10 - Scientific Thought

Summary

'Nature's mystery'

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.

A cursory glance at Shakespeare's imagery immediately demonstrates that, like all men of the Elizabethan age, the science he knew best was astronomy. Typical of the times also is his interest in the mystical (or as he would have said practical) application of astronomy to astrological prediction. And to Shakespeare, as to the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), alchemy was a natural corollary to astrology, a terrestrial form, borrowing its terminology from its older and better established relation. (We still retain a trace of this association when we call the most elusive metal, mercury, after the most elusive planet, which was itself named for the most slippery of the gods.)

The basis for the widespread acceptance of astrology in Shakespeare's day lay in a universally accepted cosmology which combined to render the world at once compact and full of wonder: the forces presumed to govern nature were mysterious, unknown and perhaps unknowable, though the universe had been made for man, whose abode was at its centre. In its essentials this cosmology was Aristotelian, Christianized and modernized by generations of medieval teachers and commentators. Though technical astronomy had made many advances in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the basic system of the world recognized by scholar and layman alike remained virtually unaltered until the end of Shakespeare's life. That the system proved highly resistant to change was the result of certain conspicuous virtues: it appealed to common sense as reasonable, and it enjoyed the advantage of apparent empirical confirmation together with the ability to explain a wide range of observed facts.