The Biology of Rain: Becoming a Distant Master in Early Modern England

In Act 3 of Shakespeare’s Richard II, Henry Bolingbroke requests the restoration of his family’s lands while painting a picture of the ecol-ogy of war. Henry claims that if his inheritance is not restored he will “use the advantage of [his] power/And lay the summer’s dust with showers of blood/Rain’d from the wounds of slaughter’d Englishmen” (3.3.42–44).1In other words, Henry argues that if he is refused the territories that he believes are rightfully his, he will drench the lands with the blood of a people whom he also claims are his own. As he makes this statement, Henry lays out a chain of cause and effect in which he becomes the pri-mary human agent and interpretive consciousness that orders the climate of the surrounding countryside. Objects (be they land, elements, or citi-zens) exist in order to be possessed and acted upon by him, and ultimately the picture his words paint makes a case for how the listener/viewer is supposed to see the landowner as well as the earth and the English citi-zen’s relationship to it. Henry suggests that the landscape, and the organ-isms within it, are ordered and sustained at his will.