A Brave New World of Knowledge: Shakespeare's 'The Tempest' and Early Modern Epistemology by B. J. Sokol (review)

Abstract

MLR, 100.3, 2005 773 A Brave New World of Knowledge: Shakespeare's 'The Tempest' and Early Modern Epistemology. By B. J. Sokol. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2003. 274 pp. ?4?- ISBN o8386 -3925-9. At the heart of B. J.Sokol's latest contribution to Shakespeare studies is a presentation of 'scientific matters that have hardly ever before been discussed as significant to The Tempest' (p. 101), the most novel of which are some glass figurines recently recovered by archaeologists working at the site ofthe Jamestown colony. The discoverers ofthese curios believe they were used as weights in prototypicalthermometers; and thus Sokol adduces them as evidence that among the settlers at Jamestown there 'may possibly have been a gentleman scientist' (p. 115). This possibility, what might have been, provides the basis for further speculations about the money loaned to George Percy, one ofthe colonists, by his elder brother, the Earl of Northumberland: 'could some of this [money]', Sokol asks his readers, 'have been fora scientific instrument?' (p. 116). If so, might Shakespeare have known about the atmospheric experiments potentially taking place in Virginia? Personally, I appreciate Sokol's tentative and exploratory approach to these matters and find the admission, on this matter particularly, that crucial information may have been irretrievably lost from the historical record to be a welcome departure from more positivist, but less convincing, attempts to understand the play through its historical contexts. A Brave New World of Knowledge is indeed intrepid in its early chapters, each of which invites us to rethink the old canard that Shakespeare was indifferent, if not inimical, to the scientific revolution burgeoning around him in the seventeenth century. In Sokol's analysis Shakespeare writes within, and with full working knowledge of, the same hydraulically driven clockwork universe that gives rise to Kepler's laws of planetary motion, Cornelis Drebbel's artificial egg hatcheries, and Thomas Harriot's 'computations of potential population growth over time' (p. 52). It comes as a disappointment, therefore, when the final chapter inexplicably exchanges the 'early modern epistemology' of the book's subtitle for a half-hearted Freudian reading of anger, guilt, work, and (not once, but thrice) the 'menstrual theme of The Tempest' (p. 180). Although Sokol's firstsix chapters stress the values of 'incremental' analysis and warn against the dangers of a 'master-discourse' that would seek to account forevery detail of the play, his last chapter nevertheless admits that its 'depth psychological approach to The Tempest is hardly new' except for its 'linking' of other (presumably more incremental) discussions of the same material (p. 189). This shift to psychoanalysis also causes Sokol to overlook a possibility that is, in this reviewer's opinion, every bit as tantalizing as the one about a gentleman scientist at Jamestown. In the final pages Sokol asks, 'what can the play's log-carrying represent that has such necessity that it justifies the retention of Caliban [...]?' His answer: the logs are indices of the male characters' 'painfully carried' erections (pp. 179-80). Here, Sokol could have made better use of one of his own notes about Johannes Kepler's 'elderly mother [. . .] accused of witchcraft' (p. 209 n. 15). Kepler's Somnium, which describes his magic-practising mother and his 'half-savage' upbringing, provocatively parallels the untold story of Caliban and Sycorax even as it makes explicit reference to the island observatory of Tycho Brahe. Sokol's complete omission of Tycho, the alchemist-cum-astronomer, is puzzling. King James, Shakespeare's patron at the time he was writing The Tempest,had some twenty years in the past visited Tycho's island as part of his prenuptial trip to Denmark. Like Prospero, Tycho also surrendered his ancestral estate to a younger brother before relocating, with his renowned library, to Hven. But Tycho did more than read on the island. He published his own books. 774 Reviews So, upon his return to Scotland, King James helped to subsidize the construction of a paper mill on Tycho's island. Given the presence of hunting dogs on Prospero's island, a reminder of the two British mastiffs James left as gifts for Tycho, is it possible that Prospero...