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I hope you enjoy the program.

Hello, in Act 1, scene 2. you enjoy the program.

Hello, in Act 1, scene 2 of King Lear, the Machiavellian Edmond scoffs at the weakness and cynicism of his fellow man.

He says,

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, and all that we are

evil in by divine thrusting on. The focus of his attack is astrology and the credulity of those who fall for its charms,

but the idea that Earthful life was ordained in the heavens ran deep in the Renaissance mind,

offering succor to servants and exercising the highest faculties of theologians and philosophers.

When Elizabeth I wanted to establish a propitious date for her coronation, she asked her own astrologer Dr John Dee.

But why did astrological ideas flourish in the period?

How did astrologes interpret and influence the course of events?

And what new ideas eventually brought the astrological edifice tumbling down?

With me to discuss Renaissance astrology

are supposed to be Peter Forshaw, lecturer in Renaissance philosophers at Berkweckin University of London,

but he was taken to White City by mistake

and on my way back at the moment,

but we are joined by the

Lauren Cassell lecturer in the History and Philosophy of Science at the

University of Cambridge and Jonathan Sawyer professor of English studies at

...