[86] See Jones’s “Credulities, Past and Present,” 1880, p. 133.
[87] See Scot’s “Discovery of Witchcraft,” 1584, p. 393; Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 264.
[88] Ibid. p. 378.
CHAPTER V.
NATURAL PHENOMENA.
Many of the most beautiful and graphic passages in Shakespeare’s writings have pictured the sun in highly glowing language, and often invested it with that sweet pathos for which the poet was so signally famous. Expressions, for instance, such as the following, are ever frequent: “the glorious sun” (“Twelfth Night,” iv. 3); “heaven’s glorious sun” (“Love’s Labour’s Lost,” i. 1); “gorgeous as the sun at midsummer” (“1 Henry IV.,” iv. 1); “all the world is cheered by the sun” (“Richard III.,” i. 2); “the sacred radiance of the sun” (“King Lear,” i. 1); “sweet tidings of the sun’s uprise” (“Titus Andronicus,” iii. 1), etc. Then, again, how often we come across passages replete with pathos, such as “thy sun sets weeping in the lowly west” (“Richard II.,” ii. 4); “ere the weary sun set in the west” (“Comedy of Errors,” i. 2); “the weary sun hath made a golden set” (“Richard III.,” v. 3); “The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head” (“Romeo and Juliet,” v. 3), etc. Although, however, Shakespeare has made such constant mention of the sun, yet his allusions to the folk-lore connected with it are somewhat scanty.
According to the old philosophy the sun was accounted a planet,[89] and thought to be whirled round the earth by the motion of a solid sphere, in which it was fixed. In “Antony and Cleopatra” (iv. 13), Cleopatra exclaims:
“O sun,
Burn the great sphere thou mov’st in! darkling stand
The varying shore o’ the world.”
Supposing this sphere consumed, the sun must wander in endless space, and, as a natural consequence, the earth be involved in endless night.
In “1 Henry IV.” (i. 2), Falstaff, according to vulgar astronomy, calls the sun a “wandering knight,” and by this expression evidently alludes to some knight of romance. Mr. Douce[90] considered the allusion was to “The Voyage of the Wandering Knight,” by Jean de Cathenay, of which the translation, by W. Goodyeare, appeared about the year 1600. The words may be a portion of some forgotten ballad.