The ‘Science’ of Astrology in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Romeo and Juliet and King Lear

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
François Laroque
Keyword(s):  
King Lear ◽  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
As If

In chapter 1, François Laroque explores the paradoxical purposes of the science of astrology in two plays, namely Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest, and in his sonnets. The craze for astrology clearly found its way into Shakespeare’s poetry. Take Sonnet 14, for example, where the speaker deliberately poses as a mock-astrologer, or Sonnet 107, where he playfully redefines what ‘poetic’ astrology should be, as his own astrological skills enable him to read the eyes of the young man as if they were two fixed stars. Astrology is therefore taken seriously, even though Shakespeare seeks to enlarge its meaning. In the plays, it can even be a structural device. Laroque argues that, in Romeo and Juliet, the “ancient grudge” of the Montagues and the Capulets is marked right from the beginning by its astrological connotations. Interestingly, Shakespeare kept thinking of the influence of the planets throughout his career, for a much later play like King Lear is similarly concerned with stars and disasters. The vivid opposition between Gloucester and Edmond allows Laroque to demonstrate that the playwright was particularly interested in the controversies that then emerged over the validity of the old science of astrology, even though Shakespeare refuses to take sides.

Authorial Revision in the Tragedies

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Werstine
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
King Lear ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
The Difference ◽  
As If

Accepting that the controversy over Shakespeare’s possible revision of his tragedies has largely passed, this chapter explores the centuries-long speculation that the dramatist rewrote some of the works that are received as his greatest: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. Like today’s editors, their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century predecessors never found evidence persuasive enough to make the claim of authorial revision with certainty when there is variation between early printed texts of the tragedies, or even to tell the difference between such revision and possibly extra-authorial playhouse adaptation. Some recent editors’ decisions to edit the tragedies as if they could be known to have been rehandled by Shakespeare appear to arise principally from theory-driven motivations, in the absence of any evidence to support them and in the presence of documentary evidence that resists them.

Shakespeare's Representation of Weather, Climate and Environment

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophie Chiari
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
Ability To Act

While ecocritical approaches to literary texts receive more and more attention, climate-related issues remain fairly neglected, particularly in the field of Shakespeare studies. This monograph explores the importance of weather and changing skies in early modern England while acknowledging the fact that traditional representations and religious beliefs still fashioned people’s relations to meteorological phenomena. At the same time, a growing number of literati stood against determinism and defended free will, thereby insisting on man’s ability to act upon celestial forces. Yet, in doing so, they began to give precedence to a counter-intuitive approach to Nature. Sophie Chiari argues that Shakespeare reconciles the scholarly views of his time with more popular ideas rooted in superstition and that he promotes a sensitive, pragmatic understanding of climatic events. She pays particular attention to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, Othello, King Lear, Anthony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest. Taking into account the influence of classical thought, each of the book’s seven chapters emphasises specific issues (e.g. cataclysmic disorders, the dog days’ influence, freezing temperatures, threatening storms) and considers the way climatic events were presented on stage and how they came to shape the production and reception of Shakespeare’s drama.

Calvin, Shakespeare, and Suspense

2021 ◽  
pp. 182-199
Author(s):  
Claire McEachern
Keyword(s):  
King Lear ◽  
Statistical Probability ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
The Future ◽  
Narrative Function

Calvin and Shakespeare both share an interest in the work of suspense; in the former case, as a feature of anticipating salvation (or not); in the latter, as a narrative function of a play’s conclusion. The mediation of Calvinist soteriology in England through the experimentalist thought of William Perkins links Shakespeare to Calvin, in a shared project of anticipating the future, an anticipation informed both by older providentialist models of probability (in which an ending simply confirms a prior pattern) and emergent models of statistical probability (in which the possibility of reversal of prior patterns exists). After an exploration of the logic of ending in Puritan deathbed accounts of Katherine Stubbes, the chapter concludes with a survey of the interplay of urgency and assurance in some of Shakespeare’s endings, those of King Lear and The Tempest in particular.

End-songs: final vistas of Spenser and Shakespeare

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Lanier Reid
Keyword(s):  
King Lear ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
The Face ◽  
Holistic Design ◽  
The Faerie Queene

Does Spenser’s Mutabilitie Songcomplete his epic,or point to a more transcendent scope in its final half?It derogates the pagan gods; itreforms the titan Mutability (unlike the discarded demon-titans in books 1-6); and its grand pastoral pageantfalls short of the symbolic city toward which the poem moves. Spenser’s holistic design is more clearly implied in his ordering of deadly sins (FQ 1.4). Compared with Dante’s pattern of sins, of purgations, and of ascensions in the Commedia, it offers a vital clue to The Faerie Queene’s format–based on the Christian-Platonismthat informs all its figures and sequences. Much evidence suggests Elizabeth I would admire a mystic structuring of this epic that so honors her. As for Shakespeare’s attentiveness to last things, we explore the theme of ‘summoning’ in Hamlet and King Lear, both concerned–as in The Summoning of Everyman–with ‘readiness’ and ’ripeness’ in the face of death and judgment. In The Tempest’s deft collocation of all social levels and artistic genres, and its odd convergence with Spenserian allegory, we debate the insistence on Shakespeare’s secularism by examining the range of meaning in Prospero’s ‘Art’.

Story Structure

2020 ◽  
pp. 73-108
Author(s):  
Patrick Colm Hogan
Keyword(s):  
General Theory ◽  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
Story Structure ◽  
Complex Relation ◽  
The Way

The second chapter of Style in Narrative illustrates and extends the general theory developed in chapter 1. Specifically, it addresses the level of story structure and the scope of an authorial canon. In connection with this, it considers William Shakespeare’s complex relation to genre, examining the way in which he thoroughly integrates genres, rather than simply adding storylines with different genre affiliations. The presence of such integration in Shakespeare’s works has frequently been noted, but critics have rarely sought to explain it in detail. In order to explore the topic more thoroughly, the chapter focuses on two plays, Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. To clarify what is specifically Shakespearean in these works, Hogan examines the former in relation to Shakespeare’s sources for the play and the latter in relation to a precursor revenge drama, Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy.

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