The Science of Shakespeare

by Dan Falk

  “People always use this phrase ‘Things happen for a reason,’” McGinn says. “But they don’t. Sometimes, things happen for no reason at all. I think that’s part of his whole worldview [in King Lear]. There’s a strong vein of pessimism, I think, in Shakespeare. It’s a very bleak view of the meaninglessness of everything.”

  * * *

  Shakespeare often emphasizes the role of happenstance—those “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”—and it was still on his mind when he came to write The Winter’s Tale in 1609. The play has, as Stephen Orgel puts it, a “disturbingly amoral” flavor. At the start of act 4, “Time,” as the Chorus, declares, “I that please some, try all; both joy and terror / Of good and bad, that makes and unfolds error…” (4.1.1–2). Good or bad, it is all the same to the passage of time.

  The atheist-Shakespeare theories may be gaining currency, but they can also be seen as the latest chapter in the never-ending story of Shakespeare’s religious beliefs—a subject of boundless inquiry and speculation. He has been called everything from a closet Catholic to an apologist for the Protestant state religion; the truth, one suspects, is murkier. We have already noted the religious turmoil that marred the English psyche in the first half of the sixteenth century; Shakespeare, whatever he believed, was all too aware of the anguish brought on by religious quarreling. As Stephen Greenblatt writes, Shakespeare often “seems at once Catholic, Protestant, and deeply sceptical of both.” While his father may have teetered between being a committed Catholic and its Protestant opposite, “William Shakespeare was on his way to being neither.” Even so, Greenblatt cautions that the playwright’s private beliefs are “wholly inaccessible.”

  We can’t definitively label Shakespeare an atheist, just as we can’t call him a scientist—even if we suspect we are seeing hints of such a worldview. All we can say is that he lived at a pivotal time in English history; a time when long-held beliefs were up for debate; a time of competing ideas and clashing values; a time of doubt and confusion. As mentioned, Jonathan Bate sees Shakespeare’s mind as poised between “rational thinking and visceral instinct, faith and scepticism.” McGinn, too, sees Shakespeare as inhabiting a world in transition. “Shakespeare is pre-scientific but he’s post-magical,” he said. “So I think of him as kind of prescientific naturalist.… Whether Shakespeare was himself an atheist, I just don’t think you’re able to say. But I wouldn’t at all be surprised if he was. I really wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “A GREAT PIECE OF CLOCK-WORK”

  The revival of the ancient theory of atomism was one force that could have pushed a well-read Elizabethan toward atheism—or at least, toward a less religious worldview. But there were other intellectual developments that could have had a similar effect. One of the most profound changes involved the way philosophers came to imagine the kind of world we inhabited. The medieval worldview had been highly animistic—treating objects as though they had soul-like properties (from the Latin word for soul, anima. We have seen, for example, how the body’s organs were imagined to have their own personalities, and how both Kepler and Gilbert had imagined the cause of planetary motion to have involved “souls.” But in 1605, as Steven Shapin notes, Kepler began to have second thoughts. In his new work, Kepler would occupy himself “with the investigation of the physical causes. My aim in this is to show that the machine of the universe is not similar to a divine animated being, but similar to a clock.” The chemist Robert Boyle would express a similar idea half a century later, writing that the natural world was, “as it were, a great piece of clock-work.”* In the physical sciences, the clockwork metaphor is most closely associated with Isaac Newton, whose theory of universal gravitation would finally provide the mathematical underpinning of the model of the solar system described by Copernicus and Kepler. This required, among other things, a new conception of God: Rather than imagining a God who constantly interacted with his creation, guiding events from day to day, it was enough to picture God as a sort of divine architect—a cosmic watchmaker. Once set in motion, the universe could look after itself; God had made the universe and the laws that govern it, and that was enough. (Intriguingly, this was not Newton’s own vision: A devout if unorthodox believer, he insisted that God was still an integral part of the physical world, and was required to tweak the system from time to time.)

  A “clockwork universe” is all fine and well—unless, or until, it wears down. This is Gloucester’s great fear in King Lear: “O ruined piece of nature! This great world / Shall so wear out to naught” (4.5.130–31). By the nineteenth century, physicists would coin a scientific name for this final act of the cosmic drama: It’s called the “heat death of the universe,” and it’s not going to be pretty. Fortunately, it’s billions of years off—that provides some comfort, one imagines. With the body, there is not quite so much time: Your best bet is to enjoy it before entropy takes its toll. But the picture of the human body as a machine comes to us not from Newton but from Descartes, who did more than any other thinker to usher in the mechanical age.

  René Descartes (1596–1650), after he had come to grips with his own existence, argued that plants and animals functioned through processes analogous to the workings of a machine. There is, he wrote, “no difference between the machine built by artisans and the diverse bodies that nature alone composes,” other than the range of their sizes. In either case, the principles of mechanics hold the key, for “it is not less natural for a clock, made of the requisite number of wheels, to indicate the hours, than for a tree which has sprung from this or that seed, to produce a particular fruit.” In hindsight, this striving for mechanistic explanations may seem like a natural extension of the atomism of the ancient Greeks; in both cases, we have a focus on reductionist, materialist, explanations for most—perhaps all—natural phenomena. Nonetheless, Descartes himself rejected atomism; he imagined matter to be infinitely divisible, so there could not be any “smallest” component. Yet many of his contemporaries, notably his countryman Pierre Gassendi, were pushing for a revival of this ancient idea, reincarnated as “corpuscularism.” Whether the world was comprised of atoms, corpuscles, or something else not yet envisioned, it was clear that its various parts pushed and pulled on each other: To explain some particular natural phenomenon, the key was to seek out the underlying mechanism.*

  The body, of course, is a living thing, but it need not be thought of as inherently organic. Descartes conceived of the body as “nothing but a statue or machine made of earth.” He describes the various functions that our bodies perform unconsciously—digestion, the circulation of blood, respiration, the workings of nerves and muscles—and declares that they occur “in the same way as the movement of a watch is produced merely by the strength of the spring and the configuration of its wheels.” He draws an analogy with the automata in the royal gardens of Saint-Germain in Paris, which featured water-driven mechanical creatures that could produce music and even “speak”—all of these functions “depending on the various arrangements of the pipes through which the water is conducted.” In the case of animals, Descartes was willing to go all the way: There was nothing, he argued, that could distinguish a flesh-and-blood animal from a highly sophisticated mechanical simulation. For humans, however, he stopped short of allowing a purely mechanical description; he believed that human beings had souls that gave them the ability to reason, to converse, and to perform a multitude of tasks compared with the limited abilities of animals.

  Sophisticated mechanical devices like the automata in the royal gardens were new, but the clock itself was well established, with the first cathedral clocks dating from the late thirteenth century. The clock, as Shapin notes, was “an exemplar of uniformity and regularity.” If philosophers sought an analogy for something that exhibited order—say, the universe—the clock was the obvious choice. While the innards of a clock may be complex, they are not mysterious: They are, in principle, completely knowable (and were certainly known to the craftsmen and mechanics who built them). As Shapin puts i
t, the clock metaphor serves as “a vehicle for ‘taking the wonder out’ of our understanding of nature.”

  * * *

  I hesitate to say that Shakespeare saw this coming—it is all too easy to imagine that Shakespeare saw everything coming—but he does seem to be enamored with machines, and with clocks and timekeeping in particular. In the canon, he uses “clock” 85 times; “minute” 63 times, and “hour” a whopping 462 times—an average of more than a dozen times in each play. As Scott Maisano points out, some of Shakespeare’s metaphors seem to hint at the new mechanical philosophy: Coriolanus is called an “engine”; Bolingbroke is described as “Jack of the Clock”; and Hamlet, who describes himself as a “machine,” famously asks if Guildenstern imagines him to be an “instrument” that can be “played upon” as one plays a flute. In The Tempest, we find a remarkably personal application of the clock metaphor, as Sebastian and Antonio await Gonzalo’s next pompous utterance: “Look, he’s winding up the watch of his wit; by and by it will strike—” (2.1.14–15). In Richard II, we find the deposed king languishing in prison, and ruminating on the nature of time; in a remarkable passage, he uses the word “time” seven times in the space of eight lines—and then imagines himself as a timepiece: “Time made me his numb’ring clock” (5.5.50). Imaginary clocks can be also found in the Forest of Arden in As You Like It. It’s nothing but trees as far as the eye can see, but Shakespeare can’t seem to get clocks out of his head:

  ROSALIND

  I pray you, what is’t o’clock?

  ORLANDO

  You should ask me what time o’ day; there’s no clock in the forest.

  ROSALIND

  Then there is no true love in the forest, else sighing every minute and groaning every hour would detect the lazy foot of Time, as well as a clock.

  (3.2.295–300)

  This exchange is followed by Rosalind’s famous reflection on the relativity (so to speak) of time’s apparent passage—“Time travels in divers paces with divers persons…”—an exposition that would not be so far out of place in a twenty-first-century psychology textbook.

  One of Shakespeare’s last plays, The Winter’s Tale, is of particular interest. In the climactic final scene, Queen Hermione, believed to have been dead for sixteen years, is presented to us, and to King Leontes, as a statue—which then springs to life, as the king and his court watch in amazement. “Statues,” as we usually think of them, cannot do this—but automata, of the kind that inspired Descartes, and which could already be found in royal courts and gardens across much of Europe by Shakespeare’s time, can indeed seem very much alive. As Maisano points out, Shakespeare may well have had such machines in mind when he wrote The Winter’s Tale. Leontes, of course, is awestruck; he hopes that what he has seen is a case of “lawful” magic, and not something darker. But wouldn’t a sophisticated automaton seem magical to the uninitiated? As Arthur C. Clarke famously said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” No wonder Maisano sees The Winter’s Tale as proto–science fiction—and The Tempest, with its magician-on-an-island, even more so. These last few plays have long been considered “backward-looking and profoundly nostalgic,” Maisano writes, but they can better be viewed as “forward-looking speculations.” Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, first published in 1818, is usually seen as the first work of literary science fiction—but Shakespeare, argues Maisano, was already inventing the genre more than two centuries earlier. And he’s not the only one who sees Shakespeare in this light. In Shakespeare the Thinker (2007), Anthony Nuttall points to Prospero’s relationship with Ariel, described in The Tempest as an “airy spirit”: Does such a spirit have feelings and emotions, or is he (it?) like the unfeeling Vulcans on TV’s Star Trek? Nuttall believes that, in The Tempest, “Shakespeare is inventing science fiction.”

  * * *

  Just a year before The Tempest made its debut on the London stage, Galileo aimed his telescope at the night sky. What he observed in “heaven” was not particularly godly; in fact, the mountains and valleys on the moon seemed remarkably like those on the Earth. He did not make it impossible to believe in heaven—but for many people, he certainly made it harder.* A half century later, Blaise Pascal, the French scientist and philosopher, was humbled by the scale of the universe described by the astronomers. Pascal was born seven years after Shakespeare’s death; as it happens, this was also the year that the First Folio saw the light of day. He was a Christian as well as something like an existentialist (before there were existentialists), and wrestled with the enormity of the cosmos, the smallness of mankind, and the contingency of human affairs. And, like Lucretius and Montaigne before him, he had a way with words:

  When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant and which know me not, I am frightened and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose wonder and direction have this place and time been allotted to me?… The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

  Three centuries later, Steven Weinberg—physicist, cosmologist, and atheist—was more blunt. He didn’t ask “Who has put me here,” because he already knew the terrible truth: His existence, like the existence of humankind, was an accident. The universe is vast, and cold, and indifferent to our joys and our sorrows. In his book The First Three Minutes (1977), he famously concluded, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”

  It was the scientists who worked out the equations, but it was the artists and writers who showed us what they meant. Whether Shakespeare would have agreed with Weinberg that the universe was “pointless,” we will never know, although my suspicion is that he would not: Whatever one may discover (or fail to discover) in the depths of space, here on Earth there are places to go, friends to cherish, lovers to woo, and the occasional regicide to avenge. But Shakespeare, writing four hundred years ago, was painfully aware of the possibility that that is all there is.

  Conclusion

  “They say miracles are past…”

  It’s fashionable these days to deny that there was such a thing as a “Scientific Revolution.” In fact, today’s history books shy away from labeling anything as a revolution, lest we mistakenly conclude that “before X, things were like this; after X, things were like that.” Best to avoid any mention of “turning points” or “pivotal moments.” And yet by the middle of the seventeenth century we find a world very different from what it had been in the middle of the sixteenth. For one thing, the debate over Copernicanism was essentially over; the heliocentric model had triumphed. When Kepler wrote his Epitome of Copernican Astronomy, published between 1618 and 1621, he described a science that, as Paula Findlen puts it, “no longer had its origins in antiquity but had begun in 1543,” the year of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus. For more than a thousand years, writers on astronomy had quoted from Aristotle and Ptolemy. Now they quoted from Copernicus, Tycho, Gilbert, and Galileo.

  But the change encompassed much more than just cosmology. Magical thinking was on the decline, mechanistic thinking was on the rise, science was becoming grounded in mathematics, and the first dedicated “scientific societies” would soon be flourishing in London and Paris. It is instructive to look at the year 1600: As it happens, the year was something of a transitional year for Shakespeare; it is the year of Hamlet, the work that marks the end of the playwright’s learning curve, and his coming of age as the leading dramatist of his day. It was also a big year (or at least, the start of a big decade) for science. In his book It Started with Copernicus, Howard Margolis lists some of the discoveries that came to light in, or close to, 1600: The distinction between electricity and magnetism; the law of free fall; the law of inertia; the idea of the Earth as a magnet; the theory of lenses; the laws of planetary motion; Galileo’s tel
escopic discoveries; the law of hydrostatic pressure; the law of the swing of the pendulum. That is quite a list. Revolution or not, something big does seem to have been going on.*

  Fig. 15.1 Science as a voyage of discovery: The frontispiece of Francis Bacon’s The Great Instauration (1620). Bacon would come to be seen as one of the key figures of the Scientific Revolution. Image Select/Art Resource, NY

  One notable development is that people began to place greater value on the new, the innovative, the original. In the introduction to his book Most Worthy Discourses (1580), the French craftsman Bernard Palissy wrote that “the theories of many philosophers, even the most ancient and famous ones, are erroneous in many points,” and that “you will learn more about natural history from the facts contained in this book than you would learn in fifty years devoted to the study of the theories of the ancient philosophers.” By 1620, an Italian writer named Alessandro Tassoni could boast of all the things discovered in his time (or in the recent past) that would have made the ancient Greeks and Romans drool with envy: the printing press, clocks that strike, the compass, the nautical chart, the telescope. All of these “surpass by far any Latin and Greek inventions that were discovered in the whole of their so-much-celebrated course of years.”