What is most important to me is that Saturn was exposed to [the comet’s] malign and adverse rays from its first risings, and that Saturn infected it with his evil qualities; consequently, from the glare of this comet I fear strong Saturnine effects. Which evils may Almighty God by his church and our prayers most mercifully avert, I implore on my knees: because only he can do it.120
Playful Argot
Virtually everyone who could read in early Stuart England would have known the argot of the almanacs that they consulted as often as the Bible: meridian, equator, ecliptic, conjunction, opposition, aspect, zodiac.121 Almanacs contained essential information for farmers, fishermen, physicians, and travelers, as well as predictions of the weather and consequences of eclipses and conjunctions. An authoritative estimate puts the number of editions of English almanacs in the seventeenth century at 2000, and the number of individual copies at three to four million. The authors of masques and plays could expect their audiences to know the lore and language of astrology to almanac level.122
It could be quite demanding. An almanac of 1642 predicts a cold spell at the autumnal equinox because “the Barren signe Virgo and Mercure Lord thereof, and the Moon are [then] ascending;” a very cold spell, because Saturn and Jupiter are in Pisces, in opposition to Virgo and retrograde, and “Venus likewise unfortunate in Scorpio in the 3. house, applying to the opposition of Mars, who is mounted in the cold and drie signe Taurus …” Convincing? William Cartwright of Christ Church, the author of a play King Charles saw and liked in Oxford in 1636, capitalized on this jargon in a later production, The Siege, or Love’s Convert. A wooer recalls the instant he fell in love with his lady. “The sun in’s Apogaeum, Moon in Libra ǀ First Quartile, Minutes 23, 2 seconds.” Lady:
What, your a Scholar?
. . . . .
I’ve vowed against all scholars.
Wooer:
I hate a scholar
. . . . .
That which I spoke now
I conn’d out of an Almanack.123
A few well-known passages from Shakespeare suggest the threshold level of astrological knowledge of Jacobean playgoers. “These late eclipses of the sun and moon portend no good to us” (King Lear); “Saturn and Venus this year in conjunction: what says the almanac to that?” (Henry IV, Part 1); “Shake the yoke of inauspicious stars” (Romeo and Juliet); “My mother compounded with my father under the dragon’s tail, and my nativity was under Ursa major; so that it follows I am rough and lecherous” (King Lear). “Madam, though Venus governs your desires ǀ Saturn is dominator over mine” (Titus Andronicus). The exchange between Sir Toby and Sir Andrew in Twelfth Night requires greater knowledge of the zodiacal associations of the body than they possessed.
“Were we not born under Taurus?”
“Taurus! That’s sides and heart”
“No, Sir; it is legs and thighs.”
They were drunk; it is the neck.
Rarely if ever does Shakespeare’s star talk refer to up-to-date astronomy. A possibility:
The heavens themselves, this planet, and this centre
Observe degree, priority and place
. . . . .
And therefore is the glorious planet Sol
In noble eminence enthroned and sphered
Adminst the other. (Troilus and Cressida)
Very likely, however, this text refers not to Copernican theory, but to the traditional scheme that centered the sun between the moon, Mercury, and Venus, on the one hand, and Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn on the other. The Sun-King stood at the center of the local ruling elite but not at the center of the visible universe. People who like metaphors might regard Copernicus’s system as a promotion of the Sun-King to the real center of power, where Bellarmine fancied the pope stood.124 Another candidate for a reference to contemporary, indeed, Galilean astronomy is Jupiter’s appearance in Cymbeline. He descends from his heaven to banish four dancing ghosts and succor the hero born under his sign. Are the dancers Galileo’s Medici stars and their banishment an expression of doubt about their existence? It is chronologically possible.125
The prattle of the ignorant practitioner in John Lyly’s Gallathea (1592), who “can bring the twelve signs out of theyr Zodiackes, and hang them up in Taverns,” would be plain to everyone; the inference by Jonson’s crooked alchemist that a horoscope with Mercury well placed in Libra advertised a “merchant [who] should trade with balance” required scarcely more knowledge; but the informed discourse of the doctor in John Fletcher’s The Bloody Brother (1617, 1639), who calls upon technical concepts of Muslim astrology, might challenge an adept. “Look upon your Astrolabe [the doctor orders]; you’ll find it ǀ Four Almucanturies at least.”126 An almucanthar is a circle of altitude projected onto a tympan of an astrolabe; quid clarius?
Stargazer in Philip Massinger’s The City Madam (1632) drivels more learned nonsense (perhaps borrowed from Ben Jonson) than Fletcher’s doctor.127 Stargazer has the job of finding signs showing that the young ladies who employ him will dominate their marriages. He calculates: “Venus in the West-angle, the house of marriage, the seventh house, in Trine of Mars, in conjunction of Luna, and Mars Almuthen, or Lord of the Horoscope …” A lady interrupts: “The Angel’s language, I am ravish’t. Forward.” Stargazer starts again:
This is infallible. Saturn out of all dignities in his detriment and fall, combust [close to the sun]: and Venus [now] in the South-angle elevated above him, Ladie of both their nativities…in a sign commanding, and he dejected…argue, fortel, and declare rule, preheminence, and absolute sovereignty in women.128
These ladies were not the sort who, we are told, flocked to astrologers to locate lost teaspoons and new husbands, but feminists using the weapons of their time to advertise their rights.129
Fletcher and Massinger did not overlook the theatrical potential of the new astronomy. The villain in The Bloody Brother describes great sights seen in a powerful glass. “All these now done by Mathematicks ǀ Without which there’s no science, no truth.” A menacing doctrine! In a lighter vein, Marcelia in Massinger’s Duke of Milan, written around 1623, dismisses the insinuation that her husband does not love her as more implausible than the Copernican system.
If you would’st worke
On my credulitie. Tell me rather
That the Earth moves, The Sunne, and the Starres stand still
The Ocean keeps nor Floods, nor Ebbes.130
Students at Cambridge used astrology to advantage in the play, Albumazar, they performed before King James in 1614. They pinched it without acknowledgment from Galileo’s Italian rival in the invention of the telescope, Giambattista della Porta. The original version opens with Albumazar and his associates itemizing the crooks who flourished in Naples, whom the Cantabridgians recast into merchants, lawyers, and other respectable persons, “the learned only excepted.” After brief consideration they cancelled the exception:
[The scholar] steales one author from another
This Poet is that Poet’s Plagiary
And he a thirds, till they all end in Homer.
Albumazar: “And Homer filch’t all from an Egyptian Prestresse ǀ The World’s a Theater of theft.” Albumazar’s main contribution is to deceive people into believing that one of the play’s protagonists died in shipwreck.
I wander twixt the Poles
And heav’nly hinges, ’mongst excentricals
Centers, concentricks, circles, and epicycles
To hunt out an aspect for your buinesse.
After much calculation, the desired result:
Drown’d in the sea stone dead: for radix directionis
In the sixt house; and the waning moon by Capricorne
Hee’s dead, hee’s dead.131
Albumazar had an engine to catch “such Planets as have lurk’t ǀ Foure thousand yeares under the protection of Jupiter and Sol.” What is it?
Sir, ’tis a perspicill, th’ best under heaven
/> With this I’ve read a copy of that small Iliade
That in a wall-nut shell was desk’t, as plainly
Twelve miles off, as you see Pauls from Highgate.
The thing works by “refraction ǀ Opticke and strange;” no closet with windows can escape its prying eye. What have we here? Ah, Rome.
I see the Pope, his Card’nals and his mule
The English Colledge and the Jesuits
And what they wrote and doe.132
For any auditors who did not recognize this parody of Sidereus nuncius, Albumazar points to “the bunch of planets new found out ǀ Hanging at th’end of my best Perspicill.” These he proposes to send to “Galileo in Padua.”133
All sorts of changes could be worked on Galileo’s glass. Jonson’s Staple of News (1625) reports the discovery of one in Galileo’s study capable of firing a ship at sea by moonshine. Jonson’s alchemist had a perspective that could spy out potential gulls and ways to fleece them. Davenant bettered even that feat. “[In] Opticks…the Moderns are become so skilled ǀ They dream of seeing to the Maker’s Throne.”134 Playwrights conjured with spheres as well as glasses. A wandering sphere represented a disturbed mind; the lunar sphere, eclipsed without earth glow, deceit; familiarity with the heavenly spheres, wisdom. The mountebank in Shackerly Marmion’s A Fine Companion is certified a sage because he “Can tell how…the Spheres are turned, and all their secrets.”135 And so on.
King James’s surfeit of academic plays included Technogamia, performed for him in Oxford in 1621. Its characters personify the seven liberal arts plus medicine and magic. Astronomia, the heroine, is seriously ill, poor thing, as she had died once already, “her brain…turned to jelly from the constant turning in her head.” The magician proposes a consultation. “[T]here’s one Galilaeus an exquisite Mathematician, an Italian: whom I came very lately acquainted with, by admirable lucke; and he has promised to help me to a glasse, by which I shall see all things as perfectly represented in Astronomia’s house, as if I were there.” Astronomia grows stronger with the help not of Magus, but of Geometricus. A figure suggestive of King James confirms the couplings geometry and astronomy, history and poetry, rhetoric and grammar, and music and melancholy, and offers them the salutary but unexpected advice not to use tobacco.136
James did not like Technogamia any more than he did tobacco or oysters. He thought it tedious, as indeed it is; but it has the merit of showing that the English had associated Copernican ideas with Galileo’s discoveries about the time the Inquisition ordered the earth to stand still and Galileo to shut up. Technogamia’s wheeze that the spinning earth turns astronomers’ brains to jelly recurs in Prynne and Ross and lesser writers. It was also applied to the stomach. Describing a rough crossing of the Channel, James Howell, the glass merchant who helped Charles in Madrid, wrote that he “began to incline to Copernicus his opinion which hath got such a sway lately in the World, viz., that the Earth, as well as the rest of her Fellow-Elements, is in perpetual Motion.” Howell associated the new noise about Copernicus with telescopes and Lunarians.137
Political Metaphor
When Charles entered Edinburgh in 1633 for his belated coronation, he passed through an arch at the east end of town decorated with a portion of the heavens showing his zodiacal sign, Virgo, in the ascendant. Planetary gods competed to improve him. Saturn pledged support for big projects; Jupiter handed over his thunderbolts; the sun offered empire without end.138 A year earlier, the audience at the inauguration of the Lord Mayor of London had heard similar play between the zodiacal signs and the City’s twelve chief companies.139 It was not play when Strafford said to the crowd eagerly awaiting his execution: “It should appear from your concourse and gazing aspects that I am now the onely prodigious Meteor toward which you direct your wandering eyes. Meteors are the infallible Antecedents of tragicall events…I am become my own prodigy.”140 A most apt metaphor, commented the king, for, “while moving in so high a sphere and with so vigorous a luster, he must needs, as the sun, raise many envious exhalations which, condensed by a popular odium, were capable to cast a cloud upon the brightest merit and integrity.” Charles’s execution excited a more veiled imagery:
Let all things move within their orbs; suppose
The inferior lights should labor to depose
The Prince of light, and drive him from his throne
. . . . .
Consider then, would not the stars let fall
Too great an influence, the sun too small
On humane bodies? Oh may they remain
In their own Region, then would Sol again
Enjoy his just prerogatives.141
The effort to impeach Buckingham in 1626 brought forth an extended analogy to the world system so admired that it was republished during the first year of the Civil War. Its author, Sir Dudley Digges, had family connections to the heavens. He was the son of Thomas Digges, who had scattered the stars in three dimensions, and the ward of Thomas’s friend and tutor John Dee, who opened his mind to further mysteries. Dudley Digges demonstrated his command of the elements of astronomy in a tract on the size of the earth intended to promote searches for a northwest passage to the Orient; inspired by the same muse as Delamain, he admired the learned who “could reduce their studie in histories the Mathematickes or the like from speculation to practice for the…honourable service of their country.”142 Digges reduced his analogy as follows.
“The solid body of incorporate Earth and Seas” represents the husbandry and commercial activities of the Commons; the “firmament of fixed stars,” the Lords; the planets, the great officers of state; the “pure element of fire, the most religious, pious Clergy;” the air, “the reverend Judges, Magistrates, and Ministers of Law and Justice.” The attribution of wandering stars to high politicians, fiery elements to pious clergy, and hot air to lawyers was autobiographical; Digges had rejected a career in court, church, and bench because of their luxury, hypocrisy, and “money getting.” All elements of the state, laudable or not, receive their “heat, and life, & Light, from our glorious sun”—that is, King James. Unfortunately, his “powerfull beames of…grace and favour,” being so very strong, have “draw[n] forth from the bowels of this earth an exhalation that…shine[s] out like a starre.” An evil star.
If such an imperfect Meteor appear like that in the last age in the Chair of Cassiopeia [Tycho’s nova of 1572] amongst the fixed starres, where Aristotle and the old Philosophers conceaved there is no place for such corruptions; then as the learned Mathematicians were troubled to observe the irregular motions, the prodigious magnitude, the ominous prognostics of the Meteor, so the commons when they see a blazing starre, in course so exorbitant in the affairs of the Common-wealth, cannot but look upon it, and for want of prospectives [Galilean glasses], commend the nearer examination thereof to your Lordships, who may behold it at a better distance, such a prodigious Commet the Commons apprehend the Duke of Buckingham to be.143
Here indeed was learning working! Working itself into rhetoric bordering on sedition! The inference that the solar Stuarts were the suns that raised the rank exhalation that was Buckingham from commoner to lord earned the “very affable and courteous” Digges a stay in the Fleet prison.144 William Davenant’s famous heroic poem Gondibert, written in 1648–9, has a place here. It describes “Optick Tubes” and other instruments belonging to Solomon’s House that are as useful for withering human conceit as for exploring the universe. The sedentary life does not suit the earth or its inhabitants. “As if ’twere great and stately to stand still ǀ Whilst other Orbes dance on …” Which, decoded, signifies that inaction results in evil, in particular, in bad government, “for the virtuous are often preach’d into retirement.” Contrary to nature, whose ceaseless motion makes life and preserves it, the indolent men of talent and probity allow the wicked to gain authority.145 The wicked of Davenant’s time drove him into exile and the arms of the Catholic Church.
Another applied cosmologist was Robert
Greville, second Lord Brooke, who, in 1640, tried to prove that Truth is one. The apparent radical multiplicity of things arises from the unreliable testimony of the senses. The senses of sight, touch, and sound tell us that the earth does not move—we see the heavens rotate, feel ourselves at rest, and do not hear “such a black Cant as [the earth’s] heavy rowlings would rumble forth” if it spun—“yet if we believe our new Masters, sense has done what sense will doe, misguided our reason.” These Masters were Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo. Suspect your senses, seize in your soul the truth that apparently disparate things are but one, but do not think too much (Greville was a militant Puritan). “It is often seene, a working head is like an over-hot liver, burneth up the heart, and so ruineth both.”146
It required a strong head and heart to face the consequences of modern astronomy. One of Ussher’s correspondents put the challenge in a striking metaphor: the immensity of Copernicus’s universe (as inferred from failure to detect a stellar parallax) exposed the immensity of our hubris in thinking ourselves “the only Creatures of Excellency for whom all these things were made.” “So might a Spider, nested in the Roof of the Grand Seignior’s Seraglio, say of herself, All that magnificent and stately structure, set out with Gold and Silver, and embellish’d with all Antiquity and Mosaick Work, was only built to hang up her Webs and Toys to take Flies.” The telescope shows us to be insects “many degrees below nothing.” The individual’s salvation is to know his true situation by “chaste observations…[and] undeniable Demonstrations” (an echo of Galileo’s mantra, “sensory experience and necessary demonstrations”) and thence rise slowly to Heaven.147
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