The Science of Shakespeare

by Dan Falk

  Columbus gave man lands to conquer by bloodshed

  Galileo new worlds harmful to none. Which is better?

  And what about Shakespeare himself? As we’ve seen, the usual view is that these discoveries, announced in the spring of 1610, come too late in Shakespeare’s working life to have had much of an impact. But perhaps we shouldn’t be so hasty. Shakespeare was not quite ready to retire in 1610; indeed, he would write at least two more plays on his own, plus a few more in collaboration with playwright John Fletcher. Of the works he penned by himself, the most famous is The Tempest. This was the last of the three “romances,” and indeed the last of the plays he wrote without a collaborator. The first of the romances is The Winter’s Tale. In between we find one of the most intriguing plays (and one of the most overlooked works) in the entire canon: Cymbeline.

  “STAGEY TRASH OF THE LOWEST MELODRAMATIC ORDER”

  There’s no getting around it: Cymbeline is an odd play. Our only surviving text is the version included in the First Folio, where it comes at the very end, wedged in with the tragedies as though an afterthought. But Cymbeline is anything but a traditional tragedy. Rather than ending in a bloodbath, like Hamlet and King Lear, this play ends in peacemaking, both familial and political. Scholars today sometimes classify it as a “tragicomedy.” Jonathan Bate, editor of the RSC Shakespeare edition, is only half joking when he describes it as “tragical-comical-historical-pastoral.” The play contains “a highly self-conscious … array of favourite Shakespearian motifs: the cross-dressed heroine, the move from court to country, obsessive sexual jealousy, malicious Machiavellian plotting, the interrogation of Roman values.” In other words, Shakespeare, nearing the end of his career, put every possible dramatic ingredient into the pot, and stirred. The plot is labyrinthine, even by Shakespearean standards: The action is driven by at least three separate but intertwined stories, while texture and mood seem to change with the wind. Samuel Johnson despised Cymbeline, saying that it contains “much incongruity” and that to list all its faults would be “to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility.…” George Bernard Shaw, meanwhile, called it “stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order … vulgar, foolish, obsessive, indecent, and exasperating beyond all tolerance.”

  More recently, however, Shakespeare scholars (and ordinary fans) seem to be warming to Cymbeline, unconventional as it may be. In the Cambridge edition, Martin Butler defends it as a work whose “narrative grips and compels, rising inexorably from a naïve tale of sundered lovers to a peripeteia of dazzling artfulness.… Cymbeline was produced by a dramatist working at the height of his powers.”

  If Cymbeline is a hodgepodge, it is perhaps because it draws on multiple sources. Shakespeare takes elements from Holinshed’s Chronicles and Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, as well as an anonymous play called The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, from 1589. King Cymbeline* rules over ancient Britain, but Roman legions, under Augustus Caesar, are targeting the island for invasion. This was also the time of the birth of Christ—an event perhaps of more significance to Shakespeare and his audience. It may be due to the unusual setting that the play is said to contain more anachronisms than any other in the canon.

  I haven’t bothered to offer plot synopses for the plays discussed so far, on the grounds that most readers are probably familiar with them; but, due to its relative obscurity, perhaps a one-paragraph outline of Cymbeline is in order. The central characters are King Cymbeline, his daughter, Imogen,* and the man she has secretly married, a commoner named Posthumus Leonatus. Cymbeline disapproves of their union, and banishes Posthumus; meanwhile the queen, Imogen’s stepmother, plots to have Imogen married to the dim-witted Cloten, her son by a previous marriage. Posthumus heads for Rome, where he and his new companions debate whose wife is the most chaste. An Italian nobleman named Jachimo makes a bet with Posthumus, wagering that when he travels to England, he will be able to seduce Imogen. He fails—but he manages to gain access to Imogen’s bedchamber by hiding in a trunk. At night he emerges, observing every detail of Imogen’s body and of the room, in order to convince Posthumus that he in fact slept with her. A second plot involves Cymbeline’s long-lost sons, Guiderus and Arviragus, who are cared for by Belarius, a former lord, but now an outlaw, who believes they are his own offspring. While out hunting, the three encounter Cloten and kill him; then they meet Imogen (who is dressed as a boy, Fidele) when she becomes lost in a Welsh forest on her way to meet Posthumus in Rome. The third plot centers on Cymbeline’s refusal to pay the annual fee (“tribute”) demanded by the Roman ambassador, as the threat of war looms over the country. (That’s not so complicated, right?)

  THE SYMBOLS IN CYMBELINE

  Of the many strange things that happen in Cymbeline, the strangest occurs in the play’s final act. Posthumus, having been convinced of Imogen’s infidelity, orders her killed; later he learns of her innocence, but mistakenly thinks his orders have been carried out. He had been traveling with the Roman army, but now switches sides and fights valiantly for Britain to defeat the Roman forces. Believing Imogen dead, however, he yearns for his own death, and puts on Roman garb to hasten his demise. Instead, he is taken prisoner. While he is in jail, something very peculiar happens.

  Scene 4 opens with Posthumus being led into his prison cell. Welcoming the solitude, he collapses in slumber. He then has a dream, or perhaps a vision, involving the ghosts of four dead family members—relatives whom he never knew in life. The spirits are those of his mother, father, and two brothers. As he lies in a daze, the ghosts move around him in a circle. (The stage direction says, “They circle Posthumus round as he lies sleeping.”) Feeling Posthumus’s anguish, they appeal to the Roman god Jupiter to come to his aid—and Jupiter obliges:

  BROTHERS

  Help, Jupiter, or we appeal, and from thy justice fly.

  Jupiter descends in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle.

  He throws a thunderbolt. The ghosts fall on their knees.

  JUPITER

  No more, you petty spirits of region low,

  Offend our hearing. Hush! How dare you ghosts

  Accuse the thunderer, whose bolt, you know,

  Sky-planted, batters all rebelling coasts?

  (5.4.62–66)

  Jupiter continues to chastise the ghosts, and then gives them a book and instructs them to give it to Posthumus. Jupiter continues:

  And so away. No farther will your din

  Express impatience, lest you stir up mine.

  Mount, eagle, to my palace crystalline.

  He ascends into the heavens.

  (5.4.81–83)

  Shakespeare’s plays cover a lot of ground, and employ many theatrical tricks—but as for gods descending from the heavens, this episode is unique; there is nothing else like it in the entire canon. Martin Butler calls the Jupiter scene the play’s “spectacular high point,” as it surely is. But the scene is also bizarre, unexpected, and extravagant—so much so that some have wondered if it represents Shakespeare’s own work. Its authenticity, Roger Warren notes, “has often been questioned … on the grounds that it is a detachable episode and that the ghosts’ speeches in particular are written in a style thought to be unworthy of Shakespeare.” The consensus seems to be that it’s as authentic as the rest of the play; still, the scene is so odd, and is so difficult to stage, that it is often cut in modern performances—when the play is performed, which is not very often.* Nonetheless, it was certainly acted on the Jacobean stage—no doubt pushing the skill of the backstage technical crews to the limit. (Because of its complex staging requirements, it may have been more readily performed at the fully enclosed Blackfriars Theatre rather than at the open-air Globe.) Butler suggests that the actor playing Jupiter would have been lowered in a chair from the ceiling (which was also, appropriately, “the heavens”) using a crane-like mechanism operated via a winch hidden in the roof. Warren adds that “perhaps the head, wings, and claws of the eagle were a façade fixed to the front of the chair, so that
Jupiter appeared to be sitting upon an eagle.” The visual and auditory effects would have been more important than the acting: “Thunder” could be created by rolling a cannonball along a groove in the ceiling, while pyrotechnics (perhaps fireworks) delivered the necessary “lightning.” (But the special effects aren’t the only reason to imagine the play being staged at the Blackfriars; the intimacy of the “trunk scene” would lose much of its impact in the enormous space of the Globe.)

  If anything in Shakespeare’s late plays points to Galileo, this is it: Jupiter, so often invoked by characters in so many of the plays, never actually makes a personal appearance—until this point in Cymbeline. And of course Jupiter is not alone in the scene: Just below him, we see four ghosts moving in a circle.… Could the four ghosts represent the four moons of Jupiter, newly discovered by Galileo? Certainly the timeline seems to hold up: Although we don’t know exactly when Cymbeline was written, the consensus is that it most likely dates from the summer or fall of 1610—in other words, it was written within the first few months (or at most half a year) after the publication of The Starry Messenger.

  Remarkably, the idea of a connection between Galileo and Shakespeare’s Cymbeline appears to have escaped scholarly attention for centuries—until roughly ten years ago, when three scholars, working independently, appear to have hit on the idea at about the same time. Scott Maisano, of UMass–Boston, discussed the Cymbeline–Galileo connection in a journal called Configurations, in the fall of 2004 (and in his PhD thesis, which was completed at about the same time), while John Pitcher, at Oxford, has given the idea its largest audience to date, addressing the matter in some detail in the new Penguin edition of the play, published in 2005. But they seem to have been beaten to the finish line (if only by a few months) by none other than Peter Usher, the astronomer we met in the previous chapter.

  Usher’s article, titled “Jupiter and Cymbeline,” was published in the Spring 2003 edition of the Shakespeare Newsletter. Usher summarizes the bizarre happenings of the play’s fifth act, noting the descent of Jupiter and the appearance of the ghosts: “These ghosts happen to be four in number, equal to the number of the Galilean moons.” But that is just the beginning: Jupiter, as mentioned, gives a book to Posthumus (via the ghosts): “This tablet lay upon his breast, wherein / Our pleasure his full fortune doth confine” (Scene 4, 79–80). The book is not identified, though we later discover that it contains a message of hope for Posthumus, who will “end his miseries” while Britain will “flourish in peace and plenty” (112–13). However, Usher has an idea of what book we should imagine it to be: “The book placed on the bosom of Posthumus could represent Galileo’s Siderius Nuncius, and the good fortune that is assigned could be praise for that part of the text that is genuinely new, the discovery of the Galilean moons.”

  “TO SEE THIS VAULTED ARCH”

  For Usher, the ghosts-as-moons symbolism is just one element in a larger thesis. He goes on to interpret other lines from the play as suggestive of early Elizabethan telescopy, a subject we looked at briefly in the previous chapter. Later, in Shakespeare and the Dawn of Modern Science, he expands on the play’s astronomical allusions, noting that “Cymbeline has mystical and cosmic overtones, and this chapter shows that it contains a subtext that chronicles the course of astronomical discovery in 1610.” Once again, the English astronomer Leonard Digges and his son, the scientist Thomas Digges, are at the center of his argument. He speculates “that Posthumus’s spirit is that of Thomas Digges, who by 1610 had graduated to a heavenly post and needed educating on new discoveries.”

  Of particular interest is a passage in act 1, scene 2, in which Jachimo meets Imogen for the first time. He has just arrived in England, and hands her a letter of introduction from her husband; she welcomes him. Seeing Imogen for the first time, Jachimo is struck by her beauty; winning the wager will be a pleasure. He concocts a story about how, back in Rome, Posthumus has forgotten she exists, and has been enjoying himself thoroughly (the implication is, with prostitutes). It’s a lie, of course; Jachimo just wants to turn Imogen against her husband. He suggests her best course of revenge would be to sleep with him (naturally). The ploy fails; she gets mad; he pretends to have only been testing her, offers an apology, and stresses Posthumus’s virtue—and for some reason she forgives him. But as he looks at her, he realizes the weakness of his own story:

  Thanks, fairest lady.

  What, are men mad? Hath Nature given them eyes

  To see this vaulted arch and the rich crop

  Of sea and land, which can distinguish ’twixt

  The fiery orbs above and the twinned stones

  Upon th’unnumbered beach, and can we not

  Partition make with spectacles so precious

  ’Twixt fair and foul?

  (1.6.30–37)

  The passage seems to allude, at least in part, to the sights one might see in the heavens; at the very least, it has something to do with distinguishing different kinds of objects (including, it would seem, stars) from one another. But the context is crucial: The first line is spoken to Imogen; the remaining lines are clearly an aside, spoken only to the audience. He seems to be saying, My story is unbelievable; why would Posthumus stoop so low, when his own wife is so beautiful? After all, he reasons, the eye gives one the power to tell the stars apart, and even to distinguish one stone on the beach from another; can’t Posthumus see the difference between his wife and a common whore? Usher passes over the sexual aspect of these lines, however, and focuses on the astronomical: The “vaulted arch” is surely the sky; the “fiery orbs above” must be the stars. Could the precious “spectacles” be a reference to a telescope-like device?

  There is more: Usher sees a parallel between Galileo’s observations of the night sky and Jachimo’s observations in Imogen’s bedroom. Jachimo emerges from the trunk in which he had been hiding, and begins to tally the various things he sees in her bedchamber. In a genuinely tricky passage, he refers to “ten thousand meaner movables.” Jachimo has taken out a notepad, and begins to write down a description of all that he observes:

  Such and such pictures; there the window; such

  Th’adornment of her bed; the arras, figures,

  Why, such and such; and the contents o’th’story.

  Ah, but some natural notes about her body

  Above some ten thousand meaner movables

  Would testify, t’enrich mine inventory.

  (2.2.25–30)

  The footnotes in most editions suggest that the “ten thousand meaner movables” refers to small items of furniture. (Indeed, as a good dictionary will point out, “movables” can still mean “furniture” to this day, and the Oxford English Dictionary notes that Jonson had used the word in this sense in Volpone in 1607.) But Usher objects: Nobody has that much furniture in their bedroom. Instead, he sees it as a reference to the number of stars visible to the unaided eye (a number that, as mentioned in the previous chapter, also crops up in Hamlet).* This number, of course, is in the process of being rendered obsolete, as Galileo’s telescope now reveals the existence of untold thousands of stars beyond those accessible to the unaided eye. Usher also points out that Jachimo emerges from a “trunk”—which was also one of the words used to describe a telescope-like device. (Usher points out that it can have a third meaning, too: It can refer to a person’s midsection—for example, the headless body of the murdered Cloten, in act 4, scene 2.)

  Of equal interest is Imogen’s intriguing reference to an “astronomer” in act 3. She has just been handed a note from her husband, delivered by his servant, Pisano:

  PISANO

  Madam, here is a letter from my lord.

  IMOGEN

  Who, thy lord? That is my lord, Leonatus?

  O learned indeed were that astronomer

  That knew the stars as I his characters—

  He’d lay the future open.

  (3.2.25–29)

  In the standard interpretation of this scene, “astronomer” simply mea
ns “astrologer,” and “characters” means “handwriting”: If only I could read the stars as easily as I recognize my husband’s handwriting, I could know the future. But Usher sees something else in these lines: He points to Thomas Digges’s addition to his father’s almanac, published in 1576, a book whose cover “is replete with zodiacal signs that could well be the ‘characters’ that Imogen’s astronomer knew.… It is reasonable to suppose that ‘the astronomer’ refers to Thomas, and that (as posited) his subtextual representative on stage, Posthumus, has a store of information residing in memory comprised of contemporary celestial facts.”

  And, as mentioned in the previous chapter, Usher believes that the play contains references to sights that even Galileo never saw—such as the detailed structure of Saturn’s rings. “Cymbeline,” he concludes, “is a paean to the glories of the night sky revealed through telescopy.”

  A SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE

  Scott Maisano and John Pitcher exercise a more restrained approach. They do not tackle the subject of early English telescope use, but instead focus on the appearance of Jupiter as a likely allusion to The Starry Messenger. Writing in Configurations, Maisano proceeds with caution:

  If it seems incongruous and unlikely, at first, for Shakespeare to have alluded to Galileo’s startling scientific discovery at the conclusion of a play primarily set in Roman Britain, a millennium and a half before the invention of the telescope, it has seemed even more unlikely to many readers that Shakespeare would not have alluded to Galileo’s discoveries, ever, in at least one of his plays.

  Maisano cites the work of Marjorie Hope Nicholson, who, writing in the 1950s, finds no trace of the “new astronomy” in Shakespeare’s works—even though he could hardly have been unaware of the latest discoveries:

  Shakespeare must have seen the new star of 1604, must have heard of Galileo’s discoveries in 1610.… Yet his poetic imagination shows no response either to new stars or to other spectacular changes in the cosmic universe.