Claire Kimball, Production Dramaturg
“Thunder and lightning. A blazing starre appears.”
Act 5 of The Bloody Banquet opens with an ominous storm and a comet in the heavens. The usurping Tyrant enters, having just discovered his wife’s adultery and ordered her punishment. He reacts to the supernatural forces he hears and sees around him, saying:
“Ha? Thunder and thou marrow melting blast
Quicke winged lightning; and thou blazing starre,
I like not thy prodigious bearded fire;
Thy beames are fatal” (G3v)
Immediately after the Tyrant acknowledges the “fatal” danger of these signs in the sky, he discovers the bodies of his dead children. The skies above portend tragedy … and still the Tyrant presses on.
By the time Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton were writing The Bloody Banquet, comets had long been the subject of fear and wonder. Ancient peoples perpetuated the idea that heavenly apparitions correlated with larger shifts in political power and cultural unrest. “The connection between comets and the downfall of princes,” Sarah Schechner notes, “may have originated with Babylonian astronomers, who practiced astrology as a vital part of statecraft” and the Romans likewise “marshaled comets as political weapons” (24). As the science of meteorology and astronomy developed in antiquity, philosophers such as Aristotle and Seneca ascribed hot and dry qualities to “bearded” stars which – in accordance with humorism – reinforced their ominous connotations. Moreover, the disciplines of astrology, astronomy, and philosophy over the centuries seemed to freely overlap. In early modern England, “scientists” like Thomas Digges and John Dee adopted astrological significances for their astronomical theories to such an extent that Queen Elizabeth I consulted with astronomers to discuss the “political significance” of a comet that appeared in 1577 (Falk 220). For seventeenth-century audiences of The Bloody Banquet, comets and thunderous storms signaled the ancient specter of angry Gods, likely displeased at the machinations of nobility. A blazing star in the heavens “heralded momentous events, particularly the subversion of kingdoms and the death of princes, statesmen, and peers.” (Walsham 174). These menacing rumbles and flashes and streaks in the sky were not only objects of increasing scientific speculation but also remnants of the earliest concepts of fate and theism.
Great Comet of 1577, woodcut by Jiri Daschitzsky (Wikimedia Commons)
“Comets mooue battels and seditions, and alter Emperies, and kingdomes: for that in the time of a Comet, are many exhalations in the ayre, hote & drie, which doe drie men, and kindle heat in them, by which they are lightly prouoked to yre: after which yre ensueth variance, next of the same followethbattell, and after battell succeedeth the translation or alteration of gouernements, when as the Emperie ensueth the conquerour.”
– A contemplation of mysteries contayning the rare effectes and significations of certayne comets (1574)
For the first audiences of The Bloody Banquet, a rolling cannonball in the ceiling would have simulated thunder while fireworks and pyrotechnics could be used for flashes of light or blazing stars. Tempests and celestial events on stage, however, were less about meteorological reality and more about the mystical implications of their presence. In the early modern theatres, Gwilym Jones argues, playgoers would have had a “basic audience response: storm equals supernatural” (39). Thus, when we begin act 5 of The Bloody Banquet, the appearance of the blazing star and the sounds of a raging storm are not merely spectacular trappings for the conclusion but an inherent commentary on the impending bloodshed and death.
D., T. The bloodie banquet A tragedie. London: Printed by Thomas Cotes, 1639.
Falk, Dan. The Science of Shakespeare: A New Look at the Playwright’s Universe. New York, NY: St Martin’s Press, 2014.
Hill, Thomas. A contemplation of mysteries contayning the rare effectes and significations of certayne comets, and a briefe rehersall of sundrie hystoricall examples, as well diuine, as prophane, verie fruitfull to be reade in this our age: with matter delectable both for the sayler, and husbandman, yea and all traueylers by sea and lande, in knowing aforehande, howe daungerous a tempest will succeede by the sight of the clowd coming ouer the head, and other matters fruitful to be read as shal appere in the table next after the preface. London: Printed by Henry Denham, [1574]. Web. 7 July 2015. < http://name.umdl.umich.edu/A03363.0001.001 >
Jones, Gwilyn. “Storm Effects in Shakespeare.” Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance. eds. Farah Karim-Cooper and Tiffany Stern. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2014. 33-50.
Schechner, Sarah J. Comets, Popular Culture, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Walsham, Alexandra. Providence in Early Modern England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.