The Science of Shakespeare (26 page)

I don't want to make too much of the Arden revision; it's just a few lines of commentary in a 613-page book—and, as Jenkins reminds us, Shakespeare may not even have had a particular star in mind. But still: Here is one of the few cases of an astronomer telling the community of Shakespeare scholars, politely but firmly, “Hey, you missed a spot.” And at least a few of those scholars have said, “You're right, we did.”
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FROM HAMLET'S CASTLE TO TYCHO'S ISLAND

We have already examined (in Chapter 3) the impact of the new star of 1572, one of the key events in the demise of the Ptolemaic model of the cosmos. As we noted, Tycho Brahe made detailed observations of the star from his Danish island, while Thomas Digges and John Dee, observing from England, were similarly captivated by its appearance. But there is more to connect
Hamlet
and Tycho than just the supernova (that is, assuming the star in question
is
the supernova). To begin with, there is the play's setting. It's no surprise that Shakespeare chose to locate his play in Denmark. One of his sources was a medieval story about a Scandinavian prince named “Amleth,” dating from the twelfth century. A written account of this tale, by an author known as Saxo Grammaticus (“Saxo the Grammarian”), was first set to print in the early 1500s. Shakespeare may not have read Saxo's version, but he surely read a more recent French version by François de Belleforest, published in 1570. (By the 1580s, the story had been adapted for the stage, and was being performed in London by Shakespeare's own company. Possibly written by Thomas Kyd, the Ur
-Hamlet
, as scholars refer to it, has sadly been lost.) Some of
Hamlet
's key elements, including the murder of the old king and the quest for revenge, go back to the story's medieval roots. (The ghost's origins seem to be more recent; he may have made his debut in the lost Ur-
Hamlet
.) But while both Saxo and Belleforest locate the story in Denmark, it was Shakespeare who specifically took the action to the royal court at Elsinore. Though we have no reason to imagine that Shakespeare ever visited Denmark—or, indeed, that he ever traveled beyond England—he would certainly have known of the castle at Elsinore, since some of his fellow actors had played there. (As noted, King James of Scotland—the future king of England—had visited there as well; apparently Tycho and his island were quite a draw.)

Elsinore—Helsingør in Danish—stands on the eastern shore of the Danish island of Zealand, overlooking the channel separating Denmark from present-day Sweden (though in Shakespeare's day, this was all part of the Kingdom of Denmark). Aside from hearing about the castle from some of his actor friends, might there have been any other reason for Shakespeare to locate the play at Elsinore? Here, Donald Olson draws our attention to another recently published book. Perhaps Shakespeare had been flipping through the pages of the
Atlas of the Principal Cities of the World
, a lavishly illustrated pictorial atlas printed in 1588. One of the book's engravings shows an oblique aerial view of the region surrounding Elsinore castle, including, not more than a few miles away, the little island of Hven—Tycho Brahe's island. The engraving even shows Tycho's observatory, Uraniborg (“Heavenly Castle”), labeled in Latin as Uraniburgum (
figure 7.1
).

Fig. 7.1
The lavishly illustrated
Atlas of the Principal Cities of the World,
published in 1588, includes this depiction of the Sound of Denmark (separating present-day Denmark from Sweden). Tycho Brahe's observatory-castle, Uraniborg, on the island of Hven, is seen at the right; on the left is the castle of Elsinore (Helschenor), soon to be made famous by Shakespeare as the setting for
Hamlet
.
Donald Olson

Fig. 7.2
In this engraving from 1590, Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe is surrounded by the crests of members of his extended family. Among the sixteen relatives, we find a “Rosenkrans” and a “Guildensteren.” Copies of the engraving were sent to several English scholars, possibly including Thomas Digges, whose family had connections to Shakespeare.
Donald Olson

At the risk of getting a little carried away, we can imagine one of Shakespeare's fellow actors getting the royal tour, so to speak, of the castle and its environs. “… And if you look out across the channel, you can just barely see the little island that the king gave to an eccentric astronomer. His name is Tycho. What he can see through all these clouds I don't know, but…”

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We might also examine
the names in
Hamlet
: While most of the key characters have fairly generic, more or less classical names (“Claudius,” “Gertrude,” “Ophelia”), Hamlet's old schoolmates, the courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, do in fact sound stereotypically Danish. What led Shakespeare to choose these names? Again, we perhaps have a clue in the material that Shakespeare may have encountered in print—and once again it leads us back to the astronomer Tycho Brahe. In the 1590s, Tycho commissioned an engraving of himself—a portrait depicting the astronomer in a somewhat pompous-looking pose—surrounded by the crests of members of his extended family. When we look at the engraving closely, we find, among sixteen relatives, one named “Rosenkrans” and another named “Guildensteren” (
figure 7.2
).

There are, in fact, multiple versions of the engraving shown in the above figure. The one depicted here was made in 1590, but similar designs were printed several times in the 1590s and in 1601, and were included in various books, including the published collections of Tycho's astronomical letters, known as the
Epistolae
. Copies of those letters were circulated to men of learning across Europe, and the copy sent to an English scholar, Thomas Savile, has survived. Written in 1590, it includes Tycho's well-wishes for the two best-known English scientists of the day—John Dee and “the most noble and most learned mathematician Thomas Digges.” We know that Digges kept up a correspondence with Tycho as well. As the historian of astronomy Owen Gingerich suggests, “it is entirely possible that Digges received a copy of the
Epistolae
directly from Tycho himself.” The overall impression is that the “scientific community” of the time, to use an anachronistic term, was small and rather tight-knit. One imagines that everyone who was interested in the structure of the cosmos knew (or at least knew of) everyone else who was pondering similar questions. In his letter to Savile, Tycho adds, “I have included four copies of my portrait, recently engraved in copper at Amsterdam.” He even suggests that one of the talented English poets (he does not mention any names) might like to compose a few lines in his praise. (If the request makes Tycho appear somewhat full of himself, it would seem to mesh with what we know of the astronomer's character from other sources—and perhaps also from the pose that he strikes in the engraving itself.)

Olson, incidentally, is not the first scholar to point out the seeming coincidence of names between Tycho's portrait and the courtiers in Shakespeare's play. It had been noted by Leslie Hotson in the 1930s, by A. J. Meadows in the 1960s, and probably by others. In the early 1980s, Owen Gingerich concluded that the coincidence with the names Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is “so striking that we may be sure that Tycho's portrait was one of the sources for
Hamlet
's cast of characters.” As Olson puts it, “Shakespeare's imagination may well have associated the English astronomers, the new star, the Danish astronomer, and the Danish Hamlet.”

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

How much should we make of these two names, found both in Shakespeare's play and among Tycho Brahe's relatives? The engraving, scholars have pointed out, isn't the only place to find these somewhat common Danish names. Apparently a Danish diplomatic mission to England in 1592 included two delegates bearing those same names, and it seems that the two men were inseparable. Moreover, they had been students at Wittenberg, just like Shakespeare's courtiers. (Although not the same men as the relatives found in the engraving, they, too, are believed to have been distant relations of Tycho.) So there is more than one way in which Shakespeare might have encountered the names Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Still, a picture is worth a thousand words. What role might Tycho's engraving have played? In the Arden editions, both Jenkins (1982) and Thompson and Taylor (2006) mention the portrait as a possible source. Jenkins concludes that Shakespeare need not have seen the picture with his own eyes; simply hearing the names at some point was enough to give the play “an authentic touch of Denmark.” He also cautions that both names “were common among the most influential Danish families,” and that Frederick II, the Danish king who gave Tycho his island, had nine Rosencrantzes and three Guildensterns at his court. Even so, there are those who feel that Shakespeare's choice of these names is significant, and indicative of an important link between the playwright and the greatest of the pre-telescopic astronomers. Howard Marchitello notes “an admittedly striking series of coincidences that, from a certain perspective, can be said to connect Tycho's book to
Hamlet
(or
Hamlet
—or Hamlet—to Tycho's book).” A few scholars, including Scott Maisano, an associate professor of English at the University of Massachussetts–Boston, see the apparent
Hamlet
–Tycho link as an intriguing connection deserving of further study. “I would say that the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern connection to Tycho Brahe isn't just a coincidence,” Maisano told me recently. “The Tycho Brahe connection is one of the most important ones, and probably one of the least explored ones, for Shakespeareans.” Maisano suggests that the idea of a scientist on an island may have even more significance for
The Tempest
than for
Hamlet
, and sees the character of Prospero as more strongly linked to Tycho Brahe than to John Dee, the scientist most often associated with Shakespeare's island magician.

It would appear, at a minimum, that Shakespeare had
some
awareness of Tycho Brahe's reputation. But the weight that we choose to lend to these connections depends on how much Shakespeare knew about the astronomical thinking of his day. It would be a stretch to imagine that Shakespeare had any direct contact with Tycho—but maybe he didn't need to. Perhaps what he knew of English astronomy, and English astronomers, was enough—and so we turn once again to Thomas Digges, the greatest of the English scientists of the Elizabethan age. As we saw in Chapter 3, Digges was the astronomer who first popularized the Copernican theory in England, and who went even further than Copernicus by daring to imagine an infinite cosmos. Because Digges died in 1595—within a few years of Shakespeare's arrival in London—it is unlikely (though not impossible) that the two men ever met. However, the Digges family had a number of connections to Shakespeare—connections that strengthened in the years following the scientist's death.
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*   *   *

We might begin in 1590,
when an updated edition of Digges's book on military strategy, known as
Stratioticos
, was published in London. Overseeing the publication was Richard Field, an old childhood chum of Shakespeare's, from Stratford, who had settled in London a few years ahead of the playwright. A couple of years later, Field would publish Shakespeare's own
Venus and Adonis
. There is no reason to imagine that Shakespeare knew every book that his friend published—as voracious a reader as he surely was, he couldn't have plowed through
all
of them; and perhaps a book on military strategy wasn't all that enthralling. Or was it? You never know when you might have to write a good battle scene. Leslie Hotson found a number of similarities between Shakespeare's
Henry V
and Digges's
Stratioticos.
For Hotson, the character of Fluellen, the fiery Welsh captain, brings to mind Digges himself, especially in a number of lines in which Fluellen (and Digges) praises the military discipline of the Romans.