In 1624, the year after Shakespeare’s First Folio appeared, George Carleton’s Astrologomania: The Madnesse of Astrologers finally reached print after remaining unpublished for nearly twenty years—and bore the imprint of the same Jaggard printing house that produced the Folio. Its title page reads:
London, Printed by W. Iaggard, for W. Turner of Oxford. 1624.
The same title page announces the long interval:
Written neere vpon twenty yeares ago, by G. C. And by permission of the Author set forth […]
Between those two statements lies a publication story that reaches back into Henry Neville’s lifetime. In 1604 John Chamber had instructed in his will that an astrology book by Carleton should be printed with his own work on the subject. The executors he named were Neville and Henry Savile. By the time Astrologomania appeared, both men were dead, Carleton had married Neville’s widow, and Thomas Vicars, Carleton’s son-in-law, was bringing the treatise before readers.123
The Jaggard name supplies a concrete connection with the production of Shakespeare’s collected plays. William and Isaac Jaggard’s printing house produced the First Folio; William died before its completion, and Isaac continued the business. The 1624 treatise still bears William’s name. Here, a work connected with Neville’s earlier publishing responsibilities reached the same printing house as the Folio.4
A manuscript brought into the light
Carleton’s book answers Sir Christopher Heydon’s Defence of Judicial Astrology. Heydon had defended the practice against Chamber’s attack of 1601. Carleton continued Chamber’s side of the argument, distinguishing what could be inferred from natural causes from claims to foretell human choices and fortunes. This was a learned controversy in which Neville’s associates were active participants. The first page names Chamber and praises him as “a man for his Life and Learning worthily honoured of all that knew him.” Carleton complains that Heydon has treated him roughly. The book begins as a defence of the scholar whose will had placed Carleton’s work in Neville and Savile’s care.5
Thomas Vicars wrote the dedication for the volume.6 By then the relationships had become familial as well as scholarly. Vicars’s wife, Anne, was Carleton’s daughter; Neville’s widow was her stepmother. Vicars had already included Neville’s widow among the patrons of his 1622 translation of Keckermann’s A Manuduction to Theology. The preceding chapter examines his later, 1628 praise of the famous poet whose name came from shaking and a spear. Here we see him performing another literary task: securing an older work’s passage into print.
Vicars also supplied a Latin poem praising Carleton and his writings. Its margin names Heroici characteres, the 1603 volume addressed to Neville and discussed in “Neville Among the Muses.” The poem praises its author in comparison with Virgil. The old book addressed to Neville is thus recalled within the new one bearing the Jaggard imprint.7
The stars and Edmund’s birth
The earlier anonymous King Leir has no bastard character and no Gloucester family subplot. Shakespeare added that family to the Leir story, drawing on Sidney’s Arcadia, where a bastard son already turns his father against his legitimate brother.8 Shakespeare makes that family conflict a vehicle for the argument about the stars: Edmund mocks people who blame heaven for misconduct that is their own. Chamber’s arguments have already provided a close comparison. Carleton states the principle with particular directness:
For ouer a mans freedome, the Positions of heauen haue no power. And it is a most foolish thing, for a man to seeke that without him, whose cause is altogether within himselfe.9
Edmund turns that dispute into a joke about the circumstances of his own birth. Gloucester has just blamed eclipses for broken family bonds, accepting as genuine the letter Edmund has forged against Edgar. Left alone, the son who manufactured the deception attacks the attempt to transfer responsibility to heaven:
EDMUND […] An admirable
evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish
disposition on the charge of a star! My father
compounded with my mother under the Dragon’s
tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it
follows I am rough and lecherous. Fut, I should
have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the
firmament twinkled on my bastardizing. […]
—King Lear 1.210
Carleton’s final chapter brings illicit sex and the resulting child into the argument about divine government:
When Adulterie is committed and Bastards begotten, it is against the reuealed will of God: But hee that shall affirme that God hath no will, nor power, nor part in gene[r]ation, shall take away part of his power, and giue it to some other thing, and so make moe Gods.11
This is a more particular correspondence than a general disagreement about horoscopes. Sexual conduct, the birth of a child, divine and celestial causation, and personal responsibility occupy the same discussion. Carleton distinguishes what God commands from what occurs under divine government: adultery violates the command, but the child’s generation cannot be placed outside God’s power. Edmund rejects a celestial explanation for his own disposition. The questions overlap even though the answers differ.
Shakespeare gives the later judgment to Edgar. After defeating Edmund, he tells him:
EDGAR […]
The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us.
The dark and vicious place where thee he got
Cost him his eyes.
—King Lear 5.3
Edgar makes Gloucester’s suffering a consequence of the sexual act that produced Edmund. That is a harsher and more specific judgment than Carleton’s argument about generation. Read together, the two scenes show Shakespeare returning to the same family history through opposed explanations: Edmund’s ridicule of heavenly excuses and Edgar’s insistence on retribution. Carleton’s treatise helps us see how closely questions of birth, guilt and divine justice belonged together in the controversy surrounding Chamber.
A truth that wins belief
In Macbeth, the danger lies in believing a prediction because part of it has come true. The witches have hailed Macbeth as Thane of Cawdor before he knows that the king has awarded him that title. When the news arrives, their promise of kingship becomes more tempting. Macbeth asks why the supernatural message, if evil, should begin with a truth:
MACBETH, [aside] […]
[…] If ill,
Why hath it given me earnest of success
Commencing in a truth? […]
—Macbeth 1.312
Carleton quotes Heydon’s confidence in astrology in similar terms:
there is no one thing that hath made me so confident in the validity of this Art, as that which I haue seene to fall out true.13
A fulfilled prediction is being made to warrant confidence in the whole source of prediction. Banquo has already named the trap, moments earlier in the same scene:
BANQUO […]
And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray ’s
In deepest consequence.–
—Macbeth 1.3
Carleton exposes the same danger by taking Heydon’s argument into the realm of witchcraft. If fulfilled predictions justify confidence in an art, then Heydon should be “very confident in Witchcraft”: the prediction made to Saul by witchcraft also came true. Carleton argues that the truth itself could serve the deception:
God in his iust iudgement against the wicked King Saul, did suffer Sathan thus to deceiue and illude Saul, euen by foretelling him a true Euent […].14
The truth of the prediction and the trustworthiness of its source are different questions. Macbeth treats the first success as an invitation to believe more. Banquo warns that the success may be the means by which belief is obtained.
Vicars makes the same point in his dedication:
[…] the wizard is neuer a whit the more to be beleeued […] The Diuell telleth truth sometimes, and yet he is still the Father of Lyes; and his Instrument (at hap-hazard) may light vpon a Truth, and yet remain a Lyer still.15
Vicars’s combination of the devil’s “Instrument” with a deceptive “Truth” brings the comparison especially close to Banquo’s warning. His insistence that the wizard is no more to be believed also anticipates the conclusion Macbeth reaches too late in the action of the play.
Carleton also describes what happens once the enquirer becomes dependent on such assurances. Spirits appear to serve the person consulting them while making that person their captive:
all vncleane Spirits are desirous to illude the soule of man, and make shew of obedience, to catch the soule of man in these snares; requiring a strong Credulity, and excessiue desire of the Soule […].16
Macbeth’s growing reliance on the witches follows that destructive course. He demands further answers and builds his confidence on assurances whose wording he has misunderstood. When Macduff reveals the circumstances of his birth, Macbeth finally recognizes the separation between the words he heard and the hope he placed in them:
MACBETH […]
And be these juggling fiends no more believed
That palter with us in a double sense,
That keep the word of promise to our ear
And break it to our hope. […]
—Macbeth 5.8
An old project in a surviving household
A book on astrology had figured in the instructions Chamber left to Neville and Savile. Nearly twenty years later, after both executors were dead, a treatise by the same author on the same controversy appeared with its author’s consent, opening with a defence of Chamber. Thomas Vicars brought it into print; Carleton, his father-in-law, had married Neville’s widow. The imprint places this old project in the Jaggard printing house in 1624, the year after the First Folio.
The arguments within the book give that history substance. Carleton’s treatment of responsibility and generation belongs beside the dispute within Gloucester’s family; his account of truthful deception illuminates Macbeth’s disastrous trust. The title page records the long interval before publication; the opening defence of Chamber connects the printed work to the controversy in which Neville had been entrusted with a part.
Notes and sources
George Carleton, Astrologomania: The Madnesse of Astrologers (London: W. Jaggard for W. Turner of Oxford, 1624), STC 4630, ESTC S107657, TCP A17971, title page, Wellcome copy; Folger catalogue. Quotations retain printed spelling, with long s rendered s and words divided at line endings joined. Red rectangles in the illustrations are editorial annotations. G.C. is George Carleton; T.V. is Thomas Vicars, Bachelor of Divinity. The date of composition is the title page’s approximate retrospective statement.↩︎
John Chamber, will, July 1604, The National Archives, PROB 11/104/339. It names Neville and Savile as executors, directs publication of unprinted works, and identifies Carleton of Mayfield’s Arraignement of Astrologie. See “Back in Public Life.” The uncertain expense phrase in the Carleton clause is not quoted. Agreement in author, subject and approximate date supports continuity with the 1624 work, not identity of every passage or a claim that Neville personally edited the surviving text.↩︎
For Anne Neville’s marriage and Vicars’s patronage address, Bartholomaeus Keckermann, A Manuduction to Theology, translated by Thomas Vicars (1622), sig. A2r, printed dedication. For Vicars’s wife as Bishop Carleton’s daughter, J. H. Cooper, “The Vicars and Parish of Cuckfield in the Seventeenth Century,” Sussex Archaeological Collections 45 (1902), p. 17, monument transcription. The two women named Anne are distinguished in “After Neville’s Death,” which also gives the 1628 Shakespeare passage and Fred Schurink’s identification of it.↩︎
Folger Shakespeare Library, “The Shakespeare First Folio,” “Who produced the First Folio?”; Carleton’s 1624 title page, cited above. The imprint reads W. Jaggard; it does not settle the division of work between William and Isaac. Eton catalogue, B42024, suggests that Isaac may have finished the printing and reports Stationers’ Register entry on 18 July 1623. The original register has not been collated here. The printing-house connection does not establish transmission of Shakespeare manuscripts from Neville’s estate.↩︎
Carleton, Astrologomania, chapter I, p. 1. “Chambers” is the printed form of John Chamber’s name. The book repeatedly defends him against Heydon.↩︎
Thomas Vicars, dedicatory epistle in Carleton, Astrologomania, opening and printed subscription.↩︎
Thomas Vicars, “In Authorem & eius Opera,” in Carleton, Astrologomania, unnumbered prefatory leaf, with marginal identification “Heroici Characteres”; George Carleton, Heroici characteres. Ad illustrissimum equitem Henricum Nevillum (Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1603), public scan. The comparison with Virgil praises Carleton, not Neville. See “Neville Among the Muses” for that volume’s Neville address.↩︎
Anonymous, The True Chronicle History of King Leir (1605), edited by Andrew Griffin, Queen’s Men Editions, full text; Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, book II, Paphlagonian episode, source extract. See also Jeffrey R. Wilson, “Edmund’s Bastardy”. Edmund is an addition to the earlier Leir play; the bastard-son plot has a precedent in Sidney.↩︎
Carleton, Astrologomania, chapter VIII, p. 75, following the distinction between natural causes and free human action on pp. 73–74.↩︎
Shakespeare, King Lear, 1.2 and 5.3, Folger Shakespeare Library. Ellipses mark excerpts from longer speeches. For the Chamber comparison and the distinction between Edmund’s polemic and the play’s larger treatment, see Phebe Jensen, “Causes in Nature: Popular Astrology in King Lear,” Shakespeare Quarterly 69.4 (2018), 205–227, especially pp. 214–216, DOI, discussed in the Lear chapter. The Carleton comparison developed here is distinct from Jensen’s Chamber finding.↩︎
Carleton, Astrologomania, chapter X, pp. 111–113, quotation p. 112. “Gene[r]ation” corrects the printed “gene-gation,” divided across two lines. He answers Heydon on how forbidden acts can occur under providence; p. 113 expressly retains punishment and God’s freedom from sin. This is not a passage specifically about Gloucester’s punishment.↩︎
Shakespeare, Macbeth, 1.3, 4.1 and 5.8, Folger Shakespeare Library.↩︎
Carleton, Astrologomania, chapter III, p. 20, quoting Heydon, A Defence of Iudiciall Astrologie (1603), p. 195. The quotation here is controlled against Carleton’s printed report of his opponent’s words, not a fresh collation of Heydon’s edition.↩︎
Carleton, Astrologomania, chapter III, pp. 20–22, quotation p. 21. The claim about Satan and Saul is Carleton’s theological account, not an independent assertion about supernatural events.↩︎
Thomas Vicars, dedicatory epistle in Carleton, Astrologomania (1624), third answer to the argument from successful prediction, unnumbered leaf. “Remain” follows the printed page. This prefatory formulation is not assigned the main treatise’s approximate composition date.↩︎
Carleton, Astrologomania, chapter IX, pp. 85–87, quotation p. 86. This passage interprets the claims of Agrippa and distinguishes apparent obedience from the spirits’ entrapment of the enquirer. Vicars also develops this argument in his epistle.↩︎