Shakespeare's Audience
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Shakespeare’s audience lived in what was in many respects a more intellectually tidied-up world than ours. Practically nobody believed, or had even heard of the notion, that the earth was a planet revolving around the sun: the earth was the center of the whole cosmos, and nature was intimately related to man. Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet has a profound knowledge of herbs … The assumption is that every plant growing out of the ground must have some connection with the human condition, good or bad. Similarly with the stars: they’re not there just to look decorative, but to “influence” (this word was originally a technical term in astrology) the human make-up. Comets and similar phenomena are signs of human social and political turmoil: “Disasters in the sun,” as Horatio says in Hamlet, reminding us that disaster is another word we got from astrology.
-- Northrop Frye, “On Shakespeare”
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One sometimes forgets just how long ago Shakespeare was.
Shakespeare’s audience lived in what was in many respects a more intellectually tidied-up world than ours. Practically nobody believed, or had even heard of the notion, that the earth was a planet revolving around the sun: the earth was the center of the whole cosmos, and nature was intimately related to man. Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet has a profound knowledge of herbs … The assumption is that every plant growing out of the ground must have some connection with the human condition, good or bad. Similarly with the stars: they’re not there just to look decorative, but to “influence” (this word was originally a technical term in astrology) the human make-up. Comets and similar phenomena are signs of human social and political turmoil: “Disasters in the sun,” as Horatio says in Hamlet, reminding us that disaster is another word we got from astrology.
-- Northrop Frye, “On Shakespeare”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
One sometimes forgets just how long ago Shakespeare was.