This chapter explores the relationship between Shakespeare and climate. Taking its inspiration from weather disruptions to the 2017 Shakespeare Association of America conference, it riffs on the tweets that this climatic disturbance generated and the themes they reveal. It deals with the issues of: climate and its material effects on Shakespearean composition and performance, whereby climate and culture may be said to be co-constitutive; the resistance in Shakespeare’s time to codifying climate, in partial acknowledgement of climate’s unpredictability; and thus the extent to which Shakespearean texts portend human and non-human entanglement in the Anthropocene.

Bruno Latour is well known as an anthropologist and sociologist of science and technology. His books include Science in action (1987), We have never been modern (1993), The pasteurization of France (1988), and Pandora's hope (1999). He has done fieldwork in a molecular biology laboratory, organized museum exhibits, and written essays that also venture into philosophy, politics, and art history. His work is highly original, hard to summarize, and harder still to classify within current academic categories. He is often described as a leading ‘postmodern’ thinker, and he does indeed have things in common with others to whom that label has been applied, although it is not one he is happy to accept. Latour claims that what is usually thought of as modernity has never really prevailed, so it is not possible to move beyond it into a postmodern phase. In his view, the characteristically modern attempt to segregate the natural realm from the human one has never entirely succeeded. Hybrid entities have continuously been fabricated, despite all efforts to demarcate the two domains. To recognize this is to adopt what he calls an ‘amodern’ or ‘non-modern’ perspective. Latour also accepts the label of ‘constructivist’ to describe his approach to science studies, which is to say that he is interested in studying the practices by which scientific facts are made, rather than considering how knowledge relates to the world in the mode of classical epistemology.

Writing in 1855, of the period now known as the Enlightenment, the Scottish Whig Henry Brougham commented that “the science of chemistry [was] almost entirely…the growth of this remarkable era.” One hundred years later, the British historian Herbert Butterfield, renowned for his critique of the Whig interpretation of history, issued a much more negative judgment of the chemistry of the Enlightenment. In his Origins of Modern Science (1949), Butterfield notoriously relegated eighteenth-century chemistry to a kind of limbo, where it was awaiting its “postponed scientific revolution,” which arrived only in the last two decades of the century with the work of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743–1794). Enlightenment chemistry had been “immature,” hindered by philosophical confusions and the absence of an adequate intellectual framework. The difference of opinion between Brougham and Butterfield has an intriguing connection with their divergent political outlooks. Whereas the Whig writer saw a lengthy period of gradual progress, culminating in Lavoisier’s individual accomplishments, the anti-Whig historian saw the French chemist as the first person with true insight into the fundamental ideas of the science, a beacon in an otherwise dark landscape of confusion and error.

The perspectives of Whiggism and anti-Whiggism have continued to dominate much of the historical writing on the sciences of the eighteenth century, not least chemistry. Whiggish historians have looked to catalog specific and permanent factual discoveries – steadily accumulating positive knowledge – such as findings of new gases, mineral species, and salts. Butterfield’s anti-Whiggism reflected the approach of Alexandre Koyré and, before him, the tradition of philosophical history derived from Immanuel Kant, which searched for organizing intellectual schemes, worldviews, Weltanschauungen, or paradigms.