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Shakespeare
Mon Jul 12, 2004
Listen in RealAudio 
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-comfits 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 stagecraft 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. Thanks also to our Marketing Manager Melody Nester, and to
Trish Anderton, who puts the show together.
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