The Science of Shakespeare (16 page)

Bruno eventually returned to Italy—foolishly, we might imagine, unless he
wanted
a martyr's fate. (Perhaps he did.) He first settled in Padua, and then Venice—where one of his patrons turned against him and reported him to Church authorities. He was arrested by the Holy Office of the Inquisition, questioned, and eventually charged with a litany of heresies, including the belief in a multitude of inhabited worlds and an infinite cosmos. (There is no evidence that Copernicanism per se played a role in Bruno's trial—but the theory seems to have become tainted by association. This fact is particularly salient when we think of what lay in store for his countryman, Galileo, three decades later.) Bruno's trial, beginning in Venice and ending in Rome, dragged on for eight years, with Bruno clinging to his beliefs right to the end. He was finally sentenced on February 9, 1600. Bruno, the Inquisition concluded, was “an impertinent, pertinacious, and obstinate heretic.” Even with his fate sealed, priests and churchmen continued to try to sway his opinions—to at least save his soul—but to no avail. Eight days later, the sentence was carried out: The prisoner was stripped naked, his tongue was clamped, and, by tradition, he was set on a mule that would carry him to the Campo de' Fiori, where he was tied to a stake and burned alive.

*   *   *

In the curious figures
of John Dee and Giordano Bruno we see a peculiar mixture of science and mysticism. Peculiar to our sensibilities, that is; as we have seen, such mixtures were simply part of the intellectual landscape in early modern Europe. We can also view Dee and Bruno as Renaissance polymaths, men for whom all fields of knowledge were inexorably linked. In hindsight, we can look at the gradual acceptance of the Copernican theory—with people like Dee and Bruno as early adherents—as one of the indications that a new worldview was taking shape, one that bore at least some resemblance to the one that defines our world today. This, of course, is partly a reflection of our modern biases, and the tendency to read historical figures as engaging in a struggle to be “like us” is, as mentioned, an obvious and ever-present danger. Still, the gradual decline and fall of the Ptolemaic system surely signaled that change
of some kind
was in the air. Of course, paradigms do not shift easily, and many decades would pass before the “new astronomy” gained widespread acceptance. Nonetheless, historians have come to see these years as a critical period in Europe's intellectual history. Mordechai Feingold calls these years an “incubatory period” in which great minds grappled with an array of “rival theories, old and new cosmologies, rational and irrational elements of science.” If rival theories were at war in late-sixteenth-century England, there were three main battlefields: the university cities of Oxford and Cambridge, and the commercial and cultural heart of the nation, found in London. Academia and commerce both had use for science, but took radically different approaches. The latter was, naturally, far more concerned with practical matters; but, as we will see, even the most down-to-earth merchants and tradespeople saw the value in looking up.

 

5.     “… Sorrow's eye, glazed with blinding tears…”

THE RISE OF ENGLISH SCIENCE AND THE QUESTION OF THE TUDOR TELESCOPE

It has been said that necessity is the mother of invention—and fear probably helps, too. In the second half of the sixteenth century, a handful of science-minded Englishmen had been calling for mathematical lectures to be held regularly in London, to aid in the training of sailors and navigators. It didn't come to pass, however, until England had seen its ships doing battle with Spanish forces just off the coast. The armada was defeated, of course—and the importance of a strong navy (and maritime prowess in general) was hammered home. This, in turn, depended on scientific knowledge: Navigators needed to understand mapping systems and the shape of the globe, and they had to calculate and plot routes, skills that were rooted in arithmetic and geometry. Astronomy played a key role as well, since the stars were the primary guideposts for the seaborne traveler. In November 1588—only months after the defeat of the armada—a lectureship covering these subjects was established, along with a detailed plan of action in case a hostile fleet, Spanish or otherwise, were to make its way up the Thames in the future. The annual lecture was delivered in the Staplers' Chapel in Leadenhall, in the commercial heart of London, and was open to the general public. The text of the first of these lectures, delivered by an instructor named Thomas Hood, has survived, and, together with his published books, gives us some insight into his teaching strategy: One must begin with arithmetic, geometry, and basic astronomy; when the student has mastered these, he can move on to the use of maps and various instruments, and tackle practical problems in surveying and navigation. Because theoretical aspects of astronomy were not a primary concern, we don't know what Hood thought of the Copernican theory—but we know that he routinely used Copernicus's figures and calculations. His students, as Francis Johnson notes, “had little scholarly training but were inflamed with a passionate desire for useful knowledge.”

THE CLEARINGHOUSE

What started as a lecture series eventually became a college. In the final years of the sixteenth century, London had, for the first time, a school dedicated almost exclusively to what we would now call science. Founded in 1597, Gresham College was named for its founder, a prominent merchant named Sir Thomas Gresham. Students at Gresham learned practical skills associated with navigation, commerce, and medicine. Astronomy and geometry figured prominently in the curriculum; one could also study divinity, music, and rhetoric. In the first half of the seventeenth century, the college would become, as Johnson puts it, “a general clearinghouse for information concerning the latest scientific discoveries.”

The learned men who made up the Gresham faculty had known one another for years, in some cases decades, before the founding of the college. They also had close ties to the city's craftsmen and instrument makers. (I suspect that the college, had it been founded in the twentieth century rather than the end of the sixteenth, would have called itself a “polytechnic institute.”) The college would go on to play a crucial role in the founding of one of the world's first scientific societies: Many of those who met and taught at Gresham would help to establish the Royal Society of London in 1660.

While Hood may have been hesitant to fully support Copernicanism, other members of the faculty at Gresham seem to have been largely committed to the new theory. Allan Chapman notes that “pretty well all the Gresham Astronomy Professors after 1597 were Copernicans: Henry Briggs, Henry Gellibrand, John Greaves, Sir Chrisopher Wren, Robert Hooke, and so on.” Chapman's list gets us a little ahead of ourselves—Christopher Wren lived well into the eighteenth century—but even so, it is intriguing to think of London's aspiring young seamen, in the final years of Elizabeth's reign, pondering whether the sun moved around the Earth or the Earth moved around the sun.

*   *   *

The spirit of inquiry
embodied by Gresham College spilled out beyond its walls; indeed, it seemed to reflect the mind-set of an ever-increasing number of ordinary Londoners. This was enabled, in part, by a sharp rise in literacy: More than a hundred grammar schools had been built in England in the previous half century, and more people could read and write than ever before. The publishing business was booming, with dozens of printers and booksellers at work in the capital (many of them plying their trade from the churchyard beside St. Paul's Cathedral). Those who couldn't buy could borrow: Libraries were becoming common throughout England in the early seventeenth century, though members of the public were able to borrow books from London's Guildhall from the early fifteenth century. As Johnson notes, at least one out of every ten books published in England between 1475 and 1640 dealt with the natural sciences. Some of these volumes were written by the scientists themselves, others by what we would now call science popularizers; and then, as today, they varied widely in quality. The influence of these books, Johnson says, “was not confined to scholars, or to those who had studied at the universities, but extended throughout all literate classes.” (We will take a closer look at the grammar schools and also the world of books and publishing in the next chapter.) Along with books, customers could pick up newssheets, treatises on medicine and surgery, and mathematical instruments that came with booklets explaining their use. Almanacs were in particularly high demand, and one gets a sense of their popularity from a scene in
A Midsummer Night's Dream
: The “mechanicals” (craftsmen) are planning a performance of the play
Pyramus and Thisbe
; because the lovers meet by moonlight, they want to know if the moon will be shining on the night of their performance. Bottom demands, “A calendar, a calendar! Look in the almanac; find out moonshine, find out moonshine!” (3.1.49–50).

INSTRUMENTS OF KNOWLEDGE

Even though, as mentioned, the word “science” had not yet acquired its current meaning, many Londoners were in fact earning their living from scientific pursuits. There were mathematicians and doctors, botanists and apothecaries, builders and inventors. They worked in hospitals, laboratories, and family-run workshops. Craftsmen worked with metal, wood, and ivory; they built, among other devices, theodolites for surveyors; rangefinders and gunsights for artillery officers; astrolabes, quadrants, cross-staffs, and backstaffs for navigators; and drawing instruments for a multitude of professions.

This burst of activity was enabled, in part, by the capital's unique position: Though located in the Continent's northwest corner, London was effectively at its crossroads. To live in the English capital at the close of the sixteenth century was to bear witness to an endless parade of new peoples, new inventions, and, perhaps most significantly, new ideas. As Deborah Harkness puts it in her wonderful book
The Jewel House
(2007): “Every ship that put in at a London dock might contain new materials that had to be classified and understood, each new book rolling off the presses at St. Paul's could contain a radical idea about the natural world, and the experiments undertaken in London had, at any moment, the potential to bring long-held beliefs into question.” Novelty was everywhere in the bustling city; indeed, there was an
appetite for the new
. On every corner, one might stumble across some peculiar wonder from a far-off land: an ostrich egg, money from China, a canoe from Lappland, a stuffed, two-headed snake. In the quest for knowledge, one might still turn to the words of ancient philosophers—but their limitations were becoming increasingly obvious. Londoners by this time were creating
new
knowledge—and indeed much of what they were finding was either at odds with what the ancient writers had described, or was simply too novel to have been known to them. It is hardly surprising that the very word “news” dates from this period.

Not only literacy but also numeracy was on the rise. Private tutors taught mathematics to the city's merchants and their apprentices; some instructors offered room and board to their pupils. An educator named Humphrey Baker boasted that he taught “after a more plain manner than has heretofore been usually taught by any man within this City.” One of his favorite tools was the now ubiquitous “math word-problem.” In his book
The Well Spryng of Sciences
(1562), Baker posed this problem to his readers:

Three merchants have formed a company. The first invested I know not how much, the second put in 20 pieces of cloth, and the third had invested £500. So at the end of their business, their gains amounted to £1000, whereof the first man ought to have £350, and the second must have £400. Now I demand: how much did the first man invest, and how much were the 20 pieces of cloth [worth]?

A merchant could easily face a variation of a problem such as this, and lessons from teachers like Baker gave some measure of preparation. (We also have here the forerunner of all those vexing exam questions that cause so much grief for students to this day—“a train leaves Chicago heading east at eighty miles per hour, while at the same time a train leaves New York heading west.…”) Baker also saw to it that his pupils could use instruments such as the quadrant, square, staff, and astrolabe—devices crucial in surveying, navigation, and astronomy. The shops of instrument makers—English born, and also French and Flemish—lined the busy shopping streets above the Strand and Fleet Street in the heart of London. While many of these devices were imported from the Continent, a growing number of local instrument makers were crafting equally fine products. “By the end of Elizabeth's reign,” writes Harkness, “Londoners had fully embraced mathematical instruments, and many of her citizens had achieved levels of mathematical literacy that previous generations would not have dreamed possible.”

At least some of these instrument makers knew about Copernicanism and took the new theory into account when developing their instruments. One of these local craftsmen, John Blagrave, designed a new astrolabe in 1596 in accordance with the Copernican model and, in a book describing its operation, made it clear that he accepted the theory as more than a mathematical convenience. In fact, his support for the heliocentric model was set right on the book's title page, which noted an approach in which “… agreeable to the hypothesis of Nicolaus Copernicus, the starry firmament is appointed perpetually fixed, and the earth and his horizons continually moving from west toward the east once about every 24 hours.…” In traditional astrolabes, the horizon was represented by a fixed metal plate, while the brightest stars were inscribed (actually pierced as small holes) on a movable plate that rotated relative to the main plate. In Blagrave's astrolabe, however, it is the Earth—that is, the observer's horizon—that moves, while the stars remain fixed. As Johnson notes, aside from his countryman Thomas Digges, Blagrave “probably did more than any other sixteenth-century Englishman to disseminate an intelligent knowledge of the Copernican theory.” The new cosmos, once just an abstract idea, could now be held in one's hands. And it wasn't just Blagrave. Nicolas Hill, a natural philosopher active at the same time, was convinced of the Earth's rotation and of the Copernican theory, and developed a version of the atomic theory. Mark Ridley, a doctor, was similarly attracted to the Copernican view, and published a treatise on magnetism. (Mind you, scientists on the Continent continued to lead the way: In 1551, Gerard Mercator had built the first celestial globe based on Copernicus's data. And it is worth noting that John Dee had worked with Mercator at the time he was working on his globe.)