The Science of Shakespeare

by Dan Falk

  This embracing of “the new” is reflected in the frontispiece of Francis Bacon’s The Great Instauration (1620), part of a massive but unfinished project in which Bacon sets out a plan by which mankind might come to understand, even conquer, the natural world, and describes the “new philosophy” that will be required. The frontispiece depicts a grand sailing ship passing through the Pillars of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar, often thought to symbolize the boundary of the known world) and out into the Atlantic Ocean (figure 15.1). For Bacon, the world of science was a great undiscovered country, and more could be learned by setting sail into these uncharted waters than by reading all of the writings of the ancient philosophers. Steven Shapin calls the image “one of the most vivid iconographical statements of new optimism about the possibilities and the extent of scientific knowledge.”

  * * *

  We have explored in some detail the question of what, if anything, Shakespeare made of the new philosophy, and of the new picture of the cosmos in particular. The traditional answer is “very little”; the playwright, it is imagined, was either unaware, or at best marginally aware, of these developments. I cited a few examples of this point of view in the Introduction; I repeat a few of them here, and offer some additional examples. Historian Dorothy Stimson, writing in the early decades of the twentieth century, put it bluntly: Various passages in the canon “indicate that Shakespeare accepted fully the Ptolemaic conception of a central, immovable earth.” Marie Boas Hall, writing in the 1960s, says that Shakespeare “was no amateur of mathematical astronomy”—that much is certainly true!—“… still less was he aware of the revolutionary ideas being tentatively developed by his contemporaries.” Thomas McAlindon, writing in 1991, admits that Shakespeare was deeply concerned with cosmological matters, but writes that there is “no sign of [the Copernican] revolution” in the plays. Even Leslie Hotson—who, as we’ve seen, went further than anyone to show the connections between Shakespeare and the Digges family—writes that “among Shakespeare’s myriad minds, there was not the mind ready to kindle the truth of Digges’s vast vision.” And David Levy, who has written extensively on Shakespeare’s fascination with the night sky, has downplayed the playwright’s awareness of the new astronomy. “Even if Shakespeare had believed in the new cosmology,” he writes, “it would not have served his purpose well, for the old system, with its emphasis on the Earth and mankind at the center of the universe, is more sound for the purpose of drama.”

  But the tide may finally be turning. As we’ve seen, a growing number of scholars are examining the question of what Shakespeare knew, and when he knew it. Some examples warrant a second mention: We have Jonathan Bate, for example, writing that Ulysses’s famous speech in Troilus and Cressida “may hint at the new heliocentric astronomy.” James Shapiro says that “Ptolemaic science … as Shakespeare knew, was already discredited by the Copernican revolution.” And we have seen the support that both John Pitcher and Scott Maisano have given to the notion that Shakespeare knew of Galileo’s telescopic discoveries in time for them to have influenced his last few plays—a view wholeheartedly endorsed by astronomer Peter Usher, whose work—contentious as it may be—has sparked a renewed interest in the question of “Shakespeare and Science.”

  “ALL COHERENCE GONE”

  Other writers and poets followed scientific developments more closely than Shakespeare, and in some cases their discomfort with the new philosophy is palpable. The poetry of John Donne (1572–1631) is full of celestial imagery, with innumerable references to the sun, moon, and stars. The context is almost always Ptolemaic, but his First Anniversary (1611) and Of the Progress of the Soule (1612) are, as Margaret Byard puts it, “laments for a dying world and a dying cosmology”:

  And freely men confesse, that this world’s spent,

  When in the Planets, and the Firmament

  They seeke so many new; they see that this

  Is crumbled out againe to’his Atomis.

  ’Tis all in pieces, all cohaerence gone …

  In this new cosmology, nothing was certain; nothing could be depended upon. In the sky, Donne writes, there are “New stars, and old do vanish from our eyes.…” Donne was “an intelligent student of science,” writes Francis Johnson, fully capable of assessing the merits of the old and new pictures of the cosmos. “The discoveries of Galileo and Kepler were scarcely published,” Johnson notes, “before they were used by Donne as material for his writing”—and, in fact, he mentions both astronomers by name. As Byard points out, Donne had connections to the astronomer Thomas Harriot through mutual friends and associates—and it seems he was taken aback by what the astronomers had discovered. In one of his most moving passages, Donne writes that the heavens were once divine and unknowable; now, thanks to the astronomers, they are losing some of their mystery. Like the new lands across the ocean, they have been conquered:

  For of Meridians, and Parallels,

  Man hath weav’d out a net, and this net throwne

  Upon the Heavens, and now they are his owne.

  Perhaps we can sympathize with those poets who found the medieval system more to their liking. In The Orchestra (1595), poet John Davies writes:

  Only the Earth doth stand forever still:

  Her rocks remove not, nor her mountains meet;

  (Although some wits enrich’d with learning’s skill

  Say heaven stands firm and that the Earth doth fleet

  And swiftly turneth underneath their feet)

  Yet, though the Earth is ever steadfast seen,

  On her broad breast hath dancing ever been.

  Writing more than seventy years later, even John Milton seems to hold a certain reverence for the old worldview—even though his detailed comparison between the old and new models of the universe in Paradise Lost shows that he understood the science quite clearly. Astronomical references are everywhere in the epic poem, and they reflect a level of precision that can come only from a masterly study of the night sky. As Thomas Orchard puts it, Milton’s knowledge of the heavens indicates “a proficient and intimate acquaintance with this science.” He clearly understood the tilt of the Earth’s axis, which gives rise to the seasons; he knew when the sun passed through each part of the zodiac; he understood how the planets move against the backdrop of fixed stars (including the retrograde motion of the outer planets); he even understood the precession of the equinoxes.* Some fourteen constellations are mentioned by name, and they’re always where they’re supposed to be. And he visited Galileo in Florence. In book 1 we find a description of the moon, “Whose orb / Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views / At evening from the top of Fesole” (I.287–89), referring to the hills outside Florence. He later refers to the scientist’s “Glazed optic tube” (III.590), and, lest there be any doubt, in book 5 he gives us the scientist’s name:

  As when by night the glass

  Of Galileo, less assured observes

  Imagined lands and regions in the moon:

  (V.261–63)

  Milton didn’t like the Copernican system—but that doesn’t mean he rejected it. Orchard believes that he “doubtless recognized the superiority of the system,” but found the Ptolemaic system more agreeable, and—more to the point—better suited to his poetic purposes: Milton had a tale to tell, and the Ptolemaic system provided the needed scaffolding.

  What Milton could not do—what no poet, by that time, could do—was to ignore the new picture of the cosmos. As Margaret Byard puts it, “By the end of the 17th century the poet could no longer write with quite the same belief in himself as a prophet and seer into the nature of things; intuition had increasingly to give way to the revolution in scientific knowledge that was to follow.” The world had changed, and there could be no turning back.

  * * *

  By the end of the seventeenth century, the case for Aristotle and Ptolemy was hopeless. The idea of experimental science—of trusting repeatable observations and experiments over ancient authority—had won out. The universe wa
s larger, perhaps infinite, and the question of other worlds, perhaps similar to Earth, was quite imaginable. New ways of understanding mankind and the natural world were taking root. These ideas spread slowly but steadily, like ripples on the surface of a pond. Old beliefs, even the most cherished ones, were in jeopardy. The Bible was still the most popular book in the world—it still is, in fact—but it was becoming less and less plausible to treat it as a science textbook. Many of its stories—ancient floods, virgin births, the raising of the dead—came to be seen as metaphorical rather than literal. Even in the closing years of the sixteenth century, the writing may have been on the wall. The French philosopher Jean Bodin, writing in the 1590s, applied a bit of physics to the Last Judgment, questioning whether it was physically possible for everyone on Earth to be resurrected in a single day. He estimates that it is 74,697,000 miles to the fixed stars (a rather precise figure for an estimate!), and even if people could be whisked up to heaven at a rate of fifty miles per day (a pretty good speed in the days of the horse and carriage), it would take some eighty thousand years to make the journey. Such a calculation obviously highlights the perils of mixing science and faith—and is roughly the equivalent of the playful twenty-first-century newspaper articles that appear each year around Christmas, calculating how fast Santa’s sleigh has to move in order to deliver toys to all the good boys and girls of planet Earth in a single night. Of course, God could always pull off a miracle, in which case the precise distance to the stars is irrelevant—but as Lafew declares in All’s Well That Ends Well, the days of God’s tinkering with the natural world may be over: “They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless” (2.3.1–3).

  WHERE SHAKESPEARE FITS IN

  How, then, are we to think of Shakespeare? We have explored the remarkable transformation that was unfolding in Europe as a result of what we now call the Scientific Revolution—but how relevant were these developments for the mind of the playwright from Stratford? In the preface to the First Folio, Ben Jonson famously declares that “He was not of an age, but for all time”—but of course Shakespeare did inhabit a specific time, and there is no shame in saying so. “I think the moment that Shakespeare was born into—1564—was terrifically important for him,” Stephen Greenblatt said during our interview. Many features of the intellectual landscape found at that time would disappear within a generation, including the animistic, soul-drenched worldview that, at the time of Shakespeare’s birth, still held enormous appeal. In was “a late-medieval worldview in which the universe is a kind of ‘magical lyre,’ in which you pluck one string and all other strings start resonating,” Greenblatt says. In such a universe, “the fate of human beings seems to be at the very center of the whole project of nature.”

  But then came Copernicus, Tycho, Bruno, Harriot, and—just in time for Shakespeare’s last few plays—Galileo. Even though they lived a thousand miles apart, Greenblatt sees the English playwright and the Italian scientist as kindred spirits, or perhaps mirror images, of a sort. “In the case of Galileo, we have a scientist of stupendous power and intelligence who also has a startlingly literary sensibility. In Shakespeare you have an artist of stupendous and incredible power who has an oddly interesting scientific sensibility.” This does not make Shakespeare a scientist—but, says Greenblatt, the playwright “is actually surprisingly alert to and interested in what we could call the ‘scientific naturalism’ of his time.” Not as interested, perhaps, as some other writers who would shortly follow—Donne or Milton, for example—but not because he didn’t understand it, or found it boring. As Scott Maisano said during our interview, Shakespeare “is neither ignorant nor indifferent to the new science.” He doesn’t necessarily write about science, the way Donne does; instead “he is writing with it.” The new science, Maisano says, can be thought of as serving as Shakespeare’s “setting”—but it is more than that. It is also “an integral, essential part of his story.”

  * * *

  Our journey has been a perilous one, with many traps: The trap of imagining Shakespeare to be “ahead of his time” (the dreaded sin of Bardolatry); the trap of confusing Shakespeare with his dramatic creations; the trap of seeing the turn of the seventeenth century through twenty-first-century eyes (sadly, the only eyes I have); the trap of equating science and atheism; and, perhaps most shameful of all, the trap of bestowing on science a privileged status relative to other ways of engaging with the world—the sin of “scientism.” The surest way to offend is to suggest that science is somehow superior to religion; but hinting that it rises above the arts is equally problematic. A few years ago, a journal called the South Central Review published a special issue on “Shakespeare and Science,” and this was a primary concern. One of the contributors warned against “the privileging of scientism as an authorizing mode,” which could lead “to problems of anachronism and disciplinary superposition.” Well, we don’t want that. But caution is in order: We often see science as being unique in having the power to actually change society, with art, music, and literature, as vital as they are, merely coming along for the ride, providing an occasional diversion. As George Levine has put it, scholarship has been preoccupied, until recently, “with the way scientific ideas shaped literary ones. The traffic was all one way.…” Such an approach “implicitly affirmed the intellectual authority of science over literature.” Even worse, when the traffic does flow the other way, it is often “cute”: “We’ve named twenty-four of Uranus’s moons after Shakespearean characters. Isn’t that charming? Now, back to calculating their orbital parameters.…”

  Of course, science would never have been in danger of acquiring a more privileged status than the humanities if the two disciplines hadn’t diverged in the first place—a rift whose negative consequences were famously decried by C. P. Snow in his essay The Two Cultures, more than fifty years ago. But the two cultures were not so far apart in Shakespeare’s time, and all branches of “the arts” were involved in shaping our picture of the world. And Shakespeare himself shaped it more than anyone. One could argue, as Harold Bloom has, that it was Shakespeare who made us fully human. The playwright probed more deeply into human nature than any psychologist. Again, this does not mean that Shakespeare was a “scientist”—but he was certainly an acute observer of human nature, and had a mind every bit as disciplined as that of a scientist. Perhaps a better word is “explorer,” the term used by John Dover Wilson. A play like King Lear is very much an exploration, Dover argued, one “more dearly won and far more significant than that of a Shackleton or an Einstein.” But it’s not a contest, and there is no need to imagine art and science in competition. I prefer to think of it as a partnership. Science has given us a new world, and Shakespeare illuminates our place within it.

  Notes

  PROLOGUE

  Although a work of fiction, the Prologue “could have happened”: At least two Englishmen had sighted the new star by November 19, and word would have spread quickly. The moon was indeed full on that date, and its location in the sky—and that of the planets, Cassiopeia, and the supernova—is accurate. Hunt and Jenkins are the names of schoolteachers known to have taught in Stratford in Shakespeare’s time. I have taken the liberty of imagining that Shakespeare’s father, John, knew a decent amount of Latin; he may not have. (And the weather that evening is a matter of conjecture.)

  INTRODUCTION

  “The poet’s eye…” A Midsummer Night’s Dream (5.1.12–14).

  “The new philosophy…” quoted in Bate, p. 60.

  “a scientific force…” Boas Hall, p. 143.

  “small Latin and less Greek” www.bartleby.com/40/163.htm.

  “… shows little awareness or interest…” Cartwright, p. 35.

  “… took almost no interest in science” Burns, p. 171. (Thanks to Scott Maisano for bringing this reference to my attention.)

  “no sign of [the Copernican] revolution” McAlindon, p. 4.

  a bright new
star lit up the night sky … See Olson et al., “The Stars of Hamlet,” for a good overview of the 1572 appearance of “Tycho’s star.”

  … a remarkably eventful period in terms of celestial drama For a list of the astronomical events that took place in Shakespeare’s lifetime, see Levy, The Stars in Early Modern English Literature, p. vii.

  “a Ptolemaic conception” Bevington, Troilus and Cressida, p. 162.

  “may hint at the new heliocentric astronomy” Bate, p. 62.

  “… already discredited by the Copernican revolution” Shapiro, 1599, p. 259.

  “cosmic imagination” McAlindon, p. 4.

  885,000 words www.folger.edu/template.cfm?cid=862.

  1. A BRIEF HISTORY OF COSMOLOGY

  “Arise, fair sun…” Romeo and Juliet (2.2.4).

  known as “the heavens” See, for example, Greenblatt, Will in the World, p. 183; Kermode, p. 109.

  Shakespeare was “aware of the passage of time…” Ackroyd, p. 264.

  that the Globe was constructed in alignment with … Ackroyd, p. 374.

  As … Sacrobosco noted This was the thirteenth-century French scholar Johannes de Sacrobosco. See Meadows, pp. 4–5.

  “If the Lord Almighty…” quoted in I. Bernard Cohen, The Birth of a New Physics, p. 33.

  “presides over the whole scheme…” Bate, p. 64.

  “I, thy Arthur, am…” These are lines 65–70 of the masque, quoted in Fowler, p. 98. Known as The Speeches at Prince Henry’s Barriers, it was sometimes called The Lady of the Lake. It was written in honor of the Prince of Wales, son of King James I, and performed in 1610.