The Science of Shakespeare

by Dan Falk

  We’ve already seen how theology and science were intertwined at this time, and it’s no surprise that Dee referred to Psalm 19 with approval when he described the structure of the universe:

  The whole frame of Gods Creatures, (which is the whole world,) is to us, a bright glasse: from which, by reflexion, reboundeth to our knowledge and perceiverance, Beames, and Radiations: representing the Image of his Infinite goodness, Omnipotency, and wisedome. And we therby, are taught and persuaded to Glorifie our Creator, as God: and be thankfull therefore.

  The passage suggests a universe that was created by God but that could be understood through science—an approach hinted at in Dee’s optical metaphor, with the universe compared to a glass, and light representing divine knowledge.

  MORTLAKE’S MAN OF SCIENCE

  Dee was England’s foremost man of science in the second half of the sixteenth century. Working from his home at Mortlake, near Richmond (now fully engulfed by Greater London), he constructed a multipurpose laboratory and collected books and astronomical instruments. His vast personal library—probably the largest private library in all of England—included two copies of De revolutionibus, along with Ptolemy’s Almagest. Dee was an influential teacher, instructing many (perhaps most) of the great English mathematicians and astronomers of his day, and maintaining a correspondence with scientists from across Europe, including Tycho Brahe. “Dee knew everyone who was anyone,” as Nigel Jones notes; and as Lesley Cormack puts it, “Anyone who was anyone in Elizabethan natural philosophy knew Dee.”

  Could “anyone” have included William Shakespeare? Perhaps. As Peter Ackroyd notes, the playwright’s company, the King’s Men, stayed in Mortlake briefly in 1603, during an outbreak of the plague. “It is possible that the actors encountered the notorious Doctor Dee during their residence in Mortlake,” Ackroyd writes—though of course we cannot be sure. What we can be somewhat more certain of is that whoever did visit the Dee residence would have been exposed to the ideas of Copernicus. Historians believe that the Copernican theory was freely discussed within Dee’s circle of friends—more freely, certainly, at his home than would have been possible at Oxford or Cambridge at that time—and that Dee himself played an important role in spreading word of the Copernican system. His house at Mortlake, as Antonia McLean puts it, “became the focal point of all scientific advance in mathematical and allied sciences in the first half of the reign of Elizabeth.” Dee was also a familiar presence at court, and served as an advisor to Queen Elizabeth, consulting on matters of astrology and alchemy.

  Another preface written by Dee hints at his desire to foster what we would now call scientific literacy. This time it was an English edition of Euclid’s Elements, published by a merchant named Henry Billingsley. Their goal, it seems, was to convince their countrymen of the value of mathematics; to show how mathematical proficiency would benefit the entire nation. Dee sought to make Euclid’s sprawling text as comprehensible and accessible as possible. The more one understood of numbers and their manipulations, he argued, the more one could make sense of the natural world. Billingsley, meanwhile, wrote that understanding mathematics required immersion in “the principles, grounds, and elements of geometry.” And it required dedication. The student must be prepared for “diligent study and reading of old, ancient authors.” But there was more: Dee linked the study of mathematics to that of music, painting, and even medicine. It was, in effect, a summary of Elizabethan knowledge—and a call to arms to work at growing that knowledge base. Even after nearly 450 years, it remains, as McLean puts it, “one of the most comprehensive and important statements on learning ever written by an Englishman.”

  Dee also mentions the “perspective glass,” presumably referring to a device similar to that mentioned by Thomas Digges. Dee writes that a military commander “may wonderfully helpe him selfe, by Perspective Glasses, in which (I trust) our posterity will prove more skillfull and expert, and to greater purposes, than in these days.…” He appreciated that such novel devices could fill the user not just with awe but with fear. Was the effect real, or was it magic? Dee showed that the telescope’s effects were simply the result of the laws of perspective and optics. He even urged skeptical readers to visit the London home of a former student, Sir William Pickering, where they could partake of a demonstration.

  I’ve mentioned the possibility that Shakespeare may have encountered Dee at Mortlake—but there is another (admittedly quite speculative) link between the two men. It has occasionally been claimed that the design of the Globe Theatre, where so many of Shakespeare’s plays were performed, was based, in part, on Dee’s writings. In his preface to Euclid, Dee wrote of the harmony of geometric forms, and this may be reflected in the Globe’s design, which consists of a square stage bounded by a circular floor, bounded in turn by a hexagonal outer structure. The design “bears a direct and important relation to the Preface,” writes McLean, “simply because it puts the theories contained [in Dee’s preface] into practise. The Globe therefore becomes the first example of a classical Renaissance building in London.”

  Above all, Dee stressed the value of mathematics for the national interest. Armed with such knowledge, Englishmen were poised to discover “new works, strange engines, and instruments for sundry purposes in the commonwealth.” In the twenty-first century, it is commonplace to hear science-policy makers stressing the value of math and science for the national good (especially in the context of a competitive global marketplace); Dee, writing more than four centuries ago, was perhaps the first to make the case.

  We have now met Thomas Digges, one of the first English thinkers to embrace the Copernican theory, and John Dee, who also lent it significant support, and was prepared to weigh it against the traditional view. As we’ve seen, however, both of these thinkers were preceded by a nearly forgotten Welshman named Robert Recorde (c. 1510–1558), who referred to the new theory less than a decade after the publication of De revolutionibus.

  SETTING THE RECORDE STRAIGHT

  In spite of his relative obscurity, Robert Recorde was probably the most influential English scientist of his day. A man of diverse talents, Recorde studied at Oxford and later earned a medical degree at Cambridge; he taught at Oxford and in London, and helped to train England’s first generation of navigators. Recorde was something of a polymath: He was an expert on languages, metallurgy, and mathematics, served as a physician in the court of Edward VI, and in his final years held the title of General Surveyor of Mines, as well as being appointed comptroller of the Bristol Mint. He was also what we would now call a popularizer of science; though he had mastered Greek and Latin, he taught in English, and chose to write for a lay audience in clear and elegant English prose.

  In 1542 Recorde published the first English textbook on arithmetic, called The Grounde of the Artes, which remained in print to the end of the seventeenth century and introduced the +, −, and = signs for addition, subtraction, and equality. Nine years later he published The Pathway to Knowledge, the first book in English on geometry. In 1556, he tackled the subject of astronomy, with a book called The Castle of Knowledge, the first comprehensive astronomy text written in English. The book is presented in the form of a dialogue between a master and a young scholar, and the crucial passage runs as follows:

  MASTER: How is it that Copernicus, a man of great learning, of much experience, and of wonderful diligence in observation, hath renewed the opinion of Aristarchus of Samos, affirming that the earth not only moves circularly about his own centre, but also may be, yea and is, continually out of the precise centre of the world eight and thirty hundred thousand miles: but because the understanding of that controversy dependeth on profounder knowledge than in this Introduction may be uttered conveniently, I will let it pass till some other time.

  SCHOLAR: Nay sir, in good faith, I desire not to hear such vain fantasies, so far against the common reason, and repugnant to the content of all the learned multitude of Writers, and therefore let it pass for ever, and a day longer. />
  MASTER: You are too young to be a good judge in so great a matter: it passeth far your learning, and theirs also that are much better learned than you, to improve his supposition by good arguments, and therefore you were best to condemn nothing that you do not well understand.

  Recorde acknowledges the counterintuitive nature of the Copernican model; the young scholar balks at the proposal, calling it a “vain fantasy” that stands opposed to “the common reason.” But the master, older and wiser, cautions that first impressions can be deceiving; that the truth sometimes requires us to abandon our preconceptions. Along with his favorable mention of the Copernican system, we should also note Recorde’s skepticism toward the veneration of ancient texts. He cautions the reader to “be not abused by their authority, but ever more attend to their reasons, and examine them well, ever regarding more what is said, and how it is proved, than who said it: for authority often times deceives many men.” The Castle of Knowledge went through a second and third printing before the century was over, and was one of the most popular mathematical works in England at the time.

  * * *

  Better-known than Robert Recorde is William Gilbert (1540–1603), another “early adopter” of Copernicanism, best known for his work on magnetism. Naturally occurring magnets, known as lodestones, had been known since ancient times; we now recognize these brownish-black stones as fragments of a mineral called magnetite. It was everyday knowledge that lodestones could attract needles or flakes of iron—but why they did so was a mystery. It is easy to see why, in Elizabethan England, magnetism was associated with magic—indeed, a magnet was the very prototype of a “magical” body. And yet, it was magic that could be put to profitable use. The magnetic compass is a medieval invention, and philosophers were aware that the Earth itself has magnetic properties. Even so, there was disagreement as to why a compass needle pointed (roughly) north: Was Polaris, the pole star, endowed with magnetic properties? Might there be a magnetic island to the north of Scotland or Scandinavia? A turning point came in 1600, when Gilbert published his treatise De magnete. (The full title translates as On the Magnet and Magnetic Bodies, and on the Great Magnet the Earth.) As the title suggests, Gilbert’s breakthrough was the realization that the Earth itself could be regarded as a giant magnet.

  MAGNET MAN

  Gilbert was born in Colchester and graduated from St. John’s College in Cambridge; he then moved to London, where he worked as a doctor, later serving as personal physician to Queen Elizabeth (and briefly to King James). He was also an astronomer, and in fact is credited with sketching the first known map of the moon. Frankly, it’s not a very good map—but, as Stephen Pumfrey notes, it was probably motivated by very specific considerations that had little to do with accuracy or detail. It was, Pumfrey suggests, part of an ongoing effort to deduce whether the moon rotates relative to the Earth, or remains—as it would appear—to keep one side facing permanently Earthward. In the decades that followed, astronomers would come to realize that the moon indeed “wobbles,” turning just enough to show a thin sliver of its far side as it does so; and then, weeks later, another thin sliver from its opposite edge. These wobbles are called “librations,” and their discovery has traditionally been credited to Galileo, who noticed them telescopically; but Pumfrey believes Gilbert was the first to discern them, more than twenty years earlier.

  Gilbert went further than Copernicus by proposing a mechanism for the motion of the planets. (Even so, he was noncommittal regarding the Earth’s annual revolution about the sun.) To begin with, Gilbert imagined that his theory of magnetism could explain the Earth’s daily rotation. The Aristotelians had said that a large body like the Earth would naturally be at rest; after all, what would cause such a massive body to move? Gilbert believed that magnetism provided the answer: He believed (wrongly, it turns out) that magnetic fields from a spherical lodestone would set it spinning, and that similar fields caused both the Earth and the moon to rotate. He also believed that magnetic forces emanating from the sun, together with the sun’s rotation, caused the planets to move in their heliocentric orbits. The entire sixth “book” of De magnete is taken up with this effort to link magnetism to this one facet of Copernicus’s theory.* Remarkably, Gilbert predicted (correctly) that all the bodies in the solar system would tug on each other, and that these irregularities ought to have observable consequences; one result would be that planetary orbits ought not to be perfectly circular—a bold notion that contradicted traditional thought. The lunar librations were one such piece of evidence, offering, as Pumfrey puts it, “visible proof of his radical cosmology.”

  Gilbert was certain that the ancient view of the heavens was wrongheaded. He eagerly embraced Thomas Digges’s view that the stars were infinite in number, and that they were located at various distances from the Earth, extending, quite possibly, without limit. The idea that the vast universe, filled with countless stars, revolved around Earth was simply untenable. Just as the planets lie at unequal distances from the Earth, he wrote,

  so are those vast and multitudinous lights separated from the earth by varying and very remote altitudes; they are not set in any sphaerick frame or firmament (as is feigned), nor in any vaulted body.… How immeasurable then must be the space which stretches to those remotest of the fixed stars!

  Gilbert was one of the foremost scientists of the Elizabethan age, every bit as influential as John Dee. And yet, should we attempt to label Gilbert as a “modern” figure we run into difficulties. Newton, the greatest mind of the next century, was comfortable discussing the motion of the planets in terms of inanimate mechanical forces—but Gilbert saw such motion in almost psychological terms. (In describing his book, he used the phrase “physiologia nova”—he was bringing a “new physiology” into the science of cosmology.) The planets were animate; they possessed souls. (One of his chapter titles was “The Magnetic Force is Animate, or Imitates a Soul; In many Respects it surpasses the human soul while that is united to an organic body.”) As John Russell puts it, the idea of mechanical force plays only a minor role in Gilbert’s theory; instead, the universe “is more like a community of souls stimulating each other to activity.” (We might note that Kepler, who did more than anyone else to develop Copernicus’s original theory, also believed for many years that the Earth had a soul.) At the same time, we see a decidedly modern emphasis on experiment and observation. Gilbert has no patience for those who blindly regurgitate the theories of the ancients—the “probable guesses and opinions of ordinary professors of philosophy”—without bothering to engage their own senses. His own theories, in contrast, are “demonstrated by many arguments and experiments.” The end result is that “causes are made known of things which, either through the ignorance of the ancients or the neglect of the moderns, have remained unrecognized or overlooked.” As I. Bernard Cohen puts it, De magnete “contains the seeds of revolution.”

  Gilbert’s book was tremendously influential, and drew praise from both Kepler and Galileo. In fact, magnetism itself became a topic of general interest in the decades following De magnete, and the effects could be seen on the London stage. Ben Jonson’s final comedy, first performed in 1632, was called The Magnetic Lady. The main character is a wealthy woman named Lady Loadstone, who tries to marry off her niece, Placentia Steel, while taking advice from one Master Compass. (For good measure, the Lady is assisted by a steward whose best friend is named Captain Ironside.) Shakespeare, in contrast, does not seem to have used the words “magnet” or “magnetism” in his works—but magnetism is referenced briefly in Troilus and Cressida. When Troilus pledges his love, he vows to stay with Cressida “As iron to adamant” (3.2.174)—with footnotes in today’s scholarly editions helpfully explaining that adamant is another word for lodestone.

  * * *

  As we examine the work of early scientific thinkers like Dee and Gilbert, we are confronted with a peculiar (to us) mix of medieval and modern. In the case of John Dee, we sense a man who was certainly part magician—and yet, w
ith hindsight, we can also see something of a modern scientist in his attitude and his work, something we perceive in Gilbert as well. An even more curious case is the figure of Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), the Italian philosopher and mystic who would pass through England in the 1580s. Even the statue of Bruno that now stands in Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori—the “field of flowers”—has a certain somber darkness to it. The statue, erected in 1889, was supposed to face south, but at the last minute its orientation was changed so that it faced northward, toward the Vatican. (Facing away was seen as disrespectful.) As a result, the hooded figure, depicted with arms crossed and clutching a hefty book, is nearly always in shadow. Nor is it likely that the grand statue is much of a likeness of the doomed philosopher; it towers over the square, even though Bruno himself was a diminutive man. Appropriate, perhaps, for a man who, at least in his own mind, was a larger-than-life figure—a firebrand whose every thought seemed to challenge the established order.

  Fig. 4.1 Philosopher, mystic, heretic: Giordano Bruno, condemned by the Roman Catholic Church and burned at the stake in 1600, is now honored by a statue in Rome, at the site of his execution. Author photo