What Does Shakespeare Say--Clouds

It’s a game that we learn as children. You don’t need an electronic device or a special app to play this game. All you need is a few clouds in the sky and maybe a gentle breeze. You lie on your back in the grass with a friend or two, or simply look up into the sky. You identify shapes in the clouds—alligators, castles, potatoes! But the alligator that you see may be a turtle on a log for your co-imaginer. The castle that you see may be a stand of trees to your fellow fancier. The potatoes that you see—well, what else can they be but potatoes?

But wait! It may take only a few seconds for that alligator or turtle on a log to morph into a canoe carrying a human and a basset hound. That stand of trees may waft away into a feathery flock of pelicans.

Joni Mitchell in “Both Sides Now” muses on different qualities of clouds:

I've looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down, and still somehow
It's cloud illusions I recall
I really don't know clouds at all.

(from jonimitchell.com)

Recently, I had the opportunity to see a production of Antony and Cleopatra at the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, an annual tradition my friend Elissa and I share. I had read the play once and that was in graduate school in the mid-1980’s, and I had never seen a production or film adaptation, so I decided to re-read the play before seeing the production. I was not surprised at all to see that Shakespeare included a musing on clouds all those centuries ago.

In Act 4, scene 14, Antony is discouraged. He asks his friend, Eros, if Eros sees Antony. Of course, Eros says yes. Then Antony describes how he sees himself at that point in the play in terms of clouds:

            Sometime we see a cloud that’s dragonish;

A vapor sometime like a bear or lion,

A tower’d citadel, a pendent rock,

A forked mountain, or blue promontory

With trees upon’t that nod unto the world

And mock our eyes with air. (4.14.3-8.)

Sadly for Antony at this point, finding images in the clouds is not a child’s game but an exercise in serious self-reflection. Regardless, for centuries humans have looked at the clouds “from both sides now,” for amusement or for more serious reflection.