| Hippol, | Four days will quickly dream away the time and then the moon, like a silver bow now bent heaven, shall behold the night of our solemnities.” |
At a later time Herinia is told to “take time to pause, and, by the next new moon, the sealing day betwixt my love and me, prepare to wed Demetrius”, which, if it does not establish the writer’s own conviction that there is, in Solomon’s words, a time for everything, at least completes the case for his Duke of Athens.
Interesting it is to note throughout this play, as well as that of the “Tempest”, how well the poet knew when to have done with Zodiacs and Right Ascensions, how he subdues his Science, so prominent at other times, and allows the stars to play their part as an attractive background to his picture. Apostrophes such as those of Oberon to the planet Venus are common; the witchery of night is ever present; when the stars are in view they fulfil all that is needed of them; anything that would divert attention from their beauty is carefully withheld, Only once it the “Tempest”, in Act 1, Sc. 2, does Prospero allow the tools with which he works to show themselves:—
This at once suggests the inner meaning of “there is a tide in the affairs of men;” but Prospero is Ariel’s master (the impulsive Ariel, born under Aries) and, as such, is supreme in forces which lie beyond the critic’s pale; he is magician as well as student of Astrology, and so is in the convenient position of being able to do precisely as he wills.
In Act l, Sc. 2, of “Winter's Tale” Polixenes speaks of “nine changes of the watery moon” which had transpired since he left his throne; Leontes, in the same scene, makes a characistic allusion to a planet, the nature of which he no doubt understood. for he himself was subject to it; and, later, Camillo says, at a crisis in his life—
“Happy star, reign now; here comes Bohentia.”
Hermione complains, in the third scene of the second act, that “some ill planet reigns”, and, in the third act speaks of her infant, ”starred unluckily” and from her ”breast haled out to murder;” as for the Oracle business in Act 3, it is known, if
