Shakespeare and Science

A Dictionary

Katherine Walker

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350044630
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

With the recent turn to science studies and interdisciplinary research in Shakespearean scholarship, Shakespeare and Science: A Dictionary, provides a pedagogical resource for students and scholars. In charting Shakespeare's engagement with natural philosophical discourse, this edition shapes the future of Shakespearean scholarship and pedagogy significantly, appealing to students entering the field and current scholars in interdisciplinary research on the topic alongside the non-professional reader seeking to understand Shakespeare's language and early modern scientific practices. Shakespeare's works respond to early modern culture's rapidly burgeoning interest in how new astronomical theories, understandings of motion and change, and the cataloging of objects, vegetation, and animals in the natural world could provide new knowledge. To cite a famous example, Hamlet's letter to Ophelia plays with the differences between the Ptolemaic and Copernican notions of the earth's movement: "Doubt that the sun doth move" may either be, in the Ptolemaic view, an earnest plea or, in the Copernican system, a purposeful equivocation. The Dictionary contextualizes such moments and scientific terms that Shakespeare employs, creatively and critically, throughout his poetry and drama. The focus is on Shakespeare's multiform uses of language, rendering accessible to students of Shakespeare such terms as "firmament, " "planetary influence, " and "retrograde."

A

(a)bodement(s) see also disasters, divination, signs

(a) An abodement, or bodement, was another term for an omen. It signalled the ways in which the natural world, particularly the heavens, might forewarn humans of impending disasters or good fortune. While an omen almost always carries a negative connotation, abodements might be positive. They were considered natural signs and could be interpreted for what they predicted of the future.

(b) In an effort to discount the natural signs of disaster in the environment, King Edward dismisses his brother Richard’s worries, ‘[t]ush, man abodements must not now affright us’ (3 HVI 4.7.13). Richard has recounted the folkloric belief that to stumble at the threshold bodes ill luck. Thus, seeing the gates of York closed against them, Richard reads this as an omen for their ill luck in battle. It is curious that Richard, who in RIII will scorn similar abodements, should mention this one. There appears to be a stark distinction between the Richard of this play, who notices three suns in the sky and spies into this abodement as an early sign of ill luck, and the Richard of his titular play, who attempts to overturn signifying Nature in her entirety.

Like Edward, Troilus is another sceptic. He pushes aside Cassandra’s prophecies as insubstantial and fanciful: ‘This foolish, dreaming, superstitious girl / Makes all these bodements’ (T&C 5.3.79–80). Troilus claims that Cassandra is actually transforming insignificant trifles into omens, suggesting that she lives in a world that signifies too much, while Troilus occupies one that does not speak at all. In both instances, to heed an abodement is not in the self-interest of the men who believe that they must push forward regardless of the signs that the environment affords.

In its more positive guise, Macbeth foolishly trusts the second set of prophecies delivered by the Weird Sisters, ironically praising their predictions as ‘[s]weet bodements, good’ (Mac. 4.1.95). In this moment, Macbeth places faith in the laws of nature, refusing to believe that Birnam Wood can be transplanted or that a man could not be born of woman: ‘Who can impress the forest, bid the tree / Unfix his earth-bound root?’ (Mac. 4.1.94–5).

(c) The environment was an animate one in early modern England, meaning that it teemed with different forces, bodies and matter that possessed the power to speak, through its signs, to human observers. It was popularly believed that God used his agents – Nature, the heavens and the elements – to send messages to humankind for their benefit. Such signs might be obtained through practices of divination or prophecy, but also resided in a more mundane body of knowledge concerning what different actions and behaviours in nature portend. The belief of abodements was less under question than was the utility of heeding them. Some, like Edward or Troilus, scoffed at the sheer abundance of abodements, while others remained convinced that the book of Nature should be read not only for her customary behaviour, but also her deviations, which were surely important cautionary messages.

Abodements were thus part of an environmental understanding that positioned humans and Nature as coterminous, in a dialogue of sorts, rather than one in which the human was separated from the language of the earth and heavens. And yet it is difficult to pinpoint a single source for the many abodements that the early moderns transmitted both orally and in print. Thomas (1991) admits defeat in the face of this diversity of abodements: ‘What we are faced by in this period is not one single code but an amalgam of the cultural debris of many ways of thinking, Christian and pagan, Teutonic and classical; and it would be absurd to claim that all these elements had been shuffled together to form a new and coherent system’ (750). Nonetheless, Shakespeare provides us with glimpses of these signs, and of the power of the universe to speak to humans through a multitude of animals, plants, stars or human bodies.

abysm (a) An abysm is immeasurable, a fathomless gulf or void. It is another spelling for an abyss. Abysm was often connected with the concept of hell. The idea of a chasm in nature allows Shakespeare’s characters to conceptualize an endless depth and thus a mirror to the boundless quality of their emotions.

(b) Antony believes that his fate is at its lowest point, in which ‘my good stars that were my former guides / Have empty left their orbs and shot their fires / Into th’abysm of hell’ (A&C 3.13.150–2). Like much of the play’s juggling with notions of infinity, Antony is trying to capture the incommensurability of space and time within the constraints of human imagination. Antony is also anthropomorphizing his stars, perhaps in another reference to his genius or ‘daemon’ (A&C 2.3.18). This guiding spirit and the stars that shape his destiny are all, in an image of doom and impossibility, descending to the underworld in an abandonment of the General. This might also be how the speaker envisions the notion of a gulf when he avers to the youth, ‘[i]n so profound abysm I throw all care / Of others’ voices’ (Son. 112.9–10). While abysm might refer to a specific, albeit immeasurable space, it could also refer to time, as when Prospero asks Miranda, ‘[w]hat seest thou else / In the dark backward and abysm of time?’ (Temp. 1.2.49–50). Time is positioned as infinite here, a dark chasm through which Miranda must stretch her imagination.

(c) This association of the abysm with hell is one that Huloet’s Dictionarie makes explicit, in which an abysm is ‘deapenes without bottome’ and ‘deapest dungeon in hel, or vnder the ground’ (1572: M4r). Milton would make the fullest use of the concept of abyss in Paradise Lost, but the idea an of unfathomable depth was one that fascinated Renaissance authors throughout the period. Wright (1604) compared Christ’s descent into human form as of such an immeasurable distance that He almost becomes an abyss: ‘Yet to ridde me and all mankinde from evill, thou abased thy selfe, almost to the abysse of nothing’ (236). Such a comparison does not speak well for humankind. Charry (2008) uses Prospero’s line to argue that the magus takes up different notions of time and foreign bodies. In Charry’s reading, Prospero must negotiate with the medieval Islamic heritage of scientific thought through the figure of Sycorax.

Academe (a) Academe is another spelling of the term academy. Although ‘academy’ might refer to a general school or university, Shakespeare may mean for the word to refer to Plato’s philosophical school, known formally as ‘The Academy’. It is clear that LLL presents a sceptical viewpoint on the very idea, for the entire plot revolves around the impossibility of a pure Academe or cloistered society amid a world of sexual desire.

(b) The term only appears twice in Shakespeare. The King of Navarre intends to make his court ‘a little academe’ (LLL 1.1.13). Berowne reasons that women’s eyes are ‘the books, the arts, the academes, / That show, contain and nourish all the world’ (LLL 4.3.326–7). The difference between these two usages and their context highlights the hollow impracticality of the concept of the Academe. If the men of Navarre are housed in a solitude of studying natural philosophy, particularly Plato’s work, Berowne’s lines point to the more appealing and compelling ‘academes’ located in the world itself. LLL therefore takes up the distinction between a contemplative or an active approach to the world, and ultimately highlights the limitations of theoric or theory.

accident(s) (a) Accident in philosophy has a very particular meaning distinct from signifying a chance occurrence or event. In Aristotelian philosophy, an accident is something that is not essential, an attribute that does not affect the essence of a thing. Accidents include quantity, quality, relation, habitus, time, location, position, action, and the state of being acted upon. A table, for example, might be made of wood or plastic, but its material is an accidental quality – it is still a table despite the material from which it is constructed. An accident cannot exist without substance. The theory of Aristotelian accidents entered scientific discourse by means of St Thomas Aquinas and his followers. Accidents were also specialized terms in astrology and medicine.

(b) Tarquin refuses to read into various signs on his way to Lucrece’s bedchamber: ‘The doors, the wind, the glove that did delay him / He takes for accidental things of trial’ (Luc. 325–6). Tarquin, that is, believes that these omens are external, or non-essential qualities, of the delays he encounters. The fastened door and the winds, to Tarquin, are accidental rather than true ‘things of trial’.

The distinction between a true object (here, valour) and its accidents is at its most scholastic in 2 HVI, when the young Clifford descants on the fact that one who is concerned with self-honour acquires valour accidentally, without any innate or natural predisposition for such bravery:

He that is truly dedicate to war

Hath no self-love; nor he that loves himself

Hath not essentially, but by circumstance,

The name of valour.

(2 HVI 5.2.37–40)

For Clifford, the difference between substance and accident is one that requires acknowledgement, for otherwise the world is deceived by the mere appearances of things, such as the supposed possession of valour.

(c) Witmore (2001) has shown how the Baconian notion of experiment came to include accidents that were, despite their sudden characteristics, nonetheless contrived and thus open to analysis. As Witmore argues, ‘[a]ccidents also represented an instance of deviation in the usual course of things; their power to distract or estrange onlookers from habitual patterns of expectation and attention thus gave them unusual epistemological force in the sceptical context of the seventeenth century’ (3). Witmore discusses Err. and Ham. at length.

adamant, including loadstone, loadstar

(a) Adamant is the hardest substance or material in Creation, and in medieval lapidaries it was conflated with both the lodestone and the diamond. It was also sometimes positioned as the hardest metal, steel. The adamant stone had many properties, including magnetism and the quality of inflexibility and intransience.

(b) Troilus tells Cressida that his love is as faithful as ‘iron to adamant’ (T&C 3.2.174), or that he is drawn inexorably to her, as a piece of iron would be to the adamant or lodestone. Helena uses the same idea but compares herself to the purer metal of steel when she complains to Demetrius, ‘you draw me, you hard-hearted adamant; / But yet you draw not iron, for my heart / Is true as steel’ (MND 2.1.195–7). In this diversity of metals, Helena claims that Demetrius both is and is not like adamant – he draws her after him but does not ultimately want or embrace her. But she, rather than the more common iron, is herself composed of a truer, purer substance, which nonetheless cannot help but be magnetized to Demetrius.

The term lodestar was also used to refer to a magnetic substance or quality. Helena complains of Hermia’s beauty, telling her ‘[y]our eyes are lodestars’ (MND 1.1.183) that lead others to her. Tarquin lights his way to Lucrece’s bedchamber as if drawn by the light of his torch: ‘Whereat a waxen torch forthwith he lighteth, / Which must be lodestar to his lustful eye’ (Luc. 178–9).

(c) In minerology and natural histories, authors ascribed magical influences to adamant. As John Maplet detailed, ‘the Adamant is a Stone of Inde, small and rare, in colour like to Iron but in cleare reflection and representation of image more Christall like: It is founde in bignesse of a Walnut, and neuer aboue: It yeeldeth or giueth place to nothing, neither is it heat by yron or fire’ (1567: B2r). It might negate the magnetism of the lodestone, as Sir Thomas Brown describes, and ultimately disproves, in Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1648: 67–8). Knoll (2020) reads Helena’s attraction to Demetrius in light of early modern magnetic theories.

aerial (a) Aerial means the atmosphere or the sky, or it is used to describe a creature that moves within the regions of the air. The term atmospheric, on the other hand, did not come into usage until the eighteenth century. Aerial can serve as an adjective to mark differences among the animal kingdom, so that birds and bats are aerial beings.

(b) Shakespeare only uses this technical term once. The governor Montano wishes to look for Othello’s ship ‘till we make the main and th’aerial blue / An indistinct regard’ (Oth. 2.1.39–40). In gazing out to the sea, Montano acknowledges that they may encounter a view in which the regions of water and sky combine into an ‘indistinct’ mass, or that they gaze for so long that they can no longer register any difference between the blues of the sea and the atmosphere. Of course, spectators would not hear a distinction between this term for atmosphere and the name of the airy spirit in Temp., Ariel.

alchemy, including alchemist see...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• List of Headwords
• Introduction
• A–Z
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint