ASTRONOMY IN SHAKESPEARE'S TIME— ABBOT J] 3 



miles away, and more than 300,000 times as massive as the earth. Our 

 sun is one of the many billions of suns which we call the stars, some 

 of them a billion times as large as it, which throng the Milky Way. 

 The very nearest of them to our sun is a Centauri, a bright star of 

 the Southern Hemisphere. It lies so far away that light itself, 

 traveling 186,000 miles each second, requires 4 years to reach us. 

 From the remotest stars of our galaxy, light requires 100,000 years 

 to come. But this is by no means the limit of the universe. It may 

 even be limitless. At least we know that on every side of our own 

 starry host lie other galaxies. They are certainly millions in num- 

 ber. Each of them contains, like ours, a multitude of stars. These 

 "island universes", as Herschel called them, lie a million light years 

 apart, and we recognize them still at such immense distances that 

 the light by which we photograph them today started toward us 

 200,000,000 years ago in Cambrian geologic times when our earth 

 was in the possession of the trilobites extinct these hundred million 

 years. 



How keenly we must regret that the fertile mind of Shakespeare 

 could not draw from this abounding store of wonders material about 

 which to wield his magic wand of expression. In his time, atoms 

 were practically unthought of, and for no star, not even for our 

 sun, was there known the distance, motion, size, temperature, or 

 physical or chemical composition. The universal unity of the 

 building material of all nature, the vast reaches of the universe, 

 and the astonishing numbers and immensity of its denizens could 

 not possibly be imagined in their grand proportions which now we 

 know. 



As already remarked, Shakespeare was no astrologist. In King 

 Lear, he puts derision of astrology into the mouth of Edmund, 

 as follows: 



When we are sick in fortune * * * we make guilty of our disasters 

 the sun, the moon, and the stars, as if we were villains on necessity, fools 

 by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predomi- 

 nance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by enforc'd obedience of planetary 

 influence, and all that we are evil in, by divine thrusting on. 



Of course in his fidelity to actuality Shakespeare does not hesi- 

 tate to put into the mouths of some of his characters exactly those 

 beliefs in the good and evil influences of the heavenly bodies, and 

 of obscure earthly things which were current among nearly all 

 men of his time. For instance, Horatio, moved by the appearance 

 of the ghost, refers as follows to the death of Caesar : 



A little ere the mightiest Julius fell. 



The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead 



Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets. 



