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battlefield:

    HELENA
    Monsieur Parolles, you were born under a charitable star.

    PAROLLES
    Under Mars, I.

    HELENA
    I especially think under Mars.

    PAROLLES
    Why under Mars?

    HELENA
    The wars have so kept you under that you must needs be born under Mars.

    PAROLLES
    When he was predominant.

    HELENA
    When he was retrograde, I think rather.

    PAROLLES
    Why think you so?

    HELENA
    You go so much backward when you fight.
    (1.1.190–200)
    Mars, aside from being the god of war, was also the most perplexing of the planets. The magnitude of its retrograde movement was greater than that of the other planets, making it the most readily visible example of backward motion in the heavens and, at the same time, the object whose movement was most urgently in need of explanation. As the French king points out early in Henry VI, Part 1 , “Mars his true moving, even as in the heavens / So in the earth, to this day is not known” (1.2.191–92). As familiar as retrograde motion was, it proved baffling to astronomers, who struggled to tweak their models of the heavens to explain this odd feature of planetary motion.
    THE SPHERES ABOVE
    Imagining the sun, moon, and planets affixed to a giant, transparent sphere was a promising start, but it was not quite enough: At the very least, each planet had to have its own sphere, so that it could move independently of the other wanderers; these nested spheres—think of the layers of an onion—could then rotate at different speeds, with the Earth at rest in the center. The innermost sphere carried the moon, which moved a significant distance from night to night; next was Mercury, then Venus. After that came the sun itself. Beyond the sun lay the spheres of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn; and finally the sphere containing the stars themselves, sometimes called the “firmament” (as Prince Hamlet referred to it in the passage quoted at the start of the chapter). And so one would not speak of a single giant sphere, but of a system of spheres—a system like that imagined in figure 1.1 . Perhaps the spheres were composed of some kind of crystal; they needed to be rigid and yet perfectly transparent.
    Although this model had evolved significantly by the sixteenth century, the ancient picture just described was more or less how ordinary people imagined the universe in the time of Shakespeare’s youth. When Hamlet, after seeing his father’s ghost, says the vision threatens to make his eyes “like stars, start from their spheres” (1.5.22), his audience would have had no trouble catching the metaphor. Similar turns of phrase can be found throughout the canon. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream , Oberon describes a mermaid’s song—music so lovely that “certain stars shot madly from their spheres” in order to hear it better (2.1.153). And if you’ve ever seen a Western in which one character says to another that “this town isn’t big enough for the both of us,” remember that Shakespeare was there first—though entire planets, rather than towns, were at issue. In Henry IV, Part 1 , Prince Henry says to his archenemy, Harry Percy, “Two stars keep not their motion in one sphere, / Nor can one England brook a double reign / Of Harry Percy and the Prince of Wales” (5.4.64–66).

    Fig. 1.1 In ancient Greece, the universe was earth-centered, with a system of concentric spheres carrying the stars, sun, and planets— including the sun and moon—across the sky. Only in the terrestrial realm do we find the four elements: earth, water, air, and fire. (In this fanciful 1599 engraving, Atlas carries the whole affair on his back.) This ancient model—with various tweaks—remained the dominant view for nearly 2,000 years. The Granger Collection, New York

    What we’ve described here is, roughly, how ancient civilizations across the Near East imagined the heavens for thousands of years: The cosmos was pictured