This chapter examines how transatlantic travel writing helped to redefine climate throughout the long eighteenth century. Beginning with the challenge that early modern travellers’ encounters with North American extremes offered to classical theories of climate, this chapter first considers how fears about the inevitable influence of degenerative air gave way to a sense that settlers could change the climate. By emphasising the improving survival rates of European crops and animals, advocates for North American settlement reframed evidence of certain types of productivity as evidence that the climate itself was improving. By thus narrowing the definition of climate, however, this pattern of writing also opened a gap between the stories of improvement circulating in Britain and settlers’ reports on conditions on the (still cold) ground – and so, for many early modern observers, this transatlantic exchange also inspired new scepticism about the political interests served by promises of a changing climate.

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.