Science found in Shakespeare (39)

And other artists with a ruff of their time during the birth of the third wave of science proper

Shakespeare with the precious neckwear of the momentous times of science’s rise. Things falling or pandemics are no stranger to him, even if not yet fully grasped.

 To wrap one’s mind in a more encompassing way around the species changing birth of science's third wave we want now to illuminate its complementing sort of existential savvy in art or literature. And was there discourse between those spheres? I start with an unusual perspective and compilation of Shakespeare doing business with the blossoming science of his time.

Shakespeare in AI

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William Shakespeare (1564-1616) and science of his day

William Shakespeare has occupied himself with much of what was available scientifically. Impressed by Vesalius and his anatomical imagery, he is fascinated with the body: see Macbeth’s killing of an enemy: “he unseamed him from the nave to th’ chops.” In Hamlet he muses: “Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer? Where be his quiddities now, his quillities, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks?” Or that man is nothing more than a “quintessence of dust,” or that the dead Polonius is simply a “bag of guts.” Some of this, Shakespeare may have picked up in spirit from the slightly earlier essayist Montaigne and his down to earth view of the human situation.

In fact, Shakespeare explores many more scientific fields besides human anatomy. In King Lear he muses poetically on theories of falling bodies (Gloucester’s “fall” compared to feathers), planetary motion, heliocentrism, matter, or voids and atoms. He deals with alchemy, the humors, and germs such as in Romeo and Juliet, where the plague is a central issue. Mercutio’s speech about the fairies’ midwife, Queen Mab, expounds playfully the infection theme to Romeo (Mercutio suggests that all desires and fantasies are as nonsensical and fragile as Mab and that they are basically corrupting). Accordingly, Queen Mab travels in an empty hazelnut, with wheel spokes made of long spider legs: “drawn with a team of little atomi.” Queen Mab with her little atomi also influences dreams and infects ladies’ lips with “blisters plagues.” Shakespeare is writing before the microscope’s advent. But the thinkers of the time are trying to understand the invisible material causes of epidemics. Syphilis was introduced to Northern Italy through French soldiers in the late 1400s and bubonic plague was so repeatedly. Mercutio, as Romeo’s friend, stands between the rival houses. He dies though through his trying to make peace. Amongst his last words are: "A plague o' both your houses!"

Queen Mab. Is she an antagonist to science, to be hated? Hard to do with whimsical fairies.

The Friar in the story combines his scientific skill and religious devotion to the effect that Romeo will call “holy physic”. Shakespeare is reasonably well read in contemporary science and translates it into understandable argot. This way people may come to hear first of it. While his science may look quaint and old fashioned to us, to some of his contemporaries it was filled with novelty. In fact, Shakespeare’s appeal to us may primarily derive from the fact that he is a foundational writer at the outset of the scientific age. He invents humans directed by logic, or failing it. Shakespeare's contemporary Christopher Marlowe broke free of ecclesiastical and moralizing tones. He set the stage for Shakespeare to become the first author of a new age. We are not bewildered anymore but entertained.

One source for the theory of contagious disease, Girolamo Fracastoro, was a scientist and physician from Verona who embraced atomism. His notion of infection involves different kinds of tiny particles, or “seeds of contagion.” They are transmitted either through direct contact with a sick person, or contact with infected paraphernalia such as clothes, or through the air.

During Shakespeare's creative life there were several periods of plague such as in 1596 and 1603, 1606. The 1596 bout probably took the life of the bard’s son Hamnet. Five years later he writes his Hamlet, with only one letter changed from his son’s name. Writing is his way to overcome his loss.

1606 is the Year of Lear when Shakespeare likely wrote, beside King Lear, also Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Timon of Athens, and Pericles in quick succession. He may have at this time been quarantining from the ongoing plague.

There are no direct references to the plagues during his life but a variety of common uses in cursing and the like. Lear tells his daughter Goneril: “Thou art a boil, A plague-sore, or embossed carbuncle / In my corrupted blood.”

Timon of Athens offers his visitor: “Be as a planetary plague, when Jove / Will o’er some high-viced city hang his poison / In the sick air.”

Coriolanus insults the plebeians: “You herd of Boils and plagues, Plaster you o’er, that you may be abhorred, Farther than seen, and one infect another, Against the wind a mile!” Doesn’t some of this, especially “Against the wind a mile” remind of today’s omicron? Wouldn’t you want to know what Shakespeare would have made of the virus load nowadays, showing up in wastewater?

Shakespeare was pessimistic that a cure would ever be found: “Physic himself must fade” is his way of expressing it.

Elsewhere there are math musings on algebra, Arabic numerals, Pythagorean geometry, and fittingly the number zero, and the infinite. Shakespeare reflects what drove Renaissance science and its insipient change into the early Baroque.

Shakespeare still makes ample use of fairies and hobgoblins although firm belief in them appears to have receded around 1580 (Reginald Scot). He is so riveting to us because he is a transitory figure perched between old fairy tales and a new rationalism.

Shakespeare does not dismiss the validity of science; he seeks to understand it. For him there are not two worlds for each realm, science and poetry. He creates poetic worlds that reflect deeply on scientific insights. For Shakespeare, poetry can empower us to live with the findings of science. He lives in what I have called Diverse Realisms.

So, science has made progress and Shakespeare feels obliged to report and muse. But isn’t progress something basically alien to the bard? His world doesn’t change much. He reports on antiquity with a sense as though it were interchangeable with the London of his days if with togas and sun. He feels about the variety of men, but history’s paraphernalia have no deeper time dimension to him. He thinks there were clocks chiming in Caesars antiquity, when they were far from being developed. In Coriolanus he refers to the compass when it didn’t exist yet. He would not be aware that the Romans had no gunpowder or large sailing vessels that could sail into the wind. He and his time have little knowledge that there is a history to science.

It is similar with his characters: Shakespeare felt the bets placed by diverse persons, as he lets them unfold out as characters in his plays. He allows them to be what they are allowed to be. Let’s see how they work out, he posits. The high drama that was to happen between popes and renegade scientists, such as Bruno of his time, or Galileo a little thereafter would have been enacted based on the power of the pope. The scientist would have to either recant or be burnt at the stake. Such is the power structure of the moment in time. There is no inkling that the perspectives would ever change in time. Shakespeare has no notion of the bets that historical evolution places into characters themselves, that they will wax and wane in their powers. He would be stunned to find that characters were long time evolving maxims that tested their viability in an ever-changing environment on evolutionary principles. He does not get it that he lives in momentous times of human change that will overthrow the world order.

By contrast, Shakespeare’s contemporary Bacon had ideas what a scientific revolution would be able to accomplish. Above all, it would put dimensionality into history. Yet, this type of history is closed to Shakespeare, the great chronicler of historical characters.

Sometimes though it appears as though Shakespeare is even ahead of his time. In the play is “As You Like It” Rosalind is strolling through the forest with her friend Orlando. She observes that if there were lovers in the forest, their “sighing every minute and groaning every hour” would spell out “the lazy foot of Time as well as a clock.” Her friend asks: “Why not the swift foot of Time?” Rosalind’s answer appears three hundred years ahead of her time: “Time travels in divers paces with divers persons. I'll tell you who Time ambles withal, who Time trots withal, who Time gallops withal and who he stands still withal. Orlando: I prithee, who doth he trot withal? Rosalind: Marry, he trots hard with a young maid between the contract of her marriage and the day it is solemniz'd. If the interim be but a se'nnight, Time's pace is so hard that it seems the length of seven years. Orlando: Who ambles Time withal? Rosalind: With a priest that lacks Latin and a rich man that hath not the gout; for the one sleeps easily because he cannot study, and the other lives merrily because he feels no pain; the one lacking the burthen of lean and wasteful learning, the other knowing no burthen of heavy tedious penury. These Time ambles withal. Orlando: Who doth he gallop withal? Rosalind: With a thief to the gallows; for though he go as softly as foot can fall he thinks himself too soon there. Orlando: Who stays it still withal? Rosalind: With lawyers in the vacation; for they sleep between term and term, and then they perceive not how Time moves.'' Of course, Shakespeare is referring to the “relativity” of psychological perception of time, not physical reality.

Science was the new wind blowing and it appears, the bard had an ear for it. Perhaps this is what he means by his quote “We know what we are, but know not what we may be.”

Shakespeare’s importance took some time to grow. Although he was not concerned with a life legacy, there was no work left, as it had to be republished, he had a renaissance some generations after his death. Samuel Johnson (the “Dictionary Johnson” of 1755) put it thus: “So careless was this great poet of future fame, that, though he retired to ease and plenty, while he was yet little declined into the vale of years . . . he made no collection of his works, nor desired to rescue those that had been already published from the depravations that obscured them, or secure to the rest a better destiny, by giving them to the world in their genuine state.”

Johnson characterized Shakespeare as “the poet of Nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life.” “Shakespeare has no heroes, his scenes are occupied only by men, who act and speak as the reader thinks that he himself should have spoken or acted on the same occasion. Even where the agency is supernatural the dialogue is level with life.” Johnson must have taken him as a psychological realist. And this realist nature is what jives well with the spirit of science. Whenever it is extant, one can expect some lively science as well.

But Shakespeare had one foot also in the really old times, listening to people like John Dee. It is likely that the occult also mixed in with concepts as his fairies. Aspects of John Dee’s occult philosophy permeate the last and most difficult of his plays, The Tempest. Prospero defends ‘white magic’ against accusations of devilish conjuration from scholastic reactionaries. This is the devout and decorous form of magic for which he stands up. Has he lost his mind at the end and capitulated to the antithesis of science? What a peculiar way to close out his work as the bard of a new age. Doesn’t it remind of Botticelli who after his sensuous celebrations of beauty closes his life with a return to paintings of saints with golden haloes.

Other happenings near Shakespeare’s death

Deep prose or poetry is written around this time such as John Donne’s (1572-1631) Devotions upon Emergent Occasions: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Is this not also a great view of a scientific moral, where any man's eureka increases me? Or how about science in: “I am a little world made cunningly.” And perhaps the promise of science in: "No winter shall abate the spring's increase."

In 1614, 2 years before Shakespeare’s death, John Napier (1550-1617) develops logarithms in Edinburgh. They become of great importance for ease of multiplication in fields like navigation. Having logarithmic tables, multiplications can be solved by adding logarithms and checking back in the tables. Slide rules similarly multiply by adding lengths. This leads to the obscure British joke about adders on Noah’s arc, not being able to multiply so that he had to give them a log.

Sometimes seemingly unrelated events can take indirect influence on new developments. On May 30, 1578, The Alteration amounted to a bloodless change in government in Amsterdam. The Catholic city government was deposed by vote in favor of a Protestant one consisting of 30 Calvinists and 10 Catholics. The coup should be seen in the context of the greater Dutch Revolt with trade interests playing an important role, because Amsterdam was becoming isolated, as surrounding cities and towns had joined the revolt. The large number of monasteries of the city came under the control of the new city-government. Monasteries were now often given non-religious purposes, such as functioning as orphanages or prisons. The ease of changing appears to have contributed to a more general acceptance of new ideas in this city that was to become so important for the history of science.

Giordano Bruno

Bruno was not the first to imagine an infinite universe with extraterrestrial life. The bishop of Brixen, Nicholas Cusanus (Kues) in On Learned Ignorance (1440), imagined an infinite universe with extraterrestrial life, finding that only an infinite universe was appropriate for an infinite God. Giordano Bruno held similar beliefs in his elaborations of Copernicus’ ideas. Stationed for some time in England, he published there in Italian under the protection of the French ambassador. He wouldn’t venture to go out for fear of being beaten up as a foreigner.  When the ambassador was moved, Bruno lost his protection and wandered through Europe with his Copernicus under his arm. He was apprehended in 1585 in Venice and held by the inquisition from then on. The man who was fearful to go out in London now stood up to the inquisition and didn’t recant. In 1600 Giordano Bruno was burnt on the stake on Rome’s Flower Market until dead and beyond (the burning though resulted more from his argument that Jesus wasn’t the son of God but a skillful magician and that the Holy Ghost is the soul of the world).

To his end he thought, even beyond Copernicus, that the Sun is a star. And the universe contained an infinite number of inhabited worlds populated by other intelligent beings who all praise God. Galileo escaped this fate of burning in 1633 by recanting the truth that the earth moves around the sun. Bruno was a gifted visionary, in several ways in line with nowadays thinking. What might be doubted is the mode of otherworldly praise as of this moment. At least, one would hope it to be of a reformed kind of creed.

Spanish Art, Pedro Calderón de la Barca et al

1600 is also the birth-year of Pedro Calderón de la Barca who will write Life is a Dream, one of the best known pieces of the Spanish Golden Age with the famous line: “and dreams themselves are merely dreams of dreams.” In it a king imprisons his son from early age on to avert a prophecy. When his son is liberated, he has difficulty to discern what is reality and what a dream. The situation has been linked to the story of Don Carlos. The use of horoscopes or prophecies at the start of a play, as a way of making false predictions, symbolizes the utter uncertainty of the future and the dawning knowledge of it. The main lesson to be learned, in this conflict between free will and fate, is that one must strive for goodness whether one is asleep or awake.

What has been accomplished by 1600, what cornucopia of knowledge distinguishes the modern world from the ancient? As though anticipating this question, Johannes Stradanus’ New Discoveries (Nova reperta, 1591) puts the answers square on its title page. Centrally placed are the discoveries of America, the invention of the compass and between them the printing press. One also finds a clock, gunpowder, silk weaving, distillation and a saddle with stirrups. We miss perhaps mastery with glass and sail ships.

More on Art of the times

El Greco with requisite ruff

One of the late transitory painters of the late Renaissance/Baroque was the Cretan El Greco (1541-1614) working in Italy and later mainly in Toledo, Spain. He makes the impression of belonging to no time in particular but the ruff in a self-portrait gives him away as a witness to the re-birth of science. He refined the somewhat artificial style of mannerism with his tortuously elongated figures and often fantastic or phantasmagorical elements. They have attracted the interest of modern painters like Picasso, who used some of his paintings as take offs for new interpretations.

To see a parallel in art and literature: Don Quixote was published in 1605 and may have been to some the first and most influential book that might be-called-a-novel. For 1618 early paintings of Diego Velasquez such as the 3 Musicians keep showing chiaroscuro, the Baroque painting technique. It makes use of the contrast between light and dark shadows to achieve a sense of volume, dramatizing a relaxed moment between playing. There is a note of comic in this and a related painting of 3 farmers.  During 1638 Rubens finished his Little Fur or Pelzchen. Besides her unusual standing gesture, one notices a woman’s eye that anticipates in its alertness and understanding already the eye of the Enlightenment, of about a hundred years later (it may be difficult to focus on the eye with what all else is revealed in Baroque manner). This is indeed a time of spiritual awakening. Rubens even paints Galileo standing with others.

In music Galileo will have witnessed the beginning of the Venetian Baroque style such as of Gabrieli (-1612) with works such as In Ecclesiis. Or Galileo may have experienced Monteverdi (1567-1643) and the birth of opera (Orfeo 1607). The style sounded to some overly ornamented and exaggerated. In fact, Rousseau, the philosopher and also musician, would write in 1768 in the Encyclopédie: "Baroque music is that in which the harmony is confused, and loaded with modulations and dissonances. The singing is harsh and unnatural, the intonation difficult, and the movement limited.” At that time Bach and Handel were long dead and we wonder about the judgment.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610)

1610 is also the time of death of Caravaggio with his focusing on the reality of light and shade, his chiaroscuro, heralding in: the Baroque. And he follows the spirit of the new age so that you feel he’s telling lies in a theatrical manner, mixed in with some truth. Such artistic vision of light and shade-shows is now also appearing in the dramatic shade-show on the planetary goddess Venus, to be discovered through science. Caravaggio actually hadn’t done a Venus, but his student Artemisia Gentileschi used similar technique in her Sleeping Venus of 1626 in appealing glistening cloud planet white flesh color vs dark where it better stay.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, born in late 1571 in Milan, exemplifies the quintessential uncontrollable artist of his time. He is the genius to whom normal rules do not apply. His name reads like two words conjoined, chiaroscuro and braggadocio. There is the humility and suffering of the deep dark on the one hand, and theatrical arrogance on the other.

Why would Caravaggio discover the appeal of chiaroscuro and Galileo the phases of Venus? Let us recall that there is a pressure for the new in healthy living, for adventure. It was the time to explore. And what programs these pressures? Well, the nature of atoms and their building constituents! One thing leads to the next in a gigantic emerging calculation, producing insight and beauty. It is what a cosmos does in its cooling phase: it creates dissipative structures, like us and our art and science, to help along in the cooling. A suitable metaphor would be frost-flowers on a windowpane.

Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro, David and Goliath. For me it can stand as a metaphor for the end of myth. It got decapitated.

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Around 1600 was the best of time and the worst of time. There was creativity, war and witch hunt. This is the witches brew that changed us into a new species, immensely more powerful than before. It is hard to behold the magnitude of what happened to us right then.

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