The Science of Shakespeare

by Dan Falk

  Where did Shakespeare acquire his medical knowledge? It has occasionally been suggested—especially by people who question the plays’ authorship—that only someone with medical training could have written so knowledgably about medicine. But that’s taking it too far: Shakespeare didn’t need to be a doctor in order to write about illnesses and treatments, just as he didn’t need to be a nobleman to write about courtly intrigue, or to have visited Italy to write about Italian cities and customs. All he needed to do was to keep his eyes and ears open. As John Andrews points out, Shakespeare’s knowledge of medicine, while seemingly thorough, wasn’t particularly unusual for the time. “The number of medical references in Shakespeare’s plays … doesn’t necessarily indicate that Shakespeare knew more about medicine than his contemporaries,” Andrews writes. “Most Elizabethans were very concerned with their health and were thus familiar with basic medical theories.”

  A DOCTOR IN THE FAMILY

  In the latter part of his career, Shakespeare had another route to medical know-how: His oldest daughter, Susanna, had married a successful doctor named John Hall in 1607. Perhaps this accounts for the respect that Shakespeare bestows on his medical men, especially in the later plays. There are, to be sure, numerous gibes—as in Timon of Athens, where Timon warns, “Trust not the physician; / His antidotes are poison” (4.3.433–34); and Lear’s advice to “Kill thy physician, and thy fee bestow / Upon the foul disease” (King Lear 1.1.157–58). But overall, Shakespeare’s doctors, and the medical profession in general, are shown in a positive light. And as Jonathan Bate has noted, Shakespeare’s portrayal of doctors seems to take on an increasingly positive tone after his daughter’s marriage. In the early plays we find comic figures like Pinch in The Comedy of Errors and Caius in The Merry Wives of Windsor—but in the later works we encounter “several dignified, sympathetically portrayed medical men.”

  Hall had studied at Queens’ College in Cambridge, and began to practice medicine in Stratford around 1600. We don’t know how often Shakespeare spoke with his son-in-law; as far as we can tell, the Halls lived in Stratford, while Shakespeare, by this point, was spending most of his time in London. Still, it’s hard to imagine that Hall’s work never came up on those occasions when the two men spoke, over the years. As it happens, we know more about John Hall than we do about most physicians of the period, because he left behind detailed notes about his cases (later published with the title Select Observations on English Bodies of Eminent Persons in Desperate Diseases).

  Remarkably, Hall has even left us with the details of a treatment he applied to Susanna herself:

  Mrs Hall of Stratford, my Wife, being miserably tormented with the Colic, was cured as followeth. R. Diaphen. Diacatholic. Ana 3i. Pul. Holand 3ii. Ol. Rute 3i. Lact. Q.s.f. Clyt. This injected gave her two Stools, yet the pain continued, being but little mitigated; therefore I appointed to inject a Pint of Sack made hot. This presently brought forth a great deal of Wind, and freed her from all Pain. To her stomach was applied a Plaister de Labd. Crat. Cum Caran. & ol. Macis. With one of these Clysters I delivered the Earl of Northampton from a grievous Colic.

  Dr. Hall is describing an enema (“clyster”), and even if the casual reader isn’t quite sure what all those ingredients are, it provides a fascinating glimpse into the lives of Shakespeare’s daughter and her doctor husband. As Bate notes, Dr. Hall likely procured his various ingredients from Philip Rogers, the apothecary who ran a shop on High Street in Stratford (and who was once sued by Shakespeare over an unpaid debt); other medicinal plants and herbs could have come from his own garden at New Place. Visitors to the Halls’ home can still see the garden—now purely decorative in function. As Bate points out, it has become difficult to sense “the intimate relationship between plants and medicine in Shakespeare’s time.”

  Hall’s notes also reveal interesting correlations with the records at St. Thomas’s Hospital. For example, Kevin Flude has noted that in 1612 the hospital paid nine pence for a pigeon to “lay at the feet of a patient.” This may sound like straight-ahead quackery, but Dr. Hall himself prescribed the very same remedy for himself in 1632: “Then was a pigeon cut open alive, and applied to my feet, to draw down the vapours; for I was often afflicted with a light Delirium.” The pigeon-at-the-feet treatment “seems fairly weird,” Flude admits. “And yet that was a very well-educated, mainstream doctor—Dr. John Hall—who prescribed that. So the difference between a mountebank and a proper doctor is difficult to tell at this particular stage.”

  On other occasions, Flude has found, Hall prescribed treatments involving such ingredients as hart’s horn, shavings of ivory, spiderwebs, dried windpipes of roosters, and a cosmetic known as virgin’s milk.* More benign herbal remedies were more typically prescribed, and some of the more common “cures”—including wormwood, plantains, and egg whites, for example—can be found both in the records of St. Thomas’s Hospital and throughout Shakespeare’s plays. The witches’ brew in Macbeth, containing such appetizing ingredients as “eye of newt, and toe of frog / Wool of bat, and tongue of dog” (4.1.13–14), sounds rather alarming today; but in Shakespeare’s time, Flude notes, it was “not so very far from the reality.”

  13. “Drawn with a team of little atomi…”

  LIVING IN THE MATERIAL WORLD

  “Ocursed, cursed slave!,” moans Othello, as he comes to grip with the fact that he has just murdered his wife:

  Whip me, ye devils,

  From the possession of this heavenly sight,

  Blow me about in winds, roast me in sulphur,

  Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire—

  (5.2.275–79)

  Throughout Shakespeare’s works, there is remarkably little talk of heavenly rewards and hellish punishments—but here we at least have a vivid description of the imagined fate that awaits the sinner after death. (Though such treatment is normally a thing to be feared, in this case Othello yearns for it in the aftermath of his vile act.) But what if there are no angels and harps to reward the virtuous, and no pools of sulfur to torment the wicked? In fact, a forward-thinking Greek philosopher had imagined this very scenario some sixteen centuries earlier. In Shakespeare’s time, that philosopher’s message—lost for more than a millennium—was slowly finding its way back into the cultural life of Renaissance Europe.

  The Roman poet Lucretius (99–55 B.C.) left us only one extant piece of writing—but what a piece it is. Spanning some 7,400 lines of rhyming Latin hexameter, his poem De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) presents a radical description of the natural world. It is reductionist, materialist, and virtually godless. For Lucretius, the universe and all the wondrous diversity within it came about not because of God (or the gods), but because of the unthinking, random jostling of atoms, tiny particles that “Fly all around in countless different ways … Perpetually driven by an everlasting motion.” Lucretius didn’t invent the atomic theory, which had in fact been circulating for some five hundred years. It is generally credited to the Greek thinker Leucippus and his pupil, Democritus, and it was later expounded on by the philosopher Epicurus, who attracted many followers.* The school of thought Epicurus gave rise to, built around materialism and the legitimacy of valuing pleasure for its own sake, became known as Epicureanism—and we might note that variations of the word “epicure” crop up at least four times in Shakespeare’s plays. Epicureanism, while not quite synonymous with atheism, was the next-worst thing; its practitioners, as Benjamin Bertram writes, did not necessarily reject God outright, but “they were dangerously close to doing so and were risking eternal damnation.” While various writers made note of the atomic theory, it was Lucretius who, more than any other ancient thinker, explored its philosophical implications—and who gave the theory its most eloquent expression. The world, Lucretius says, is self-made; it is brought into existence by nature herself,

  Of her own, by chance, by the rush and collision of atoms,

  Jumbled any which way, in the dark, to no result,

  Bu
t at last tossed into combinations which

  Became the origin of mighty things,

  Of the earth and the sea and the sky and all that live.

  Lucretius goes on to describe the physical properties of atoms, and how the motion of these atoms is able to account for the vast array of phenomena we see in the natural world. He asserts that earthquakes, volcanoes, and lightning—which have struck fear into so many, and which had often been seen as requiring a supernatural explanation—have physical causes. To be sure, certain key ideas are missing; he did not quite have the notion of evolution and natural selection, for example—although Lucretius did suspect, as other ancient writers had, that species that once flourished have since become extinct. Nonetheless, On the Nature of Things has a strikingly modern feel.

  THE BEST SCIENCE POEM EVER WRITTEN

  Lucretius’s most recent champion has been Harvard scholar Stephen Greenblatt, who examines Lucretius’s influence in his Pulitzer Prize–winning Swerve (2011). When he read On the Nature of Things, Greenblatt couldn’t help thinking of a trio of more recent thinkers: “So much that is in Einstein or Freud or Darwin or Marx was there,” he told Harvard Magazine. “I was flabbergasted.” In The Swerve, he describes the ancient poet’s worldview:

  There is no master plan, no divine architect, no intelligent design. All things, including the species to which you belong, have evolved over vast stretches of time. The evolution is random, though in the case of living organisms it involves a principle of natural selection. That is, species that are suited to survive and to reproduce successfully endure, at least for a time; those that are not so well suited die off quickly. But nothing—from our own species to the planet on which we live to the sun that lights our days—lasts forever. Only the atoms are immortal.

  This is a remarkably modern way of seeing things (even though, as Greenblatt stresses, the path from Lucretius to our own culture is neither straight nor smooth). Nonetheless, there is at least a hint of twenty-first-century skepticism in Lucretius’s epic poem, in which we are confronted with a universe that is neither for, nor about, humans. Here, for example, is Lucretius’s take on “intelligent design”:

  For certainty not by design or mind’s keen grasp

  Did primal atoms place themselves in order,

  Nor did they make contracts, you may be sure,

  As to what movements each of them should make.

  But many primal atoms in many ways

  Throughout the universe from infinity

  Have changed positions, clashing among themselves,

  Tried every motion, every combination,

  And so at length they fall into that pattern

  On which this world of ours has been created.

  Lucretius’s vision provides, among other things, a new and much less frightening view of death. There can be no heaven or hell, he reasons, because the soul is mortal. He and his followers regarded death as part of life; they dismissed notions of an afterlife as superstitions. He even urges his readers to keep their minds “clean of the taint of vile religion.” Even so, Lucretius and his followers were not, in the modern sense, atheists: They did, in fact, have a panoply of gods. And as Gavin Hyman writes, “the notion, intrinsic to the modern understanding of atheism, of immanence—of the world existing quite free of any sort of transcendent realm—would have been almost unintelligible to them.” But such gods as they did believe in kept their hands off of humans and human affairs. If they were not entirely absent, the gods were at least indifferent.

  * * *

  There is no need to recount the gradual rediscovery of Lucretius in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, a story that Greenblatt covers quite thoroughly in The Swerve. It is enough to note that the ideas that Lucretius explores with so much energy in his poem were just beginning to resurface in the time of Shakespeare. The message of the poem was still too radical to be openly embraced—it was too close to all-out atheism—but nonetheless, as Greenblatt notes, “Lucretian thoughts percolated and surfaced wherever the Renaissance imagination was at its most alive and intense.”

  Some thirty Latin editions of On the Nature of Things were published between 1473 and 1600, from thick scholarly versions to cheap pocket editions. We don’t know if Shakespeare got his hands on one of these editions, although we do know that Ben Jonson did; his own pocket-sized copy, its pages ink-stained, corroded, and brittle (it is literally falling apart), can be seen in the Houghton Library at Harvard. But, as we will see, Shakespeare at least knew of Lucretius, thanks to Montaigne, whose work we will examine in a moment.

  THE THEORY THAT WOULDN’T DIE

  And what of Lucretius’s bold theory of atoms in motion? References to atomic theory are rare in English writing through to the middle of the sixteenth century, but then, as Ada Palmer has noted, they become increasingly common—presumably inspired by a renewed awareness of Lucretius’s poem—beginning in the 1560s (as it happens, the decade of Shakespeare’s birth). We can at least say that Shakespeare had some understanding of what Lucretius’s atoms were about. In act 1 of Romeo and Juliet, the young lover is talking to his friend Mercutio about dreams and dreaming. Mercutio replies that Romeo must have been visited by Queen Mab, referring to a tiny fairylike creature possibly originating in Celtic mythology. She causes her “victims” to dream, by entering their brains through their noses while they sleep:

  She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes

  In shape no bigger than an agate stone

  On the forefinger of an alderman,

  Drawn with a team of little atomi

  Over men’s noses as they lie asleep.

  (1.4.55–59)

  This little speech is nothing if not vivid, and we are left wondering how small Queen Mab must be, and her little coach, and the even tinier “atomi” that pull it. Shakespeare mentions “atomi” on a couple of other occasions, as when Celia declares, in As You Like It, that “It is easier to count atomies as to resolve the propositions of a lover” (3.2.229–30). This of course is poetry, not physics—but then, we can say the same for Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things. Of course, one doesn’t need to postulate a theory of atoms in random motion to acknowledge the haphazard nature of life’s journey. As Florizel admits in The Winter’s Tale, “… we profess / Ourselves to be the slaves of chance,” always at the mercy “Of every wind that blows” (4.4.536–37).

  “QUE SAIS-JE?”

  If Lucretius was the great skeptical thinker of the first century B.C., Montaigne filled that role in the sixteenth century. Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) was brave enough to doubt much of the accepted dogma in his time. He questioned the authority of religious and political leaders; he questioned the wisdom of the ancient philosophers; he questioned mankind’s privileged status in the cosmic hierarchy. He even questioned the power of reason to make sense of the world. In his private study, he had the words of the skeptic philosopher Sextus Empiricus, “All that is certain is that nothing is certain,” painted along one of the wooden beams; another bore the phrase “I suspend judgment.” And for good measure he had a medal struck with what has come to be thought of as his motto: Que sais-je?—“What do I know?” For Montaigne, nothing was to be taken for granted.

  Montaigne, whom we met briefly in the introduction, was born into a wealthy family that owned property not far from Bordeaux, in the southwest of France. He was something of a child prodigy, and his father, recognizing his son’s talents, arranged for the boy to be spoken to only in Latin. It seems to have worked, as the boy is said to have mastered Latin even before he was fluent in French. He studied law, advised kings and princes, and served two terms as mayor of Bordeaux—but it is as a man of letters that we remember him.

  Montaigne spent much of the final twenty years of his life in self-imposed exile within the tower of his chateau, where he amassed a personal library of more than a thousand books. His greatest influences were the skeptical philosophers of the ancient world; along with Sextus Empiricus, he was attracted t
o the ideas of the Greek thinker Pyrrho of Elis (ca. 360–275 B.C). Pyrrho and his followers believed that human beings were in no position to judge questions for which there was no clear answer. Indeed, they weren’t sure if anything at all could be known with certainty. Pyrrho’s own writings have been lost, but an account written by Sextus, nearly five centuries later, survived. New copies of that text began to circulate in Europe in Montaigne’s time, and he eagerly devoured its contents. Sometimes he agreed with the conclusions of the ancient writers, and sometimes he didn’t—he read everything with a critical eye. And then he started writing. And writing. And writing. The result is his sprawling Essays, spanning 107 chapters and filling three books. They were published over a twenty-two-year period, beginning in the 1570s. In the Essays, Montaigne has given us his thoughts on life, the universe, and everything.

  Montaigne, writing in plain French, sets down exactly what is on his mind—and because of this clarity and honesty, his words sound as fresh today as they did four and a half centuries ago. His foremost goal was to know the mind itself—a task he described as “a thorny undertaking,” one that asks us “to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds.” Indeed, he more or less invents “stream of consciousness” writing:

  I turn my gaze inward, I fix it there and keep it busy. Everyone looks in front of him; as for me, I look inside of me; I have no business but with myself; I continually observe myself, I take stock of myself, I taste myself … I roll about in myself.