"Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!"

Or as King Lear might have said to you at the time if you'd been standing next to him at the bus stop "Awful weather for the time of year wouldn't you say?" Why are we Brits so obsessed with the weather? Partly because of where we sit on the planet combined with our islands status, it makes us the receptacle of an awful loot of unpredicatable weather.

And it was even more the case in Shakespeare's time. The elements played a much bigger part in our lives than they do at the moment, current heatwaves excepted. In a couple of the plays the tone is set by the opening lines - 'Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York,' Richard the Third says at the start of that play. While Macbeth begins famously with the three witches, the first asking "When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning or in rain?"

Shakespeare often uses the weather to evoke a sense of personality - think of the stormy nature of Lear, the man and the play, or the dark and broodiness that hangs over the whole of Macbeth.

As I often say, Shakespeare isn't so much a man with the answers as someone who knows how to ask the right questions, and he makes us think about how whatever kind of person we are, however much we think we can control events, nature has much greater control than any single individual. Even in a play like The Tempest, where Prospero invents a storm - he literally makes the weather - he can't change people.

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