The Science of Shakespeare (20 page)

There are further references to a “glass”—for example, in
Macbeth
. In act 4, scene 1, the witches present Macbeth with “a show of eight kings”; as the stage direction indicates, the last of them enters “with a glass in his hand.” In the New Cambridge edition, A. R. Braunmuller interprets “glass” as a “magic crystal permitting visions of the future … not a looking-glass or a mirror.” The glass's magical properties are the key; there is, once again, little evidence that Shakespeare was referring to a telescope-like device. One finds a similar reference to a “perspective” in act 3, scene 4 of Ben Jonson's
The Alchemist
, and the scholarly verdict is much the same: As Douglas Brown sees it, the reference is to “a specially devised optical instrument, or, perhaps primarily, a design constructed to produce remarkable effects.” That seems to cover nearly all the bases: These Elizabethan writers may have been referring to just about anything one might be able to achieve with a specially crafted glass, or to anything that mimics such a change in perspective,
except for
producing a magnified view of distant objects.

So why weren't inquisitive Tudor tinkerers building and using telescopes? Such devices would be only as good as their lenses; but this by itself may not have been a limiting factor, since high-quality spectacles—that is, reading glasses—had been common since the fifteenth century (as one can surmise from portraits dating from that period), as had simple magnifying glasses. Surely an inquisitive young spectacle maker must have played with various arrangements of lenses; indeed, it's hard to imagine a bored optician
not
fiddling with a variety of lenses in such a manner. Richard Dunn notes that “by the late sixteenth century many people were experimenting with lenses and mirrors and thinking about their potential.” The idea of a telescope seems to have been “in the air,” so to speak, and perhaps it was inevitable that someone would invent a device similar in principle to a modern telescope before too long—and yet there seems to have been only halting progress toward such a device over a period of many decades.

As we've seen, the strongest claim comes from Thomas Digges, who says that his father, Leonard, had used a sophisticated telescope-like instrument in the 1550s, one that could reveal minute details of people and objects at a great distance from the observer. For those who take Thomas's story at face value, it offers the possibility, as we have seen, that it was a look through one of his father's instruments that set Digges on the path toward envisioning an infinite cosmos. But this is speculation—and recall that Leonard died when Thomas was thirteen. His account may well be based on fading recollections of his father's stories, or the stories of others who knew him, and may be little more than embellished family folklore. Intriguingly, however, we do have an additional secondhand account, which happens to come from Bourne, the man behind the submarine designs. Sometime after Thomas Digges published his description of his father's experiments, Bourne wrote a letter to William Cecil, Elizabeth's chief advisor, assuring him that Digges's optical device, and its reported capabilities, were real: A certain kind of “looking glasse,” he wrote, could be used to see “things of a marvellous largeness in a manner incredible to bee believed of the common people.” He added that “those things that Mr Thomas Digges hathe written that his father hathe done, may be accomplished very well, withowte any dowte of the matter.…” And John Dee, as we've seen, had written of the military value of such a device.

It's a classic conundrum for historians: A smattering of enthusiastic written accounts for an early telescope-like device—but no physical evidence, and no evidence that others adopted Digges's design. (If it was so good, why wasn't it widely copied?) Among twentieth-century historians, Francis Johnson was probably the strongest proponent of the Diggeses, suggesting that it “seems entirely probable” that Thomas Digges had access to one of his father's early telescopes and “may have used them for examining the heavens.” But more recent voices are more cautious. David Levy, an astronomer who has also written extensively on the history of the field, says that we “cannot conclude … that telescopes were invented in England,” even if various people had tinkered with an early form of such a device. Allan Chapman, who specializes in the history of English astronomy, is even more doubtful about the existence of a Tudor telescope decades before the telescope's “official” invention, circa 1609. He notes, for example, that Harriot showed the Native Americans “strange sights” with his optical devices, but makes no mention of achieving a
magnified
view. “I simply do not believe that the historical evidence for a Tudor telescope stands up to detailed scrutiny,” he concludes. (We will return to this issue in Chapter 8, when we consider a rather bold claim regarding Shakespeare and Elizabethan telescopy.)

*   *   *

None of the scientific developments
that we've been looking at in this chapter were revolutionary on their own. Acceptance of the Copernican system, as we've seen, came slowly. And while Bacon's first writings came during this period, his major works still lay a few years off. William Harvey's treatise on the circulation of the blood—a crucial breakthrough—would come only in 1628. And yet these first stirrings of science in England, and in London in particular, laid the groundwork for what was to come. “There would have been no Scientific Revolution in England without the intellectual vitality present in Elizabethan London,” writes Deborah Harkness, “for she provided later scientists with its foundation: the skilled labor, tools, techniques, and empirical insights that were necessary to shift the study of nature out of the library and into the laboratory.” We find, if not science in the modern sense, at least “the seeds of modern scientific thought,” as Freyja Cox Jensen puts it. Mordechai Feingold calls the period between 1560 and 1640—which happens to encompass Shakespeare's life—the “prologue of modern science”; the disciplines that were beginning to take shape during those years would, by the second half of the seventeenth century, evolve into highly specialized fields of study. “Prologue,” “seeds,” “foundation”: Whichever word we apply to this incubation period, we are witnessing the beginning of a profound and far-reaching change.

We have taken a broad look at the growth of English science, with a focus on astronomy in particular; and along the way we have met some of the great minds at work in Oxford, Cambridge, and London in the second half of the sixteenth century. Now let us turn our attention to a provincial town in Warwickshire, and a very different kind of genius.

 

6.     “Who is it that can tell me who I am?”

A BRIEF HISTORY OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

“Right, shall we start walking then?”

The guide is Barbara, a middle-aged woman with gold hair and boundless energy. She corrals the dozen or so tourists who have signed up for the town's most popular Shakespeare walk, and sets off from the meeting place—the Swan Fountain by the River Avon, a hundred yards or so from the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. Either Barbara or one of her colleagues conducts the walk every day, as they have for the past eleven years. I follow the group as we explore the church where the playwright was baptized, and where his bones now rest; the famous Birthplace on Henley Street; the grammar school; and the handful of other locations linked in some way to the town's most famous resident. From time to time we interrupt Barbara to ask questions. The man with the German accent seems to be the most inquisitive, or at least the most persistent. Barbara handles the queries deftly. Sometimes we clog up the sidewalk; we have to be reminded that there are regular Stradfordians here, ordinary men and women, including a large number of pensioners, who are just trying to get their shopping done. They must have mixed feelings about sharing their streets with so many bardolators.

It is 2012, but in our minds it is the late 1500s. Stratford at that time was a provincial market town of some two hundred houses, known for its bustling fairs and for its strategic location on a crossing of the River Avon. The town's name, as Barbara points out, tells of its origins: “Stratford” comes from the Old English word for street, combined with ford, the name for a river crossing; in other words, this was the site where an ancient Roman road crossed the Avon. In Shakespeare's day, London would have been two days away by horseback; at least four days by foot. Oxford, with its famous university, was about half that distance.

It was around 1550 that a man named John Shakespeare moved to Stratford from the nearby village of Snitterfield. John was a glove maker and also traded in wool and meat. He married a woman named Mary Arden, who came from a wealthy family in Wilmcote, a few miles away. John Shakespeare apparently did quite well for himself. He served on the town council and later became an alderman and, eventually, a bailiff (a position similar to that of mayor). He ended up buying two large properties in the town, including the one on Henley Street, now a mecca for Shakespeare fans from around the world. The two-story wattle-and-daub structure is built around a wooden frame; the sturdy oak beams would have come from the nearby Forest of Arden. The house is not remarkable architecturally, but was large enough to accommodate living quarters as well as a workshop, and would have marked the owner as a man of some means.

Fig. 6.1
Birthplace of genius: The house on Henley Street, in Stratford-upon-Avon, is now a tourist attraction; in the 1550s, it provided John and Mary Shakespeare with space to raise their children, and for a workshop. Author photo

John and Mary Shakespeare had eight children, including two daughters who died in infancy. Childbirth took place in the home, and was inherently risky for both mother and child. Infant mortality was high—perhaps twelve times higher than today. One out of five children died before their first birthday. Only three-quarters would live to the age of ten.
*
William, their third child and first son, was one of the lucky ones. We don't know the exact date of his birth, but we do have the record of his baptism, from Stratford's Holy Trinity Church. The parish records for April 26, 1564, indicate the baptism of “Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspere” (“William, son of John Shakespeare”). Traditionally, a child was baptized three days after its birth, and so we celebrate Shakespeare's birthday on April 23—which, by pleasant coincidence, is also the feast day of Saint George, England's patron saint.

ONE LAND, TWO FAITHS

The England of William's youth was very different from that of his father's childhood. The old Catholic religion had been swept away—in theory, at least—with the reforms begun by Elizabeth's father, Henry VIII, and a new Church of England installed in its place. Shakespeare's father was caught up in this transformation. Stratford's Guild Chapel was already three hundred years old when John Shakespeare arrived in town; its colorful stained-glass windows displayed Catholic saints, and its walls were covered in the iconography of the old faith. John Shakespeare was in charge of renovating the chapel to conform to the new order. Under his supervision, on a midsummer's day in 1571, the windows were smashed and replaced with plain white glass. An earlier effort at “correcting” the chapel's imagery had taken place a few years earlier, when the ornate frescoes on the walls were covered in whitewash. The Bible, too, had been replaced. A scholarly English translation of the scriptures, known as the Geneva Bible, had been published in England in the 1570s; this, along with the Bishop's Bible of 1568 and the Book of Common Prayer, first published in 1549, were the primary religious works that Shakespeare would have encountered in his youth. Echoes of each of these books can be found throughout Shakespeare's plays. (By the end of the playwright's career there was yet another version of the Bible—the King James edition of 1611.) The scriptures, in one form or another, were ubiquitous. By law, the parish minister was required to give religious instruction to local boys, age six and up, on alternate Sundays and on holy days—though basic religious instruction would have already begun in the home.

What kind of faith would John and Mary Shakespeare have instilled in their children? We will probably never know, but biographers aren't shy about guessing. Much has been written on the question of John Shakespeare's possible Catholic sympathies.
*
Perhaps, muses Stephen Greenblatt, the elder Shakespeare may have been of two minds on the issue of faith. He may have wanted “to keep both his options open” so as to cover all the spiritual bases, so to speak. “He had not so much a double life as a double consciousness.” For James Shapiro, the walls of the guild chapel—with the images of the old faith just visible beneath the fresh layers of paint—is an appropriate symbol of the religious confusion that hung over the times: