| Chapter 1: | The New Astronomy |
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It is the goal of this work to assess Shakespeare's alleged backwardness in the cosmic sciences within the broader context of five plays. This chapter contains an outline of the state of astronomical knowledge from about 1589 (at the start of Shakespeare's writing career) through subsequent developments to about 1610–1612—a period that includes the advent of astronomical telescopy. Before presenting the major Worldviews extant in 1589, it is helpful first to consider the ancient Greek cosmology of Pythagoras (c.582–c.507 BC) and his followers who flourished from the sixth to the fourth centuries BC.
Pythagorean Design
Pythagoras lived the early part of his life on the Greek island of Samos off the coast of modern Turkey. As a young man, he fled the tyrant who ruled there, and after traveling widely, he settled in Croton, Italy. There, he founded a school of philosophy based in part on the tenets that belief in God is the best foundation for governance and that only through philosophy could humans develop a relation to the divine.
Like Socrates (469–399 BC), Pythagoras believed that lovers of wisdom are superior to those who seek fame or pleasure, and that mathematics is the key to acquiring that wisdom. Pythagoreans saw beauty in mathematics and came to value the concept of numbers as the essence of reality. They believed in a quasi-dimensionality of space, according to which the values 1, 2, 3, and 4 (representing point, line, area, and solid) could be added to reach a sum of 10, which Pythagoreans regarded as the perfect number. This notion was all the more credible to them because these four numbers appear in the ratios—4:3, 3:2, and 2:1—describing the chief musical harmonies.
Pythagoras believed that the Earth was round and that the planets produced music only he could hear because of the exemplary life that he led. Philolaus (c.480–c.385 BC) believed that the Earth revolved, along with the Moon, Sun, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, as well as with a Counter-Earth, which revolved around an imaginary “Central Fire.”