Shakespeare and Science

Abstract This book shows how Shakespeare’s plays and poems made detailed use of the knowledge and theories about the cosmos, the natural world, and human biology that were available to him. These range from astronomical and anatomical ideas derived from medieval scholars, Islamic philosophers, and ancient Greek and Roman authorities, through to the challenges issued to those models by more recent figures such as Copernicus and Vesalius. Shakespeare’s treatment of these materials was informed by the poetic and dramatic media in which he worked: in particular, the inherently dialogic nature of drama enabled an approach that could be provisional, exploratory, and tolerant of uncertainty and contradiction. Shakespeare made the early modern playhouse a venue for the production of scientific understanding through performance, illusion, and the creative use of space. As well as surveying current scholarship that contextualizes Shakespeare’s work in relation to histories of meteorology, matter theory, humoral physiology, racialization, mathematics, and more, Shakespeare and Science offers detailed and original readings of texts including the Histories, Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, King Lear, The Tempest, the Sonnets, and Lucrece. It also makes extensive reference to primary works by figures such as Robert Recorde, William Fulke, Juan Huarte, and Thomas Elyot. Its four chapters focus on astronomy and meteorology, matter, the body, and mathematics, and its overall approach is informed by recent critical and historical work that interrogates ‘science’ as a concept and that questions both the boundary between literature and science and the idea of a seventeenth-century ‘scientific revolution’.