At the time of Shakespeare’s writing, philosophies of causation were on the move. They began to shift away from the providential, theocentric views of medieval Christianity – broadly, things happen because God says so – via Machiavelli’s unsentimental stress on human ingenuity and significance in The Prince (circulated widely in the second half of the sixteenth century), and emerged somewhere about the philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (printed in 1651), where things happen because humans, individually and collectively, behave in particular self-interested ways.
