The Science of Shakespeare

by Dan Falk

  5. “… Sorrow’s eye, glazed with blinding tears…”

  THE RISE OF ENGLISH SCIENCE AND THE QUESTION OF THE TUDOR TELESCOPE

  It has been said that necessity is the mother of invention—and fear probably helps, too. In the second half of the sixteenth century, a handful of science-minded Englishmen had been calling for mathematical lectures to be held regularly in London, to aid in the training of sailors and navigators. It didn’t come to pass, however, until England had seen its ships doing battle with Spanish forces just off the coast. The armada was defeated, of course—and the importance of a strong navy (and maritime prowess in general) was hammered home. This, in turn, depended on scientific knowledge: Navigators needed to understand mapping systems and the shape of the globe, and they had to calculate and plot routes, skills that were rooted in arithmetic and geometry. Astronomy played a key role as well, since the stars were the primary guideposts for the seaborne traveler. In November 1588—only months after the defeat of the armada—a lectureship covering these subjects was established, along with a detailed plan of action in case a hostile fleet, Spanish or otherwise, were to make its way up the Thames in the future. The annual lecture was delivered in the Staplers’ Chapel in Leadenhall, in the commercial heart of London, and was open to the general public. The text of the first of these lectures, delivered by an instructor named Thomas Hood, has survived, and, together with his published books, gives us some insight into his teaching strategy: One must begin with arithmetic, geometry, and basic astronomy; when the student has mastered these, he can move on to the use of maps and various instruments, and tackle practical problems in surveying and navigation. Because theoretical aspects of astronomy were not a primary concern, we don’t know what Hood thought of the Copernican theory—but we know that he routinely used Copernicus’s figures and calculations. His students, as Francis Johnson notes, “had little scholarly training but were inflamed with a passionate desire for useful knowledge.”

  THE CLEARINGHOUSE

  What started as a lecture series eventually became a college. In the final years of the sixteenth century, London had, for the first time, a school dedicated almost exclusively to what we would now call science. Founded in 1597, Gresham College was named for its founder, a prominent merchant named Sir Thomas Gresham. Students at Gresham learned practical skills associated with navigation, commerce, and medicine. Astronomy and geometry figured prominently in the curriculum; one could also study divinity, music, and rhetoric. In the first half of the seventeenth century, the college would become, as Johnson puts it, “a general clearinghouse for information concerning the latest scientific discoveries.”

  The learned men who made up the Gresham faculty had known one another for years, in some cases decades, before the founding of the college. They also had close ties to the city’s craftsmen and instrument makers. (I suspect that the college, had it been founded in the twentieth century rather than the end of the sixteenth, would have called itself a “polytechnic institute.”) The college would go on to play a crucial role in the founding of one of the world’s first scientific societies: Many of those who met and taught at Gresham would help to establish the Royal Society of London in 1660.

  While Hood may have been hesitant to fully support Copernicanism, other members of the faculty at Gresham seem to have been largely committed to the new theory. Allan Chapman notes that “pretty well all the Gresham Astronomy Professors after 1597 were Copernicans: Henry Briggs, Henry Gellibrand, John Greaves, Sir Chrisopher Wren, Robert Hooke, and so on.” Chapman’s list gets us a little ahead of ourselves—Christopher Wren lived well into the eighteenth century—but even so, it is intriguing to think of London’s aspiring young seamen, in the final years of Elizabeth’s reign, pondering whether the sun moved around the Earth or the Earth moved around the sun.

  * * *

  The spirit of inquiry embodied by Gresham College spilled out beyond its walls; indeed, it seemed to reflect the mind-set of an ever-increasing number of ordinary Londoners. This was enabled, in part, by a sharp rise in literacy: More than a hundred grammar schools had been built in England in the previous half century, and more people could read and write than ever before. The publishing business was booming, with dozens of printers and booksellers at work in the capital (many of them plying their trade from the churchyard beside St. Paul’s Cathedral). Those who couldn’t buy could borrow: Libraries were becoming common throughout England in the early seventeenth century, though members of the public were able to borrow books from London’s Guildhall from the early fifteenth century. As Johnson notes, at least one out of every ten books published in England between 1475 and 1640 dealt with the natural sciences. Some of these volumes were written by the scientists themselves, others by what we would now call science popularizers; and then, as today, they varied widely in quality. The influence of these books, Johnson says, “was not confined to scholars, or to those who had studied at the universities, but extended throughout all literate classes.” (We will take a closer look at the grammar schools and also the world of books and publishing in the next chapter.) Along with books, customers could pick up newssheets, treatises on medicine and surgery, and mathematical instruments that came with booklets explaining their use. Almanacs were in particularly high demand, and one gets a sense of their popularity from a scene in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The “mechanicals” (craftsmen) are planning a performance of the play Pyramus and Thisbe; because the lovers meet by moonlight, they want to know if the moon will be shining on the night of their performance. Bottom demands, “A calendar, a calendar! Look in the almanac; find out moonshine, find out moonshine!” (3.1.49–50).

  INSTRUMENTS OF KNOWLEDGE

  Even though, as mentioned, the word “science” had not yet acquired its current meaning, many Londoners were in fact earning their living from scientific pursuits. There were mathematicians and doctors, botanists and apothecaries, builders and inventors. They worked in hospitals, laboratories, and family-run workshops. Craftsmen worked with metal, wood, and ivory; they built, among other devices, theodolites for surveyors; rangefinders and gunsights for artillery officers; astrolabes, quadrants, cross-staffs, and backstaffs for navigators; and drawing instruments for a multitude of professions.

  This burst of activity was enabled, in part, by the capital’s unique position: Though located in the Continent’s northwest corner, London was effectively at its crossroads. To live in the English capital at the close of the sixteenth century was to bear witness to an endless parade of new peoples, new inventions, and, perhaps most significantly, new ideas. As Deborah Harkness puts it in her wonderful book The Jewel House (2007): “Every ship that put in at a London dock might contain new materials that had to be classified and understood, each new book rolling off the presses at St. Paul’s could contain a radical idea about the natural world, and the experiments undertaken in London had, at any moment, the potential to bring long-held beliefs into question.” Novelty was everywhere in the bustling city; indeed, there was an appetite for the new. On every corner, one might stumble across some peculiar wonder from a far-off land: an ostrich egg, money from China, a canoe from Lappland, a stuffed, two-headed snake. In the quest for knowledge, one might still turn to the words of ancient philosophers—but their limitations were becoming increasingly obvious. Londoners by this time were creating new knowledge—and indeed much of what they were finding was either at odds with what the ancient writers had described, or was simply too novel to have been known to them. It is hardly surprising that the very word “news” dates from this period.

  Not only literacy but also numeracy was on the rise. Private tutors taught mathematics to the city’s merchants and their apprentices; some instructors offered room and board to their pupils. An educator named Humphrey Baker boasted that he taught “after a more plain manner than has heretofore been usually taught by any man within this City.” One of his favorite tools was the now ubiquitous “math word-problem.” In his book The Well Spryng of Sc
iences (1562), Baker posed this problem to his readers:

  Three merchants have formed a company. The first invested I know not how much, the second put in 20 pieces of cloth, and the third had invested £500. So at the end of their business, their gains amounted to £1000, whereof the first man ought to have £350, and the second must have £400. Now I demand: how much did the first man invest, and how much were the 20 pieces of cloth [worth]?

  A merchant could easily face a variation of a problem such as this, and lessons from teachers like Baker gave some measure of preparation. (We also have here the forerunner of all those vexing exam questions that cause so much grief for students to this day—“a train leaves Chicago heading east at eighty miles per hour, while at the same time a train leaves New York heading west.…”) Baker also saw to it that his pupils could use instruments such as the quadrant, square, staff, and astrolabe—devices crucial in surveying, navigation, and astronomy. The shops of instrument makers—English born, and also French and Flemish—lined the busy shopping streets above the Strand and Fleet Street in the heart of London. While many of these devices were imported from the Continent, a growing number of local instrument makers were crafting equally fine products. “By the end of Elizabeth’s reign,” writes Harkness, “Londoners had fully embraced mathematical instruments, and many of her citizens had achieved levels of mathematical literacy that previous generations would not have dreamed possible.”

  At least some of these instrument makers knew about Copernicanism and took the new theory into account when developing their instruments. One of these local craftsmen, John Blagrave, designed a new astrolabe in 1596 in accordance with the Copernican model and, in a book describing its operation, made it clear that he accepted the theory as more than a mathematical convenience. In fact, his support for the heliocentric model was set right on the book’s title page, which noted an approach in which “… agreeable to the hypothesis of Nicolaus Copernicus, the starry firmament is appointed perpetually fixed, and the earth and his horizons continually moving from west toward the east once about every 24 hours.…” In traditional astrolabes, the horizon was represented by a fixed metal plate, while the brightest stars were inscribed (actually pierced as small holes) on a movable plate that rotated relative to the main plate. In Blagrave’s astrolabe, however, it is the Earth—that is, the observer’s horizon—that moves, while the stars remain fixed. As Johnson notes, aside from his countryman Thomas Digges, Blagrave “probably did more than any other sixteenth-century Englishman to disseminate an intelligent knowledge of the Copernican theory.” The new cosmos, once just an abstract idea, could now be held in one’s hands. And it wasn’t just Blagrave. Nicolas Hill, a natural philosopher active at the same time, was convinced of the Earth’s rotation and of the Copernican theory, and developed a version of the atomic theory. Mark Ridley, a doctor, was similarly attracted to the Copernican view, and published a treatise on magnetism. (Mind you, scientists on the Continent continued to lead the way: In 1551, Gerard Mercator had built the first celestial globe based on Copernicus’s data. And it is worth noting that John Dee had worked with Mercator at the time he was working on his globe.)

  Shopkeepers, carpenters, clockmakers, surveyors, sailors—all were motivated to learn and master basic mathematics. One needed mathematical knowledge to sort out different measures of weight, dimension, and currency; more generally, it was said to sharpen the mind. In his popular book on arithmetic, The Ground of the Artes, Robert Recorde described mathematics as “the ground of all men’s affairs.” Without mathematical literacy, he noted, “no tale can be long continued, no bargaining without it can be duly ended, nor no business that man has justly completed.” It’s hard to know exactly how many mathematical books were published in London in the sixteenth century, since many have been lost; but historians put it at about five per year in the early years of Elizabeth’s reign, with texts on navigation and surveying proving the most popular; and the number was certainly higher by the century’s close.

  OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE

  With all of this activity—all of this learning—happening in London, one may reasonably inquire what was going on up the road at Oxford and at Cambridge, where professors had been professing and students had been studying for half a millennium. It is sobering to remember that the university at Oxford, the second-oldest surviving university in the world (after the University of Bologna in Italy), was already five centuries old by Shakespeare’s time. In fact, the actual date when the University of Oxford was founded is not known, though the record of teaching there goes back to 1096, and it grew rapidly after 1167, when English students were prohibited from studying at the University of Paris. (We might note that even Oxford’s “New College” dates from 1379.) The university at Cambridge was founded in 1209 when some disgruntled Oxford students fell into a dispute with townsfolk and fled eastward.

  The students were younger back then: Officially, one had to be fifteen, but the sons of noblemen were often admitted earlier. (Robert Devereux, the Second Earl of Essex and one of Elizabeth’s favorites, was admitted at age ten, though he didn’t matriculate until two years later.) A bachelor of arts normally took four years, a master of arts an additional three. If money helped one get in, it could also help you get out: For those who had not yet met the BA requirements by the end of the fourth year of study at Oxford, ten shillings would get you your degree. While the student was enrolled, discipline was strict. At Oxford, students found lurking about inns and taverns, or even tobacco shops, could be flogged; the same penalty awaited those with the gall to play football on university grounds.* (Cambridge may have been slightly more laid-back: There, football was deemed a “legitimate” sport, along with archery and quoits, a game similar to horseshoes.) Not everyone was cut out for the scholarly life. In Twelfth Night, the buffoonish Sir Andrew Aguecheek says he always regretted that he didn’t attend university: “I would I had bestowed that time in the tongues [i.e. learning languages] that I have in fencing, dancing, and bear-baiting. O, had I but followed the arts!” (1.3.90–93). The “arts” he refers to are the so-called liberal arts that had formed the backbone of Western higher education since ancient times—and which Prospero, in The Tempest, says he studied (“… and for the liberal arts / Without a parallel; those being all my study…”) (1.2.73–74). The standard program of study consisted of the “trivium” of grammar, dialectics, and rhetoric, along with the “quadrivium” of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music—a program of study which, as J. A. Sharpe puts it, was “basically the education appropriate to the free man of a Greek city-state in the fourth century B.C.” The natural philosophy taught at the two august institutions had been Aristotelian through and through—and so it remained, by and large, in the sixteenth century. But a student’s experience depended critically on who his teachers were. As Francis Johnson puts it, education for this select group of young men would have been “superficial and elementary”—unless the student was lucky enough to be taught by one of the handful of brilliant young mathematicians “during the brief period of their active connection with the university.” If a student did receive a first-class education, it would most likely have been an accident, “entirely dependent upon the enthusiasm and enterprise of individual scholars on the faculties.” The keenest learners would have shunned the dry Latin texts offered by the schools in favor of the more accessible—and more up-to-date—popular works.

  Given that the universities at this time were not exactly hotbeds of innovation, one might expect that any astronomy that was taught would have been strictly Ptolemaic. And yet, perhaps surprisingly, Copernicus’s theory did come up for debate, on occasion, in the second half of the sixteenth century. Certainly the universities on the Continent were ahead of the game: By 1545, Erasmus Reinhold’s Commentary—published a few years earlier, and containing a favorable reference to the Copernican theory—had become the standard astronomy textbook at the University of Wittenberg (where Hamlet is said to have studied). By 1560, as Paul
a Findlen notes, students at Wittenberg were learning astronomy from Copernicus’s own book; at Salamanca, by the 1590s, De revolutionibus was required reading. This doesn’t mean that Copernicanism had triumphed; rather, it was being taught as an alternative. It “enriched the calculating skills of astronomers,” Findlen writes, without necessarily making them confront problems in cosmology or physics. “It was possible to read Copernicus as a manual rather than a manifesto.”

  And so it was at Oxford and Cambridge. At Oxford, records from 1576—the same year that Digges published his treatise on the Copernican system—show that one of the questions assigned for disputation for prospective MA students was “An terra quiescat in medio mundi?” (“Is the entire earth at rest in the middle of the world?”) We don’t know which side was argued by the student and which by the proctor, but, as Johnson puts it, “we may be sure that the theories of Copernicus and the opposing doctrines of Aristotle were the chief subjects of debate.”