Date: August 2, 2011

Title: Shakespeare’s Secret Knowledge of Astronomy

Podcaster: Mick Vagg

Description: There is no shortage of pet revisionist theories about Shakespeare, largely because he left no working notes or manuscripts, and little is known about his life. While doing my own research for this podcast I discovered an excellent and provocative argument about Shakespeare’s knowledge of astronomy which suggests that he had knowledge of phenomena such as the craters on the moon, sunspots, the phases of Venus, the Great Red Spot of Jupiter and the resolution of the Milky Way into millions of individual stars at least 10 years before Galileo discovered them, and that this knowledge was probably based on telescopic observations done in England decades before Galileo and Thomas Harriot in 1610.

Bio: Dr. Michael Vagg is a physician specializing in Rehabilitation Medicine and Pain Management. He lives in Torquay, in the Surfcoast region of Australia. One day he hopes to be able to remember more than five constellations and own a telescope bigger than Galileo’s.

Sponsor: This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” is sponsored by — NO ONE. We still need sponsors for many days in 2011, so please consider sponsoring a day or two. Just click on the “Donate” button on the lower left side of this webpage, or contact us at signup@365daysofastronomy.org.

Transcript:

Shakespeare’s Secret Knowledge of Astronomy

365 Days of Astronomy for 02 August 2011 – Mick Vagg

The sophisticated astronomical knowledge displayed in Shakepseare’s plays has already been the topic of 2 previous podcasts in 365DoA. There is no shortage of pet revisionist theories about Shakespeare, largely because he left no working notes or manuscripts, and in fact little else beyond basic documentation of his baptism, property purchases, death, and brushes with the law in between. While doing my own research for this podcast I discovered an excellent and provocative argument about Shakespeare’s knowledge of astronomy which suggests that he had knowledge of phenomena such as the craters on the moon, sunspots, the phases of Venus, the Great Red Spot of Jupiter and the resolution of the Milky Way into millions of individual stars at least 10 years before Galileo discovered them, and that this knowledge was probably based on telescopic observations done in England decades before Galileo and Thomas Harriot in 1610.

Forests of trees and tanker trucks of ink have been devoted in efforts to interpret the Bard line by line. Scholars for at least two centuries have made their livings by coming up with ever more subtle and elaborate interpretations of individual lines of Shakespeare. The challenge for the lover of Shakespeare mysteries is to work out how plausible these baroque assumptions actually are. Modern authors like Tolkein and JK Rowling are known to have been bemused by the extraordinary depths of meaning which fans and academics have found in their novels, and James Joyce in fact deliberately laid trails of obscure symbols and even jokes to keep the scholars tied in knots for years to come. So any new revisionist theory has to have a substantial historical basis and other lines of evidence to support it.

Our theory takes place against the tumultuous background of Elizabethan England, and revolves around one of the little-known heroes of astronomy as well as a giant of mathematical thought of the time. Thomas Digges lived from 1546-1595. He took over from his father Leonard the editorship of a successful almanac with the excellent title of A Prognostication Everlasting. Having attempted to measure the distance to the supernova of 1572 using the parallax method, Digges junior got a result which confirmed that the supernova had to be way past the orbit of the moon, thus supporting the Copernican model. He slipped a detailed description of the heliocentric model into an appendix of the Prognostication Everlasting in 1576, and continued to keep it out there until his death in 1595. As well as heliocentrism, Thomas Digges was one of the first to argue that the stars were spread through infinite space, not fixed to the crystal celestial spheres that even Copernicus did not have the insight to smash. Digges was an intellectual protégé of John Dee who was one of the truly remarkable figures of the Tudor period. To scientists he was the first great popularizer of mathematics and the first to try to spread mathematical ideas outside universities and into technological applications. To occultists he was a supreme magus, one of the most successful esoteric scholars ever. To conspiracy theorists he is an unending source of speculation about his activities in espionage, secret societies and hidden knowledge. He is generally accepted by scholars to be the model for Prospero in The Tempest, a wise man who combines knowledge and wisdom to control people’s destinies.

So, is it plausible that Leonard and Thomas Digges could have used a crude telescope? In a word, yes. Leonard Digges invented the theodolite, the optical instrument used by surveyors to measure distances and angles accurately. Digges Snr was also an inveterate experimenter with lenses and mirrors. There are historical documents left by a colleague of his which suggest he may have constructed a functioning reflecting telescope and possibly a refracting telescope. Digges Jnr wrote that his father had created ‘proportional glasses’ to read writing at a distance or spy on far-off activities. Astronomical historians are not convinced that he could do what Digges jnr claimed in detail, but it is at least a plausible conjecture that the Digges’ could have had a crude telescope decades before Galileo, though its optical performance would have been no better than his, and the known quality of lenses and mirrors at the time tend to suggest these claims may be exaggerated somewhat. For more detail about this see Dr Fred Watson’s excellent book Stargazer. But how could Shakespeare have known about this obscure scientific knowledge?

There are a number of fascinating possibilities. Leonard Digges and his colleague William Bourne were well-known to William Cecil, Baron Burghley. Baron Burghley was Queen Elizabeth’s Secretary of State and Lord Privy Seal and one of the most powerful and capable men in the Tudor era. Thomas Digges was a Member of Parliament for most of his adult life, and was a senior military figure in the English Army in the late 1580’s when he would have been well-known to Burghley. Burghley’s daughter Anne married Edward De Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. De Vere is well-known to Shakespeare revisionsists as the most convincing alternative author of the plays. Burghley also supervised the upbringing of the 3rd Earl of Southampton Henry Wriothesley. Southampton was an undisputed patron of Shakespeare’s early poems, and is thought by many scholars to be the Fair Youth to whom the sonnets are dedicated. Finally, the character of Polonius in Hamlet has always been seen by scholars and by the public of the time as a caricature of Burghley.
Thomas Digges’ widow Anne remarried to a man named Thomas Russell, who owned land in Stratford Upon Avon and was an executor of Shakespeare’s will. Thomas Digges’ son Leonard, who was a poet, contributed laudatory poems to editions of Shakespeare’s work that were collected posthumously. They all knew John Dee and had dealings with him in Court and Parliament. As a member of the cultural elite of the time, Shakespeare could quite plausibly have heard of secret discoveries that the Digges could have made, as they clearly moved in the same circles, and probably were on good terms.

So, if it was at least possible that Shakespeare might have known about these phenomena, why put it into his plays, and where are these so-called references? The date of the composition of Hamlet is normally given as between 1599 and 1602, with 1600 or 1601 being the most likely dates. Giordano Bruno was an Italian philosopher monk who was an advocate of the infinite universe (an idea pioneered by Thomas Digges) and heliocentrism. Bruno lived in England between 1582-85 and given the documented circles in which he moved during this time, it is almost inevitable that he would have met several other major players in this story, including John Dee, Thomas Digges, the Earl of Oxford and Shakespeare himself. The Bard is believed to have met Bruno in a printer’s shop in London. Bruno was executed by the Church in 1600, and his beliefs in heliocentrism and an infinite universe were felt at the time to have contributed to the Church’s persecution of him. The available records of his lengthy trial mention only his numerous unorthodox Christian beliefs, but it would have been a powerful motivation for his English supporters to make an artistic tribute to these beliefs in a way that only those with the secret knowledge would understand. The sentiments and phraseology of Hamlet’s famous ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy are almost a paraphrase of a work of Bruno’s which would have been familiar at the time only to a select few who were very familiar with them.

So, we have established that it would not be totally implausible for there to have been telescopic observations of celestial phenomena in England prior to Galileo and Harriot. It would also have been likely that as a member of the cultural elite of the time, and intimately associated with the scientific and political players of the time, Shakepseare could have been aware of this new science, and also had a pressing reason at about the time of Hamlet’s composition in 1600 or 1601 to include a disguised tribute to Giordano Bruno in his masterpiece.

The textual evidence supporting the idea that Hamlet is an allegory of the New Astronomy is well set out in detail in a paper by Peter Usher, which can be found at this URL. http://www.shakespearedigges.org/ox2.htm . I will only mention a couple of the more convincing textual arguments.

Shakespeare was not in the habit of naming his characters randomly. Denmark is the home of Tycho Brahe, whose observations were crucial in establishing the nonexistence of the celestial spheres and who was a major Copernican advocate. The unusual Danish names of the characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Hamlet are found on the coats of arms behind Brahe in some engravings which he sent to Sir Thomas Savile in England with a letter asking that he be remembered to John Dee and Thomas Digges. Hamlet’s castle is called Elsinore, which is the nearest Danish castle to Brahe’s island observatory on Uraniborg. The false King of Denmark is called Claudius. What was Ptolemy’s first name again? Hamlet has been repeatedly identified with Shakespeare’s own feelings about his son Hamnet who dies when he was only 11. Never one to miss a pun, did the Bard choose to name his allegorical Sun after his own beloved son? The name Ophelia is not recorded in history before Hamlet. Peter Usher argues that it can be derived from combining the Greek prefix ob/op meaning opposite with the Greek word for sun – helios. Ophelia is the allegorical moon character in the play. Her death is foreshadowed by a lunar eclipse. There are several other hints that seem to refer to knowledge of craters on the moon, and the phases of Venus when read in this allegorical context. There are several passages in the play where Hamlet and others play on the sun/moon image for Hamlet and Ophelia.

It seems less amazing that Shakespeare would be up with cutting edge secret scientific knowledge when you know it appears that he was also aware of the circulation of blood years before William Harvey described it in 1616. References to blood circulating occur in nine plays written before 1608, so it seems that unlike today, in Tudor times scientists had to wait until it was politically safe to announce their discoveries, though rumours and even proof may have been circulating among well-educated people prior to the date of publication.

So, to summarize, a reasonably plausible argument can be made from textual and historical sources that William Shakespeare had knowledge of astronomical phenomena at least a decade before Galileo and Thomas Harriot in 1610. He probably got this knowledge from the Digges (father and/or son), Giordano Bruno and John Dee whom he would have been acquainted with due to their mutual connections in the Tudor parliament and aristocracy. I have found a number of additional lines in Hamlet myself which could also be interpreted along this cosmic allegorical theme. It is a fascinating conjecture, to imagine that the greatest playwright of all time was also an early advocate of one of the greatest scientific revolutions of all time.

References

http://www.shakespearedigges.org/ox2.htm Peter Usher’s paper Shakespeare’s Support for the New Astronomy

Stargazer –the life and times of the telescope Dr Fred Watson Pub by Allen and Unwin 2004

http://www.levity.com/alchemy/h_shake.html

http://uweb.txstate.edu/~do01/astronomyinliteraturehamlet.htm

Wikipedia pages
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_bruno
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dee_%28mathematician%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Digges
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cecil,_1st_Baron_Burghley
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Sidney
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Digges_%28scientist%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Wriothesley,_3rd_Earl_of_Southampton
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_de_Vere,_17th_Earl_of_Oxford

End of podcast:

365 Days of Astronomy
=====================
The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the Astrosphere New Media Association. Audio post-production by Preston Gibson. Bandwidth donated by libsyn.com and wizzard media. Web design by Clockwork Active Media Systems. You may reproduce and distribute this audio for non-commercial purposes. Please consider supporting the podcast with a few dollars (or Euros!). Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org. Until tomorrow…goodbye.