by Dan Falk
Holy Trinity Church in
location of
overview of
Shakespeare, W., departure from
Shakespeare, W., return to
Shakespeare’s properties in
Stratioticos (Digges, T.)
sublunar world
submarines
sun. See also heliocentric theory
as center of universe
Earth distance from
location of
movement of
observations of
role of
soul within
symbolism of
superlunar world
supernova
The Sure Fundamentals of Astrology (Kepler)
surgeons and surgery
surveying
The Swerve (Greenblatt)
Swift, Jonathan
Syon House
Tamburlaine the Great (Marlowe)
Tassoni, Alessandro
Tate, Nahum
Taylor, Neil
telescope
invention of
possible use in Tudor England
use of
The Tempest (Shakespeare, W.)
clocks and timekeeping in
Dee and
education in
epilogue from
influences on
magic in
production of
as science fiction
seminar on
The Theatre of God’s Judgement (Beard)
theodolites
thermometer
Thomas, Keith
Thompson, Ann
Thornton, Dora
Tillyard, E. M. W.
time. See also clocks and timekeeping
and light / shadow on stage
stars and
time machine, imaginary use of
Timon of Athens (Shakespeare, W.)
Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare, W.)
Tower of London
tragedies. See also individual plays
The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry (Cary)
traveling players
trepanning
Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare, W.)
magnetism in
social and cosmic order in
Ulysses’s speech in
Tudor telescope, possibility of
Twelfth Night (Shakespeare, W.)
education in
four elements in
music of the spheres in
Two Noble Kinsmen (Shakespeare, W.)
The Two Cultures (Snow)
Tycho. See Brahe, Tycho
Tychonic system
Tycho’s star
Tyson, Neil deGrasse
Ulysses. See Troilus and Cressida
universe. See also geocentric theory; geoheliocentric theory; heliocentric theory
age of
Earth as center of
heat death of the universe
infinite
size of
structure of
sun as center of
theories of
University of Wittenberg
Uraniborg castle
Ure, Peter
Ur-Hamlet
Ursus. See Baer, Nicholai Reymers
Usher, Peter
on Copernican system
on Cymbeline
on Hamlet
Hamlet’s Universe
“A New Reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet”
Shakespeare and the Dawn of Modern Science
Vanini, Lucilio
Vaughan, Alden T.
Vaughan, Virginia Mason
Vautrollier, Thomas
Venus
Venus and Adonis (Shakespeare, W.)
editions of
publication of
spleen in
Vesalius, Andreas
villains
Villegaignon, Nicolas Durand de
Virgil
Aeneid
Visscher, Claes
Viviani, Vincenzo
void. See nothingness
Volpone (Jonson)
voyages of discovery
Wallis, John
Walsingham, Francis
“wandering stars” (planets)
Warren, Roger
Waterhouse, Agnes
Weinberg, Steven
Wells, H. G.
The Well Spryng of Sciences (Baker, H.)
White, John
Wilkins, George
will, of Shakespeare, W.
Will in the World (Greenblatt)
Willer, Robb
Wilson, John Dover
Winchester, Bishop of
The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare, W.)
astrology in
astronomical references in
atomism in
bear stage direction in
breeched in
final scene of
influences on
magic in
numbers in
as science fiction
witchcraft
history of
in Macbeth
religion and
women
in Renaissance England
witchcraft and
written works by
worlds, plurality of
Wotton, Henry
Wren, Christopher
Wyatt’s Rebellion
Yachnin, Paul
A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (Shapiro, J.)
yellow bile
zodiac, constellations of
About the Author
Dan Falk has written for Smithsonian, New Scientist, Astronomy, Sky & Telescope, The Walrus, and many other publications, and is the author of In Search of Time and Universe on a T-Shirt. He’s been a regular contributor to Canadian public radio, and has won several international awards for his radio documentaries. Falk was a 2011–2012 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He lives in Toronto.
* Of course, my version included nine planets—the five known since antiquity, plus the four discovered in modern times. Today it would be eight, assuming that Pluto’s demotion in 2006 has taken hold in the minds of twenty-first-century children.
* Six undisputed examples of the playwright’s signatures have survived, all on legal documents, and they vary from “Shakp” and “Shakspe” to “Shaksper” and “Shakspere.” The more familiar “Shakespeare” was, however, used in the first printed works to bear his name—his two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, published in 1593 and 1594.
* This is a simplification, of course—the Jesuits, a Catholic religious order, were establishing some of Europe’s best schools—but the two religions’ differing view of the miraculous is worth noting. According to Church doctrine, Catholics were obliged to believe in continuing divine intervention in human affairs, while Protestants held the opinion that, as Shakespeare’s Lafeu puts it in All’s Well That Ends Well, “miracles are past” (2.3.3). See Dear, “Miracles, Experiments, and the Ordinary Course of Nature”; Kocher, p. 191; Johnson, Astronomical Thought in Renaissance England, pp. 149–50.
* I say “amazingly” because, in general, supernovae are quite rare. Kepler’s star of 1604 was the last known star to explode in our Milky Way galaxy.
* The word “science” did not acquire something close to its modern meaning until roughly 1700, while the word “scientist” entered the language only in the 1830s. In the Renaissance, the study of the natural world was often called “natural philosophy,” though, as we will see, this covered a broader domain of inquiry than present-day science. (To complicate matters, the word “science” was in use—meaning, roughly, “knowledge.”) In the interest of readability, however, I will use the word “science,” anachronistic as it may be, to refer to those endeavors that would today be seen as scientific pursuits.
* Or at least, they seem uncountable. Today we know that only about two thousand stars—a bit more for a person with perfect eyesight under ideal conditions�
�can be seen with the unaided eye at any one time.
* As you might imagine, this seemingly light-hearted interlude has been subject to much scholarly analysis. Regarding the too-early sunrise, and its not-quite-right location, Arthur Humphreys (in the Oxford edition, p. 135) urges the reader not to worry about such “minor inconsistencies” which, after all, “pass unremarked on the stage.” The main function of the scene, says Humphreys, is to relieve tension; it also “creates the local atmosphere, marks the significant progress of the hours, and fixes attention on the Capitol.”
* Venus usually outshines Jupiter; however, Venus can only be visible for, at most, a few hours after sunset or a few hours before sunrise. Jupiter, depending on its position in its orbit, can shine at any time of night.
* Ptolemy lived in Alexandria, in Egypt, which at that time was a province of the Roman Empire. Ptolemy wrote in Greek.
* Such comparisons have more or less disappeared today in the West, but note that in North Korea, the birth of Kim Jong-il was said to have been heralded by the appearance of a new star in the heavens.
† Kirstin Olsen writes, “Ulysses’ speech is sometimes taken to be a profession of Shakespeare’s affinity for the Copernican system … But this passage is ambiguous at best; ‘this centre’ could just as easily be the earth as the sun, and the sun is described as ‘Amidst the other’ planets, which could mean at the center of all their orbits or in its traditional Aristotelian/Ptolemaic position between Venus and Mars.” (Kirstin Olsen, All Things Shakespeare: An Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s World, vol. 1, pp. 69–70)
* Shapin also provides a sobering reminder of the Eurocentric nature of much historical investigation: “… the overwhelming majority of seventeenth-century people did not live in Europe, did not know that they lived in ‘the seventeenth century,’ and were not aware that a Scientific Revolution was happening.” (Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution, p. 8)
* Two books were particularly influential in initiating the “conflict” paradigm—John William Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). The relationship between science and faith has been endlessly scrutinized since the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, and remains a fascinating and complex subject. For those interested in a historical perspective, Ronald L. Numbers’s introduction to Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (2009) is a good starting point.
† For a more thorough look at the “problem of Easter,” leading to the Gregorian calendar reform, see Chapter 2 of my earlier book In Search of Time.
* The question of whether Copernicus should be considered German or Polish is a nonstarter, as the concept of “nationality” as we know it today did not exist in the sixteenth century. He likely would have considered himself a “Prussian.” (See Sobel, p. 5; Davies, p. 20.)
† The meaning of “humanist” has evolved over the centuries—today we think of “secular humanism,” but in the sixteenth century it referred to an engagement with civic life, devotion to learning, and the quest to live a virtuous life; the art and literature of antiquity were held up as models of what could be achieved. It is from this usage that we refer to certain streams of higher education as “the humanities.”
* In an occultation, the moon appears to pass in front of a star, causing the star to disappear for up to several hours.
* For an interesting analysis of why it took fourteen hundred years for anyone (beyond a handful of ancient Greek thinkers) to take this simple step, see Margolis, pp. 91–102.
* This idea is often associated with the medieval English monk William of Ockham (or Occam), and is known as “Ockham’s razor.” In his own words, “Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.” (quoted in I. Bernard Cohen, Birth of a New Physics, p. 127)
* You can see this effect without leaving your chair: With your arm outstretched and your thumb raised, close one eye. Now switch to the other eye. Note how the background, behind your thumb, seems to shift. That’s parallax.
* For a useful discussion, see Dennis Danielson’s essay in Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (ed. Ronald L. Numbers, 2009).
* These remarks—which may be little more than hearsay—are discussed in Dava Sobel’s wonderful biography of Copernicus, A More Perfect Heaven (2011); see also Daniel Boorstin’s The Discoverers, p. 302. Note that Luther (1483–1546) was an almost exact contemporary of Copernicus.
* However, historians caution against reading these condemnations as flowing from “the Church.” They are more accurately seen as indicative of local conflicts; in this case, the condemnation was issued by a local bishop. (See Michael J. Shank’s essay in Galileo Goes to Jail.)
* Stellar parallax was eventually detected—but not until the 1830s.
* “Nearly unthinkable,” but not completely so: The idea of a purely naturalistic universe has ancient roots, notably in the writing of the Greek atomists and their followers, as we will see in Chapters 13 and 14.
* As we will see, however, it is possible that English astronomers had something like a primitive telescope in the second half of the sixteenth century.
* Confusingly, the star has more than one name. 3C10 refers to its catalog designation from the 1950s, when remnants of the star were first identified using radio telescopes. Astronomers eventually concluded that this had indeed been the star that Tycho and others had observed in 1572. Astronomers sometimes call it “SN 1572” (SN for supernova; 1572 for the year it was first observed). It is often simply called “Tycho’s star” in the popular literature, or, in reference to its current appearance, “Tycho’s supernova remnant.” (Also, there is more than one model for the physics behind this type of supernova; a merger of two white dwarfs might also produce such events.)
* There’s a significant margin of error in the distance to 3C10, and therefore also in the estimate of how long it took the light to reach Earth. If it were exactly nine thousand light-years distant, then we could say that it exploded more than 9,440 years ago (9,000 years for the light to reach Earth, plus the 440-plus years that have passed since Tycho observed it).
* The technical term is diurnal parallax.
* Today we usually think of letters as private—but in those days it was common to publish a letter if its contents were thought to be of interest to a larger audience beyond the named recipient. (A famous example from a half century later is Galileo’s “Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina,” which was widely circulated and clearly meant to be read by educated readers besides the duchess.)
* One might imagine that the last adherents of Tycho’s system would have died several centuries ago—but not so. A handful of biblically minded Creationists, primarily in the U.S., still argue for the Tychonic system over that of Copernicus; after all, it’s consistent with most observations, and manages to keep the Earth at the center of the universe. (See DeWitt, p. 139.)
* Owen Gingerich eventually tracked down Digges’s own copy of De revolutionibus, which is now in a library in Geneva. There aren’t too many annotations, but, tellingly, Digges wrote on the title page, “Vulgi opinio Error” (“the common opinion errs”). Gingerich also found two copies that had been owned by Dee (Gingerich, The Book Nobody Read, pp. 119, 242).
* Ephemeris tables list the positions (coordinates) of celestial objects over a given time period.
* Note that a theory of “gravity,” as we think of it today, would remain elusive until the work of Newton more than sixty years later.
* Times, however, have changed, and the Vatican has recently made peace with the idea of alien civilizations. In 2008, the director of the Vatican Observatory, José Gabriel Funes, told the Vatican’s newspaper that the existence of intelligent aliens “doesn’t contradict our faith” because such beings would still be God’s creatures.” In the interview, headlined “The Extraterrestrial Is My Brother,” Funes also acknowledg
ed that the universe was billions of years old and likely began with the big bang—although it was designed by God and is “not the result of chance.” (Ariel David, “Heavens big enough for both God and aliens, says Vatican astronomer.” The Globe and Mail, May 14, 2008, p. A3.)
* While tennis was enjoyed by the nobility, football (“soccer” to North Americans) was seen as a vulgar sport suitable only for the lower classes. In King Lear, Kent contemptuously calls Oswald a “base football player” (1.4.74).
* Full confession: I can’t actually read Latin, beyond picking out a few key words; however, it would have been a shame to visit Oxford without taking the time to view some of these remarkable documents firsthand. This, of course, meant reciting the Bodleian Library’s centuries-old oath, which includes a promise “… not to bring into the Library, or kindle therein, any fire or flame.…” If only those in charge of the ancient library at Alexandria had been as vigilant.…
* Another such figure is Robert Fludd (1574–1637), an English philosopher, medical doctor, and alchemist. Fludd was a vocal supporter of the Copernican model—which he tied to “a mystical explanation for the formation of the universe involving an angelic hierarchy and the mutually influential macrocosm and microcosm,” as Lesley Cormack describes it (Cormack, “Science and Technology,” p. 517).
* If not a chicken, an edible bird of some kind. The account from John Aubrey refers to it as a “fowl.”
* Perhaps curiosity ran in the Stuart family. His great-grandfather, James IV of Scotland, wondered what language a child would speak if raised in isolation and without exposure to any specific “mother tongue.” A chronicler named Robert Lindsay reports the king’s cruel but at least quasi-scientific experiment: He “caused two children to be marooned with a deaf-and-dumb nurse on the island of Inchkeith … [and] furnished them with al Necessaries … desiring to understand the Language the Bairns [children] could speak when they came of lawful age.” Unfortunately, we have no record of the result. Lindsay provides only the rumored outcome: “Some say they spak guid Hebrew. But as to myself, I know not” (quoted in Guthrie, p. 1193).
* Even with the breathing tube, carbon dioxide would have built up within the vessel, probably to dangerous levels. It’s not certain how Drebbel solved this problem. One guess is that he heated “nitre”—either potassium nitrate or sodium nitrate—in a metal pan, causing it to release oxygen; the residue would also act to absorb carbon dioxide. (A diarist noted that Drebbel used a “cheymicall liquor” that worked to “restore the troubled air.”) (http://www.nmmc.co.uk/index.php?/collections/featured_boats/the_drebbel_submarine)
