The Science of Shakespeare (40 page)

“TELL ME WHO MADE THE WORLD”

Another quasi-legitimate “magic” was alchemy, the quest to turn one kind of substance into another (and especially, to turn cheap metals such as lead into gold). Again, the theory of the four elements is key; alchemists believed that by changing the balance of these elements, they could transform one kind of material into another. This could be achieved through burning, distilling, dissolving, sublimating, and melting, usually with the aim of purifying one of the ingredients. (The fact that the transmutation of metals was prohibited by law suggests that many people believed it could actually be done.) As with other kinds of magic, including astrology, there were countless quacks. Ben Jonson's satirical play
The Alchemist
(1610) serves as a kind of theatrical debunking of alchemy and those who practice it. Jonson makes endless fun of the main characters, a con man named Subtle and his sidekick, Face—as well as those gullible enough to fall for their trickery (the “gulls”).

Who was Jonson's model for Subtle, the title character in
The Alchemist
? As we saw in Chapter 4, he may have been influenced by John Dee, the Elizabethan scientist-magician (and Dee is mentioned by name in the play); but another line of reasoning connects the play to Giordano Bruno's comedy
Candelaio
, published in 1582. After weighing the evidence of a Jonson–Bruno connection (including a tally of who may have known whom), Hilary Gatti concludes that it is “at least possible, if not probable, that Jonson had some knowledge of Bruno and perhaps of his works, even if only through conversations with those who had known him personally in London.”

As with astrology, there would have been those who believed in the power of alchemy, and those who doubted—and some who would have harbored both views simultaneously, just as someone today may claim to dismiss astrology, but might check their horoscope in the newspaper, even if just for its entertainment value. As Gordon Campbell puts it, both Jonson and his audience would have regarded alchemy “as a combination of science and imposture.” For Jonson, this duality creates the perfect dramatic and comedic vehicle.

Shakespeare seems to have had less use for alchemy than Jonson, though he mentions it on a handful of occasions. It comes up metaphorically in
Timon of Athens
(“You are an alchemist; make gold of that” [5.1.114]), for example; and in
King John
, where Philip, the king of France, says:

To solemnize this day the glorious sun

Stays in his course and plays the alchemist,

Turning with splendour of his precious eye

The meagre cloddy earth to glittering gold …

(3.1.3–6)

But the greatest magician on the London stage was not one of Shakespeare's creations, nor was it one of Jonson's. Twenty years before Prospero cast his first spell, audiences were treated to Christopher Marlowe's masterly play
The Tragicall History of Doctor Faustus
(ca. 1592). Marlowe did not invent his doctor out of whole cloth: His play is based on age-old stories of learned men who sell their souls to the devil in return for knowledge. By the sixteenth century, these tales had become associated with the real-life figure of Johannes Faustus, a German astrologer who lived in the early part of the century. A fictionalized account was set down by an anonymous German writer in 1587, and an English translation had appeared in 1592, serving as Marlowe's immediate source.

Marlowe's Faustus was a magician and also a scholar; he studied at Wittenberg just like Hamlet and his friend Horatio. Faustus yearns to know the secrets of the universe; in keeping with the traditional story, he promises his immortal soul to the devil in exchange for worldly knowledge. He abandons the traditional fields of academic learning for black magic (“'Tis magic, magic that hath ravished me” [1.112]). As we saw in Chapter 1, one of the first things Faustus asks of Mephistopheles concerns cosmology: He inquires after the structure of the heavenly spheres. “Now would I have a book where I might see all characters and planets of the heavens, that I might know their motions and dispositions” (7.171–3). His questions become ever more dangerous: “Tell me who made the world … Sweet Mephistopheles, tell me” (7.66–8).

Fig. 11.1
“Tell me who made the world … Sweet Mephistopheles, tell me.” Both a scholar and a magician, the title character of Christopher Marlowe's
Doctor Faustus
yearns to understand the universe's workings. This is the frontispiece of a 1631 edition of the play.
© British Library Board/Robana/Art Resource, NY

Faustus gradually gains both knowledge and power. He travels around Europe, casting spells, wreaking havoc in the royal courts, and playing tricks on the pope. As the end nears, the Devil comes to make good on the bargain. Faustus is now filled with regret—and fear—and pleads for mercy. All of that learning, he laments, was a terrible mistake: “O, would that I had never seen Wittenberg, never read a book!” (14.19–20). It is to no avail (spoiler alert!): The Devil carries Faustus's soul off to hell.

*   *   *

Astrology, witchcraft, alchemy,
magic … and science. It was all part of a package; all were thoroughly intertwined in the sixteenth century, and even into the early years of the seventeenth. Belief in fairies, demons, ghosts, and witches was common; like religion, these spirits were simply a part of everyday existence. What we now think of as “science” was only beginning to disentangle itself from magical thinking. We have heard about John Dee and his magic crystal, and the subtle mix of science and magic that informed the works of thinkers like Bruno and Gilbert. Indeed, Gilbert's magnetism seems almost tailor-made for mystical interpretations. As Keith Thomas notes, the very idea of magnetic forces “seemed to open the possibility of telepathy, magical healing, and action at a distance.” (For example, if someone was injured by the use of a weapon, it made sense to apply the healing ointment not only to the wound, but also to the weapon; after all, if magnetic forces could affect planetary orbits, might not vital spirits readily traverse the short distance between weapon and wound? Even the Royal Society, in its early years, took an interest in such matters.)

Another pivotal figure who embodies both mysticism and the emerging scientific worldview is the German astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler (1571–1630). Today we remember Kepler as the man who completed what Copernicus had begun—the scientist who finally worked out the precise mathematical laws governing planetary motion. But there was another side to this Renaissance genius, a side that reveals his deep-seated connections to the thinking of past ages.

Born near Stuttgart and educated at Tübingen, Kepler studied theology with the expectation of becoming a Lutheran clergyman. Instead, he ended up teaching mathematics at a provincial school, where he read
De revolutionibus
and became interested in the mathematical underpinnings of astronomy. He would later work as Tycho Brahe's assistant in Prague, and eventually served as court mathematician to Emperor Rudolf II and his successors.

THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

But Kepler was more than just a mathematician: Like the ancient Pythagoreans before him, he was obsessed with numerology; he was sure that certain numbers had special properties.
*
Why, for example, were there six planets (counting the Earth), rather than five or seven or some other number? The Creator must have had a reason for this state of affairs, and numerology presumably held the answer. When he was developing his model of the solar system, Kepler was careful to make it conform to his notions of mathematical beauty. He was enamored with the parallels between mathematics and music, and dreamed of translating the positions and motions of the heavenly bodies into a musical score. This was the “music of the spheres,” another idea that goes back to the Pythagoreans. Shakespeare alludes to this ancient concept several times—for example, in the words of Olivia in
Twelfth Night
:

O, By your leave, I pray you!

I bade you never speak again of him;

But would you take another suit,

I had rather hear you to solicit that,

Than music from the spheres.

(3.1.107–11)

Kepler was particularly fascinated by another mathematical discovery of the ancient Greeks—the five “regular solids” of Euclidean geometry. (These three-dimensional figures have sides that are all of an identical polygonal shape. They are the tetrahedron, with four sides, each triangular; the cube, with six sides, each square; the octahedron, with eight sides, each triangular; the dodecahedron, with twelve sides, each pentagonal; and the icosahedron, with twenty sides, each triangular.) In his
Mysterium Cosmographicum
(
The Cosmographic Mystery
), published in 1596, he presented his first full-length defense of the Copernican model. But he also put forward a remarkable theory about the relative sizes of the planetary orbits. The insight is said to have occurred to him while teaching in Graz, Austria. He was thinking about the solar system, and the platonic solids, and came up with the notion that the orbits of the planets must have the same proportions as these perfect geometrical figures (see
figure 11.2
).

It was an ingenious, bold idea; unfortunately, it was wrong—as Kepler discovered when he checked his theory against the best available data on the sizes of the planetary orbits, and realized it didn't quite fit (although it was close). The first draft of the
Mysterium Cosmographicum
was simultaneously a work of science and a work of theology, with Kepler trying to reconcile the heliocentric theory with various passages from the Bible. He imagined the universe itself as analogous to God, with the sun corresponding to the Father, and the stellar sphere to the Son; the space separating them he imagined as the Holy Spirit. (The book was published only after his mentor, Michael Maestlin, urged him to simplify the argument, and to go easy on the theology.)

*   *   *

Kepler's mystical side
tends to be downplayed these days, as we instead honor him for developing the laws of planetary motion, and for deducing the true shape of the planetary orbits (they're not circles, as the philosophers had for millennia imagined, but rather ellipses). These breakthroughs came only after he had moved to Prague; indeed, the great leap forward came only after Kepler gained access to Tycho's exquisite data on the positions of the planets (especially Mars), collected over many years. (Tycho and Kepler failed to see eye-to-eye on many things—recall that Tycho had rejected the Copernican view in favor of his own hybrid model—and Kepler got his hands on the vital data only after Tycho's death, and after much wrangling with his heirs.)

The resulting book was called the
Astronomia Nova
(
A New Astronomy
), published in 1609. The title suggests a certain amount of bravado, and perhaps it was justified. As mentioned, Kepler did not yet have the notion of gravity in the modern sense—but he realized that whatever force was holding the planets in their orbits decreased in strength in proportion to the distance.
*
Inspired by Gilbert's work on magnetism, Kepler was willing to accept the notion that it was indeed a magnetic force that kept the planets in their orbits. He pays tribute to both Gilbert and Tycho in his later astronomy textbook,
Epitome astronomiae Copernicanae
(
The Epitome of Copernican Astronomy
), published in three volumes beginning in 1615. He writes, “I erect the whole of astronomy on Copernicus's hypotheses about the universe, on Tycho Brahe's observations, and finally on the Englishman William Gilbert's science of magnetism.” Perhaps the key point is not that Kepler believed that the force was magnetism, but that he was willing to consider that
a force
, a purely physical (if tangible) entity, governed the motion of the planets. For the first time, an astronomer was investigating not only the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies, but their presumed physical causes. We can see why Owen Gingerich has referred to Kepler as the first astrophysicist. His work, as historian I. Bernard Cohen puts it, “implied an end to the Aristotelian cosmos and readied the scientific stage for Newton”—even though, as Cohen stresses, many astronomers remained unconvinced of Kepler's theory, and, as usual, the paradigm changed only slowly.