The Bard and the Stars

Some Examples of Astronomical Ideas and Images in Shakespeare's Plays

The North Star, Polaris, is the ultimate figure of order and stability. In Julius Caesar, the conspirators pretend to plea for Caesar to pardon the exiled Publius Cimber, but Caesar will not be moved:

Caesar: I could be well moved, if I were as you
But I am constant as the Northern Star,
Of whose true fixed and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.
The skies are painted with unnumbered sparks;
They are all fire, and every one doth shine.
But there's one in all doth hold his place.
So in the world: 'tis furnished well with men,
And men are flesh and blood, and apprehensive.
Yet in the number I do know but one
That unassailable holds onto his rank,
Unshaked of motion; and that I am he
Let me a little show it, even in this:
That I was constant Cimber should be banished
And constant do remain to keep him so.
(III.1.64-79)

Disorder among the planets brings uncertainty and foretells disaster.
As the Greek hero observes in Troilus and Cressida:

Ulysses: ...when the planets
In evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues and what portents, what mutiny,
What raging of the sea, shaking of the earth,
Commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors,
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states
Quite from their fixture!
(I.3.94-101)

Comets show up at unpredictable times, upsetting the order of the universe, so they are evil omens.
In Henry VI, the Duke of Bedford remarks upon the death of the greatest English hero, Henry V:

Comets, importing change of times and states,
Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky,
And with them scourge the bad revolting stars
That have consented unto Henry's death.
(I.1.2-5)

The moon was thought to cause changes in personality as it went through its phases.
It was thought of as a cause of fickleness, depression, amorousness, and outright madness (lunacy).
When Romeo sees Juliet on the balcony, he exclaims:

It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief...
(II.2.3-5)

When he later swears his love by the moon, Juliet responds:
O! Swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,
That monthly changes in her circled orb,
Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.
(II.2.109-111)

In Othello, the murderer, driven insane with jealousy,

makes a much darker observation:

It is the very error of the moon.
She comes more nearer earth than she was wont
And makes men mad.
(III.3.207-223)

Eclipses, because they bring darkness, are an even worse sign of disaster.
Having just murdered his wife Desdemona, Othello wonders how she can look so virtuous and
wonders why no disruption in nature comes as a sign of
the universe being so out of order:

...She's dead...
Still as the grave...
I think she stirs again...
My wife, my wife! I have no wife.
O insupportable! O heavy hour!
Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse
Of sun and moon, and that th' affrighted globe
Should yawn at alteration...
(V.2.115-125)

In King Lear there is what amounts to a debate between
the old view of the universe and the new questioning.
Edmund the Bastard has told his father, Gloucester,
that his legitimate brother Edgar has written a letter trying to
arrange a conspiracy against the old man:

Gloucester:
He cannot be such a monster...
These late eclipses in the sun and moon
portend no good to us: though the wisdom of
nature can reason it thus, and thus, yet nature
finds itself scourg'd by the sequent effects.
Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers
divide. In cities, mutinies; in countries,
discord; in palaces, treason, and the bond
crack'd 'twixt son and father. This villain
of mine comes under the prediction: there's
son against father... Machinations, hollowness,
treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us
disquietly to our graves... He exits.

Bastard:
This is the excellent foppery of the world, that
when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeits of
our own behavior) we make guilty of our disasters
the sun, the moon and stars, as if we were villains
on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves,
thieves, and traitors 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 on the charge of a star!. My father
compounded with my mother under the Dragon's
tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it
follows I am rough and lecherous. Fut, I should
have been that I am had the maidenliest star in the
firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.
(I.2.99-140)

A similar exchange of views concerning astrology occurs in Henry VI.
Glendower is a believer. Hotspur is a skeptic:

Glendower:
...at my nativity
The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes,
Of burning cressets; and at my birth
The frame and huge foundation of the earth
Shakes like a coward.

Hotspur:
The same thing would have happened
if your cat had kittened...
(III.1.13-17)