Vidéo Année : 2024

Shakespeare and the ‘spots of heaven’

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Even though it was not until the end of the seventeenth century that telescopically-viewed stars came to be charted on traditional star maps, the star charts and maps of the Tudor period are, from a purely aesthetic perspective, gorgeous documents depicting the zodiac constellations in sometimes vivid colours. No wonder if the power of the skies looms large in Shakespeare. To put it simply, in his plays and poems, stars are much more than stars. They are called ‘candles’ (Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth), ‘burning cressets’ (Henry IV), ‘the burning tapers of the sky’ (Titus Andronicus), or ‘spots of heaven’ (Antony and Cleopatra). In Antony and Cleopatra, the male protagonist is indeed portrayed as a man whose faults ‘seem as the spots of heaven, / More fiery by night’s blackness’ (1.4.12-13). Today, all those who keep reading Shakespeare and attending performances of his plays feel impoverished. Why? Partly because light pollution increasingly prevents us from seeing the sky that the playwright could see, and because this attenuates our connection to nature, a fact particularly true for those who inhabit big cities in developed countries. My point in this talk is that light pollution does not simply mar our relation with the environment, it also destroys our link with art and beauty by making a major and timeless source of poetry inaccessible.

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hal-04827101 , version 1 (09-12-2024)

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Sophie Chiari, Eric Fayet. Shakespeare and the ‘spots of heaven’. 2024. ⟨hal-04827101⟩
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