Lear in the Storm: Shakespeare’s Emotional Exploration of Sovereign Mortality

Abstract

When Shakespeare rewrote the age-old story of King Lear (c.1606), he created an extended storm sequence and, over several scenes, dramatized the ailing monarch’s emotional response to the elements. In this regard, King Lear differs significantly from its source texts, in terms of the basic plot, and from Shakespeare’s other plays, in terms of the use of wild weather as a dramatic device. The only instance of a meteorological effect in the Lear story before Shakespeare’s version is in the anonymously written play The True Chronicle History of King Leir (1605). But the ‘thunder’ in this version is a pragmatic plot device: thunder frightens Leir’s potential assassin into dropping his dagger. Conveniently spared a cruel ending, Leir happily reunites with Cordella and reclaims the throne. In stark contrast, Shakespeare’s Lear directly pleads with the storm for assistance and, tragically, this storm does not help him. In creating a pitiless storm, Shakespeare uses this meteorological event differently. In King Lear, he forgoes the supernatural scene setting of the thunder and lightning in Macbeth and refuses the simple foreshadowing of political tumult facilitated by Julius Caesar’s busy skies. The storm is also neither a device for gathering all his characters into the one setting as in the sea storms that precede Twelfth Night and A Comedy of Errors, nor is it the spectacular meta-theatrical trick of The Tempest’s tempest.1 Indeed, nowhere else does Shakespeare place a protagonist exposed to the howling wind and rain and, over several climactic scenes, dramatize his emotional struggle in the face of a violent cataclysm.