This is the excellent foppery of the world

Draco and Ursa Major, duking it out.

In the long tradition of Shakespearean villains and tricksters spouting truth, King Lear gives us Edmund: Gloucester's bastard son. He's intelligent, sexy, and utterly unscrupulous, believing he deserves no less respect (and money) than his legitimate half-brother Edgar. He succeeds in convincing his father that Edgar wishes to kill him for his lands, betraying Gloucester to Cornwall, and getting named Earl. Though a practicing douche-bag, Edmund is an effective fighter and his ambition gets him far before his fall. 

In the soliloquy I chose, Edmund mocks his father's insistence that the "late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us." Ironically(and as they always do in Shakespeare) the predictions laid out by Gloucester--that love will cool, friendships will fail, brothers will divide, and the King will rail against nature--come true. But that's the beauty of fiction, to write in vague prophecies that match up with real events.

Astrology was the mysterious science of the day, and professional astrologers were hired by the state to serve the kings and queens and provide "wisdom" written in the stars. One of my heroes, Carl Sagan, explained in the documentary series Cosmos thusly:

"Astrology developed into a strange discipline--a mixture of careful observations, mathematics and record-keeping, with fuzzy thinking and pious fraud. Nevertheless, astrology survived and flourished. Why? Because it seems to lend a cosmic significance to the routine of our daily lives. It pretends to satisfy our longing to feel personally connected with the universe. Astrology suggests a dangerous fatalism--if our lives are controlled by a set of traffic signals in the sky, why try to change anything?"

Edmund's speech provides a rant worthy of Sagan's appeal to reason.

King Lear, Act I, Sc. II

Edmund: This is the excellent foppery of the world 

that when we are sick in fortune—

often the surfeit of our own behavior—

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 all that we are evil in by a divine thrusting-on. 

An admirable evasion of whoremaster 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. 

But I am constant as the northern star

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your pants!

An owl hoots in the public square at noon. A lioness gives birth in the streets. A man's hand burns with flame without being scorched. The dead leave their graves. No wonder Calpurnia had a nightmare the evening before the ides of March. I'd freak too if I dreamt that people were bathing in my husband's fountain of blood.

Caesar, however, is so high from the public's very public adoration of him that he spurns the soothsayer's warnings and his wife's pleas (along with speaking in the first person) and goes to the capitol with Brutus and all his senate buddies anyway.

Earlier in the play, while listening to Casca roundly freaking out over the strange portents floating around the city, Cicero says,

Indeed, it is a strange-disposed time; 

But men may construe things after their fashion, 

Clean from the purpose of the things themselves.

And Cassius says to Brutus:

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, 

But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

In one way, Caesar is taking it upon himself to ignore the "stars" that are telling him to phone in sick on the ides. Unfortunately, he is also feeding into his own tragic fault: he believes himself to be a thing of the heavens, so powerful and untouchable that he fails to recognize his own human frailty. Moments before he is stabbed on the marble floor of the Capitol, Metellus Cimber, Marcus Brutus, Cassius, and Cinna beg Caesar to repeal Publius Cimber's banishment. Caesar, surrounded by these politely dissenting voices, refuses, citing himself as something as unmovable as Olympus.

Again, with the astronomical references. I love 'em.

Julius Caesar, Act III, Sc. I

Caesar: I could be well mov'd if I were as you.
If I could pray to move, prayers would move me.
But I am constant as the northern star,
Of whose true-fix'd and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.
The skies are painted with unnumb'red sparks.
They are all fire and every one doth shine,
But there’s but one in all doth hold his place.
So in the world. 'Tis furnished well with men,
And men are flesh and blood, and apprehensive,
Yet in the number I do know but one
That unassailable holds on his rank,
Unshak'd of motion. And that I am he
Let me a little show it even in this:
That I was constant Cimber should be banished,
And constant do remain to keep him so.

Hung be the heavens with black

The Wars of the Roses began with a bunch of pansies fighting in the back garden...

Henry VI Part One was written after Henry VI (Parts Two and Three), which were all written before King Henry IV (Parts One and Two) and King Henry V, and you can totally tell. The Henriad plays (Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V) have more of a Shakespearean flair than those earlier plays, which were likely written collaboratively with other authors. It helps that the Henriad plays have significantly more empathetic characters (in number and quality) and the triumphant battle of England over France contained within--Harfleur and Agincourt and all that. By comparison, the story of Henry VI and his so totally not living up to his father's fame and admirability is a bit of a letdown, especially since the famously reviled (but infamously quotable!) Richard III is well on his way to ascending the throne by the end.

The play itself is full of literal battles royale between those firebrand Plantagenets of Lancaster and York. It's got crowd-pleasing fights, murders, and prophetic details that are so often easily inserted into prequels. Joan of Arc even has a glorified cameo role in which she defeats the French Dauphin in single combat--an event that is less of a nod to feminism than one example of just how far back the whole "effeminate Frenchman" joke goes.

That said, Henry VI, Part One opens with the funeral of the great Henry V, narrated with a handful of encomiums worthy of the man that was to be portrayed in the eponymous uber-prequels we know and love to see made by Sirs Olivier and Branagh today. I chose Bedford's because it references the stars, and any poetic waxing about the heavens is enough to win over this amateur astronomer in a heartbeat.


1 King Henry VI, Act I, Sc. I
Bedford: Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!
Comets, importing change of times and states,
Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky,
And with them scourge the bad revolting stars
That have consented unto Henry's death!
King Henry the Fifth, too famous to live long!
England ne'er lost a king of so much worth.