The Science of Shakespeare (24 page)

More recently, in March 2013, a team of researchers uncovered documents that suggest that Shakespeare, during a time of famine, hoarded grain for profit and chased down those who could not (or would not) repay their debts. Again, it made headlines: “Bad Bard: a tax dodger and famine profiteer,” trumpeted the
Sunday Times
; “Shakespeare the ‘hard-headed businessman' uncovered,” declared the
Independent
(although, as we've seen, we
already
knew he was a savvy businessman). As usual, the urge to reinterpret the plays in light of the new “evidence” was irresistible: The lead researcher, Jayne Archer of Aberystwyth University, suggested the newly revealed facts are reflected in
Coriolanus
, set in ancient Rome during a time of famine, and were perhaps inspired by the real-life uprising by peasants in the English Midlands in Shakespeare's time. What does it mean if Shakespeare was against grain hoarding in the play, but all for it in real life? Perhaps, Archer speculates,
Coriolanus
was the playwright's attempt “to expunge a guilty conscience.” She also sees famine as central to the story of
King Lear
, in which the king's unfair distribution of resources to his daughters triggers a war.

We can't blame scholars for building theories around their data, scant as it may be. But that doesn't mean that “anything goes.” And that applies whether you're building your theory from the ground up, from bits of “evidence” (like the grains of cannabis), or starting from the standard narrative and chipping away at it, as the anti-Stratfordians are wont to do. And of course, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Consider Shakespeare's lack of a personal library: As a skeptical
New York Times
article recently noted, no books are mentioned in the playwright's will, and there is no record of him paying tax on such a collection. What can we make of this? Very little, actually—and Bill Bryson has a humorous rebuttal to those who try. He reminds us that we know nothing of Shakespeare's incidental possessions one way or another. The author of the
Times
article, Bryson says, “might just as well have suggested that Shakespeare never owned a pair of shoes or pants. For all the evidence tells us, he spent his life naked from the waist down, as well as bookless, but it is probable that what is lacking is the evidence, not the apparel or the books.”
*

We should also note that while Shakespeare is somewhat of an enigma, he is
no more of an enigma
than others from his social rank living in England at that time. Indeed, the problem with the surviving traces of Shakespeare's life, as Stephen Greenblatt has put it, “is not that they are few but that they are dull.” Indeed, compared with Marlowe, a spy who faced accusations of brawling, sodomy, and atheism, Shakespeare seems to have been something of a couch potato. When I spoke with Greenblatt recently, he pointed out that Shakespeare is actually better documented than many of his contemporaries—at least, better than most of his artistic or literary contemporaries. “And certainly [he's] better known than contemporaries of his social class—unless they got in horrendous trouble with the police,” Greenblatt said, referring to the body of evidence concerning Christopher Marlowe's activities. “Marlowe had a spy assigned to him, and the spy wrote reports. We could wish that Shakespeare had a spy assigned to him and left reports, but as far as we know that didn't happen.”

“WORDS, WORDS, MERE WORDS”

There is another trap to avoid: We have Shakespeare's plays, poems, and sonnets—but we must resist the urge to read them autobiographically. Usually, that is easy enough: When Shakespeare writes about the assassination of Julius Caesar, we don't imagine either that he himself had plotted assassinations, or that he time-traveled to ancient Rome to witness the big moment. (He didn't have to: He could just read Plutarch's account, readily available in a recent English translation by Thomas North.) Few would suggest that Hamlet's indecision means that Shakespeare was indecisive, or that Iago's scheming implies that the play's author was a devious manipulator. But certain scenes—parts of
As You Like It
and
The Winter's Tale
, for example—do conjure up something of life in a small English town, while the epilogue from
The Tempest
strikes many readers as offering at least a glimpse of the real Shakespeare. Another oft-mentioned example is the scene in
King John
in which Shakespeare writes poignantly of a mother's grief at the loss of her son, a play written very close to the time that Shakespeare lost his own son, Hamnet. The temptation to see the author through his works is even greater in the Sonnets, in which the words even play on the author's name (for example, Sonnet 135, which includes the line, “Whoever hath thy wish, thou hast my Will”). Are we really seeing the inner life of the author behind these lines? Caution would seem to be in order. As James Shapiro puts it, “Since I don't know when or where Shakespeare is speaking as himself, I steer clear of reading [the sonnets] as autobiographical. I'm not denying that there are elements of Shakespeare's personal experience woven into the fabric of these remarkable poems. But I am insisting that it is impossible to know how or when such personal elements appear.… It seems rather circular to me to construct the life out of the works and then read the works as autobiographical.”

That is good advice—but even so, the Shakespeare enthusiast can be forgiven for
looking for
glimpses of the author behind the words. It is a natural urge, especially when those words are so powerful that they seem to speak directly to us, even four hundred years later. As Greenblatt told me:

The longer you muse over and ponder [Shakespeare's works], the more you enjoy them, the more you feel that you're in contact with something important—you
do
wonder, ‘Who was this person?' And that would be just as true if a message appeared on the beach in a bottle, and you opened it up. Even if you had no access whatsoever to whomever launched that, you would, if only idly, think, ‘Who sent me this message?'—particularly if the message seemed actually addressed, in a strange way, to you.… This is not unique to Shakespeare. If Jane Austen reaches you, if Kafka reaches you—if you feel you're in contact with something powerful that is speaking to you deeply and personally—it is an absolutely natural human response to want to know who sent you this message and what to do about that response.

And so we yearn to know the “real Shakespeare”—while at the same time we learn to live with the biographical gaps. We have the most crucial elements of Shakespeare's life, and from those elements—after much scholarly research—a portrait, albeit an imperfect one, emerges.

*   *   *

There is a reason
why I paused to look at the challenges of piecing together the details of Shakespeare's life. I want the reader to be conscious of just how tricky it is to separate the probable from the plausible in the world of Shakespeare; to judge how speculative is too speculative. Every discipline has its quacks: Biology has “intelligent design”; psychology has parapsychology and phrenology; medicine has homeopathy; geology has (or at least had) its flat-Earthers and (amazingly) hollow-Earthers. And though it doesn't have a catchy name, physics has its “Einstein was wrong”ers. Isaac Asimov, one of the great science communicators of the last century, spoke of his “built-in doubter,” which he called on when confronted with controversial claims. The more radical the claim, the more skepticism was needed. Carl Sagan expressed a similar sentiment when he said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” A theory that claimed to overthrow four hundred years of established physics, for example, would demand the highest possible level of skepticism. One must doubt, but one must doubt intelligently.

Shakespeare studies has, of course, the anti-Stratfordians, “the Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare” crowd. But a theory doesn't have to be off-the-deep-end crazy to warrant suspicion. Nor is the reverse the case: A claim need not have tangible, physical proof to be plausible or even probable—as with the supposition that Shakespeare, as a youngster, attended his local grammar school, or that he owned at least a few books, which the majority of scholars accept. I sometimes wish I had a “nonsense detector,” analogous to Asimov's doubter, that could do the work for me: When someone mentions young William's attendance at the grammar school, it would emit a pleasing hum; perhaps a green light would go on. The discussion turns to Shakespeare's Catholic sympathies, or his sexual orientation, and a yellow warning light might come on. A visit to Italy? The yellow light begins to flash, and a buzzer comes on. Shakespeare was the Earl of Oxford? The light turns red, the buzzer gets louder, and smoke begins to stream out of the machine.… (Not as much fun as a time machine, to be sure, but still rather handy.)

We don't have such a device, so we must make do with our common sense, and the opinions of those scholars who have dedicated their careers to the study of Shakespeare and his work—exercising caution when the experts disagree with each other. In the chapters ahead, we'll face a task even more difficult than working out where Shakespeare was or who he was with at some particular time. We want to know
what he was thinking
. More specifically, we want to know what—if anything—he thought about the scientific discoveries of the day; the so-called “new philosophy.” Along the way we will hear a variety of theories and opinions, some of them very plausible and some perhaps not-so-plausible. I hope by this point I have laid the groundwork to help the reader navigate through the coming arguments.

If this were a traditional Shakespeare biography, we would plod through obligatory chapters on Elizabethan drama, the layout of the Globe Theatre, Shakespeare's use of language, and so forth—but we must move on. As we've seen, the final decade of the sixteenth century was a remarkable time in English history. This was the age not only of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, and Kyd, but also the age of John Dee, Thomas Digges, and Thomas Harriot. Nobody could have known it at the time, but a new age—the Age of Science—was nascent. We are now ready to ask how much Shakespeare may have known about such developments. Did he ever meet any of the great scientific thinkers of the day? Did he hear about their work, or read about their ideas? And if he did, how did that knowledge shape his own work? We could begin with any one of the playwright's beloved works, but why not start with the most famous of all. Let us head for the battlements of Elsinore.

 

7.     “More things in heaven and earth…”

THE SCIENCE OF
HAMLET

More than four hundred years after its debut on the London stage,
Hamlet
remains Shakespeare's most famous work, his most frequently produced play, and, arguably, his greatest artistic achievement. (A significant number of critics, especially since the early decades of the twentieth century, have voted for
King Lear
over
Hamlet
—we'll look at that contest a bit more in Chapter 14—but for now, let's not quibble; for the sake of argument, let's say they're both works of the highest order of literary genius.)
Hamlet
is also Shakespeare's longest play—staged uncut, it would run for more than four hours—and one of the most problematic.
*
Incredibly, as the centuries pass,
Hamlet
seems more and more relevant: It is said to define what it means to be modern; to be self-aware; to be human. Prince Hamlet himself is Shakespeare's most complex character, and certainly the most thoroughly scrutinized figure in English literature. (He also loves to talk, speaking more than 1,500 lines, accounting for about 39 percent of the play.) Hamlet is the role most coveted by actors, in spite of (or perhaps because of) his obvious flaws. He is cowardly, narcissistic, indecisive, starkly misogynistic—the list goes on—and yet we can't seem to get enough of him. Perhaps, as William Hazlitt once put it, “It is
we
who are Hamlet.” For a fictitious character, the prince and his inner turmoil seem all too real. His speeches, Hazlitt reminds us, are “but idle coinages of the poet's brain,” and yet “they are as real as our own thoughts.”

While
Hamlet
is rarely examined from the point of view of science, it is impossible not to think of the play, at least in part, as a reflection of its turbulent times—a period of remarkable intellectual upheaval. The time, many people surely felt, was indeed “out of joint.” From the play's start to its finish, Prince Hamlet seems trapped between two worlds. In act 1 we find him “crawling between earth and heaven” (1.2.129); when his uncle asks him about his dark mood, he claims to have been, on the contrary, “too much in the sun” (1.2.67). Several acts later, we find him peering down at Ophelia's freshly dug grave while invoking the planets above; he notes that Laertes' grief “conjures the wand'ring stars” (5.1.249). And lest we imagine the stars are moving across the sky peaceably, the ghost has warned Hamlet that his tale will “make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres” (1.5.17). The prince will soon be complaining that the world—“this goodly frame the earth”—is, for him, “a sterile promontory” (2.2.298–99).

“YOND SAME STAR THAT'S WESTWARD FROM THE POLE”

The action of the play is grounded in Denmark, but right from the opening scene we are asked to look upward. For the past two nights, the guards at Elsinore have been startled by the appearance of a ghost resembling the dead king (the recently deceased King Hamlet, father of the title character). Horatio, an old school friend of the prince, arrives on the scene, and Bernardo, one of the guards, explains the ghost's habits: He is prone to walking about the ramparts at night—not just at any time of night, but at one hour past midnight, when a particular star appears “westward from the pole”: