“Hast thou, spirit, Perform’d to point the tempest that I bade thee?” says Prospero to the spirit Ariel in The Tempest.
Last Saturday it was four hundred years to the day since William Shakespeare – England’s most celebrated dramatist and poet – died suddenly, at the age of 52. In Shakespeare’s time Europe and North America were in the grip of the “Little Ice Age”. Winters were significantly colder, glaciers captured farmsteads in their icy grip, and winter festivals were frequently held on the deeply frozen rivers and lakes. And, as Shakespeare demonstrates in both The Tempest and Macbeth, many people blamed the malevolent weather on witchcraft.
Shakespeare may have gained inspiration for Macbeth and The Tempest from a real storm at sea in 1589, which forced Princess Anne of Denmark and her husband, King James VI of Scotland to seek shelter in Norway for many weeks. “The storms gave rise to witchcraft trials, first in Denmark and later Scotland, in which more than a hundred unfortunates were arrested and 70 put on trial,” writes Gerald Stanhill in the latest edition of the journal Weather.
Witchcraft hysteria gripped Europe, with witchcraft trials resulting in an estimated 45,000 deaths between 1560 and 1630. Today, with hindsight, it is easy to see that the Northern hemisphere cooling associated with the Little Ice Age was just a blip in the climate, but back then, when your crops had failed or your ship been lost at sea, witchcraft seemed the most plausible explanation. Thankfully we tend not to blame innocent old ladies for storms these days, but superstitions surrounding the weather still run deep.
