The Science of Shakespeare (17 page)

Shopkeepers, carpenters, clockmakers, surveyors, sailors—all were motivated to learn and master basic mathematics. One needed mathematical knowledge to sort out different measures of weight, dimension, and currency; more generally, it was said to sharpen the mind. In his popular book on arithmetic,
The Ground of the Artes
, Robert Recorde described mathematics as “the ground of all men's affairs.” Without mathematical literacy, he noted, “no tale can be long continued, no bargaining without it can be duly ended, nor no business that man has justly completed.” It's hard to know exactly how many mathematical books were published in London in the sixteenth century, since many have been lost; but historians put it at about five per year in the early years of Elizabeth's reign, with texts on navigation and surveying proving the most popular; and the number was certainly higher by the century's close.

OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE

With all of this activity—all of this learning—happening in London, one may reasonably inquire what was going on up the road at Oxford and at Cambridge, where professors had been professing and students had been studying for half a millennium. It is sobering to remember that the university at Oxford, the second-oldest surviving university in the world (after the University of Bologna in Italy), was already five centuries old by Shakespeare's time. In fact, the actual date when the University of Oxford was founded is not known, though the record of teaching there goes back to 1096, and it grew rapidly after 1167, when English students were prohibited from studying at the University of Paris. (We might note that even Oxford's “New College” dates from 1379.) The university at Cambridge was founded in 1209 when some disgruntled Oxford students fell into a dispute with townsfolk and fled eastward.

The students were younger back then: Officially, one had to be fifteen, but the sons of noblemen were often admitted earlier. (Robert Devereux, the Second Earl of Essex and one of Elizabeth's favorites, was admitted at age ten, though he didn't matriculate until two years later.) A bachelor of arts normally took four years, a master of arts an additional three. If money helped one get in, it could also help you get out: For those who had not yet met the BA requirements by the end of the fourth year of study at Oxford, ten shillings would get you your degree. While the student was enrolled, discipline was strict. At Oxford, students found lurking about inns and taverns, or even tobacco shops, could be flogged; the same penalty awaited those with the gall to play football on university grounds.
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(Cambridge may have been slightly more laid-back: There, football was deemed a “legitimate” sport, along with archery and quoits, a game similar to horseshoes.) Not everyone was cut out for the scholarly life. In
Twelfth Night
, the buffoonish Sir Andrew Aguecheek says he always regretted that he didn't attend university: “I would I had bestowed that time in the tongues [i.e. learning languages] that I have in fencing, dancing, and bear-baiting. O, had I but followed the arts!” (1.3.90–93). The “arts” he refers to are the so-called liberal arts that had formed the backbone of Western higher education since ancient times—and which Prospero, in
The Tempest
, says he studied (“… and for the liberal arts / Without a parallel; those being all my study…”) (1.2.73–74). The standard program of study consisted of the “trivium” of grammar, dialectics, and rhetoric, along with the “quadrivium” of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music—a program of study which, as J. A. Sharpe puts it, was “basically the education appropriate to the free man of a Greek city-state in the fourth century B.C.” The natural philosophy taught at the two august institutions had been Aristotelian through and through—and so it remained, by and large, in the sixteenth century. But a student's experience depended critically on who his teachers were. As Francis Johnson puts it, education for this select group of young men would have been “superficial and elementary”—unless the student was lucky enough to be taught by one of the handful of brilliant young mathematicians “during the brief period of their active connection with the university.” If a student did receive a first-class education, it would most likely have been an accident, “entirely dependent upon the enthusiasm and enterprise of individual scholars on the faculties.” The keenest learners would have shunned the dry Latin texts offered by the schools in favor of the more accessible—and more up-to-date—popular works.

Given that the universities at this time were not exactly hotbeds of innovation, one might expect that any astronomy that was taught would have been strictly Ptolemaic. And yet, perhaps surprisingly, Copernicus's theory did come up for debate, on occasion, in the second half of the sixteenth century. Certainly the universities on the Continent were ahead of the game: By 1545, Erasmus Reinhold's
Commentary
—published a few years earlier, and containing a favorable reference to the Copernican theory—had become the standard astronomy textbook at the University of Wittenberg (where Hamlet is said to have studied). By 1560, as Paula Findlen notes, students at Wittenberg were learning astronomy from Copernicus's own book; at Salamanca, by the 1590s,
De revolutionibus
was required reading. This doesn't mean that Copernicanism had triumphed; rather, it was being taught as an alternative. It “enriched the calculating skills of astronomers,” Findlen writes, without necessarily making them confront problems in cosmology or physics. “It was possible to read Copernicus as a manual rather than a manifesto.”

And so it was at Oxford and Cambridge. At Oxford, records from 1576—the same year that Digges published his treatise on the Copernican system—show that one of the questions assigned for disputation for prospective MA students was “
An terra quiescat in medio mundi?
” (“Is the entire earth at rest in the middle of the world?”) We don't know which side was argued by the student and which by the proctor, but, as Johnson puts it, “we may be sure that the theories of Copernicus and the opposing doctrines of Aristotle were the chief subjects of debate.”

Even so, historians are divided: John Russell writes that there is “no good evidence that Copernican ideas had made any serious impact [at Oxford] at this time.” And we might recall the mockery that Bruno faced when he lectured on Copernicanism at Oxford in the 1580s. But Mordechai Feingold notes that the heliocentric model was taught, “and sometimes taught well,” even if those who taught it didn't necessarily accept it fully. Typically, the instructor left it up to the students to weigh the arguments and reach their own conclusions. They were welcome to read further on their own, and the more gifted among them undoubtedly did just that.

A student named Edmund Lee, for example, kept a notebook with commentaries on numerous scientific ideas spanning the fields of physics, astronomy, and mathematics; among his dense notes, he comments favorably on the Copernican system. The mathematician Sir Henry Savile, meanwhile, was appointed as the first professor of astronomy and geometry at Oxford, and taught there in the 1560s and 1570s. His notebooks, now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, show that he taught from Ptolemy's
Almagest
—but with references to Copernicus, including a chapter-by-chapter comparison between the
Almagest
and
De revolutionibus
, as well as other medieval and contemporary thinkers.
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His own leanings seemed to favor the new cosmology, and we catch a glimpse of his enthusiasm from a remark jotted in his notebook, “
Copernicus Mathematicoru Modernoru Priceps
” (“Copernicus, the prince of modern mathematicians”). William Camden, an Oxford student and friend of Savile, may have owned his own copy of
De revolutionibus
, and, like Thomas Digges, made careful observations of the nova of 1572. At Cambridge, a student named John Mansell (later Master of Queens' College) responded to a question on the structure of the solar system, in 1601, by defending Copernicus and describing the heliocentric model in detail. The works of Copernicus and Digges could be found at the library in Cambridge by 1580, along with astrolabes, quadrants, globes, and elaborate sundials. A couple of decades later, an Oxford tutor named Richard Crakanthorpe again used Aristotle and Ptolemy as his starting point, but covered all the latest astronomical observations and ideas: the new star of 1572; the great comets of 1577 and 1580; the telescopic discoveries of Galileo. We know that he consulted the works of Kepler and Digges, as well as Galileo's
Siderius Nuncius
(
The Starry Messenger
). Sir William Boswell, a Cambridge mathematician, corresponded with Galileo himself, and played a vital role in making the Italian scientist's work known in England.

*   *   *

However much theoretical science
was being disseminated at the two universities, they were almost certainly lagging behind the capital in terms of practical learning. Although written a few decades later, a letter penned by mathematician John Wallis is telling. When he moved from Cambridge to London in the 1640s, he found a greater number of people interested in his craft, “[for] the study of
Mathematicks
was at that time more cultivated in London than in the Universities.” We have also seen that England was hardly a scientific backwater; the notion that it lagged far behind continental Europe is simply unfounded. One sign is the relative openness to the Copernican theory: While Tycho Brahe in Denmark and Christopher Clavius in Rome had been vocal opponents of the heliocentric model, we can add Blagrave, Hill, and Ridley to our ever-growing list of English thinkers—with Recorde, Dee, Thomas Digges, and perhaps a handful of others—who embraced the “new astronomy.”
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By the latter years of the sixteenth century, England, as we've seen, was far from being an intellectual hinterland. As Francis Johnson writes, “[In] England, perhaps more than in any other country, an intelligent knowledge of the Copernican theory was spread among all classes of practical scientific workers before 1600, and nowhere was there a keener interest in the implications of the new astronomy, or a more earnest search for a satisfactory physical explanation of various features of the Copernican hypothesis.”

Intriguingly, some of the people whom one might imagine to have eagerly embraced Copernicanism in fact rejected it. The philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon was just such a thinker: It's not that the Copernican model was too radical for his tastes; it's that there was not, at this early stage, enough direct observational evidence in support of the new theory. It is easy to imagine, in hindsight, that the Copernican theory was “obvious”—but of course it was anything
but
obvious, and one might legitimately harbor doubts about the heliocentric model, at least until the telescopic work of Galileo.

THE PHILOSOPHER-STATESMAN

As we noted in the introduction, the standard view is that Shakespeare lived “too early” to have been a witness to the Scientific Revolution. But we should remember that Bacon, one of the key figures of modern science, was an almost exact contemporary of the playwright, entering the world three years ahead of him, and departing ten years after him. Bacon's first important scientific work,
The Advancement of Learning
, was published in 1605—around the time that Shakespeare was finishing
King Lear
(and in fact Bacon had written about the nature of science two years earlier, in
Valerius Terminus: On the Interpretation of Nature
, although the work is fragmentary and was never published).

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was a well-connected man: His aunt was married to Queen Elizabeth's key advisor, William Cecil. Bacon studied law, served as a member of Parliament, and eventually held the titles of Attorney General and Lord Chancellor. But we remember Bacon not for his statesmanship but for his philosophy. He is considered the father of empiricism, the idea that knowledge ultimately rests on what we can observe and study via the senses. For Bacon, science was about much more than esoteric knowledge, and he refused to accept ancient wisdom just because it's ancient. He had grand aims for science, whose “explanations take the mystery out of things.” It wasn't foolproof—the experiment may be flawed; the observer may make a mistake—but the process is self-correcting. Yes, the senses may sometimes deceive; “but then at the same time they supply the means of discovering their own errors.”

Bacon wasn't himself a scientist; in fact, he made no significant discoveries on his own. The one experiment that he did (allegedly) attempt—at least, the only one we have a detailed record of—also appears to have killed him: He is said to have caught a chill while trying to determine if one could preserve a chicken by stuffing it with snow on a freezing March day; a few days later he was dead, from either bronchitis or pneumonia.
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Nonetheless, Bacon thought a great deal about
what science ought to be
. In
The Advancement of Learning
, he sets out to partition science into various branches, including physics, metaphysics, mathematics, astronomy, engineering, and medicine—although we should note that he included theology, poetry, and drama among the sciences, and considered them to be equally deserving of study. (God, he says, made the world—but not in order for us to be mystified by it. As Philip Ball puts it, Bacon sees the world as “an intricate puzzle,” one that God hopes mankind will rise to the challenge of solving.) Bacon argues passionately for the importance of scientific learning, asserting that natural philosophy, and the improved technologies it would lead to, would better the lot of mankind. He declares that “heaven and earth do conspire and contribute to the use and benefit of man.” In
The New Atlantis
(1627), Bacon describes something like the ultimate scientific laboratory—he calls it Solomon's House—in which many of these new technologies are presented in detail. Here we find, as John Cartwright notes, dozens of ideas “that anticipate the technology that science did deliver in the centuries that followed.” These include “the genetic engineering of plants and animals, zoological gardens, robots, telephones, refrigerators, weather observation towers, and all sorts of flying machines.”