Lightning and infertility in King Lear
In the famous storm scene (Act 3, Scene 2), King Lear having been cast out of doors by his elder daughters, prays for a flood of cataclysmic dimensions that will drown the whole world:
Blow winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples,drownedthe
cocks.
(3.2.1-3)
and also a thunderstorm of such proportions as will not only destroy him: ‘singe my white head’ (3.2.6), but will also render the entire population sterile:
You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head. And thou, all-shaking
thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world,
Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once
That makes ingrateful man!
(3.2.5-11)
The flattening out of the world’s ‘rotundity’ could be construed as a curse upon pregnancy and fecundity, with the earth representing a pregnant woman’s body in this case presumably to be…
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