Fate, 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.
…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.
Even the planetary movements in
to them achinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders…
…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.
Notably, 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.
Directly 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.
Edmund’s skepticism could be inspired, in part, by Niccolò Machiavelli’s
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.