Shakespeare
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Was Shakespeare a weather nut? From the "cataracts and hurricanoes" that spout till they have "drenched our steeples" in "King Lear" to "The rough winds" that "shake the darling buds of May" in Sonnet 18, the Bard has written some of the most vivid weather in the English language.

Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is the weather Notebook.

Many a Shakespearean tempest rages only in the teapot of metaphor. So, in "The Merchant of Venice," when Portia speaks of how "It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven," what she's talking about is not a spring shower but "the quality of mercy." And in "The Merry Wives of Windsor," what sounds like a meteorological tirade is actually Falstaff's prayer for erotic prowess: "Let the sky rain potatoes; let it thunder to the tune of Green-sleeves, hail kissing-comfi

ts and snow eringoes." In case your Elizabethan English is rusty, kissing comfits are breath fresheners and eringoes are the candied roots of sea-holly, considered a potent aphrodisiac. When Shakespeare does let loose an actual storm, he is a master of stage craft and dramatic compression. The tempest that opens the play of that name is a marvelous set piece of noise, confusion and terrified drunken sailors; and with a two-word stage direction "Storm still" the Bard conjures up the harrowing weather that unhinged King Lear.

Shakespeare may have had "small Latin, and less Greek," as his colleague Ben Jonson put it, but he certainly knew a thing or two about the weather.

Thanks today to writer David Laskin, who reads Shakespeare and watches the weather from his home in Seattle, Washington. The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington observatory and is supported by Subaru and the National Science Foundation.