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Reviewed by:
  • Shakespeare's Storms by Gwilym Jones
  • Edward J. Geisweidt
Gwilym Jones. Shakespeare's Storms. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. Pp xi, 198.

Ecocritics might well have preconceived notions about a book titled Shakespeare's Storms, the winner of the 2016 Shakespeare's Globe Book Award. Its author, Gwilym Jones, seems to have preconceptions of ecocritics' preconceptions, making for some tricky moments in an otherwise deservedly lauded contribution to Shakespearean scholarship. Jones's familiarity with weather references in the canon is wide-ranging, but his chapter-length readings of five plays (Julius Caesar, King Lear, Macbeth, Pericles, and The Tempest) are sharply focused. The full chapter readings (save the last) are preceded by mini-chapters (ranging from three to nine pages) in which Jones usefully provides historical research on early modern meteorology.

Jones offers a narrative of development in Shakespeare's dramatic representations of storms, proposing that throughout Shakespeare's career, 'we see an increasing interest in bringing the storm into a more immediate, and thereby dramatic and threatening, presentation' (3). The book's argument centres on spectatorship of the storms (whether by characters in the plays, or, more to Jones's point, audiences in the theatre) and interpretations of their origins — natural or supernatural. One of Jones's main contentions is that the characteristically natural origins of Shakespeare's storms set them apart from the typically supernatural storms in works by contemporary playwrights, and, furthermore, that Shakespeare's audiences came to expect that the Shakespearean storms they witnessed in the theatre could be explained without recourse to the supernatural. For all this emphasis on the natural, one might expect Jones to have an easy relationship with ecocritics. Such does not seem to be the case.

In his introduction, Jones begins the subsection 'Shakespeare's Storms and Ecocriticism' by declaring, 'I think I have already failed the test' (19), the test being the titular question posed by Sharon O'Dair's chapter in Ecocritical Shakespeare: 'Is It Shakespearean Ecocriticism If It Isn't Presentist?'.1 Jones points to his historicist approach as the source of his supposed failure, and he retorts with an oddly preemptive defense: 'I suspect that I may be accused of coding "present-ist … as unscholarly" and will be eyed warily by self-proclaimed ecocritics as a result' (19; quoting O'Dair, 75). From the Scylla of O'Dair's presentism, Jones steers toward the Charybdis of Simon Estok's activism: 'There is little in the [End Page 181] way of advocacy or activism to be found in my argument, and so I also fall foul of Simon C. Estok's criteria for "Doing Ecocriticism with Shakespeare"' (20).2 Unfortunately, Jones seems to have been goaded by Estok's scolding of 'legions of staid thematicists who muse endlessly as the world smolders to an end'.3 Jones offers the salient response that '[t]hematic studies can teach us not only what to look at, but also how to look at ourselves looking' (21), a claim he supports throughout the book, particularly in his chapter on The Tempest. But Jones also makes a somewhat baffling claim: 'that our experience of real weather is fundamentally aesthetisced [sic] by dramatic weather prompts us to remember that activism is about changing minds, not actions' (21). Jones 'prompts us to remember' an idea not subject to recall; I doubt many of his readers, ecocritics and thematicists alike, actually believe that activism is not about changing actions.

I do not mean for polemics to overshadow my assessment of Jones's smartly crafted book. I will return to his contributions to ecocriticism later, but first I want to highlight a few of the remarkable insights and readings that scholars would miss were they to dismiss Shakespeare's Storms for failing a litmus test. In chapter two, Jones argues that Julius Caesar — the play containing 'Shakespeare's first staged storm' (31) — provided the playwright a vehicle for spectacle made possible by the new Globe Theatre. He describes the 'thunder runs' that simulated thunder, and the fireworks, squibs, and swevels that created stage lightning. Jones imagines that such special effects were used on a grand scale in the 1599 production largely to announce the Globe...

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