earthquakes are perhaps the most unlikely phenomenon to be
classified as a ‘meteor’, given that they occur underground and that we now understand them as
the movement of the tectonic plates. But for many centuries earthquakes were thought to be
caused by powerful subterranean winds that found their way underground through openings in
the Earth’s surface and, as such, they were classified as ‘meteors’.
7
Rain, for example, was produced ‘when the heat which caused (water) to rise leaves it … the
vapour cools and condenses again as a result of the loss of heat and the height and turns from air

25
Illus. 5: Two sixteenth-century representations of the sublunary spheres
The material constitution of the meteors was unstable. As mentioned earlier,
meteors were combinations of different elements, but they were not conceived of as
substances in their own right. For Aristotle, the fact of a meteor’s formation was
accidental. This mutable materiality is a subtle but conceptually important feature of
classical meteorology. Craig Martin has identified a long tradition of characterising the
meteors as nature's accidents spanning from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century:
Albertus Magnus [13th
Century] ... described [meteors] as matter that
is in a state of becoming a simple substance … [and] John Buridan
[14th
Century] was one of the first to use the term imperfect mixtures
to categorise meteorological effects in contrast to the perfect
mixtures, such as flesh, blood, milk or metals.9
into water: and having become water again, falls again onto the earth’ (1.9.26-31). The vapours
were the evaporation and condensation of water in relation to the sun.
8
Aristotle described the two kinds of exhalations as follows: ‘Exhalations that arise from the
earth when it is heated by the sun … (are) of two kinds; one is more vaporous in character, the
other more windy, the vapour rising from the water within and upon the earth, while the
exhalations from the earth itself, which is dry, are more like smoke’ (1.4.8-11).
9
Martin, Renaissance Meteorology, p.27.

26
Furthermore, according to Martin, the mid-sixteenth-century meteorologist Marcus
Frytsche described a meteor as something ‘that happens in the upper regions of the air’
and as ‘close to being an element’.10
As Martin points out, the word ‘happens’ translates
from Latin ‘accidere’, thereby forging a conceptual and etymological linkage between
the meteors and the notion of the accident. Martin’s point is that the consensus amongst
natural philosophers from the thirteenth century onward is that the meteors are
accidental, incomplete and imperfect.
Despite the tradition of understanding the meteors as nature’s accidents, when
they did materialise they were understood as distinct, albeit temporary, entities,
produced by specific atmospheric situations. For example, Aristotle characterises
thunder and lightning, rain and hurricanes as related but distinct:
The windy exhalation causes thunder and lightning when it is
produced in small quantities, widely dispersed, and at
frequent intervals, and when it spreads quickly and is of
extreme rarity. But when it is produced in a compact mass and
is denser, the result is a hurricane, which owes its violence to
the force which the speed of its separation gives it. When
there is an abundant and constant flow of exhalation the
process is similar to the opposite process which produces rain
and large quantities of water. Both possibilities are latent in
the material and when an impulse is given which may lead to
the development of either, the one of which there is the
greater quantity latent in the material, is forthwith formed
from it, and either rain, or, if it is the other exhalation that
predominates, a hurricane is produced (3.1.11-18).
There is nothing especially surprising about this physical distinction: then as now, a
hurricane was distinct from a light showering of rain. I underline this point simply
because in the limited scholarship hitherto devoted to violent weather conditions in
Shakespeare, storms are rarely separated from thunder and lightning in any meaningful
10
Ibid., p.10.

27
way.11
But of course a hurricane or storm is different from thunder and lightning. But
the distinction between storms/hurricanes and thunder/lightning – and they are very
distinct, of course – will become clear when I turn to examine the significance and
function of these meteorological events in Shakespeare’s play.
There was also an explicit link between Aristotelian meteorology and classical
cosmology. In a geocentric cosmos, the weather was literally the medium between the
heavens and the earth. If a meteorological sign was considered a sign from God, this
connection was not just metaphysical, but also direct and material. For instance, the
image below (Illus. 6), published in The Nuremberg Chronicle in 1493, represents the
geocentric cosmos similar to the one above (Illus. 4), but in this instance God and the
angels inhabit the heavens; thus, it is easier to see why it was thought that the meteors
were the mediators of the relationship between the heavens and the earth. When
orthodox philosophers, poets, pamphleteers, priests and dramatists drew a link between
the meteors and the heavens, or the meteors and the human world, it was not a religious
metaphor or idle fantasy, but a description that awarded meaning to the material world
as it was popularly imagined and literally understood in Britain and Europe until the late
seventeenth century.12
Over the course of this chapter, these features of Aristotelian
meteorology are gradually drawn into an analysis of the storm in King Lear.
Furthermore, as was said above, this model of meteorological thinking helps to
emphasise the material aspects of the storm and reveal the complexity of meteorological
natural philosophy that is important throughout the thesis.
11
For example, under the title, Shakespeare's Storms (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of
Sussex, 2010, Sussex Research Online, retrieved from http://eprints.sussex.ac.uk, 19 August
2010.), Gwilym Jones focuses on ‘Storm and tempest’ in King Lear and the ‘Thunder and
lightning’ in Macbeth as ‘storms’, but I argue that the two are distinct in some ways due to their
intensity and duration.
12
Although Copernicus’s heliocentric theory was published in 1543, and began to destabilize
the dominant worldview soon after, the actual transition from the Classical to the Modern
cosmological model took more than a century. The historical details of this slow transition shall
be touched upon in more detail below.

28
Illus. 6: The geocentric cosmos represented with God in his heavenly seat

29
1.2. Dramatic Meteorology
The specific vocabulary of Aristotelian meteorology is clearly legible in the
work of early modern English dramatists and poets like Spenser, Marlowe, Chapman,
Jonson and Shakespeare. References to the exhalations and vapours and all the
aforementioned phenomena from rain to earthquakes were part of this meteorological
imaginary. S.K. Heninger traces the influence of Aristotelian meteorology in early
modern dramatic dialogue in exhaustive detail in the Handbook of Renaissance
Meteorology: with Particular Reference to Elizabethan and Jacobean Literature
(1960), which is divided into sections on vapours and exhalations, with subsections on
the use of all the meteors from clouds to earthquakes. There is no need to repeat all
Heninger’s findings here: not only is his discussion of phenomena such as rainbows and
dew, for example, irrelevant to my purpose, but also his focus, as his title clearly states,
is the meaning of meteorological imagery on the printed page. However, I will briefly
summarise the relevant material from Heninger and highlight some of the ways the
meteors were incorporated in dramatic dialogue and poetry.
The most common use of the meteors in poetry and dramatic dialogue is as a
metaphor or simile. For example, Prince Hal in Henry IV, Part I uses the wind as an
extended metaphorical portent of the imminent battle: 'The southern wind / Doth play
the trumpet to his purposes, / And by his hollow whistling in the leaves / Foretells a
tempest and a blust’ring day' (Hen. IV, 1, 5.1.3-6). This kind of meteorological
metaphor is common in the early modern repertoire, and Heninger catalogues numerous
examples. Often the descriptions are more explicitly Aristotelian, invoking the vapours,
exhalations and the rotations of the heavens. When it comes to King Lear, Heninger
does not mention the storm as such, but rather other occasions when the meteors are
mentioned in the dramatic dialogue. For example, he looks at the moments when Lear

30
calls upon the 'nimble lightnings' (2.2.354) to blind and the 'fen-suck'd fogs' (356) to
destroy Regan’s beauty.13
With regards to the storm scenes Heninger is interested in the
poetic references in the dialogue. For example he shows how 'Blow winds and crack
your cheeks' (3.2.1) invokes the conventional visual representation of winds as cherubs
with bursting round cheeks blowing down from the heavens,14
like the cheeks of the
four cardinal winds represented in both the Nuremberg Chronicle image (Illus. 6). But
Heninger’s discussion of poetic moments in individual lines of dialogue does not
address a spectacular meteorological event’s function in a dramatic story.
A meteorological event, such as the storm in King Lear or the thunder and
lightning in Macbeth, has a more significant role in the overall dramatic story than the
poetic allusions contained in individual lines of dialogue. 'Meteorological event' here
refers to an instance of dramatic weather that exceeds the poetry of an individual line,
impacts upon a dramatic story and is an imagined and/or staged entity distinct from the
characters' spoken words. In a published play, such meteorological events are usually
indicated by stage directions. In the early modern period common stage directions for
storm-related meteorological events included: ‘Thunder’, 'Thunder and lightning' and,
less frequently, ‘Storm’.15
In the case of King Lear there are no stage directions in the
Quarto texts (1608 & 1612), but the First Folio (1623) offers the unique directions
‘Storm and tempest’ in 2.2 and ‘Storm still’ in 3.1, 3.2 and 3.4.16
It is highly unlikely
13
Heninger, Handbook of Renaissance Meteorology, p.62.
14
Ibid., p.118.
15
These conventions are catalogued in detail by Leslie Thomson in 'The Meaning of "Thunder
and Lightning": Stage Directions and Audience Expectations' (Early Theatre, Vol.2, No.1,
1999, pp.11-24.) and in the introduction to Gwilym Jones' Shakespeare's Storms.
16
Beyond the stage directions, in Quarto and Folio there are many differences in the dialogue of
the storm scenes. I am using the conflated text, so I do not present an extended comparison
between the two editions here. There is scope for a future article on the disparities in the
dialogue between Quarto and Folio. Such a study could investigate the meaningful differences
between the early Quartos and the edits and additions made in the publication of the Folio.
Specifically, the article could reflect upon how the subtle distinctions in what characters say
when they are exposed to the storm and how they act in response to the storm impacts upon the

31
that directions were authorial and, as is the case with the directions in the Lear Folio,
often they only appear in print well after a play’s first production. Usually either a
theatre company’s scrivener or an editor at a printing house inserted stage directions
into the text. For the purposes of this analysis it is important to keep in mind that, if
nothing else, the stage directions in King Lear are textual markers of a meteorological
event with substantial duration, that can be conceptualised as distinct from a character's
dialogue. This section will now emphasise some of the ways in which meteorological
events signalled by stage directions are used as devices within dramatic storytelling,
paying particular attention to how, when and the extent to which a meteorological event
intervenes in or impacts upon the trajectory of a play's narrative.
The most common meteorological stage direction was 'Thunder and lightning'
and these violent meteors were used as a device within a dramatic story. First, thunder
and lightning was a meteorological effect used to indicate the link between the
legitimate king and the heavens. Sometimes this effect was used as a representation of
the king’s legitimate power. The anonymous King Leir (1605) – one of Shakespeare’s
sources and a playtext I shall return to below – offers a good example of this device:
thunder and lightning is called for just as Leir is about to be murdered. The
meteorological intervention frightens Leir’s enemy, who drops his dagger and rather
than die then and there, Leir is able to reclaim the throne at the end of the play.17
This
instance exemplifies the existence of a cause-and-effect correspondence between the
stage effect and the dramatic story. Conversely, thunder sometimes signalled a darker
supernatural and subversive force at work: thunder foreshadows the entry of demonic
conclusions we scholars can make regarding the meaning and function of the storm as a
dramatic meteorological event.
17
Anonymous, The True Chronicle History of King Leir, (orig. publ. 1605), J. Farmer (ed.), The
Tudor Facsimile Texts, London, 1910.

32
figures such as the Witches in Macbeth ('Thunder. Enter the three Witches' [1.3]), or
Mephistopheles in Christopher Marlowe's Dr Faustus ('Thunder. Enter Lucifer and
foure devils' [1.3]).18
These devices imply a classical cosmology, in which the link
between the heavens and the earth is manifest in the weather. Thunder could also strike
to signal divine endorsement of a particular plot. This device was ubiquitous enough to
be parodied by Thomas Middleton in The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606). Vindice suggests
that the heavens have missed their cue: ‘Is there no thunder left, or is’t kept up / in stock
for heavier vengeance? (Thunder) There it goes!’ (4.2.196-197).19
In contrast, the
‘Storm and tempest’ called for by the stage direction in the First Folio version of King
Lear is a different kind of meteorological device because it does not have a
straightforward function within the drama: there is no divine intervention; there are no
devils or demons; and the storm is not a response to Lear’s cries.
Both Thomson and Jones argue that the storm in King Lear departs from the
conventional theatrical use of storms because it is not obviously connected with a divine
or supernatural order. Both imply that the unique stage direction ‘Storm and tempest’ is
the main clue. In Thomson’s view, ‘Thunder’ indicated supernatural activity, whereas
‘Storm and tempest’ did not. She then argues that the uniqueness of the direction
provides the best insight into the storm’s meaning:
It is seldom critically defensible to try and relate a direction to a
character’s response, since directions and dialogue function at
different levels of the play text; but here, however accidentally,
King Lear appears to illustrate my point (that the storm is not
supernatural). Lear’s combined pride and self-pity foster his belief
that the malevolent gods are punishing him, and he tries to control
this by encouraging them. It is impossible to know if the signals
for ‘Storm’ and ‘Storm still’ are authorial – certainly they are rare.
Nevertheless, the use of ‘storm’ in the stage direction implicitly
confirms that Lear is wrong to assume supernatural intervention; it
18
All references to works by Marlowe from C. Marlowe, The Complete Works of Christopher
Marlowe, Volumes 1 and 2, F. Bowers (ed.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1973.
19
T. Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy, (orig. publ. 1607), in K. Eisaman Maus (ed.), Four
Revenge Tragedies, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995.

33
is only a storm – even if thunder and lightning are among the
special effects at this point in the play.20
Jones takes issue with Thomson’s idea that the direction ‘storm’ confirms the fact it is
not supernatural: ‘It seems a stretch too far to conclude that there are various
tempestuous effects which have been ingrained in theatrical practice to the extent that
the audience recognises that one is natural, one supernatural’.21
Whether or not the
technology was the same is a secondary issue. Regardless of the technology used to
create the storm or its imagined origin, in a meteorological sense there is a distinction
between a storm and a tempest on the one hand and thunder and lightning on the other.
The latter is a momentary effect, whereas the former is a durational event. This may
seem an obvious distinction, but it has significant implications for my analysis.
While it may in fact be impossible to know for certain what, if any,
technological distinction early modern stage hands drew between a ‘Storm and tempest’
and ‘Thunder and lightning’ or ‘Thunder’, the key difference between the thunder in the
aforementioned examples and King Lear’s storm is that the ‘Storm and tempest’
continues over several scenes. Even Julius Caesar, with its direction for ‘Thunder and
lightning’ in both 1.3 and 2.2, does not compare to the scale and duration of the storm
and tempest in King Lear, with stormy effects called for in at least four scenes.
Furthermore, while the rumble of thunder in the Anonymous Leir may have been made
with the same drum as the thunder in productions of Shakespeare's play, there are many
more rumbles of thunder called for in the Folio. In Shakespeare’s Lear, the thunder is
accompanied by lightning, wind and rain. It is a durational event rather than a
momentary effect. Thus, by virtue of its duration, the storm takes on a different
presence within the drama.
20
Thomson, ‘The Meaning of “Thunder and Lightning”’, p.16.
21
Jones, Shakespeare’s Storms, p.24.

34
As such, the distinction between thunder and lightning and storm and tempest is
better understood through the language of meteorology than the language of the theatre.
In meteorological terms, a storm and tempest is a different meteorological event from
thunder and lightning. This basic physical distinction enhances our understanding of the
most significant difference between Lear’s storm and tempest and the instances of
thunder and lighting in other plays.22
These distinctions are physical and temporal. A
storm or a tempest includes thunder and lightning, but also wind and rain; a storm is
also a more violent and potentially destructive event. Furthermore, in King Lear the
storm continues for at least five scenes over two acts. Thus, the different stage
directions neatly, if accidently, capture the material distinction in the meteorological
events that needs to be created on the stage.
Where instances of thunder and lightning usually only comprise a small aspect
of a scene, in order to suggest divine intervention or endorsement, presage the entry of a
demon or frighten a character, a storm or a tempest is an all-encompassing and
structurally significant event. The scale and intensity of the meteorological event are
analogous to the impact that that event has upon the structure or trajectory of the plot as
a whole. For instance, violent sea storms form the premise of both The Comedy of
Errors and Twelfth Night, making the reunions of long-lost twins more or less plausible
in the plots. In Pericles, the eponymous hero’s journey is made possible by two sea
storms that carry him from place to place, storms that occur offstage between acts. For
22
Jones claims that there was probably no recognisable distinction between the representation
of ‘Storms’ and ‘Thunder and lightning’ on the stage. This is likely the safest assumption, but it
is possible that there were some differences. In Theatre of Fire: Special Effects in Early English
and Scottish Theatre (Society for Theatre Research, London, 1998), Philip Butterworth shows
that different kinds of powders produced different colours of smoke and light effects and what
they would signal to an audience was distinct. Black, yellow and white smoke signaled
different kinds of supernatural intervention, and the technology existed to deliver a thunderbolt
strike from God or Jove directly to a character when necessary or simply suggest the rumbling
thunder elsewhere. Thus it is quite possible that there was something visually distinct about the
storm effects in King Lear as opposed to a clearly supernatural thunder and lightning like that in
Macbeth or the divine intervention of the anonymous King Leir.

35
example, Pericles enters in 2.1 ‘wet' and talks about his time out in the 'Wind, rain, and
thunder' (2.1.2) on the ocean. Similarly Lord Cerimon enters at 3.2 ‘with a Servant and
another poor man, both storm-beaten' and they reflect upon the 'turbulent and stormy
night' (3.2.4). There is also a sea storm in Marlowe's Dido: Queen of Carthage, one of
the few indicated by the direction 'The storme' (3.4); this storm is powerful enough to
trap Dido and Aeneas in a cave and provokes them to declare their love for one another.
In The Tempest Shakespeare exploits to the full the device of a storm to create
the premise of his plot. The unusual stage direction, 'A tempestuous noise of thunder
and lightning is heard' (1.1), is hardly an adequate description of what modern directors
arrange for the play’s opening scene.23
The storm rages throughout the scene, causing
the ship carrying Prospero’s brother Antonio to wreck on the island. In setting up the
pre-conditions of the plot, the tempest functions in the same way as those in A Comedy
of Errors and Twelfth Night, except that Shakespeare requires that his Tempest be seen
and heard.
Given that most meteorological stage directions call for something to be
physically constructed on stage that has a purpose and function in the drama, the
direction 'Storm and tempest' in King Lear does not indicate a poetic reference to the
storm’s cosmological origin, but rather provides a clue to the theatre technician –
whether that be the early modern or the twenty-first-century technician – as to the kind
of effect to construct. In King Lear, the tautology of the direction is presumably
designed to indicate that the weather should be especially horrible, destructive,
spectacular and violent. Furthermore, with the ‘Storm and tempest’, coming as it does
mid-scene at the end of Act Two and arguably continuing throughout the entire third
23
For discussions of the idiosyncratic stage directions in The Tempest, see J.A. Roberts, 'Ralph
Crane and the Text of The Tempest', Shakespeare Studies, Vol.13, 1980, pp.213-234 and J.
Jowett, 'New Creatures Created: Ralph Crane and the Stage Directions in The Tempest',
Shakespeare Survey, Vol.36, 1983, pp.107-120.

36
act, transgresses the usual practical function of a storm to bring people to a situation or
create the basic conditions for a plot. Instead, the storm in King Lear messes with the
plot, alters the character’s actions and, as I shall argue below, assists in Shakespeare’s
rewriting of the age-old story about an old king, a tragic representation of the
powerlessness of human individuals and political systems in the face of meteorological
violence.
1.3. The ‘Storm and tempest’ in King Lear
The cataclysm in King Lear is the dramatic meteorological event par excellence.
The storm in King Lear has duration; it crosses two acts and spans the better part of
eight scenes. It is physical, imposing itself on the action with complete impartiality, and
the characters have no choice but to respond. It is by no means an extension of Lear’s
royal power, any more than it expresses the thoughts of any other single character, and
it bears no warning of demonic presence. The storm’s material presence is reflected in
the dialogue in various ways: Gloucester describes ‘the high winds’ (2.2.493), Kent
curses 'Fie on this storm!' (3.1.45), the Fool jests that it is ‘a naughty night to swim in’
(3.4.109-110) and Poor Tom exclaims that he is ‘a-cold’ (3.4.82). Furthermore,
although Lear calls for the thunder gods to ‘Strike flat the thick rotundity o’the world’
(3.2.7), no divine or demonic figures intervene to make the situation better or worse
and, as such, there is no clearly divine or supernatural dimension. For all that, the storm
may be said to sustain the conflict throughout the central acts, to bring the dramatic
action to a climax and to turn the plot towards resolution.
The storm’s dramatic function is best illustrated by a brief exegesis of the plot,
noting its ‘appearances’. It begins to rumble in 2.2, when the King, having rashly
divided his kingdom and banished Cordelia and Kent, is in heated negotiation with

37
Goneril and Regan about his accommodation. The daughters refuse to take him unless
he dismisses his hundred knights. Enraged, Lear refuses to capitulate to his daughters’
demands. At this crucial moment in the conflict, as relations between the parties
collapse, the storm begins to thunder. Until this point, the conflict has been solely about
Lear’s knights, their behaviour and whether he has any need of so many when living
with his daughters. The argument breaks out in 1.3 ('His knights grow riotous and
himself upbraids us / On every trifle' [1.3.7-8].). But 2.2 is the scene in which it reaches
a climax: Goneril and Regan refuse to negotiate any further and Lear runs out of
options.
The storm is indicated in the play text by a stage direction, first published in the
1623 Folio, as Lear tries to explain why he needs his hundred knights: 'O, reason not the
need' (2.2.456), he cries, insisting that humans need adornments like knights to mask
their fundamentally beastly nature:
Our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous;
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life is cheap as beast’s (2.2.456-459).
His self-justifications slide into a declaration of vengeance upon his daughters for
depriving him of his right:
No, you unnatural hags,
I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall – I will do such things –
What they are yet I know not, but they shall be
The terrors of the earth! You think I’ll weep,
No, I’ll not weep. [Storm and tempest.]
I have full cause of weeping, but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws
Or e’er I’ll weep. O fool, I shall go mad [2.2.470-478].
The storm is heard. The king resumes his rant and refusing to capitulate to his demands,
leaves the stage.

38
This is a deceptively complex instance of dramatic plotting. It seems that we are
being invited to conflate the storm with Lear in some way. If we were watching this
moment in the theatre, the sound of the ‘Storm and tempest’ at this point might strike us
as a cosmic expression of Lear’s power. But this is ultimately a dramatic ruse:
Shakespeare is playing a cruel trick on both his protagonist and his audience. The trick
is in Shakespeare’s audacious exploitation of expectations. Lear and his audience are
effectively led into misrecognising the storm as an extension of Lear’s power or his
emotions: what Lear and his audience both want is the reward of vengeance from on
high. Instead what Shakespeare provides is a pathetic old man and a storm that is
entirely indifferent to his plight. In some senses both Lear and the audience already
know this. Lear cannot quite imagine the nature of his vengeance (‘I will do such things
– what they are yet I know not’ (2.2.472-473)) and everything else, such as Cornwall’s
cold response to Lear’s hysterics (‘Let us withdraw; twill be a storm’ (2.2.479)), suggest
that the storm will probably not respond to Lear. But the complex interplay between
convention, expectation, desire and the storm’s surprisingly cruel indifference confuses
things. There is more to be said about Lear's situation here – his so-called madness, his
refusal to let go of the entourage, the 'Storm and tempest' theatrical trick – and I shall
return to these issues in Chapter Four. The most important point to be made at this stage
is that while Shakespeare may wish us to see the storm as an extension of Lear’s power,
the direction itself even completes the actor’s iambic pentameter as if it is literally an
extension of Lear’s thought and word, but ultimately it is not.
Instead the ongoing tension between Lear’s desire for the storm to be on his side
and the eyeless destructiveness of the storm itself is the source of the conflict that leads
to the climax of the play. Lear exits the stage and goes out into the storm and the
characters onstage watch him go and respond accordingly. Cornwall orders Regan,

39
Goneril and Gloucester to retreat indoors: ‘Let us withdraw, ‘twill be a storm’ (2.2.479).
Gloucester’s loyalty to Lear makes him hesitate: ‘Alack the night comes on, and the
high winds / Do sorely ruffle; for miles about / There’s scarce a bush’ (2.2.493-495).
But finally Cornwall convinces him to retreat indoors: ‘Shut up your doors, my lord ‘tis
a wild night … come out o’the storm’ (2.2.501-502).
The fact that the characters are exposed to the storm in 3.1, 3.2 and 3.4 is
indicated in the dialogue and signalled in the first Folio at the beginning of each scene
by the stage direction ‘Storm still’; 3.6 in the hovel has no such direction, but
Gloucester’s remark, ‘Here’s better than the open air’ (3.6.1), implies they are
sheltering from the storm as it still rages outside. I even think of 3.7 as part of the
extended ‘storm sequence’, simply because Gloucester’s eye gouging is a direct result
of his aiding the king in the storm. In 3.1 we imagine Kent, and the Knight who joins
him, to be somewhere out in the storm – the specific direction indicating they were on a
‘heath’ did not appear until Nicolas Rowe’s 1709 edition. Lear’s whereabouts are
unknown, but the Knight, another lost soul, gives us a direct account of the storm's
indifference to Lear when he tells Kent how Lear desperately tries to get the storm to
respond to him:
Contending with the fretful elements;
Bids the winds blow the earth into the sea,
Or swell the curled water 'bove the main,
That things might change or cease; tears his white hair
Which the impetuous blasts, with eyeless rage,
Catch in their fury and make nothing of;
Strives in his little world of man to out-scorn
The to and fro conflicting wind and rain.
This night where the cub-drawn bear would couch,
The lion and the belly-pinched wolf
Keep their fur dry, unbonneted he runs,
And bids what will take all (3.1.4-15).
In return, Kent reveals to the Knight that a greater strife is brewing, a civil war, because,
‘although as yet the face of it is covered’ (3.1.20), there are divisions between Albany

40
and Cornwall. In addition the French army is mobilized and Cordelia has returned to
assist her father. We learn all this against the backdrop of the wind, thunder, lightning
and rain of the storm. There are two main points to make about this scene. First, it
interrupts the main action at its putative climax, in order to again point to the fact that
this meteorological climax is not following convention: the storm is not on Lear’s side.
Secondly, Kent's account of what is happening offstage – the conflict between the two
parts of the kingdom and the outbreak of civil war – is the principal impulse towards the
resolution of the broader dramatic conflict. Chapter Five will undertake an analysis of
the links between the storm and the war. But here it shall suffice to say that 3.1 is an
important scene because it links the storm scenes to the broader political conflict and
characterises the storm as so violent and powerful that no-one else, neither man nor
beast, except the king, is prepared to expose themselves to its fury.
Act 3, scene 2 is the play’s best-known scene and Lear’s first face-to-face
encounter with the ‘fretful elements’ (3.1.4). I shall return presently to the details of his
attempted dialogue with the weather, but simply say here that the king attempts to
control the storm (‘Blow winds and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!’ [3.2.1]) and,
realising that it is beyond his control, he swiftly moves to accusing the storm of
conspiring with his daughters (‘with my two pernicious daughters join / Your high-
engendered battle ‘gainst a head / So old and white as this’ [3.2.22-24]). Not convinced
of this analysis either, Lear declares that the storm is yet to decide whose side it is on
and implores it to do so (‘Let the great gods / That keep this dreadful pudder o’er our
heads / Find out their enemies now’ [3.2.49-51]). Meanwhile the Fool and Kent urge
Lear quickly to take shelter (Alack, bare-headed? / Gracious my lord, hard by here is a
hovel: some friendship will it lend you ‘gainst the tempest' [3.2.60-62]). Lear accepts
Kent's offer ('Come, bring us to this hovel' [3.2.77]). The point to note here is that, from

41
2.2 to 3.2, all the characters see the storm as quite independent of Lear, while Lear
struggles to understand precisely how the storm relates to himself and his situation.
Indeed, rather than being an uncomplex representation of Lear’s unique relation to the
storm, his time in the storm is interrupted again by 3.3, in which Gloucester decides to
go out and make sure the king is properly sheltered.
In 3.4, Lear is en route to the hovel, but his exposure to the elements is extended
by constant distractions. On the one hand, Lear seems mad for not taking shelter, but,
on the other hand, he is provoked into a radical reconsideration of his role, as a king, in
the cosmos. He contemplates a king's position in relation to that of the wretched of the
earth (‘Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are, / That bide the pelting of this pitiless
storm … O, I have ta’en / Too little care of this’ [3.4.28-30]), then turns his mind to a
consideration of the human condition more generally (‘Why thou wert better in a grave
than to answer with thy uncovered body this extremity of the skies. Is man no more than
this? Consider him well’ [3.4.100-102]). Having reached no satisfactory conclusions, he
consults Edgar, now Poor Tom the Bedlam beggar, whom he addresses as a
‘Philosopher’: ‘What is the cause of thunder?’ (3.4.151). Once he has had a private
word on the issues with which he has been grappling, Lear accepts the offer of shelter
and invites Poor Tom to join him in the hovel.
Since it is the storm that obliges Lear to take shelter in a hovel, those scenes that
Shakespeare locates notionally inside the hovel should be considered part of the overall
storm sequence. Lear enters the hovel at the end of 3.4. In 3.5 the storm is broken yet
again for more exposition of Edmund’s plot against his father Gloucester. At the
beginning of 3.6, in the hovel, Gloucester is pleased that Lear has finally taken shelter,
even if inside a ‘hovel’ (‘Here is better than in the open air; take it / thankfully’ [3.6.1-
2]). The shelter has turned Lear’s attention away from the storm and his obsession with

42
his own condition, and his focus returns to his daughters’ ingratitude. Lear plays at
avenging himself on Goneril and Regan by setting up a mock trial and arraigning the
‘joint-stools’, towards which he directs his anger. The Fool plays along, and Kent
encourages Lear to sleep. The hovel scene ends with a short soliloquy from Edgar who
realises that his own problem is not as bad as the King’s and decides to come out of
disguise and confront his situation (‘How light and portable my pain seems now, /
When that which makes me bend makes the king bow, / He childed as I father’d! Tom,
away!’ [3.6.106-108]). After this scene little mention is made of the storm. The
meteorological event might have passed, but the conflict and violence in the kingdom
escalates. The shocking arraignment of Gloucester and the old man’s appalling eye
gouging thrusts us straight out of the hovel into 3.7 and the play’s broader political
realities.
It is clear from this account of what happens in Acts 2 and 3 that the storm
cannot easily be separated from the play’s central dramatic action. In the play text itself,
the storm is present; its elemental nature is described in the dramatic poetry, it is created
on stage and responded to by the characters in their words and gestures and as such, the
indifferent storm becomes an integral part of the dramatic action. But it is not enough
simply to observe that the storm breaks the conventions for the representation of the
meteors and, paradoxically, sustains the dramatic action throughout this crucial part of
the drama despite its indifference to the action. It is also necessary to ask why
Shakespeare may have involved the storm in such complex ways in the action. My next
task, then, is to investigate the philosophical dimensions of this cataclysmic
meteorological event in relation to the dramatic action, especially with regard to the
early modern natural philosophy of meteorology. The Lear storm may reject the
conventions for the theatrical representation of meteorological violence, but in Lear’s

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