The Celestial Plane in Shakespeare

Summary

The heavens have always played a dramatic role in the works of poets and playwrights, both Christian and pagan, and, notwithstanding the impersonal cosmology of modern science, they still do so. Thunder and lightning, as interpreted by Oedipus and the chorus, is as portentous as it is in King Lear. In the Paradiso souls shine among the stars as in Juliet’s vision of Romeo transfigured after death. It has been well said that the fundamental divergence between Chaucer’s world and our own is the shift of attitude towards the starry heavens. Yet a T. S. Eliot hero prays for a hearth under the protection of the stars, a Christopher Fry heroine believes in man’s ordeal by star, and Claudel’s curtain falls on lovers making star-signs with their hands in token that their souls will be henceforward intertwined like a two-fold star. Even in the masterless night of modern science, Maxwell Anderson hears a heart cry towards something dim in distance.

If, as J. Q. Adams supposes, Shakespeare as a boy saw the Mystery Plays at Coventry, he may have seen the star in the east that blazoned forth the birth of Jesus. He was probably taught that the sun stood still and the moon stayed for Joshua and that the stars in their courses fought against Sisera. When he came to man's estate and to the London playhouses he found even the supposedly atheistical Marlowe drawing on the Prophetical Books to give a sort of cosmic grandeur to Tamburlaine, much as in later ages Napoleon believed in his star and Hitler trusted astrologers. John Lyly might write a comedy in which the seven planets are personified and mortal temperament is transformed as each is ascendant in turn.