by Dan Falk
Fig. 5.1 The grounds of Syon House, in west London, part of the Earl of Northumberland’s estate. In the late sixteenth century, it was home to the ninth earl, Henry Percy, patron of astronomer Thomas Harriot. It was from here that Harriot observed the night sky with a telescope—beginning, it seems, a few months ahead of Galileo. Author photo
Although Harriot had been making telescopic observations of the night sky before reading the Italian scientist’s book, his encounter with The Starry Messenger seems to have sparked a renewed interest in all things astronomical, and he appears to have begun a regular observing program at this time. We know that from 1610 to 1613 Harriot made numerous astronomical observations, most of them carried out from the grounds of Syon House, Northumberland’s grand estate near Richmond, on the outskirts of London (figure 5.1). He made detailed maps of the lunar surface, produced nearly a hundred drawings of Jupiter with its four bright moons, and made several dozen drawings of the surface of the sun. We might note that his drawing of the full moon, likely dating from the summer of 1610, is, arguably, better than Galileo’s (compare figure 5.2 with figure 9.1). Though he doesn’t have Galileo’s knack for realistic, three-dimensional topography, Harriot does a better job of showing various prominent craters and the lunar “seas” (now known to be plains of hardened lava) in their true positions. (Perhaps, having seen Galileo’s engravings by this point, he had become more confident of his own observing skills.)
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Harriot kept up a diligent correspondence with other like-minded scientists of the day—including Kepler (at that time living in Prague), with whom he discussed optical theory and techniques for building telescopes. Within England, he had a diverse array of protégés who watched the sky and reported back to him. By the time of his death, Harriot had accumulated a sizable collection of telescopes, which he bequeathed to his friends and patrons. His will states that he left to the Earl of Northumberland his “two perspective trunks wherewith I use to see Venus horned like the Moone and spotts on the Sonne.”
Fig. 5.2 Thomas Harriot’s drawing of the full moon, from the summer of 1610. Drawn with telescopic aid, the sketch shows the relative sizes and locations of various lunar features (if not their topography) more accurately than those of Galileo (compare with Fig. 9.1). Lord Egremont
Harriot seems to have been every bit as well connected as John Dee. Indeed, historians suspect that all of the notable English philosopher-scientists we’ve looked at so far would have likely known each other. Harriot certainly knew Dee; in his diary, Dee mentions two visits by Harriot in the early 1590s. And since Dee was Digges’s teacher, it is likely that Digges knew Harriot as well. Harriot likely also knew Gilbert, and may even have met with Bruno at some point during the Italian’s stay in the south of England. (We know that Bruno’s books were in Northumberland’s library.) “There can be no question,” writes Johnson, “that Harriot and his group of astronomers in England were not only fully abreast of all the latest developments in their science, but were also carrying on independent researches of their own along similar lines.” We might also note that Northumberland’s younger brother, Sir Charles Percy, was a patron of the arts and a Shakespeare fan; he once commissioned a production of Richard II from Shakespeare’s acting company. There is no evidence that Shakespeare ever met Harriot himself, although it is certainly possible, and it seems likely that the playwright would have at least heard of his work. When I spoke with Stephen Greenblatt, he weighed in on the question of who knew whom in this tightly knit world: Greenblatt notes that Raleigh and Harriot were both said to have had connections with Shakespeare’s colleague Christopher Marlowe; and this group “could well have intersected with Shakespeare himself.” (We will look at Marlowe in more detail in Chapter 14.) Greenblatt has also identified a link (albeit a tenuous one) connecting Shakespeare and Bruno: In Will in the World, he notes that Shakespeare’s friend, the printer Richard Field, had served as an apprentice to Thomas Vautrollier, who had published Bruno’s books. During our interview, he acknowledged that “there is a possibility that Shakespeare could have encountered Bruno,” although it is somewhat of a long shot.
Harriot, like Bruno, seems to have been a Copernican, and his telescopic observations would certainly have led him in that direction even if he had not been previously inclined toward the new astronomy. And like Bruno, he endorsed the plurality of worlds as well as the atomic theory of matter first proposed by the Greek philosophers. Although both theories could be considered dangerous, the atomic theory was, at the time, certainly the more repugnant of the two, having long been associated with irreligion and atheism. As with Dee, accusations of atheism haunted Harriot, especially in his later life. Perhaps in hesitating to publicize his work he was simply thinking of his own safety (or at least his peace of mind). As Allan Chapman puts it, Harriot “was quite happy to accumulate 35 years’ worth of work, and publish nothing.… One suspects that, like Copernicus, he found controversy to be distasteful.”
Harriot’s work in mathematics had more of an impact than his astronomical work. He wrote a groundbreaking book on algebra, known as the Artis analyticae praxis (The Application of the Analytic Art), or the Praxis for short, published a decade after his death. In the Praxis, Harriot explained how to solve polynomial equations, conceived of negative numbers, and introduced the “greater than” and “less than” algebraic symbols (> and <), as well as the modern symbol for “square root” (). He studied the parabolic paths of projectiles and determined the densities of numerous materials. He investigated optics, and understood the principles behind the rainbow. And he independently discovered what we now call Snell’s Law governing the refraction of light (doing so a full twenty years before the Dutch scientist for whom it is named).
Matters of state held little interest for Harriot, but he nonetheless got swept up in the political turmoil of the early seventeenth century. His second patron, Northumberland, was linked to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. A distant relative of Northumberland’s, Thomas Percy, had been one of the five conspirators in the failed plot to blow up Parliament; Northumberland, considered guilty by association, spent seventeen years in prison. Harriot, too, was jailed, but was released after a few weeks. (His first patron, Raleigh, was not so lucky. Imprisoned several times in the Tower of London for a variety of alleged crimes, he was finally beheaded for treason in 1618.) When not gazing skyward from the grounds of Syon House, Harriot could be found at another of Northumberland’s homes, located on Threadneedle Street in the heart of London. It was here that he died in 1621.
Even though he was a keen observer of the heavens and one of the most important mathematicians and experimental scientists of his day, Thomas Harriot remains an obscure figure. Part of the reason is that Harriot, unlike his better-known contemporaries, published very little; only the Briefe and True Report appeared in his lifetime. (The vast majority of his scientific work—including his astronomical observations—exists only in manuscript form.) A plaque honoring Harriot’s scientific achievements was finally unveiled on the grounds of Syon House in 2009, during the International Year of Astronomy (honoring the four hundredth anniversary of the modern telescope). An older memorial plaque had been placed near Harriot’s grave in the parish church of St. Christopher le Stocks in London, not far from the home on Threadneedle Street; when the church was demolished to make way for an expansion of the Bank of England in 1781, the inscription was copied onto a new plaque, set on a wall within the bank, where it can be found today—or rather, where it can’t easily be found; in quintessential British fashion, the plaque is mounted in a hallway that is not normally open to the public.
Why was Harriot so reluctant to publish? Surely he recognized the novelty of the sights he was seeing through his telescope—and yet he seemed perfectly content to keep them to himself, or to share them with only a handful of colleagues. Allan Chapman notes that, although there was nothing particularly dangerous about the study or practice of astronomy in Elizabethan and Jacobean England,
Harriot may simply have sought to avoid unnecessary risks. His secrecy may reflect “a reluctance to put his head above the parapet in dangerous times.” Besides, there was nothing to gain by going public with his discoveries. Unlike Galileo, Chapman notes, Harriot did not desire fame; thanks to his well-heeled patrons, he already had everything he needed. “A peaceful and intellectually productive life,” Chapman suggests, “was best enjoyed as a private gentleman, not as a public figure.”
WHITHER THE “TUDOR TELESCOPE”?
Just how good were telescopes in England in the sixteenth century, and the early years of the seventeenth? As we’ve seen, they almost certainly underwent a significant evolution over this time period, from the simple perspective tube or trunk purportedly used by Leonard Digges in the 1550s, to the device taken by Harriot to Virginia in the 1580s, to the more sophisticated device that Harriot was able to use to observe the moon and other celestial objects beginning in 1609. The latter development may have come just as word was arriving from Holland of a new-and-improved telescope, and of course it was just such a device, further refined by Galileo, that would herald the dawn of modern astronomy in the months that followed.
Fig. 5.3 A matter of perspective: Viewed from a sharp angle, a hidden image—of a human skull—appears at the bottom of Hans Holbein the Younger’s painting, The Ambassadors. A reference to “perspectives” in Shakespeare’s Richard II may refer to such illusions. The Bridgeman Art Library, London
What, if anything, did Shakespeare have to say about these early optical devices? We may find a clue in an intriguing passage from Richard II (as it happens, the play once commissioned by the brother of Harriot’s patron). The play was likely written in 1594–95, and was first published in 1597. In act 2, one of the king’s supporter’s, Sir John Bushy, speaks metaphorically of the task of reading a person’s emotions (in this case, the Queen’s); he says it’s like gazing at an object by means of a “perspective”:
For sorrow’s eye, glazed with blinding tears,
Divides one thing entire to many objects,
Like perspectives which, rightly gaz’d upon,
Show nothing but confusion; eyed awry,
Distinguish form.
(2.2.16–20)
This may plausibly allude to a “perspective glass” of some kind, as David Levy argues in his book The Sky in Early Modern English Literature (2011). But most Shakespeare editors are skeptical. Anthony Dawson and Paul Yachnin, in the Oxford edition, say that Bushy is playing on two different meanings of the word “perspective”: As an optical device, it can mean “a glass instrument whose multi-prism lenses show the viewer multiple images of an object”; but it can also refer to a particular kind of painting or drawing in which a hidden, secondary image appears only when the work is viewed from an oblique angle. The most famous of these, as Dawson and Yachnin note, is Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Ambassadors, dating from 1533 (see figure 5.3): At first glance, it is a portrait of two accomplished young men; when viewed from a sharp angle, however, a hidden image appears—the technique is called “anamorphosis”—and we see a skull at the bottom of the canvas, “a stealthy reminder of mortality.” (We might note that the German-born Holbein was living in England at the time, where he also painted iconic portraits of Henry VIII and members of his court.) Peter Ure, in the Arden edition, notes both of these possible allusions but believes that Bushy is more likely referencing the kind of hidden image typified by Holbein’s painting. He also offers an additional word of caution, noting that neither of these two meanings “must be confused with the perspective (or “prospective”) glass, a kind of magic crystal which could be used to look into the distance or the future.” Things are not looking so good for the Tudor telescope or the Tudor time machine!
The case for this passage from Richard II being an allusion to a special kind of painting may be bolstered by a similar passage from Antony and Cleopatra, which seems more clear-cut: The queen is describing her lover’s character; his nature, it seems, depends on one’s perspective: “Though he be painted one way like a Gorgon, / The other way’s a Mars” (2.5.116–17). The footnote in the Arden edition explains: “The allusion is to a ‘perspective’ picture of a kind which was popular in Shakespeare’s time. They were painted on a furrowed surface in such a way that if looked at from the left they showed one portrait and from the right they showed another. Viewed straight from the front they appeared confused.… Cleopatra says that, seen from one point of view, Antony appears like the Gorgon Medusa (whose head was crowned with snakes and whose gaze turned men to stone), but seen from the other he looks like the god of war.” Telescopes aside, Shakespeare seems to have been well versed in the methods of contemporary painters.
There are further references to a “glass”—for example, in Macbeth. In act 4, scene 1, the witches present Macbeth with “a show of eight kings”; as the stage direction indicates, the last of them enters “with a glass in his hand.” In the New Cambridge edition, A. R. Braunmuller interprets “glass” as a “magic crystal permitting visions of the future … not a looking-glass or a mirror.” The glass’s magical properties are the key; there is, once again, little evidence that Shakespeare was referring to a telescope-like device. One finds a similar reference to a “perspective” in act 3, scene 4 of Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, and the scholarly verdict is much the same: As Douglas Brown sees it, the reference is to “a specially devised optical instrument, or, perhaps primarily, a design constructed to produce remarkable effects.” That seems to cover nearly all the bases: These Elizabethan writers may have been referring to just about anything one might be able to achieve with a specially crafted glass, or to anything that mimics such a change in perspective, except for producing a magnified view of distant objects.
So why weren’t inquisitive Tudor tinkerers building and using telescopes? Such devices would be only as good as their lenses; but this by itself may not have been a limiting factor, since high-quality spectacles—that is, reading glasses—had been common since the fifteenth century (as one can surmise from portraits dating from that period), as had simple magnifying glasses. Surely an inquisitive young spectacle maker must have played with various arrangements of lenses; indeed, it’s hard to imagine a bored optician not fiddling with a variety of lenses in such a manner. Richard Dunn notes that “by the late sixteenth century many people were experimenting with lenses and mirrors and thinking about their potential.” The idea of a telescope seems to have been “in the air,” so to speak, and perhaps it was inevitable that someone would invent a device similar in principle to a modern telescope before too long—and yet there seems to have been only halting progress toward such a device over a period of many decades.
As we’ve seen, the strongest claim comes from Thomas Digges, who says that his father, Leonard, had used a sophisticated telescope-like instrument in the 1550s, one that could reveal minute details of people and objects at a great distance from the observer. For those who take Thomas’s story at face value, it offers the possibility, as we have seen, that it was a look through one of his father’s instruments that set Digges on the path toward envisioning an infinite cosmos. But this is speculation—and recall that Leonard died when Thomas was thirteen. His account may well be based on fading recollections of his father’s stories, or the stories of others who knew him, and may be little more than embellished family folklore. Intriguingly, however, we do have an additional secondhand account, which happens to come from Bourne, the man behind the submarine designs. Sometime after Thomas Digges published his description of his father’s experiments, Bourne wrote a letter to William Cecil, Elizabeth’s chief advisor, assuring him that Digges’s optical device, and its reported capabilities, were real: A certain kind of “looking glasse,” he wrote, could be used to see “things of a marvellous largeness in a manner incredible to bee believed of the common people.” He added that “those things that Mr Thomas Digges hathe written that his father hathe done, may be accomplished very well, withowte any dowte of
the matter.…” And John Dee, as we’ve seen, had written of the military value of such a device.
It’s a classic conundrum for historians: A smattering of enthusiastic written accounts for an early telescope-like device—but no physical evidence, and no evidence that others adopted Digges’s design. (If it was so good, why wasn’t it widely copied?) Among twentieth-century historians, Francis Johnson was probably the strongest proponent of the Diggeses, suggesting that it “seems entirely probable” that Thomas Digges had access to one of his father’s early telescopes and “may have used them for examining the heavens.” But more recent voices are more cautious. David Levy, an astronomer who has also written extensively on the history of the field, says that we “cannot conclude … that telescopes were invented in England,” even if various people had tinkered with an early form of such a device. Allan Chapman, who specializes in the history of English astronomy, is even more doubtful about the existence of a Tudor telescope decades before the telescope’s “official” invention, circa 1609. He notes, for example, that Harriot showed the Native Americans “strange sights” with his optical devices, but makes no mention of achieving a magnified view. “I simply do not believe that the historical evidence for a Tudor telescope stands up to detailed scrutiny,” he concludes. (We will return to this issue in Chapter 8, when we consider a rather bold claim regarding Shakespeare and Elizabethan telescopy.)
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None of the scientific developments that we’ve been looking at in this chapter were revolutionary on their own. Acceptance of the Copernican system, as we’ve seen, came slowly. And while Bacon’s first writings came during this period, his major works still lay a few years off. William Harvey’s treatise on the circulation of the blood—a crucial breakthrough—would come only in 1628. And yet these first stirrings of science in England, and in London in particular, laid the groundwork for what was to come. “There would have been no Scientific Revolution in England without the intellectual vitality present in Elizabethan London,” writes Deborah Harkness, “for she provided later scientists with its foundation: the skilled labor, tools, techniques, and empirical insights that were necessary to shift the study of nature out of the library and into the laboratory.” We find, if not science in the modern sense, at least “the seeds of modern scientific thought,” as Freyja Cox Jensen puts it. Mordechai Feingold calls the period between 1560 and 1640—which happens to encompass Shakespeare’s life—the “prologue of modern science”; the disciplines that were beginning to take shape during those years would, by the second half of the seventeenth century, evolve into highly specialized fields of study. “Prologue,” “seeds,” “foundation”: Whichever word we apply to this incubation period, we are witnessing the beginning of a profound and far-reaching change.
