Cassiopeia Macbeth

The starry sky in the Astronomical Calendar 2026 cover picture is as it was in 1599, the year when the original Globe was built, so that it can be the sky seen through the open roof during the first performances.

It’s at June 21 of that year because it had to be a night scene, and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” came first to mind. But then, the witches in “Macbeth,” dramatic for illuminate the Globe’s interior,.

And the hour had to be not midnight but early night, when the audience enters the theatre, the only time when I could be briefly inside and take a look upward.

This led to the sky scene, as shown in the chart accompanying the story. The view up through the open roof is centered at the northern end of Boötes (which happens to be the radiant of the June Boötid meteors) and includes Corona Borealis and Hercules and part of the Big Dipper.

But another idea might have been to get Cassiopeia into the picture, casting her as Gruoch, Lady Macbeth, with Cepheus as the husband she, with her ambition, goaded into regicide.

Cassiopeia’s fault was vanity; her boast that she and her daughter Andromeda were more beautiful than the goddesses of the sea provoked a tsunami and the near-sacrifice of Andromeda to the sea monster Cetus and the rescue by Perseus. As punishment Cassiopeia forever whirls around the pole, strapped into her throne-shaped constellation.

But her constellation has whirled to the opposite side of the pole, and to show it we would have to choose a time half a year later, at the winter solstice.

It could be that Cassiopeia and Cepheus have been maligned, like Lady Macbeth and her husband, who did not murder his way to the throne, reigned for 17 peaceful years, and was killed by English invaders.

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