Now the celestial regions must be refilled with asterisms more suited to them than the beasts just evicted. Personifications of the spirits that dominate human life put themselves forward. Mercury and the greatest nitpicker of the gods, Momus, examine each in turn: Plutus (Wealth), who claims to hold virtue by a golden chain and to have supplied Jove with the coins showered on Danae; Paenia (Poverty), who argues that her kingdom is far larger than Wealth’s, and contains many poets and intellects; Hedone (Pleasure), who also excels Wealth, being the reason for acquiring riches; and so on. None passes scrutiny. The obvious solution arrives in personifications of the Genius of Britain and its three kingdoms, who emerge from a mountain on stage, and of Religion, Truth, Wisdom, Concord, Government, and Reputation, who descend on clouds. By adding to these the worthies of Britain, past and present, Mercury has enough virtuous candidates to replace the thousand stars listed by Ptolemy.132 No member of “the eighth of our Coelestiall Mansions, commonly called the Starre-Chamber,” is among the nominees. The requirement of virtue rules them out.133
The strikes at the high court of Star Chamber and the Inquisition aimed jointly at English censorship of the stage and Roman control of thought. Galileo’s trial and sentencing took place between the performance and the printing of Coelum britannicum. That is not its only Italian reference. Carew took his plot from a dialogue, Spaccio della bestia triomfante, “Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast,” which Giordano Bruno had published in 1584 during his stay in England. It is so thorough a compilation of Bruno’s quirks and heresies that the Roman Inquisition featured it in its summary of his trial. In Bruno’s plot, Jove decides on reform because his “jaded strength and enervated manliness” disqualify him from repeating his former exploits. He orders Cupid to put on some clothes, Bacchus to give up debauchery except on Saturday nights, and Vulcan to stop working on holidays. He gets the gods to agree to the purge and, with the help of Momus and some input from Mercury, chooses the new celestial residents.134
Bruno’s Jove substitutes Truth and Prudence for the Bear and the Dragon, which he sends to Britain. Wisdom and Law advance to the former seats of Cepheus and Boötes. Thus personifications of Good Things fill the Heavens: no king or courtier, as in Carew’s adaptation, ascends so high. Jove leaves Corona Borealis in place as the crown of the champion who wipes out the Calvinists, a “stinking filth,” whose souls Bruno condemns to spend 3,000 years migrating from one metempsychotic ass to another.135 Carew’s masquers who knew that his plot derived from Bruno might have shuddered at the thought of Jove’s Roman-style Inquisition.136 Charles would not have been among them. If we credit the report of a Catholic newsmonger, the king regarded the Inquisition as a useful tool for divine government, “it were to be wished that it were in all parts of Christendom to bridle mens tongues.”137
Between the Bishops’ Wars, Jones diverted the court with storms, mountains, cityscapes, heavenly spheres, populated clouds, and flying chariots. Like contrivances appear in the last court masque, William Davenant’s Salmacida spolia (January 1640), in which, unusually, both the king and the queen performed. In the ancient story, a tavern-keeper by the sweet spring Salmacis civilized (some say emasculated) barbarians by serving them its waters; by strained analogy, Charles will conquer the idiots who oppose him by overcoming them with wisdom and patience. There is a nice astronomical image. “You that so wisely studious are ǀ To measure and to trace each Starr,” look where the true light is, down here, where the royal tavern keeper dwells. Lower your telescopes, “Levell your perspectives.”138 In an earlier masque, Britannia triumphans (1638), Davenant had directed king and courtiers by a more elaborate celestial metaphor.
Move then in such an order here
As if you each his governed planet were
And he moved first, to move you in each sphere.
The ranks of courtier dancers, inspired by “the wonders of his virtue,” formed figures reminiscent of the constellations.139
Instruments were a common way of keeping astronomy in playgoers’ minds. Among many humdrum examples of telescopes used to peer into ladies’ closets, we have such marvels as Galileo’s glass capable of firing a ship at night by concentrating moonbeams and the more remarkable lens that allowed a vision of God’s throne.140 A playwright needing a representation of genius might well choose an astronomer whose mind, instructed by his observations,
Has pierc’t into the utmost of the Orbes
Can tell how…the Sphaeres are turned, and all their secrets
The motion and influence of the starres …
The causes of the winds, and what moves [!] the earth.141
This accomplished astronomer appears to have been a Copernican.
As the Personal Rule ran into trouble in Scotland, the Caroline masques promoted a picture of Camelot-in-being that increasingly diverged from reality. They insisted on the king’s wisdom in governing and his divinely ordained prerogatives. Henrietta Maria’s masques, The Temple of Love (1635) and Luminalia (1638), both by Davenant, portray her Catholicism and Charles’s Anglicanism implausibly as two peas in an irenic pod.142 Aurelian Townshend’s Albion’s Triumph (1637) stresses cultural refinement, especially in painting, which showcased the gap between the king’s self-image and the condition of his realm. Charles’s hazy distinction between fantasy and reality helped him to play the final part in his tragedy. An eyewitness to his execution thought that he “came out of the Banqueting House on the scaffold with the same unconcernedness and motion, that he usually had, when he entered it on a Masque-night.”143
Although presented but once or twice to a small audience, the Caroline masques had a wide circulation by report and in print, and the repetition of their themes, almost as a liturgy, suggested the height to which king and country could aspire. By pointing to gaps between Whitehall and Camelot, panegyrics might encourage better behavior.144 Strode’s Floating Island (1636), reviewed earlier, is an example. It contains many apt jibes at favorite targets: monopolies, judges, the godly, Puritans, physicians, playwrights. Reversing direction, it attacks parliament and defends ship money. Before Charles–Prudentius temporarily sets aside his crown, he experienced efforts to blunt his prerogatives, reform his state, determine his expenditures, appoint his ministers, and refuse him supplies. Recognizing that the “Tumult, Lust, Debate, and Discontent” affecting his island might tempt foreign powers to attack it, he had collected ship money as the means to build a powerful defensive navy. Oh, “thou god on earth”! The island remains afloat. “Our scene which was but Fiction now is true ǀ No King so much Prudentius as you.”145
James Shirley’s Triumph of Peace (3 February 1634), also mentioned earlier, struck at obscure inventions on which projectors hoped to obtain monopolies: a bridle that keeps a horse from tiring, a device for a day’s walk under a river, a means of raising poultry on carrot scrapings. These projects are as idiotic as the quixotic knight and squire who, in the elaborate antimasque, attack a windmill.146 Charles did not object to attacks on monopolies and other abuses provided they did not come too near to his. He thought Shirley’s Gamester (February 1634), which digs at courtiers, one of the best plays he had ever seen. Since he suggested the plot, it must indicate his taste.
The main action revolves around a husband who tries to enlist his wife in his seduction of one of her kinswomen. She agrees but contrives to substitute for her relative in the dark room arranged for the tryst. As the hour of action approaches, the husband, who is as addicted to gambling as a courtier, is too deeply engaged to fulfill the seduction. He asks a fellow gamester to perform in his stead. The substitute reports blissful success, although the woman, contrary to expectation, was not a maid. The husband perceives that he is a cuckold by (if possible) his own hand. Chaste Charles could not end the play there. The wife discloses the plot to the gamester, the gamester forbears, and the husband avoids the sin he desired to commit.147 Virtue all around.
As Charles’s rule weakened, playwrights grew bolder. William Habington’s Cleo
dora, Queen of Aragon (1640) rails against the use of force to achieve agreement in Aragon’s government as well as in marriage. The device of locating Caroline abuses in distant times and places recurs in John Denham’s The Sophy (1642), which has the further interest of a fine telescopic metaphor. The venue is Turkey, the victim the ruler, the evil doers bad councilors.
Alas, they shew him nothing
But in the glasse of flatterie, if any thing
May have a shew of glory, fame, or greatnesse
’Tis multiplied to an immense quantitie
And strtech’t even to Divinitie
But if it tend to danger or dishonour
They turn about the Perspective, and shew it
So little, at such distance, so like nothing
That he can scarce discerne it.148
5
Heavens Above
The Theater of the World
Sense and common sense for once agree with philosophy and theology in placing the earth firmly at the center of whatever is. The stars wheel around the earth as their hub, at incredible speed, once a day; the moon and sun also circle the universal center, in a month and a year, for what else do day, month, and year signify? Less obviously, the wandering stars, whose exact gyrations concern only astronomers, also make their rounds, the inferior planets Mercury and Venus, which never appear far from the sun, in about a year, the superior ones Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, which are not so bound, in two, twelve, and thirty years. Both sorts of planets differ from the sun and the moon, which in their yearly and monthly journey always move from west to east, counter to the daily motion of the fixed stars. The planets complicate matters by sometimes retrograding to the west. Their misbehavior challenged the picky astrologers and serious astronomers of Galileo’s time.
Masque: Mathematical Astronomy
To account for the uneven and retrograde motion of the planets and for certain small irregularities in the behavior of the sun and moon, mathematical astronomers calculated as if the heavenly bodies rotated on systems of circles whose centers did not coincide with the center of the earth. It took painstaking study to master this ancient masque; the novice was advised to imitate Ptolemy night and day, “study him waking, dream of him sleeping.”1 Philosophers who desired something solider than hard mathematical fictions embedded celestial bodies in crystalline spheres composed of an incorruptible “quintessence” not found on or near the earth. No material change could happen in the celestial region above the concave surface of the moon’s sphere. Below it, in the region occupied by earth, water, air, and fire, everything is in flux, uncertainty, and confusion. Unfortunately, the philosophers’ world did not have a place for the astronomers’ masque: the inquiring mind might analyze the world mathematically or physically, but not both simultaneously.
Copernicus’s alternative geometry, despite its counterintuitive assumption of a moving earth, had the important advantages of explaining why inferior planets stay close to the sun (the earth’s orbit contains theirs) and superior ones do not (they enclose ours) and how retrogradations arise (another consequence of viewing planets from our moving platform). But Copernicus too had had to compound fictional circles in order to mimic the elliptical paths on which, unknown to him, the planets travel around the sun. It took a reagent more powerful than Copernican mathematics to dissolve the ancient adamantine quintessence. That was Tycho’s mission. His measurements of parallax showed that passing comets traveled above the moon and, perhaps worse, that the new star that shone and vanished in Cassiopeia in 1572 had to be placed there too. The quintessence appeared to be fluid and flighty.
Tycho spread his ideas to Britain through books he gave to such prominent scholars as Dee and Buchanan. Although unequal to Buchanan in degrees of fame, he wrote in uncharacteristic modesty, he could claim equality in degrees of latitude. “For as Denmark sees the heavens roll by ǀ Your Scotland later will regard them too.”2 Not quite! Where Tycho saw planets swimming in fluid heavens, Buchanan saw spinning crystalline spheres with embedded stars. Nor could Buchanan accept the positioning of comets and the nova of 1572 above the moon; for, as universal experience testified, the heavens do not change.3 Nor does the earth turn, “as many ancient wizards did suspect.” Nowadays, Buchanan told his royal student James, only people incurably ignorant could accept the tale of Copernicus or the deductions of Tycho.4
Ignorant meant ignorant of Aristotle’s physics, which implied that an orbiting earth would fall to the universal center and a spinning one suffer perpetual winds. Where then are the winds? Scripture confirmed that the sun moves and not the earth, for had not Joshua, who was no fool, commanded it to stand still? Here Buchanan made common cause with Tycho, whose cosmology had no place for an earth that misbehaved physically and theologically. Yet, without the crystalline spheres, Tycho’s planets and comets had no known reason to move in the formation he prescribed: revolving about the sun while the sun circled the stationary earth. Nonetheless, since this Tychonic formulation solved technical puzzles like retrogradation almost as naturally as Copernicus’s without raising the physical or theological problems of a moving earth, many astronomers, particularly Jesuit experts, preferred it. James stuck with Buchanan’s cosmology, “where everie planet has his owen repaire ǀ and christall house.”
Although he rejected Tycho’s picture of the universe, James admired the observational work and feudal discipline of the island of Hven and the power they gave the astrologer. The king’s admiration overflowed into three separate sonnets. One puts Tycho in command of the planets that govern base bodies, another advises those who would grasp the order, course, and influence of the planets to consult his methods, and the third mates him with the muse of astronomy.
What foolish Phaeton dar’d was by Apollo done
Who rul’d the fiery Horses of the Sunne
More Tycho doth, hee rules the Starres above
And is Urania’s Favorite, and Love.5
Galileo was one of James’s few informed contemporaries who did not share his high opinion of Tycho.
Tycho’s observations and deductions were not the only conspicuous novelties that disfigured the traditional heavens before Galileo’s telescopic discoveries in 1610. Another nova appeared in 1604 and also some comets, all of which by measurement from different places appeared to be at different distances above the moon. That agreed with the earlier suggestion by Dee’s protégé Thomas Digges that the fixed stars might be distributed in space. The most important innovator in astronomy between Tycho’s measurements and Galileo’s observations, or, perhaps, between the cosmologies of Adam and Newton, was Tycho’s one-time computer Kepler. Thinking far outside the box, or, as he put it in a letter to King James, outside the barrel from which, as “Diogenes of Prague,” he begged his living from the emperor Rudolf, Kepler chained Mars to an elliptical path not quite centered on the sun.6 That was in 1609. The computational advantages of this geometry became clear in 1627, when Kepler published unprecedentedly accurate tables of planetary positions. The table’s elaborate frontispiece presented the history of astronomy from the Greeks to Tycho by columns of increasing sophistication all supporting a vault flaunting a diagram of Tycho’s system (Figure 23). He stands at the center of this little temple pointing at the diagram and asking “what if it’s like this” (quod si sic?), to which Kepler silently answers, “it is not.” Scenes from Tycho’s island decorate the temple’s base. The goddesses standing on its roof convey details about optics and other knowledge on which astronomy depends.7
Figure 23 Johannes Kepler, Tabulae rudolphinae (1627), frontispiece.
The solidity of the temple is misleading. By replacing the fictitious circles of astronomy with the real orbits of planets, Kepler’s ellipses underscored the lack of a foundation for the theater of the world. More than ever, the mathematical masque needed a physical stage.
Antimasque: Galileo’s Song and Dance
Galileo printed only two items after his silencing by Pope Paul V before the Dialogue of 163
2, both attacks on the Jesuits. The first, issued under the name of a student, dealt disingenuously with the destructive comet of 1618, and the second, the famous Il saggiatore (1623), “The Assayer,” unfairly with a professor of mathematics at the Collegio Romano. Galileo’s fellow lynxes saw The Assayer through the press and protected it with a dedication to Pope Urban. The new pope, who had written a few appreciative lines about the appearances of Jupiter and Saturn, “discovered ǀ Learned Galileo, by your glass,” enjoyed the Assayer’s hits against the Jesuits.8 Galileo went to Rome to congratulate his fellow Florentine Barberini on becoming Rome’s pope and came away from their several conversations believing that he had permission to reopen the discussion of world systems provided that he decided for neither. Urban did not think that any man-made astronomical system could be known or shown to be true and expected that Galileo’s even-handed treatment would demonstrate the truth that there is no truth outside revelation. Rumor, which reached even unto England, more wisely expected something unexpected from “the novelty and freedom of [Galileo’s] opinions.”9
The immediate path to the Dialogue began after Urban’s election with Galileo’s draft answer to arguments against the Copernican system made by Francesco Ingoli, Secretary to the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, who earlier had drawn up the corrections to Copernicus’s book mandated by the Congregation of the Index. Galileo’s draft proposed reopening discussion about world systems in order to show that Catholic authorities did not prohibit the new astronomy on the basis of Ingoli’s invalid arguments. Galileo sent the draft to Ciampoli, who asked Conn for advice. Conn delivered a favorable verdict, with which Pope Urban, informed by Ciampoli, concurred: “it was good to repress the audacity of such people [as Ingoli].”10 Ciampoli asked Conn to teach young clerics how to philosophize about nature and asked Cesi to add him to the list of lynxes.11
The Ghost of Galileo Page 18