It’s a Friday evening, the first clear sky since I started looking for C/2020 F3 aka NEOWISE named for the instrument that discovered it (Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer). I stand on a 15th floor terrace that faces north, a common space in the building where I live. As I scour the sky with binoculars, searching for the elusive comet, I hear voices from a backyard party wafting over Rosedale Valley. Covid-19 has turned me into a cautious mask wearing, hand washing, social distancing germaphobe. I wince a little when I find that others don’t share my caution. I don’t want to live my life cowering in fear, but I do want to approach the coronavirus pandemic with a measure of common sense. I catch a wisp of something, a tendril of cotton drawn across the sky. As I switch to my camera, I hear more laughter. This time it’s louder. The partiers must be on to their second or third drink by now.
Comets have long been regarded as supernatural portents of major events in human affairs. On the eve of the Norman Conquest, Harold II, ruler of England, saw a comet and decided his troops were doomed. It turns out that he was right. It also turns out that what he saw was Halley’s Comet. The portentous nature of celestial appearances found its way into Shakespeare’s plays. By the time Shakespeare wrote about comets, Tycho Brahe had already determined that comets were bodies in motion beyond the moon and not supernatural signs. However, it would be years after Shakespeare’s death before Newton developed the mathematical tools to precisely describe their elliptical orbits.
In historical terms, Shakespeare sat in an odd position. He inherited all the superstitious lore associated with comets but knew that an emerging science undermined that lore. We find that odd position reflected in the conflicts that arise between Shakespearian characters. One of my favourites is a conversation between Hotspur and Glendower in Henry IV, Part I at the beginning of Act III. Hotspur is that new breed of renaissance character who enjoys using the pin of reason to burst superstitious medieval bubbles. By contrast, Glendower is full of superstition, but he is also full of himself and we can’t help but wonder if Glendower’s superstition is not medieval so much as self-serving and cynical. Glendower says that when he was born the universe offered up all sorts of portents to declare the extraordinary life that had just come into being. Hotspur mocks him and assures that those events he calls portents would have appeared whether or not he was born.
Glendower
At my nativity
The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes,
Of burning cressets, and at my birth
The frame and huge foundation of the earth
Shak’d like a coward.Hotspur Why, so it would have done
At the same season, if your mother’s cat
Had but kitten’d, though yourself had never been born.Glendower
I say the earth did shake when I was born.Hotspur
And I say the earth was not of my mind,
If you suppose as fearing you it shook.Glendower
The heavens were all on fire, the earth did tremble.
A similar exchange happens between Calpurnia and Caesar in Julius Caesar, Act II, Scene ii. Calpurnia begs her husband to heed all the signs and portents but Caesar brushes them aside.
Caesar What can be avoided
Whose end is purposed by the mighty gods?
Yet Caesar shall go forth; for these predictions
Are to the world in general as to Caesar.Calpurnia
When beggars die, there are no comets seen;
The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.
Henry IV, Part I appeared at the Globe Theatre in 1596 and Julius Caesar appeared there in the fall of 1599. Not long after that, the bubonic plague tore through London. From 1603 to 1613, the Globe was closed for 78 months. Writing in the Guardian, Andrew Dickson speculates that Shakespeare wrote Lear while in lockdown. It’s hard to say much with certainty about Shakespeare’s life at that point, but there is one fact we know with absolute certainty: in 1607, Shakespeare saw a comet. Everybody saw it and spoke about it. It was Halley’s Comet. At that time, people did not understand that its appearance was a recurrent event and had presided over the Battle of Hastings in 1066 just as it presided over London in the midst of the bubonic plague.
Finally, at 11:15 pm, I got a shot of the comet NEOWISE. I like it as a photograph but it isn’t a great shot of the comet, and for a couple reasons. For one, I shot it from downtown Toronto where light pollution overwhelms the sky. In a way, it’s remarkable I got anything at all. For another, the comet’s closest approach was on July 3rd and on each succeeding evening it recedes a little further from view. And for yet another reason, I shot it with a camera, not with proper astronomical gear. I used a 100-400mm lens. For this photo, I set the lens at 150mm so I could get buildings in the foreground. Even with an 8 second exposure, the stars and comet are slightly blurred thanks to the Earth’s rotation. To do a proper job of it, I would need a motorized mount that would compensate for the Earth’s rotation. Maybe I’ll have all the necessary gear to get a better photograph of NEOWISE when it returns 6,800 years from now.
Like Hotspur, I’m inclined to think that the appearance of a comet portends nothing. I know that it would appear whether or not we had to contend with a pandemic. Nevertheless, collectively, I’m not sure we’re further ahead of the people in Shakespeare’s day as they stared into the sky at Halley’s Comet and wondered at the spread of disease and death. Every day, we read in the news about people—both ordinary people and national leaders—who turn their backs on reason and, like the cynical Glendower, embrace views that properly belong in medieval Europe. I don’t want to contract Covid-19. Should I cross my fingers?