This chapter explores the relationship between Shakespeare and climate. Taking its inspiration from weather disruptions to the 2017 Shakespeare Association of America conference, it riffs on the tweets that this climatic disturbance generated and the themes they reveal. It deals with the issues of: climate and its material effects on Shakespearean composition and performance, whereby climate and culture may be said to be co-constitutive; the resistance in Shakespeare’s time to codifying climate, in partial acknowledgement of climate’s unpredictability; and thus the extent to which Shakespearean texts portend human and non-human entanglement in the Anthropocene.

This chapter outlines the ways in which historical traditions of climatic medicine influenced nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial discourses. It further examines three authors’ engagements with and reaction to these discourses, in both fictional and non-fictional literatures of empire. Rather than simply recapitulating pro-imperial uses of climate science, works by Richard Burton, Joseph Conrad, and Rudyard Kipling all ‘map’ race and climate in a way that reflects the ambivalences and contradictions at the heart of colonial discourse. Further, this chapter analyses the imaginative potential provided by the structures of fiction for authors like Conrad and Kipling to grapple with concepts of chronic disease, bodily transformation, adaptation, and degeneration in Africa and India.