William Shakespeare paid close attention to the weather. From the stormy climax of King Lear to the thunder, lightning and rain in Macbeth, the great playwright often invoked atmospheric disturbances to convey a sense of dread or disorder. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he alludes to a particularly unnerving development. “The seasons alter,” Titania remarks: “The spring, the summer, the childing autumn, angry winter, change their wonted liveries, and the mazed world, by their increase, now knows not which is which.”
For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, living through a period of sharp global cooling known as the Little Ice Age, the altering of the seasons was an unmistakable fact of life. Temperatures had been dropping ever since the 1560s. Fierce winters and violent summer storms now left regular harvest failures in their wake. As the agrarian expansion of the 16th century slowly gave way to the recession of the 17th, a wave of poverty washed over the countryside. It would not be long before revolution and civil war tore through the British Isles. For the Bard of Avon, the unpredictability of the weather was much more than a poetic metaphor: it was a material force to be reckoned with in its own right.
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