Among the many other items of folk-lore associated with thunder is a curious one referred to in “Pericles” (iv. 3): “Thunder shall not so awake the bed of eels.” The notion formerly being that thunder had the effect of rousing eels from their mud, and so rendered them more easy to be taken in stormy weather. Marston alludes to this superstition in his satires (“Scourge of Villainie,” sat. vii.):
“They are nought but eeles, that never will appeare
Till that tempestuous winds or thunder teare
Their slimy beds.”
The silence that often precedes a thunder-storm is thus graphically described in “Hamlet” (ii. 2):
“‘we often see, against some storm,
A silence in the heavens, the rack stand still,
The bold winds speechless, and the orb below
As hush as death, anon the dreadful thunder
Doth rend the region.’”
Earthquakes, around which so many curious myths and superstitions have clustered,[147] are scarcely noticed by Shakespeare. They are mentioned among the ominous signs of that terrible night on which Duncan is so treacherously slain (“Macbeth,” ii. 3):
“the obscure bird
Clamour’d the livelong night: some say, the earth
Was feverous and did shake.”
And in “1 Henry IV.” (iii. 1) Hotspur assigns as a reason for the earthquakes the following theory:
“Diseased nature oftentimes breaks forth
In strange eruptions; oft the teeming earth
Is with a kind of colic pinch’d and vex’d
By the imprisoning of unruly wind
Within her womb; which, for enlargement striving,
Shakes the old beldam earth, and topples down
Steeples, and moss-grown towers.”
Equinox. The storms that prevail in spring at the vernal equinox are aptly alluded to in “Macbeth” (i. 2):
“As whence the sun ’gins his reflection
Shipwrecking storms and direful thunders break,
So from that spring, whence comfort seem’d to come,
Discomfort swells.”