The Science of Shakespeare (2 page)

*   *   *

This book could never have been written
were it not for the scholars—too many to name—who have explored the subject matter within these pages in far greater depth than myself; their books and journal articles have been invaluable. I am particularly indebted to those researchers who allowed me to pester them (sometimes repeatedly) with all manner of Shakespeare questions, and especially those who allowed me to interview them, microphone in hand, for the CBC Radio documentary. This group includes Stephen Greenblatt at Harvard, John Pitcher at Oxford, Eric Mallin at the University of Texas–Austin, and Colin McGinn, recently retired from the University of Miami. Scott Maisano, who sat for more than one interview and answered numerous queries, is due a special note of appreciation. Peter Usher, whose work was one of the catalysts for this project, also deserves particular thanks. I am also grateful to numerous museum curators, tour guides, and librarians on both sides of the Atlantic. In London, meetings with Boris Jardine at the Science Museum, and Kevin Flude at the Old Operating Theater Museum and Herb Garret, were especially fruitful. Owen Gingerich and Donald Olson answered many of my questions on the history of astronomy, and Ray Jayawardhana pointed me in the right direction on the physics of supernovas. Many scholars have helped me without knowing it; David Levy's work, for example, led me to numerous astronomical references in early modern English literature. I also thank the professors who welcomed me into their classrooms—a list that includes Gordon Teskey at Harvard, Peter Donaldson at MIT, and Christopher Warley and Jeremy Lopez at the University of Toronto.

I am indebted to my tireless agent, Shaun Bradley of the Transatlantic Agency, and my very patient editor, Peter Joseph of St. Martin's Press, as well as production editor David Stanford Burr and copy editor Terry McGarry. Jessica Misfud was invaluable in helping to gather the images that illustrate this work, and I owe special thanks to Marina De Santis for her Italian-to-English translation skills. Dr. Maisano generously took the time to look over portions of the manuscript, as did Bill Lattanzi and the ever-supportive Amanda Gefter. (Nonetheless, the reader should not presume that any of the researchers mentioned in the book would necessarily agree with any of the particular conclusions that I draw; and of course any mistakes are purely my own.) My family and friends stood by me at every step along this journey, and I couldn't have succeeded without their love and support.

Finally, in spite of all my hours in libraries, classrooms, and theaters, I make no pretense of being a professional Shakespeare scholar: I'm merely a journalist who is fascinated by science, intrigued by history, and—like millions of people around the world—in awe of Shakespeare's achievement. I've used footnotes, endnotes, and a thorough bibliography to document my sources and to point the reader to further information; yet the book is aimed squarely at non-experts—those who marvel at the way that science has transformed our world, and those who enjoy reading and watching Shakespeare for the joy of it, as I do.

 

By the Favor of the Heavens

PROLOGUE

Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England
November 19, 1572
6:05 p.m.

“Father!”

A middle-aged man turns to greet his son, one of a dozen schoolboys making their way out of the King's New School and onto Chapel Lane. It's getting cold; the man pulls his cloak to his chest. He's thankful to be wearing his new fur cap rather than the felt one he'd had to make do with the previous winter. The boy, as full of energy as ever, doesn't seem to mind the cold.

“You don't need to walk me home, Father. I'm almost nine years old.” The boy's breath is visible in the crisp winter air.

“Eight and a half is not ‘almost nine.' But you're right, William, you are a young man now,” the father replies. “It happens that I had some business at the church, and I was just on my way back. Let us make haste now, your mother and the children are waiting. I hope you didn't give Master Hunt any trouble today?”

“Master Hunt had to leave for Alveston, on account of his mother being sick.”

The father is taken aback; usually he is the first to hear any news of that kind. “Is that so?”

“But another teacher took his place,” the boy continues. “Master Jenkins. We still had to do all of that Latin grammar. But we also talked about the Bible, and the children in the upper form read a poem by Horace, and got to act out a scene from a Roman play.”

“Horace was my favorite. Can you remember a few lines?”

“Let me think.…
There is nothing that the hands of the Claudii will not accomplish
—”

“Not in
English
. Horace isn't meant to be read in English. In Latin, William, please.”

“Oh, Father, school is out. And I don't
like
Latin.”

“Whether you like it is hardly the point. You must learn it to be a gentleman—and, for the next few years, to escape the birch. Now continue. In Latin.”

“Um …
nil Claudiae non perficient manus, quas et
 … um …
benignus numine Iuppiter
—”

“
Benigno numine
,” his father interrupted, correcting the boy's grammar. “It means ‘by the favor of the heavens.' That's enough for now. You did very well, William.”

The pair turn from Chapel Street onto High Street. It is now growing dark; the long winter's night stretches ahead. The full moon will provide some relief, but it is only just creeping above the eastern horizon. It has been a cloudy day—a little snow fell earlier—but as the wind blows, the clouds finally begin to part. In the southeast shines mighty Jupiter—the same Jupiter the Romans had put their faith in as they marched into battle; the same Jupiter that Horace had rhapsodized over. As they reach Henley Street, William stops and gazes upward.

“What are you looking at, son?”

“It's something Master Jenkins told us about. He said there was a new star in the sky. He said he had been in Oxford yesterday, and everyone was talking about it.”

The father lets out a hearty laugh. “Don't be silly, William. I heard some talk of it also at the guild, but the reverend said it couldn't be, and of course he is right. It could be a comet perhaps.”

“But Father, Master Jenkins said it was a star. In the constellation of—the queen with the funny shape. The queen shaped like an ‘M.'”

“Cassiopeia,” the father replies. In spite of himself, he turns northward to see what may be there. His son turns to follow his gaze. “The Lord doesn't just create new stars, the way Mr. Smith hammers out horseshoes. God created the world thousands of years ago, and he doesn't need to make improvements.”

A pause.

“I think that's it!” William points to a bright star, eastward from the pole, just visible now that the clouds have passed. It stands just to the left of the unmistakable “M” of Cassiopeia.

The father has to admit there is
something
there. Whatever it is, it's even brighter than Jupiter. Brighter even than Venus had been that morning, as far as he could recall.

“Father—what does it mean?”

“I don't know, son. And I don't know that it really is what it appears to be. It could just as well be the devil's work as the Lord's. And now we really must carry on, or supper will be cold. Not to mention my fingers.”

“I'm coming, Father.” But the boy lingers for one last look as his father heads off down the street. “It's beautiful,” he says, and then runs to catch up. “I don't think it's a comet, Father, because comets have tails.”

“More nonsense from Master Jenkins? Well, cats have tails too, but Mrs. Olden's cat doesn't have one, and it's still a cat.”

The boy pauses, seemingly deep in thought. “Why doesn't Mrs. Olden's cat have a tail?”

“They say Mr. Olden's dog bit it off,” his father replies.

“Well, maybe a dog bit off the new star's tail,” the boy offers.

“That's quite an imagination you have, son. And how many dogs are there in the sky, William?”

Another pause—and then a wide smile. “Two, Father! You showed them to me last winter—the big dog and the little dog!”

The father laughs. “You do have quite a wit, don't you, son? Now say their names in Latin, please.”

“Oh, Father!
Canis
 …
Canis Major
and
Canis Minor
.”

“Very good, son. By Jove, I swear you'll make a fine lawyer one day.”

 

Introduction

“The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven…”

I'm sitting in a large, airy room on the ground floor of the Houghton Library, a small, elegant neoclassical building in the shadows of Harvard University's gargantuan Widener Library. The semester is winding down, and there are only eight or nine people in the room, leafing through dusty books or clicking away on their laptops. Portraits of forgotten scholars peer down at us, while a giant clock with gold hands looms above the doorway. As a gloomy drizzle falls outside, I stare at two books on the table in front of me.

They're both old—four centuries, give or take—though the one on the left had an eighty-year head start. I gently pick up the first book. Its pale beige cover is made from a pig's skin stretched over wood, and may be nearly as old as the pages themselves. (Back then, customers who bought a “book” were actually buying a bundle of pages from the bookseller; one could then pay a bookbinder to put it all together in an attractive package.) Scenes from the Bible, barely discernible, have been pressed onto the front and back covers; the process was called “blind stamping,” the librarian tells me. On the spine, the author's name has been nearly obliterated with the passage of time.

Two slim metal clasps, probably brass, hold the covers shut. I gently release them, and lift the front cover. The pages are stiff and warped, as though they had been damp at one time—who knows how many years ago—and then left to dry. A blank inside page has a few scribbles from a previous owner, as well as a sticker indicating the name of the man—a graduate of the class of 1922—who donated the book to Harvard. Then I come to the title page. Here the author's name is very legible indeed—though the typesetter apparently had trouble fitting it all on one line:

NICOLAI CO-

PERNICI TORINENSIS

DE REVOLUTIONIBUS ORBI-

um coeleſtium, Libri VI.

It's Latin, of course. And in those days, an “s” looked like an “f,” so it's actually “
coelestium
”—“celestial,” or, perhaps more accurately, “heavenly.” The author's name, in the genitive, is given matter-of-factly as Nicolaus Copernicus of Toru
ń
. The full title is
On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, in Six Books
, often shortened to
On the Revolutions
or
De revolutionibus
, or even “
De rev
”; I figure a tiny bit of Latin won't hurt us, so I'll stick to calling it
De revolutionibus
. However we label it, this is the book that turned the universe inside out. At the bottom of the page is the publisher's name (Johannes Petreius), the city where the book was printed (Nuremberg), and the year (1543):

Norimbergae apud Ioh. Petreium,

Anno M. D. XLIII.

Each page makes a peculiarly satisfying sound as it is turned. I soon come to Copernicus's famous diagram, located on page 10 verso (meaning “left-hand page”), nestled between two chunks of Latin text (see
figure 0.1
). There are more than 140 other diagrams in the book, most of them very technical and now of interest only to historians of science—but this one has become iconic. It may be the most important diagram in the history of Western thought.

Fig. 0.1
One of the most important diagrams in the history of Western thought: Copernicus's illustration of a sun-centered universe, from
De revolutionibus
(
On the Revolutions
), published in 1543.
Image Select/Art Resource, NY

The diagram shows a series of concentric circles; at their center is a very small circle with a dot in the middle, labeled “Sol.” (My rudimentary Latin is enough to know that “
sol
” is “sun.”) The larger circles mark the paths of the planets as they revolve around the sun in their orbits. And there
we
are: the third rock from the sun, a mere dot, labeled “Terra”—Earth. Circling this diminutive dot is another tiny object, a little crescent moon. It is a diagram that I had drawn countless times as a nerdy, science-minded kid,
*
but you don't get any brownie points for being the hundred thousandth child to do so. You
do
get credit for being the person who came up with the picture in the first place.