CMU School of Drama


Wednesday, July 31, 2024

33 Shakespeare Quotes About the Weather

Folger Shakespeare Library: How’s the weather? Hot enough for ‘ya? How about this weather? There’s no topic of conversation more universal than the weather. Here in Washington, DC, we’ve had a scorching summer—our hottest on record according to the Washington Post. July 14 – 17, the city experienced four days in a row with temperatures over 100° F. With so many miserably hot days, we quickly ran out of ways to say, “It’s too darn hot.” So, we turned to Shakespeare. Thankfully, the Bard’s plays offer lots of literary and sophisticated ways to take your weather-related small talk to the next level. Here are some great lines from the Bard about the weather.

1 comment:

Carly Tamborello said...

Folger is so cute for posting this. Anyway, the idea of responding to very common small talk catchphrases about the weather with any of this needlessly elegant rhetoric is so funny to me. Especially because some of these quotes are full-on conversations, or the weather is just a metaphor. Weather has endured as a popular symbolic and semiotic expression since poets started writing stuff down –– after all, poets and writers love to comment on nature and to expound on what nature reflects within ourselves, so weather is a figuratively rich topic. But weather is also beautiful, powerful, and, while trackable and definable, on some level beyond our cosmic understanding, which is probably why Shakespeare was inspired enough by the simple idea of a storm to write The Tempest. Anyway, I also enjoy the weather-related insults section. We love a solid Shakespearean insult, and he was very prolific with them.