by Dan Falk
* When it comes to professors’ offices—and I’ve seen quite a few—it is hard to compete with Oxford. The walls of Pitcher’s quarters are painted eggshell blue, with white trim and lots of what Douglas Adams would have called “fiddly bits.” The chairs and sofa, deep burgundy in color and thickly padded in the extreme, would not be out of place in M’s office as portrayed in one of the early James Bond films.
* The line is one of those tricky passages that occurs only in the 1608 quarto edition of King Lear, and not the 1623 folio edition. It is thus absent from the New Cambridge edition (ed. Halio), but can be found, for example, at 4.3.33–34 in the Arden Complete Works.
† Once again we must recall that an Elizabethan could view the heavens far better than we can, from our light-polluted skies. As you read this sentence, are you conscious of the phase of the moon? Do you know if Venus is currently in the evening sky, or in the morning sky? A villager in sixteenth-century England would have known. In Shakespeare’s time, the nation was gradually becoming more urbanized, but artificial street lighting was still a century away. The night sky would have been a captivating sight on any cloudless night.
* While this sounds like a cop-out, we might note that, in many branches of science, probability (albeit educated probability) is still the norm: A doctor gives the chances that the patient will have a heart attack over the next ten years; the geologist estimates the odds of a major earthquake in the next century; an economist speaks of the risk of a recession.…
* Aside from being short, Macbeth is also a fairly straightforward play; perhaps that’s why it is so often taught in high school. Conversely, some Shakespeare aficionados see it as too simple a drama to deserve our admiration. I once heard a Harvard professor introduce Macbeth to his class by describing it—hopefully somewhat tongue in cheek—as “a not entirely contemptible play.…”
* It is sobering to note that the period with the most intense preoccupation with witchcraft coincides almost exactly with the period labeled by modern historians as the Scientific Revolution. The reasons for this (if it is more than a coincidence) remain unclear.
* Scot believed in the existence of witches, but denied that their “power” was supernatural. Yet his attempt to find a “scientific” explanation for witchcraft is, to the modern reader, quite troubling. He focuses on menopause, and the extreme psychological metamorphosis it supposedly triggers. Witches, “upon the stopping of their monethlie melancholike flux or issue of bloud,” leave themselves prone to an increase in “melancholike imaginations,” and these imaginations remain, “even when their senses are gone” (quoted in Braunmuller, p. 34).
† One can’t help thinking that “blaming a witch” was to sixteenth-century England what “blaming a Jew” was to mid-twentieth-century Europe, and “blaming a black man” was (and perhaps is) to late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century America. The most famous such incident in recent times was the 1994 case of Susan Smith. The South Carolina woman told police that she had been carjacked by a black man who drove off with her children still inside the vehicle, triggering a nationwide manhunt; in fact, as she later confessed, she allowed the car to roll into a lake, intentionally drowning her two young sons. (See, for example, Katheryn Russell-Brown, The Color of Crime [1998].)
* Kirstin Olsen summarizes the plot against the king: It “chiefly involved trying to wreck a ship carrying James and his Danish bride by casting a spell with human body parts and a christened cat.” As many as one hundred people were tried in connection with the alleged crime, and James supervised some of the torture sessions personally (Olsen, vol. 2, p. 676).
* We like to imagine that we live in a more sophisticated age—but once again the truth is more muddled. As I was writing this chapter, newspapers were reporting that the town council in Richmond Hill, Ontario, has agreed to stop using the numeral “4” in street addresses. Residents had been complaining that the mere presence of a 4 in a house’s address was lowering its resale value by tens of thousands of dollars. Richmond Hill is home to a large number of Asian immigrants, many of whom consider 4 to be unlucky because it sounds like the word for “death” in Cantonese and Mandarin. (And now you can deduce what the word “tetraphobia” means.)
* And he almost nailed it: As Newton would show, the strength of the force decreases with the square of the distance (double the distance, and the strength of the force decreases by a factor of four). Still, as I. Bernard Cohen notes, the important thing is not that he got the exact formula wrong, “but rather that he should have conceived of a celestial force in the first place,” and recognized that it must decrease with increasing distance (Cohen, Revolution in Science, p. 130).
* Why does Falstaff call the page a “giant”? The footnotes in the scholarly editions explain that he’s making fun of the page, who is actually short.
* The hall itself survived the Great Fire of 1666, but was destroyed by German bombs during the Second World War. The hall was rebuilt after the war, and, although the barbers and surgeons had parted ways in the mid-eighteenth century, the old name was retained, and a sign reading “Barber-Surgeons’ Hall” still marks the front entrance, on Monkwell Square.
* The tendency to blame disease on foreigners can also be seen in the case of syphilis, another poorly understood malady. As John Hale notes, there was “much displacement of responsibility: To Italians it was either the Spanish Disease or—more popularly—the French Disease, to the French it was the Pox of Naples, to the Turks it was the Christian Disease” (Hale, p. 556).
† Also, the fleas would bite humans only if there were no more rats in the immediate area—which means that when an outbreak began, the rats may not have been particularly noticeable, making their role harder to infer.
* Othello seems to be referring to the moon’s distance rather than its phase. The moon’s orbit around the Earth is an ellipse, causing its distance to vary (by about 12 percent) over the course of a month. This variation had been observed since ancient times, long before the true shape of its orbit had been deduced. The variation in size could be explained—although not very accurately—by means of the epicycles and deferents in the Ptolemaic system (see Chapter 1). It was Kepler who showed that planets (he did not mention the moon) do in fact move in elliptical orbits, beginning with his description of the motion of Mars in his Astronomia Nova of 1609 (less than six years after Shakespeare wrote Othello).
* The Merriam-Webster dictionary says that it consists “either of the tincture of benzoin or some balsam or of lead subacetate precipitated by addition of water.”
* For a brief history of atomic theory, I (humbly) direct the reader to my first book, Universe on a T-Shirt: The Quest for the Theory of Everything.
* It seems strange that scholars have had so little to say about Montaigne’s discussion of Copernicus. M. A. Screech’s hefty 1991 translation, running to nearly thirteen hundred pages, does not even have a listing for Copernicus in its index, and one has to hunt for a brief mention of the subject in the introduction.
* Like so much else that may illuminate the playwright’s life, the signature is the subject of significant dispute. Fake Shakespeare signatures abound, and the one on the museum’s copy of Montaigne had been declared a forgery decades ago. However, the debate reopened when Nicholas Knight compared the signature with that found on another copy of Montaigne, housed at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington; Knight believes both are authentic.
* Bradley’s analyses haven’t survived the last hundred years unscathed: Today’s scholars believe he erroneously applied early twentieth-century concepts to turn-of-the-seventeenth-century works. But then, what will scholars a hundred years from now think of today’s literary criticism?
* We might note that the previous Lear story—Shakespeare’s immediate source—was also a happier one. A version dating from 1594, titled The True Chronicle History of King Leir, and his three daughters, Gonerill, Ragan, and Cordelia, had been a success on the London stage; in this version, both
the king and Cordelia live, and the two evil sisters have their comeuppance.
* This passage occurs only in the quarto text, and not the folio (and so it can be found, for example, in the Arden Complete Works, but not in the New Cambridge edition).
* Although he didn’t explicitly make use of the clock metaphor, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes expressed similar doubts about the plausibility of animism. In Leviathan (1651), he makes fun of those who treated inanimate objects as though they could act with purpose, or had goals. Who can believe, he asks, that “stones and metals had a desire, or could discern the place they would be at, as man does” (quoted in Shapin, p. 30).
* For a useful discussion of the rise of the mechanistic worldview, see Steven Shapin’s The Scientific Revolution (1996), pp. 30–46. See also Richard DeWitt’s Worldviews (2004), pp. 178–82.
* In his 1940 play The Life of Galileo, Bertolt Brecht has the astronomer himself make this point. When he observes the moons of Jupiter, Brecht’s Galileo declares, “Today is 10 January 1610. Today mankind can write in its diary: Got rid of heaven” (Brecht, p. 24).
* Of course, not everyone denies the Scientific Revolution. Historian of science Richard Westfall, who died in 1996, stood by the claim that the world did indeed change profoundly during that period: “A once Christian culture has become a scientific one. The focus of the change, the hinge on which it turned, was the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (Westfall, p. 43).
* Precession of the equinoxes refers to a slow, circular motion traced out by the Earth’s axis. Just as the axis of a spinning top slowly rotates, the Earth’s axis traces out a circle (actually a pair of cones, joined at their vertices). The period for this precessional motion is about twenty-six thousand years. The discovery of this motion is usually credited to the ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus in the second century B.C.
