This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, -- often the surfeit of our own behavior, -- we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!
¶ King Lear, I.ii [Edmund] (c. 1605)
