Man in Stormy Weathers in the Age of Shakespeare

Résumé En

The opening dialogue between D’Amville and Borachio, in Cyril Tourneur’s Atheist’s Tragedy, renders men’s antithetic philosophical and ethical creeds and attitudes, when they are confronted to hostile natural phenomena and catastrophes. D’Amville’s pseudo-scientific arguments and reasoning suit his atheism whereas Borachio’s blind faith in determinism and superstition cannot help him control his fright when thunder rolls and when flashes of lightening take him by surprise.Historical records and chronicles show that natural catastrophes have always existed. Yet, at the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th centuries, the European continent was severely affected by floods and tempestuous climates. Inundations, higher tides, ‘furious’ tempests, heavy rainfalls and storms caused thousands of casualties in many countries, and made sailing perilous.From general stormy contexts to edifying texts, this study first focuses on men’s behaviours in stormy weathers in Desiderius Erasmus’s Colloquy on The Shipwreck (1523), as well as in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, King Lear and Twelfth Night. It is meant to show how the characters face the ‘Holy’ mysteries of Nature and Life, and how they respond to them, from veneration to the saints to fear and superstition, from praying and begging, to bartering and bargaining. Emphasis is laid on how they position themselves in the micro world they inhabit within a macro universe they ignore and believe overpowered and ruled by anthropomorphic divine skies.From mirroring texts to mirrored interior political contexts, the second part of the analysis focuses on how the Scottish witch-hunt launched by James VI-I was triggered off and amplified by his allegedly superstitious reactions to the several storms he and newly-wed Queen Anne were submitted to, and how it became a political strategy to overcome his fear of being overthrown.