Y - “Yond Same Star”

At the start of the film, Horatio inquires about the Ghost, and as Barnardo responds, the camera focuses on a bright star in the sky:

Last night of all,

When yond same star that’s westward from the pole

Had made his course t’illume that part of heaven

Where now it burns, Marcellus and myself,

The bell then beating one— (Hamlet, 1.1.36-40)

It was widely believed in Shakespeare’s time that celestial portents precede dramatic human events, so it was natural for the star and the Ghost to appear in conjunction. Horatio mentions to the guards that shortly before Julius Caesar’s downfall, the sky was full of heavenly harbingers: “stars with trains of fire,” “disasters in the sun,” and “doomsday’s eclipse” (Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, which also features a confounding apparition, indeed includes descriptions of unnerving occurrences).

In November of 1572, when Shakespeare was eight years old, “a new star” suddenly brightened in the sky near the constellation Cassiopeia. It was an event that was most studied and described by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, for whom the “star” was named “Tycho’s Supernova.” It would have been easily witnessed and noted by everyone in England, and no doubt young William had it in his memory lock’d. 

Only a few years later, Brahe would be stationed at an observatory custom-built for him by King Frederick II on the island of Hven, only a few miles away from Helsingør (Elsinore). The frontispiece of Brahe’s Epistolae astronomicae, published in 1596, depicts Brahe with the crests and names of his extended family, two of which are Rosenkrans and Guldensteren. Brahe conducted his research and wrote this book without the use of a telescope, which was invented in the Netherlands in 1608. Galileo made his own telescope in 1609, and used his artistic skills to draw his observations of the moon.

In 1966, the Carl Zeiss Planar 50mm f/0.7 lens was constructed for NASA’s Apollo lunar program to photograph the far side of the moon. When Stanley Kubrick needed an ultra-fast lens to achieve the proper exposure for the dim, candle-lit scenes in Barry Lyndon (1975), he acquired three of these lenses (only ten existed) for filming.

Barry Lyndon, which was also filmed partially at Blenheim Palace, inspired Ken Branagh’s vision for the dark Rembrandt-style lighting used in his All is True (2018), the fictionalized story of Shakespeare’s final days of retirement in Stratford.

Sources:

Shakespeare’s Worlds of Science

The NASA lens that ended up in the hands of Stanley Kubrick

Falk, Dan. The Science of Shakespeare. Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Press, 2014.