The Science of Shakespeare (3 page)

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The book on my right
is a bit larger, measuring about nine-by-thirteen inches; it must weigh three or four pounds. Its cover, like that of its companion, is made from wood, this time covered in dark brown leather. The binding is too good to be original; it must have been re-bound a century or two after its pages first came off the press. Someone has also applied a gold-leaf gilt to the edges; the book still gleams. The writing on the spine is crystal clear, naming both the author and the printers:

SHAKESPEARE

I. JAGGARD

AND

E. BLOUNT

1623

Just inside the cover, a previous owner had pasted a newspaper article from November 11, 1848, on “The Folios of Shakespeare.” This collection of thirty-six of Shakespeare's most important plays went through multiple editions, but it is the first one—the famous First Folio of 1623—that gets pride of place in libraries and museums around the world. The title page will look familiar to any student of Shakespeare. And—a refreshing change from Copernicus—it's in English:

MR. WILLIAM

SHAKESPEARES

COMEDIES,

HISTORIES, &

TRAGEDIES.

Published according to the True Originall Copies.

Don't be alarmed by the spelling: Scholars of early modern English assure us that spellings had not yet been standardized, and Shakespeare himself was known to mix it up even when signing his own name.
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Just below is the familiar black-and-white engraving by Martin Droeshout—one of only two known depictions of the playwright that have a fighting chance of being accurate likenesses (see
figure 0.2
). (The other is the funerary monument in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, which dates from sometime between the playwright's death, in 1616, and the publication of the First Folio, seven years later.)

Fig. 0.2
The frontispiece from Shakespeare's First Folio, a collection of thirty-six of his plays, compiled by his colleagues John Heminges and Henry Condell. It was published in 1623, seven years after the playwright's death.
The Bridgeman Art Library, London

An introductory note from Shakespeare's friend and fellow playwright, Ben Jonson, asks the reader not to spend too much time staring at the portrait; it is Shakespeare's words that will bring him immortality. The note urges us to “looke Not on his Picture, but his Booke.”

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Is there any connection
between these two books? Did Shakespeare know about Copernicus's revolutionary idea? Did he care? History is so much clearer in hindsight: Looking back after four centuries, it's obvious
to us
that Shakespeare lived in a remarkable time. The medieval world—a world of magic, astrology, witchcraft, and superstition of all kinds—was just beginning to give way to more modern ways of thinking. Shakespeare and Galileo were born in the same year, and new ideas about the human body, the Earth, and the universe at large were just starting to transform Western thought. The first modern anatomy book, by the Flemish-born physician Andreas Vesalius, was published in 1543, the same year as
De revolutionibus
. Is it possible that Shakespeare was unaware of these developments—or that he was vaguely conscious of them, but uninterested?

For some literary figures, the impact of this new picture of the world is obvious: In a famous passage from
An Anatomy of the World
(1611), John Donne laments that “the new philosophy calls all in doubt.… The sun is lost, and th'earth, and no man's wit / Can well direct him where to look for it.” A half century later, John Milton would devote lengthy passages in
Paradise Lost
to a debate over the structure of the cosmos; indeed, he refers to Galileo three times in the poem (once by name; the astronomer is the only living figure to warrant such a mention). Milton is even said to have met the Italian scientist in person, when Galileo was in his final years, under house arrest, in his villa outside Florence. By Milton's time, as one scholar puts it, the Copernican system was “a scientific force with which all thinking men had to reckon.” But Milton went to Cambridge, and Donne studied at
both
Oxford and Cambridge. Shakespeare flourished a little bit earlier, and had only the benefit of his local grammar school; as Jonson famously quipped, his colleague had only “small Latin and less Greek.”

The traditional view is that Shakespeare was unconscious, or barely conscious, of the “new philosophy.” It's not that Shakespeare scholars, or historians of early modern science, have neglected to look at possible connections between Shakespeare's works and the ideas and discoveries that mark what we now call the Scientific Revolution: They've looked, and concluded—wrongly, I believe—that no such connections exist. As recently as 2005, John Cartwright and Brian Baker, in
Literature and Science: Social Impact and Interaction
, find that “… the greatest poet of the age, William Shakespeare, shows little awareness or interest in the achievements or concerns of the astronomers.” A few years earlier, William Burns declared in
The Scientific Revolution: An Encyclopedia
(2001) that “William Shakespeare … took almost no interest in science.” Thomas McAlindon, meanwhile, believes that Shakespeare, in spite of being deeply concerned with cosmological matters, showed “no sign of [the Copernican] revolution” in his plays. Why is it so easy to read Shakespeare as a wholly prescientific figure? One reason is that Shakespeare's plays are littered with references to the medieval worldview. He frequently mentions the stars and the heavens, typically in a manner consistent with the thinking of the ancient Greek astronomer Ptolemy, dead for fourteen centuries. Shakespeare couldn't have known much about the new way of thinking, the theory goes, because ideas circulated slowly in those days, and Copernicanism took many decades to reach England, which at any rate was an intellectual backwater. Moreover, Copernicus's novel conception of the cosmos didn't really gain intellectual currency until Galileo's telescopic observations lent it some measure of observational support—and that came only in 1610, just as Shakespeare was packing his bags for a well-earned retirement in his hometown of Stratford.

But perhaps we shouldn't be so hasty. First of all, while acceptance of the Copernican theory came slowly, finding pockets of enthusiasm in a handful of university towns in central Europe, the theory did attract a number of early adherents in England, where a spirit of intellectual freedom and rational inquiry was in the air (arguably nurtured by the Protestant national faith, in contrast to the more repressive atmosphere in Catholic Europe).
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Copernicus's groundbreaking book had been published in 1543, twenty-one years before Shakespeare's birth; by 1556 it was already mentioned favorably in an English book, Robert Recorde's
The Castle of Knowledge
. The first full account of the theory by an Englishman came from astronomer Thomas Digges in 1576 (when Shakespeare was twelve). Digges's book included a diagram of the solar system in which the stars were seen to extend outward without limit, a vision of an infinite cosmos that surpassed even Copernicus in its daring.

As we will see, Shakespeare had multiple connections to the Digges family. (For a time he and Digges's son, Leonard, lived less than three blocks apart in their north London neighborhood. Leonard, a poet, was an early Shakespeare “fan” who contributed an introductory verse at the start of the First Folio.) Shakespeare may have encountered England's other great men of science of the day, from Thomas Harriot to Queen Elizabeth's own “science advisor,” John Dee—the man often put forward as the model for Prospero in
The Tempest
. And then there was the Italian philosopher and mystic Giordano Bruno, who traveled to England in the 1580s, lecturing on Copernicanism and other provocative notions. Shakespeare is unlikely to have met Bruno, but may well have encountered his ideas.

Moreover, Shakespeare could have seen at least some of the evidence for the “new astronomy” with his own eyes, as hinted at in the fictionalized prologue. In November 1572, a bright new star lit up the night sky, appearing in the constellation Cassiopeia. (Today we know such an event as a supernova, the explosive death of a massive star.) It was so bright that for several months it outshone even Venus, making it the brightest object in the sky apart from the sun and the moon. (Indeed, it could be spotted even in daylight.) It was observed by Digges in England, and watched even more closely in Denmark by astronomer Tycho Brahe, whose published account of the new star was making waves even before the object had faded from view. The strange and wonderful apparition—today we call it simply “Tycho's star”—dealt a shattering blow to the cosmology of the ancients, refuting the idea of immutable heavenly spheres.

Amazingly, another new star blazed forth thirty-two years later, in 1604, and was studied by the German mathematician Johannes Kepler.
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Shakespeare was forty, and at the height of his career, when Kepler's star illuminated the skies of Europe. Even if he somehow failed to see Tycho's star, he could not have missed Kepler's. It was a dazzling sight, one that could not be ignored. In fact, Shakespeare lived during a remarkably eventful period in terms of celestial drama: A dazzling comet in 1577 displayed a tail stretching one-eighth of the way across the sky, and two more comets appeared in 1582 and 1607; and a solar eclipse darkened the skies over Europe in the autumn of 1605. There were ample reasons for taking an interest in cosmic happenings.

We should also note that England, and in particular London, was hardly a backwater. The city was teeming with tradesmen, merchants, and sailors who took a keen interest in what we would now call “science,” and in particular in the latest technological advances, especially those connected to the art of navigation. The curriculum at Gresham College in London, founded in 1597, included astronomy, geometry, and medicine. Francis Bacon's groundbreaking work,
The Advancement of Learning
, championing the importance of observation and empirical knowledge, was published in 1605, around the time Shakespeare was working on
King Lear
. And the bold ideas penned by the French statesman and essayist Michel de Montaigne had appeared in English translation two years earlier. (Although Shakespeare scholars routinely discuss Montaigne's influence on the playwright—several of the plays contain passages lifted almost verbatim from the
Essays
—the fact that Montaigne specifically mentions the Copernican theory is often overlooked.)

But a reassessment may finally be at hand. In the last few years, a handful of scholars have begun to look more closely at Shakespeare's interest in the scientific discoveries of his time—asking what he knew, when he knew it, and how that knowledge might be reflected in his work. Scott Maisano at the University of Massachusetts–Boston, for example, has written extensively on the evidence for Shakespeare's awareness of the science of his day, and for its influence on his plays, especially the late romances. Other scholars, like John Pitcher and Jonathan Bate, both at Oxford, have acknowledged Shakespeare's interest in contemporary science, discussing it in popular biographies and in scholarly editions of the plays. One result of this reassessment is that it allows for a familiar passage to be read in a new light. Consider Ulysses's speech in
Troilus and Cressida
, in which he refers to “the glorious planet Sol / In noble eminence enthroned and sphered…” (1.3.89–90). The reference to “spheres” sounds at first like straight-ahead medieval cosmology, including the reference to the sun as a “planet.” In the 1940s, this passage served as the backbone for E. M. W. Tillyard's thesis that Shakespeare's time ought to be seen as medieval rather than modern, a case he argued in his influential book
The Elizabethan World Picture
. Some current scholars continue to follow in Tillyard's footsteps; in the Arden edition, David Bevington tags the line simply as “a Ptolemaic conception.” But as Bate points out, by emphasizing the role of the sun, the passage “may hint at the new heliocentric astronomy.” James Shapiro, meanwhile, concedes that Shakespeare knew that Ptolemaic science “was already discredited by the Copernican revolution.”

And Shakespeare wasn't quite ready to retire in 1610; he had a few years to go, and would produce five more plays in that time (two on his own, including
The Tempest
, and three more in collaboration with colleagues). It is from this period that we find
Cymbeline
—and an even more tantalizing hint that the playwright may have been conscious of the new cosmology. This admittedly weird play, combining elements of ancient Britain and ancient Rome, seems to have been written in 1610—just late enough that Shakespeare could have read Galileo's account of his telescopic discoveries, published in the spring of that year. Both Maisano and Pitcher have written in support of this hypothesis. “Jupiter” himself appears near the end of the play, while a stage direction calls for four ghosts to dance in a circle; could this be an allusion to the planet's four newly discovered moons, described by Galileo?