Under the Dragon’s Tail: Following the Comet from Shakespeare to Martin
Der Komet von 1618 über Heidelberg by Matthaus Merian (1593-1650) (Wikimedia Commons)
I suspect this also inspired a woodcut of a mysterious star crashing in the Scottish Highlands in a certain Doctor Who episode, but will need to investigate further…
“When beggars die, there are no comets seen;
The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.”
- Julius Caesar, II.ii, 30-31
Last summer the world was surprised by the appearance of a green comet, previously unknown to astronomers and discovered by an amateur stargazer. Calculations suggest it was last seen over earth in about 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada’s destruction off the coast of England. Now known as Nishimura, after its discoverer, this was actually the second green comet to be spotted from Earth in 2023: C/2022 E3 (ZTF), last seen by early humans 50,000 years ago, visited that February. These rare celestial visitors and their distinctive hue immediately brought to mind the red comet that blazes over Westeros and Essos in A Clash of Kings. The true meaning, if any, of Martin’s red comet remains to be discovered through the course of the books, and the characters certainly have no shortage of interpretations: “the dragon’s tail,” a sign for Danaerys, a sign for Joffrey, a Lannister victory, a Tully victory, a Stark vengeance, the change of seasons, war, purification, dragons, blood, fire, and - inevitably - the fulfillment of prophecy. G.R.R.M. has referenced both the comets of the late 1990s and Shakespeare’s take on the “Julian Star” that followed Julius Caesar’s assassination as inspirations for the Bleeding Star. In order to appreciate the inspiration that Martin drew from Shakespeare’s brief depiction of the Julian Star (sidus Iulium), we need to immerse ourselves in the mindset of Shakespeare’s time, with cultural threads arcing back to the Romans but teetering, at the same time, on the edge of a science we - and perhaps the maesters - might recognize. Shakespeare’s career overlapped with multiple comets that would have been visible from London while he was writing, and comets remained a subject of fear, debate, and hope for his contemporaries. A trio of three comets that passed by Earth in late 1618, two years after Shakespeare’s death, were greeted by both Europeans and North Americans as heralds of disaster - but also, in some cases, of possibility. The three comets of 1618 really were followed by various disasters, but they also mark a turning point in the history of science: they were the first comets ever to be observed by telescope, sparking debate amongst Galileo and his contemporaries about the visiting stars’ nature and origin. This was a liminal world where comets were popular omens but also subjects of scientific study and debate; a successful writer with the largest entertainment audience of his time and place could stir his crowds with chilling portents in the heavens while letting his characters mock the cultural fascination with astrology. In other words, Shakespeare’s England sounds quite a bit like Westeros.
Shakespeare’s fingerprints are all over ASOAIF and its world-building materials, and the storytelling lessons of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar are especially strongly stamped not only on the main series but on the interpersonal dramas of the Dance of the Dragons and the early Blackfyre Rebellions. It comes as no surprise that Caesar is reputedly one of Martin’s favorite Shakespeare plays; given that it was once part of the standard freshman year curriculum for American high school students, it’s also possible that it was the first Shakespeare play Martin read. Scholar Marjorie Garber points out that one reason for this was the play’s relative cleanliness, always a hard quality to find in Shakespeare (Elizabethan drama is PG-13 at best!). The play is a remarkable blend of the personal and political, bloody and philosophical, epic in scale yet turning on individual interpretations of principle and private grudges, containing everything from intimate marital arguments to a riot in which an innocent poet is literally torn apart. It’s a strikingly effective blueprint for anyone aspiring to write a multi-layered political drama with complex, vivid characters. “One measure of Shakespeare’s success in employing this balanced dramatic structure is that four centuries later critics continue to debate whether he sides with or against Brutus and his fellow conspirators,” writes scholar James Shapiro. It would be hard to find a better artistic lesson in how to paint shades of gray while handling stakes cranked as high as they can go. And the comet, of course, is part of how Shakespeare chooses to crank those stakes. Martin uses his comet to related ends, but he is worldbuilding for different needs, fitting the requirements of his own time, as we shall see.
Martin wrote and ultimately published A Clash of Kings almost exactly 400 years after Julius Caesar debuted at the newly constructed Globe theatre in early 1599. However, these two writers were working in dramatically different political climates, and compared with Shakespeare’s reality, the U.S. in the late 1990s seems like a pacific writer’s paradise. The 1590s, the decade following the triumph over the Armada, was a rough decade for the aging Elizabeth I, and even more so for her subjects. Multiple famines, outbreaks of plague, plots against the crown, witchcraft persecutions, and disastrous attempts to subjugate the Irish dominated the scene. As Shakespeare was working on Julius Caesar, Elizabeth’s government (and church) were banning and burning both histories and dramas deemed politically dangerous. While yet another campaign set off for Ireland, bright, sunny weather changed suddenly to thunderstorms and hail as the army marched out from Tower Hill. The natural world’s seeming comment on the troops’ departure was read by many Elizabethans as an ill omen (their fears would be resoundingly justified, as the campaign was, from an English perspective, an unqualified disaster). For most Elizabethans, highborn or low, the idea that unusual natural events - sudden changes in weather, bizarre lighting strikes, eclipses, and of course comets - reflected imminent future events (usually frightening ones) was obvious. These were “wonders” or “prodigies,” unusual signs available for interpretation by anxious humans, and the 1590s provided no less than 3 comets (in 1590, 1593, and 1596) to reflect the turbulent state of affairs below. Interpreting the heavens was a common Elizabethan preoccupation, providing business for contemporary astrologers and cunning folk (service magicians), as well as the relentless astrological imagery that populates Shakespeare’s plays. This is not to say that all Elizabethans believed this to the same degree, as Shakespeare suggested a few years later in King Lear (Act I, scene ii, lines 119-133):
EDMUND This is the excellent foppery of the world, that
when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeits of
our own behavior) we make guilty of our disasters
the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains
on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves,
thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance;
drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced
obedience of planetary influence; and all that we
are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable
evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish
disposition on the charge of a star! My father
compounded with my mother under the Dragon’s
tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it
follows I am rough and lecherous. Fut, I should
have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the
firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.
The lunar nodes, “the head and tail of the dragon,” illustrated in Peter Apian’s Astronomicum Caesareum, 1540. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and the Gallica Digital Library.
The deliciously dreadful Edmund, conceived “under the dragon’s tail,” is a furious, frustrated, envious, bastard-born second son: the prototype of a whole slew of Westerosi antagonists from Ramsay Bolton to Bittersteel to Daemon and the tellingly named Aemond (Valyrian Aemon is a homonym of Irish Eamonn, which translates as both Edmund and Edward), and there are flashes of him even in Jon Snow. In his bitterness and rationalism, however, he also strongly resembles fellow second son and skeptic Tyrion Lannister, an educated and sharp-witted man who casts doubt on the superstitions and supernatural allusions that the smallfolk take for granted as genuine. However, neither man represents the prevailing zeitgeist of his world, and Shakespeare leans firmly into this aspect of his audience’s worldview even while suggesting, as Cassius says to Brutus, that “the fault lies not in our stars/ But in ourselves.” His interest in horrific prodigies in Julius Caesar goes well beyond comets, beginning with the Soothsayer’s public and infamous warning to Caesar to “Beware the Ides of March!” Ceasar’s dismissive response, “He is a dreamer. Let us leave him. Pass,” is followed by Calphurnia’s dragon-dream-like prophetic nightmares, which wake her husband Caesar in the middle of the night. Calphurnia relates not only her own experiences but those witnessed elsewhere in Rome that night, battling her husband’s devout indifference:
CALPHURNIA Caesar, I never stood on ceremonies,
Yet now they fright me. There is one within,
Besides the things that we have heard and seen,
Recounts most horrid sights seen by the watch.
A lioness hath whelpèd in the streets,
And graves have yawned and yielded up their dead.
Fierce fiery warriors fought upon the clouds
In ranks and squadrons and right form of war,
Which drizzled blood upon the Capitol.
The noise of battle hurtled in the air,
Horses did neigh, and dying men did groan,
And ghosts did shriek and squeal about the streets.
O Caesar, these things are beyond all use,
And I do fear them.
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.
Calphurnia’s response, “When beggars die there are no comets seen/ The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes,” was culturally plausible to an Elizabethan audience, but her failure to actually say that she had seen such a comet is a historically accurate detail. This legendary comet didn’t appear at Caesar’s assassination, but rather several months later in July, Caesar’s birth month. This was likely the same as the tailed comet recorded by Chinese astronomers that May, and was daytime-visible by the time it was seen over Rome (though it’s also debated whether the comet was a real occurrence or later political invention). Both Virgil and Calpurnius Siculus suggested that the comet was related to the civil wars engulfing the Republic as the result of Caesar’s death, and this is the imagery that Shakespeare chooses to work with. Although Shakespeare’s main source for the play was Plutarch’s Lives, his “small Latin and less Greek” would have been more than sufficient to familiarize him with Virgil as well (biographers have pointed out that while Shakespeare’s classical education was limited by the Renaissance standards of his day, it was at least as good as that of a modern classics major). All of this being said, Shakespeare surely chose to use this historical material in a way that made sense not only to the Romans he was writing about, but the Elizabethan audience he was writing for. The audience who crowded into the newly built Globe walked under the rotting heads of decapitated traitors as they crossed the bridge over the river to the playhouse; they lived with constant anxiety about the aging queen’s intent for the succession (about which it was illegal to speculate) and the constant threat of civil and religious war whenever the last Tudor finally departed. In addition, the ongoing wars against the Irish were a reminder that the Spanish could try to use Ireland as a launchpad to attack England. To draw a Westerosi analogy, London in 1599 would have felt a lot like King’s Landing in the final years of Viserys I’s reign, teeming with relentless plotting and speculation about the succession but with far greater public awareness that civil war could easily erupt whenever and however the queen died, especially since Elizabeth refused to formally name her heir.
Der komet von 1618 über Augsburg by Elias Ehinger (1573-1653) (Wikimedia Commons)
For Shakespeare’s audience, the descriptions of unnatural signs in the heavens and in the streets were not just creepy or atmospheric, nor were they merely a useful plot device to remind everyone that doom was on the horizon: they were a reminder that the audience was about to witness a story of civil strife, blood, betrayal, and division that every individual in that audience had real cause to fear on an almost daily basis. Their culture felt these political disturbances to be so profound that they assumed they would be reflected in nature itself. For them, the stakes could not have been higher. Martin, of course, was not originally writing A Song of Ice and Fire for an audience living with these stakes, although the progress of climate change and the current political landscape may have changed that perception in the almost thirty years of the series’ writing. Public discourse around the supernatural and interest in subjects such as astrology has also increased since A Clash of Kings was published, but the general worldview of Martin’s readers still largely belongs to a disenchanted, post-industrial, post-Enlightenment age of which Shakespeare’s audience encountered only the earliest glints. For this exact reason, Martin uses the red comet very differently than Shakespeare uses his prodigies and allusion to the Julian star. The “dragon’s tail” is an intense, eerie, otherworldly reminder that when we’re in Westeros, we have left our society’s disenchanted world behind, and are now in a world of real supernatural horrors, strange magic, and monsters reborn, where prophecies just might come true. Following the Bleeding Star, we are drawn further into the supernatural worldviews of both Westerosi and Essosi cultures, and especially into the realm of the prophecy on which these stories hinge. The people of Planetos may view the comet much as the Elizabethans and Jacobeans did, as a harbinger of strife, but for us as readers it’s a thread that pulls us into the depths of an alien worldview. The characters' conflicting interpretations also sow the seeds of doubt in readers’ minds: how can these conflicting perspectives be trusted? Are multiple interpretations possible, or only one, or is it all nonsense? These conflicts keep the reader constantly on edge, unsettled, unsure, and invested in the elusive truth of an ancient and subjective prophecy. For Shakespeare’s audience, the comet and associated prophecies and prodigies were an anxiety-stirring reminder of inescapable political realities; for Martin’s readers, the “blazing-star of dreadful greatnesse” is a sign to pursue into the depths of a political fantasy that we may mercifully escape whenever we choose.
If you’re curious…
If you’re not familiar with Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, I strongly recommend listening to the play before reading or watching it. The Folger Shakespeare Library has an excellent radio-style dramatization available here. I’m also uploading both of the speeches referenced in this post to my Instagram reels for ease of reference.
For further reading, I recommend the following:
James Shapiro’s A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare immerses the reader in the world of London in 1599, when Shakespeare was writing not only Julius Caesar but also Henry V, As You Like It, and ultimately Hamlet. It’s a very readable immersion in the dangerous, dirty, multifaceted world of Elizabethan London; if you’ve ever wanted to hang out with mummers in the depths of Flea Bottom and then go to entertain the royal court, this is the book for you!
Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare After All includes essays on all of Shakespeare’s works, including her insightful commentary on Julius Caesar. Given the essay format, it’s easy to focus on whichever play happens to interest you the most or to browse at will.
David Nuranen’s article “Shakespeare and Comets” (Journal of the Wooden O, 2004) contains a helpful summary of the comets seen in England during Shakespeare’s career, plus documentation of these comets from multiple cultures; it can be accessed here.
As an aside…I’ve been unable to find a working link to a definitive quote from GRRM describing Julius Caesar as his favorite Shakespeare, though he does discuss Shakespeare’s Brutus briefly in a blog entry. If you know where it’s buried in So Spake Martin or someplace else, let me know!