Shakespeare's Universe

Abstract

FOR his Friday evening discourse before the Royal Institution on April 30, Prof. J. Dover Wilson discussed “Shakespeare's Universe”. To understand Shakespeare, he said, one must understand his universea very different one from that of Newton, and still more from that of Einstein. In his day the ideas of Copernicus and Galileo were just beginning to penetrate to the consciousness of the ordinary man, and did not become really influential until after the middle of the seventeenth century. Shakespeare lived in a universe which, first described by Ptolemseus of Alexandria in the second century A.D., held sway over men's minds throughout the Middle Ages and had thus served humanity for fifteen hundred years. The best picture of this universe in our literature is to be found in “Paradise Lost”, for though Milton understood the new astronomy and actually refers in his poem to Galileo, whom he had met in Italy, he made iise of the old scheme of ten concentric spheres with the earth at the centre. As the spheres revolved at different rates and with their own peculiar motions on one another, they made music which was known as “the music of the spheres”; the sound was inaudible to mortal ears. Shakespeare's description of this astral musical box is well-known. Thus the universe was a ‘harmony’; and harmony is the master-key of Shakespeare's thinking, whether upon the world at large, upon human society, or upon man himself, man the microcosm which reflected the macrocosm in little.