The Science of Shakespeare (25 page)

Last night of all,

When yond same star that's westward from the pole,

Had made its course to illume that part of heaven

Where now it burns, Marcellus and myself,

The bell then beating one—

Hamlet
(1.1.39–42)

Bernardo is struck silent at this point when (speak of the devil!) the ghost appears, as if on cue. Is Bernardo merely using this star as a way of marking the time? Perhaps—and, as we've seen, there are other occasions where Shakespeare's characters track the time by noting the positions of the stars (see
here
). But in
Hamlet
, the stars (and celestial happenings in general) seem to hold more gravitas for Shakespeare's characters than what we might associate with mere timekeeping. As Horatio explains, strange phenomena in the heavens are often accompanied by dire events on Earth. He refers to the murder of Julius Caesar, signaled by “stars with trains of fire”—a reference to meteors or a comet, perhaps—and “disasters in the sun”; the moon, meanwhile, was “sick almost to doomsday with eclipse” (1.1.120–23). And so the star “westward from the pole,” we might surmise, holds more significance than some run-of-the-mill star that one might use to mark the hour.

But what star, exactly, are we talking about? Can we reconstruct the skies over Denmark at the time of
Hamlet
and find out?
*
Astronomer Donald Olson has attempted to do just that. Olson, who teaches at Southwest Texas State University, is sometimes described as a “forensic astronomer.” He and his students analyze astronomical references in art and literature, in an effort to gain a deeper insight into the works in question. Over the years, he's tackled such diverse subjects as Julius Caesar's account of his invasion of Britain, Edvard Munch's painting
The Scream
, and the photographs of Ansel Adams. In the 1990s, he turned his attention to
Hamlet
, and, in particular, to the star seen from the ramparts of Elsinore.
†
He begins with the clues present in the text itself: We know the time of night (1 a.m.), as well as the star's location in the sky (“westward from the pole”)—but to know which star that might be, we also need to know the time of year. Fortunately, there are further clues. Francisco complains that the night is “bitter cold” (1.1.8), and Hamlet, on the following night, agrees that “the air bites shrewdly, it is very cold” (1.4.1). Olson argues, quite reasonably, that this is suggestive of late fall or winter. Another reference makes it clear that we are not currently in “that season … Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated” (1.1.163–64), implying that the scene is not unfolding during Advent; thus most of December is ruled out. But we also know that two months have passed since old Hamlet's death—a murder, as it turns out—which happened while he was taking a nap outdoors, in his garden. Putting these clues together, Olson concludes that King Hamlet died in September, and that the ghost's appearance on the battlements takes place in November. (So far, so good; a number of other scholars have also put forward November as the most probable time of the play's initial action.)

Now that we have the time of year as well as the time of night, what star might we find “westward from the pole”? Olson and his students used astronomical software
*
to try to answer that question, but as it turns out, there is no obvious candidate for such a star—at least, not at first glance. Olson considers, and then rejects, the various stars that make up Ursa Major and Ursa Minor (the Great Bear and the Little Bear); they aren't in the right part of the sky at that time of year; neither are the bright stars Vega or Deneb, which lie at the right declination (that is, the right distance from the pole star) but which again would not lie to the west of the pole in late fall. About all that's left, Olson argues, are the stars of Cassiopeia, which does happen to lie fairly close to the pole (in a direction roughly opposite to that of the “Big Dipper” asterism of Ursa Major). Unfortunately, Cassiopeia contains no particularly bright stars—none of the first magnitude
*
—and the second-magnitude stars that make up the familiar “W” (or “M”) are all of about equal brightness. If one were keeping time by noting the position of Cassiopeia, one might just as well refer to the constellation as a whole than to single out any one of its virtually identical stars.

But as Olson points out—and as we saw in Chapter 3—there
was
a bright star in Cassiopeia, back in the days of Shakespeare's youth. It was, of course, Tycho's star, the supernova of 1572, which lit up the skies over Europe that fall, remaining visible for more than a year. It would have been in just the right part of the sky to lie “westward from the pole” at about 1 a.m. on a crisp November night, as seen from England or Denmark (or anywhere else of that approximate latitude). As we've seen, beginning with the Prologue, Shakespeare was just eight years old when Tycho's star appeared. The Prologue is fiction, of course, but it seems reasonable to expect that young William would have remembered such a sight from his childhood. We can't know how vivid the memory would have been more than twenty-five years later, when he sat down to write
Hamlet
, but I would suggest, as Olson does, that one's first sighting of a bright new star—a star that's
not supposed to be there
, which stays in the sky for months, and which people keep on talking about for
years
—is not something one would soon forget. Moreover, when Shakespeare was a young man, there would have been a reminder: As Olson points out, the historian Raphael Holinshed discusses the star at some length in his
Chronicles
—one of Shakespeare's key sources for his history plays. (The
Chronicles
also gave Shakespeare the plot of
Macbeth
, and bits of
King Lear
and
Cymbeline
.) Published in 1577 and reprinted in 1587, the
Chronicles
refer to a new star “in the constellation of Cassiopeia … [appearing] bigger than Jupiter, and not much lesse than Venus when she seemeth greatest.” The star was “so strange, as from the beginning of the world never was the like.” I tend to agree with Olson, that Shakespeare's “boyhood memory of the new star could have been reinforced [by Holinshed] at the time he was writing
Hamlet
.”

Of course, Olson isn't the first to ponder the nature of the star “westward from the pole,” but for some reason its identity has left Shakespeare scholars somewhat baffled. Many editions of
Hamlet
helpfully point out that “pole” means “pole star” (so far, so good) but leave it at that. Many also note that it is perfectly reasonable for the guards doing the night shift at Elsinore to mark the time by following the stars (even when clocks that strike the hour are present, as we are told they are in Shakespeare's play).
*
In the Penguin edition (1980, reprinted 1996), T. J. B. Spencer writes that the playwright “throughout the scene gives an impression of a clear, frosty, starlit sky.” Fair enough. He adds, “Bernardo presumably points to the sky at one side of the stage, guiding the eyes of the audience away from where the ghost will enter,” reminding us that the reference to the star may be motivated more by utilitarian stagecraft than by astronomical accuracy. Spencer then points to some of the other words that Bernardo uses to describe the star and its motion: “made its course”; “illume”; “burns.” Taken together, Spencer says, this “seems to imply that the
star
is a planet” (italics in the original). Unfortunately, this cannot be: Planets are always located near the
ecliptic—
that is, near the imaginary line that runs through the constellations of the zodiac—and not near the pole.
*

“THESE BLESSED CANDLES OF THE NIGHT”

It's remarkable how much confusion Shakespeare's astronomical references have wrought—with references to the pole star being (for some reason) among the most problematic. Bernardo's speech on the ramparts is one of at least three references to the celestial pole—the spot marked, roughly, by the “pole star” or “northern star.” The most famous instance comes from the lips of Julius Caesar, who declares, “… I am constant as the northern star, / Of whose true-fixed and resting quality / There is no fellow in the firmament” (3.1.60–62). The star shines again in act 2 of
Othello
, where we find Montano, the Venetian governor of Cyprus, discussing the fate of a Turkish naval fleet caught in a violent storm at sea. Even watching from shore, they can discern the storm's fury. Montano asks his companions what the fate of the Turkish fleet will be. One of them (identified only as “Second Gentleman”) replies,

A segregation of the Turkish fleet:

For do but stand upon the foaming shore,

The chidden billow seems to pelt the clouds,

The wind-shaked surge, with high and monstrous mane

Seems to cast water on the burning Bear

And quench the guards of th'ever-fixèd pole.

(
Othello
2.1.10–17)

In spite of the flowery language, the gist of the passage is clear enough: The storm is so bad it will surely be the demise of the Turkish ships. Owing to intense winds, the ocean spray has become so thick as to render the stars invisible—or, perhaps, the spray is rising so high that it seems to extinguish the stars. (Or, as George Costanza would have put it, “The sea was angry that day, my friends—like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli.”) We might stumble on some of the particular words—like “chidden,” for starters. (Footnotes to the rescue: Apparently it means “repelled by the shore.”) Easier to gloss is the “burning Bear,” presumably a reference to either Ursa Major or Ursa Minor—and since the next line mentions the “guards” of the pole, we can surmise that we're talking about the pole star and its neighbors: The guards are the two bright stars in the bowl of the Little Dipper, a part of Ursa Minor (the Little Bear), believed to guard or protect the north star.

The phrase “ever-fixèd pole” seems straightforward, but, as with so many passages in Shakespeare, it suffers from textual ambiguity. The quarto (1622) and folio (1623) editions of the play differ in a number of places, and this is one of them: It is
fired
in the former but
fixed
in the latter. Were the folio editors simply correcting a typo in the quarto? If so, the line expresses the most familiar property of the north star, which remains fixed in the sky while the other stars appear to circle around it. If we instead read it as “fired,” then it presumably has something to do with “burning” in the previous line, and similar phrasings do crop up, occasionally, elsewhere in the canon. (The Arden edition goes with “ever-fired”; the Oxford, quoted above, goes with “ever-fixèd.”) At least everyone seems to agree on the significance of these particular stars: The scene describes the fate of warships on the high seas, so there is little surprise that it contains a reference to stars that were of particular interest to navigators. In fact, their utility is twofold: The direction of the pole star indicates north, while the orientation of the “guards” relative to the pole can be used to determine the hour.

Still, it is possible to stumble. In the Oxford edition (2006), Michael Neill writes, “The Pole Star's usefulness to navigators seeking to take their bearings was that it was one of the so-called ‘fixed stars.'” Unfortunately, this is a conflation of two senses in which a star might be “fixed”: In the broad sense, all of the stars in the sky are “fixed stars,” in contrast to the planets, known as “wandering stars”; that is, although they move across the sky, the stars (unlike the planets) maintain the same relative positions to one another. But the usefulness of the pole star comes from the fact that it doesn't join in with this collective motion: It remains in the same part of the sky, while all of the other stars appear to revolve around it. If modern editors seem strangely confused about this distinction, or about celestial mechanics in general, it may simply be because we spend less time looking up than we once did. And yet even in the nineteenth century editors were having trouble with Shakespeare's astronomical references. When Horace Howard Furness was compiling his massive “Varorium” edition of
Othello
in 1886, he waded through the various competing glosses from the preceding hundred years or so, assessing their merits. The scene that begins act 2 had been particularly troublesome, with critics recruiting a bewildering array of stars and constellations in order to make sense of it. Furness, cutting through the clutter, chose “fixed” over “fired,” and concluded that the stars in question are indeed the three brightest stars of Ursa Minor—the pole star and the two stars which guard it. “Shakespeare,” he concluded, “knew better than his commentators what he was talking about when he spoke of the guards of the pole.” (Furness went on to cite a number of sixteenth-century astronomical manuals that describe how one can use the north stars and its companions for navigation.)

*   *   *

Let's return now
to the opening scene of
Hamlet
, where once again the relationship between the north star and other celestial objects—in particular, the star “westward from the pole”—is paramount. The Arden editions are considered by many to be the gold standard for Shakespeare commentary, so it is illuminating to see how they treat the star mentioned by Bernardo on the battlements. In the second-to-last Arden edition, from 1982, editor Harold Jenkins notes that the reference need not be to a particular star—that much is certainly true—but then adds that “Shakespeare had presumably seen the brilliant star Capella, which would appear in the winter sky ‘westward from the pole.'” Unfortunately, Jenkins is way off: At 1 a.m. in November, Capella, as seen from mid-northern latitudes, lies nearly overhead. One might describe it as being “above the pole,” but certainly not “westward from the pole.” (Having said that, it's still a better guess than suggesting the object is a planet.) But the latest Arden edition—the hefty 2006 text edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor—brings a fresh start to the guards' nocturnal observations, and provides a revised take on the star's identity: Capella is out and the supernova is in, with a reference to Donald Olson's article from
Sky & Telescope
.