Ptolemaic vs Coopernican Investigation

``Neither can we judge Shakespeare completely by the effect produced on our own minds, we after all, are a remote posterity.'' Now the rub ``and nothing is more certain than that he did not write for us.''
Once we look at that audience and try to think what they were thinking and how they were thinking--a universe understood in the Coopernican rather than the Ptolemaic way--we will see matters differently. Many problems we have in understanding Shakespeare will go away, on the other hand many problems will arise.
Here Lilian Winstanley allows us a peak into her next book and asks why ``Macbeth''? One reason is a Scottish king had succeeded to the English throne, the play would have been viewed as a compliment to him, James I. Banquo was an acestor to the Stuarts and depicted favorably in light of the play. The main character in the play would bring about one of the Merlin prophecies in the foundation or re-foundation of the British empire. According to Winstanley's contemporary professor Thomas Gwynn Jones, these prophecies had political bearing in Wales and England and were celebrated by writers at the time of the Bard--including Edmond Spencer, Michael Drayton, and Ben Jonson.