The Science of Shakespeare (36 page)

Shakespeare, we can be sure, wouldn't have settled for just
hearing about
this remarkable book: Here was a provocative little pamphlet from Italy, describing sights never seen before in the heavens,
with pictures
. He would have wanted to see it with his own eyes. Some of those in Shakespeare's audience—not all, of course—would also have seen
The Starry Messenger
; many others would have at least heard of it. With up to a thousand people at each performance of
Cymbeline
, Pitcher speculates, you could easily have a couple of hundred who would understand a reference to Galileo's book.

Naturally, I was curious what Stephen Greenblatt, perhaps the best-known Shakespeare scholar in America today, might have to say about these interpretations of
Cymbeline
, and, more generally, the suggestion that Shakespeare's plays contain allusions to the “new philosophy.” He's heard most of the theories at least in broad outline; he hadn't read Usher's work, however, so I summarized it as best I could. As the rain poured down in Harvard Square just beyond his window, he said that he wasn't quite willing to commit, explaining that, as a general rule, he is “somewhat allergic” to treating works of literature (not just Shakespeare) “as a kind of esoteric allegory.” I asked him specifically about Jupiter's appearance in act 5 of
Cymbeline
: Might the scene have been intended as an allusion to the discoveries announced in
The Starry Messenger
? Greenblatt concedes that it's “a very strange moment in Shakespeare,” and that it requires some sort of explanation. “I suppose it's conceivable,” he said.

Looming over both
The Starry Messenger
and
Cymbeline
is the question of authority: who has it, who can challenge it, and where one might seek the truth. Galileo's discoveries question the supremacy of ancient teachings, and, by extension, those who supported and propagated those views; in
Cymbeline
, Shakespeare questions a whole array of once-unassailable authorities, from fathers to kings and beyond. Galileo's discoveries made another set of ancient beliefs equally obsolete. Paradigms that had managed to escape the slings and arrows of the past fifteen centuries now lay in ruins. “The authority of Jupiter, of the old king, of God—it's done with, finished,” Pitcher says. “It's all back to human beings now.”

 

10.     “Treachers by spherical predominance…”

THE ALLURE OF ASTROLOGY

The parish register from Holy Trinity Church in Stratford—the site of Shakespeare's baptism, and his burial—does not make for compelling reading; normally, it is an endless tally of births, marriages, and deaths. Next to the date of July 11, 1564, however, the register contains these words:
Hic incipit pestis
(“Here begins the plague”). It is hard to imagine the terror that lurks behind these three little words, written three months after the playwright's birth. A tenth of the town's population was dead within six months. In London, the victims numbered in the tens of thousands. The plague was a recurring menace in Shakespeare's England, and no one knew when the next deadly visitation might come. When an outbreak occurred in 1593, the historian William Camden, a contemporary of Shakespeare, made a careful note of the circumstances. It was not the overcrowded streets or the lack of hygiene that captured his attention; rather, he noted that “Saturn was passing through the uttermost parts of Cancer and the beginning of Leo”—just as they had thirty years earlier, during another deadly outbreak.

The stars were never the sole explanation for human misfortune; disasters could also be interpreted as punishment by God for various moral transgressions (as countless pamphlets from this period show). Everyone agreed, however, that the movements of the stars and planets were a critical factor, and that their motion, along with the appearance of meteors or comets, could be read as portents of terrestrial events to come. One ignored such heavenly signs at one's peril. As Kirstin Olsen puts it, “People watched the sky with the same jumpy intensity of Wall Street analysts watching economic indicators; a bad omen could cause public confidence to plummet.” Clearly the sun, moon, stars, and planets held power over people's lives. As Kent declares in
King Lear
, “It is the stars, / The stars above us govern our conditions.…”
*
And Kent is not alone in pondering heavenly influences. In the same play, Gloucester refers to “these late eclipses of the sun and moon,” believed to be a reference to actual eclipses in September and October 1605. But note the rest of the line: These celestial events “portend no good to us” (1.2.91). Clearly there is little hope for disentangling astronomy from astrology: To Shakespeare—or at least to his audience—a profound link is suggested between celestial happenings and human affairs, a connection that would have made perfect sense to even the best-educated of Shakespeare's countrymen. Astrology was by far the most prevalent form of magic in Shakespeare's day; in fact, it simply reflected the prevailing wisdom of the time. As Olsen notes, anyone who denied the power of astrology would have been adopting “a fringe position.” Man and nature, earth and sky, microcosm and macrocosm: It was all connected, and the profound influence of the stars and planets was not to be taken lightly.
†

“THERE WAS A STAR DANCED”

Astrology loomed large in Shakespeare's world, but it was hardly new. The Babylonians had laid the groundwork three thousand years earlier; the system was further developed by the Greeks and Romans, and then by Arab astrologers in the Middle Ages. In England, astrology came to have two more or less distinct branches, known as “natural astrology” and “judicial astrology.” Natural astrology was, in fact, something like straight-ahead astronomy; it focused on tracking and predicting the motions of the sun, moon, and planets. Judicial astrology was closer to what we think of today as just plain “astrology”—the attempt to link celestial happenings to earthly affairs, and to use astronomical knowledge to predict terrestrial happenings. (To avoid confusion, I will put natural astrology aside, and use the term “astrology” to refer solely to “judicial astrology.”)

How, exactly, would the motions of the heavenly bodies affect human affairs? We must recall, first of all, the prevalence of the geocentric worldview: Most people believed that the Earth was the center of the universe, and that the stars revolved around the Earth. This by itself must have lent considerable weight to astrological beliefs. Also note that the sublunar world—the corruptible, changeable earth and its equally imperfect environs—was thought to be composed of the four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. These were in a state of constant flux, but their motion was thought to be governed by the pristine (and yet complex) motion of the heavenly spheres. This explains why any attempt to separate astrology from any other branch of “science” would have been a meaningless pursuit in Shakespeare's day. Astrological thinking, as Keith Thomas notes, “pervaded all aspects of scientific thought.” It should not be thought of as an isolated discipline, but as “an essential aspect of the intellectual framework in which men were educated.” Astrology, as J. A. Sharpe puts it, “had a fair claim to being the most systematic attempt to explain natural phenomena according to rigorous scientific laws then in existence.” In other words, astrology, in Shakespeare's England, was seen as a scientific pursuit, and a rigorous one at that. Indeed, many of the scientists we've been looking at (again, noting that “scientist” is an anachronistic term) transitioned effortlessly between astrology and astronomy. Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Thomas Digges, and John Dee were all, to some extent, astrologers as well as astronomers. (Writing in 1570, Dee notes that “man's body, and all other elementall bodies, are altered, disposed, ordered, pleasured and displeasured, by the influentiall working of the Sunne, Mone and other Starres and Planets.”) Dee consulted astrological charts to determine the best day for Elizabeth's coronation, and was called on to offer his views on the political significance of the comet of 1577. (Elizabeth herself asked that horoscopes be cast for her suitors, and used astrology to assess potential heirs.) As we've seen, the new star of 1572, and the Great Comet of 1577, were imagined to be fraught with astrological significance. Even Francis Bacon, now regarded as one of the key figures of the Scientific Revolution, seems to have embraced astrological thinking. (It has been argued that Copernicus and Galileo were exceptional in their
lack
of interest in astrology—although Galileo did cast horoscopes for his Medici patrons; presumably he had little choice in the matter.) But it was not just an educated man's hobby: The widespread popularity of astrology is reflected in the sales of almanacs, which were filled with astrological prognostications along with astronomical data; they outsold even the Bible. Astrology lay at the very foundation of humankind's attempt to understand the universe.

*   *   *

In an age
when scientific explanations were in short supply, one can see astrology's appeal. After all, the sun and moon (if not the stars and planets) actually
do
play a vital role in regulating life on Earth. The sun, of course, provides warmth and light and, indirectly, is responsible for the wind and weather patterns, while the moon (together with the sun) controls the tides. The motion of the sun and moon, along with the lunar phases, was perfectly predictable, and farmers required an intimate knowledge of this cycle. A doctor would have been well aware that certain kinds of illness—say, a bronchial condition—would be more common in winter than in summer. But the connections were imagined to run much deeper. For example, the moon was believed to control not only the tides, but also the moisture in a person's body, including the humors thought to govern health and sickness (we will look at medicine more closely in Chapter 12); moreover, a person's personality, and even their actions at specific moments, were thought to be controlled, or at least swayed, by celestial influences.

To the astrologer, much depends on the positions of the planets at the time of a person's birth; the planets, like the moon, were thought to affect the person's natural humors, which in turn make one more likely, or less likely, to be influenced by various passions, and to be predisposed to either good or evil. The free-spirited Beatrice, in
Much Ado about Nothing
, notes that “there was a star danced, and under that star I was born” (2.2.316). It is true that, by force of will, one might overpower these predispositions; but as one Elizabethan astrologer put it, “the most part of men doe follow their affections, and there are but fewe that doe master and overrule them.” It's not that the stars left one with no freedom; but it was only prudent to be fully aware of the various cosmic forces pushing and pulling on each individual as they navigated through life's decisions, big and small. As another practitioner put it, “An expert and prudent astrologer may through his cunning skill show us how to prevent the many evils proceeding from the influence of the stars.” The skilled astrologer could also advise on the best time to perform certain activities, such as embarking on a long journey, choosing a wife, or having a baby. Here, for example, is a seventeenth-century tip for siring a male child: “If thou want'st an heir, or man-child to inherit thy land, observe a time when the masculine planets and signs ascent, and [are] in full power and force, then take thy female, and cast in thy seed, and thou shalt have a man-child.”

We should not be surprised to learn that, in 1599, Shakespeare's company consulted an astrologer to decide on the best day to open the Globe Theatre. (They settled on June 12, which was the summer solstice and also a new moon.) Of course, astrologers needed to hedge their bets: They never offered certainty, only probabilities.
*
Purposeful ambiguity was the norm. A prediction might fail to come true, and yet one could not label the astrologer or the almanac as “wrong.” (Indeed, as early as 1569 an English pamphlet had mocked the almanac makers by publishing three differing predictions from popular almanacs of the day.) Moreover, if you shell out enough predictions, some are bound to come true—as Montaigne observed in his
Essays
: “I know people who study their almanacs, annotate them and cite their authority as events take place. But almanacs say so much that they are bound to tell both truth and falsehood.”

*   *   *

Astrology permeates the Shakespeare canon,
with its endless references to celestial happenings and their earthly significance. The playwright understood, and exploited, the traditional symbolism associated with each of the heavenly bodies, linking the sun with masculinity and kingship; the moon with femininity, changeability, and of course madness (“lunacy”). The planets had their purported domains of influence, as did the twelve constellations of the zodiac in which they appeared. The characters in
Henry VI, Part 1
speak of “planetary mishaps” (1.1.22) and “adverse planets” (1.1.54); and in
The Winter's Tale
, Hermione bemoans:

There's some ill planet reigns.

I must be patient till the heavens look

With an aspect more favourable.

(2.1.105–7)

We have already looked at Helena's verbal sparring with Parolles in
All's Well That Ends Well
, in which she suggests that he was “born under a charitable star,” but then goes on to insist that the star was Mars “when he was retrograde,” an astrological as well as an astronomical reference. In
Richard III
, the king expresses a straightforward desire for a celestial “blessing” of his ambitious political maneuverings: “Be opposite, all planets of good luck, / To my proceeding…” (4.4.402–3). And of course the entire plot of
Romeo and Juliet
is focused (as the prologue tells us) on the fate of the “star-crossed lovers.” One senses that the playwright knew the basics of astrological practice nearly as well as the almanac writers.