Dan Falk, Scientific American

April 23, 2014

From The Science of Shakespeare: A New Look at the Playwright’s Universe, by Dan Falk. Copyright © 2014, by the author. Reprinted by permission of Thomas Dunne Books.

In the last few years, a handful of scholars have begun to look more closely at Shakespeare’s interest in the scientific discoveries of his time—asking what he knew, when he knew it, and how that knowledge might be reflected in his work. Scott Maisano at the University of Massachusetts–Boston, for example, has written extensively on the evidence for Shakespeare’s awareness of the science of his day, and for its influence on his plays, especially the late romances. Other scholars, like John Pitcher and Jonathan Bate, both at Oxford, have acknowledged Shakespeare’s interest in contemporary science, discussing it in popular biographies and in scholarly editions of the plays. One result of this reassessment is that it allows for a familiar passage to be read in a new light. Consider Ulysses’s speech in Troilus and Cressida, in which he refers to “the glorious planet Sol / In noble eminence enthroned and sphered . . .” (1.3.89–90). The reference to “spheres” sounds at first like straight-ahead medieval cosmology, including the reference to the sun as a “planet.” In the 1940s, this passage served as the backbone for E. M. W. Tillyard’s thesis that Shakespeare’s time ought to be seen as medieval rather than modern, a case he argued in his influential book The Elizabethan World Picture. Some current scholars continue to follow in Tillyard’s footsteps; in the Arden edition, David Bevington tags the line simply as “a Ptolemaic conception.” But as Bate points out, by emphasizing the role of the sun, the passage “may hint at the new heliocentric astronomy.” James Shapiro, meanwhile, concedes that Shakespeare knew that Ptolemaic science “was already discredited by the Copernican revolution.” […continued]

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