In Much Ado About Nothing, Sir John the Bastard allows that both he and Conrade, his companion, are "born under Saturn. Sometimes the characters themselves announce their resonances with a particular planet. Obviously Shakespeare is well acquainted with planetary archetypes because he often explicitly connects planets to particular characters. (In a second paper, I’ve explored the grand model of the cosmos from ancient times, certainly from classical Greece and even earlier from Egypt and Persia, and its path into Elizabethan times.) This paper brings together great literature, esoteric thought, and spiritual philosophy to show that astrological symbolism remarkably provides secret keys to unlocking deeper meanings in-to use one play as an example- Romeo and Juliet. But the astrological model provides a much grander underlying archetypal structure for many of his plays. Favourites are Ulysses’ paean to order in Troilus and Cressida or, in contrast, Edmund the Bastard’s refutation of any stellar influence at his birth in King Lear. When the topic of Shakespeare and astrology arises, generally people rummage around in his plays looking at various characters’ speeches to determine Shakespeare’s attitude to or “belief” in astrology.
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