{"id":3775,"date":"2014-01-31T15:45:42","date_gmt":"2014-01-31T20:45:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/?p=3775"},"modified":"2014-01-31T15:48:15","modified_gmt":"2014-01-31T20:48:15","slug":"was-shakespeare-a-scientist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/2014\/01\/31\/was-shakespeare-a-scientist\/","title":{"rendered":"Was Shakespeare a scientist?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\"shakespeare\"<\/a><\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

A recent <\/span>article<\/a> by Dan Falk of <\/span>The Telegraph<\/i> puts forth this important question by highlighting that:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/i>The genius from Stratford-upon-Avon has worn many hats over the years, with imaginative scholars casting him as a closet Catholic, a mainstream Protestant, an ardent capitalist, a Marxist, a misogynist, a feminist, a homosexual, a legal clerk and a cannabis dealer \u2013 yet the words \u201cShakespeare\u201d and \u201cscience\u201d are rarely uttered in the same breath.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

CC201 delves a little into this, and indeed, the science of Shakespeare\u2019s texts is not obvious. The closest we get to science fiction is Milton\u2019s Paradise Lost<\/i> and Satan\u2019s journey through space. Still, Dan Falk writes that Shakespeare\u2019s plays are:<\/p>\n

\u00a0Full of references to the Sun, Moon, stars, comets, eclipses and heavenly spheres \u2013 but these are usually dismissed as strictly old-school, reflecting the (largely incorrect) ideas of ancient Greek thinkers such as Aristotle and Ptolemy. Although Copernicus had lifted the Earth into the heavens with his revolutionary book in 1543 \u2013 21 years before Shakespeare\u2019s birth \u2013 it supposedly took decades for the new cosmology to reach England; and anyway, the idea of a sun-centred universe only became intellectually respectable with the news of Galileo\u2019s telescopic discoveries in 1610. By then, Shakespeare was ready for retirement in Warwickshire.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Giving examples from the plays themselves, the article proposes different readings:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Donald Olson of Texas State University has argued that the star observed by Prince Hamlet shining \u201cwestward from the pole\u201d was inspired by Shakespeare\u2019s boyhood memory of Tycho\u2019s star \u2013 reinforced, perhaps, by a reference to it in Holinshed\u2019s Chronicles 15 years later. (At the very least, Shakespeare would have seen the next supernova, \u201cKepler\u2019s star\u201d, in 1604.) One might note that Brahe observed the stars from the Danish island of Hven, a stone\u2019s throw from the castle of Elsinore, Shakespeare\u2019s setting for Hamlet.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/i>Astronomer Peter Usher, recently retired from Penn State University, takes the story further, arguing that Hamlet can be read as an allegory of competing cosmological world views. The evil Claudius stands in for his namesake, the ancient astronomer Claudius Ptolemy, while Rosencrantz and Guildenstern represent Brahe, and Prince Hamlet is Thomas Digges. When Hamlet envisions himself as \u201ca king of infinite space\u201d, could Shakespeare be alluding to the new, infinite universe described \u2013 for the first time \u2013 by his countryman, Digges?<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Are there Core texts whose scientific elements you think deserve more attention? Let us know!<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 A recent article by Dan Falk of The Telegraph puts forth this important question by highlighting that: \u00a0The genius from Stratford-upon-Avon has worn many hats over the years, with imaginative scholars casting him as a closet Catholic, a mainstream Protestant, an ardent capitalist, a Marxist, a misogynist, a feminist, a homosexual, a legal clerk […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3451,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3857],"tags":[48558,4184],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3775"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3451"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3775"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3775\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3779,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3775\/revisions\/3779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}