The Science of Shakespeare

by Dan Falk

  A pause.

  “I think that’s it!” William points to a bright star, eastward from the pole, just visible now that the clouds have passed. It stands just to the left of the unmistakable “M” of Cassiopeia.

  The father has to admit there is something there. Whatever it is, it’s even brighter than Jupiter. Brighter even than Venus had been that morning, as far as he could recall.

  “Father—what does it mean?”

  “I don’t know, son. And I don’t know that it really is what it appears to be. It could just as well be the devil’s work as the Lord’s. And now we really must carry on, or supper will be cold. Not to mention my fingers.”

  “I’m coming, Father.” But the boy lingers for one last look as his father heads off down the street. “It’s beautiful,” he says, and then runs to catch up. “I don’t think it’s a comet, Father, because comets have tails.”

  “More nonsense from Master Jenkins? Well, cats have tails too, but Mrs. Olden’s cat doesn’t have one, and it’s still a cat.”

  The boy pauses, seemingly deep in thought. “Why doesn’t Mrs. Olden’s cat have a tail?”

  “They say Mr. Olden’s dog bit it off,” his father replies.

  “Well, maybe a dog bit off the new star’s tail,” the boy offers.

  “That’s quite an imagination you have, son. And how many dogs are there in the sky, William?”

  Another pause—and then a wide smile. “Two, Father! You showed them to me last winter—the big dog and the little dog!”

  The father laughs. “You do have quite a wit, don’t you, son? Now say their names in Latin, please.”

  “Oh, Father! Canis … Canis Major and Canis Minor.”

  “Very good, son. By Jove, I swear you’ll make a fine lawyer one day.”

  Introduction

  “The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling

  Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven…”

  I’m sitting in a large, airy room on the ground floor of the Houghton Library, a small, elegant neoclassical building in the shadows of Harvard University’s gargantuan Widener Library. The semester is winding down, and there are only eight or nine people in the room, leafing through dusty books or clicking away on their laptops. Portraits of forgotten scholars peer down at us, while a giant clock with gold hands looms above the doorway. As a gloomy drizzle falls outside, I stare at two books on the table in front of me.

  They’re both old—four centuries, give or take—though the one on the left had an eighty-year head start. I gently pick up the first book. Its pale beige cover is made from a pig’s skin stretched over wood, and may be nearly as old as the pages themselves. (Back then, customers who bought a “book” were actually buying a bundle of pages from the bookseller; one could then pay a bookbinder to put it all together in an attractive package.) Scenes from the Bible, barely discernible, have been pressed onto the front and back covers; the process was called “blind stamping,” the librarian tells me. On the spine, the author’s name has been nearly obliterated with the passage of time.

  Two slim metal clasps, probably brass, hold the covers shut. I gently release them, and lift the front cover. The pages are stiff and warped, as though they had been damp at one time—who knows how many years ago—and then left to dry. A blank inside page has a few scribbles from a previous owner, as well as a sticker indicating the name of the man—a graduate of the class of 1922—who donated the book to Harvard. Then I come to the title page. Here the author’s name is very legible indeed—though the typesetter apparently had trouble fitting it all on one line:

  NICOLAI CO-

  PERNICI TORINENSIS

  DE REVOLUTIONIBUS ORBI-

  um coeleſtium, Libri VI.

  It’s Latin, of course. And in those days, an “s” looked like an “f,” so it’s actually “coelestium”—“celestial,” or, perhaps more accurately, “heavenly.” The author’s name, in the genitive, is given matter-of-factly as Nicolaus Copernicus of Toruń. The full title is On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, in Six Books, often shortened to On the Revolutions or De revolutionibus, or even “De rev”; I figure a tiny bit of Latin won’t hurt us, so I’ll stick to calling it De revolutionibus. However we label it, this is the book that turned the universe inside out. At the bottom of the page is the publisher’s name (Johannes Petreius), the city where the book was printed (Nuremberg), and the year (1543):

  Norimbergae apud Ioh. Petreium,

  Anno M. D. XLIII.

  Each page makes a peculiarly satisfying sound as it is turned. I soon come to Copernicus’s famous diagram, located on page 10 verso (meaning “left-hand page”), nestled between two chunks of Latin text (see figure 0.1). There are more than 140 other diagrams in the book, most of them very technical and now of interest only to historians of science—but this one has become iconic. It may be the most important diagram in the history of Western thought.

  Fig. 0.1 One of the most important diagrams in the history of Western thought: Copernicus’s illustration of a sun-centered universe, from De revolutionibus (On the Revolutions), published in 1543. Image Select/Art Resource, NY

  The diagram shows a series of concentric circles; at their center is a very small circle with a dot in the middle, labeled “Sol.” (My rudimentary Latin is enough to know that “sol” is “sun.”) The larger circles mark the paths of the planets as they revolve around the sun in their orbits. And there we are: the third rock from the sun, a mere dot, labeled “Terra”—Earth. Circling this diminutive dot is another tiny object, a little crescent moon. It is a diagram that I had drawn countless times as a nerdy, science-minded kid,* but you don’t get any brownie points for being the hundred thousandth child to do so. You do get credit for being the person who came up with the picture in the first place.

  * * *

  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.* 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 t
oo 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.”

  * * *

  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).* 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.* 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?