(Image: Angus Greig)

From a supernova in 1572 to the discovery of Jupiter’s four biggest moons – astronomical discoveries of Shakespeare’s time may pop up in his work

IT IS the middle of the night when the ghost of King Hamlet comes to Elsinore castle. As Bernardo, one of the guards, tells Prince Hamlet’s friend Horatio, the ghost’s arrival is heralded by a bright light in the heavens. “When yond same star that’s westward from the pole / Had made his course to illume that part of Heaven / Where now it burns”, he says, before he is cut off by the arrival of the ghost himself.

Shakespeare’s output is full of astronomical allusions, but they were traditionally seen as narrative devices or else viewed in the light of medieval thinking. Heavenly bodies, after all, were often considered as portents. But recently, musings about Shakespeare’s stargazing have taken a new turn.

The star in Hamlet may have been inspired by a supernova, and Hamlet’s soliloquies may subtly question the old ideas about Earth’s place in the universe. One astronomer even claims the play is an allegory for the scientific revolution sweeping through Europe. On the 450th anniversary of his birth, is it time to reappraise Shakespeare’s interest in the natural world?

The seismic shifts shaking the medieval understanding of the universe had begun to ripple through Europe decades before 1564, when the playwright was born. For centuries, people had believed that Earth was the centre of the universe, but in 1543, Copernicus published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, which proposed that Earth revolved around the sun (heliocentrism), rather …