The Science of Shakespeare (19 page)

Fig. 5.2
Thomas Harriot's drawing of the full moon, from the summer of 1610. Drawn with telescopic aid, the sketch shows the relative sizes and locations of various lunar features (if not their topography) more accurately than those of Galileo (compare with Fig. 9.1).
Lord Egremont

Harriot seems to have been every bit as well connected as John Dee. Indeed, historians suspect that all of the notable English philosopher-scientists we've looked at so far would have likely known each other. Harriot certainly knew Dee; in his diary, Dee mentions two visits by Harriot in the early 1590s. And since Dee was Digges's teacher, it is likely that Digges knew Harriot as well. Harriot likely also knew Gilbert, and may even have met with Bruno at some point during the Italian's stay in the south of England. (We know that Bruno's books were in Northumberland's library.) “There can be no question,” writes Johnson, “that Harriot and his group of astronomers in England were not only fully abreast of all the latest developments in their science, but were also carrying on independent researches of their own along similar lines.” We might also note that Northumberland's younger brother, Sir Charles Percy, was a patron of the arts and a Shakespeare fan; he once commissioned a production of
Richard II
from Shakespeare's acting company. There is no evidence that Shakespeare ever met Harriot himself, although it is certainly possible, and it seems likely that the playwright would have at least heard of his work. When I spoke with Stephen Greenblatt, he weighed in on the question of who knew whom in this tightly knit world: Greenblatt notes that Raleigh and Harriot were both said to have had connections with Shakespeare's colleague Christopher Marlowe; and this group “could well have intersected with Shakespeare himself.” (We will look at Marlowe in more detail in Chapter 14.) Greenblatt has also identified a link (albeit a tenuous one) connecting Shakespeare and Bruno: In
Will in the World
, he notes that Shakespeare's friend, the printer Richard Field, had served as an apprentice to Thomas Vautrollier, who had published Bruno's books. During our interview, he acknowledged that “there is a possibility that Shakespeare could have encountered Bruno,” although it is somewhat of a long shot.

Harriot, like Bruno, seems to have been a Copernican, and his telescopic observations would certainly have led him in that direction even if he had not been previously inclined toward the new astronomy. And like Bruno, he endorsed the plurality of worlds as well as the atomic theory of matter first proposed by the Greek philosophers. Although both theories could be considered dangerous, the atomic theory was, at the time, certainly the more repugnant of the two, having long been associated with irreligion and atheism. As with Dee, accusations of atheism haunted Harriot, especially in his later life. Perhaps in hesitating to publicize his work he was simply thinking of his own safety (or at least his peace of mind). As Allan Chapman puts it, Harriot “was quite happy to accumulate 35 years' worth of work, and publish nothing.… One suspects that, like Copernicus, he found controversy to be distasteful.”

Harriot's work in mathematics had more of an impact than his astronomical work. He wrote a groundbreaking book on algebra, known as the
Artis analyticae praxis
(
The Application of the Analytic Art
), or the
Praxis
for short, published a decade after his death. In the
Praxis
, Harriot explained how to solve polynomial equations, conceived of negative numbers, and introduced the “greater than” and “less than” algebraic symbols (
>
and
<
), as well as the modern symbol for “square root” (
). He studied the parabolic paths of projectiles and determined the densities of numerous materials. He investigated optics, and understood the principles behind the rainbow. And he independently discovered what we now call Snell's Law governing the refraction of light (doing so a full twenty years before the Dutch scientist for whom it is named).

Matters of state held little interest for Harriot, but he nonetheless got swept up in the political turmoil of the early seventeenth century. His second patron, Northumberland, was linked to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. A distant relative of Northumberland's, Thomas Percy, had been one of the five conspirators in the failed plot to blow up Parliament; Northumberland, considered guilty by association, spent seventeen years in prison. Harriot, too, was jailed, but was released after a few weeks. (His first patron, Raleigh, was not so lucky. Imprisoned several times in the Tower of London for a variety of alleged crimes, he was finally beheaded for treason in 1618.) When not gazing skyward from the grounds of Syon House, Harriot could be found at another of Northumberland's homes, located on Threadneedle Street in the heart of London. It was here that he died in 1621.

Even though he was a keen observer of the heavens and one of the most important mathematicians and experimental scientists of his day, Thomas Harriot remains an obscure figure. Part of the reason is that Harriot, unlike his better-known contemporaries, published very little; only the
Briefe and True Report
appeared in his lifetime. (The vast majority of his scientific work—including his astronomical observations—exists only in manuscript form.) A plaque honoring Harriot's scientific achievements was finally unveiled on the grounds of Syon House in 2009, during the International Year of Astronomy (honoring the four hundredth anniversary of the modern telescope). An older memorial plaque had been placed near Harriot's grave in the parish church of St. Christopher le Stocks in London, not far from the home on Threadneedle Street; when the church was demolished to make way for an expansion of the Bank of England in 1781, the inscription was copied onto a new plaque, set on a wall within the bank, where it can be found today—or rather, where it
can't easily
be found; in quintessential British fashion, the plaque is mounted in a hallway that is not normally open to the public.

Why was Harriot so reluctant to publish? Surely he recognized the novelty of the sights he was seeing through his telescope—and yet he seemed perfectly content to keep them to himself, or to share them with only a handful of colleagues. Allan Chapman notes that, although there was nothing particularly dangerous about the study or practice of astronomy in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, Harriot may simply have sought to avoid unnecessary risks. His secrecy may reflect “a reluctance to put his head above the parapet in dangerous times.” Besides, there was nothing to gain by going public with his discoveries. Unlike Galileo, Chapman notes, Harriot did not desire fame; thanks to his well-heeled patrons, he already had everything he needed. “A peaceful and intellectually productive life,” Chapman suggests, “was best enjoyed as a private gentleman, not as a public figure.”

WHITHER THE “TUDOR TELESCOPE”?

Just how good were telescopes in England in the sixteenth century, and the early years of the seventeenth? As we've seen, they almost certainly underwent a significant evolution over this time period, from the simple perspective tube or trunk purportedly used by Leonard Digges in the 1550s, to the device taken by Harriot to Virginia in the 1580s, to the more sophisticated device that Harriot was able to use to observe the moon and other celestial objects beginning in 1609. The latter development may have come just as word was arriving from Holland of a new-and-improved telescope, and of course it was just such a device, further refined by Galileo, that would herald the dawn of modern astronomy in the months that followed.

Fig. 5.3
A matter of perspective: Viewed from a sharp angle, a hidden image—of a human skull—appears at the bottom of Hans Holbein the Younger's painting,
The Ambassadors
. A reference to “perspectives” in Shakespeare's
Richard II
may refer to such illusions.
The Bridgeman Art Library, London

What, if anything, did Shakespeare have to say about these early optical devices? We may find a clue in an intriguing passage from
Richard II
(as it happens, the play once commissioned by the brother of Harriot's patron). The play was likely written in 1594–95, and was first published in 1597. In act 2, one of the king's supporter's, Sir John Bushy, speaks metaphorically of the task of reading a person's emotions (in this case, the Queen's); he says it's like gazing at an object by means of a “perspective”:

For sorrow's eye, glazed with blinding tears,

Divides one thing entire to many objects,

Like perspectives which, rightly gaz'd upon,

Show nothing but confusion; eyed awry,

Distinguish form.

(2.2.16–20)

This may plausibly allude to a “perspective glass” of some kind, as David Levy argues in his book
The Sky in Early Modern English Literature
(2011). But most Shakespeare editors are skeptical. Anthony Dawson and Paul Yachnin, in the Oxford edition, say that Bushy is playing on two different meanings of the word “perspective”: As an optical device, it can mean “a glass instrument whose multi-prism lenses show the viewer multiple images of an object”; but it can also refer to a particular kind of painting or drawing in which a hidden, secondary image appears only when the work is viewed from an oblique angle. The most famous of these, as Dawson and Yachnin note, is Hans Holbein the Younger's
The Ambassadors
, dating from 1533 (see
figure 5.3
): At first glance, it is a portrait of two accomplished young men; when viewed from a sharp angle, however, a hidden image appears—the technique is called “anamorphosis”—and we see a skull at the bottom of the canvas, “a stealthy reminder of mortality.” (We might note that the German-born Holbein was living in England at the time, where he also painted iconic portraits of Henry VIII and members of his court.) Peter Ure, in the Arden edition, notes both of these possible allusions but believes that Bushy is more likely referencing the kind of hidden image typified by Holbein's painting. He also offers an additional word of caution, noting that neither of these two meanings “must be confused with the
perspective
(or “prospective”)
glass
, a kind of magic crystal which could be used to look into the distance or the future.” Things are not looking so good for the Tudor telescope
or
the Tudor time machine!

The case for this passage from
Richard II
being an allusion to a special kind of painting may be bolstered by a similar passage from
Antony and Cleopatra
, which seems more clear-cut: The queen is describing her lover's character; his nature, it seems, depends on one's perspective: “Though he be painted one way like a Gorgon, / The other way's a Mars” (2.5.116–17). The footnote in the Arden edition explains: “The allusion is to a ‘perspective' picture of a kind which was popular in Shakespeare's time. They were painted on a furrowed surface in such a way that if looked at from the left they showed one portrait and from the right they showed another. Viewed straight from the front they appeared confused.… Cleopatra says that, seen from one point of view, Antony appears like the Gorgon Medusa (whose head was crowned with snakes and whose gaze turned men to stone), but seen from the other he looks like the god of war.” Telescopes aside, Shakespeare seems to have been well versed in the methods of contemporary painters.