by Dan Falk
Still, it is possible to stumble. In the Oxford edition (2006), Michael Neill writes, “The Pole Star’s usefulness to navigators seeking to take their bearings was that it was one of the so-called ‘fixed stars.’” Unfortunately, this is a conflation of two senses in which a star might be “fixed”: In the broad sense, all of the stars in the sky are “fixed stars,” in contrast to the planets, known as “wandering stars”; that is, although they move across the sky, the stars (unlike the planets) maintain the same relative positions to one another. But the usefulness of the pole star comes from the fact that it doesn’t join in with this collective motion: It remains in the same part of the sky, while all of the other stars appear to revolve around it. If modern editors seem strangely confused about this distinction, or about celestial mechanics in general, it may simply be because we spend less time looking up than we once did. And yet even in the nineteenth century editors were having trouble with Shakespeare’s astronomical references. When Horace Howard Furness was compiling his massive “Varorium” edition of Othello in 1886, he waded through the various competing glosses from the preceding hundred years or so, assessing their merits. The scene that begins act 2 had been particularly troublesome, with critics recruiting a bewildering array of stars and constellations in order to make sense of it. Furness, cutting through the clutter, chose “fixed” over “fired,” and concluded that the stars in question are indeed the three brightest stars of Ursa Minor—the pole star and the two stars which guard it. “Shakespeare,” he concluded, “knew better than his commentators what he was talking about when he spoke of the guards of the pole.” (Furness went on to cite a number of sixteenth-century astronomical manuals that describe how one can use the north stars and its companions for navigation.)
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Let’s return now to the opening scene of Hamlet, where once again the relationship between the north star and other celestial objects—in particular, the star “westward from the pole”—is paramount. The Arden editions are considered by many to be the gold standard for Shakespeare commentary, so it is illuminating to see how they treat the star mentioned by Bernardo on the battlements. In the second-to-last Arden edition, from 1982, editor Harold Jenkins notes that the reference need not be to a particular star—that much is certainly true—but then adds that “Shakespeare had presumably seen the brilliant star Capella, which would appear in the winter sky ‘westward from the pole.’” Unfortunately, Jenkins is way off: At 1 a.m. in November, Capella, as seen from mid-northern latitudes, lies nearly overhead. One might describe it as being “above the pole,” but certainly not “westward from the pole.” (Having said that, it’s still a better guess than suggesting the object is a planet.) But the latest Arden edition—the hefty 2006 text edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor—brings a fresh start to the guards’ nocturnal observations, and provides a revised take on the star’s identity: Capella is out and the supernova is in, with a reference to Donald Olson’s article from Sky & Telescope.
I don’t want to make too much of the Arden revision; it’s just a few lines of commentary in a 613-page book—and, as Jenkins reminds us, Shakespeare may not even have had a particular star in mind. But still: Here is one of the few cases of an astronomer telling the community of Shakespeare scholars, politely but firmly, “Hey, you missed a spot.” And at least a few of those scholars have said, “You’re right, we did.”*
FROM HAMLET’S CASTLE TO TYCHO’S ISLAND
We have already examined (in Chapter 3) the impact of the new star of 1572, one of the key events in the demise of the Ptolemaic model of the cosmos. As we noted, Tycho Brahe made detailed observations of the star from his Danish island, while Thomas Digges and John Dee, observing from England, were similarly captivated by its appearance. But there is more to connect Hamlet and Tycho than just the supernova (that is, assuming the star in question is the supernova). To begin with, there is the play’s setting. It’s no surprise that Shakespeare chose to locate his play in Denmark. One of his sources was a medieval story about a Scandinavian prince named “Amleth,” dating from the twelfth century. A written account of this tale, by an author known as Saxo Grammaticus (“Saxo the Grammarian”), was first set to print in the early 1500s. Shakespeare may not have read Saxo’s version, but he surely read a more recent French version by François de Belleforest, published in 1570. (By the 1580s, the story had been adapted for the stage, and was being performed in London by Shakespeare’s own company. Possibly written by Thomas Kyd, the Ur-Hamlet, as scholars refer to it, has sadly been lost.) Some of Hamlet’s key elements, including the murder of the old king and the quest for revenge, go back to the story’s medieval roots. (The ghost’s origins seem to be more recent; he may have made his debut in the lost Ur-Hamlet.) But while both Saxo and Belleforest locate the story in Denmark, it was Shakespeare who specifically took the action to the royal court at Elsinore. Though we have no reason to imagine that Shakespeare ever visited Denmark—or, indeed, that he ever traveled beyond England—he would certainly have known of the castle at Elsinore, since some of his fellow actors had played there. (As noted, King James of Scotland—the future king of England—had visited there as well; apparently Tycho and his island were quite a draw.)
Elsinore—Helsingør in Danish—stands on the eastern shore of the Danish island of Zealand, overlooking the channel separating Denmark from present-day Sweden (though in Shakespeare’s day, this was all part of the Kingdom of Denmark). Aside from hearing about the castle from some of his actor friends, might there have been any other reason for Shakespeare to locate the play at Elsinore? Here, Donald Olson draws our attention to another recently published book. Perhaps Shakespeare had been flipping through the pages of the Atlas of the Principal Cities of the World, a lavishly illustrated pictorial atlas printed in 1588. One of the book’s engravings shows an oblique aerial view of the region surrounding Elsinore castle, including, not more than a few miles away, the little island of Hven—Tycho Brahe’s island. The engraving even shows Tycho’s observatory, Uraniborg (“Heavenly Castle”), labeled in Latin as Uraniburgum (figure 7.1).
Fig. 7.1 The lavishly illustrated Atlas of the Principal Cities of the World, published in 1588, includes this depiction of the Sound of Denmark (separating present-day Denmark from Sweden). Tycho Brahe’s observatory-castle, Uraniborg, on the island of Hven, is seen at the right; on the left is the castle of Elsinore (Helschenor), soon to be made famous by Shakespeare as the setting for Hamlet. Donald Olson
Fig. 7.2 In this engraving from 1590, Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe is surrounded by the crests of members of his extended family. Among the sixteen relatives, we find a “Rosenkrans” and a “Guildensteren.” Copies of the engraving were sent to several English scholars, possibly including Thomas Digges, whose family had connections to Shakespeare. Donald Olson
At the risk of getting a little carried away, we can imagine one of Shakespeare’s fellow actors getting the royal tour, so to speak, of the castle and its environs. “… And if you look out across the channel, you can just barely see the little island that the king gave to an eccentric astronomer. His name is Tycho. What he can see through all these clouds I don’t know, but…”
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We might also examine the names in Hamlet: While most of the key characters have fairly generic, more or less classical names (“Claudius,” “Gertrude,” “Ophelia”), Hamlet’s old schoolmates, the courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, do in fact sound stereotypically Danish. What led Shakespeare to choose these names? Again, we perhaps have a clue in the material that Shakespeare may have encountered in print—and once again it leads us back to the astronomer Tycho Brahe. In the 1590s, Tycho commissioned an engraving of himself—a portrait depicting the astronomer in a somewhat pompous-looking pose—surrounded by the crests of members of his extended family. When we look at the engraving closely, we find, among sixteen relatives, one named “Rosenkrans” and another named “Guildensteren” (figure 7.2).
There are, in fact, mul
tiple versions of the engraving shown in the above figure. The one depicted here was made in 1590, but similar designs were printed several times in the 1590s and in 1601, and were included in various books, including the published collections of Tycho’s astronomical letters, known as the Epistolae. Copies of those letters were circulated to men of learning across Europe, and the copy sent to an English scholar, Thomas Savile, has survived. Written in 1590, it includes Tycho’s well-wishes for the two best-known English scientists of the day—John Dee and “the most noble and most learned mathematician Thomas Digges.” We know that Digges kept up a correspondence with Tycho as well. As the historian of astronomy Owen Gingerich suggests, “it is entirely possible that Digges received a copy of the Epistolae directly from Tycho himself.” The overall impression is that the “scientific community” of the time, to use an anachronistic term, was small and rather tight-knit. One imagines that everyone who was interested in the structure of the cosmos knew (or at least knew of) everyone else who was pondering similar questions. In his letter to Savile, Tycho adds, “I have included four copies of my portrait, recently engraved in copper at Amsterdam.” He even suggests that one of the talented English poets (he does not mention any names) might like to compose a few lines in his praise. (If the request makes Tycho appear somewhat full of himself, it would seem to mesh with what we know of the astronomer’s character from other sources—and perhaps also from the pose that he strikes in the engraving itself.)
Olson, incidentally, is not the first scholar to point out the seeming coincidence of names between Tycho’s portrait and the courtiers in Shakespeare’s play. It had been noted by Leslie Hotson in the 1930s, by A. J. Meadows in the 1960s, and probably by others. In the early 1980s, Owen Gingerich concluded that the coincidence with the names Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is “so striking that we may be sure that Tycho’s portrait was one of the sources for Hamlet’s cast of characters.” As Olson puts it, “Shakespeare’s imagination may well have associated the English astronomers, the new star, the Danish astronomer, and the Danish Hamlet.”
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
How much should we make of these two names, found both in Shakespeare’s play and among Tycho Brahe’s relatives? The engraving, scholars have pointed out, isn’t the only place to find these somewhat common Danish names. Apparently a Danish diplomatic mission to England in 1592 included two delegates bearing those same names, and it seems that the two men were inseparable. Moreover, they had been students at Wittenberg, just like Shakespeare’s courtiers. (Although not the same men as the relatives found in the engraving, they, too, are believed to have been distant relations of Tycho.) So there is more than one way in which Shakespeare might have encountered the names Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Still, a picture is worth a thousand words. What role might Tycho’s engraving have played? In the Arden editions, both Jenkins (1982) and Thompson and Taylor (2006) mention the portrait as a possible source. Jenkins concludes that Shakespeare need not have seen the picture with his own eyes; simply hearing the names at some point was enough to give the play “an authentic touch of Denmark.” He also cautions that both names “were common among the most influential Danish families,” and that Frederick II, the Danish king who gave Tycho his island, had nine Rosencrantzes and three Guildensterns at his court. Even so, there are those who feel that Shakespeare’s choice of these names is significant, and indicative of an important link between the playwright and the greatest of the pre-telescopic astronomers. Howard Marchitello notes “an admittedly striking series of coincidences that, from a certain perspective, can be said to connect Tycho’s book to Hamlet (or Hamlet—or Hamlet—to Tycho’s book).” A few scholars, including Scott Maisano, an associate professor of English at the University of Massachussetts–Boston, see the apparent Hamlet–Tycho link as an intriguing connection deserving of further study. “I would say that the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern connection to Tycho Brahe isn’t just a coincidence,” Maisano told me recently. “The Tycho Brahe connection is one of the most important ones, and probably one of the least explored ones, for Shakespeareans.” Maisano suggests that the idea of a scientist on an island may have even more significance for The Tempest than for Hamlet, and sees the character of Prospero as more strongly linked to Tycho Brahe than to John Dee, the scientist most often associated with Shakespeare’s island magician.
It would appear, at a minimum, that Shakespeare had some awareness of Tycho Brahe’s reputation. But the weight that we choose to lend to these connections depends on how much Shakespeare knew about the astronomical thinking of his day. It would be a stretch to imagine that Shakespeare had any direct contact with Tycho—but maybe he didn’t need to. Perhaps what he knew of English astronomy, and English astronomers, was enough—and so we turn once again to Thomas Digges, the greatest of the English scientists of the Elizabethan age. As we saw in Chapter 3, Digges was the astronomer who first popularized the Copernican theory in England, and who went even further than Copernicus by daring to imagine an infinite cosmos. Because Digges died in 1595—within a few years of Shakespeare’s arrival in London—it is unlikely (though not impossible) that the two men ever met. However, the Digges family had a number of connections to Shakespeare—connections that strengthened in the years following the scientist’s death.*
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We might begin in 1590, when an updated edition of Digges’s book on military strategy, known as Stratioticos, was published in London. Overseeing the publication was Richard Field, an old childhood chum of Shakespeare’s, from Stratford, who had settled in London a few years ahead of the playwright. A couple of years later, Field would publish Shakespeare’s own Venus and Adonis. There is no reason to imagine that Shakespeare knew every book that his friend published—as voracious a reader as he surely was, he couldn’t have plowed through all of them; and perhaps a book on military strategy wasn’t all that enthralling. Or was it? You never know when you might have to write a good battle scene. Leslie Hotson found a number of similarities between Shakespeare’s Henry V and Digges’s Stratioticos. For Hotson, the character of Fluellen, the fiery Welsh captain, brings to mind Digges himself, especially in a number of lines in which Fluellen (and Digges) praises the military discipline of the Romans.
While we’re talking about who printed what, we must briefly mention another publisher, William Jaggard. (We encountered his surname on the title page of the First Folio: Jaggard, together with bookseller Edward Blount, published the first collection of Shakespeare’s plays in 1623; since Jaggard died a month before the Folio’s publication, however, it is his son Isaac’s name that appears on the famous frontispiece.) We remember Jaggard for his connection to Shakespeare, but he also published many less-well-known works, among them a textbook on astronomy by Thomas Hill. The book went to press in 1599—around the time that Shakespeare was putting the finishing touches on Hamlet. By this time, Hill himself was dead, but a preface written by Jaggard pays tribute to the late author’s skill. And though Hill rejected the Copernican theory, Jaggard’s remarks are suggestive of the appetite for popular scientific works in Elizabethan England: With the nation having been blessed with four decades of peace, “Students have never had more liberty to look into learning of any profession”; as a result, “England may compare with any Nation for number of learned men, and for variety in professions.”
Besides Richard Field and William Jaggard, who else was Shakespeare friendly with in the 1590s? Certainly his fellow actors, including Richard Burbage, to whom he seems to have been particularly close, as well as John Heminges and Henry Condell, the two actors who would later compile Shakespeare’s works for publication in the First Folio.* (Shakespeare left a small amount of money to Burbage, Heminges, and Condell in his will.) There was Ben Jonson, of course—both a friend and a competitor. Adding to the list, perhaps just below Shakespeare’s professional colleagues, we can put forward the name of Leonard Digges, son of Thomas Digges.* We know that Leonard, who became a poet, was a fan of Shakespeare: He co
ntributed a dedicatory verse in honor of the playwright in the First Folio in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death. (A few more lines of praise were included with a collection of Shakespeare’s poems published in 1640.) Shakespeare may well have known Leonard’s older brother, Dudley, and their mother, Anne (Thomas Digges’s widow). As Hotson’s research showed, the Digges family lived in Cripplegate, an area noted for its weavers and brewers, located just north of the city’s ancient walls. Digges, like Isaac Newton in the following century, was not just a scientist but also something of a politician, serving as a member of Parliament for roughly the last thirteen years of his life. He was also rich—probably one of the wealthiest men in the neighborhood. Cripplegate, incidentally, was also home to Shakespeare’s close friend Heminges; so if Shakespeare was spending time with Heminges, and certainly if he was chumming with either of the Digges brothers, occasional visits to the stately Digges home seem plausible.
A brief geographical note: We know that Shakespeare, in his first dozen or so years in London, was a man on the move. As we’ve seen, he lived, at various times, in Shoreditch, Bishopsgate, and Southwark. None of these neighborhoods is particularly close to the Digges residence in Cripplegate. But, given that Cripplegate was just a stone’s throw from the booksellers’ stalls north of St. Paul’s, and that Shakespeare’s good friend Heminges had been living there for several years already, the playwright is unlikely to have been a stranger to the area. (Hotson says that Shakespeare was “a frequent and welcome guest” at Heminges’ house, although I’m not sure how he deduced this.) However, Shakespeare’s connection to the neighborhood grew even stronger a few years later, when he rented a room on Silver Street, in the heart of Cripplegate, just two blocks away from the Digges family.