Summer’s Lease: Shakespeare in the Little Ice Age

In his hyper-canonical eighteenth Sonnet, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Shakespeare has his speaker use the brevity and tenuous hold of spring and summer as a metaphoric argument for seizing the day: “Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May /And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.”¹ If these lines trail behind them a long tradition of carpe diem verse that hammers home the metaphoric connections between spring and youth, winter and old age, Shakespeare’s reimagining of the summer growing season as a short-term lease seems to demand a traditional New Historicist interpretation that might treat the language of property ownership and anxieties about patrilineal succession as a crucial means of structuring the reader’s perception of the natural world.² Yet if the eighteenth sonnet yokes easterly winds and short growing seasons to a rhetoric of economic hardship and the problems of land tenure, it also invokes an experiential world of agricultural and arboricultural hardship in what was still, for many Elizabethans, a subsistence economy. “Summer’s lease,” in this respect, is characteristic of a persistent strain of imagistic language in the sonnets, and in a wide range of writing about the natural world in the sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth centuries. This language reflects a sensitivity to climatic conditions in early modern England that—all but unnoticed by most modern commentators—locates Shakespeare and his contemporaries in a volatile era in climatological history that, in some ways, offers an inverted, but potentially instructive, image of our own twenty-first-century descent into global warming.