The Science of Shakespeare (4 page)

We will also take a look at the work of a more controversial figure, the astronomer Peter Usher, recently retired from Pennsylvania State University. Like Maisano and Pitcher, Usher sees the Jupiter scene in
Cymbeline
as a response to Galileo's discovery—but he takes “Shakespearian science” much further, arguing that examples of the playwright's scientific knowledge can be found in works spanning his entire career. Usher has taken a particular interest in
Hamlet
, which he sees as an allegory about competing cosmological worldviews. According to Usher, the play references not only Copernicus, but also Ptolemy, as well as Tycho Brahe, who pushed for a hybrid model of the solar system (a compromise that preserved elements of the ancient Ptolemaic system as well as the new Copernican model). Digges, too, is central to Usher's theory. When Hamlet envisions himself as “a king of infinite space” (2.2.255), could he be alluding to the new, infinite universe described—for the first time—by his countryman Thomas Digges?

Usher's proposal may sound far-fetched—but even skeptics do a double take when they look at Tycho Brahe's coat of arms, noticing that two of Tycho's relatives were named “Rosencrans” and “Guildensteren.” And Usher isn't quite alone; several mainstream Shakespeare scholars are at least willing to admit that the playwright was influenced by Tycho's astronomy.

Shakespeare's characters were connected to the cosmos in a way that seems quite foreign to the modern reader. They have, to use Thomas McAlindon's phrase, “cosmic imagination”: Whether crying for joy or shedding tears of anguish, they look to the heavens for confirmation, calling out to “Jupiter” or “the gods” or “the heavens” as they struggle to make sense of their lives.

And so we find, not surprisingly, a multitude of references to astrology. But some of Shakespeare's characters also speak out
against
such superstitions, as when Cassius declares, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings” (
Julius Caesar
1.2.139–40), or when Edmond, in
King Lear
, ridicules those who blame their misfortune on the heavens, dismissing such astrological conceit as “the excellent foppery of the world” (1.2.104). As for religion, though Shakespeare often alludes to biblical stories, he never once uses the word “bible.” Nor do his characters put much faith in life continuing beyond death. He lived in an age of belief, yet a streak of skepticism runs through his work, especially toward the end of his career; in
King Lear
it reaches an almost euphoric nihilism. His characters often call upon the gods to help them, but their desperate pleas are rarely answered. Was Shakespeare a closet atheist, like his colleague Christopher Marlowe?

*   *   *

Of course,
one has to tread carefully. Shakespeare is not only the most beloved writer in the English language, but also the most closely scrutinized. There is an enormous amount of very good scholarship on the playwright's life and work, and a significant amount of not-so-good scholarship. One reason there is so much to potentially be said about Shakespeare is that
he
said so much: He was prolific, with an output in the ballpark of 885,000 words. Yet there are only a few scraps of documentation to illuminate his personal life, and we can make only educated guesses regarding his private thoughts and beliefs. With no diaries, no letters, and no manuscripts, we have to rely on Shakespeare's published works. There is the perpetual danger of attributing the beliefs of his characters to the playwright himself. And, since Shakespeare uses language that is often challenging for the modern reader, his precise meanings are sometimes elusive (indeed, sometimes they are intentionally ambiguous). There is always the temptation to bend the facts to fit one's pet theory. (As with the Bible, one can find anything in Shakespeare if one looks hard enough.) We will consider a variety of opinions—mainly from established Shakespeare scholars, but occasionally from those whose expertise lies in another field but who nonetheless have something to contribute to our understanding of Shakespeare's world. I will do my best, however, to always indicate how widely accepted—or not—the various viewpoints are.

In the chapters ahead, we will examine the science of Shakespeare's time, beginning with a detailed look at the astronomical knowledge of his day, and then broadening our canvas to include the physical and life sciences more generally—along with the astrology, alchemy, and magic with which they were so deeply intertwined. Throughout the journey we will stop to ask what Shakespeare knew, and how it may have influenced his work. Obviously, Shakespeare was not the Carl Sagan of the Elizabethan Age—his first commitment was to his stagecraft, not to philosophy or science.
*
But I would argue that a close reading of his works reveals the depth of his interest in the natural world, and I hope to show that he was more conscious of the changing conception of the cosmos than we usually imagine. Shakespeare's writing often reflects the scientific ideas of his time—and the philosophical problems they were raising—and the more carefully we look at those ideas the better we can appreciate the scope of his achievement.

 

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.