by Dan Falk
Of course, Shakespeare’s own characters frequently argue about what is true and what is illusory. In the opening scene, the guards put their trust in Horatio, the intellectual—the closest thing the play has to a scientist—to ascertain the ghost’s true essence: “Thou art a scholar, speak to it, Horatio” (1.1.46). At first, he doubts that the apparition will even appear; later he says he wouldn’t have believed it unless he had seen it with his own eyes. Hamlet is less amazed than his friend. In one of the play’s most quoted lines, he says “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (1.5.174–75). If the play had been written in our own time, he probably would have said “science” instead of “philosophy” (recalling that the closest thing to “science” in Shakespeare’s time was “natural philosophy”). (Another small complication is that it’s “your” philosophy in the quarto editions, but “our” philosophy in the later folio: Thus the jab may not be directed at Horatio’s scholarly learning in particular, but rather at all such learning.) Hamlet is looking for truth, even as he questions whether his friend’s worldly knowledge—his science—is up to the challenge.
It is only natural to ask what Hamlet, which has so much to say about so many aspects of the human condition, might have to say about our place in the universe. As Donald Olson has shown—building on the work of Hotson, Meadows, and others before him—there is an argument to be made concerning Shakespeare’s awareness of the work of Tycho Brahe and Thomas Digges. And as Hilary Gatti suggests, perhaps more tentatively, there may also be signs of Bruno’s bold philosophy. Shakespeare covers a lot of ground in Hamlet, and quite possibly the physical nature of the universe was among his concerns. Next we will meet a scholar who takes the argument further. Is it possible that Shakespeare’s most famous play is all about the structure of the cosmos?
8. “… a hawk from a handsaw”
READING SHAKESPEARE, AND READING INTO SHAKESPEARE
It’s the world’s largest gathering of astronomers and astrophysicists: The American Astronomical Society meets twice a year, giving its members a chance to talk about their research and to announce the most newsworthy findings. I attended for the first time in January 1997, when, by luck, it was held in my home city of Toronto. As an aspiring science journalist, I was eager to take it all in: extrasolar planets, exploding stars, galaxies, black holes, the latest findings in astrophysics and cosmology—whatever was on offer. The AAS always picks out a handful of papers to publicize during the meeting, in the hope of garnering media attention, and one of these highlighted papers, titled “A New Reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet,” caught my attention. What did Shakespeare have to do with astronomy?
According to the presenter, quite a lot. His name was Peter Usher, an astronomer from Penn State University, and his paper made some bold claims: “I argue that as early as 1601 Shakespeare anticipated the new universal order and humankind’s position in it.” The journalists at the press briefing listened attentively, if skeptically, as Professor Usher outlined his new interpretation of Hamlet; afterward, the professor answered a handful of questions. It is perhaps not surprising that the reporters from the British newspapers showed the most interest; after all, Shakespeare is “one of theirs.” “Astronomer discovers cast of stars hidden in Hamlet” was the headline when the story ran in the next day’s London Times.
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Peter Usher became a Shakespeare enthusiast by accident. Born in South Africa, he taught astronomy for many years at Penn State, where he still holds the title of Professor Emeritus in astronomy and astrophysics. Often, while teaching introductory astronomy, he sought to engage his students by looking for connections across disciplines—for example, by connecting physics and astronomy with music or literature. Eventually he turned to Shakespeare, poring through the canon in search of astronomical references, and looking, in particular, for anything that might hint at the “new astronomy” of Copernicus.
At first, Usher came up empty-handed. It’s not that there weren’t any astronomical references in the canon; in fact they seemed fairly common in Shakespeare’s work. As Usher has pointed out, happenings in the sky were simply a “bigger deal,” so to speak, in Elizabethan England than they are now, partly because there was less light pollution, and partly because many of the trappings of our perennially distracted information-drenched culture hadn’t yet been invented. But most of these astronomical references seemed to either reflect the medieval, Ptolemaic view of the cosmos, or to be phrased in such a way as to render them ambiguous. There didn’t seem to be anything that pointed directly to the Copernican model of the heavens. This left Usher somewhat puzzled, given the profundity of the new discoveries unfolding at the time, and Shakespeare’s obvious curiosity about the world. “It seemed to me that someone who lived through the beginning of the Scientific Revolution would have something a little more strongly to say about it, because this was a major upheaval in the worldview,” he says. Or, as he puts it in the preface to his book Shakespeare and the Dawn of Modern Science (2010), “It is simply not credible that a poet of this stature could remain ignorant of the cultural impact that the New Astronomy was having during his lifetime—or that he would refrain from using the literary devices at his command to address the topic if he was not ignorant of its significance.” He spent his spare time “hunting through the canon, to find whether Shakespeare did or didn’t have any knowledge of heliocentrism.” Once he began his search, there was no turning back.
Usher, now retired, lives in a leafy neighborhood a few miles east of downtown Pittsburgh. He is tall, slim, and sports wire-rim glasses; when he was a bit younger, he may have borne a passing resemblance to the actor Ed Harris. His knowledge of astronomy and its history served as a starting point for his literary quest. Soon he had read Leslie Hotson’s account of the connections between Shakespeare and the Digges family, including the reference to Tycho Brahe’s portrait with its “Rozencrans” and “Guildensteren” crests; and of course he considered the possible cosmological significance of Prince Hamlet’s reference to “infinite space.” Soon he was scrutinizing Shakespeare’s most famous play scene by scene, line by line. Whatever Shakespeare might have known about the “new astronomy,” he reasoned, had to be in there somewhere; it was, after all, his most ambitious play and certainly his longest and most complex work. The “aha moment” came as Usher pondered the name of Hamlet’s villainous uncle, Claudius. Could the name be an allusion to Claudius Ptolemy, the Greek astronomer who had worked out the mechanics of the geocentric system? Soon, Usher was finding what seemed like other correspondences in the text. Gradually, he began to see the entire dramatis personae of Shakespeare’s masterpiece in a new light. The play, he says, can be interpreted as an allegory about competing cosmological models.
THE PLAY WITHIN THE PLAY
In Usher’s interpretation of Hamlet, nothing is quite what it seems—or, rather, nobody is quite who they seem to be. Nearly everyone in the play, he says, can be seen as “standing in” for an astronomer from Shakespeare’s time, or from the annals of the history of astronomy—figures who, in one way or another, had a stake in the competing descriptions of the cosmos that were battling for acceptance in Renaissance Europe. According to Usher’s interpretation, Prince Hamlet, the play’s hero, represents the true picture of the universe—the heliocentric (sun-centered) model proposed by Copernicus and championed in England by the astronomer Thomas Digges. The correspondence applies also to the previous generation: The deceased king, Hamlet’s father, is Leonard Digges, father of Thomas Digges—the man who, according to his son, may have invented a telescope-like device in the mid-sixteenth century, and whose work was continued by his son. (“Thomas and Hamlet are both compelled by the spirits of their deceased fathers to finish the job,” Usher says.) The courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, meanwhile, represent Tycho Brahe, and serve as a surrogate for Tycho’s “hybrid” model of the universe (in which the planets revolve around the sun, but the sun, in t
urn, revolves around the Earth). Laertes stands in for another English astronomer, Thomas Harriot. The lesser characters are vital, too. Bernardo, for example, is the medieval philosopher Bernardus Silvestris, an early proponent of a moving Earth. (Bernardus’s major work, Cosmographica, “is an excellent fit to the Hamlet subtext,” Usher writes.) In all, Usher finds such correspondences for twelve characters in the play (a list that includes all of the main characters except for the two women, Gertrude and Ophelia).
As Usher sees it, the battle between worldviews gets under way right from the play’s famous opening scene, with the ghost of old King Hamlet (Leonard Digges) seeking revenge on his evil brother (Claudius Ptolemy). As the drama unfolds, some of Prince Hamlet’s more enigmatic lines are seen in a new light. Consider his claim that he could be “bounded in a nutshell” while still counting himself “a king of infinite space.” To Usher, this one line serves to highlight the essential difference between the old and the new models: A “shell” of fixed stars forms the universe’s “bounds” not only in the outdated Ptolemaic model, but in those of Copernicus and Tycho as well; they were eliminated only when Digges put forward his vision of an unbounded cosmos—a world of “infinite space.” In the end, although Hamlet dies, his ideas live on: When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are killed, it represents the demise of the Tychonic system; and when Claudius is killed, it’s the long-overdue downfall of Ptolemy and geocentrism. Finally we have the return of Fortinbras from Poland, and his salute to the English ambassadors—symbolizing the final triumph of Copernicus, the Polish astronomer.
Usher was also struck by the prominence given to the German city of Wittenberg, the university town where Hamlet and Horatio, as well as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, are said to have studied, and to which Hamlet is apparently intent on returning. In Shakespeare’s time, Wittenberg was renowned for its scholarship, and, as Harold Jenkins points out, it was already well known to the playwright’s audience, having been mentioned in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, which had premiered about eight years earlier. Wittenberg was also the seat of the Protestant Reformation: Luther studied there, and in 1517 he nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the city’s Castle Church. But as Usher points out, Wittenberg is also connected to Copernicanism: Rheticus, the only pupil of Copernicus, studied and later taught there, before supervising the publication of De revolutionibus. The city is mentioned four times in Hamlet, and was the home of the heliocentric theory’s first ardent supporter; for Usher, it’s not a coincidence. When Hamlet announces his intention to return to Wittenberg to resume his studies, Claudius declares that such a move is “most retrograde to our desire” (1.2.114). Usher sees this as both an allusion to the retrograde motion of the planets, which had originally motivated so much astronomical investigation in the first place, and to Claudius’s (that is, Ptolemy’s) opposition to the Copernican system, which was being taught at the famous German university. (Usher is not the first to make this connection; he notes that another astronomer, Celia Payne-Gaposchkin, suggested such a link in a textbook in the 1970s.)
THE VIEW FROM HVEN
If Shakespeare’s decision to give Wittenberg such prominence in Hamlet is linked to Copernicus, then perhaps this connection can be used to make sense of some of the play’s more puzzling lines, which, according to Usher, can now be read so as to support the cosmic allegory. Consider Hamlet’s peculiar description of his apparent madness:
I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.
(2.2.374–75)
Needless to say, critics have puzzled over this line at great length.* The basic idea is plain enough: Hamlet is only mad at certain times—or rather, he is choosing to appear mad at certain times, while underneath he is quite sane. The proof of his sanity is that he can distinguish one object from another—although the two objects are not necessarily what they first appear to be. As the footnotes explain, one possibility (among many) is that “handsaw” may be a corruption of “hernshaw” (or “heronshaw”), referring to a kind of heron—in which case the passage refers to the ability to distinguish one type of bird from another. (However, this is still a bit odd: A prince, accustomed to hunting, would surely have little difficulty in telling a bird of prey from a wading bird, and wouldn’t be inclined to brag about being able to make such a distinction.)
Usher sees the passage quite differently. His focus is not so much on the hawk and the handsaw, but on the two compass directions: For someone living on Tycho’s island of Hven, the castle at Elsinore would lie to the north-northwest, while the German city of Wittenberg would lie to the south—and he feels confident that it’s not just a geographical fluke. “We’ve got to think that there’s something important going on here, because these are not mere coincidences,” Usher says. “Shakespeare could have chosen other directions, but he happened to choose these particular two directions: one in which Claudius, namely Claudius Ptolemy, resides; and the other, where Rheticus is teaching Copernican astronomy. And he’s contrasting the two.” In other words, north-northwest leads to Elsinore, Ptolemaic astronomy, and madness; south leads to Wittenberg, Copernicanism, and sanity.
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There is more to Usher’s Hamlet theory, but that is enough to give the flavor of his argument. Perhaps not surprisingly, he encountered difficulty in getting his novel interpretation published. His first paper was rejected by “all the conventional Shakespearean outlets,” he says. A turning point came in 1997, when a brief account of his theory ran in Mercury, the journal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, and, at about the same time, his paper on Hamlet was accepted for presentation at the AAS meeting in Toronto. More publications followed. Among the periodicals that have taken an interest in his work are the Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, The Elizabethan Review, The Shakespeare Newsletter—along with the Oxfordian, the journal of the Shakespeare Oxford Society, a group that, according to their website, welcomes papers on “Shakespeare authorship issues” and is dedicated “to Researching and Honoring the True Bard.”
While Usher didn’t set about his research with the aim of wading into the so-called authorship question, he eventually found it impossible to separate the question of Shakespeare’s astronomical knowledge from the question of his identity. Still, when he was writing Shakespeare and the Dawn of Modern Science, he managed to put off that problematic issue until the book’s final chapter. Even so, one finds a hint of where things may be heading in the book’s preface, where he refers to “the Stratford actor William Shakspere,” who is “widely regarded as the poet Shakespeare. Some have wondered whether Shakspere wrote Shakespeare, and they have proposed alternate candidates for the authorship of the Canon—but the unique fact of this work is that the cosmic allegorical context provides an entirely new perspective on these propositions.” Usher also had an earlier book, Hamlet’s Universe, which he self-published in 2006, but Shakespeare and the Dawn of Modern Science takes the story much further, exploring astronomical references in Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Merchant of Venice, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, and of course Hamlet.
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Usher is fully aware that his ideas are unorthodox, and that they may strike many Shakespeare scholars (and perhaps many ordinary readers) as far-fetched. And wading into the authorship debate certainly doesn’t help. But acceptance, or lack thereof, doesn’t seem to trouble him. “Change comes very, very slowly,” he says. “But I’m not concerned about that. I’m a scholar, and I’ve written a scholarly book, and we’ll see where it goes.”
A few scholars are at least citing Usher’s work; for example, Helge Kragh, in his book Conceptions of Cosmos, notes the Shakespeare–Digges connection, adding that “it has been argued that [Digges’s] world picture enters allegorically in several of the Bard’s plays,” with an endnote crediting Usher.
That Shakespeare was influenced by Thomas Digges is one thing; that he was some kind of literary secret agent, slyly alluding to taboo subjects by me
ans of allegory in his most famous plays, is another. The way Usher sees it, Shakespeare could discuss Copernicanism only allegorically, rather than tackling it head-on, because the heliocentric theory was supposedly a dangerous doctrine in Elizabethan England; that any mention of it could somehow jeopardize one’s career or even one’s life. (“The idea of having, for example, imperfections in the heavens was enough to have you decapitated, or at least disemboweled,” he said during our interview. “You had to be careful what you were doing.”) However, there seems to be scant evidence to support such a view. As Allan Chapman points out, while there were any number of ways to get into trouble for one’s political beliefs in Elizabethan England, scientific views were considered harmless. “Nobody, as far as I am aware, got into any hot water whatsoever for their scientific beliefs,” he writes. Still, we need to remember that science and philosophy were part of a single package at that time, and there were certainly “dangerous ideas.” (Atomism, with its association with atheism, was one example—though I’m not aware of anyone in England facing persecution specifically for adhering to the atomic theory.) At the very least, there were perceived dangers—and a hint of these dangers (real or imagined) can be glimpsed in a letter that Harriot wrote to Kepler in 1608. Regarding his decision not to publish his astronomical findings, he says: “Things with us are in such a condition that I still cannot philosophize freely. We are still stuck in the mud. I hope Almighty God will soon put an end to it.” How tangible was the danger? To be sure, anything that might be interpreted as an attack on the queen or her court might lead to a charge of treason, Chapman notes, but “as far as science was concerned, you could, if you did not mind being laughed at, believe that the moon was a lump of green cheese, and nobody would touch you for it.” He concludes that “there was no persecution at all for scientific subjects.”
