It has its way with us. Not just the wind, but the weather. If landscape and terrain describe the provinces of mortality, then weather marks the shape of emotion, of passions, that can be either simmering or immediately tempestuous. Climate delineates the changing arc of passion and despair. Wherever we go in life, weather, both inner and outer, walks with us.
In Hamlet, before the ghost appears, a sentry, Francisco, shivers alone on the freezing battlements. When Bernardo arrives to take the next watch, Francisco is grateful. “For this relief much thanks: ’tis bitter cold/ And I am sick at heart.” The two go together, the bitter cold and heart sickness. The “unweeded garden” of Denmark remains a heartsick place, with the rightful king’s murder having taken the pilot from the wheel of the ship of state.
Conversely, in King John, the air stagnates, hot and heavy with the tensions of war. The Bastard enters carrying Austria’s head, remarking, “Now, by my life, this day grows wondrous hot; some airy devil hovers in the sky/ And pours down mischief.” All sorts of mischief, with misdeeds and wicked plans sprouting like weeds throughout the play.
In Macbeth, the perspective shifts slightly, but we still feel war hanging in the weather. The violent weather of the witches’ opening presages the dramatic turbulence to follow. “When shall we three meet again,/ in thunder, lightning, or in rain?” The answer? “When the hurly burly’s done,/ When the battle’s lost and won.” War and chaos clog the standing air, turning the very atmosphere to an open sewer as an inversion of the usual order takes hold. “Fair is foul, and foul is fair:/ Hover through the fog and filthy air.” Reality shifts, and the usual perspectives are rendered effectively meaningless.
Witches themselves remain agents of change as much as they may be agents of fate. Like the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, who represent (among other things) the changes inherent in mating and renewal, the witches in Macbeth represent the agency through which our worlds sometimes turn upside down. Mostly unseen, witches are those things we never see coming, ranging from car trouble to outright betrayal. We all know this kind of catastrophe. The loss of a job, the loss of love, or the loss of someone dear who leaves us too young. The bend in the road beyond which we cannot see. Yes, the sudden storm, the white squall appearing from nowhere, but also the lengthening shade of falling night.
If we are wise, we slow down when we encounter such conditions, although it may not always help. Macbeth hesitates. “If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me without my stir.” Would that we could all be so patient. Yet, there are mouths to feed and “Time’s winged chariot” pursues us. The ‘King’ title is a damned big prize, and it glitters and glows, moonlight on a moth’s wing. “Oh, ye of little faith,” Luke admonishes us.
We seem to have faculties beyond the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, but our patience is not always among these. Seeking may become our undoing. Most of us do not wait upon our sustenance, and in the modern world, who can blame us? We must eat. Yet, leaving the urging of Lady Macbeth aside, because Macbeth chooses to go ahead, and to murder Duncan, he sets in motion a series of events that interfere not only with his sleeping, but with his eating.
The central feast in Macbeth, where the nobles tend on Macbeth as their king, is interrupted, first by the arrival of two murderers with the news that although they have killed his erstwhile friend, Banquo, Banquo’s son has escaped. The arrival of Banquo’s ghost, however, disbands the feast entirely, even as it unhinges Macbeth. While his guilt over Duncan seems barely manageable, barely contained, the murder of his friend undoes him and the confused pain of guilt wrapped around loss leads to the inevitable collapse that we suffer when confronted with the unbearable.
The dagger that Macbeth, on the brink of Duncan’s murder, first saw hovering in the air before him is mentioned again here. Lady Macbeth says that Banquo’s ghost “is the very air-drawn dagger, which, you said/ Led you to Duncan”. At this point, although Macbeth may be beyond saying “full of scorpions is my mind”, the very air is full of daggers. Hovering. And “on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood/ Which was not so before.” Macbeth feels them. Sees them. So does the audience. And sometimes we do too.
Some shifts we see or feel. Trinculo feels it in The Tempest, “And another storm brewing;/ I hear it sing i’ the wind.” The jester is correct. In that play another storm is brewing, but it ends up being more of a slow motion storm of the human (and maybe the not so human) heart. The whole play deals largely with emotion or passion, and it is all precipitated by the opening storm. We do our best to fend off the coming weather, at times doing whatever we can. “[M]isery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.” Or at least it can.
Twelfth Night has a storm near the opening, or at least the aftermath of a shipwreck, as does Comedy of Errors. It is worth mentioning other Shakespeare plays that feature the idea of shipwreck in passing. Merchant of Venice, The Winter’s Tale, and Pericles, Prince of Tyre. We humans at the mercy of the weather. Shipwrecks are like witches in that they invert (sometimes literally) the human world, leaving human structures, ships, in various states of disarray or ruin, and forcing people to refashion themselves, their perspectives, and sometimes to rebuild their entire world.
Shipwrecks are another form of the bend in the road, which analogy not so far fetched if we consider the ancient Polynesian tradition of being able to “see” pathways in the sea. Some older Hawaiian mariners reportedly still have this skill. Yet, in Shakespeare, the sea remains a threat, a potentially devouring presence. England remains a solid presence “whose foot spurns back the ocean’s roaring tides”. Solidity keeping the fluidity of change at bay.
When the witching weather comes though, we tend to be on our own. The “witch of November” on the Great Lakes is a phrase most often associated with Gordon Lightfoot’s song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”. The loss of that big freighter on Lake Superior in a November storm in 1975 reminds of what a toy even a huge boat can be in the face of the weather, and what great and sudden change witches can initiate.
In the Great Lakes region, the Ojibwe would hear the Wendigo in coming of the winter winds–an ogre that wandered the boreal forest, perpetually hungry. Witches, fairies, and ogres. Sometimes we hear them. Sometimes (but only very rarely) we even see them. Sometimes “[t]he air is delicate”, and sometimes it is full of daggers. Sometimes witches hover there unseen. Sometimes it is fragrant with violets, and sometimes the wind sings with storms. We cannot always know. Yet, it is always best to pay attention to the weather–the metaphor that so often reflects human passions. In early modern drama, weather frequently delineates human passion in some way, because in our lives, we ignore the internal climate at our peril. Sometimes emotions can be almost palpable.
In Othello, just before Othello murders her, Desdemona interrupts her song to ask, “Who is ‘t that knocks?” Emilia answers, “It’s the wind.” In this case, the wind seems relentlessly hungry, and full of empty promises, and ghosts. These are the echoes of Iago whispering in the ear, his breath the whispering wind bending Othello’s susceptible mind. Another instance of the wind, the harbinger of the weather, having its way with us again.