Cosmological Disorder in King Lear’s Tragic Universe

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Johann Heinrich Ramberg’s King Lear, III, 2, Another Part of the Heath, enter Lear and the Fool, 1829. Courtesy Folger Digital Image Collection. Public Domain.
Para1Fate, planetary movements, storms, politics, family dynamics, and psychological imbalance. Shakespeare has everything about King Lear’s existence intensify his tragedy. The magnitude of disorder and pathos creates a sense of a greater power trembling in the background of the play’s tragic universe. However, Shakespeare leaves the interpretation of the cause of Lear’s tragedy up to the audience. One main cause the play explores is cosmological disorder.

Cosmological Disorder

Para2King Lear is ambiguous about fate, providence, and the existence of an overarching order to the cosmos. Many scholars like Natalie Elliot believe that the mix of religion, superstition, and new scientific perspectives in the play could echo the conflicting explanations circulating in Elizabethan society. Was the earth the centre of the galaxy or was it the sun? What happens when scientific explanations of the natural world refute religious ones? According to Elliot, Shakespeare explores …how we are personally affected by the uncertainties that cosmological science can introduce, or what it means when scientists claim that our first-hand experience is illusory, or how we respond when science probes into matters of the heart (33). For example, this tension between different systems of thought appears in the exchange between the Earl of Gloucester and his villainous son Edmund on the role of astrology.

Astrological Disorder

Para3Even the planetary movements in King Lear are apparently out of order. In Act 1 Scene 2, Gloucester famously connects the machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders… to the …late eclipses in the sun and moon (1.2.443–444; 1.2.434). Gloucester uses astrology not like a science to understand the world in general, but as an attempt to understand the causes of the harmful events that happen in his life. Because of this, his application of astrology is more mystical or superstitious than scientific. Gloucester typifies the early modern view that divine powers controlled the celestial bodies which influence earthly events.
Para4Notably, Shakespeare’s audience may not have viewed Gloucester as overly superstitious because his reasoning follows the well-understood and practiced astrology in popular English almanacs of the time. Almanacs typically contained a calendar, important church dates, positions of planets and stars, weather forecasts, astrological predictions, and other information.
Para5Directly after his father exits in Act 1, Scene 2, Edmund parodies how humans use astrological and spiritual influences to explain their pain and suffering instead of addressing their own behavior and choices:
…when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeits of our own behavior—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars, as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on.(1.2.448–453)
Para6Edmund’s skepticism could be inspired, in part, by Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince, claims scholar Michael Best. Edmund’s opinions could also look far ahead to a Darwinian survival of the fittest or a Hobbesian man-as-brute perspective (Kernan 18–19). Scholar Phebe Jensen points out that Edmund’s total rejection of astrological providence is likely fairly radical for his time because even those who opoosed astrology usually still believed in celestial influence in the early 17th century. The references to astrology in King Lear are also a way that Shakespeare gives his plays a cosmic and universal dimension (Laroque 32) and a way for him to question ideas of fate, the origins of evil, the nature of humans, and their connection to the world and the divine.

Key Print Sources

Elliot, Natalie. Shakespeare’s Worlds of Science. The New Atlantis, vol. 54, 2018, pp. 30–50.
Jensen, Phebe. Causes in Nature: Popular Astrology in King Lear. Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 69, no. 4, Oxford University Press, 2019, pp. 205–227.
Laroque, Francois. The Science of Astrology in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Romeo and Juliet and King Lear. Spectacular Science, Technology and Superstition in the Age of Shakespeare, edited by Chiari, S. & Popeland, M., Edinburgh University Press, 2017, pp. 29–42.
Kernan, Alvin B. King Lear and the Shakespearean Pageant of History. On King Lear, edited by Danson, Lawrence, 2014, Princeton University Press, pp. 7–24.

Key Online Sources

almanac, n. OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/almanac_n. Accessed 6 Mar. 2021.
Best, Michael. Ideas: disorder and the stars. Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions, University of Victoria, 28 Sept. 2016, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/plays/king%20lear/learintellect.html. Accessed 31 Aug. 2021.
Witmore, Michael, and Natalie Elliot. Shakespeare, Science, and Art. Shakespeare Unlimited: Folger Shakespeare Library. Episode 158, 23 Dec. 2020, https://www.folger.edu/shakespeare-unlimited/science-art-natalie-elliot.

Image Sources

Cousin, Jehan. Fortuna Adrastia, Plate CXXIX. The Book of Fortune: Two Hundred Unpublished Drawings. ca. 1522–1593. p. 178. France. Paris: Librairie de l’art, 1883. HathiTrust. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/gri.ark:/13960/t2p55zg4z?urlappend=%3Bseq=178, Image Rights. Accessed 18 May 2024.
Ramberg, Johann Heinrich. King Lear, III, 2, Another part of the heath, enter Lear and the fool graphic. 1829. Luna: Folger Digital Image Collection, Digital image File Name 36303, https://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/3zo9dx. Accessed 18 May 2024.

Prosopography

Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

Melissa Walter

Melissa Walter is Associate Professor of English at the University of the Fraser Valley. Her research focuses on early modern English drama and English and European prose fiction. She is the author of The Italian Novella and Shakespeare’s Comic Heroines (U of Toronto, 2019), and co-editor, with Dennis Britton, of Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Authors, Audiences, Digital Technologies (Routledge, 2018). Her work on English theatre and the European novella has appeared in several edited collections, including Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater (Ashgate, 2008), and Transnational Mobility in Early Modern Theater (Ashgate, 2012). She has also written about Translation and Identity in the Dialogues in English and Malaiane Languages (Indographies, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris. Palgrave 2012). At the University of the Fraser Valley, she is a lead coordinator of UFV’s Shakespeare and Reconciliation Garden.

Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

Sarah Brown

Sarah Brown was a student at the University of Fraser Valley.

Orgography

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

University of Victoria (UVIC1)

https://www.uvic.ca/

Metadata

Authority title Cosmological Disorder in King Lear’s Tragic Universe
Type of text Critical
Publisher University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform
Series Early Modern England Encyclopedia
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By Sarah Brown, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions
Editorial declaration This document uses Canadian English spelling
Edition Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a
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Early Modern England Encyclopedia

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.
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Utah Valley University
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