People of Shakespeare’s time believed that the Christian God had given them two crucial things to read: the Bible and the world itself — the so-called ‘Book of Nature’.While the Bible had become more accessible and easier to read, thanks to printing and translation into English, the Book of Nature was becoming harder to read as a result of new scientific ideas, such as Copernicus’s argument that the earth went round the sun rather than vice versa, and an increasing scepticism about older philosophical authorities such as Aristotle.
John Donne referred to this as ‘new philosophy’ which, he said, called ‘all in doubt’. That feeling of doubt about the natural world and man’s place in it pervades Shakespeare’s plays. Yet there remained a belief that people had a duty to understand and engage with nature — and some thought that they had to master it. King Lear and The Tempest offer very different responses to these challenges — respectively a tragic vision of man’s isolated position in nature, and a more benign acceptance of the limitations of human power.
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