![]() Whether at the Globe, the court at Whitehall, or the theater at Blackfriars, many in the early audiences would have owned, and perhaps even had on their persons, the annual almanacs that encapsulated the popular astrological beliefs of the time: Ptolemaic astrology as it developed in the Latin West in the late Middle Ages and was reformed and reinvigorated in the sixteenth century. 4 Those distortions could have been obvious to the play's first spectators. 3īut in fact astrology was a science of its time, and Edmond's position mis-represents the central tenets of the art as it was practiced, theorized, and debated in early seventeenth-century England. 2 This association of astrology with magic and medieval superstition and the related claim that the play (and sometimes its author) repudiates the art replicate-perhaps unwittingly-a position most influentially articulated for Renaissance studies by Jacob Burckhardt, for whom astrology was "ancient superstition," a fatalist "delusion" from which the "clear Italian spirit" of quattrocento thinkers sought to free humankind. S cholars have often sided with E dmond in this mini-debate about astrology in the second scene of King Lear, usually by identifying Gloucester's belief in astrology with superstition, and Edmond's skepticism with emerging scientific rationalism.
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