Flight and spaceflight in Romeo and Juliet

Juliet is a small icy moon in orbit around the planet Uranus, 1.7 billion miles from earth. Romeo and Juliet also provides the source of one of the few Shakespeare quotations to have been sent into space; a nickname for Valentina Tereshkova, the first female cosmonaut; and, nearly, the name of the first manned spacecraft to land upon the moon's surface. Space enthusiasts, this essay argues, respond particularly strongly to Romeo and Juliet, because of that play's fascination with ideas of outer space and the possibility of reaching it. And yet scholarly attempts to talk about this play's "cosmology" tend to run into the sand in the quaint terminology of Ptolemaic spheres, epicycles, and astrology. Drawing attention in particular to the play's links to Doctor Faustus, this essay aims to rediscover the energy and urgency of Romeo and Juliet's fascination with the possibility of reaching outer space.