The Science of Shakespeare (44 page)

Of her own, by chance, by the rush and collision of atoms,

Jumbled any which way, in the dark, to no result,

But at last tossed into combinations which

Became the origin of mighty things,

Of the earth and the sea and the sky and all that live.

Lucretius goes on to describe the physical properties of atoms, and how the motion of these atoms is able to account for the vast array of phenomena we see in the natural world. He asserts that earthquakes, volcanoes, and lightning—which have struck fear into so many, and which had often been seen as requiring a supernatural explanation—have physical causes. To be sure, certain key ideas are missing; he did not quite have the notion of evolution and natural selection, for example—although Lucretius did suspect, as other ancient writers had, that species that once flourished have since become extinct. Nonetheless,
On the Nature of Things
has a strikingly modern feel.

THE BEST SCIENCE POEM EVER WRITTEN

Lucretius's most recent champion has been Harvard scholar Stephen Greenblatt, who examines Lucretius's influence in his Pulitzer Prize–winning
Swerve
(2011). When he read
On the Nature of Things
, Greenblatt couldn't help thinking of a trio of more recent thinkers: “So much that is in Einstein or Freud or Darwin or Marx was there,” he told
Harvard Magazine
. “I was flabbergasted.” In
The Swerve
, he describes the ancient poet's worldview:

There is no master plan, no divine architect, no intelligent design. All things, including the species to which you belong, have evolved over vast stretches of time. The evolution is random, though in the case of living organisms it involves a principle of natural selection. That is, species that are suited to survive and to reproduce successfully endure, at least for a time; those that are not so well suited die off quickly. But nothing—from our own species to the planet on which we live to the sun that lights our days—lasts forever. Only the atoms are immortal.

This is a remarkably modern way of seeing things (even though, as Greenblatt stresses, the path from Lucretius to our own culture is neither straight nor smooth). Nonetheless, there is at least a hint of twenty-first-century skepticism in Lucretius's epic poem, in which we are confronted with a universe that is neither for, nor about, humans. Here, for example, is Lucretius's take on “intelligent design”:

For certainty not by design or mind's keen grasp

Did primal atoms place themselves in order,

Nor did they make contracts, you may be sure,

As to what movements each of them should make.

But many primal atoms in many ways

Throughout the universe from infinity

Have changed positions, clashing among themselves,

Tried every motion, every combination,

And so at length they fall into that pattern

On which this world of ours has been created.

Lucretius's vision provides, among other things, a new and much less frightening view of death. There can be no heaven or hell, he reasons, because the soul is mortal. He and his followers regarded death as part of life; they dismissed notions of an afterlife as superstitions. He even urges his readers to keep their minds “clean of the taint of vile religion.” Even so, Lucretius and his followers were not, in the modern sense, atheists: They did, in fact, have a panoply of gods. And as Gavin Hyman writes, “the notion, intrinsic to the modern understanding of atheism, of immanence—of the world existing quite free of any sort of transcendent realm—would have been almost unintelligible to them.” But such gods as they
did
believe in kept their hands off of humans and human affairs. If they were not entirely absent, the gods were at least indifferent.

*   *   *

There is no need
to recount the gradual rediscovery of Lucretius in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, a story that Greenblatt covers quite thoroughly in
The Swerve
. It is enough to note that the ideas that Lucretius explores with so much energy in his poem were just beginning to resurface in the time of Shakespeare. The message of the poem was still too radical to be openly embraced—it was too close to all-out atheism—but nonetheless, as Greenblatt notes, “Lucretian thoughts percolated and surfaced wherever the Renaissance imagination was at its most alive and intense.”

Some thirty Latin editions of
On the Nature of Things
were published between 1473 and 1600, from thick scholarly versions to cheap pocket editions. We don't know if Shakespeare got his hands on one of these editions, although we
do
know that Ben Jonson did; his own pocket-sized copy, its pages ink-stained, corroded, and brittle (it is literally falling apart), can be seen in the Houghton Library at Harvard. But, as we will see, Shakespeare at least knew
of
Lucretius, thanks to Montaigne, whose work we will examine in a moment.

THE THEORY THAT WOULDN'T DIE

And what of Lucretius's bold theory of atoms in motion? References to atomic theory are rare in English writing through to the middle of the sixteenth century, but then, as Ada Palmer has noted, they become increasingly common—presumably inspired by a renewed awareness of Lucretius's poem—beginning in the 1560s (as it happens, the decade of Shakespeare's birth). We can at least say that Shakespeare had some understanding of what Lucretius's atoms were about. In act 1 of
Romeo and Juliet
, the young lover is talking to his friend Mercutio about dreams and dreaming. Mercutio replies that Romeo must have been visited by Queen Mab, referring to a tiny fairylike creature possibly originating in Celtic mythology. She causes her “victims” to dream, by entering their brains through their noses while they sleep:

She is the fairies' midwife, and she comes

In shape no bigger than an agate stone

On the forefinger of an alderman,

Drawn with a team of little atomi

Over men's noses as they lie asleep.

(1.4.55–59)

This little speech is nothing if not vivid, and we are left wondering how small Queen Mab must be, and her little coach, and the even tinier “atomi” that pull it. Shakespeare mentions “atomi” on a couple of other occasions, as when Celia declares, in
As You Like It
, that “It is easier to count atomies as to resolve the propositions of a lover” (3.2.229–30). This of course is poetry, not physics—but then, we can say the same for Lucretius's
On the Nature of Things
. Of course, one doesn't need to postulate a theory of atoms in random motion to acknowledge the haphazard nature of life's journey. As Florizel admits in
The Winter's Tale
, “… we profess / Ourselves to be the slaves of chance,” always at the mercy “Of every wind that blows” (4.4.536–37).

“QUE SAIS-JE?”

If Lucretius was the great skeptical thinker of the first century B.C., Montaigne filled that role in the sixteenth century. Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) was brave enough to doubt much of the accepted dogma in his time. He questioned the authority of religious and political leaders; he questioned the wisdom of the ancient philosophers; he questioned mankind's privileged status in the cosmic hierarchy. He even questioned the power of reason to make sense of the world. In his private study, he had the words of the skeptic philosopher Sextus Empiricus, “All that is certain is that nothing is certain,” painted along one of the wooden beams; another bore the phrase “I suspend judgment.” And for good measure he had a medal struck with what has come to be thought of as his motto:
Que sais-je?
—“What do I know?” For Montaigne, nothing was to be taken for granted.

Montaigne, whom we met briefly in the introduction, was born into a wealthy family that owned property not far from Bordeaux, in the southwest of France. He was something of a child prodigy, and his father, recognizing his son's talents, arranged for the boy to be spoken to only in Latin. It seems to have worked, as the boy is said to have mastered Latin even before he was fluent in French. He studied law, advised kings and princes, and served two terms as mayor of Bordeaux—but it is as a man of letters that we remember him.

Montaigne spent much of the final twenty years of his life in self-imposed exile within the tower of his chateau, where he amassed a personal library of more than a thousand books. His greatest influences were the skeptical philosophers of the ancient world; along with Sextus Empiricus, he was attracted to the ideas of the Greek thinker Pyrrho of Elis (ca. 360–275 B.C). Pyrrho and his followers believed that human beings were in no position to judge questions for which there was no clear answer. Indeed, they weren't sure if anything at all could be known with certainty. Pyrrho's own writings have been lost, but an account written by Sextus, nearly five centuries later, survived. New copies of that text began to circulate in Europe in Montaigne's time, and he eagerly devoured its contents. Sometimes he agreed with the conclusions of the ancient writers, and sometimes he didn't—he read everything with a critical eye. And then he started writing. And writing. And writing. The result is his sprawling
Essays
, spanning 107 chapters and filling three books. They were published over a twenty-two-year period, beginning in the 1570s. In the
Essays
, Montaigne has given us his thoughts on life, the universe, and everything.

Montaigne, writing in plain French, sets down exactly what is on his mind—and because of this clarity and honesty, his words sound as fresh today as they did four and a half centuries ago. His foremost goal was to know the mind itself—a task he described as “a thorny undertaking,” one that asks us “to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds.” Indeed, he more or less invents “stream of consciousness” writing:

I turn my gaze inward, I fix it there and keep it busy. Everyone looks in front of him; as for me, I look inside of me; I have no business but with myself; I continually observe myself, I take stock of myself, I taste myself … I roll about in myself.

Montaigne was able to project his imagination outside of his own immediate world. He knew that, in a sense, everything is relative: Everything depends on one's point of view. He saw that what was sacred to members of one culture was blasphemy to members of another. As a young man he had traveled widely, and became acutely conscious of what we would now call “cultural relativism.” Neighboring countries, even neighboring regions, had different customs, laws, and beliefs. “What kind of Good can it be,” he asked, “which was honoured yesterday but not today and which becomes a crime when you cross a river! What kind of truth can be limited by a range of mountains, becoming a lie for the world on the other side.”

To question culture and customs leads one inevitably to question religion and religious practice. Montaigne understood that people come to their religious beliefs through a series of accidents: of birth, of location, by exposure to particular teachers, and so on. We defend our particular brand of faith—but we should not be surprised that our neighbors defend theirs just as vigorously. He quotes approvingly from the Roman poet Juvenal: “The fury of the mob is aroused since everyone hates his neighbours' gods, convinced that the gods he adores are the only true ones.” Montaigne had witnessed the horrors of religious warfare with his own eyes, as well as the needless suffering brought on by the witch-hunt craze. As he once reflected, “It is taking one's conjectures rather seriously to roast someone alive for them.” And although Montaigne was fascinated with (perhaps obsessed by) death, he seems to have had little interest in what, if anything, came after it.

Montaigne questioned
almost
everything. He refused to embrace the godless world described by Lucretius. However much he may have tried, he could not bring himself to doubt the existence of a creator. (He at one point calls atheism a “monstrous thing,” and later speaks of “the dreadful, horrible darkness of irreligion.”) He remained a practicing (and presumably believing) Catholic to his dying day. But he saw no conflict between his faith and his skepticism: He accepted the teachings of his religion not by any process of reasoning, but simply
as faith
(a perspective known as
fideism
, from the Latin word for faith,
fides
). Without such faith, he believed, there was no way to anchor one's life. Yet he allowed for a separation of private and public life. Whatever inner thoughts one harbored, there was no need to let it interfere with one's place in the community. “The wise man ought to retire into himself, and allow himself to judge freely of everything,” he wrote, “but outwardly he ought completely to follow the established order.” As a result of this duality, James Jacob notes, Montaigne's skepticism “had revolutionary intellectual consequences, while scarcely producing so much as a social ripple.” In spite of Montaigne's avowed devotion to his Catholic faith, many people came to see the
Essays
as an irreligious, even dangerous work. A century after its publication, the Vatican, which had seen no problems with the book initially, decided not to take any chances, and placed the
Essays
on its Index of prohibited works.

MONTAIGNE, MAN OF SCIENCE?

Montaigne, like Lucretius, was prepared to question one of the most cherished notions of all—the idea that the universe was made for our benefit. Montaigne's take on such pompous self-importance—which presages not only Sagan, but Feynman, Weinberg, and a host of late-twentieth-century writers on physics and cosmology—is worth examining (we looked at it briefly in Chapter 2, but here I will quote the relevant passage in its entirety). Who, Montaigne asks,