ABSTRACT
In the midst of a relatively peaceful fi n de siècle decade, anxiety about the aging childless Queen, who had reigned so well for so long, coincided with periods of turbulent weather and dearth. Roughly two years after her death, Shakespeare wrote King Lear, an apocalyptic tragedy that can be seen in retrospect to signal the demise of the so-called Elizabethan World Picture. In 2001, after a long fi n de millennium decade of geo-political stability and prosperity in the West, a disputed election, Islamic jihad, and recession coincided with scientifi c reports on an up-tick in global temperature, triggering widespread concern that the environmental overreach of industrialized nations has gravely affected our planet’s long-term inhabitability. I call attention to this overlap not to discredit the truth of ecology or the recent groundswell of green criticism in academia. The search for “manifestations of order” in nature occurs with far too much regularity to be dismissed as a mere backlash or anodyne against political upheaval. Yet this search does become particularly intense during eras of accelerated change and uncertainty. These transitional moments in the past, of which the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century remains one of the best documented in English literature, harbor lessons that can illuminate and orient our own search in the present. The Renaissance itself rummaged for insights in the thought of antiquity, and that, in turn, is where this search for the origins of the belief in the inherent orderliness of the universe must begin.
