(Image: Angus Greig)
From a supernova in 1572 to the discovery of Jupiter’s four biggest moons – astronomical discoveries of Shakespeare’s time may pop up in his work
IT IS the middle of the night when the ghost of King Hamlet comes to Elsinore castle. As Bernardo, one of the guards, tells Prince Hamlet’s friend Horatio, the ghost’s arrival is heralded by a bright light in the heavens. “When yond same star that’s westward from the pole / Had made his course to illume that part of Heaven / Where now it burns”, he says, before he is cut off by the arrival of the ghost himself.
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Shakespeare’s output is full of astronomical allusions, but they were traditionally seen as narrative devices or else viewed in the light of medieval thinking. Heavenly bodies, after all, were often considered as portents. But recently, musings about Shakespeare’s stargazing have taken a new turn.
The star in Hamlet may have been inspired by a supernova, and Hamlet’s soliloquies may subtly question the old ideas about Earth’s place in the universe. One astronomer even claims the play is an allegory for the scientific revolution sweeping through Europe. On the 450th anniversary of his birth, is it time to reappraise Shakespeare’s interest in the natural world?
The seismic shifts shaking the medieval understanding of the universe had begun to ripple through Europe decades before 1564, when the playwright was born. For centuries, people had believed that Earth was the centre of the universe, but in 1543, Copernicus published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, which proposed that Earth revolved around the sun (heliocentrism), rather than the other way around (geocentrism).
The geocentric idea originated with Aristotle’s theories that the stars and planets orbited Earth in giant crystalline spheres, and it was later championed by the Greek thinker Claudius Ptolemy, who gave it a mathematical framework. Until Copernicus, few had questioned it.
Explosive death
At first, Copernicus’s arguments failed to change those views, but he attracted a few followers in England, beginning with a mention in Robert Recorde’s The Castle of Knowledge in 1556. Twenty years later, astronomer Thomas Digges published the first detailed account of the theory by an Englishman. Digges’s book even included a diagram of the solar system in which the stars extend outward without limit – a remarkable vision of an infinite cosmos.
Interest in the Copernican system would be renewed when the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei aimed a new invention – the telescope – at the night sky, beginning in 1609. Even with the unaided eye, however, there were hints that the ancient model was on shaky ground. In November 1572, a bright new star lit up the night sky, appearing in the constellation of Cassiopeia. Today we know it was a supernova, the explosive death of a massive star. The supernova was so bright that for several months it outshone Venus. It was observed by Digges in England and astronomer Tycho Brahe in Denmark, who published a brief description of the object. The strange apparition, now called “Tycho’s star“, was a blow to the old cosmology, refuting the idea of immutable heavenly spheres.
What might Shakespeare have known of these developments by the time he began writing his plays in the 1590s? We have no letters or diaries to give definitive proof of his interests, but there are hints of the ways he could have come across the new ideas. Scholars have noted multiple connections between Shakespeare and the Digges family, who lived just a few blocks apart in north London. For example, Digges’s son, Leonard, was an early Shakespeare fan who contributed a verse for the front of the first published collection of his plays.
There are also tenuous connections to Giordano Bruno, who travelled Europe lecturing on the Copernican model. It is unlikely that Shakespeare ever met Bruno, but he could have encountered his ideas through Richard Field, Shakespeare’s friend and a printer who had apprenticed under the man who published several of Bruno’s books. The Bard may also have known Bruno’s acquaintance, the translator John Florio; we know that Shakespeare lifted several passages from Florio’s translation of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays, and Florio was a tutor to one of Shakespeare’s patrons.
The enthroned sun
So Shakespeare may have encountered the arguments circulating among astronomers, but what is the evidence that his works reflect those competing theories? Many of the relevant passages are ambiguous. In Troilus and Cressida, for example, we find a famous scene in which one of the Greek commanders, Ulysses, compares hierarchies among men with the order displayed in the heavens. In Act 1, Scene 3, he refers to ““. The reference to spheres sounds like medieval cosmology, including the reference to the sun as a planet. But as the University of Oxford points out, by emphasising the central role of the sun, it “may hint at the new heliocentric astronomy”.
Perhaps Hamlet is a more fruitful target. Consider the remarkable passage in Act 2, where the prince envisions himself as “a king of infinite space”. Could he be alluding to the new, infinite universe described, for the first time, by Digges?
“Hamlet envisions himself as the “king of infinite space” – is he alluding to the infinite universe?”
Then there’s the star observed “westward from the pole” that heralds in Act 1. Scholars once suggested that it may be a planet, or the star Capella. Yet neither Capella nor any planet could be in the right part of the sky on a late autumn evening for observers in England or Denmark, says Donald Olson of Texas State University in San Marcos. Olson instead suggests it was inspired by Tycho’s star.
Shakespeare was a boy of 8 when the supernova appeared, but he may have been reminded of it by a reference in Holinshed’s Chronicles, a book that is thought to be a source for many of his plays. And we know the star would have been a noticeable object in the right part of the sky during November, when the play is thought to be set.
Shakespeare may even have been influenced by the writings of Tycho himself, who made detailed observations of the new star from the island of Hven, barely a stone’s throw from the castle of Helsingør (Elsinore), which provides the setting for Hamlet. Significantly, two of Tycho’s relatives were named “Rosencrans” and “Guildensteren”, as documented on an engraving that was widely circulated in the 1590s. While most of the characters in the play have classical names, it seems more than a coincidence that Shakespeare chose these Danish names for the courtiers sent to spy on Hamlet.
Given these clues, , an astronomer who recently retired from Pennsylvania State University, argues that the entire play can be read as an allegory about competing cosmological world-views. He points out that the play’s villain, Claudius, has the same name as the astronomer behind the geocentric model of the universe, Claudius Ptolemy. Usher goes on to identify a series of correspondences linking the characters to various astronomers.
The conflict is reflected in the action and the dialogue: when Hamlet announces his intention to return to Wittenberg to resume his studies, Claudius declares that such a move is “retrograde to our desire”. Usher sees this as an allusion to the retrograde (looping) motion of the planets, which first motivated the efforts to understand celestial motions. This controversial view may exaggerate the influence of astronomy on the play, but Hamlet at least suggests the playwright had absorbed some of the new theories.
Galileo’s telescopic observations came towards the end of Shakespeare’s career, but Cymbeline, first performed in 1611, offers tantalising hints that he was aware of the findings. In the play’s final act, the hero, Posthumus, falls into a dream-like state, and the ghosts of four family members appear and move around him in a circle. The ghosts cry out for Jupiter, the Roman god. On hearing their pleas, he descends onto the stage. So we have Jupiter, and four ghosts moving in a circle. Could the scene allude to the planet Jupiter and its four newly discovered moons, recently described by Galileo? Usher and Shakespeare scholars Scott Maisano at the University of Massachusetts in Boston and John Pitcher at the University of Oxford have all argued in its favour.
These ideas are only just beginning to receive mainstream scholarly attention, and it would be a mistake to overstate the role of “science” in Shakespeare’s literary output. Like a scientist, he had an insatiable curiosity that seems to have extended beyond humans to nature itself – but it was as an artist that he drew on those thoughts and ideas to create some of the world’s most powerful dramas.
Read more: “Shakespeare: Poet, playwright, scientist?“
