In his short offering For the Anniversary of My Death, the contemporary American poet, W.S. Merwin, suggests a sobering thought:
Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me,
And the silence will set out,
Tireless traveller,
Like the beam of a lightless star.
For William Shakespeare, the irony was greater than it is likely to be for most of us. Shakespeare was born on April 23rd, 1564, and died on his 52nd birthday, 385 years ago today, on April 23rd, 1616.
The Bard passed his childhood and early manhood in the lanes and fields of Warwickshire, marrying Anne Hathaway when he was 18. He left four years later for London, and returned to his birthplace for the last five years of his life.
A rural boyhood gave Shakespeare a keen appreciation of the weather in its many guises, and a sure touch when describing the beauty of the seasons. Indeed, much of Shakespeare's weather lore is identical to that we know today - albeit expressed with rather more finesse. His "red sky at night", for example, has no shepherds tending sheep, but becomes:
The weary sun hath made a golden set, And, by the bright track of his fiery car, Gives signal of a goodly day tomorrow.
The plays abound with the terminology of Aristotle's theories of the Four Elements. There is frequent mention of "meteors", "vapours" and "exhalations"; Hamlet, for example, finds himself in one of his darker moments surrounded by "a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours". There are also frequent allusions to the meteorological gods of ancient mythology. In Troilus and Cressida, "the ruffian Boreas", the north wind of the ancient Greeks, churns up a nasty storm; and the rainbow, alias "many coloured Iris", the "distempered messenger of the wet", appears in The Tempest as "the watery arch and messenger of Juno".
But the weather was in a funny mood in Shakespeare's time. The early 1500s had been a period of genial climatic conditions over much of Europe, with average temperatures higher then they had been. But by the 1580s, the picture had changed dramatically: it was much colder, wetter and windier than it had been before, and in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare reflects the weather's unaccustomed volatility:
The seasons alter: the spring the summer,
The chiding autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries, and the 'mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.