The Science of Shakespeare

by Dan Falk

  * * *

  In an age when scientific explanations were in short supply, one can see astrology’s appeal. After all, the sun and moon (if not the stars and planets) actually do play a vital role in regulating life on Earth. The sun, of course, provides warmth and light and, indirectly, is responsible for the wind and weather patterns, while the moon (together with the sun) controls the tides. The motion of the sun and moon, along with the lunar phases, was perfectly predictable, and farmers required an intimate knowledge of this cycle. A doctor would have been well aware that certain kinds of illness—say, a bronchial condition—would be more common in winter than in summer. But the connections were imagined to run much deeper. For example, the moon was believed to control not only the tides, but also the moisture in a person’s body, including the humors thought to govern health and sickness (we will look at medicine more closely in Chapter 12); moreover, a person’s personality, and even their actions at specific moments, were thought to be controlled, or at least swayed, by celestial influences.

  To the astrologer, much depends on the positions of the planets at the time of a person’s birth; the planets, like the moon, were thought to affect the person’s natural humors, which in turn make one more likely, or less likely, to be influenced by various passions, and to be predisposed to either good or evil. The free-spirited Beatrice, in Much Ado about Nothing, notes that “there was a star danced, and under that star I was born” (2.2.316). It is true that, by force of will, one might overpower these predispositions; but as one Elizabethan astrologer put it, “the most part of men doe follow their affections, and there are but fewe that doe master and overrule them.” It’s not that the stars left one with no freedom; but it was only prudent to be fully aware of the various cosmic forces pushing and pulling on each individual as they navigated through life’s decisions, big and small. As another practitioner put it, “An expert and prudent astrologer may through his cunning skill show us how to prevent the many evils proceeding from the influence of the stars.” The skilled astrologer could also advise on the best time to perform certain activities, such as embarking on a long journey, choosing a wife, or having a baby. Here, for example, is a seventeenth-century tip for siring a male child: “If thou want’st an heir, or man-child to inherit thy land, observe a time when the masculine planets and signs ascent, and [are] in full power and force, then take thy female, and cast in thy seed, and thou shalt have a man-child.”

  We should not be surprised to learn that, in 1599, Shakespeare’s company consulted an astrologer to decide on the best day to open the Globe Theatre. (They settled on June 12, which was the summer solstice and also a new moon.) Of course, astrologers needed to hedge their bets: They never offered certainty, only probabilities.* Purposeful ambiguity was the norm. A prediction might fail to come true, and yet one could not label the astrologer or the almanac as “wrong.” (Indeed, as early as 1569 an English pamphlet had mocked the almanac makers by publishing three differing predictions from popular almanacs of the day.) Moreover, if you shell out enough predictions, some are bound to come true—as Montaigne observed in his Essays: “I know people who study their almanacs, annotate them and cite their authority as events take place. But almanacs say so much that they are bound to tell both truth and falsehood.”

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  Astrology permeates the Shakespeare canon, with its endless references to celestial happenings and their earthly significance. The playwright understood, and exploited, the traditional symbolism associated with each of the heavenly bodies, linking the sun with masculinity and kingship; the moon with femininity, changeability, and of course madness (“lunacy”). The planets had their purported domains of influence, as did the twelve constellations of the zodiac in which they appeared. The characters in Henry VI, Part 1 speak of “planetary mishaps” (1.1.22) and “adverse planets” (1.1.54); and in The Winter’s Tale, Hermione bemoans:

  There’s some ill planet reigns.

  I must be patient till the heavens look

  With an aspect more favourable.

  (2.1.105–7)

  We have already looked at Helena’s verbal sparring with Parolles in All’s Well That Ends Well, in which she suggests that he was “born under a charitable star,” but then goes on to insist that the star was Mars “when he was retrograde,” an astrological as well as an astronomical reference. In Richard III, the king expresses a straightforward desire for a celestial “blessing” of his ambitious political maneuverings: “Be opposite, all planets of good luck, / To my proceeding…” (4.4.402–3). And of course the entire plot of Romeo and Juliet is focused (as the prologue tells us) on the fate of the “star-crossed lovers.” One senses that the playwright knew the basics of astrological practice nearly as well as the almanac writers.

  “STARS WITH TRAINS OF FIRE AND DEWS OF BLOOD”

  Astrology was intertwined with magical thinking in general, and with connections between humanity and nature in particular. In Shakespeare’s world, these connections take center stage when important people are involved. In Henry IV, Part 1, the king chastises his son, Prince Hal, for behavior unbecoming of the heir to the throne. He says that in his prime, he was “… seldom seen, I could not stir / But, like a comet, I was wondered at; / That men would tell their children, ‘This is he!’” (3.2.47–48). A similar sentiment can be found in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, Part 2, where Orcanes, the king of Natolia, dismisses Tamburlaine as a “shepherd’s issue, baseborn.” Tamburlaine counters that although he was indeed of humble birth, “Heaven did afford gracious aspect / And joined those stars that shall be opposite / Even till the dissolution of the world…” (3.5.80–82). Kings and princes were, in a sense, heavenly beings. The stars could be expected to take notice when they were born, and when they died. Should they meet a premature end, even greater disruptions could be expected. In Macbeth, when the king is murdered, mayhem—both celestial and terrestrial—follows. Ross, one of the Scottish chiefs, asks an old man if

  Thou seest the heavens, as troubled with man’s act,

  Threatens his bloody stage. By th’clock ’tis day

  And yet dark night strangles the traveling lamp.

  (2.4.5–7)

  The old man agrees that “’Tis unnatural, / even like the deed that’s done” (lines 10–11), and then the conversation turns from the celestial to the earthly, as he describes a bizarre sight that he’s witnessed, involving a falcon and an owl. But Ross can top that: He observed that Duncan’s horses “Turned wild in nature, broke their stalls, flung out…” (line 16) and finally—but only after prompting from the old man—the kicker: The horses ate each other. (You’d think Ross would have started the conversation with that item, wouldn’t you?) “O horror, horror, horror,” wails Macduff (2.3.56), comparing the murdered king’s wounds to a breach in nature itself.

  We have already noted Calpurnia’s observation in Julius Caesar: “When beggars die there are no comets seen; / The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes” (2.2.30–31). Of course, Caesar himself meets an untimely end—an event recalled by Horatio, in Hamlet, who notes the upheavals in the earth and wonders in the sky that accompanied Caesar’s murder:

  A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,

  The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead

  Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets

  As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood,

  Disasters in the sun, and the moist star

  Upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands

  Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse.

  (1.1.113–19)

  Remember, Horatio is the wise “scholar” in Hamlet. But then, astrology purported to be an empirical, objective science; it was exactly the sort of thing a scholar would study. As one observer wrote in 1600, “Nowadays among the common people [one] is not judged any scholar at all, unless he can tell a man’s horoscopes, cast out devils, or hath some skill in soothsaying.” The more one studied astrology, the better one (su
pposedly) became at its practice. Astrology was, as Thomas notes, “probably the most ambitious attempt ever made to reduce the baffling diversity of human affairs to some sort of intelligible order”; it provided “a coherent and comprehensive system of thought.”

  GOD VS. THE STARS

  Astrology was ubiquitous—but it was also controversial. Not because it was antiscience, of course; if anything, it was imagined to be a part of science. We’ve noted that there was no “war” between science and religion in early modern Europe; even so, some aspects of astrology did seem to pose a threat to Christianity. The central question was how much faith one ought to place in astrology’s predictive power. As Paul Kocher notes, judicial astrology, which purported to govern all of the major events in one’s life, “often looked suspiciously like a rival of religion contending for the emotional loyalty of mankind.” After all, the Church of England nurtured the idea of God having a specific plan for every man, woman, and child in the land. The extreme version of this was the notion of “predestination”—the idea that everything that happens has already been determined by God, who had known the destiny of each living creature, even before the universe had come into being. By this line of reasoning, if it was God’s will that something occur, then no course of action on the part of mortal human beings could prevent it coming to pass. The sentiment is suggested in Julius Caesar: Calpurnia warns her husband that he is in danger, but Caesar refuses to change his plans. Why bother? “What can be avoided / Whose end is purpose’d by the mighty gods?” (2.2.26–27). And more famously by Prince Hamlet, as he riffs on the Gospel according to Matthew (10:29):

  There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be to come, it will not be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows aught, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.

  (Hamlet 5.2.215–20)

  One approach was to compromise, and assert that God and the stars somehow worked together; that their powers were complementary. As Sir Walter Raleigh once said:

  If we cannot deny but that God hath given virtue to springs and fountains, to cold earth, to plants and stones, minerals and to the excremental parts of the basest living creatures, why should we rob the beautiful stars of their working powers? For, seeing they are many in number and of eminent beauty and magnitude, we may not think that in the treasury of his wisdom who is infinite there can be wanting, even for every star, a peculiar virtue and operation; as every herb, plant, fruit, flower, adorning the face of the earth hath the like.

  While anyone might get caught up in the allure of astrology’s (seeming) predictive power, a clergyman or theologian who did so was likely to draw condemnation from his superiors. (As Kocher notes, all five of the harshest polemics against astrology published in Elizabethan England were written by churchmen.) If the clergy were against astrology, who was in favor of it? Surprisingly (to the modern reader) it was the people we would now call scientists. Doctors, in particular, seemed to be its staunchest defenders. But it all depended on how far one presumed to go with one’s astrological forecasting. The more specific the predictions, the greater the controversy, for the simple reason that such predictions seemed to pose the most direct challenge to God’s own power over the lives of men and women. But of course it was exactly such specific predictions that people yearned for: No one cared all that much about general good or ill omens suggested by heavenly patterns; rather, they wanted to know what lay in store for them. When a woman came knocking on the astrologer’s door, Kocher writes, she came

  not to hear about the stars as universal causes but to ask what lay in store for her, whether she was to inherit that pewterware from her aunt, find the ring she had lost, or marry the handsome stranger who had been eyeing her lately. The noble lord who summoned the astrologer to his castle to cast a horoscope for his new heir did not happen to be interested in a calculus of probabilities larded with “ifs,” “buts,” and “maybes.” He demanded positive information about the boy’s education, his marriage, and career.

  While the published almanacs of the day tended to avoid making overly specific predictions, individual astrologers almost certainly went much further—especially if there was money to be made by telling clients what they wanted to hear. And if the client had experienced misfortune, there was comfort in knowing that the stars weren’t aligned in one’s favor: It’s not that you’re foolish, or lazy, or have poor judgment; the cosmic deck was merely stacked against you.

  “THE EXCELLENT FOPPERY OF THE WORLD”

  But there were always doubters: It was easy enough to see that the astrologers’ predictions were wrong as often as they were right; and anyway the positions of the stars and planets were only known with limited precision. Besides, how many other factors might influence a person’s destiny to an equal or larger degree? And even if an astrologer’s predictions were occasionally borne out, might it not be a coincidence? Today, statistics professors (and science journalists) routinely caution that correlation does not imply causation—but a skeptic named William Perkins made the same point in 1585 when he wrote, “For in those thinges which happen together, the one is not the cause of the other.” Chaucer, writing two centuries earlier, pokes fun at astrology (and, one might argue, astronomy) in The Miller’s Tale, where an astrologer walks into a field to gaze at the stars, in the hope of seeing the future—and promptly falls into a well:

  So fared another clerk with astromy;

  He walked into the meadows for to pry

  Into the stars, to learn what should befall,

  Until into a clay-pit he did fall;

  He saw not that.

  Shakespeare, it would seem, also found astrology deserving of some degree of mockery. His characters, at least, harbor doubts. It’s worth focusing on King Lear, in which the key figures themselves debate the power of astrological thinking. The crucial scene comes in act 1, scene 2. As we’ve seen, Gloucester is concerned about the meaning of the eclipses recently observed in the heavens; he is afraid that they “portend no good to us.” He goes on to list all of the disasters that such events may signal: “Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide. In cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked ’twixt son and father” (1.2.94–96). For Gloucester, unusual sights in the heavens cannot be mere coincidence; they must be understood in relation to terrestrial happenings. They serve as signs, as forecasts, as warnings. Disharmony in the heavens will bring disharmony on earth, as surely as night follows day. As it turns out, of course, Gloucester has more to fear from his evil son, Edmond, than from the movements of the heavenly spheres. As soon as he has left the room, Edmond, in a remarkable speech directed only to the audience, dismisses his father’s superstitious beliefs:

  This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeits of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars; as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the Dragon’s tail, and my nativity was under Ursa major, so that it follows, I am rough and lecherous. I should have been that I am had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.

  (King Lear 1.2.104–16)

  It’s a wonderful passage, and the footnotes help us through some of the trickier phrases. In the New Cambridge edition, for example, we learn that “heavenly compulsion” means “astrological influence,” and that “spherical predominance” means “planetary influence” (think of the heavenly spheres that carry the sun, moon, and planets). In other words, Edmond is a hardened skeptic, mocking his father’s superstitious worldview in a fashion that would make Car
l Sagan proud (or these days, Richard Dawkins). As David Bevington notes, Edmond’s contempt for astrology “is likely to strike us as appealingly modern”:

  He scorns the platitudes of his elders as without foundation. He is a true skeptic in the sense of interrogating received opinion, refusing to accept its timeworn notions without objective verification. In his view, such a verification would be impossible because the older ideas are worthless. They are myths, in his view, that human society invents to perpetuate privilege and hierarchy.

  We find a similar view expressed more succinctly by Cassius, in Julius Caesar, who asserts that “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars / But in ourselves, that we are underlings” (1.2.139–40). And again, from Helena, in All’s Well That Ends Well:

  Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,

  Which we ascribe to heaven; the fated sky

  Gives us free scope; only doth backward pull

  Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull.

  (1.1.216–19)

  Shakespeare’s characters understood astrology’s appeal: It gets you off the hook. They also saw that, as often as not, the astrologers’ predictions are flat-out wrong. Anyone who takes the trouble to examine their work seriously—as Shakespeare seems to have done—is led to an inescapable conclusion: The astrologer has no clothes. And if the astrologer is naked, so, too, is the magician, and perhaps anyone else claiming to have insights into the supernatural.

  SHOW ME THE MAGIC

  Consider the case of a great ruler who claims to have mystical powers; whose birth supposedly shook the heavens. We return to Henry IV, Part 1: As act 3 opens, King Henry is confronted by rebels on all sides—mainly Welsh and Scots, but also (to complicate matters) a smattering of Englishmen with loyalty issues. The rebel leader, Owen Glendower, boasts that his prowess on the battlefield is due to his magical powers; indeed, the forces of nature put on something of a spectacle at the moment of his birth. But young Harry Percy, known as Hotspur, isn’t buying it. The two men, each with substantial egos, debate the matter at some length: