The Science of Shakespeare: A New Look at the Playwright's Universe
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The Science of Shakespeare: A New Look at the Playwright's Universe
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Overview
William Shakespeare lived at a remarkable time—a period we now recognize as the first phase of the Scientific Revolution. New ideas were transforming Western thought, the medieval was giving way to the modern, and the work of a few key figures hinted at the brave new world to come: the methodical and rational Galileo, the skeptical Montaigne, and—as Falk convincingly argues—Shakespeare, who observed human nature just as intently as the astronomers who studied the night sky.
In The Science of Shakespeare, we meet a colorful cast of Renaissance thinkers, including Thomas Digges, who published the first English account of the "new astronomy" and lived in the same neighborhood as Shakespeare; Thomas Harriot—"England's Galileo"—who aimed a telescope at the night sky months ahead of his Italian counterpart; and Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, whose observatory-castle stood within sight of Elsinore, chosen by Shakespeare as the setting for Hamlet—and whose family crest happened to include the names "Rosencrans" and "Guildensteren." And then there's Galileo himself: As Falk shows, his telescopic observations may have influenced one of Shakespeare's final works.
Dan Falk's The Science of Shakespeare explores the connections between the famous playwright and the beginnings of the Scientific Revolution—and how, together, they changed the world forever.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250008787 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 04/22/2014 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Dan Falk has written about science for The Boston Globe, The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, Astronomy, Nature, and New Scientist, and has been a regular contributor to the CBC Radio programs Ideas and Quirks and Quarks. His awards include a Gold Medal for Radio Programming from the New York Festivals and the Science Writing Award in Physics and Astronomy from the American Institute of Physics. His first book, Universe on a T-Shirt, won the 2002 Science in Society Journalism Award from the Canadian Science Writers’ Association. He is also the author of In Search of Time. He lives in Toronto, Canada.
Read an Excerpt
The Science of Shakespeare
A New Look at the Playwright's Universe
By Dan Falk
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2014 Dan FalkAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-00878-7
CHAPTER 1
"Arise, fair sun ..."
A BRIEF HISTORY OF COSMOLOGY
Shakespeare's audience did not have to look far to see the stars: A wooden canopy projected out over the stage, and its underside — known as "the heavens" — was decorated with brightly painted stars and constellations. It served its purpose in Hamlet, for example, when the prince refers to "this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire" (2.2.283–5) or when Caesar declares that "the skies are painted with unnumbered sparks" (Julius Caesar 3.1.63).
The view of the universe engendered by this simple theatrical device wasn't so far off from how our ancestors had envisioned the cosmos for thousands of years: We look up at night, and we see an uncountable number of stars, brilliant pinpoints of light, seemingly painted on the vast dark canvas of the night sky. And back then, before the light pollution brought by electrical lighting, the sky really was black. In Antony and Cleopatra, when Lepidus says to Caesar, "Let all the number of the stars give light / To thy fair way!", we might imagine that the stars truly shone brightly enough for the purpose (3.2.65–66). (In practice, a bit of moonlight would probably help.) The stars were intimately familiar, yet at the same time deeply mysterious. They were certainly far away — climbing the highest hills did not seem to bring them any closer — but how far away, one couldn't say. Perhaps they lay just out of reach; a little farther, perhaps, than the great oceans or the highest mountain peaks.
The sun was more familiar, its presence more intimate: the brightest of lights; the giver of life. Everyone knew that it rose in the east and set in the west, but they also knew the subtle variation in that pattern over the course of a year: In the winter, the sun makes only a low arc across the southern sky, while summer brings longer days in which the sun takes a much higher path across the sky. The cycle repeats, with perfect dependability, year after year. A farmer had to know the sun's movement — but so, too, did a playwright; for the action to be visible, one had to contend with the harsh sunlight of midsummer as well as the long shadows of autumn and the all-too-early darkness of the winter months. Sophisticated stagecraft and spectacular costumes mean nothing if audience members have to squint to see them. As Peter Ackroyd writes, Shakespeare was "aware of the passage of time and of daylight across the open stage, so that he wrote shadowy scenes for the hour when the shadows begin to deepen across London itself." Stage directions calling for a character to enter "with a torch" or "with a light" tend to come in a play's final act. (There is also some evidence that the Globe was constructed in alignment with the position of the rising sun on the summer solstice.) Of course, one might misread a signal: In Romeo and Juliet, the two lovers famously quibble over the signs of the coming dawn. A bird cries — but was it the lark, or the nightingale? "Night's candles are burnt out," Romeo declares, "and jocund day / Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops." Juliet has heard and seen the same signals, but her wishful thinking interprets them quite differently: "Yon light is not day-light, I know it, I: / It is some meteor that the sun exhales." (The physics of meteors was not yet understood; a common guess was that they were vapors "exhaled" by the earth under the sun's influence.) Eventually, Romeo gives in; if Juliet says it is night, so be it:
I'll say yon grey is not the morning's eye,
'Tis but the pale reflex of Cynthia's brow.
Nor that is not the lark whose notes do beat
The vaulty heaven so high above our heads.
(3.5.19–22)
The only tricky part for a modern reader is perhaps the reference to "Cynthia"; in a good scholarly edition, a footnote will explain that Cynthia was a name for the moon goddess in Greek mythology. As Romeo notes, a cloud reflecting the light of the moon could indeed be mistaken for the coming dawn.
The rising sun intrudes on the young lovers in Romeo and Juliet; it intrudes, too, on the conspirators in Julius Caesar. They gather for a nighttime meeting in Brutus's garden to plot their next move — but take time out of their scheming to argue about where, exactly, the sun will rise:
DECIUS
Here lies the east. Doth not the day break here?
CASKA
No.
CINNA
O pardon, sir, it doth, and yon grey lines
That fret the clouds are messengers of day.
CASKA
You shall confess that you are both deceived.
Here, as I point my sword, the sun arises,
Which is a great way growing on the south,
Weighing the youthful season of the year.
Some two months hence, up higher toward the north
He first presents his fire, and the high east
Stands as the Capitol, directly here.
(2.1.100–110)
There are murders to plan, ambitions to thwart, and nations to rebuild — but first, let's argue about the position on the horizon where the sun will rise! Nothing will happen, it seems, until this point can be agreed upon. Interestingly, Shakespeare gets it almost right. We know that it's mid-March (the "ides" and all that), which means it's almost the equinox — and therefore the sun will rise almost due east, not "a great way growing on the south," as Caska proclaims. But he is right that, as the weeks pass, the sun's position as it rises will advance to the north. (But the time is a problem: Later in the scene we are told that it's three o'clock — too soon for the sunrise, or even the dawn's early light, at any time of year.)
The moon's appearance and movement is every bit as familiar as that of the sun: It, too, rises in the east and sets in the west, though its appearance changes dramatically as it goes through its familiar phases, waxing and waning in its monthly cycle. For a few days each month it disappears completely, only to reappear as a thin crescent in the western sky, where it shines for a short time after sunset. About a week later it reaches "first quarter," shining like a capital "D" in the southern sky. Another week passes, and it becomes a majestic full moon, rising opposite the setting sun and shining all night long. The lunar cycle repeats as dependably as its solar counterpart.
And then there were the stars — "these blessed candles of the night," as Bassanio poetically describes them in The Merchant of Venice (5.1.219). They move as well — not haphazardly, but in unison, also from east to west. If you face north, they appear to revolve in a counterclockwise direction, as if attached to a giant pinwheel. Only the north star, or "pole star," seems to remain fixed at the center of this pinwheel. (Known as "Polaris" since the seventeenth century, the north star happens to lie close to the north celestial pole, the imaginary spot that the Earth's axis points toward.) This basic astronomical fact was, of course, well known to Shakespeare. In Julius Caesar, the general compares himself to the pole star: "... I am constant as the northern star, / Of whose true-fixed and resting quality / There is no fellow in the firmament" (3.1.60–62). Because the other stars move around the north star in a smooth circle and at a steady rate, one can use the sky itself as a clock. Telling time by the stars is a straightforward task for Shakespeare's characters, as it must have been for his audience. In Henry IV, Part 1, a farmer tracks the time by noting the position of the Big Dipper, known in Britain today as "the Plough" but in Elizabethan times as "Charles's Wain," that is, "Charles's Wagon": "Charles's Wain is over the new chimney, and yet our horse not packed" (2.1.2–3).
Although the distance to the stars was unknown, it was convenient to imagine them lying at some fixed distance from the Earth, attached to the inner surface of a vast, transparent sphere. The sphere turned about the Earth, carrying the stars with it; one lived at the center of this arrangement, watching the heavens' endless procession.
The stars also display a second kind of motion. Along with the daily rising and setting, the entire pinwheel seems to shift slightly from night to night. As the weeks pass, the shift becomes more noticeable. Consider Orion, the mighty hunter. In autumn, it rises about midnight. By Christmas, however, it rises much earlier, around the time of sunset. By the following autumn, Orion once again rises at midnight. This cycle, like that of the seasons, lasts one year. These motions are straightforward and predictable. A shepherd would have known which constellations were visible in which season, and in which direction one would have to gaze.
THE WANDERERS
But there were certain objects in the night sky whose behavior wasn't quite so simple. From ancient times, skywatchers noticed that there were a handful of starlike objects that did not quite move in unison with the other stars; they changed their position against the constellations from night to night and from season to season. Today we call them planets; the word derives from the Greek term for "wanderer." Five of these wandering stars were known in ancient times — Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.
Although the planets wandered, they did not run amok: One could always depend on finding them within a narrow band that circles the night sky, the belt defined by the twelve constellations of the zodiac. In this respect, they are like the sun and moon, which also keep within the zodiac, and so one sometimes spoke of seven (rather than five) wandering bodies. But there were some intriguing differences in the paths that these wandering stars seemed to take: Mercury, looking like a dim reddish star, moved swiftly — only the moon seemed to move faster — and yet it always appeared close to the sun. Brilliant white Venus moved a little slower, and strayed a little farther from the sun, but not too far (neither planet was ever seen opposite the sun). Mars, with its distinctive reddish color, moved more slowly than the sun; so, too, did Jupiter and Saturn, both creamy white in color. Their paths took them across the entire sky, so that sometimes they were near the sun, sometimes opposite the sun. Of these, Saturn was the slowest of all; it took weeks before its motion against the background stars was perceptible, and required almost thirty years to complete a full circle relative to the background stars.
To the title character in Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, such motions were elementary. The doctor distinguishes "the double motion of the planets" — referring to their daily rising and setting, and also to their more complicated motion against the stars of the zodiac. Saturn's motion, he says, is completed "in thirty years, Jupiter in twelve, Mars in four, the sun, Venus, and Mercury in a year, the moon in twenty-eight days. Tush, these are freshmen's suppositions" (7.51–56). Actually, the period for Mars is closer to two years than four, but close enough: For Marlowe, and for his learned doctor, this basic comprehension of the heavens — knowing which objects were visible, in which part of the sky, and for how long — was everyday knowledge.
The planets, however, were more than just points of light in the night sky: They were also associated with gods. Each had its own powers, its own domain of influence. For both the Greeks and the Romans, Venus was the goddess of love; Mars was the god of war. Saturn was a god of agriculture and of time, while Mercury was a kind of messenger, a god of travel — which makes sense, given Saturn's plodding pace and Mercury's swiftness. Jupiter, often the brightest of the planets, was the king of the gods.
The movement of the planets showed many regularities — but also some downright peculiar behavior. From night to night, the planets usually edged a little bit to the east; as the weeks passed, this was easily observed. Eventually, they completed a full circle against the backdrop of the stars. But for several weeks or months each year they would reverse their direction, moving westward from night to night, before resuming their usual eastward motion. Astronomers refer to this backtracking as "retrograde" motion, in contrast to the more usual "direct" motion. Again, these were familiar terms in Elizabethan times — as much for their use in astrology as in astronomy. In All's Well That Ends Well, Helena plays with this idea, poking fun at Parolles's skills on the battlefield:
HELENA
Monsieur Parolles, you were born under a charitable star.
PAROLLES
Under Mars, I.
HELENA
I especially think under Mars.
PAROLLES
Why under Mars?
HELENA
The wars have so kept you under that you must needs be born under Mars.
PAROLLES
When he was predominant.
HELENA
When he was retrograde, I think rather.
PAROLLES
Why think you so?
HELENA
You go so much backward when you fight.
(1.1.190–200)
Mars, aside from being the god of war, was also the most perplexing of the planets. The magnitude of its retrograde movement was greater than that of the other planets, making it the most readily visible example of backward motion in the heavens and, at the same time, the object whose movement was most urgently in need of explanation. As the French king points out early in Henry VI, Part 1, "Mars his true moving, even as in the heavens / So in the earth, to this day is not known" (1.2.191–92). As familiar as retrograde motion was, it proved baffling to astronomers, who struggled to tweak their models of the heavens to explain this odd feature of planetary motion.
THE SPHERES ABOVE
Imagining the sun, moon, and planets affixed to a giant, transparent sphere was a promising start, but it was not quite enough: At the very least, each planet had to have its own sphere, so that it could move independently of the other wanderers; these nested spheres — think of the layers of an onion — could then rotate at different speeds, with the Earth at rest in the center. The innermost sphere carried the moon, which moved a significant distance from night to night; next was Mercury, then Venus. After that came the sun itself. Beyond the sun lay the spheres of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn; and finally the sphere containing the stars themselves, sometimes called the "firmament" (as Prince Hamlet referred to it in the passage quoted at the start of the chapter). And so one would not speak of a single giant sphere, but of a system of spheres — a system like that imagined in figure 1.1. Perhaps the spheres were composed of some kind of crystal; they needed to be rigid and yet perfectly transparent.
Although this model had evolved significantly by the sixteenth century, the ancient picture just described was more or less how ordinary people imagined the universe in the time of Shakespeare's youth. When Hamlet, after seeing his father's ghost, says the vision threatens to make his eyes "like stars, start from their spheres" (1.5.22), his audience would have had no trouble catching the metaphor. Similar turns of phrase can be found throughout the canon. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Oberon describes a mermaid's song — music so lovely that "certain stars shot madly from their spheres" in order to hear it better (2.1.153). And if you've ever seen a Western in which one character says to another that "this town isn't big enough for the both of us," remember that Shakespeare was there first — though entire planets, rather than towns, were at issue. In Henry IV, Part 1, Prince Henry says to his archenemy, Harry Percy, "Two stars keep not their motion in one sphere, / Nor can one England brook a double reign / Of Harry Percy and the Prince of Wales" (5.4.64–66).
What we've described here is, roughly, how ancient civilizations across the Near East imagined the heavens for thousands of years: The cosmos was pictured as an intricate system of nested, transparent spheres, carrying the sun, moon, planets, and stars across the sky in their daily and yearly cycles. It was also the way the great thinker Aristotle imagined the universe in the fourth century B.C. By Aristotle's time, it was accepted that the Earth itself was spherical; but it was thought to be immobile, fixed at the center of the universe, surrounded by this intricate array of translucent spheres, carrying the five planets — or seven, if we count the sun and moon among these "wanderers."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Science of Shakespeare by Dan Falk. Copyright © 2014 Dan Falk. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
1. "Arise, fair sun . . ."
A Brief History of Cosmology
2. "He that is giddy thinks the world turns round . . ."
Nicolaus Copernicus, the Reluctant Reformer
3. "This majestical roof fretted with golden fire . . ."
Tycho Brahe and Thomas Digges
4. "These earthly godfathers of heaven's lights . . ."
The Shadow of Copernicus and the Dawn of Science
5. "sorrow's eye, glazed with blinding tears . . ."
The Rise of English Science and the Question of the Tudor Telescope
6. "Who is it that can tell me who I am?"
A Brief History of William Shakespeare
7. "More things in heaven and earth . . ."
The Science of Hamlet
8. ". . . a hawk from a handsaw . . ."
Reading Shakespeare, and Reading Into Shakespeare
9. "Does the world go round?"
Shakespeare and Galileo
10. "Treachers by spherical predominance . . ."
The Allure of Astrology
11. "Fair is foul, and foul is fair . . ."
Magic in the Age of Shakespeare
12. "A body yet distempered . . ."
Shakespeare and Medicine
13. "Drawn with a team of little atomi . . ."
Living in the Material World
14. "As flies to wanton boys . . ."
The Disappearing Gods
"They say miracles are past . . ."