In King Lear, Edmund the bastard reflects on the curious manner in which we tend to blame our characters and misfortunes on impersonal forces, meta-beings, the stars and such.
Edmund is clearly no fan of any theology unduly emphasizing the "potter's hands" !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, Act I, Sc.ii
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