The Science of Shakespeare

by Dan Falk

  * Knowing that each child may not be long for this world, were parents reluctant to bond with their offspring? Historians have found no evidence to support such a notion. Jeffrey Forgeng notes the following words written by a nobleman, addressed to his newborn son: “I love thee, boy, well. I have no more, but God bless you, my sweet child, in this world forever, as I in this world find myself happy in my children. From Ludlow Castle this 28th of October, 1578.” The note is signed, “Your very loving father.” (Forgeng, Daily Life in Elizabethan England, p. 47)

  * And we shouldn’t make too much of the fact that Shakespeare’s oldest sister was baptized a Catholic, as she was born when Mary was still on the throne. William was born six years after Elizabeth’s accession.

  * “Prain”? What’s a prain? None of the major editions have a footnote to assist the reader, but, as Scott Maisano explained it to me, it’s simply “brain” pronounced in a way that reflects Evans’s Welsh accent. (The joke is that the teacher is chiding the student over his slow progress with Latin, while he himself hasn’t yet mastered English.) An online search of the canon seems to back up this interpretation: Shakespeare uses “prain” a handful of times—but it is only spoken by Evans and by another Welshman, Captain Fluellen from Henry V. In each case the context does seem to suggest “brain.”

  * It may be a useful intellectual exercise to reach back 110 years, to the time of Albert Einstein’s youth, rather than the nearly 450 years in the case of Shakespeare. Einstein, still working on his PhD, was employed as a patent clerk when he came up with the insight that led him to the first part of his theory of relativity. A miracle? No—just the outcome of an extraordinarily agile mind, a nurturing network of friends, and nerve-racking hours, days, and months of hard work.

  * We will never know if Shakespeare agreed with Francis Bacon’s (horribly sexist) sentiment that having a wife and children spelled the end of one’s creativity: “He that have wife and children hath given hostage to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprise, either of virtue or mischief. Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from unmarried or childless men, which both in affection and means have married and endowed the public.” (quoted in Pritchard, pp. 28–29)

  * The Jews had been a presence in England (and especially London) since the time of William the Conqueror, but had been expelled by Edward I in 1290. While some may have remained and practiced their faith in secret, there was no active Jewish community from the expulsion until the time of Oliver Cromwell in the mid-seventeenth century (and we know from court records that a number of Jews were discovered and deported during this period).

  † The bear was tied to a post, while hungry dogs were set loose in the enclosure. While unspeakably cruel to twenty-first-century eyes, it was clearly not seen that way at the time. One contemporary observer described bear baiting as “a sport very pleasant,” as the bear tried to fight off the dogs, “with biting, with clawing, with roaring, tossing and tumbling…” (quoted in Ridley, p. 269). Henry VIII enjoyed bear baiting; his daughter Elizabeth even more so. Shakespeare alludes to the spectacle metaphorically in Macbeth: As the protagonist’s world closes in around him, he vows that “bear-like I must fight the course” (5.7.2). Bear baiting was finally banned in 1835.

  * It is unfortunate, though perhaps not surprising, that Lanyer is better known not for her own writing but for (allegedly) being the “dark lady” of Shakespeare’s sonnets. (There is no hard evidence for this theory, and the idea is not widely accepted.)

  * For whatever reason, Shakespeare chose not to pay his taxes on that occasion. As Charles Nicholl notes, “This is not remarkable—the system was chaotic, and evasion was common—but it is piquant to find that the first actual documentation of Shakespeare in London is as a tax-dodger” (Nicholl, p. 41).

  * Shakespeare had become something of a celebrity by this time. A remarkable booklet by a man named Francis Meres, dated 1598, lists a number of his plays (and is thus invaluable for deducing their chronology), and compares the playwright to the greatest of the ancients: “As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins; so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage…” (quoted in Chute, p. 179).

  * Although still the subject of some controversy, a manuscript for the play Sir Thomas More, now in the collection of the British Library, may contain a longer sample of Shakespeare’s handwriting. The play was a collaborative effort, and a three-page section is widely believed to be in the playwright’s hand.

  † And yet it can be done: The best of the no-nonsense biographies is Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life by Samuel Schoenbaum (1987).

  * Of Shakepseare’s 154 sonnets, 126 appear to be addressed to a young man (referred to as a “fair youth”), including sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate…”). The sonnets hardly constitute proof of homosexuality, as men routinely spoke of “loving” other men in Shakesepare’s time, whether there was a sexual component or not. Even so, a number of candidates for the playwright’s possible gay lover(s) have been put forward, including his early patrons, Henry Wriothesley, the Third Earl of Southampton, and William Herbert, the Third Earl of Pembroke.

  * At a recent lecture, I heard a well-known Shakespeare scholar respond to the “no books” issue as follows: Shakespeare was no dummy; knowing that the tax auditors were in the neighborhood, couldn’t he have simply hidden the books? The audience seemed satisfied, but to my mind it’s not much of a retort. (If I were doing battle with the anti-Stratfordians, I wouldn’t make too much of the book-hiding theory.)

  * Cyrus Hoy, in the Norton Critical Edition of the play, begins his analysis: “Everything about The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is problematic.” Among the difficulties that Hoy notes are the uncertainty in dating the play, in choosing among its various texts (there are multiple editions from Shakespeare’s time, and they differ significantly), in relating the play to its sources, and of course in comprehending the character of Prince Hamlet himself.

  * Denmark and southern England differ in latitude by about four degrees—which means the height of a celestial object above the horizon would differ, slightly, between the two locations at any one time (which Shakespeare may or may not have been conscious of). This does not affect the positions of celestial objects relative to one another, or their distance to the celestial pole.

  † Donald Olson’s article, “The Stars of Hamlet,” was published in the November 1998 issue of Sky & Telescope.

  * Although sky-simulation software (“planetarium software”) is useful for its precision (and is necessary if one is interested in the positions of the planets as well as the stars), the basic task—determining which stars in which constellations are visible in which part of the sky, for an observer in the mid-northern latitudes, at a particular time of night at a particular time of year—can be tackled with little more than a cheap “planisphere,” the rotating star map that you can buy in any planetarium gift shop for about ten dollars.

  * In astronomy, “magnitude” is a measure of a star’s brightness. The lower the number, the brighter the star. The very brightest stars actually have negative magnitudes: Sirius shines at magnitude −1.5, with Arcturus and Vega very close to zero. Capella, Aldebaran, and Antares are all about magnitude 1.0 (“first magnitude”), while the stars of the Big Dipper (part of Ursa Major) shine at about 2.0 (“second magnitude”).

  * Shakespeare’s plays are famously full of anachronisms. Striking clocks date from the mid-fourteenth century, making them rather out of place in Julius Caesar. But Hamlet, in spite of its medieval roots, seems to call for a Renaissance setting: The action can take place no earlier than the founding of the university at Wittenberg (established in 1502), so the presence of striking clocks at Elsinore is reasonable.

  * The closest a planet can ever come to the pole is about sixty degrees. An observer in the northern hemis
phere might say that a planet is “in the east” if it was rising or “in the west” if it was setting; if it was midway in its trajectory across the sky, one might say the planet was “in the south” (or “nearly overhead,” if it was at the northern extremity of its orbit at that time).

  * And yet, even Thompson and Taylor have what I suspect is an astronomy-related stumble: When Laertes says that he has obtained a poison “So mortal that, but dip a knife in it, / Where it draws blood no cataplasm so rare, / Collected from all samples that have virtue / Under the moon, can save the thing from death / That is but scratched withal” (4.7.140–44), they suggest that “under the moon” simply means “anywhere on earth.” I suspect it more likely means “sublunar,” in the Aristotelian sense—that is, no earthly potion could serve as an antidote, though a divine remedy (from the heavenly realm above the moon) might do the trick.

  * A few scholars have noted these connections, but the most thorough account can be found in Leslie Hotson’s book I, William Shakespeare (1937).

  * Today, a memorial to the First Folio, capped with a bust of Shakespeare, stands as a tribute to the role that Condell and Heminges played in committing Shakespeare’s plays to print (figure 7.3). The memorial can be found, appropriately, at the end of Love Lane, a couple of blocks from the site of the playwright’s house.

  * We mustn’t get our Leonards mixed up: Thomas Digges’s father was also named Leonard Digges; in Chapter 3 we heard about his purported development of an early telescope-like device.

  * The critical resource for such matters is Open Source Shakespeare, a searchable online collection of the playwright’s complete works: www.opensourceshakespeare.org.

  * I suppose one can debate whether the process of “burning” hydrogen through a process of nuclear fusion should be classified as “fire.” At any rate, Hamlet’s poem is not Shakespeare’s only mention of the subject: It comes up again in Coriolanus: A messenger delivers some news to Sicinius, who asks if he’s certain, and the messenger replies, “As certain as I know the sun is fire” (5.4.46), and Macbeth pleads with the heavens, “Stars, hide your fires…” (1.4.50).

  * The extreme version of this line of speculation is the allegation that Florio was Shakespeare—that is, that Florio was the author of the plays attributed to Shakespeare. As with the other “alternative” authorship claims, few if any Shakespeare scholars take the idea seriously.

  * It has been argued that the title of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 film North by Northwest is an allusion to this passage.

  * In Chapter 7 of Shakespeare and the Dawn of Modern Science, Usher argues that “Shakespeare” was in fact Leonard Digges (senior).

  * Stephen Greenblatt noticed it—and I’m grateful to him for bringing it to my attention.

  * The figure is likely too high. The standard number usually given is six thousand: This is the total number of stars that one could see, in theory, in the entire sky, from a dark-sky site, without optical aid. In practice, only a fraction of that total would be visible at any one time. Half would of course be below the horizon, and atmospheric dimming would obscure another thousand or so. Astronomers usually say that no more than about two thousand stars are visible to the unaided eye at any one time. Perhaps a person with exceptional vision, under exceptional viewing conditions, could see a total of ten thousand stars—but it seems like a stretch.

  † The most direct evidence for Hamlet’s age is found in act 5, scene 1, in which the gravedigger says he’s had his job since King Hamlet defeated Old Fortinbras—which, he reminds us, also happens to be the day on which Prince Hamlet was born. He later adds: “I have been sexton here, man and boy, thirty years” (5.1.156–7). This figure also meshes with what we know about Yorick, the jester: Hamlet played with him as a child, but the jester has now been dead for twenty-three years. Nonetheless, there has been much hand-wringing over Hamlet’s age; see, for example, Jenkins’s lengthy discussion of the subject in the Arden edition.

  * However, timekeeping-by-rooster has its perils. It’s true that there’s a similar reference in Romeo and Juliet, in which Capulet states that “… the second cock has crow’d!…’tis three o’clock” (4.4.3–4)—but editors are hesitant to apply the same logic to Macbeth. A. R. Braunmuller (in the New Cambridge edition) and Nicholas Brooke (in the Oxford edition) shy away from equating “second cock” with “three o’clock,” with Brooke interpreting the porter’s phrase loosely as “early dawn” (Brooke, p. 131).

  † At the far end of the Shakespeare-and-numbers plausibility spectrum is the theory that Shakespeare was responsible for some of the translation work in preparing the King James version of the Bible, printed in 1611—work that had to be done in secret, of course, since it would have been inappropriate for a lowly actor to contribute to such a lofty work. The “clues” can be found in Psalm 46, where the forty-sixth word from the beginning is “shake” (verse 3) and the forty-sixth word from the end is “spear” (verse 9). Oh, and Shakespeare was forty-six at the time (turning forty-seven in the year it was published).

  * Another example from Hamlet: When the Player King speaks of “thirty dozen moons” (3.2.150) having passed since he married the queen, it seems like a poetic way of saying “thirty years”—except that the first quarto edition of the play gives the figure as forty years, not thirty—but then, the first quarto is not considered to be a very authoritative text.

  * Perhaps it is appropriate that the two conferences mentioned in this chapter, AAS and SAA, have opposite acronyms. The two conferences could hardly be more different.

  * Note that even the surface meanings remain the subject of debate. In the new Arden Hamlet, for example, Thompson and Taylor point out that even the most famous speech in English literature is ambiguous: Hamlet says, “To be, or not to be—that is the question”—but what is the question? “Perhaps surprisingly after so much debate, editors and critics still disagree as to whether the question for Hamlet is (a) whether life in general is worth living, (b) whether he should take his own life, (c) whether he should act against the King.” They add in their introduction that “it is still possible to disagree about almost every aspect of this play…” (Thompson and Taylor, p. 284; p. 137) In fact, one need not have an entire sentence, or even a whole word, to have a controversy: Certain letters, and even punctuation marks, have triggered much debate.

  * Another coincidence between Galileo’s life and that of Shakespeare, who also had two daughters and one son.

  * Or perhaps all except for Thomas Harriot. As we saw in Chapter 5, Harriot appears to have aimed a telescope at the night sky a few months ahead of Galileo.

  * Stillman Drake notes that the word “telescope” was coined in 1611.

  * Christoph Scheiner, a Jesuit priest and astronomer working in Bavaria, observed sunspots at about the same time as Galileo, in the fall of 1611, and the two fell into a bitter dispute over who was first—neither of them apparently being aware that Johannes Fabricius, an astronomer at Wittenberg, had published a short treatise on sunspots the previous summer. They had also been observed in England by Thomas Harriot, as we saw in Chapter 5.

  † The argument is a bit subtle because, in the Ptolemaic system, Venus was believed to move in an epicycle that was “synched,” so to speak, with the sun’s motion around the Earth; that is, the center of Venus’s epicycle was thought to lie at all times on a straight line connecting the Earth and the sun. (This was necessary to account for the fact that Venus always appears in close proximity to the sun.) With this constraint in place, Venus could only display crescent phases. In contrast, in the Copernican (or the Tychonic) model, one would see a full set of phases, whether Venus moved in its own epicycle or not.

  * Shakespeare’s King Cymbeline has virtually nothing in common with the real-life King Cunobeline (in Latin, Kynobellinus) who ruled over southeastern England in the first century A.D. We might also note that, while Shakespeare had been content to refer to his country as “England” in the history plays penned during Elizabeth�
�s reign, in Cymbeline he says “Britain” (or “Britains”) nearly fifty times. It was written during the reign of King James—the first king to rule over both England and Scotland—and its language may reflect the new king’s ambitions for a unified “Great Britain” (See Bate and Thornton, p. 49).

  * There are different spellings for this unusual name. It is “Imogen” in the 1623 folio, but some editors believe this to be a typo, and prefer “Innogen” (which would match the name of a ghost character in early editions of Much Ado About Nothing). Jachimo has alternate spellings, too (typically Iachomo and Giacomo). All excerpts here are from the recent Penguin edition, edited by John Pitcher, and I have adopted his spellings for the names of the characters.

  * I feel privileged to have seen an uncut version at the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario, in 2012. The godlike figure of Jupiter indeed descended on a giant eagle, just as the four-hundred-year-old stage direction calls for.

  * Roger Warren, in the Oxford edition, notes that “movables” can include small personal items as well as furniture (a claim supported by the OED). Still, ten thousand is a lot—if we are to take the number literally. Martin Butler, in the Cambridge edition, says we do not have to: “What counts is the evocation of a richly decorated bedchamber—and one broadly seventeenth-century in its furnishings” (Butler, Cymbeline, 120). Intriguingly, the OED also notes that “movables” had been used to denote the spheres in Ptolemaic astronomy, a fact that nobody seems to have linked to Jachimo’s bedroom tally (and indeed ten thousand spheres would seem excessive in any planetary theory). See also my footnote here.

  * Galileo showed that our galaxy was composed of a multitude of stars; but he didn’t know that it was a galaxy, or that other galaxies existed. While many “nebulae” were seen in the night sky, the fact that some of them are galaxies external to our own Milky Way, and that they each contain billions of stars, wasn’t realized until the early decades of the twentieth century. (However, a few bold thinkers had guessed as much, more than 150 years earlier, the philosopher Immanuel Kant among them.)