Eclipses in Shakespeare's plays

Editor’s Note: We published this post in 2017 as we were preparing for that year’s “Great American Eclipse.” You can watch a livestream of the April 8, 2024 eclipse on NASA’s website. If you’re watching our 2024 eclipse outside, don’t forget those eclipse glasses!

Did you know? In 1598, during Shakespeare’s lifetime, England experienced a total solar eclipse, with the path of totality tracking from Cornwall in the southwest up to Aberdeen in Scotland.

As we in the 21st century prepare for the Great American Eclipse, let’s look at three of the ways Shakespeare used eclipses in his plays and poems:

1. An eclipse as an ill omen

“These late eclipses in the sun and moon
portend no good to us. Though the wisdom of
nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds
itself scourged by the sequent effects.”
—Gloucester in King Lear (1.2.109)

2. The physical darkness of an eclipse as a metaphor for psychological darkness

“My wife, my wife! What wife? I have no wife.
O insupportable! O heavy hour!
Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse
Of sun and moon, and that th’ affrighted globe
Should yawn at alteration.”
—Othello in Othello (5.2.121)

3. An eclipse as that which mars beauty

“No more be grieved at that which thou hast done.
Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud;
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.”
—Sonnet 35