Any solar eclipse – even the tiniest of partial eclipses – is an event worth watching. I believe that Shakespeare and his colleagues, in a little studied, probably multi-authored play Edward III, were describing a total eclipse even though this was years before the great solar eclipse of 1605. (The full quote opens Chapter 5.) Although it is highly unlikely that Shakespeare ever witnessed a total eclipse of the Sun, he probably heard or read reports about them from those who had. Also, he had the opportunity to witness several partial eclipses from London, including one on July 31, 1590, during which half the Sun was covered by the Moon at maximum. There were other, shallower ones, like the sunset eclipse on August 11, 1589. More important, the great writer's fertile imagination would have allowed him to imagine what a solar eclipse, continued to totality, might have looked like. It is this sense of imagination and dreaming that leads me to believe that he had an eclipse in mind when he wrote (if he wrote) the lines that begin the next chapter; this was a play of multiple authorship.

In July 1990 Steve Edberg and I drove for several hours along back roads to a spot in Northern California where we watched the Sun begin to set.