jetsam wrote:geo wrote:
SCENE IV. A camp in Wales.
Enter EARL OF SALISBURY and a Welsh Captain
This scene is just a conversation between a Welsh captain and the Earl of Salisbury, but one that shows the cosmic significance of a King being deposed, representing a shift in the Great Chain and a world that suddenly goes topsy turvy.
Meteors occlude the stars, the moon appears bloody, rich men look sad and ruffians dance and leap.
I enjoyed reading this segment again here, and I too always enjoy Shakespeare in this mode. But Shakespeare is also capable of poking a bit of fun at this stuff. There's that wonderful passage in Henry IV between Glendower and Harry Percy where Glendower keeps calling up images of meteors, earthquakes and shooting stars, stampeding animals and spirits from the depths, all to impress young Percy, and Percy won't have a bar of it, treating it all as so much mumbo jumbo. Very amusing scene.
I do get a sense that Shakespeare wasn't a superstitious guy, and there's a hint of absurdity in the line, when "rich men look sad and ruffians dance and leap." As Flann says, Shakespeare knew what side his bread was buttered on. He was very much indebted to Queen Elizabeth for her patronage and later King James.
Here's a line from A Midsummer Night's Dream where Shakespeare pays homage to the Queen.
"That very time I saw — but thou couldst not —
Flying between the cold moon and the earth,
Cupid all arm'd: a certain aim he took
At a fair vestal throned by the west,
And loos'd his love-shaft smartly from his bow
As it should pierce a hundred-thousand hearts:
But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft
Quench'd in the chaste beams of the watery moon,
And the imperial votaress passed on,
In maiden meditation fancy free." — Act II., Sc. i.
At the time Shakespeare wrote this, Queen Elizabeth had reigned for 37 years and was still unmarried and so presumably a virgin. The Queen's virginity became a source of pride for the Elizabethans (especially when she passed the age of childbirth). And so Shakespeare paints a delicate and respectful image of his "Virgin Queen" suggesting Cupid's arrow was aimed at a "fair vestal throned by the west" but missed and hit a flower instead—the pansy which Oberon in the play calls "love-in-idleness."
Note: this info taken from Asimov's previously mentioned book.