The Science of Shakespeare

by Dan Falk

  Maisano, like Usher, challenges that view. The appearance of Jupiter with the four ghosts, in the final act of Cymbeline, seems to have Galileo’s fingerprints all over it. (As he put it when I spoke with him in Boston recently: “It seems an awfully big coincidence if it’s not an allusion to Galileo.”) Yes, the play is a “romance”—but a romance need not be a retreat from reality, Maisano explains. (Plus, the label “romance” was bestowed on the late plays only in Victorian times.) Maisano compares Cymbeline to a peculiar book written by Johannes Kepler the previous year. This was his Somnium—Latin for “Dream”—published in 1609. In the Somnium, the German scientist imagines what the Earth might look like from the moon, and how that view might change depending on the veracity of the Copernican model. This remarkable book has been called, among other things, the first work of science fiction, and yet it can also be seen as a vital work of science: It is here that Kepler first uses the word “gravity” in its modern sense. It could have been told in straight-ahead prose, but instead the entire story unfolds as a dream sequence. Kepler’s vision may have been revolutionary, but his approach in communicating it in the Somnium was romantic, even antiquated. As Maisano puts it, “Kepler understood that in order to get at intellectual realities that defy our ordinary experiences … it is often necessary to resort to what looks on its surface like ‘literary escapism.’” Similarly, Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, composed just one year later, “might appear to be a backward-looking romance full of dog-eared devices from popular literature, but it is in reality a scientific romance.” Incidentally, he agrees with Usher that the reference to a “learned … astronomer” does, in fact, point to a real-life astronomer—but while Usher sees it as referring to Thomas Digges, Maisano believes that “it is undoubtedly Galileo” who is being alluded to.

  Another line in the play, from near the very end, catches Maisano’s attention. One by one, the play’s divergent plots come together, and the various loose ends are tied up: The misunderstandings are resolved, disguises removed, true identities revealed. King Cymbeline is overjoyed, but stunned. He asks, “Does the world go round?” (5.5.232). Maisano notes, “This is the only such utterance in Shakespeare’s plays; and coincidentally, this precise question was part of intellectual discussion all across Europe in 1610.”

  And what of the book placed on Posthumus’s breast? The Starry Messenger was perhaps the most provocative new book circulating at that time—but it was not the only one. As Maisano points out, scholars were also plugging away on another groundbreaking book, the King James version of the Bible, to be published the following year. The book mentioned in act 5 of Cymbeline may, he speculates, be an allusion to the new bible—an appropriate gift, perhaps, for characters in a pagan setting seeking to improve their fortunes. (Again the dates are a bit tricky; as Maisano notes, although Cymbeline likely dates from late 1610, the first known performance occurred the following year.) There is another link to connect these two books: The Copernican view, now supported by Galileo’s observations, would soon call into question the interpretation of scripture (a subject Galileo would address in his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina in 1615). This, of course, would eventually get Galileo into trouble; but already the tension could be felt. Shakespeare, Maisano writes, “calls our attention to how this new universe of unimaginable size fundamentally alters the human predicament.” The playwright, he says, “seems to have set the two revolutions—Christian and Copernican—purposely and provocatively side by side.”

  * * *

  Like Maisano, John Pitcher of Oxford sees Cymbeline as Shakespeare’s attempt to come to grips with a changing world, a universe opened wide by the scientific discoveries of the day. The play involves fathers and kings and gods—throughout history, figures of authority—but all now finding their leadership challenged “by the evidence of modern experimental science.” As Pitcher argues in the introduction to the Penguin edition of the play (2005), the Jupiter scene is almost certainly a reference to the discoveries newly announced by Galileo. Previous scholarly editions of the play (and there have been many) have, as far as I can tell, left Galileo out completely. Editors of course noticed the cosmological allusions in the play’s dramatic climax, but seemed content to address it in Ptolemaic terms. When Jupiter returns to his “palace crystalline,” for example, Martin Butler notes that “in Ptolemaic cosmology the ‘crystalline heaven’ was one of the universe’s outermost spheres, next to the firmament.”

  For Pitcher, however, the nod to Galileo is more than a one-off allusion. The very essence of Cymbeline, he argues, involves the playwright’s confrontation with a new worldview, a new way of thinking now sanctioned by the discoveries of Galileo and other promoters of the “new philosophy.” Shakespeare is also being forced to give something up—to abandon ancient ways of thinking that, beginning in 1610, were no longer tenable:

  In that year, because of Galileo … the universe was finally proved to be not an enormous glass ball with the earth at its center but an expanding infinitude of galaxies, each packed with stars. It took a century or more for the old father, ruling in European courts and churches, to be unseated by this extraordinary scientific discovery, but everyone in the know realized its significance from the start, including Shakespeare.

  This is a bold argument: Galileo looks through his telescope, the world suddenly changes, and Shakespeare knows it. The transformation began with Copernicus writing on the revolutions in the sky; soon, Pitcher is suggesting, there will be revolutions of a more dangerous kind, with political and religious orders turned on their heads. (He is perhaps getting ahead of himself with the reference to galaxies, whose nature was not understood in Shakespeare’s time.*) But Pitcher’s assertion is also the clearest statement yet from a mainstream Shakespeare scholar that Shakespeare knew what was going on in science, and that this knowledge is reflected in his plays.

  Intriguingly, Shakespeare manages to allude to the new astronomy in a scene built almost entirely from elements of ancient mythology and Ptolemaic cosmology. Jupiter is not only a planet but a god; and when he appears he refers explicitly to his “palace crystalline.” Moreover, the play is set not in Renaissance England but in ancient Britain. When Jupiter makes his appearance, Pitcher says, it is intended “as a deliberate and subtle twist in the game of old and new being played out constantly in Cymbeline.” What Galileo has seen with his telescope is crucial, but what he doesn’t see may be just as relevant: There is no sign, for example, of the crystalline sphere through which Jupiter must pass in order to make his descent onto Shakespeare’s stage. “If Galileo’s telescope was correct,” Pitcher writes, “the crystalline roof had been an illusion all along.” In addition, Pitcher, like Maisano, sees something not-so-subtly Copernican in King Cymbeline’s question, “Does the world go round?” The Earth’s alleged movement through the heavens was, for an Elizabethan audience, every bit as disorienting as the discovery of new stars in the night sky. And, like Usher, he suspects the play also alludes to the new stars revealed by Galileo’s telescope. The “stones on the beach / stars in the sky” comparison, in the “vaulted arch” speech from act 1, may be “possibly a way of saying that the stars too are uncountable.” (Mind you, the comparison did not originate with Galileo; Pitcher points out that it has its roots in Genesis.)

  A further note on The Starry Messenger is in order: While it was written in Latin, it would not have been a difficult read for educated Englishmen. Galileo’s book, Pitcher writes, was “a scientific publication written in very simple Latin, unimpeded by courtly rhetoric, and illustrated with clear plates.” I explored this point in more detail when I spoke with Pitcher in his office at St. John’s College at Oxford.* “I think by the time Shakespeare had finished his grammar-school education, he would have had a reading fluency for Latin prose that matches the achievements of our undergraduates after, say, five terms,” he told me. In school, “Shakespeare would have done very little else but learn Latin.” Moreover, The Starry Messenger is not a difficu
lt book. “The Latin is ‘schoolboy Latin,’” Pitcher says. “The learned community, and the not-so-learned community, will be able to open up that book and know what it means.” As mentioned, the book was distributed far and wide; it made such a splash that everyone who was anyone would have been discussing it. “I think it’s the kind of stuff that would have been talked about in alehouses,” Pitcher muses.

  Here is a destination for your time machine: an alehouse in London—maybe the famous Mermaid, in Cheapside, which Ben Jonson and other playwrights are known to have frequented—circa April 1610. Mugs and plates clatter; a knight argues with a tailor; a silversmith’s apprentice tries to chat up a barmaid; a vagabond looks for any unguarded foodstuffs or coin purses. A group of actors are making merry at a table in the corner. One of them, sitting at the end of the table, is an actor who is also a playwright. Two strangers walk in; the playwright doesn’t recognize them. One of them has just returned from Italy, and is enthusiastically describing his adventures to his companion. He pulls out a small book; they start talking about its remarkable claims, and pointing to its crisp, copperplate engravings.… The playwright leans forward. What was that about Jupiter again?

  Shakespeare, we can be sure, wouldn’t have settled for just hearing about this remarkable book: Here was a provocative little pamphlet from Italy, describing sights never seen before in the heavens, with pictures. He would have wanted to see it with his own eyes. Some of those in Shakespeare’s audience—not all, of course—would also have seen The Starry Messenger; many others would have at least heard of it. With up to a thousand people at each performance of Cymbeline, Pitcher speculates, you could easily have a couple of hundred who would understand a reference to Galileo’s book.

  Naturally, I was curious what Stephen Greenblatt, perhaps the best-known Shakespeare scholar in America today, might have to say about these interpretations of Cymbeline, and, more generally, the suggestion that Shakespeare’s plays contain allusions to the “new philosophy.” He’s heard most of the theories at least in broad outline; he hadn’t read Usher’s work, however, so I summarized it as best I could. As the rain poured down in Harvard Square just beyond his window, he said that he wasn’t quite willing to commit, explaining that, as a general rule, he is “somewhat allergic” to treating works of literature (not just Shakespeare) “as a kind of esoteric allegory.” I asked him specifically about Jupiter’s appearance in act 5 of Cymbeline: Might the scene have been intended as an allusion to the discoveries announced in The Starry Messenger? Greenblatt concedes that it’s “a very strange moment in Shakespeare,” and that it requires some sort of explanation. “I suppose it’s conceivable,” he said.

  Looming over both The Starry Messenger and Cymbeline is the question of authority: who has it, who can challenge it, and where one might seek the truth. Galileo’s discoveries question the supremacy of ancient teachings, and, by extension, those who supported and propagated those views; in Cymbeline, Shakespeare questions a whole array of once-unassailable authorities, from fathers to kings and beyond. Galileo’s discoveries made another set of ancient beliefs equally obsolete. Paradigms that had managed to escape the slings and arrows of the past fifteen centuries now lay in ruins. “The authority of Jupiter, of the old king, of God—it’s done with, finished,” Pitcher says. “It’s all back to human beings now.”

  10. “Treachers by spherical predominance…”

  THE ALLURE OF ASTROLOGY

  The parish register from Holy Trinity Church in Stratford—the site of Shakespeare’s baptism, and his burial—does not make for compelling reading; normally, it is an endless tally of births, marriages, and deaths. Next to the date of July 11, 1564, however, the register contains these words: Hic incipit pestis (“Here begins the plague”). It is hard to imagine the terror that lurks behind these three little words, written three months after the playwright’s birth. A tenth of the town’s population was dead within six months. In London, the victims numbered in the tens of thousands. The plague was a recurring menace in Shakespeare’s England, and no one knew when the next deadly visitation might come. When an outbreak occurred in 1593, the historian William Camden, a contemporary of Shakespeare, made a careful note of the circumstances. It was not the overcrowded streets or the lack of hygiene that captured his attention; rather, he noted that “Saturn was passing through the uttermost parts of Cancer and the beginning of Leo”—just as they had thirty years earlier, during another deadly outbreak.

  The stars were never the sole explanation for human misfortune; disasters could also be interpreted as punishment by God for various moral transgressions (as countless pamphlets from this period show). Everyone agreed, however, that the movements of the stars and planets were a critical factor, and that their motion, along with the appearance of meteors or comets, could be read as portents of terrestrial events to come. One ignored such heavenly signs at one’s peril. As Kirstin Olsen puts it, “People watched the sky with the same jumpy intensity of Wall Street analysts watching economic indicators; a bad omen could cause public confidence to plummet.” Clearly the sun, moon, stars, and planets held power over people’s lives. As Kent declares in King Lear, “It is the stars, / The stars above us govern our conditions.…”* And Kent is not alone in pondering heavenly influences. In the same play, Gloucester refers to “these late eclipses of the sun and moon,” believed to be a reference to actual eclipses in September and October 1605. But note the rest of the line: These celestial events “portend no good to us” (1.2.91). Clearly there is little hope for disentangling astronomy from astrology: To Shakespeare—or at least to his audience—a profound link is suggested between celestial happenings and human affairs, a connection that would have made perfect sense to even the best-educated of Shakespeare’s countrymen. Astrology was by far the most prevalent form of magic in Shakespeare’s day; in fact, it simply reflected the prevailing wisdom of the time. As Olsen notes, anyone who denied the power of astrology would have been adopting “a fringe position.” Man and nature, earth and sky, microcosm and macrocosm: It was all connected, and the profound influence of the stars and planets was not to be taken lightly.†

  “THERE WAS A STAR DANCED”

  Astrology loomed large in Shakespeare’s world, but it was hardly new. The Babylonians had laid the groundwork three thousand years earlier; the system was further developed by the Greeks and Romans, and then by Arab astrologers in the Middle Ages. In England, astrology came to have two more or less distinct branches, known as “natural astrology” and “judicial astrology.” Natural astrology was, in fact, something like straight-ahead astronomy; it focused on tracking and predicting the motions of the sun, moon, and planets. Judicial astrology was closer to what we think of today as just plain “astrology”—the attempt to link celestial happenings to earthly affairs, and to use astronomical knowledge to predict terrestrial happenings. (To avoid confusion, I will put natural astrology aside, and use the term “astrology” to refer solely to “judicial astrology.”)

  How, exactly, would the motions of the heavenly bodies affect human affairs? We must recall, first of all, the prevalence of the geocentric worldview: Most people believed that the Earth was the center of the universe, and that the stars revolved around the Earth. This by itself must have lent considerable weight to astrological beliefs. Also note that the sublunar world—the corruptible, changeable earth and its equally imperfect environs—was thought to be composed of the four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. These were in a state of constant flux, but their motion was thought to be governed by the pristine (and yet complex) motion of the heavenly spheres. This explains why any attempt to separate astrology from any other branch of “science” would have been a meaningless pursuit in Shakespeare’s day. Astrological thinking, as Keith Thomas notes, “pervaded all aspects of scientific thought.” It should not be thought of as an isolated discipline, but as “an essential aspect of the intellectual framework in which men were educated.” Astrology, as J. A. Sharpe puts it, “had
a fair claim to being the most systematic attempt to explain natural phenomena according to rigorous scientific laws then in existence.” In other words, astrology, in Shakespeare’s England, was seen as a scientific pursuit, and a rigorous one at that. Indeed, many of the scientists we’ve been looking at (again, noting that “scientist” is an anachronistic term) transitioned effortlessly between astrology and astronomy. Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Thomas Digges, and John Dee were all, to some extent, astrologers as well as astronomers. (Writing in 1570, Dee notes that “man’s body, and all other elementall bodies, are altered, disposed, ordered, pleasured and displeasured, by the influentiall working of the Sunne, Mone and other Starres and Planets.”) Dee consulted astrological charts to determine the best day for Elizabeth’s coronation, and was called on to offer his views on the political significance of the comet of 1577. (Elizabeth herself asked that horoscopes be cast for her suitors, and used astrology to assess potential heirs.) As we’ve seen, the new star of 1572, and the Great Comet of 1577, were imagined to be fraught with astrological significance. Even Francis Bacon, now regarded as one of the key figures of the Scientific Revolution, seems to have embraced astrological thinking. (It has been argued that Copernicus and Galileo were exceptional in their lack of interest in astrology—although Galileo did cast horoscopes for his Medici patrons; presumably he had little choice in the matter.) But it was not just an educated man’s hobby: The widespread popularity of astrology is reflected in the sales of almanacs, which were filled with astrological prognostications along with astronomical data; they outsold even the Bible. Astrology lay at the very foundation of humankind’s attempt to understand the universe.