The Science of Shakespeare

by Dan Falk

  Even so, historians are divided: John Russell writes that there is “no good evidence that Copernican ideas had made any serious impact [at Oxford] at this time.” And we might recall the mockery that Bruno faced when he lectured on Copernicanism at Oxford in the 1580s. But Mordechai Feingold notes that the heliocentric model was taught, “and sometimes taught well,” even if those who taught it didn’t necessarily accept it fully. Typically, the instructor left it up to the students to weigh the arguments and reach their own conclusions. They were welcome to read further on their own, and the more gifted among them undoubtedly did just that.

  A student named Edmund Lee, for example, kept a notebook with commentaries on numerous scientific ideas spanning the fields of physics, astronomy, and mathematics; among his dense notes, he comments favorably on the Copernican system. The mathematician Sir Henry Savile, meanwhile, was appointed as the first professor of astronomy and geometry at Oxford, and taught there in the 1560s and 1570s. His notebooks, now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, show that he taught from Ptolemy’s Almagest—but with references to Copernicus, including a chapter-by-chapter comparison between the Almagest and De revolutionibus, as well as other medieval and contemporary thinkers.* His own leanings seemed to favor the new cosmology, and we catch a glimpse of his enthusiasm from a remark jotted in his notebook, “Copernicus Mathematicoru Modernoru Priceps” (“Copernicus, the prince of modern mathematicians”). William Camden, an Oxford student and friend of Savile, may have owned his own copy of De revolutionibus, and, like Thomas Digges, made careful observations of the nova of 1572. At Cambridge, a student named John Mansell (later Master of Queens’ College) responded to a question on the structure of the solar system, in 1601, by defending Copernicus and describing the heliocentric model in detail. The works of Copernicus and Digges could be found at the library in Cambridge by 1580, along with astrolabes, quadrants, globes, and elaborate sundials. A couple of decades later, an Oxford tutor named Richard Crakanthorpe again used Aristotle and Ptolemy as his starting point, but covered all the latest astronomical observations and ideas: the new star of 1572; the great comets of 1577 and 1580; the telescopic discoveries of Galileo. We know that he consulted the works of Kepler and Digges, as well as Galileo’s Siderius Nuncius (The Starry Messenger). Sir William Boswell, a Cambridge mathematician, corresponded with Galileo himself, and played a vital role in making the Italian scientist’s work known in England.

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  However much theoretical science was being disseminated at the two universities, they were almost certainly lagging behind the capital in terms of practical learning. Although written a few decades later, a letter penned by mathematician John Wallis is telling. When he moved from Cambridge to London in the 1640s, he found a greater number of people interested in his craft, “[for] the study of Mathematicks was at that time more cultivated in London than in the Universities.” We have also seen that England was hardly a scientific backwater; the notion that it lagged far behind continental Europe is simply unfounded. One sign is the relative openness to the Copernican theory: While Tycho Brahe in Denmark and Christopher Clavius in Rome had been vocal opponents of the heliocentric model, we can add Blagrave, Hill, and Ridley to our ever-growing list of English thinkers—with Recorde, Dee, Thomas Digges, and perhaps a handful of others—who embraced the “new astronomy.”* By the latter years of the sixteenth century, England, as we’ve seen, was far from being an intellectual hinterland. As Francis Johnson writes, “[In] England, perhaps more than in any other country, an intelligent knowledge of the Copernican theory was spread among all classes of practical scientific workers before 1600, and nowhere was there a keener interest in the implications of the new astronomy, or a more earnest search for a satisfactory physical explanation of various features of the Copernican hypothesis.”

  Intriguingly, some of the people whom one might imagine to have eagerly embraced Copernicanism in fact rejected it. The philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon was just such a thinker: It’s not that the Copernican model was too radical for his tastes; it’s that there was not, at this early stage, enough direct observational evidence in support of the new theory. It is easy to imagine, in hindsight, that the Copernican theory was “obvious”—but of course it was anything but obvious, and one might legitimately harbor doubts about the heliocentric model, at least until the telescopic work of Galileo.

  THE PHILOSOPHER-STATESMAN

  As we noted in the introduction, the standard view is that Shakespeare lived “too early” to have been a witness to the Scientific Revolution. But we should remember that Bacon, one of the key figures of modern science, was an almost exact contemporary of the playwright, entering the world three years ahead of him, and departing ten years after him. Bacon’s first important scientific work, The Advancement of Learning, was published in 1605—around the time that Shakespeare was finishing King Lear (and in fact Bacon had written about the nature of science two years earlier, in Valerius Terminus: On the Interpretation of Nature, although the work is fragmentary and was never published).

  Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was a well-connected man: His aunt was married to Queen Elizabeth’s key advisor, William Cecil. Bacon studied law, served as a member of Parliament, and eventually held the titles of Attorney General and Lord Chancellor. But we remember Bacon not for his statesmanship but for his philosophy. He is considered the father of empiricism, the idea that knowledge ultimately rests on what we can observe and study via the senses. For Bacon, science was about much more than esoteric knowledge, and he refused to accept ancient wisdom just because it’s ancient. He had grand aims for science, whose “explanations take the mystery out of things.” It wasn’t foolproof—the experiment may be flawed; the observer may make a mistake—but the process is self-correcting. Yes, the senses may sometimes deceive; “but then at the same time they supply the means of discovering their own errors.”

  Bacon wasn’t himself a scientist; in fact, he made no significant discoveries on his own. The one experiment that he did (allegedly) attempt—at least, the only one we have a detailed record of—also appears to have killed him: He is said to have caught a chill while trying to determine if one could preserve a chicken by stuffing it with snow on a freezing March day; a few days later he was dead, from either bronchitis or pneumonia.* Nonetheless, Bacon thought a great deal about what science ought to be. In The Advancement of Learning, he sets out to partition science into various branches, including physics, metaphysics, mathematics, astronomy, engineering, and medicine—although we should note that he included theology, poetry, and drama among the sciences, and considered them to be equally deserving of study. (God, he says, made the world—but not in order for us to be mystified by it. As Philip Ball puts it, Bacon sees the world as “an intricate puzzle,” one that God hopes mankind will rise to the challenge of solving.) Bacon argues passionately for the importance of scientific learning, asserting that natural philosophy, and the improved technologies it would lead to, would better the lot of mankind. He declares that “heaven and earth do conspire and contribute to the use and benefit of man.” In The New Atlantis (1627), Bacon describes something like the ultimate scientific laboratory—he calls it Solomon’s House—in which many of these new technologies are presented in detail. Here we find, as John Cartwright notes, dozens of ideas “that anticipate the technology that science did deliver in the centuries that followed.” These include “the genetic engineering of plants and animals, zoological gardens, robots, telephones, refrigerators, weather observation towers, and all sorts of flying machines.”

  SCIENCE FIT FOR A QUEEN (AND A KING)

  At least some measure of what we would today call “science literacy” filtered through all levels of society, including the very top. Queen Elizabeth herself was something of a science buff. We have already noted her consultations with Thomas Digges, as well as her close association with John Dee, who advised her on both astronomy and astrology. According to Bacon, Elizabeth read extensively about the
philosophical and scientific ideas of the day: “This lady was endued with learning in her sex singular, and rare even amongst masculine princes,” he wrote, “whether we speak of learning, of language, or of science, modern and ancient, divinity or humanity: and unto the very last year of her life she accustomed to appoint set hours for reading, scarcely any young student in a university more daily or more duly.”

  We also know that Elizabeth showed an interest in the latest gadgets and gizmos, at one point commissioning the construction of a complex set of musical chimes. She even wore a tiny “alarm watch” on her finger; at the appointed hour, a small prong would extend and give a gentle poke. Of course, timepieces weren’t just any gadgets; they were, in fact, among the most sophisticated mechanical devices of the age. The first mechanical clocks had appeared in the late thirteenth century, with the first pocket watches dating from the early 1500s. (I explore the history of clocks and timekeeping in some detail in Chapter 5 of my earlier book In Search of Time.) But clockwork wasn’t just for clocks: A German visitor, strolling along Whitehall in 1598, described a sophisticated “jet-d’eau” which splashed passers-by: It employed “a quantity of water, forced by a wheel, which the gardener turns at a distance, through a number of little pipes” and “plentifully sprinkles those that are standing around.”

  Elizabeth’s successor, James I, was even more passionate about science and technology. He admired the work of Kepler and Tycho—as mentioned, he once visited Tycho at his island observatory—and even composed a brief verse in praise of the Danish astronomer.* Elaborate mechanical devices held him in awe. Word of his interest reached the Continent, and in 1609 Rudolf II, ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, presented James with a clock and a celestial globe. James’s son, Prince Henry, seems to have shared his father’s scientific leanings. As Scott Maisano has pointed out, the young Henry relished visits from French and Italian engineers and inventors, and acquired a substantial library; in 1610 he even asked an Italian contact for “the latest book by Galileo.” (Henry would have inherited the throne had he not died of typhoid fever at the age of eighteen; the crown would instead pass to his younger brother, Charles.)

  James’s relationship with the Dutch scientist Cornelis Drebbel is especially noteworthy. Drebbel moved to London in 1604, at James’s request, and presented the king with a (purported) perpetual motion machine—apparently a sophisticated clockwork mechanism that displayed the time, date, and season. The Dutchman is also remembered for building the first working submarines. Using plans drawn up by mathematician William Bourne, Drebbel built and demonstrated a series of underwater craft during his time in London. The craft were built from wood and covered with grease-soaked leather, and employed pigskin bladders that could be filled with water or emptied in order to dive and to ascend, while oars provided forward propulsion. The largest of these vessels is said to have carried up to sixteen passengers and crew, and could remain underwater for three hours—long enough to travel from Westminster to Greenwich and back, at a depth of about fifteen feet—with those on board breathing through a hollow tube that reached the surface.* When James himself was offered a ride, he became the first king in history to travel underwater.

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  The submarine was of course a novelty—too novel even for the navy to fund further research at this early stage—but just about everything else involving the seas and navigation was regarded as a national priority. This push for maritime supremacy was inexorably linked to the English drive to explore and exploit the New World, which had begun under Elizabeth and continued under James, and to defend trade routes, particularly against competing Spanish, French, and Dutch forces. The attempted English settlement on Roanoke Island (in present-day North Carolina) failed, but the later effort at Jamestown, Virginia, succeeded, giving England a permanent presence in America from 1607. A second foothold to the north—at Plymouth, on Massachusetts Bay—would be established in 1620. But the colonies were a small operation in a vast and distant land, and in Elizabeth’s time, the New World was almost completely unexplored. (That is, unexplored from the European point of view; the natives who had been living there for millennia of course knew parts of the Continent quite well.) The various Englishmen who helped to explore the American continent are well known, the figure of Sir Walter Raleigh being almost a household name (and deservedly so; he was a poet, linguist, philosopher, astronomer, and all-around man of action). Less well known is the scientist who sailed to the New World under his patronage, a man of multiple talents named Thomas Harriot (ca. 1560–1621).

  EXPLORING A NEWFOUND LAND

  Harriot was probably born in or near Oxford. He enrolled at the university at the age of seventeen, taking his entrance oath at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin. He lived and studied nearby, at St. Mary’s Hall. (The church is still there, and still looks much as it did in Harriot’s day. St. Mary’s Hall—not actually a building but rather a kind of collective—has since been absorbed into Oriel College.) Graduating in 1580, Harriot moved to London, and soon after began working for Raleigh, teaching mathematics and navigation to Raleigh’s sailors. He set out across the Atlantic with Raleigh’s men in 1585, acting as chief scientist and surveyor for the new colony of Virginia. His observations of the new land and its people appeared in a book called A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, published in 1588—the first book about the New World to be printed in English.

  Harriot turned out to be an acute observer: He described in detail the vegetation, animal life, and natural resources of the land, and took an intense interest in the indigenous people he encountered. He studied native customs and religious practices, and learned the Algonquin language, even developing a system for transliterating Algonquin words into English so they could be written down. He also may have taken a telescope-like device with him on the voyage. Harriot notes that on the tenth day at sea—a short way into the eleven-week voyage—he observed a solar eclipse from the deck of his ship. Whether he used his optical device to aid in observing the eclipse, we simply don’t know; but he definitely showed off some kind of optical instrument to the native people that he encountered in America. He mentions a number of objects which he says fascinated the local inhabitants, including “a perspective glasse whereby was shewd manie strange sightes.” The natives were also much taken with the guns, books, and clocks that he showed them, all of which “were so strange to them, and so far exceedeth their capacities to comprehend … that they thought they were rather the works of Gods rather than of men.…” Harriot was accompanied on the voyage by an artist named John White, whose detailed sketches would appear alongside the scientist’s text in A Briefe and True Report. The book was partly propaganda; one of its aims was to encourage settlement, and to portray the new lands as bountiful and rich. Yet Harriot himself was more engaged in the new land and its people than many other early European visitors were.

  After spending just over a year in Virginia, Harriot returned to England. He continued to work for Raleigh, living briefly in Ireland, where he administered one of Raleigh’s estates. He then returned to London, where, beginning in 1595, he found employment with a new patron, Henry Percy, the Ninth Earl of Northumberland, known as “the Wizard Earl” because of his passion for science.

  ENGLAND’S GALILEO (ALMOST)

  Over the next decade or so, Harriot seems to have developed a keen interest in astronomy. In 1607 he made naked-eye observations of the comet now known as Halley’s Comet (long before Edmond Halley’s birth). Soon—probably sometime in the summer of 1609—he began to use a new invention from Holland, the telescope, to study the night sky. Clearly this device was different from the perspective glasses that he and other English scientists had been using in earlier decades, and that he had taken to Virginia nearly twenty-five years earlier. Whether it was an improvement on a familiar device or an entirely new design isn’t clear—but it definitely opened up new vistas in a way that the earlier instruments had not. Using a device that magnified celestial obj
ects by a factor of six, Harriot was able to sketch the surface of the moon, observe sunspots, and determine the sun’s rotation speed. He also observed the moons of Jupiter, calculating their orbits, and observed the phases of Venus.

  This was around the same time that Galileo was making his groundbreaking observations in Italy—the observations that would end up in The Starry Messenger, published in 1610—and it is only natural to ask who was first. While some of Harriot’s observations postdate those of Galileo, his study of the moon, at least, seems to come first. One of his lunar drawings is dated July 26, 1609, while Galileo’s first observations likely date from November or December of that year. Allan Chapman writes, “As far as we can tell from the historical record … it was Thomas Harriot who became the first person to look at an astronomical body through a telescope, on or before 1609 July 26, when he came to realize that the image of the moon produced by it was very different from what was seen by the naked eye, although he did not publish his discovery.” The big difference, of course, is that while Galileo shouted his discoveries from the mountaintops, so to speak, Harriot kept his findings under wraps, perhaps telling a few trusted associates but no one else. (Indeed, more than 150 years would pass before Harriot was recognized for his astronomical work. His manuscripts are now in the British Museum, and at Pentworth House in Wiltshire.)

  However, he had enough of a reputation in his day that if someone in England wanted a telescope, Harriot was known as the man to ask. Correspondence between Harriot and Sir William Lower, an astronomer and member of Parliament, has survived, and shows that by February 1610—still a month before the publication of Galileo’s book—Lower was using telescopes supplied by Harriot to observe the moon. The letters also reveal that Harriot had received a copy of The Starry Messenger soon after it was written; indeed, within three months of the book’s publication, he had summarized its contents to Lower, and Lower had written back. Clearly, the publication of Galileo’s book marked a turning point (which we will examine more closely in Chapter 9).