King Lear: Edmund's star speech and the scientific method
Gloucester blames eclipses; his son Edmund mocks blaming the stars, a modern idea in a play about ancient Britain.
The setup (Act 1, Scene 2)
The Earl of Gloucester has just been fooled by his son Edmund into thinking his other son, Edgar, is plotting against him. Shaken, he blames the sky:
These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us.
There were in fact real eclipses in 1605, just before Shakespeare wrote the play, and pamphlets were predicting doom from them. His audience would have heard it as current news.
Edmund's answer
Once his father leaves, Edmund, alone on stage, mocks the whole idea:
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 by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence.
And then:
I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.
In plain words: "We do bad things, then blame the planets. I'd be exactly who I am no matter which star was shining when I was conceived."
Why it matters
Notice the word "disasters" here. It means "bad stars" literally (see Disaster means bad star). Edmund rejects it.
The irony is that the villain has the modern, almost scientific view: look for causes in people's behaviour, not in signs in the sky. This was the moment when that view was being born. Francis Bacon, Shakespeare's contemporary, was arguing that knowledge should come from observation and testing rather than from authority and omens. His Advancement of Learning came out in 1605, the same time as Lear, and his Novum Organum (1620) laid out what became the scientific method.
Shakespeare doesn't make it simple, though. The clear-eyed man is the liar and schemer, and the superstitious old father is the one who ends up blinded.
Key facts
- Gloucester: "These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us" (1.2)
- Edmund: we "make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars"
- Real eclipses in 1605 came just before Lear was written
- Francis Bacon, Shakespeare's contemporary, pushed observation over omens (Advancement of Learning, 1605)