Shakespeare’s Transformative Tempests

Although Shakespeare was born in the Warwickshire countryside, he spent much of his adult life in London, the busy hub of a seafaring nation.  Winter storms, windy gales, and high seas affected everyone, and Londoners surely worried, as we do now, about the weather. The tempests that scattered Philip II’s Spanish armadas in 1588 and 1596 were viewed as a sign of God’s providential concern for England, but other tempests were not so kind. Indeed, sea-storms added a major element of risk to the merchant class’s overseas enterprises. Unusual weather was sometimes reported in pamphlets, such as this one from 1590: “A most true and lamentable report of a great tempest of hail which fell upon a village in Kent.”[1]  1613, the year Shakespeare wrote Henry VIII, seems to have been unusually bad.  One pamphlet names it “The windie year. Shewing many strange accidents that happened, both on the land, and at sea, by reason of the winde and weather.[2] Another 1613 pamphlet is titled, “The wonders of this windy winter. By terrible stormes and tempests, to the losse of lives and goods of many thousands of men, women, and children. The like by sea and land, hath not been seene, nor heard of in this age of the world.”[3]  Unusual storms were clearly a subject of intense interest.

Tempests were also important building blocks in Shakespeare’s imaginary, the focus of this essay. His dramatic exploitation of weather effects was no doubt based partly…