was having during his lifetime—or that he would refrain from using the literary devices at his command to address the topic if he was not ignorant of its significance.
With this difficulty in mind, in 1996 I suggested that Shakespeare's Hamlet is a cosmic allegory describing the competition between the four chief cosmic models that were vying for acceptance at the turn of the seventeenth century. Critics deem a work allegorical when they sense that an author has a meaning in mind that is broader than the work appears to have. Allegory caters to the ideals of attainable knowledge and political unity in a moral and fundamentally theological context by using elaborate symbolism and levels of meaning deeper than literal, making it a suitable means for relating appearance with reality. This technique of expressing something in such a way as to convey nonliteral meaning is especially useful when it comes to dealing with sensitive issues like new worldviews, false cosmologies, and the overthrow of corrupt regimes.
Understanding allegory with an astronomical component requires attention to science and a variety of other disciplines, among which are interpretation theory, history, and philosophy of science, as well as literature itself. Whereas the parts of a work enable understanding of the whole work, the whole, in turn, mediates understanding of the parts. This cycle of understanding is not a vicious circle, however. Genuine advances do occur as novel ideas and theories are either discarded or modified and as those that survive attain a measure of validation through analytic discourse and empirical test.
Every inquirer brings limitations and preconceptions to the quest and must work to ensure objectivity in interpretation. In previous work, I have drawn parallels between the hermeneutic-dialectical approach to understanding literature and the hypothetico-deductive inquiry into the Book of Nature, both of which strive for maximally reasonable interpretations. Text and context are the ultimate authorities in literary interpretation, and it is in accordance with these canons that I conduct this research.
Chapter 1 outlines the evolution of scientific cosmological thinking from the Pythagoreans of the sixth century BC to Galileo Galilei in the early seventeenth century. It places into historical context Michael