The Science of Shakespeare (14 page)

MASTER:
How is it that Copernicus, a man of great learning, of much experience, and of wonderful diligence in observation, hath renewed the opinion of Aristarchus of Samos, affirming that the earth not only moves circularly about his own centre, but also may be, yea and is, continually out of the precise centre of the world eight and thirty hundred thousand miles: but because the understanding of that controversy dependeth on profounder knowledge than in this Introduction may be uttered conveniently, I will let it pass till some other time.

SCHOLAR:
Nay sir, in good faith, I desire not to hear such vain fantasies, so far against the common reason, and repugnant to the content of all the learned multitude of Writers, and therefore let it pass for ever, and a day longer.

MASTER:
You are too young to be a good judge in so great a matter: it passeth far your learning, and theirs also that are much better learned than you, to improve his supposition by good arguments, and therefore you were best to condemn nothing that you do not well understand.

Recorde acknowledges the counterintuitive nature of the Copernican model; the young scholar balks at the proposal, calling it a “vain fantasy” that stands opposed to “the common reason.” But the master, older and wiser, cautions that first impressions can be deceiving; that the truth sometimes requires us to abandon our preconceptions. Along with his favorable mention of the Copernican system, we should also note Recorde's skepticism toward the veneration of ancient texts. He cautions the reader to “be not abused by their authority, but ever more attend to their reasons, and examine them well, ever regarding more what is said, and how it is proved, than who said it: for authority often times deceives many men.”
The Castle of Knowledge
went through a second and third printing before the century was over, and was one of the most popular mathematical works in England at the time.

*   *   *

Better-known than
Robert Recorde
is William Gilbert (1540–1603), another “early adopter” of Copernicanism, best known for his work on magnetism. Naturally occurring magnets, known as lodestones, had been known since ancient times; we now recognize these brownish-black stones as fragments of a mineral called magnetite. It was everyday knowledge that lodestones could attract needles or flakes of iron—but
why
they did so was a mystery. It is easy to see why, in Elizabethan England, magnetism was associated with magic—indeed, a magnet was the very prototype of a “magical” body. And yet, it was magic that could be put to profitable use. The magnetic compass is a medieval invention, and philosophers were aware that the Earth itself has magnetic properties. Even so, there was disagreement as to why a compass needle pointed (roughly) north: Was Polaris, the pole star, endowed with magnetic properties? Might there be a magnetic island to the north of Scotland or Scandinavia? A turning point came in 1600, when Gilbert published his treatise
De magnete
. (The full title translates as
On the Magnet and Magnetic Bodies, and on the Great Magnet the Earth
.) As the title suggests, Gilbert's breakthrough was the realization that the Earth itself could be regarded as a giant magnet.

MAGNET MAN

Gilbert was born in Colchester and graduated from St. John's College in Cambridge; he then moved to London, where he worked as a doctor, later serving as personal physician to Queen Elizabeth (and briefly to King James). He was also an astronomer, and in fact is credited with sketching the first known map of the moon. Frankly, it's not a very good map—but, as Stephen Pumfrey notes, it was probably motivated by very specific considerations that had little to do with accuracy or detail. It was, Pumfrey suggests, part of an ongoing effort to deduce whether the moon rotates relative to the Earth, or remains—as it would appear—to keep one side facing permanently Earthward. In the decades that followed, astronomers would come to realize that the moon indeed “wobbles,” turning just enough to show a thin sliver of its far side as it does so; and then, weeks later, another thin sliver from its opposite edge. These wobbles are called “librations,” and their discovery has traditionally been credited to Galileo, who noticed them telescopically; but Pumfrey believes Gilbert was the first to discern them, more than twenty years earlier.

Gilbert went further than Copernicus by proposing a mechanism for the motion of the planets. (Even so, he was noncommittal regarding
the Earth's
annual revolution about the sun.) To begin with, Gilbert imagined that his theory of magnetism could explain the Earth's daily rotation. The Aristotelians had said that a large body like the Earth would naturally be at rest; after all, what would cause such a massive body to move? Gilbert believed that magnetism provided the answer: He believed (wrongly, it turns out) that magnetic fields from a spherical lodestone would set it spinning, and that similar fields caused both the Earth and the moon to rotate. He also believed that magnetic forces emanating from the sun, together with the sun's rotation, caused the planets to move in their heliocentric orbits. The entire sixth “book” of
De magnete
is taken up with this effort to link magnetism to this one facet of Copernicus's theory.
*
Remarkably, Gilbert predicted (correctly) that all the bodies in the solar system would tug on each other, and that these irregularities ought to have observable consequences; one result would be that planetary orbits ought not to be perfectly circular—a bold notion that contradicted traditional thought. The lunar librations were one such piece of evidence, offering, as Pumfrey puts it, “visible proof of his radical cosmology.”

Gilbert was certain that the ancient view of the heavens was wrongheaded. He eagerly embraced Thomas Digges's view that the stars were infinite in number, and that they were located at various distances from the Earth, extending, quite possibly, without limit. The idea that the vast universe, filled with countless stars, revolved around Earth was simply untenable. Just as the planets lie at unequal distances from the Earth, he wrote,

so are those vast and multitudinous lights separated from the earth by varying and very remote altitudes; they are not set in any sphaerick frame or firmament (as is feigned), nor in any vaulted body.… How immeasurable then must be the space which stretches to those remotest of the fixed stars!

Gilbert was one of the foremost scientists of the Elizabethan age, every bit as influential as John Dee. And yet, should we attempt to label Gilbert as a “modern” figure we run into difficulties. Newton, the greatest mind of the next century, was comfortable discussing the motion of the planets in terms of inanimate mechanical forces—but Gilbert saw such motion in almost psychological terms. (In describing his book, he used the phrase “physiologia nova”—he was bringing a “new physiology” into the science of cosmology.) The planets were animate; they possessed souls. (One of his chapter titles was “The Magnetic Force is Animate, or Imitates a Soul; In many Respects it surpasses the human soul while that is united to an organic body.”) As John Russell puts it, the idea of mechanical force plays only a minor role in Gilbert's theory; instead, the universe “is more like a community of souls stimulating each other to activity.” (We might note that Kepler, who did more than anyone else to develop Copernicus's original theory, also believed for many years that the Earth had a soul.) At the same time, we see a decidedly modern emphasis on experiment and observation. Gilbert has no patience for those who blindly regurgitate the theories of the ancients—the “probable guesses and opinions of ordinary professors of philosophy”—without bothering to engage their own senses. His own theories, in contrast, are “demonstrated by many arguments and experiments.” The end result is that “causes are made known of things which, either through the ignorance of the ancients or the neglect of the moderns, have remained unrecognized or overlooked.” As I. Bernard Cohen puts it,
De magnete
“contains the seeds of revolution.”

Gilbert's book was tremendously influential, and drew praise from both Kepler and Galileo. In fact, magnetism itself became a topic of general interest in the decades following
De magnete
, and the effects could be seen on the London stage. Ben Jonson's final comedy, first performed in 1632, was called
The Magnetic Lady
. The main character is a wealthy woman named Lady Loadstone, who tries to marry off her niece, Placentia Steel, while taking advice from one Master Compass. (For good measure, the Lady is assisted by a steward whose best friend is named Captain Ironside.) Shakespeare, in contrast, does not seem to have used the words “magnet” or “magnetism” in his works—but magnetism is referenced briefly in
Troilus and Cressida
. When Troilus pledges his love, he vows to stay with Cressida “As iron to adamant” (3.2.174)—with footnotes in today's scholarly editions helpfully explaining that adamant is another word for lodestone.

*   *   *

As we examine the work
of early scientific thinkers like Dee and Gilbert, we are confronted with a peculiar (to us) mix of medieval and modern. In the case of John Dee, we sense a man who was certainly part magician—and yet, with hindsight, we can also see something of a modern scientist in his attitude and his work, something we perceive in Gilbert as well. An even more curious case is the figure of Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), the Italian philosopher and mystic who would pass through England in the 1580s. Even the statue of Bruno that now stands in Rome's Campo de' Fiori—the “field of flowers”—has a certain somber darkness to it. The statue, erected in 1889, was supposed to face south, but at the last minute its orientation was changed so that it faced northward, toward the Vatican. (Facing away was seen as disrespectful.) As a result, the hooded figure, depicted with arms crossed and clutching a hefty book, is nearly always in shadow. Nor is it likely that the grand statue is much of a likeness of the doomed philosopher; it towers over the square, even though Bruno himself was a diminutive man. Appropriate, perhaps, for a man who, at least in his own mind, was a larger-than-life figure—a firebrand whose every thought seemed to challenge the established order.

Fig. 4.1
Philosopher, mystic, heretic: Giordano Bruno, condemned by the Roman Catholic Church and burned at the stake in 1600, is now honored by a statue in Rome, at the site of his execution. Author photo

Bruno was trained as a Dominican monk in his native Naples, but even as a young man his unorthodox views turned many of his friends into enemies. Among other things, he imagined a broader kind of Christian faith, larger than that embraced either by the Catholics of his home country or by the Protestants north of the Alps; under his guidance, he imagined, religious fighting would become a thing of the past, and a new golden age could be ushered in. Although Bruno succeeded in attaining the priesthood, he was also suspected of heresy and was forced to flee the land of his birth.

THE WANDERER

Bruno would spend more than twenty years wandering across Europe—years that he appears to have spent teaching, writing, and, when money was tight, proofreading. And perhaps above all, arguing—and making even more enemies. (One gets a sense of this even from his scribblings in other people's books. In the margin of one text, he wrote, “Remarkable that this ass professes himself a doctor.”) He was also known for his feats of memory, and taught mnemonic techniques for improving memory (even demonstrating his methods to the pope, Pius V, before fleeing Italy).

Bruno, like Tycho and Digges, lived at a unique moment in the history of our understanding of the cosmos, a time when ancient wisdom was confronted with new doubts. The poet Dante Alighieri, Bruno's countryman, had described the structure of the heavens in his fourteenth-century epic poem
Divina Commedia
(the
Divine Comedy
), built on a strictly Ptolemaic view of the universe—but such descriptions could no longer be taken at face value. As Bruno's biographer Ingrid Rowland writes:

Dante's certainties about natural philosophy were no longer certain. Astronomy had begun to split away from astrology, substituting a mechanical system of stars and planets for a system tied to the gods of Olympus. Mathematicians like Copernicus could track their movements with the help of complex equations, an activity as absorbing, in the end, as tracking their personalities had been in times past. In a whole series of applications, from cosmology to mechanics to geometry, algebra promised more exciting discoveries than numerology.

Bruno had read the works of Aristotle and the other influential thinkers of antiquity, and he respected their opinions. But he didn't grant them any special authority just because of their age or their perceived wisdom. He believed that much of what had been learned in the intervening millennia might be equally useful. Moreover, not lacking in ego, he imagined his own intellect as very much on par with that of the ancients: he could build on what they had begun.