The Science of Shakespeare (27 page)

While we're talking about who printed what, we must briefly mention another publisher, William Jaggard. (We encountered his surname on the title page of the First Folio: Jaggard, together with bookseller Edward Blount, published the first collection of Shakespeare's plays in 1623; since Jaggard died a month before the Folio's publication, however, it is his son Isaac's name that appears on the famous frontispiece.) We remember Jaggard for his connection to Shakespeare, but he also published many less-well-known works, among them a textbook on astronomy by Thomas Hill. The book went to press in 1599—around the time that Shakespeare was putting the finishing touches on
Hamlet
. By this time, Hill himself was dead, but a preface written by Jaggard pays tribute to the late author's skill. And though Hill rejected the Copernican theory, Jaggard's remarks are suggestive of the appetite for popular scientific works in Elizabethan England: With the nation having been blessed with four decades of peace, “Students have never had more liberty to look into learning of any profession”; as a result, “England may compare with any Nation for number of learned men, and for variety in professions.”

Besides Richard Field and William Jaggard, who else was Shakespeare friendly with in the 1590s? Certainly his fellow actors, including Richard Burbage, to whom he seems to have been particularly close, as well as John Heminges and Henry Condell, the two actors who would later compile Shakespeare's works for publication in the First Folio.
*
(Shakespeare left a small amount of money to Burbage, Heminges, and Condell in his will.) There was Ben Jonson, of course—both a friend and a competitor. Adding to the list, perhaps just below Shakespeare's professional colleagues, we can put forward the name of Leonard Digges, son of Thomas Digges.
*
We know that Leonard, who became a poet, was a fan of Shakespeare: He contributed a dedicatory verse in honor of the playwright in the First Folio in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death. (A few more lines of praise were included with a collection of Shakespeare's poems published in 1640.) Shakespeare may well have known Leonard's older brother, Dudley, and their mother, Anne (Thomas Digges's widow). As Hotson's research showed, the Digges family lived in Cripplegate, an area noted for its weavers and brewers, located just north of the city's ancient walls. Digges, like Isaac Newton in the following century, was not just a scientist but also something of a politician, serving as a member of Parliament for roughly the last thirteen years of his life. He was also rich—probably one of the wealthiest men in the neighborhood. Cripplegate, incidentally, was also home to Shakespeare's close friend Heminges; so if Shakespeare was spending time with Heminges, and certainly if he was chumming with either of the Digges brothers, occasional visits to the stately Digges home seem plausible.

A brief geographical note: We know that Shakespeare, in his first dozen or so years in London, was a man on the move. As we've seen, he lived, at various times, in Shoreditch, Bishopsgate, and Southwark. None of these neighborhoods is particularly close to the Digges residence in Cripplegate. But, given that Cripplegate was just a stone's throw from the booksellers' stalls north of St. Paul's, and that Shakespeare's good friend Heminges had been living there for several years already, the playwright is unlikely to have been a stranger to the area. (Hotson says that Shakespeare was “a frequent and welcome guest” at Heminges' house, although I'm not sure how he deduced this.) However, Shakespeare's connection to the neighborhood grew even stronger a few years later, when he rented a room on Silver Street, in the heart of Cripplegate, just two blocks away from the Digges family.

LIFE ON SILVER STREET

Of all of Shakespeare's London residences, the one we can pin down with the greatest precision is the home on Silver Street in Cripplegate. There we find him, beginning about 1603, renting a room from a man named Christopher Mountjoy. Mountjoy was a Huguenot—a French Protestant—and like many Huguenots, he had fled France to escape religious persecution. Apparently he did quite well for himself in London, manufacturing ladies' ornamental headpieces and wigs from his workshop in his London home. He lived there together with his wife, his daughter, and a number of apprentices and servants.

Fig. 7.3
A memorial to the First Folio, topped with a bust of Shakespeare, stands just off Love Lane, not far from the Museum of London and the Barbican complex. Shakespeare once rented rooms in a house a few blocks away. Author photo

Where, exactly, was the Mountjoy house? As is so often the case, legal documents provide the answer. It seems that Mountjoy's daughter, Mary, became involved with one of her father's apprentices. There was a courtship, then an engagement—and then something went terribly wrong. Mountjoy had been obligated to pay a dowry, but refused, and the matter ended up before the courts. (Maybe stinginess was something Mountjoy and Shakespeare bonded over? The playwright didn't like paying taxes; his landlord didn't like paying dowries.) The court case would be of minimal interest, except that Shakespeare, who apparently encouraged the pair in their romantic pursuits, was called on as a witness. At any rate, the court documents mention that the Mountjoys lived at the northeast corner of Silver Street and Muggle Street. Don't bother looking for either of these thoroughfares in your current
A-Z
; sadly, neither street exists today. And “Muggle” was actually just an alternative name for “Monkwell,” a street that ran northward from Silver Street, near the ancient city walls. Charles Nicholl, who pieced together the clues in his delightful book
The Lodger
(2007), concludes that the Mountjoy house—likely a timber-framed structure—was just across the street from the church of St. Olave's, which stood on the south side of Silver Street. This is the church where Shakespeare would have worshipped, though as Nicholl reminds us, this says nothing about his religious views, as church attendance was mandatory, and those who failed to attend services could be fined. Unfortunately, the Great Fire of 1666 leveled much of the neighborhood, destroying the church as well as the Mountjoy home. Silver Street itself lingered on for another 274 years, until a German bombing raid during the Second World War reduced the entire neighborhood to rubble. Postwar redevelopment of the area yielded the sprawling Barbican complex, just to the north; the Museum of London, immediately to the west; and the major east-west thoroughfare known as London Wall (part of the A1211 highway). About all that's left from Shakespeare's time is St. Olave's churchyard, now a small park (where London Wall meets Noble Street—two streets that you
can
find in your
A-Z
). Because street level has risen over the years, Nicholl's best guess is that the Mountjoy house occupied what is now an underground car park beneath London Wall. It is hard not to think of the neighborhood's transformation as something of an indignity. “An underground car-park is unmistakably an underground car-park,” Nicholl writes, “whether or not Shakespeare once lived on the site of it.” Nonetheless, a visitor to the neighborhood today may want to pause on the pedestrian footbridge that straddles the busy road adjacent to the Museum of London, and gaze out at this depressingly ordinary corner of Europe's busiest city: As thoroughly transformed as it may be, this was, at least for a few years, the center of Shakespeare's world.

*   *   *

It was the Digges' neighborhood, too.
As Leslie Hotson has noted, the Digges family home was on Philip Lane—two streets to the east of Monkwell Street. But they were more than just neighbors. As it turns out, the connections between Shakespeare and the Digges family, already strong when Shakespeare arrived at Silver Street, would only grow: A few years after Thomas Digges's death, his wife, Anne—now a wealthy and much-pursued widow in her mid-forties—married Thomas Russell, a landowner from the playwright's native Warwickshire. Shakespeare and Russell must have been close; after Shakespeare's death, Russell, together with Stratford attorney Francis Collins, would serve as the executors of Shakespeare's will. Meanwhile, the Digges's older son, Dudley (later Sir Dudley), would become a member of the Virginia Company, which established the colony at Jamestown in 1607. Although Dudley Digges never visited the New World himself, he would certainly have heard reports from those who did, and Shakespeare may have heard the tales from Dudley. By the same route, scholars have speculated, Shakespeare could have heard about the wreck of the
Sea Venture
off Bermuda in 1609, an event often seen as part of the inspiration for
The Tempest
. Much later, in 1655, Dudley's son, Edward Digges, would be appointed governor of the Virginia colony. But it is Leonard, not Dudley, whose life was transformed by his acquaintance with Shakespeare. As he would write in the First Folio, “This book, / when brass and marble fade, shall make thee look / fresh to all ages.” The twenty-two-line verse concludes: “Be sure, our Shakespeare, thou canst never die, / But, crown'd with laurel, live eternally.”

Let's recap the Shakespeare–Digges connection: Shakespeare was likely a regular visitor to Thomas Digges's neighborhood, and was friendly with at least one of his two sons. In the late 1590s, while searching for plausibly Danish-sounding names for two of his characters, he may have stumbled on the engraving of Tycho Brahe's relatives and has a flash of insight; the names are perfect, problem solved. Perhaps, as Leslie Hotson suggests, he saw the engraving on a visit to Thomas Digges's house. (As Hotson puts it, there is “little doubt that from 1590 Digges had a copy of his learned friend's portrait, bearing the names
Rosenkrans
and
Guildensteren
, at his house in Heminges' parish. Perhaps Shakespeare saw [the names] there.”) The death of Thomas Digges in 1595 need not sink this theory: It is possible that Digges's sons, or his widow, kept the picture after his death, a treasured keepsake, perhaps, of Thomas Digges's far-reaching influence and interests. (We know the family continued to live in the same house, in Cripplegate, for several more years.) However the playwright may have chanced upon the image, Shakespeare scholars seem at least willing to entertain the notion that he saw the Tycho engraving with his own eyes. If Shakespeare could have seen Tycho's astronomical letters, might he have also seen Digges's own writings? In particular, might he have perused Digges's updated edition of his father's almanac—the one featuring the now-famous diagram of an infinite cosmos? If he did, perhaps it can illuminate yet another remarkable passage in
Hamlet
.

THE UNIVERSE IN A NUTSHELL

The scene in question comes in the play's second act, where we find the prince conversing with his old schoolmates, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Prince Hamlet, as usual, is feeling a bit melancholy. More specifically, he feels trapped in his own country, which he feels is like a prison:

GUILDENSTERN:

Prison, my lord?

HAMLET:

Denmark's a prison.

ROSENCRANTZ:

Then is the world one.

HAMLET:

A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one o'th' worst.

ROSENCRANTZ:

We think it not so, my lord.

HAMLET:

Why, then 'tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.

ROSENCRANTZ:

Why, then your ambition makes it one: 'tis too narrow for your mind.

HAMLET:

O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space—were it not that I have bad dreams.

(
Hamlet
2.2.242–256)

We all have bad dreams on occasion, but where did Shakespeare come up with this striking phrase, “king of infinite space”? The scholarly editions are of little help; most of them simply let it pass without comment. Even the venerable Arden editions (Jenkins, 1982, and Thompson and Taylor, 2006) allow the phrase to slip by without a footnote—and the Ardens have footnotes up the wazoo. (Don't be alarmed if your own edition of
Hamlet
doesn't contain the “infinite space” remark—it occurs only in the folio text of 1623, and not in the various quarto editions, so it depends on which text your edition was based on.) Shakespeare does use the phrase “infinite” or “infinity” about forty times in the canon, but, with the exception of this scene from
Hamlet
, it is never invoked for the purpose of describing spatial extent.
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Of the remaining cases, the most beguiling is the soothsayer's line from
Antony and Cleopatra
: “In nature's infinite book of secrecy / A little I can read” (1.2.10–11).

The phrase “infinite space” was certainly not in common use in Shakespeare's time—though, as we've seen, there were a handful of thinkers who were giving the matter serious consideration. Digges, of course; and before him, Nicolas of Cusa. And then there was Giordano Bruno, who lectured in England in the 1580s. Bruno tackled the subject in one of his dialogues,
On the Infinite Universe and Worlds
(1584), writing that “There is a single general space, a single vast immensity which we may freely call Void.… This space we declare to be infinite.” Bruno was an ardent Copernican; so, too, was Digges. Might one of these thinkers have sparked a thought on the nature of the infinite as Shakespeare was working on
Hamlet
? Did he perhaps get the idea from looking at Thomas Digges's diagram of the cosmos (figure 3.3)—a diagram in which the stars, for the first time, are depicted as extending outward to infinity?