Abstract
On one November evening in 1572, a Stratford father and his impressionable 8-year-old son stood outside their home looking incredulously at a brilliant star just atop the “W”-shaped figure of Cassiopeia. Far brighter than any other, this “blazing starre” shone even in daylight. Could William Shakespeare have been that boy? Although he left no documentation of his observation, it would have been hard for Shakespeare to miss it; even the following summer the star would have shone brightly low in the northeastern sky, and if James Joyce is correct, the independent lad would have sacrificed sleep for a midnight peek at the sky.
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© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
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Levy, D.H. (2011). The Stella Novae of 1572 and 1604. In: The Sky in Early Modern English Literature. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7814-1_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7814-1_1
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Print ISBN: 978-1-4419-7813-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-4419-7814-1
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