King Lear--Astronomy
William Shakespeare's King Lear contains a number of curious temporal allusions. Gloucester declares Edgar "some yeare elder" to his half-brother (1.1.19-20), while Edmund reckons himself "twelve or 14. mooneshines" junior; Lear's banishment of Kent matures to a death-sentence on the fifteenth day in Quarto 1 (1.1.176-81) but on the sixteenth day in the Folio (187-92); Lear, who imposes himself on his daughters "by monthly course" (1.1.134), sounds evocatively self-referential as he speaks of "great ones That ebbe and …
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…of Saint Stephen as the 360th day of the English Julian solar year, and set the opening scenes of Lear on the 360th day of the primitive lunar year: 23 February, the feast of the Terminalia, the last dark night of the year's last moon. Then Shakespeare wittily drew attention to the Ides of March with Kent's two sentences of doom -- the first written for a common year, the second revised in a leap year.
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