| Chapter 1: | The New Astronomy |
In other words, observers on Earth only behold that part of the “Orbe of starres fixed infinitely up” that lies “in the inferioure partes of the same Orbe,” or closer to the observers. This is because the farther away the stars are (“as they are hygher”), so they seem fainter and fainter (“of lesse and lesser quantity”) until observers see none at all (“our sighte beinge not able farder to reach or conceyve”). As a result, the rest of the stars are invisible owing to their distance (“not able farder to reach…the greatest part rest by reason of their wonderfull distance unto us”). Similarly, in 1600—a year before the nominal date for the writing of Hamlet—William Gilbert (1540–1603) published De Magnete (“On the Loadstone”), in which he foresaw the possibility of a multitude of stars that are “obscured because of [their] distance” (Gilbert 319). The devout Thomas Digges further defined the nature of the seen and unseen Universe, “And this may wel be thought of vs to be the gloriouse court of ye great god…”
Thus to Digges, the spherical shape of the distribution of stars is apparent and not real because the Diggesian observer (who finds the huge frame of God's work as admirable as it is incomprehensible) is necessarily at the center of that which he admires and finds incomprehensible.3 Some modern scholars have failed to appreciate this and think that Digges embraced the absurdity of placing the Solar System at the center of an infinite spherical distribution.4
As a consummate mathematician, Thomas Digges would have encountered the notion of immeasurably large quantities and would have found these compatible with the parallel theological concept. He would have known from the 1440 work by Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) on “learned ignorance” that theological space has a center everywhere and