The Science of Shakespeare (6 page)

If you're thinking that all of this is frighteningly complex, you're not alone. In the thirteenth century, the king of León, Alfonso X, commissioned a new set of astronomical tables to be drawn up; the calculations were carried out using the Ptolemaic system, which still reigned supreme in celestial matters. When one of his aides explained the system to him, the king is said to have remarked, “If the Lord Almighty had consulted me before embarking upon the creation, I should have recommended something simpler.”

Three centuries later, this apparent complexity would trouble the poet John Milton. In
Paradise Lost
, Adam inquires about the structure of the heavens; the angel Raphael replies that God must surely be laughing at man's desperate efforts to explain the cosmos:

… when they come to model heav'n

And calculate the stars, how they will wield

The mighty frame, how build, unbuild, contrive

To save appearances, how gird the Sphere

With centric and eccentric scibbled o'er,

Cycle and epicycle, Orb in Orb …

(8.79–84)

Remarkably, as complicated as the Ptolemaic system sounds, it worked: It allowed astronomers (and astrologers) to predict the positions of the planets with reasonable accuracy, allowing them to “save the appearances” of the wandering lights in the night sky. (That phrase, derived from a Greek expression, had long been in common use when Milton borrowed it for use in his poem.) And it worked in spite of a fairly serious glitch. It's not just that Ptolemy had placed the Earth, rather than the sun, at the center; that, by itself, would not affect the predicted positions, as the two schemes are mathematically equivalent. But his estimates of the sizes of the spheres were all quite far off. They were based on the “best guess” at the distance between the Earth and the sun—which, it turns out, Ptolemy had underestimated by a factor of twenty; this, in turn, threw off all of the other estimates of distance.

Ptolemy's vision was laid out in his hefty book, which, thankfully, is no longer known by its Greek title (translated roughly as “Mathematical Systematic Treatise”) but by the name it took on centuries later, the
Almagest—
derived from an Arabic phrase meaning “the majestic” or “the great.” The
Almagest
is divided into thirteen sections, or “books,” each crammed full of diagrams, charts, and equations. (And remember, for the first thirteen hundred years of its existence, it could be copied only by hand.) Far more thorough and authoritative than any previous astronomical text, it would dominate cosmological thinking and teaching for the next fourteen centuries.

In medieval Europe, Christian theology adopted some aspects (though not all) of the ancient Greek description of the cosmos. What endured, both in Catholic nations and in the newly Protestant lands, was a kind of “Christianized Aristotelianism.” It was a worldview that embraced the structure of the heavens and the Earth as described by Aristotle, and the basic elements of the various celestial movements as described by Ptolemy, with all of those deferents, eccentrics, and epicycles. It was an ingenious synthesis—and a remarkably cohesive picture of the world.

MICROCOSM AND MACROCOSM

What this discussion of the motion of the heavenly spheres leaves out is just how
intimate
the medieval universe was—at least, the version of the universe that emerged once Christianity and Greek philosophy had completed their merger. It was not a complete unification, however. Some of the key ideas of Greek thought—those seen to be compatible with the Christian faith—were embraced by the early Church; others were discarded. (For example, the idea of the primum mobile was absorbed rather easily; for Christians, this realm could simply be associated with God himself, who could act as a “first cause,” giving the spheres their initial motion.)

The picture that emerged was one of profound unity: A sublime order was seen to underlie the arrangement of the natural world, from the lowest rocks to the loftiest stars—with man occupying a unique position in the middle, noble in reason but frail in body. Everything, and every person, had its place in this grand cosmic hierarchy, sometimes called the “Great Chain of Being.” Kings ruled over men; men ruled over their households. It was an interconnected web, with a just and omnipotent God supervising from above. With this hierarchy in mind, we can see why cosmology had a political dimension—or, if you prefer, why politics had a cosmic dimension. The king was next to God, and God ruled the heavens.

It was a small step to imagine a connection between the monarch and the heavens themselves—an idea illustrated rather vividly on the frontispiece of
Sphaera Civitatis
(
The Sphere of State
), a commentary on Aristotle's
Politics
by the writer John Case, published in 1588 (see
figure 1.2
). As a queen without an heir, Elizabeth could be forgiven for fearing disorder above all. But the engraving goes beyond simply equating the sovereign with divine order; it places her in the realm of the heavens themselves. The diagram is solidly Ptolemaic, with the Earth lying as the center. But as Jonathan Bate points out, it wouldn't be all that disruptive had it been presented as Copernican, with the sun, symbolizing the monarch, placed at the center; either way, the queen “presides over the whole scheme [with] implacable authority.” (Much later, in the second half of the seventeenth century, Louis XIV of France would push the metaphor as far as one might reasonably expect to, declaring himself the “sun king.”) Royalty need not be compared to the sun; a star might suffice. In one of Ben Jonson's masques, a prince declares,

I, thy Arthur, am

Translated to a star; and of that frame

Or constellation that was called of me

So long before, as showing what I should be,

Arcturus, once thy king, and now thy star.

Elizabeth couldn't be compared to Arcturus, since she was a woman; instead, as Alastair Fowler points out, she was often compared to Astraea, the “star maiden” of Greek mythology. Astraea was associated with justice as well as innocence and purity. Born a human, she was repulsed by the wickedness of mankind and ascended to the sky to become the constellation Virgo (the Virgin)—rather appropriate for the Virgin Queen.

Fig. 1.2
With the monarch imagined to have divine properties, it was reasonable to depict her in the heavens, preserving the very order of the cosmos—an idea illustrated vividly in the frontispiece of a 1588 book of political commentary. (Note that Queen Elizabeth presides over an Aristotelian, earth-centered universe.)
The Granger Collection, New York

With great power, of course, comes great responsibility, and so kings and princes must be held to a higher moral standard than the common man. As Imogen notes in
Cymbeline
, “… falsehood / Is worse in kings than beggars” (3.6.13–14). Few would have doubted a profound connection between social and celestial order, the inherent unity of microcosm and macrocosm—a way of thinking encapsulated in Calpurnia's famous warning: “When beggars die, there are no comets seen; / The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes” (
Julius Caesar
2.2.30–31).
*
In
Troilus and Cressida
, Ulysses takes the analogy much further. In a remarkable speech, he describes an intricate parallel between social order and cosmic order:

The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre

Observe degree, priority and place,

Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,

Office and custom, in all the line of order.

And therefore is the glorious planet Sol

In noble eminence enthroned and sphered

Amidst the other …

(1.3.85–91)

As we've seen, this passage can be taken as either Ptolemaic or Copernican, depending on one's interpretation.
†
Either way, everything and everyone had their place and their purpose. Not surprisingly, there was little hope for improving one's lot in life; to attempt to do so was like putting a wrench in the divine machinery of the cosmos, and was likely to bring divine retribution. It was, above all, an interconnected world; its every corner, as historian Lawrence Principe says, was “filled with purpose and rich with meaning.”

The ancient writings were taken seriously. By Shakespeare's time, Plato and Aristotle had been dead for nineteen centuries, yet were deemed more authoritative than any living thinker. For the natural sciences in particular, Aristotle was
the
authority. But it was Plato who spoke of the link between man and the cosmos—between microcosm and macrocosm (“little ordered world” and “large ordered world”). As we struggled to understand our lives here on Earth, we could look to the heavens for guidance: Their orderly structure was a model, a blueprint, for living a rational, meaningful life. Every branch of learning, from astrology to medicine, flowed from this simple assertion. We can see why natural philosophy, though roughly equivalent to what we now call “science,” was broader in scope: It encompassed not only the observational sciences, but also theology and metaphysics. And we can understand why as late a figure as Sir Isaac Newton, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, was able to carry out scientific experiments one day, dabble in alchemy the next, and study obscure biblical passages the day after that.

To study nature was to study God's creation. That sentiment was commonplace in Renaissance Europe, but its most compact and eloquent expression is found in Psalm 19: “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.” (On this point, Protestants and Catholics were in full agreement. As Calvin writes, “The skillful ordering of the universe is for us a sort of mirror in which we can contemplate God, who is otherwise invisible.”) To see God's handiwork is one thing; to comprehend it is another. The Creator worked in mysterious ways, and no mere mortal could grasp his plan for humankind in its entirety—but one could glimpse a small part of it, perhaps, by studying God's creation. One could come to know God through either of the “two books”—the book of nature or the book of scripture. His Word or his Work.

By Shakespeare's day, the metaphor was ubiquitous: Nature was seen as a book that could be read by someone with the right training. We have some idea of the texts that the playwright perused, and he almost certainly had access to an encyclopedia written by a Frenchman named Pierre de la Primaudaye, who declares that we must consult both “books” in order to know God: “We must lay before our eyes two bookes which God hath given unto us to instruct us by, and lead us to the knowledge of himselfe, namely the booke of nature, and the booke of his world.” Mind you, Shakespeare wasn't shy about projecting the metaphor back to ancient Rome. In
Antony and Cleopatra
, the soothsayer says of his abilities: “In nature's infinite book of secrecy / A little I can read” (1.2.10–11).

Two books, but a common purpose: to know the mind of God, and through God to understand the meaning and purpose of life. As a new era dawned, Lawrence Principe writes, the greatest of thinkers “looked out on a world of connections and a world full of purpose and meaning as well as of mystery, wonder, and promise.”

FROM MEDIEVAL TO MODERN

A profound change in this way of seeing the world was on the horizon—though of course no one at the time would have recognized its first stirrings. The period that we now think of as the Scientific Revolution—roughly 1500 to 1700—was seen as nothing of the sort at that time. Moreover, the discoveries that we celebrate in science museums today probably had little impact on ordinary men and women at the time. As Peter Dear observes, it is “unclear how much difference the classic ‘Scientific Revolution' of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries made to ordinary people.” The innovations that it brought “left most features of their everyday lives unchanged.” As Steven Shapin points out, the term “Scientific Revolution” saw widespread use beginning only in the late 1930s.
*
(It has been fashionable in recent years to quote the first sentence of Shapin's book
The Scientific Revolution
: “There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution. And this is a book about it.”) And yet it was, undeniably, a time of unprecedented inquiry, investigation, and discovery.

Whatever we may call this period, something rather important happened, even if it was more gradual, and constituted less of a break with past traditions, than the name “revolution” might suggest. But it did not come out of the blue; rather, it was built on a foundation established in the latter part of the Middle Ages. And it did not happen everywhere at the same time; what we would now recognize as “modern” developments in medicine, engineering, and commerce, as well as in the visual arts and literature, could be seen in Italy many decades before they reached more remote parts of the Continent. It was, as Principe puts it, “a rich tapestry of interwoven ideas and currents, a noisy marketplace of competing systems and concepts, a busy laboratory of experimentation in all areas of thought and practice.” The printing press, a fifteenth-century invention, fostered the spread of ideas at a new, accelerated pace, while voyages of discovery were opening up new worlds for colonization and exploitation. And the rediscovery of classical texts, via Arabic translations, triggered a new wave of learning across Europe. Those works included the writings of Aristotle and Ptolemy, which we've touched on, as well as the geometry of Euclid, the medical writings of Galen, and much more.