What does spheres mean in Romeo and Juliet?

Answer 1

The meaning of spheres is round, orbits. Shakespeare is connecting eyes/orbits, with stars having round orbits as if the stars have "eyes".

The passage from Romeo and Juliet is:

But soft! what light through yonder window breaks?

It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!--

Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,

Who is already sick and pale with grief,

That thou her maid art far more fair than she:

Be not her maid, since she is envious;

Her vestal livery is but sick and green,

And none but fools do wear it; cast it off.--

It is my lady; O, it is my love!

O, that she knew she were!--

She speaks, yet she says nothing: what of that?

Her eye discourses, I will answer it.--

I am too bold, 'tis not to me she speaks:

Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven,

Having some business, do entreat her eyes

To twinkle in their spheres till they return.

What if her eyes were there, they in her head?

The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars,

As daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven

Would through the airy region stream so bright

That birds would sing and think it were not night.

Answer 2

You know already what a sphere is, right; it's a ball, a three-dimensional object whose surface is equidistant from the point in its centre. So what's romeo talking about when he says, "Two of the fairest stars in the heaven, having some business, do entreat her eyes to twinkle in their spheres till they return."?

It helps to know that the medieval model of the universe was built like an onion, with the earth in the middle, and those celestial objects which were observed to move on their own was in a seperate layer, each one of which, like the layers of an onion, was a sphere or ball. So the moon moved in a moon-sphere, the sun in a sun-sphere, Mars in a Mars-sphere, and so on until after Saturn (the last planet they knew about) all of the stars were in the outer layer or skin of the onion-universe.

Therefore "the spheres" in relation to stars is the place they live and stay. Thus we have Romeo's rather strange image of the stars needing to take a break from a hard night of twinkling and, instead of hanging a sign on their part of the sky saying "Back soon", they hire Juliet's eyes as celestial office temps to twinkle there.