The Science of Shakespeare (35 page)

There is more: Usher sees a parallel between Galileo's observations of the night sky and Jachimo's observations in Imogen's bedroom. Jachimo emerges from the trunk in which he had been hiding, and begins to tally the various things he sees in her bedchamber. In a genuinely tricky passage, he refers to “ten thousand meaner movables.” Jachimo has taken out a notepad, and begins to write down a description of all that he observes:

Such and such pictures; there the window; such

Th'adornment of her bed; the arras, figures,

Why, such and such; and the contents o'th'story.

Ah, but some natural notes about her body

Above some ten thousand meaner movables

Would testify, t'enrich mine inventory.

(2.2.25–30)

The footnotes in most editions suggest that the “ten thousand meaner movables” refers to small items of furniture. (Indeed, as a good dictionary will point out, “movables” can still mean “furniture” to this day, and the Oxford English Dictionary notes that Jonson had used the word in this sense in
Volpone
in 1607.) But Usher objects: Nobody has
that much
furniture in their bedroom. Instead, he sees it as a reference to the number of stars visible to the unaided eye (a number that, as mentioned in the previous chapter, also crops up in
Hamlet
).
*
This number, of course, is in the process of being rendered obsolete, as Galileo's telescope now reveals the existence of untold thousands of stars beyond those accessible to the unaided eye. Usher also points out that Jachimo emerges from a “trunk”—which was also one of the words used to describe a telescope-like device. (Usher points out that it can have a third meaning, too: It can refer to a person's midsection—for example, the headless body of the murdered Cloten, in act 4, scene 2.)

Of equal interest is Imogen's intriguing reference to an “astronomer” in act 3. She has just been handed a note from her husband, delivered by his servant, Pisano:

PISANO

Madam, here is a letter from my lord.

IMOGEN

Who, thy lord? That is my lord, Leonatus?

O learned indeed were that astronomer

That knew the stars as I his characters—

He'd lay the future open.

(3.2.25–29)

In the standard interpretation of this scene, “astronomer” simply means “astrologer,” and “characters” means “handwriting”:
If only I could read the stars as easily as I recognize my husband's handwriting, I could know the future
. But Usher sees something else in these lines: He points to Thomas Digges's addition to his father's almanac, published in 1576, a book whose cover “is replete with zodiacal signs that could well be the ‘characters' that Imogen's astronomer knew.… It is reasonable to suppose that ‘the astronomer' refers to Thomas, and that (as posited) his subtextual representative on stage, Posthumus, has a store of information residing in memory comprised of contemporary celestial facts.”

And, as mentioned in the previous chapter, Usher believes that the play contains references to sights that even Galileo never saw—such as the detailed structure of Saturn's rings. “
Cymbeline
,” he concludes, “is a paean to the glories of the night sky revealed through telescopy.”

A SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE

Scott Maisano and John Pitcher exercise a more restrained approach. They do not tackle the subject of early English telescope use, but instead focus on the appearance of Jupiter as a likely allusion to
The Starry Messenger
. Writing in
Configurations
, Maisano proceeds with caution:

If it seems incongruous and unlikely, at first, for Shakespeare to have alluded to Galileo's startling scientific discovery at the conclusion of a play primarily set in Roman Britain, a millennium and a half before the invention of the telescope, it has seemed even more unlikely to many readers that Shakespeare would
not
have alluded to Galileo's discoveries, ever, in at least one of his plays.

Maisano cites the work of Marjorie Hope Nicholson, who, writing in the 1950s, finds no trace of the “new astronomy” in Shakespeare's works—even though he could hardly have been unaware of the latest discoveries:

Shakespeare must have seen the new star of 1604, must have heard of Galileo's discoveries in 1610.… Yet his poetic imagination shows no response either to new stars or to other spectacular changes in the cosmic universe.

Maisano, like Usher, challenges that view. The appearance of Jupiter with the four ghosts, in the final act of
Cymbeline
, seems to have Galileo's fingerprints all over it. (As he put it when I spoke with him in Boston recently: “It seems an awfully big coincidence if it's
not
an allusion to Galileo.”) Yes, the play is a “romance”—but a romance need not be a retreat from reality, Maisano explains. (Plus, the label “romance” was bestowed on the late plays only in Victorian times.) Maisano compares
Cymbeline
to a peculiar book written by Johannes Kepler the previous year. This was his
Somnium
—Latin for “Dream”—published in 1609. In the
Somnium
, the German scientist imagines what the Earth might look like from the moon, and how that view might change depending on the veracity of the Copernican model. This remarkable book has been called, among other things, the first work of science fiction, and yet it can also be seen as a vital work of science: It is here that Kepler first uses the word “gravity” in its modern sense. It could have been told in straight-ahead prose, but instead the entire story unfolds as a dream sequence. Kepler's vision may have been revolutionary, but his approach in communicating it in the
Somnium
was romantic, even antiquated. As Maisano puts it, “Kepler understood that in order to get at intellectual realities that defy our ordinary experiences … it is often necessary to resort to what looks on its surface like ‘literary escapism.'” Similarly, Shakespeare's
Cymbeline
, composed just one year later, “might appear to be a backward-looking romance full of dog-eared devices from popular literature, but it is in reality a scientific romance.” Incidentally, he agrees with Usher that the reference to a “learned … astronomer” does, in fact, point to a real-life astronomer—but while Usher sees it as referring to Thomas Digges, Maisano believes that “it is undoubtedly Galileo” who is being alluded to.

Another line in the play, from near the very end, catches Maisano's attention. One by one, the play's divergent plots come together, and the various loose ends are tied up: The misunderstandings are resolved, disguises removed, true identities revealed. King Cymbeline is overjoyed, but stunned. He asks, “Does the world go round?” (5.5.232). Maisano notes, “This is the only such utterance in Shakespeare's plays; and coincidentally, this precise question was part of intellectual discussion all across Europe in 1610.”

And what of the book placed on Posthumus's breast?
The Starry Messenger
was perhaps the most provocative new book circulating at that time—but it was not the only one. As Maisano points out, scholars were also plugging away on another groundbreaking book, the King James version of the Bible, to be published the following year. The book mentioned in act 5 of
Cymbeline
may, he speculates, be an allusion to the new bible—an appropriate gift, perhaps, for characters in a pagan setting seeking to improve their fortunes. (Again the dates are a bit tricky; as Maisano notes, although
Cymbeline
likely dates from late 1610, the first known performance occurred the following year.) There is another link to connect these two books: The Copernican view, now supported by Galileo's observations, would soon call into question the interpretation of scripture (a subject Galileo would address in his
Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina
in 1615). This, of course, would eventually get Galileo into trouble; but already the tension could be felt. Shakespeare, Maisano writes, “calls our attention to how this new universe of unimaginable size fundamentally alters the human predicament.” The playwright, he says, “seems to have set the two revolutions—Christian and Copernican—purposely and provocatively side by side.”

*   *   *

Like Maisano,
John Pitcher of Oxford sees
Cymbeline
as Shakespeare's attempt to come to grips with a changing world, a universe opened wide by the scientific discoveries of the day. The play involves fathers and kings and gods—throughout history, figures of authority—but all now finding their leadership challenged “by the evidence of modern experimental science.” As Pitcher argues in the introduction to the Penguin edition of the play (2005), the Jupiter scene is almost certainly a reference to the discoveries newly announced by Galileo. Previous scholarly editions of the play (and there have been many) have, as far as I can tell, left Galileo out completely. Editors of course noticed the cosmological allusions in the play's dramatic climax, but seemed content to address it in Ptolemaic terms. When Jupiter returns to his “palace crystalline,” for example, Martin Butler notes that “in Ptolemaic cosmology the ‘crystalline heaven' was one of the universe's outermost spheres, next to the firmament.”

For Pitcher, however, the nod to Galileo is more than a one-off allusion. The very essence of
Cymbeline
, he argues, involves the playwright's confrontation with a new worldview, a new way of thinking now sanctioned by the discoveries of Galileo and other promoters of the “new philosophy.” Shakespeare is also being forced to give something up—to abandon ancient ways of thinking that, beginning in 1610, were no longer tenable:

In that year, because of Galileo … the universe was finally proved to be not an enormous glass ball with the earth at its center but an expanding infinitude of galaxies, each packed with stars. It took a century or more for the old father, ruling in European courts and churches, to be unseated by this extraordinary scientific discovery, but everyone in the know realized its significance from the start, including Shakespeare.

This is a bold argument: Galileo looks through his telescope, the world suddenly changes, and Shakespeare knows it. The transformation began with Copernicus writing on the revolutions in the sky; soon, Pitcher is suggesting, there will be revolutions of a more dangerous kind, with political and religious orders turned on their heads. (He is perhaps getting ahead of himself with the reference to galaxies, whose nature was not understood in Shakespeare's time.
*
) But Pitcher's assertion is also the clearest statement yet from a mainstream Shakespeare scholar that
Shakespeare knew what was going on in science, and that this knowledge is reflected in his plays.

Intriguingly, Shakespeare manages to allude to the new astronomy in a scene built almost entirely from elements of ancient mythology and Ptolemaic cosmology. Jupiter is not only a planet but a god; and when he appears he refers explicitly to his “palace crystalline.” Moreover, the play is set not in Renaissance England but in ancient Britain. When Jupiter makes his appearance, Pitcher says, it is intended “as a deliberate and subtle twist in the game of old and new being played out constantly in
Cymbeline
.” What Galileo has seen with his telescope is crucial, but what he
doesn't
see may be just as relevant: There is no sign, for example, of the crystalline sphere through which Jupiter must pass in order to make his descent onto Shakespeare's stage. “If Galileo's telescope was correct,” Pitcher writes, “the crystalline roof had been an illusion all along.” In addition, Pitcher, like Maisano, sees something not-so-subtly Copernican in King Cymbeline's question, “Does the world go round?” The Earth's alleged movement through the heavens was, for an Elizabethan audience, every bit as disorienting as the discovery of new stars in the night sky. And, like Usher, he suspects the play also alludes to the new stars revealed by Galileo's telescope. The “stones on the beach / stars in the sky” comparison, in the “vaulted arch” speech from act 1, may be “possibly a way of saying that the stars too are uncountable.” (Mind you, the comparison did not originate with Galileo; Pitcher points out that it has its roots in Genesis.)

A further note on
The Starry Messenger
is in order: While it was written in Latin, it would not have been a difficult read for educated Englishmen. Galileo's book, Pitcher writes, was “a scientific publication written in very simple Latin, unimpeded by courtly rhetoric, and illustrated with clear plates.” I explored this point in more detail when I spoke with Pitcher in his office at St. John's College at Oxford.
*
“I think by the time Shakespeare had finished his grammar-school education, he would have had a reading fluency for Latin prose that matches the achievements of our undergraduates after, say, five terms,” he told me. In school, “Shakespeare would have done very little else
but
learn Latin.” Moreover,
The Starry Messenger
is not a difficult book. “The Latin is ‘schoolboy Latin,'” Pitcher says. “The learned community, and the not-so-learned community, will be able to open up that book and know what it means.” As mentioned, the book was distributed far and wide; it made such a splash that everyone who was anyone would have been discussing it. “I think it's the kind of stuff that would have been talked about in alehouses,” Pitcher muses.

Here is a destination for your time machine: an alehouse in London—maybe the famous Mermaid, in Cheapside, which Ben Jonson and other playwrights are known to have frequented—circa April 1610. Mugs and plates clatter; a knight argues with a tailor; a silversmith's apprentice tries to chat up a barmaid; a vagabond looks for any unguarded foodstuffs or coin purses. A group of actors are making merry at a table in the corner. One of them, sitting at the end of the table, is an actor who is also a playwright. Two strangers walk in; the playwright doesn't recognize them. One of them has just returned from Italy, and is enthusiastically describing his adventures to his companion. He pulls out a small book; they start talking about its remarkable claims, and pointing to its crisp, copperplate engravings.… The playwright leans forward.
What was that about Jupiter again?