It’s too easy to imagine Shakespeare’s England as a kind of ‘Golden Age’: a moment of cultural confidence, newly ordered and secure.

It was nothing like that.

England was a liminal space.

It was the many-fronted battleground where inherited assumptions about the unknowable strained against new knowledge, complicated by a growing insistence on individual human agency.  A country buffeted by an uneasy confrontation of opposing ideas – the difficult birth of a nation.

No wonder we call it ‘Early Modern’, not simply ‘Modern’.

Shakespeare encapsulates this sense of flux. He’s rarely didactic: for at least a decade I’ve been telling people ‘we don’t read Shakespeare; Shakespeare reads us.’ If he told us what he thought, and how to think, we probably wouldn’t read him any more.

Few subjects reveal the era’s tension more clearly than the heavens. And this week’s #ShakespeareSunday theme is ASTRONOMY.

To the play, then …

Why choose Lear over all the others that contemplate the moon, planets, and stars?

A product of the first decade of the seventeenth century, King Lear demonstrates how belief in a meaningful cosmos never disappeared – but it fractured, and was suddenly as open to individual interpretation as a Christian’s belief in God.

Sure, to modern minds it’s baffling to think that as head of the Anglican church, Elizabeth I employed Dr John Dee as personal astrologer (the term was interchangeable with astronomer) to advise on a propitious coronation date – but that was five years before  Shakespeare was born.

He was middle-aged when he wrote Lear. Attitudes were changing, and quickly. 

Towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign, that liminal space – that battleground – is where understandings and beliefs which were once universally-held become polarising, and open to challenge. A generation before, being the wrong ‘flavour’ of Christianity is potentially fatal. Now, in the early 1600s, people feel emboldened to oppose, not simply accommodate the official line. How much of that was down to the understanding that the Tudor line was ending (despite Treasons Acts forbidding open discussion of the issue), I will leave to you.

I often say that the long road to the civil war began with Richard II. We’re a lot closer now.

In the early parts of Lear, Edmund is a ‘new man’.

Not for him the acceptance of the old ways. It’s interesting to see him scornfully talk of ‘moonshines’ in describing his precedence over Edgar by simple terms of birthday.¹

Look at this week’s quotation.

We make guilty of our disasters

The sun, the moon, and the stars.

The moon has no hold on Edmund’s ambitions, desires, or his belief in his own ability. The sun? His dismissal of it is almost atheistic in the context of ‘The Great Chain of Being’. The Stars? Edmund feels it’s ridiculous, contemptible, to blame his predicament on them. His is a typical Renaissance, humanist, self-reliance.

The planets might conceivably deal the cards, but it’s down to Edmund how to play them.

Everywhere we look in the play, accepted beliefs and hierarchies are challenged. Why on earth would Edmund accept any ‘cosmic’ authority which suggests he’s inferior to his loyal, stoic, but unimaginative half-brother?

I’ll go further – Edmund is Marlovian in rejecting the cosmos, Machiavellian in his methods. Anthony Grafton tells us what Machiavelli had to say about Fortune:

“she favoured those bold enough to treat her roughly.”²

Edmund is bold. And rough.

Edmund doesn’t hedge. Unlike characters in so many other Shakespeare plays – Julius Caesar springs to mind – he rejects the temptation to interpret astronomy as incontestable truth. In those other plays, by the way, it’s notable that there is more than one interpretation of what the stars have to say, but their authority is pretty much unchallenged …

An interesting thing about Edmund’s journey is his ending. What are we to make of ‘the wheel has come full circle’? Is that an acceptance of fate, of the restrictions of free will he rejected earlier? Or is he just accepting that some you win, some you lose?

[A post for another time – is Edmund more of a ‘tragic hero’ than Lear, in the Aristotelian / Senecan tradition? This quotation feels like part of a broader ‘anagnorisis’, but maybe I am looking for things which aren’t there.]

Shakespeare reads us as if we are the positions of the planets, whilst never quite offering his own divination.

If the heavens seem to be against us, should we accept or challenge them?

And if we reject these cosmic forces, what should we trust or believe in, instead?

1. all Shakespeare quotations: www.opensourceshakespeare.org ↩︎
2. Anthony Grafton, in Nicolas Machiavelli, Il Principe (The Prince, ed. George Grafton), (London: Penguin, 2003) ↩︎