William Shakespeare's King Lear contains a number of curious temporal allusions. Gloucester declares Edgar "some yeare elder" to his half-brother (1.1.19-20), while Edmund reckons himself "twelve or 14. mooneshines" junior; Lear's banishment of Kent matures to a death-sentence on the fifteenth day in Quarto 1 (1.1.176-81) but on the sixteenth day in the Folio (187-92); Lear, who imposes himself on his daughters "by monthly course" (1.1.134), sounds evocatively self-referential as he speaks of "great ones That ebbe and …showed first 75 words of 5173 total…

…showed last 75 words of 5173 total…of Saint Stephen as the 360th day of the English Julian solar year, and set the opening scenes of Lear on the 360th day of the primitive lunar year: 23 February, the feast of the Terminalia, the last dark night of the year's last moon. Then Shakespeare wittily drew attention to the Ides of March with Kent's two sentences of doom -- the first written for a common year, the second revised in a leap year.