The Science of Shakespeare

by Dan Falk

  “THIS SACRED CELESTIAL TEMPLE”

  While Tycho had found it impossible to accept the Copernican view, Digges became one of its strongest supporters. A few years after the appearance of the new star, he seemed to have become even more fully immersed in the new astronomy. This time he was writing an appendix for a new edition of an almanac originally published by his father more than twenty years earlier; it would go by the title A Prognostication Everlasting (1576). The appendix was, in fact, a translation of part of De revolutionibus, focusing on its most crucial elements (including Copernicus’s rebuttal to arguments against the possibility of the Earth’s motion). Digges spoke of “that devine Copernicus of more than human talent,” describing him as a “rare wit” who has recently proposed that “the Earth resteth not in the Center of the whole world, but … is carried yearly round about the sun, which like a king in the midst of all reigneth and giveth laws of motion to the rest, spherically dispersing his glorious beams of light through all this sacred celestial temple.” At the same time, the Earth—described as a “little dark star”—is “turning every twenty-four hours round upon its own center, whereby the sun and great globe of fixed stars seem to sway about and turn, albeit indeed they remain fixed.” Digges went on to explain that he included the excerpts from Copernicus in his almanac “so that Englishmen might not be deprived of so noble a theory.”*

  Digges does more than pay homage to Copernicus as a sophisticated natural philosopher. He insists that the author of De revolutionibus intended his description of the solar system to be taken as physical fact and—in spite of Osiander’s disclaimer—not merely as a mathematical hypothesis. Copernicus meant for the heliocentric model to be employed not only “as Mathematicall principles” but to be recognized as “Philosophicall truly averred.” Digges also goes out of his way to counter some of the arguments most commonly put forward against the idea of a moving Earth. As we’ve seen, it had long been argued that on a rotating Earth, an object dropped from a tall tower—or, say, from the mast of a tall ship—would land some distance away from the base. Not so, says Digges, who may well have conducted such experiments himself; it would land at the base of the mast, just as if the ship were at rest. Finally, using a trick that Copernicus and others had often employed, he tried to make it sound like his vision of the cosmos was both novel and, at the same time, rooted in the most noble thinking of antiquity. The crucial chapter on the Copernican system is titled “A Perfect Description of the Celestial Orbs According to the Most Ancient Doctrine of the Pythagoreans, Lately Revived by Copernicus and by Geometrical Demonstrations Approved.” Thanks to the work of Digges, references to Copernicus in English books, both scholarly and popular, become much more frequent from the mid-1570s. By that time, as Johnson notes, “nearly every writer on astronomy felt it necessary to pay some attention to the heliocentric theory, if only to try to refute it by the conventional Aristotelian arguments.”

  Digges even speculates on the nature of gravity. For Aristotle, gravity was a force that drew objects—no matter where they were in the cosmos—to the center of the universe. The Earth, being heavy, occupied that central position, so gravity pulled other objects toward the Earth. But if the Earth was one of the planets, then what? In such a system there was clearly more than one “center.” Digges reasons that “it may be doubted whether the center of this earthly gravity be also the centre of the world. For gravity is nothing else but a certain proclivity or natural coveting of parts to be coupled with the whole.…” Isaac Newton would develop these ideas further in the next century.

  Digges was fluent in Latin, but chose to write in the vernacular. His reasoning was practical: He wanted to put the knowledge in the hands of men who had not attended university, but could nonetheless profit from such learning. Dee had expressed a similar motivation, and the trend would continue: Robert Norman and William Borough would write in English about the workings of the magnetic compass; John Blagrave wrote about astronomical instruments. Science was becoming a pursuit not just for scholars, but for ordinary literate citizens.

  TO INFINITY AND BEYOND

  Perhaps more important than Digges’s words, however, was a fold-out diagram he included with the text (see figure 3.3). The central part of the diagram reproduced Copernicus’s new vision of the solar system, with the Earth as one of the planets revolving around the sun. Beyond it, however, the stars could be seen extending outward in all directions, perhaps, one might imagine, to infinity. A few lines of text embedded in the diagram reinforce what it already plainly shows: This “orbe of stares” extends “infinitely up … in altitude,” and is “therefore immovable.” The “primum mobile” is no longer necessary. The heavens, which had since ancient times been seen as moving around the Earth, had been brought to a standstill.

  Fig. 3.3 In 1576, the English astronomer Thomas Digges published a new edition of an almanac written by his father, Leonard. Thomas added an enthusiastic synopsis of the Copernican theory, and—perhaps even more profoundly—a diagram of the universe in which the stars are seen to extend outward without limit. The Granger Collection, New York

  The diagram, reprinted in each subsequent edition of the Prognostication Everlasting, was seen and pondered widely, says Francis Johnson; it “was the representation of the new Copernican system most familiar to the average Englishman of the Renaissance.” Moreover, because of the book’s popularity, many English thinkers came to think of the infinite universe as an integral part of the Copernican theory.

  What was the inspiration for this remarkable and daring expansion of the celestial canvas? One theory is that his father had indeed invented something like a telescope, and that the younger Digges had an opportunity to look through it. Indeed, whether it was actually a telescope in the modern sense, or just a lucky combination of lenses or mirrors, hardly seems to matter. As Francis Johnson notes, “Even the most casual observation of the sky with such an instrument would have provided Digges with ample experimental justification for his assertion that the stellar regions should be conceived of as infinite.” Even today we can get a hint of what such an observation would have been like. The next time you’re out in the countryside, have a look at some particular region of the sky on a clear, moonless night. Now look again through a pair of binoculars. Even the cheapest, most poorly crafted such device immediately increases the number of stars that are visible dozens of times over. Moreover, while this magnified view reveals a greater number of stars, and makes the bright ones appear brighter, it does not seem to bring them any closer. Even with a very good telescope, the brightest stars appear as mere points. It is not a great leap of faith to imagine that they are very distant indeed. We cannot perceive “infinity,” but looking at the night sky with any kind of optical aid, even the most rudimentary, is suggestive of a world without limits.

  John Gribbin, who calls Digges’s move an “astonishing leap into the unknown,” agrees that it was likely triggered by gazing at the heavens using one of his father’s telescopes. It “seems highly likely,” Gribbin says, “that he had been looking at the Milky Way with a telescope, and that the multitude of stars he saw there convinced him that the stars are other suns spread in profusion throughout an infinite Universe.”

  The theological implications of this possibly infinite universe are worth considering. If God and the angels were supposed to dwell beyond the sphere of the fixed stars, then where, exactly, would they reside in this new, larger universe, in which there is no “last star”? As Owen Gingerich explains, Digges came up with a rather ingenious solution: They could dwell among the stars. In yet another line of text embedded in the diagram, Digges explained that the realm of the stars constitute “… the very court of celestial angels, devoid of griefe and replenished with perfite endless joye, the habitacle of the elect.” What better place for God than in an infinite and unmoving heaven?

  * * *

  Thomas Digges’s astronomical research came to an end around 1580, when, because of his skills as a military e
ngineer, he was called on to assist in the fortifications at Dover and later to support English forces in the Netherlands. But his influence continued to be felt. His emphasis on observation and experiment marks him as an early proponent of what would eventually become known as the scientific method. His revised edition of the Prognostication would go through at least seven editions before 1605, with an eighth published in 1626. By Owen Gingerich’s estimate, some ten thousand copies must have been printed by that point. Sadly, fewer than forty copies are known to exist today. I had the privilege of viewing one of them in Gingerich’s private collection, at his office at the Harvard Observatory. Here one finds a set of books, maps, and manuscripts that would put many smaller museums to shame, and a few larger ones, too. The more valuable items, of course, are kept in a safe—and this was where Gingerich reached to pull out his copy of the Prognostication, gently unfolding its famous diagram for me to inspect. He held up the centuries-old picture of the heavens, and I was at once filled with awe. I was also reminded just how difficult it is to put ourselves in the mind of someone who walked and ate and slept and pondered the night sky four and a half centuries ago. How did the most brilliant natural philosopher in Shakespeare’s England picture the universe? This diagram is a large part of the answer. Here was the first detailed description of the Copernican system written in English—and with it comes a vision of a boundless cosmos, a universe even more expansive than that imagined by Copernicus.

  4. “These earthly godfathers of heaven’s lights…”

  THE SHADOW OF COPERNICUS AND THE DAWN OF SCIENCE

  In London, history is often on full display; at other times it lurks in dark corners, hidden from view. Everyone knows of the great museums of London’s South Kensington neighborhood—the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Together, they draw more than nine million visitors each year to their grand exhibit halls. Few, however, know about the museum “annex” in West Kensington. Occupying a stately turn-of-the-twentieth-century building known as Blythe House, the annex serves as a storehouse for millions of “overflow” items from the three museums. My guide there is a young, sharply dressed man named Boris Jardine, a historian and curator for the Science Museum. We walk past row after row of metal shelves containing thousands of items, ranging from the familiar—I recognize the astrolabes and sextants and telescopes—to the obscure. The endless rows of tightly packed metal-frame shelves are straight out of the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, in which the Ark of the Covenant is ignobly and anonymously placed to rest in a vast military warehouse. There are no holy relics in Blythe House that I know of, but there are indeed treasures, and they span some twenty-five centuries. None are normally on display to the public.

  We stop to look at a small armillary sphere—a kind of 3-D model of the Earth and the heavens—measuring five or six inches across. Later armillary spheres represent a sun-centered system, but this one is firmly Ptolemaic: it depicts the geocentric model of the heavens, with our home planet at the center. “These were very popular astronomical teaching tools,” Jardine says, as he slips on a pair of white latex gloves and lifts the object carefully from the shelf. A brass plate indicates that it was made in 1542—one year before the publication of De revolutionibus—and, like many of the finest instruments of that era, it was an import from continental Europe. (In a few decades, however, English craftsmanship would come close to matching that found on the Continent.) “At least through most of the sixteenth century, they have the Earth at the center,” he says, “because the Ptolemaic view of the universe was the one that was widely accepted at that time.”

  TALKING TO ANGELS

  Jardine leads me down to the basement, and into a room that looks, at first glance, like a storeroom for Hollywood horror-movie props. I can’t help noticing the array of iron torture instruments and related objects: chains with spikes; a prisoner’s mask; a mask worn by an executioner. Jardine tells me they span the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. There’s also a disturbingly lifelike wax head, apparently from the early twentieth century. One of the items in the room, however, has a remarkable connection to the period we’ve been looking at. Jardine opens a drawer to reveal a tiny display box—it fits easily in his hand—containing a small, convex glass disk, rather like a semi-transparent lens, measuring about an inch across. It belonged to Queen Elizabeth’s court astrologer.

  “This is actually John Dee’s pendant, which he used in order to communicate with angels,” Jardine says, taking the crystal gently from its case. With a bit of imagination, one can picture the inquisitive Dr. Dee holding the crystal in front of a candle or fireplace, peering at the shimmering image it would have presented. “It’s effectively a lens, and it distorts whatever is behind it,” Jardine says. “So clearly, in the right conditions, you could use it to conjure up some rather extraordinary visions.”

  Stored alongside the crystal is a short manuscript, in Latin, written on vellum parchment. It was penned by a man named Nicholas Culpeper, a seventeenth-century doctor famous for his herbal recipes and treatments. Jardine reads from an English translation of Culpeper’s testimony: In November 1582, it says, “the angel Uriel appeared in the window of the museum of Dr. Dee, situated to the west, and gave him this transparent stone or crystal.” The note, written in 1640, goes on to explain how the crystal came into Culpeper’s possession: Dee’s son, Arthur, gave it to him as a reward “for having cured a liver complaint of his with the greatest rapidity.” Culpeper went on to make use of the crystal in his own practice: “I have used this crystal in many ways, and have thus cured illness. But with its use, a very great weakness always set in and a lethargy of the body.”

  In other words, the crystal was believed—by Culpeper, at least—to have been a gift from God, and to possess magical properties. “That is apparently its origin,” Jardine says. “It was a divine gift to Dr. Dee, the famous astrologer. To his enemies, he was a conjurer; to his friends, he was a mathematician and great teacher of Continental learning.” Did Dee believe in his own supposedly divine gifts? Did he really think the crystal came from God? “I don’t know whether that’s his claim or not,” says Jardine. “It’s certainly his claim that using this stone, this transparent crystal, along with an obsidian mirror and some other artifacts, that he actually communicated with angels, together with some of his friends and acquaintances. The question of whether they really believed what they claimed to be seeing is an incredibly difficult one to answer.”

  As the “magic crystal” suggests, John Dee (1527–1608) was a remarkable figure whose way of thinking embraced both science and magic—which is less of a surprise when we remember that he lived at a time when a distinction between the two was only just emerging. In his only known portrait, he sports a long white beard and a black skullcap. Wherever a magician-like character turns up in Elizabethan literature, scholars wonder if it is a reflection of the enigmatic John Dee. He has long been seen as a potential inspiration for Shakespeare’s Prospero—and perhaps for the title characters in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist and Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. More recently he is said to have inspired the character of Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter series. (His portrait “would only need a crystal ball, a cat and a pointy hat with astrological symbols to complete the picture,” as Nigel Jones noted recently.) The son of a wealthy textile trader, Dee was a skilled mathematician, astronomer, and navigator, as well as an astrologer and alchemist. He also had a sizable ego, believing that he understood God’s will better than the biblical prophets did. Though he was fascinated by the occult and magic of all kinds, in some ways he nonetheless had a very modern perspective on what science is and how it should be conducted. He seems to have embraced something close to what we would now call the “experimental method”—the combination of careful observation and recording of data, the use of mathematics to analyze the data, the development of hypotheses, and the devising of new experiments to check those hypotheses.

&nb
sp; Dee wasn’t only a man of science. As a student, he had a passion for the theater. While an undergraduate at Cambridge, Dee helped to construct the props for a student production—in particular, a mechanical flying beetle. The play, an early Greek comedy, calls for a dung beetle that flies toward the sun. Dee would later claim that his beetle was so realistic that audiences ran from the theater in terror. He explained that his contraption was harmless; it was just a machine—albeit a sophisticated one—that could be understood through mechanics and mathematical laws. Many didn’t believe him; he was called a “conjurer,” a practitioner of dark magic—a label that would haunt him throughout his career.

  Dee was a skilled mathematician, and, when still in his early twenties, lectured widely on the Continent. He took an interest in astronomy, and was ready to embrace the Copernican theory—up to a point. In 1557 he wrote a preface for a set of ephemeris tables* penned by the astronomer John Field. In the preface, Dee lamented the shortcomings of the older, Ptolemaic tables. The figures in the new tables were worked out using the new model, which Dee recognized as yielding improved accuracy. He praised Copernicus “for the more than Herculean labours which he endured in giving a new impetus to the study of the heavens and confirming it most strongly by his calculations,” though he cautioned that “this is not the place to discuss his hypothesis.” (Field himself seems to have been more confident; in his own foreword to the ephemeris, he spoke of the new theory having been “established and based upon true, certain, and genuine demonstrations.”) Dee was clearly prepared to utilize the Copernican model when it proved advantageous; but did he accept it as the true description of the cosmos? We can’t be sure—but at the very least, he was clearly aware of the problems raised by the conflict between the two systems of the universe.