Note to The Tempest, 1.2.4: "welkin's cheek"


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The Tempest,
Act 1, Scene 2, line 4.
Since the 19th Century "welkin's cheek" has been glossed as "sky's face," but the gloss leaves a question unanswered: What "fire" is being referred to in the next line?

Here is the whole sentence in question:
The sky, it seems, would pour down stinking pitch,
But that the sea, mounting to the welkin's cheek,
Dashes the fire out.
It's clear that the rain is coming down fast and the waves are leaping up just as fast, but the statement that "the sea . . . Dashes the fire out" indicates that the picture should include flashes of lightening that threaten to set ship on fire, as Ariel describes later in the same scene: "I flamed amazement: sometime I'ld divide, / And burn in many places."

Here is the discussion of this problem in The Globe Illustrated Shakespeare of 1864:
"———mounting to the welkin's cheek.——] Although we have, in "Richard II." Act III. Scene 2,—"the cloudy cheeks of heaven," and elsewhere "welkin's face," and "heaven's face," it may well be questioned whether "cheek," in this place, is not a misprint. Mr. Collier's [John Payne Collier, 1789-1883, was an editor of Shakespeare, and a forger] annotater substitutes heat, a change characterised by Mr. Dyce [Alexander Dyce, 1798 - 1869, another editor of Shakespeare] as "equally tasteless and absurd." A more appropriate and expressive word, one, too, sanctioned in some measure by its occurrence in Ariel's description of the same elemental conflict, is probably, crack, or cracks,——
                     "——the fire and cracks
Of sulphurous roaring, the most mighty Neptune
Seem to besiege," &c.
In Miranda's picture of the tempest, the sea is seen to storm and overwhelm the tremendous artillery of heaven; in that of Ariel, the sky's ordnance, "the fire and cracks," assault the "mighty Neptune." Crack, in the emphatic sense it formerly bore of crash, discharge, or explosion, is very common in our old writers thus, in Marlowe's "Tamburlaine the Great," Part I. Act IV Sc. 2—
"As when a fiery exhalation,
 Wrapt in the bowels of the freezing cloud,
 Fighting for passage make the welkin cracke."
Agan, in some verses prefixed to Coryat's "Crudities,"—
"A skewed engine mathematicall
 To draw up words that make the welkin cracke."
And in Taylor's Superbiæ Flagellum, 1630,—
"Yet every Reall heav'nly Thundercracke,
 This Caitife in such feare and terror strake," &c.
.