The Science of Shakespeare

by Dan Falk

  * * *

  Kragh and Chapman are historians of science—but what about the literary community? What do mainstream Shakespeare scholars think of Usher’s work? In fact, this was hard to determine, for the simple reason that most of them aren’t familiar with it. The vast majority of the scholars that I spoke with hadn’t heard of Professor Usher and knew nothing of his investigation into Shakespeare and astronomy. On a few occasions I tried to summarize his work, or at least his Hamlet theory, though it is possible that my attempts to condense it into a few sentences failed to do it justice. However, there are a small handful of Shakespeare scholars who have taken the time to read Usher’s work (or at least portions of it), and, while they may have doubts about his Hamlet-as-allegory thesis, they say that he’s done something quite valuable.

  Among those willing to lend qualified support to Usher’s approach is Scott Maisano at the University of Massachusetts–Boston. “I’m really glad that he’s done it,” Maisano told me, referring to Usher’s work on Hamlet. “I think the new science makes a difference in a play like Hamlet, and makes a difference in perhaps the ways that Peter Usher is suggesting.” The problem, he says, is that Usher’s proposal “feels a little too allegorical.” (One Harvard professor was more blunt, stating flatly that “Shakespeare doesn’t do allegory.”) It’s not that the Hamlet story can’t contain allusions to the decline and fall of the medieval worldview—but for Maisano, the idea that this is the play’s primary function is too much of a straitjacket for such a broad and complex work. “It’s hard for me to reduce Hamlet to being just about, or primarily about, the Copernican or Ptolemaic models of the universe,” he says. “There’s so much going on in that play, so many ideas, so many angles from which one can approach that play.” Maisano is highly suspect of the idea “that you can reduce it to some sort of allegory about the overthrow of the Ptolemaic system.” And if it really is such an allegory, he says, it’s a staggeringly elaborate one. “I would resist the idea that Hamlet, or any other Shakespeare play, is primarily an allegory encoding a set of ideas or beliefs.”

  Nonetheless, Maisano (who has read Usher’s published articles but not his books) says that Usher has provided a valuable service by focusing attention on a neglected subject—the question of what Shakespeare might have known about the revolution that was unfolding in the sciences, and whether he took an interest in it. “You ask, ‘Did he know and did he care?’ I think he did. I think Usher’s right. He did know, and he did care.”

  John Pitcher, a professor of English at the University of Oxford, has a similar assessment of Usher’s contribution. “It’s good work; it digs up stuff,” he says. “But it’s got the same kind of determination to prove something about Shakespeare that you find in people who want to prove that Shakespeare is Oxford.”* Usher has “this same kind of over-resolve to make everything fit. And I don’t think everything does fit, probably.” Even so, Pitcher, like Maisano, believes that Usher is shining a spotlight on what had previously been a dark corner of Shakespearean studies. “I think the most important thing is to ask, ‘Do these plays have running through them an exploration of different aspects of the physical world?’ And I think there’s no doubt about that at all.”

  THE VIEW FROM ITALY

  Usher is not alone in his effort to link Shakespeare to the Copernican Revolution. An Italian scholar, Gilberto Sacerdoti, tackled the subject head-on in his 1990 book Nuovo cielo, nuova terra: La rivelazione copernicana di “Antonio e Cleopatra” di Shakespeare (New Heaven, New Earth: The Copernican Revolution in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra). While Usher finds the crucial link between Shakespeare and astronomy in the figure of Leonard Digges, Sacerdoti finds it in the Italian philosopher and mystic Giordano Bruno; and while Usher focuses most intently on Hamlet, Sacerdoti homes in on Antony and Cleopatra. A great deal of his thesis hinges on a key line that occurs in the very first scene of the play. Antony, Rome’s most powerful general, is already smitten with Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt; but just as things are heating up, he is called back to Rome. Torn between love and duty, he professes the depth of his feelings for Cleopatra. But she demands to know how much he loves her:

  CLEOPATRA

  If it be love indeed, tell me how much.

  ANTONY

  There’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned.

  CLEOPATRA

  I’ll set a bourn how far to be beloved.

  ANTONY

  Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth.

  (1.1.14–17)

  Antony says his love is boundless; when Cleopatra insists on measuring it, he replies that one would run out of territory if one tried: You would need a new heaven and a new earth. The standard interpretation is that the line merely references a well-known passage in the Bible, occurring both in 2 Peter (“We, according to his promise, look for a newe heaven and a newe earth”) and in Revelation (“I sawe a new heaven, and a new earth”), referring to the redemption of humankind at the Second Coming of Christ. (The phrasing is from the “Bishop’s Bible” of 1572, the version most likely to have been known to Shakespeare.) But Sacerdoti sees something else. The play, he argues, reflects a vision of the universe “that is unmistakably the Brunian version of Copernicanism.” Sacerdoti’s work seems to have gone virtually unnoticed by English-speaking scholars.* I was able to find only a single review of the book, and, like the original work, it was in Italian. The reviewer, Henry Newbolt, had the same concern with Sacerdoti that Maisano and Pitcher have with Usher: He’s just a bit too … enthusiastic. “If he keeps on like this,” Newbolt writes, “Sacerdoti will end by attributing to Bruno the paternity of the Bard’s works, if he does not end by identifying Shakespeare with Bruno himself (I hope not).”

  SHAKESPEARE UNDER THE MICROSCOPE—AND THROUGH THE TELESCOPE

  One thing that Usher and Sacerdoti have in common—and it is not unusual in the world of Shakespeare scholarship—is an eye for minutiae. If there is something within the plot or dialogue of one of the plays that might yield an astronomical allusion, Usher has probably found it. Sometimes these are references to particular celestial objects; sometimes they lead to specific astronomers or philosophers. In Shakespeare and the Dawn of Modern Science, Usher devotes nine pages to analyzing the most famous stage direction in the canon—the “Exit, pursued by a bear” directive in the middle of The Winter’s Tale. Usher eventually concludes that the bear represents Nicholai Reymers Baer, known as Ursus (Latin for “bear”), a sixteenth-century German astronomer who once visited Tycho Brahe at his island observatory. (Tycho himself, meanwhile, is represented by Antigonus in the play, Usher says.) Following a dispute, Tycho threw Ursus off his island and later tried to sue him for libel. Usher concludes that “the backwardness of Tycho’s thinking and the Dane’s haughty attitude to social inferiors would be sufficient reason to invent a vengeful bear.”

  Usher is also deeply concerned with passages that suggest not merely a knowledge of the night sky, but telescopic knowledge. Consider act 3, scene 4 of Hamlet: Prince Hamlet has confronted his mother, the queen, in her bedroom; in front of them are paintings of both King Hamlet and Claudius. He asks her to look at the images; to study the men’s features. His father’s image is clearly the more noble; he has, among other things, “an eye like Mars to threaten and command” (3.4.57). The standard interpretation is that the king’s eye is suggestive of his power—that he could command an army like the god of war (Mars). Usher, however, sees it as a reference to the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. “The planet Mars … is not known for an ‘eye,’ only for its red color. What Shakespeare means is that Jupiter has an eye that is red; in short, it seems most reasonable that Shakespeare is describing Old Hamlet’s face as like that of Jupiter which has an ‘eye’ that is red like Mars, in other words, a reference to the planet Jupiter’s Great Red Spot”—discovered many decades ahead of schedule, so to speak. (The standard view is that the red spot was discovered in the 1660s by Giovanni Cassini; the oldest surviving drawings
of it date only from the 1830s.)

  Usher believes he’s found references to the planet Saturn as well. In The Merchant of Venice, Graziano “associates Antonio’s chronic melancholy with yellowness and that Bassanio is suitor number 7,” he writes. “It happens that Saturn is yellowish and the seventh Ancient Planet. The recurrence of heptads raises the possibility that Saturn is at issue.” Meanwhile, the ring that Portia gives to Bassanio, a crucial plot device in the play, could represent Saturn, the ringed planet. The same goes for Imogen’s ring in Cymbeline—but with an important difference: When the ring is described as being cracked, in the play’s fifth act, Usher sees it as a reference to the gap in Saturn’s rings known as the “Cassini division.” The standard view is that the gap was first observed by Cassini in 1675—but Usher believes it was seen by Leonard Digges more than a century earlier.

  Usher goes on to collect a vast array of astronomical references within the canon. Hamlet, not surprisingly, is the richest source of such information. Usher believes that within its pages, Shakespeare describes “properties of the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars that he could not have known without telescopic aid.” (In an earlier paper, he writes, “In Hamlet, the Bard describes with relative clarity the phases of Venus, craters on the moon, sunspots, the stellar makeup of the Milky Way, the number of naked-eye stars, and the existence of stars lying beyond the pale of human vision. These data could only derive from telescopic observations.”) The figure of Leonard Digges lurks in the background throughout; his early “perspective glass” would have been “a reasonable means of resolving such detail.”

  THE TUDOR TELESCOPE REVISITED

  While Usher’s Hamlet-as-allegory thesis can stand or fall on its own merits, his broader argument, focusing on Leonard Digges and Elizabethan telescopy, makes very specific claims about what historians call the “material culture” of early modern England. Usher asks us to consider the possibility that Digges had a fully functioning telescope some half a century before Galileo got his hands on such a device; and, for that matter, that Digges’s telescope was significantly better than any of those employed by Galileo. But as we saw in Chapter 5, the case for the “Tudor telescope,” though tantalizing, is hardly convincing. As noted, we have the case of Leonard Digges, who, according to his son, Thomas, used a “perspective glass” in the mid-1500s. And we have Thomas Harriot, who may have used a variety of devices, and, by around the time of Galileo’s telescopic observations, was almost certainly using an instrument similar to Galileo’s, with which he was able to view details of the lunar surface, sunspots, and the moons of Jupiter. But the existence of a telescope suited for astronomical observations at that date—around 1609–10—is not controversial. Peter Usher wants to push back the timeline of the telescope’s invention and its use: In Shakespeare and the Dawn of Modern Science, and in a series of papers, he argues that Elizabethan telescopy was in an advanced state by the mid- to late 1500s. And he goes further, stating that Shakespeare himself had access to a telescope—or, more specifically, that whoever wrote the works of “Shakespeare” had such access. But, as we noted in Chapter 5, the evidence is thin. To sum up: In the case of Leonard Digges, all we have is Thomas’s passing reference to a device his father supposedly used many years earlier, plus another secondhand account from Bourne; and Harriot—before his encounter with more sophisticated Dutch instruments in or around 1609—makes no mention of a device offering a magnified view of distant objects. If there really was a “Tudor telescope”—a device as good as instruments developed more than a century later—wouldn’t more copies of the instrument have been made? Wouldn’t its existence have been widely known and discussed? To be sure, Leonard Digges probably experimented with an array of optical devices, and, with difficulty, may have achieved reasonably good views of distant terrestrial objects. And, on occasion, he perhaps even glimpsed something in the night sky that no one else had seen up to that point. But observing the planets in fine detail is another matter. On the weight of the evidence, it doesn’t seem likely. As David Levy puts it, the existence of an Elizabethan telescope capable of revealing Jupiter’s Great Red Spot “strains credulity.”

  Of course, one could argue that the invention of the telescope was a state secret; that such a device had been developed, but word of its existence was kept quiet in the interest of national security. This is the line of reasoning Usher suggests: “Spyglasses had obvious military uses, and the lack of printed detail on optical devices no doubt stemmed from a need for a nominally Protestant England to guard its scientific and technical expertise against the Catholic theocracies that menaced her.” As for the sights revealed by the telescope—these were perhaps not dangerous in their own right, but “would affect national security indirectly as discoveries that flew in the face of scholastic certainty could only inflame anti-Elizabethan sentiment at home and abroad and strengthen the resolve of theocracies to stamp out heresy on the island nation.” However, historians are skeptical. Much like the claim that Copernicanism was a dangerous topic, the idea of a secret Elizabethan telescope doesn’t quite hold up to scrutiny. Allan Chapman believes there is “a formidable argument against such a ‘conspiracy’ theory.… Frankly, I find the idea as implausible as Sir Winston Churchill suppressing radar in World War II, and then expecting no-one to talk or write about it thereafter!” Again, it is possible that Leonard Digges used a primitive telescope-like device; and John Dee and Thomas Harriot may have used one as well—but it was only with the improved Dutch inventions, circa 1609, that a new window on the heavens was truly opened. Only then did astronomers have, as Chapman puts it, “relatively good, clear images which conveyed a wholly new level of meaning in the universe.”

  * * *

  The minutiae that catch a scholar’s eye need not stem from Shakespeare’s words: His numbers will do just as well. For Usher, every number in the canon is a potential clue. In The Merchant of Venice, he notes that Bassanio is Portia’s seventh suitor, suggestive of Saturn, the seventh of the known planets. When the number ten thousand occurs in Hamlet, and again in Cymbeline, Usher says that this is approximately the number of stars visible to the unaided eye.* A scene of particular numerical interest comes in the middle of The Winter’s Tale, in which the elderly Shepherd laments the foolishness of young men. He wishes that “there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty” (3.3.58–59). Men of that age, he says, do nothing but fight, steal, impregnate women, and disrespect their elders (Shakespeare says it with more poetic language, of course). They also lack common sense: “Would any but these boiled brains of nineteen and two-and-twenty hunt in this weather?” (3.3.62–64). Usher gets a lot of mileage out of these two pairs of numbers (10/23 and 19/22). With some deft numerical juggling, he pieces together a chronology within the play that parallels many of the key dates in the life and times of both Tycho and Ursus, including the years of their deaths. (The sixteen-year leap announced by the Chorus at the start of act 4 provides further temporal data for additional number crunching.) Another odd number is Hamlet’s age: Though he’s called “young Hamlet,” and wants to return to university, he is apparently thirty.† Usher points out that this is the same age that Thomas Digges was when he published the supplement to his father’s almanac—the one with the diagram of the infinite cosmos.

  WHAT’S IN A NUMBER?

  What is intriguing about these arguments is that, if one removes the speculation about early Elizabethan telescopy, they begin to resemble the kind of “close reading” that has always formed a significant part of Shakespeare criticism; indeed, they echo many of the arguments that Shakespeare scholars have been putting forward for decades (if not centuries). Consider Usher’s attention to numbers. At first, his number crunching might seem somewhat obsessive, like that of a Kabbalist—but there’s always been a corner of Shakespeare scholarship in which obsession with numbers is de rigueur. A case in point is the work of Thomas McAlindon, a respected Shakespeare scholar who taught at the University of Hull, in England. In Shakespeare
’s Tragic Cosmos (1991), for example, McAlindon explored the “quadruple groupings” in Julius Caesar: two marriages; four plebeians responding to the speeches of Brutus and Antony; four plebeians attacking Cinna the poet (“no doubt the same ones”). The number two holds even more significance for McAlindon. The “dyad” crops up frequently in the canon—for example, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where “unified duality is presented as incipient doubleness and confusion.”

  McAlindon finds numbers to be even more crucial to interpreting Macbeth, a play in which “number symbolism co-operates with nature symbolism in the process of signalling key ideas relating to the tragic theme of disunity and chaos.… Threes and twos, trebling and doubling, are closely linked throughout the play.” This pattern of numbers “focuses sharply on the idea that ‘doubleness’ is the root cause of tragic chance and confusion, so that the witches’ refrain, ‘Double, double, toil and trouble; / Fire burn, and cauldron bubble’ … might be taken as the play’s epigraph.” It is the three witches who naturally catch his attention first. (If three is a mystical number to Christians—think of the Holy Trinity—then why would Christians associate the number with witchcraft? McAlindon has the answer: “The explanation, of course, lies in the fact that witchcraft, like devilry, is a rival system which parodies what it seeks to overthrow.”) The porter admits three imaginary sinners into hell; Macbeth hires three murderers. Banquo hallucinates a series of nine kings, but of course nine is “the witches’ favourite multiple of three.” (Wait a minute, is it really nine kings? The text says “a show of eight kings” with “Banquo following” [4.1.3]—eight plus one; there’s your nine.) Duncan is murdered at 3 a.m. (there’s a tradition that roosters crow three times—at midnight, at 3 a.m., and an hour before dawn); and the porter admits to “carousing till the second cock” (2.3.23–24).* And, of course, three “tomorrow”s in Macbeth’s famous soliloquy.