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Shakespeare And Astrology

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Bianca
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« on: October 15, 2008, 10:55:43 am »











Gloucester, one of the more sympathetic characters in the play, equates the troubles in the land to the recent eclipses. Eclipses are one of the most powerful events in astrology, portending great upheaval in the places where they can be seen. Visible total solar eclipses are rare and, depending on their position in the charts of the King, country, and other entities, can destroy old structures and supplant them with new ones. Eclipses are harbingers of war and drastic change, and Gloucester recognizes this. Another possible result of eclipses is blindness, which Gloucester himself becomes intimately familiar with. Gloucester respects the efficacy of astrology. Gloucester's illegitimate son, Edmund, has a quite different view of astrology. He doesn't believe in, understand or respect astrology, as shown in his soliloquy immediately following his father's exit:
 


Edm.



This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our

own behaviour, 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 pre-

dominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc'd obedience of planetary influence; and all

that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of ****-master man, to lay his

goatish disposition to the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the Dragon's

Tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and lecherous. Fut! I should

have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing. (I,i)
 
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Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.
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