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Shakes~eare's Cosmic World View
Peter D. Usher
Pennsylvania State
University
Shakespeare lived at the
dawn of modern science, as
skepticism was becoming
an accepted way of thinking
and perceptions of the
cosmos were changing
rapidly. The Bard adopted
the standard geocentric
cosmology for the mundane
affairs of his plays. Yet a few
passages suggest he was
aware of the emerging
concepts of heliocentrism
and the infinite universe.
The Flo wer portrait of William Shakespeare
(1564-1616), Bard of Avon. Photo courtesy of
Peter D. Usher.
W
illiam Shakespeare was born 21 years after the
death of Nicolaus Copernicus and in the same
year as Galileo Galilei. His productive career
spanned the critical period that followed the
publication of Copernicus's De revolutionibus and preceded
scientific advances made by the early modern figures of Galileo
and Johannes Kepler.
Shakespeare lived and wrote at a time when the ferment of
a new world was at work. In his time, the groundwork was
being laid for the scientific and industrial revolutions that were
to transform the world and lead, among other things, to the
modern cosmological world view. The incidence and nature of
references to astronomy in the works of this poet afford an
appreciation of how such a thinker viewed that crucial period
in intellectual history.
The frequent mention of celestial phenomena in
Shakespeare's plays is not unusual; medieval and early
Renaissance literature is richly sprinkled with astronomical
allusions. Astronomy intrudes more into Elizabethan literature
than into modern literature, for in those days celestial events
played a more prominent role in everyday life than they do
today. In pre-industrial society, celestial phenomena were sig­
nificant in those practical matters that Hesiod addressed in his
Works and Days and Virgil in his Georgics. Widespread belief in
astrology posited a close relationship between terrestrial affairs
and the sky. Moreover, there was a close relation of the heavens
to theology and thus to the establishment and flourishing of
Christianity in Europe - a matter of particular concern in the
years following the Reformation. Yet despite these significant
connections, and notwithstanding the beauty of the descrip­
tions and accounts, most scholars have paid little attention to
the Bard's astronomy.
Shakespearean Cosmology
Shakespeare seemed content to refer to those superficial phe­
nomena that were apparent even to the most casual observer. He
made frequent mention of "heaven" and "the heavens;' and per­
haps the most common of his references is to the rising Sun, for
he attached much hope and joy to the early morning hours. His
characters speak in language that had special meaning for
Elizabethan audiences; his astronomical descriptions and allu­
sions were necessarily interpreted in accordance with contem­
porary belief in a stationary Earth.
In addition, Shakespeare often drew parallels between
human foibles and celestial events. He used the latter as omens
to great dramatic effect, and astrological allusions occur in his
plays with a frequency quite acceptable to his audiences, even
though he himself may not have believed in divination.
Passages in Shakespeare's plays reveal his vision of the popu­
lar or "standard" model of the time, the geocentric model of
Ptolemy.
The standard model. In Hamlet, the prince relates that far above
... this goodly frame, the earth ...
there is the
... brave o'er hanging firmament
which is a
... majestical roof fretted with golden fire.
Julius Caesar tells us that
The skies are painted with unnumber'd sparks;
They are all afire and everyone doth shine
while, from Pericles, the five elements,
...fire, air, water, earth, and heaven ...
comprise all of the matter and space of the tangible world.
Beyond the quintessential sphere of the heavens lies the abode of
... that supernal judge that stirs good thoughts
In any breast of strong authority.
Here in King John is Shakespeare's only use of the word supernal,
meaning "celestial" or "heavenly"; it modifies judge, so that in so
many words, Shakespeare means "God."
The planets. Between the firmament and the earth there is
... stuck
A sun and moon, which kept their course and lighted
... the earth.
The Moon shines by the reflected light of the Sun:
The sun's a thief and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea; the moon's an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun.
Shakespeare knew that the Sun illuminates the Moon and Earth
by beams of light:
Even till the eastern gate, all fiery red,
Opening on Neptune with fair blessed beams.
The planet Neptune, of course, would not be discovered for
another two centuries; here Shakespeare is referring to the
ancient Roman god of the sea.
There are many references to sunrise in the east and to the
morning hours:
Lo! in the orient when the gracious light Lifts up his burning head ... whereupon the Sun sets in the west, being carried along
...the track
Of his bright passage to the occident.
With the advancing hours,
Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,
Whiles night's black agents to their prey do rouse.
The Sun and Moon change position with respect to the stars,
as do Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. In olden days,
all seven objects were classed as "wanderers" or "planets." These
were said to be kept in place by giant transparent crystalline
orbs:
... as clear
As yonder Venus in her glimmering sphere.
The average apparent sidereal periods of Mercury, Venus, and
the Sun are the same, though it was generally accepted that the
Sun's sphere lay between those of Venus and Mars:
...the glorious planet, Sol,
In noble eminence enthron'd and spher'd
Amidst the other ....
Time and Calendar
The day. The ancient Greeks represented the rise and progress of
the Sun in the sky as the passage of Helios or Phoebus in a char­
iot drawn by horses. A calendrical day is the interval between
successive appearances:
Ere twice the horses of the sun shall bring
Their fiery torcher his diurnal ring.
A day is comprised
Of four-and-twenty times the pilot's glass.
Telling time. Sooner or later, a fellow such as Falstaff in 1 Henry
IV will want to know the lateness of the hour:
Now Hal, what time of day is it, lad?
On a spherical Earth, solar time is local,
So thou, thyself outgoing in thy noon
may see the Sun culminate on your own meridian. Sundials tell
time, even to the satisfaction of a motley fool in the forest:
And then he drew a dial from his poke
And, looking on it with lackluster eye,
Says very wisely "It is ten o'clock."
At night in 1 Henry IV, the orientation of Charlemagne's Wagon
(the Big Dipper) is a useful timekeeper:
Heigh-ho! An it be not four by the day, I'll be hanged. Charles' Wain is
over the new chimney, and yet our horse not packed.
Phoebus's daily round initiates some cycles, while others draw
to a close. Romeo persuades Juliet that the dawn has come (see
photo on p. 23):
It was the lark, the herald of the morn. No nightingale; look love, what envious streaks Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east. The month. In the course of a month,
Full thirty times hath Phoebus' cart gone round
Neptune's salt wash, and Tellus' orbed ground
while the month is subdivided on specially named days:
Caesar: The Ides of March are come.
Soothsayer: Ay, Caesar, but not gone.
The phases of the Moon are a convenient way to count the
days, and Bottom must plan a midsummer night's events with
its phase in mind:
A calendar, a calendar! Look in the almanac. Find out moonshine, find
out moonshine.
Thus people get about at night with the help of both the Moon
and the "seven stars" (Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, perhaps the
Pleiades), as Hal and Falstaff banter:
1997 january - february Mercu
... we that take purses go by the moon and the seven stars and not by
Phoebus.
The year. The Zodiac marks the progress of the Sun, for no year
shall pass
... until the twelve celestial signs
Have brought about their annual reckoning.
During the year the Sun compensates for the hours of daylight
lost in winter by lengthening the summer days, unlike terrestri­
al debtors, such as Timon of Athens, who cannot balance their
books:
... He was wont to shine at seven. Ay, but the days are waxed shorter with him. You must consider that a prodigal course Is like the sun's, but not, like his, recoverable. The arrow of time. The arrow of time points ever forward; oth­
erwise, says Hamlet speaking to the older Polonius,
... yourself, sir, shall grow old as I am, if like a crab you could go backward.
The world and things in it run down and wear out:
Poet: How goes the world?
Painter: It wears, sir, as it grows.
Poet: Ay, that's well known.
Isolated systems tend to disorder:
And this neglection of degree it is
That by a pace goes backward with a purpose
It hath to climb.
Life itself is finite, since
... time that takes survey of all the world
Must have a stop.
According to scripture, one day is as a thousand years. To
Elizabethans, ever conscious of the six days of creation, it
appears that:
The poor world is almost six thousand years old
and that therefore its end is nigh.
Alchemy and Astrology
Alchemy. Despite the widespread acceptance of alchemy in
Elizabethan days, its incidence in Shakespeare's works is infre­
quent and regarded by some scholars as merely descriptive:
To solemnize this day, the glorious sun Stays in his course, and plays the alchemist; Turning, with splendour of his precious eye, The meagre cloddy earth to glittering gold. Astrology. Shakespeare frequently couched celestial phenomena
in popular astrological terms - an understandable ploy, for he
would want to make his characters think and speak as would
persons of the time. Just as today we might "thank our lucky
stars;' so Helena in All's Well That End's Well speaks with equal
conviction:
... his good receipt
Shall for my legacy, be sanctified
By the luckiest stars in heaven.
Many people believed, as did the Earl of Kent in King Lear,
that:
.. .It is the stars
The stars above us, govern our conditions.
Nevertheless, Shakespeare ridiculed astrology frequently. In 1
Henry IV, Owen Glendower proclaims bombastically,
I say the earth did shake when I was born ... The heavens were ~ll on fire; the earth did tremble. Hotspur tries to dissuade him, first with sarcasm:
... Why, so it would have done
At the same season, if your mother's cat
Had but kittened, though yourself had never been born
and then with reason:
0, then the earth shook to see the heavens on fire,
And not in fear of your nativity.
Mercury january - february 1997
In King Lear, Edmund describes astrology as
This...excellent foppery of the world that when we are sick in for­
tune ...we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and
stars .. .
while in Julius Caesar Cassius says,
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our Stars,
But in ourselves ....
Helena is equally skeptical:
Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie
Which we ascribe to heaven. The fated sky
Gives us free scope, only doth backward pull
Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull.
In "Sonnet 14" is a convincing disavowal of astrology:
Not from the stars do I my judgement pluck
And yet methinks I have astronomy ...
while the retrograde motion of Mars, the god of war, provided a
magnificent opportunity to poke fun:
Helena: Monsieur Parolles, you were born under a charitable star.
Parolles: Under Mars ... When he was predominant.
Helena: When he was retrograde, I think, rather.
Paralies: Why think you so?
Helena: You go so much backward when you fight.
The Music of the Spheres. The idea of the Music of the Spheres
attracted many writers of the time, including Shakespeare. One
of the most beautiful passages in the English language is found
in The Merchant of Venice:
How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank . Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music Creep in our ears ... There's not the smallest orb which thou behold's! But in his motion like an angel sings ... Such harmony is in immortal souls, But whilst this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it. Celestial omens. The Welsh Captain in Richard II plays the
doomsayer:
And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven,
The pale faced moon looks bloody on the earth ...
These signs forerun the death or fall of Kings.
Comets, too, were thought to presage the deaths of kings or
nobles and changes in governance or state. In 1 Henry VI,
Bedford forewarns of appalling events to come:
Hung be the heavens with black! Yield, day, to night! Comets, importing change of time and states, Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky, And with them scourge the bad revolting stars That have consented unto Henry's death ­
though from Julius Caesar we learn that simple folk are exempt:
When beggars die, there are no comets seen;
The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.
Bedford further subscribes to the common belief that the stars
are living beings whose brightness is a measure of status:
Combat with adverse planets in the heavens!
A far more glorious star thy soul will make
Than Julius Caesar. ...
Eclipses of the Sun and Moon are dreaded too, for the Earl of
Gloucester laments in King Lear,
These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us.
Action at a distance. Astrological influences are mostly without
any overt physical manifestation, except for the Moon, the "gov­
erness of the floods":
... the moist star
Upon whose influence Neptune's empire stands
who caused tides by some unfathomable effect. By a myth still
prevalent today, the Moon was also thought to cause lunacy.
Shakespeare even guessed the functional dependency of lunar
forces, proposing that the effect be to some degree inversely pro­
portional to distance:
Ills the
error of lite moon;
She come> lllore near the earth than she was wonl,
And makes men mad.
Action and reaction. Shakespeare was aware that actions have
consequences that ill lurn re,lel upon
causalive agent.
Remarkably, he had Othello advance a law of action and reac­
tion between omen and effect: If eclipses foretell calamities on
then
process should
in reverse, too: OJ insupportable l 01 heavy hour! Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse Of sun and ll1oon. Was Shakespeare a Copernican?
The geocentric model, perfected in the Almagest of Ptolemv,
"Ic'rn,oni-,.,' Elizahcthan
for both were hierarchical:
... Degree bemg vizarded,
Th' unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask.
lhe Heavc:m themselv,,,. the Planers, and this
Observe
priorit) .•md place ..
The Ptolemaic model was magnificently successful, holding
5''18Y into the 17th century. It was still the accepted paradigm in
day, although the Copernican heliocentric model
was gaining ground.
Copernicus's treatise had been published two decades before
hirth and about
wars before he wloje HamIel.
and it was well known in England; but, for ali the importance 01
celestial events to Elizabethans, Shakespeare seems to have given
he that was only
new model short shrift. One reason
in 1610, when Shaltcspeare was almost in retircmcnt, that
Galileo supplied the first direct observational support of the
SUll-centered Iheory. Whatever
case, Shllkespeare's plays and
impression that
neglected the lHlvlInces
poems give
astronomy that had occurred before his birth and continued in
lifetime.
Sun was
the
of the
Accordillg 10 Copernicus,
universe and Earth and the other five known planets revolved
about it. Earth was the center only of the Moon's orbit and W?S
uthcrwise
special. Fllrth's orbitld revolution and
simulta­
neous rotation every 24 hours about an inclined axis explained
the seasonal and diurnal cycles. Precession was a small correc­
to this kinematic Illude! and did not
the
attell
hon as the other major hypotheses.
In The Life and Death of King John, there is a metaphor that
refer
Copernican theory. Robert Faulconbridge, bas­
tard son of Richard the Lionhearted, rails against "commodity"
or "self-interest," which he says is "the bias of the world" with a
of motion!' Sorne,cholars, notably Lesler Beaurline, have
held that the Hard was likening Earth to a howling ball whose
motion would, this theo
causes 10 sway. The result
ry, cause the seasons and explain the obliquity of the ecliptic. In
a recent abstract in the Bulletin of the American Astronomical
I listed other reasons
believe that Sh,lkespeare
advanced the Copernican model in this play.
The astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin has suggested
t
Shakespeare
have referred
heliocent rism in
Hamlet. In her 1970 textbook, she noted thallhe 16lhcentu­
ry astronomer Rheticus, who played an early and prominent
in promot ing the publication of De rCl'oiutionillUs, \Vas
Wittenberg, where Tycho Brahe was student- as
was Hamlet.
Moreover, ~s Leslie Hotson has pointed Ollt, Hamlet's
chums Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have the names of rela­
tives of Brahe.
must have been
aware of Brahe
if he had been so aware of his relatives, for he appears to have
taken their names from an engraved portrait sent to England.
BraheOs astronomical worl.'., were aV,Jilllble in print'in
by 1592, and it is possible that Shakespeare kuew of them well
before 1599, when he commenced writing Hamlet.
Iii
Bullclin of the liAS, I suggested tbal ! Iamlet's mm­
plainl lhat "DemlMrk's a pri[)on" and his proclamation,
I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite
space
rna}
compllring competing models of cosmic sp,lCe that
existed at the time. On the one hand, the Ptolemaic and
Copernican models encase humanity in a cosmic nutshell; on
the Copernican model by
the
the vi"ionary eXil:nsion
ShakeslJeare's contemporary Thomas Digges liberate us 1rom
that prison to live in infinite space.
So
evidence is mounting that Shakespeare did not com­
pletely ignore the astronomical revolutions of the 16th century.
Not only did he incorporate subtle references to heliocentrism
plays,
he was ll].,O up-Iodate on
concept
an
into
infil1 jIt' univeroe. The
to
his
reflect Ihese
astronomical revolutions is still a matter for ongoing conjecture
and research. m
PETER D. USHER is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics
at the Pennsylvania State University in University Parle He was
born
Soutb rica. fJis research illierests include fainl hlue
objects and BL Lacertae objects; his recent papers have been
devoted to defining the interface between galaxies and quasars
qUll',,1f surwv',. His hohbies indude plavj
the
in
Highland bagpipe. His email address is [email protected].
Juiret:
Then, Window, let
day in. and let life
farewell l
out
one kiss and /,11
d.'scend.
Arler disputillg the signs
of impending dawn in
scene
Pomeo
i
his impeccable period
costume (Leslie Howard
(.;wings
over
)iJii<::!t's
bal­
cony in the 'J 936 film. I\J
youthful fling, this. Julie
({\forma Sheart?fJ
is wea r
ing iler wedding ring;
the two were married in
scene
CCUI
tesy of
Photo
Stills
Archive, Harrison, Neb.