The Wind and the Rain
More than four centuries after it closed Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Feste’s final song still sounds surprisingly familiar.
When everyone leaves, the Fool remains.
Twelfth Night spends most of its time in a world of disguise, mistaken identity, desire, vanity, drinking, practical jokes and impossible love. By the final scene, much of the confusion has finally begun to untangle.
Viola and Sebastian have found one another. Identities have been restored. Lovers have been paired. The machinery of Shakespearean comedy has done what audiences expect it to do.
And then almost everyone leaves.
The final voice belongs not to one of the lovers, nor to a duke, nor to the characters whose fortunes have suddenly improved. It belongs to Feste — the Fool.
What follows is a short song about moving through life: childhood, adulthood, marriage, disappointment, drinking, foolishness and the simple realization that no stage of life offers permanent protection from difficulty.
For the rain it raineth every day.FESTE · TWELFTH NIGHT · ACT V
From a London hall in 1602 to a book in 1623.
The exact date on which Shakespeare completed Twelfth Night, or What You Will is not known, but the play is generally believed to have been written around 1601.
What we do have is an unusually valuable piece of evidence. A law student named John Manningham recorded seeing Twelfth Night performed at Middle Temple Hall in London on 2 February 1602, during the Candlemas festivities.
It is important to call this the first recorded performance rather than the unquestioned premiere. Shakespeare’s company may have performed the play before that night. The surviving evidence simply does not allow us to say so with certainty.
The play then had to wait more than two decades before appearing in print. It was first published in 1623 in the collection now known as the First Folio — seven years after Shakespeare’s death.
The path of Twelfth Night
The play is generally dated to around 1601, although no manuscript survives to give us an exact completion date.
John Manningham recorded a performance at Middle Temple Hall in London on 2 February.
Twelfth Night appeared in print for the first time in Shakespeare’s First Folio.
A world briefly turned upside down.
Twelfth Night belonged to the festive end of the Christmas season and was associated with revelry, disguise and the temporary inversion of ordinary social rules.
Shakespeare’s comedy seems almost built for that atmosphere. A woman disguises herself as a man. A servant imagines himself elevated above his station. Twins become indistinguishable. Desire crosses identities. Authority becomes ridiculous.
For a few hours, almost anything seems possible.
But festivals end.
Feste is rarely the foolish one.
Shakespeare’s professional fools often occupy a strange position: socially marginal, yet free to say things other characters cannot. Feste moves between Olivia’s household and Orsino’s world, singing, joking and watching the emotional confusion around him.
That makes him an unusually appropriate figure to have the final word. The lovers are absorbed in their futures. Feste is left to remind the audience that life continues after the curtain falls.
A lifetime compressed into five verses.
The song progresses almost like a miniature biography. It begins with childhood, moves into adult society, marriage and drinking, and finally steps outside the fictional world of the play itself.
Instead of promising that adulthood brings wisdom or stability, each stage simply brings another version of the same weather.
The printed song contains a small archival surprise.
Modern editions normally print the complete recurring refrain in every stanza. The 1623 First Folio does something slightly different.
After establishing the repeated lines, the Folio often replaces later repetitions with the printer’s shorthand &c. — essentially “and so forth.”
Editors therefore restore the repeated words when preparing modern reading editions. It is a tiny detail, but it reminds us that what now feels like a familiar poem or lyric survives through a four-hundred-year chain of performance, printing, editorial decisions and interpretation.
There is another important absence: the First Folio preserves the words and the instruction that the Fool sings, but it does not give us a musical score for the performance.
The words survived more securely than their original sound.
Did Shakespeare write every word of the song?
The song is preserved inside Twelfth Night and is conventionally presented as part of Shakespeare’s text. Yet its precise authorship has occasionally been questioned.
Some scholars have wondered whether Shakespeare adapted an already familiar popular song. Others have suggested Robert Armin — the celebrated clown and singer associated with Shakespeare’s company and the role of Feste — as a possible contributor.
There is no surviving document that settles the question. That uncertainty is part of the fascination. Early modern theatre was collaborative, musical and performance-driven, and not every song heard on Shakespeare’s stage necessarily began its life in the same way as the surrounding dialogue.
What can be said with certainty is that the song had become part of Twelfth Night by the time the play reached print in 1623.
The refrain returns in King Lear.
One of the most intriguing clues to the song’s wider life appears in another Shakespeare play. In the storm scene of King Lear, the Fool sings a closely related verse built around the same wind-and-rain refrain.
Whether this represents Shakespeare returning to his own earlier material, a performer carrying a familiar song between productions, or evidence of a refrain already circulating in popular culture remains open to interpretation.
Four centuries of new melodies.
Because the First Folio does not preserve a score for Feste’s closing song, later generations were never tied to one single, unquestionable musical version.
Performers and composers have repeatedly approached the text again, supplying new melodies, harmonies and atmospheres for words that remain essentially unchanged.
In that sense, creating a new musical version in the twenty-first century is not as radical a departure as it might first appear. Shakespeare’s song has been returning to music for centuries.
The text survives precisely because each generation has found another reason to speak it, perform it, print it — or sing it.
Not a museum piece. A song.
For STRIGOI Archives, the attraction of this text was its strange familiarity.
Remove the date, the stage costumes and the four centuries separating us from Shakespeare’s audience, and the central idea remains remarkably easy to recognize: growing older does not mean reaching a point where life stops being difficult.
Love does not eliminate disappointment. Success does not prevent loss. Happiness does not guarantee clear skies.
This release also marks a small first for the Archives. Rather than presenting the musical adaptation only through a static or atmospheric visual, The Wind and the Rain became the first STRIGOI Archives song accompanied by its own dedicated music video.
The aim remains the same: not to modernize the past until it becomes unrecognizable, but to create a new doorway into it.
The weather always changes.
Perhaps that is why Feste’s song still works.
It does not promise a life without bad weather. It does not offer a magical ending in which difficulty disappears simply because the story has reached its final page.
It simply acknowledges the rain.
More than four hundred years later, that feels unexpectedly modern.
And if you happen to find this song during a difficult chapter of your own life, perhaps there is something worth remembering: weather changes.
No storm owns the sky forever.
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— STRIGOI
Historical references
- Folger Shakespeare Library — Twelfth Night, complete text, Act V and textual notes.
- Folgerpedia — Twelfth Night: date of composition, first recorded performance and early editions.
- Royal Shakespeare Company — Dating the Play: Twelfth Night.
- The Honourable Society of the Middle Temple — archival material on the 2 February 1602 performance at Middle Temple Hall.
- Internet Shakespeare Editions — Twelfth Night, First Folio text of 1623.
- Folger Shakespeare Library — King Lear, Act III, Scene II, for the related wind-and-rain refrain.
