When King James VI of Scotland and I of England, with his court in attendance, saw Shakespeare’s King Lear1 on Saint Stephen’s night (December 26) at the royal palace of Whitehall during the Christmas holiday season of 1606-1607, the audience was witnessing a performance “By his Majesty’s Servants playing usually at the Globe on the bankside, London.” We learn this information from the entry in the Stationers’ Register, the official record book of the London Company of Stationers (i.e., booksellers and printers), dated November 26, 1607. The publishers, Nathaniel Butter and John Busby, having paid the necessary fee to the Stationers to ensure that the rights of publication would be theirs, issued their quarto edition of the play in 1608, with a title page that confirmed what the Stationers’ Register had declared about the date and location of these first recorded performances.
King Lear was thus a publicly performed play that also benefited from the privilege of having a royal audience as well—something the publishers did not hesitate to proclaim on their title page as an inducement to potential buyers of the quarto volume. These performances and publication must have been a notable event in London in 1606-1607. The play was evidently new. Shakespeare was highly regarded as the chief dramatist for the King’s Men. He had evidently become an actor-sharer (i.e., part owner and manager) when he joined Richard Burbage and others in forming the acting troupe known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1594. That company became “His Majesty’s Servants” in 1603 on the death of Queen Elizabeth I and the accession to the throne of King James; clearly by that time they were the premier acting troupe in England, beating out the competition of the Lord Admiral’s Men and other companies. Shakespeare’s eminence as a playwright was surely a critical factor in the King’s Men’s rise to fame and success. They performed usually at the Globe Theatre “on the bankside,” that is, on the south shore of the Thames River opposite the city of London, near London Bridge.
What did the play’s first audiences, at the Globe and then at the royal court, see in this new tragedy by Shakespeare? In what ways did the play seem relevant to their concerns? It was, of course, dramatic entertainment for a city that was alive with new plays. It had epic family disagreements, quarrels, sword fights, battles, deaths aplenty, and a daringly unhappy ending—daring in that the death of Cordelia especially must have struck some viewers as a violation of ideas of poetic justice according to which the good end happily and the bad end unhappily. Some audience members would have known an earlier play of King Leir (c. 1590) in which the dynastic struggles had been sorted out more to the benefit of the virtuous. Other accounts, too, going back to Geoffrey of Monmouth’sHistoria regum Britanniae (c. 1136), restored Lear to the throne and enabled Cordelia to succeed him for some five years until she eventually was overthrown. The First Part of the Mirror for Magistrates (1574), William Warner’s Albion’s England (1586), and Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (second edition, 1587) continued this tradition, as did still other works both before and after Shakespeare’s great play. Shakespeare alone chose to confront his audiences with unrelieved horror. Why?
One possible clue may be discernible in contemporary theories about the nature of the cosmos. Did human beings occupy a privileged space at the center of all existence, as visualized in the traditional scheme of the universe going back at least to the astronomer Ptolemy of Egypt (c. 100-178 c.e.)? Ptolemy envisaged Earth at the center of creation, surrounded by nine concentric spheres, with the Moon nearest Earth, followed in order outward by Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the fixed stars on a single sphere, and lastly a primum mobile that imparted motion to the whole system. Alternative arrangements were proposed by other commentators—perhaps a “crystalline sphere” was to be imagined in the space between the fixed stars and the primum mobile—but a general consensus accepted the axiomatic view that the Earth stood at the center. Except for some brilliant ancient Greek astronomers, most people of the ancient and medieval worlds assumed that the Earth was essentially flat and that the heavenly bodies all rotated around Earth on a daily basis; in addition, the Moon required a monthly span of time for its change of phases from new to full and back again, while the Sun and planets moved more slowly through the entire circumference of the fixed stars, each on its own separate sphere and time period: the Sun in one entire year, Jupiter in approximately twelve years, and so on. The Moon, both mutable and constant, defined the boundary between the sublunar world of imperfection and the immutable heavens lying beyond. Anyone observing the heavens from an individual point of view could naturally conclude that everything in the cosmos rotated around the Earth and its inhabitants.
More precise observations of the motions of the heavenly bodies, however, pointed to disconcerting variations and even reversals in the expected perfect circularity of planetary movements. Mars in particular, and Jupiter and Saturn also, appeared at times to slow down in their yearly progress from east to west through the fixed stars and then move from west to east for a time before resuming the more normal westerly course. What was the cause of this? Ptolemy, without coming up with a coherent explanation, showed that the irregularities could be resolved through the imposition of epicycles on the cylindrical orbits of these planets: that is, the planets were imagined to move on small circular paths that were themselves carried forward on the circumferences of the larger orbits. When one epicycle failed to account fully for celestial observations, another epicycle could be imposed on the first epicycle. Despite its Rube Goldberg appearance, this scheme held sway as the traditional view of the heavens well into the time that Shakespeare lived and wrote. It enjoyed the endorsement of most religious and philosophical thinkers because it preserved the presumed uniqueness and centrality of life on Earth as the work of the supreme Creator so beautifully evoked in the book of Genesis.
Yet in 1543 the Polish mathematician and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) demonstrated that the irregularities ascribed by Ptolemy to epicycles could be accounted for as phenomena of relative motion. If one posited the Sun as the center of a solar system, with the Earth as one of several planets revolving around the Sun in their circular orbits (they were in fact elliptical orbits, as Johannes Kepler was to demonstrate in 1609, but Copernicus’s data did not enable him to see this), then Mars’s occasional reversing of course could be seen as the result of the Earth’s rotating around the Sun at a faster pace than Mars in its more outer orbit, and thereby passing up Mars at various times when the observer on Earth could see Mars seeming to move backward or eastward against the fixed stars. To be sure, Copernicus had no observational data to bolster his hypothesis. His theorem, as yet unsupported by experimental evidence, seemed so heretical that it ran into huge resistance.
Where did this leave Shakespeare and others of his generation in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries? A free translation of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543) by Thomas Digges (d. 1595), the greatest English astronomer of his time, was published in London in 1576, entitled A Perfect Description of the Celestial Orbs According to the Most Ancient Doctrine of the Pythagoreans, Lately Revived by Copernicus. The idea of a solar system was thus current and even sensational in the final decades of the sixteenth century and on into the next. Many Londoners could not be sure whether Copernicus or Ptolemy was right. A bright star (in fact a supernova, or exploding star), newly appearing in the constellation Cassiopeia in 1572 and studied with great care by Tycho Brahe, provoked much thought and anxiety; it could be interpreted as a prognostication of some divine intent (like the star of Bethlehem) or as evidence that the universe beyond the Moon was not as immutable as commonly supposed. Tycho used parallax to show that a bright new comet appearing in 1577 was farther from Earth than was the Moon (even though Tycho conservatively refused to abandon the central axiom of the Ptolemaic system; in 1583 he suggested that all the planets except the Earth revolved about the Sun). And we know that Copernicus’s theory was much talked about. The protagonist of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1588) speculates scoffingly that “hell’s a fable” and demands of Mephistopheles to know the answer to the burning question of the day: “Why have we not conjunctions, oppositions, aspects, eclipses all at one time, but in some years we have more, in some less?” That is, why are the movements of some heavenly bodies inexplicably irregular at times? Thomas Nashe, in 1595, referred to Copernicus as the author “who held that the sun remains immobile in the center of the world, and that the earth is moved about the sun” (Works, ed. R. B. McKerrow, 1904-10, 3.94). John Donne lamented, in his “An Anatomy of the World,” 1611-12, that the “new philosophy,” by which he meant the new science, “calls all in doubt.”
Shakespeare reflects this uncertainty throughout his career. In the early Henry VI, Part I (1589-92), the French dauphin Charles expresses his anxiety about his chances for military victory by comparing his state to that of planetary irregularity: “Mars his true moving, even as in the heavens/ So in the earth, to this day is not known” (1.2.1-2). Such celestial phenomena were of crucial importance to attempts to read human destiny in the stars and in omens. In Julius Caesar (1599), prodigious and frightening events on the night before the assassination of Caesar seem to many observers to betoken “civil strife in heaven.” Shakespeare seems fascinated with the range of responses: superstitious fear (even in a cynic such as Casca), indifference (as when Brutus reads by the light of “exhalations whizzing in the air” without further acknowledgment of their significance), open defiance (as when Cassius dares expose his bosom even to “the thunder-stone” and “The breast of heaven”; 1.3.49-52), and, lastly and most important, philosophical Pyrrhonism. “Indeed, it is a strange-disposèd time,” Cicero avers. “But men may construe things after their fashion,/ Clean from the purpose of the things themselves” (1.3.33-35). Cicero’s wise skepticism seems especially apt in registering a view that the workings of the heavens are ultimately mysterious.
Unnervingly in King Lear, the most eloquent apostle of open skepticism toward traditional readings of celestial omens and prognostications is the villain Edmund. His scoffing at his father for credulously believing in astrological signs seems calculated to challenge any spectator seeing the play in 1606-1607. Edmund’s skepticism challenges us, too, for it is strikingly modern in its rejection of superstition and in its audacious creed of self-reliance. Edmund sees himself as a self-made man, not the product of a chance configuration of heavenly bodies when he was conceived. “Fut,” he boasts, “I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing” (1.2.134-36). Having been born out of wedlock, Edmund refuses to be beholden to anything other than his own self: he owes no obedience to family, to the social structure, to Mosaic laws of moral conduct, or to the heavens. His only god, he defiantly proclaims, is “Nature,” by which he means the impartial and pitiless law of competition for survival. In a disarmingly “modern” way he sees moral and legal codes as mythical structures devised by human society to protect its own conservative best interests. Edmund is a daringly innovative thinker, who begins by rejecting the received ideas of the past as mere cant. He is especially contemptuous of those persons like his father who cravenly blame their weaknesses on “the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on.” To him it is “An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star” (1.2.121-31).
When Shakespeare wrote these lines, Galileo, with the aid of the telescope (recently invented in Holland), had spotted myriad stars not observable to the naked eye, mountains on the Moon, spots on the Sun, a twenty-seven-day rotation of the Sun (determined by the movement of the sunspots across its surface), moonlike phases of Venus, and four moons of Jupiter that periodically disappeared behind that great planet, all of which now provided experimental, observable evidence that not all astronomical bodies circled the Earth and that the heavens beyond the Moon were far from immutable. Shakespeare cannot have known all these things when he wrote King Lear—Galileo published his findings in Siderius Nuncius or “Starry Messenger” in 1610—but Shakespeare must have been aware of the challenge presented by unorthodox new ideas of the cosmos. He doubtless knew that the Italian heretical philosopher Giordano Bruno, who had come to England in 1582 during his wanderings in exile, was burned alive at the stake in Rome in 1600.
The larger consequences of Edmund’s skepticism, part of an increasing uncertainty during Shakespeare’s day about traditional ideas of cosmic order, are at the heart of what makes King Lear so profoundly disturbing, and must have done so when the play was first staged. From his premise that conventional religious and moral teachings are only a myth, Edmund proceeds logically enough to the conclusion that he can lie, cheat, steal, and murder with impunity as suits his purposes. Indeed, he will have the upper hand in any competition with traditionally minded folk like Albany or Gloucester, since they will suffer the constraint of alleged moral imperatives that he feels free to ignore. Goneril and Regan, Edmund’s counterparts in villainy in the Lear plot of the play, are similarly motivated to obtain their wills without conscience or remorse. “The laws are mine, not thine,” declares Goneril to her husband, Albany, when he confronts her with written evidence of her conspiring against him. “Who can arraign me for’t?” (5.3.160-61). Together, Goneril, Regan, and Edmund come scarily close to proving their thesis that the race goes to the unscrupulous. Edmund is within an ace, in act 5, of becoming king of England. He has supplanted his brother, then his father, then the Duke of Cornwall as the consort of Regan, and is on the verge of taking Albany’s place as the lover of Goneril. Both women hope to elevate Edmund to the throne as the consort of one or the other. Only at the last moment does Albany’s use of the incriminating letter written by Goneril, and Edgar’s unexpected and anonymous emergence as challenger to Edmund, prevent a takeover of the nation by those who profess allegiance to godlessness.
And where are the gods in all this devastating account? King Lear repeatedly invokes their aid, on the grounds that the gods will surely choose to defend age and authority against insubordination and calculated villainy. “O heavens,” Lear implores, as he beholds Goneril arriving at Gloucester’s house to join her sister against their father, “If you do love old men, if your sweet sway/ Allow obedience, if you yourselves are old,/ Make it your cause; send down, and take my part!” (2.4.190-93). As though by way of response, the heavens send down a fierce storm, inflicting terrible suffering on Lear and his forlorn companions while the insolent worldlings who have thus conspired in his discomfiture enjoy the warmth and comfort of a house they have commandeered for the occasion. Earlier, in Albany’s palace in Scotland, Lear has imagined Nature as a “Dear goddess” who will avenge him by conveying sterility into the womb of his ungrateful daughter Regan (1.4.274-82), but Elizabethan spectators presumably could only see the ineffectualness of Lear’s curse as contrasted with Edmund’s vastly more successful appeal to a Nature of pitiless competition and self-promotion.
Shakespeare offers sympathetic depictions of those like Albany who want to believe that the heavens are just but who keep finding their hopes upended by the course of events. “This shows you are above,/ You justicers,” cries Albany when he learns from a messenger that Cornwall, after having snuffed out Gloucester’s eyes, has perished at the hands of a servant who was outraged by the terrible deed. But how can this hypothesis of divine justice explain the blinding itself? “Oh, poor Gloucester!” Albany exclaims. “Lost he his other eye?” (4.2.73-82). And how can Albany explain the inhumanity of his own wife and his sister-in-law in banishing Lear into the storm? “If that the heavens do not their visible spirits/ Send quickly down to tame these vile offenses,” he laments, “It will come,/ Humanity must perforce prey on itself,/ Like monsters of the deep” (4.2.47-51). Albany sees the world in which he stands at the moment as one of supreme testing, in which the odds are fearfully extreme: If the gods do not punish crimes, then, do the gods exist at all, or, if they do so, are they merely playing with us as humans? Gloucester entertains such dark thoughts in the wake of his blinding: “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods;/ They kill us for their sport” (4.1.36-37). Is it more or less bearable to suppose that the gods, even if they do exist, are malicious? In a quarto-only passage, not in the folio text, some servants who have witnessed the blinding of Gloucester put the matter similarly in the form of a test. “I’ll never care what wickedness I do,/ If this man [Cornwall] come to good,” says one, to which his fellow replies, “If she [Regan] live long,/ And in the end meet the old course of death,/ Women will all turn monsters” (3.7.101-5). In the play’s last moments, Albany seems still not to have learned the hard lesson that justice and virtue may not be protected by any divine plan. “All friends shall taste/ The wages of their virtue, and all foes/ The cup of their deservings” (5.3.308-10), he piously declares, only to be confronted then with the horrendous and unmitigatable fact that Cordelia is dead.
To be sure, the play gestures importantly in the direction of ameliorating considerations. The anonymous servants who darkly wonder if it even matters what wickedness they do, when confronted with Gloucester’s suffering, charitably offer him assistance at the presumed risk of punishment for having disobeyed Cornwall’s order to “Throw this slave/ Upon the dunghill” (3.7.99-100). Edgar, no less skeptical of the gods than is his brother, nonetheless concludes that he need not act ruthlessly on that account; other reasons can urge us to be humane and generous. Like Albany, he longs to believe that things will eventually be better; “To be worst,/ The lowest and most dejected thing of fortune,” he reflects, offers at least grounds for hope that things cannot get worse. He says this, however, only to realize, when he then happens on his ruined blinded father, that things can indeed get worse; Edgar has made the mistake of thinking only of himself. “And worse I may be yet,” he concludes. “The worst is not/ So long as we can say, ‘This is the worst’” (4.1.2-28). In this bleak pronouncement Edgar seems to offer the sobering consolation of Stoic philosophy: if one expects nothing, one cannot be disappointed. And one can be generous and forgiving to others, even (or especially) to those who have persecuted you. This is close in spirit to Christian teaching, though presented in a play that is consistently pre-Christian and pagan in its setting. King Lear thus relentlessly challenges its spectators by implicitly asking them if they have any answer as to how to live in what may be a godless universe. It also formulates a possible reply. In Hamlet Ophelia, nearly wordless as a thinker, embodies something like Edgar’s creed in her deeds of charity and forgiveness.
King Lear is preoccupied with witchcraft and sorcery, highly controversial subjects of the day. Shakespeare here makes notable use of Reginald Scot’s The Discovery of Witchcraft, published in 1584, and Samuel Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, published by order of the Privy Council in 1603. The latter polemical work, by a cleric who became fellow and then master of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and vice-chancellor of the university at about the time Shakespeare wrote King Lear (he later became archbishop of York in 1629), took as its mission the condemnation of exorcisms performed by Roman Catholic priests in the 1580s. Earlier, Harsnett had condemned exorcisms by Puritans, especially John Darrell. These exorcisms had caused considerable stir and had attracted the attention of the Anglican authorities in London. Harsnett was noted for his skeptical attitude toward demons and witchcraft. King James, on the other hand, had written against witchcraft in his Demonology in Form of a Dialogue, published in Scotland in 1597 and based on James’s own supervision of a trial at North Berwick in 1590 of some women who had purportedly conspired to kill him. The book offered a refutation of, among others, Scot’s The Discovery of Witchcraft, which had undertaken to prove that belief in witchcraft and magic should be rejected on both reasonable and religious grounds as the product of ignorant superstition and charlatanism. George Gifford’s A Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcrafts, 1593, similarly argued that the symptoms often alleged to be signs of witchcraft could often be explained by natural causes. Conversely, treatises attacking witchcraft as pernicious and diabolical, by William Lambarde (1610), Thomas Potts (1612-13), Alexander Roberts (1616), John Cotta (1616), William Perkins (1616-18), John Lambe (1628), Thomas Beard (1631), and many later writers, were common in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thus throughout Shakespeare’s lifetime belief and skepticism about these matters were continually at odds with each other.
Shakespeare may have consulted Scot’s The Discovery of Witchcraft on a number of occasions. Scot offers a pejorative view of Puck as incubus or hobgoblin that may have been in Shakespeare’s mind when he wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Scot’s account of a man who found an ass’s head on his shoulders might have blended in Shakespeare’s awareness with the story of a similar transformation in William Adlington’s translation (1566) of Apuleius’s The Golden Ass. When Master Ford, in The Merry Wives of Windsor (2.2.284-85), fears that his marriage bed may have been abused by Falstaff, he invokes the names of various devils—Amaimon, Lucifer, Barbason—that Shakespeare apparently found in Scot. Scot may then also have been a source for Edgar’s mad ravings when, disguised as poor Tom, he encounters the mad Lear, the Fool, the Earl of Gloucester, and the disguised Kent in a hovel on Gloucester’s estate (3.4). Several of the fiends that Edgar invokes by name are to be found in Harsnett’s Declaration, especially Flibbertigibbet, Smulkin, Modo, and Mahu.
How then did Shakespeare intend his audience to respond to these names, and what do they imply about issues of skepticism in King Lear? The names were presumably scary ones for any spectators unsure of the reality of ghosts or gremlins or fairies, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Henry VI, Part II, and Macbeth, and whenever otherworldly or demonic spirits appear onstage. Witchcraft persecutions, which had begun in England in about 1563 with the statute of Elizabeth I, may have claimed a thousand victims or more, from Agnes Waterford of Chelmsford in 1566 down to Alice Molland of Exeter in 1684. Playwrights turned to the topic in Thomas Middleton’s The Witch (1613), Thomas Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley’s The Witch of Edmonton (1621), and Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome’s The Late Lancashire Witches (published 1634), bringing in the Salmesbury witches of 1612 and the arrests of 1633-34. In some trials the ever-present problems of recusancy and of the transformation of Catholic rituals, symbols, prayers, and objects of devotion into inscrutable mumbo jumbo lent to the subject of witchcraft the inflammatory characteristics of Protestant-Catholic controversy.
Shakespeare thus broaches a touchy subject for his spectators when he associates Edgar’s poor Tom with demonology. Yet he does so in a way that hardly endorses traditional beliefs in witchcraft. Edgar’s use of names out of Scot and Harsnett is a part of his disguise stratagem to avoid capture by his father. The pretended madness associates him with the truly mad Lear and the wise Fool in scenes that famously invert the ambiguous distinctions between madness and sanity, blindness and vision. Increasingly, Edgar is a vitally important skeptic in the play, one who shares his brother’s rejection of their father’s traditional astrological superstitions and yet does so charitably, thereby demonstrating that a nonbeliever in religious orthodoxy and its moral imperatives need not then turn to cynical self-promotion. Indeed, Edgar puts his philosophical skepticism to the kindly use of creating a bogus cosmic worldview for his grieving father, explaining to us in an aside as he does so, “Why I do trifle thus with his despair/ Is done to cure it” (4.6.33-34). Edgar is content, as a loving son, to let his father believe in nonsense, since belief in something can give the old man strength to endure until it is time for him to die. By implication, King Lear allows plentiful room for a skeptical view of traditional attitudes about the gods and about witches and demons. Such a flexible view seems needed to allow humans to go on living in a world where the apparent indifference of the gods (if they exist) is everywhere to be seen.
What does King Lear’s contemporary context suggest about Lear’s proposed division of the kingdoms? The topic must have seemed hugely relevant to Shakespeare’s first audience. King James VI of Scotland had become James I of England in 1603, just three or four years before the first public performances of the play. He claimed, in his own person, to have united the kingdoms of Great Britain. The claim was resisted by many members of Parliament, for whom the authority of such a union was too heavily invested in the person of the monarch. Union was thus a burning issue. The play dramatizes the unsettling consequences of what Gloucester refers to as “the division of the kingdom” (1.1.4) into three parts of Albany (Scotland), Cornwall (the west country, implicitly including Wales), and what Lear hopes to leave to Cordelia, “a third more opulent than your sisters’” (86)—that is, the southeast heartland of England. (Ireland is not included in this partition.) A similar tripartite division takes on the threatening aspect of civil war in Henry IV, Part I, when the rebels propose to divide up Great Britain “Into three limits,” with the “south and east” going to Mortimer, “All westward . . . beyond the Severn shore” to Glendower, and “The remnant northward, lying off from Trent” to Hotspur (3.1.69-76). King Lear proposes such a division among his daughters “that future strife/ May be prevented now” (1.1.44-45). Courtly observers worry about rivalry between Cornwall and Albany but do not object to the king’s plan; those who speak up, notably Kent, are upset at Lear’s rejection of Cordelia, not the division itself. Yet the consequence for the play is manifestly civil war, severely aggravated by a French invasion led by Cordelia in behalf of her father.
Whether this burning issue is presented in King Lear as a critique of King James’s views on union is hard to assess. Such an approach can hardly determine whether such an implied criticism would weigh in the king’s favor or the reverse. We should remember that Shakespeare and his company were the King’s Majesty’s Servants. More certainly, we can well imagine that a play starting with the division of Great Britain into three would introduce a mood of pessimism and uncertainty about that future. Shakespeare had celebrated Great Britain’s successful if feisty camaraderie of English, Scots, Welsh, and even Irish in Henry V in 1599, in the last years of Queen Elizabeth. The world of King Lear seems more suited to a mood of political confrontation, of anti-Catholic hysteria in the wake of Guy Fawkes’s Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and the subsequent trial of the Jesuit Henry Garnet as the notorious “equivicator” of the conspiracy (alluded to in the porter scene in Macbeth, a play nearly contemporary with King Lear), and of increasing polarization between the political center and the Puritan movement. The threat of injustice looms large in King Lear, especially in its pairing and juxtaposing of trial scenes: on one hand, the abuses of tyrannical power in the summary arraigning and sentencing of Kent and Gloucester by the Duke of Cornwall (2.2, 3.7), and on the other the pathetically mad inquisition by King Lear of a joint stool mistakenly supposed by the king to be his wicked daughter Goneril (3.6). Civil war was still a long way off and by no means inevitable. Still, a sense of national malaise and anxiety gave Shakespeare the opportunity to write tragedies that invited his spectators to ponder their darkest fears.