Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare 9780674027114

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Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare

Angus Fletcher

Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare

Harvard University Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 2007

Copyright © 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fletcher, Angus, 1930– Time, space, and motion in the Age of Shakespeare / Angus Fletcher. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-674-02308-6 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-674-02308-0 (alk. paper) 1. English poetry—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. 2. Literature and science—England—History—17th century. 3. Literature and science—England—History— 16th century. 4. Motion in literature. 5. Renaissance—England. PR535.S33F55 2007 321′.30936—dc22

2006043576

Contents

Introduction

1

1

Galileo’s Metaphor

2

The Theme of Motion

3

On Drama, Poetry, and Movement

4

Marlowe Invents the Deadline

5

The Defense of the Interim

6

Structure of an Epitaph

7

Donne’s Apocryphal Wit

8

Milton and the Moons of Jupiter

12 21

Conclusion 152 Notes 159 Acknowledgments Index

176

36

55

70

95 113 130

Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare

Introduction

Imaginative literature is the subject of this book, yet our discussion must begin elsewhere, in the field of ideas and the history of religion. There the contextual interests of literature are linked to one startling development: a broad-based radical change in fundamental attitudes, a shift generated by the rise of early modern science. During the frightful conflict of the Second World War, Lucien Febvre looked back to a somewhat parallel period; he wrote that throughout Europe there had been “a problem of unbelief in the sixteenth century,” a picture few historians would care to contradict.1 Turbulent collisions of ideological conviction are not hard to discern, while skepticism and what some thought to be atheistic forays against the true faith created all the conditions for a storm of religious warfare—the storm broke savagely during the Thirty Years’ War—and at the very least for unrelenting religious ambivalence. If we begin, as did Lucien Febvre, with the omnipresent differences among various religious sects, we must guard against being entrapped inside their religious doubts. Given the complex character of Christianity, given external pressures from Islam, given the inherently obscure nature of religious mystery, there was assuredly no easy way for “unbelief” to find a doctrinal path to harmony. Within this large circle of ideas we shall ask, sooner or later, where skepticism could possibly find a successful alternative authority. In philosophy perhaps? Or in science, as it took its first serious steps toward Newtonian mechanics? Or in the occult, including Gnosticism, the kabala, and alchemy? One thing is surprising about our own period: chronicling the Wars of Truth, historians speak of that era as a crisis of faith, yet they do not sufficiently clarify one critical perspective upon this strife and uncertainty—the crisis of natural science and natural knowledge. There is clearly still no comfortable way to juxtapose religion and science, except to note their frequent 1

2

Introduction

discord, discomfiting the modern reader, who may wish to deny the destabilizing effects of scientific revolution while applauding the impetus of science upon mind and heart. The key question is stability, and the Bible’s “house built upon sand” provided a frightening prospect. Following the Reformation, a failure of religiously sanctioned stability was bound to create an intellectual power vacuum, which one can only suppose would finally have to be filled by a new metaphysic. Yet the Copernican Revolution and the “New Philosophy,” as John Donne and others frequently called the new science, were so clearly not religious in character that few believers could find in them an equivalent replacement for the theology of the Passion of Christ. In a poem like “Good Friday: Riding Westward,” Donne would attempt just that, but science and faith could only mix in a concord of opposites, or so it seems. The question would remain: Did not the new science promise the riskiest metaphysical venture, since it promised only a naturalistic basis for stable beliefs? The claims of empirical certainty were surely not metaphysically the same as the claims of faith. For all concerned, Febvre’s “unbelief” (incroyance) was the sticking point, and it remained doubtful whether knowledge provided by instrumental observation was not in fact a kind of unbelief. This doubt permeates the attitudes, art, literature, philosophy, and religion of the entire period. What source of stable beliefs, thinkers of the sixteenth century endlessly asked, would have power to undercut or counterbalance their own growing habit of unbelief? How could they reach the legitimacy their age was looking for? Hans Blumenberg, contemplating the world today, finds a prevailing sense of self that is actively searching for the modus or measure of the modern age; and as an impetus for this adventuring self, no gift (or curse) is stronger than curiosity: “Curiosity is a mark of youthfulness even in animals, and a mark, all the more, of man as an animal who remains youthful.”2 This naive curiosity inspires the ambitious and laborious articulations of thought as conditioned by history, fearlessly opening many strange doors. In the early modern period curiosity leads to deliberate novelty, for unlike a constraining logical system, this ubiquitous tendency to probe even the forbidden will lead back to the model of the magus, who seeks to know everything. Defining modern intellectual freedom, this quest leads eventually to the Faustian contract with demonic power, a new sort of libertine relationship. Activity of a lynx-eyed virtuosity becomes one form of this ideal, and such is the basis of Francis Bacon’s advancement of learning: “The ten-

Introduction

3

dency of Bacon’s method is to set the human mind in controlled motion,” as Blumenberg writes.3 In two directions—toward earthly surroundings and toward celestial observations—this active intellect was drawn, as Kepler said, by the belief that “God, who founded everything in our universe according to the norms of quantity, also gave man a mind that can grasp those norms.”4 Since qualitative norms of value always involve contrary elements, many of them not rationally knowable, Kepler’s norms of quantity would need restatement in the medium of words, expressed in natural languages like English, French, and German, or even learned scientific Latin. This mixing of languages forces us to imagine a crossover between words and mathematics—the subject of my first chapter—but in any case the Keplerian view demands that we accept changes in the overall manifold of beliefs. Febvre puts the demand very bluntly: “The philosophy of the past was opinions, which were worth whatever the speaker was worth in the eyes of his followers or critics. There was no checking by facts, no recourse to realities that allowed one to make a valid choice between the rival opinions of A and B, so long as both of them stood up equally well to the logician’s critical examination. As for the science of the past, it too was opinions.”5 Following a suggestion by Abel Rey, Febvre generally stressed the primacy of the observer’s perceptions, especially those mediated by sight, since their hard-won objectivity undoes the unseen, upon which religious mystery must rest its power to stabilize belief. Controlling the perceptions of nature is sometimes like waking up to the facts of a failed love affair. When considering the early modern period, therefore, an independent intellectual history can only strive to understand the tension between certainty and fear. The prime question for this history must surely be the way civilizations change, as they encounter new cultural pressures to think of human life and its context in terms, precisely, of its instability. A willingness to accept the encounter runs largely alien to our human penchant for “keeping things just the way they have always been.” Archaically, humans have always revered the “symbol of the center”—the sacred mountain, the secret cave, the desert oasis, the island in a pathless ocean, the temple, the civic monument, the brightest star—therein seeking to ground their wish for stable beliefs; and in this manifold the symbols drawn from nature give rise to an extended imagery of human institutions, such as the monarchy, where a single ruler stands above all other powers. Such is the centering archaic model. In England, for example, “divine right” theory argues for the single chosen ruler, while through its magical staging the court masque is designed to reaffirm

4

Introduction

the political centrism of the Tudor and Stuart monarchies. Yet the decentering political forces remain shockingly powerful, and themes of skeptical unbelief cast doubt upon all fixed symbols of the center. We ask, therefore, whether the human yearning for fixed cynosures might not be the actual source of long-term instability. Trying to recapture those stable points may be a delusion, for history shows that all major transformations in society are ambiguous, driven by mixed motives. My periodic focus on a small number of major poets is intended to constellate my discussion, as I return again and again to my theme: the physics and metaphysics of motion. Because literature concentrates its powers in the art of poetry, where metaphor plays the strongest part during this literary period, I am always suggesting that the metaphysical theme is paralleled in poetry by the moving and momentous role of poetic figurations of speech. The student of the dream always finds that imagination, when set free of the censorship and commonsense controls of the waking state, functions through metaphor, while this motility of language permits a commanding response to the need for the metaphysics of motion. Music is in some sense the most important and for Europe the most impressive Elizabethan and Jacobean art form, and it may be regarded as the secret foundation of the metaphoric instinct, where form and content merge freely, defying all the rigid categories of “sense.” In music we find the most abstracted powers of symbolic combination—indeed, those closest to physics; but the principle of harmonious border-crossing applies equally to music and poetry, and during the early modern period these two arts were virtually joined at the hip. It is as if, through music and poetry, the metaphysical aspect of early modern science found a natural ally. Modern critics have made much of the fact that consciousness requires the ability to reflect upon the self, so it must be asked how this can happen without a semiotic perspective on that self. We glimpse the process when we notice, for example, that dramatic villains of the time are always, like Shakespeare’s Richard III, investigating their own bloody designs, as if they found themselves at the wheel of a dreadful machine whose workings fascinated them. When Doctor Faustus debates the sources of ultimate authority, he is in fact examining his own intellectual process, and when he strikes his deal with the Devil, he has devised a scientist’s experimentum crucis. Single events in literature, science, or theology are never in fact solitary occurrences, and for that reason, as Richard Rorty remarked in conversation, “the only thing that can displace an intellectual world is another intel-

Introduction

5

lectual world—a new alternative, rather than an argument against the old alternative.” When C. S. Lewis made his inventory of a lost worldview, The Discarded Image, he looked back to the Middle Ages with deep nostalgia. The medieval universe seemed to him finite and perfectly shaped, “containing within itself an ordered variety.”6 By contrast, “the ‘space’ of modern astronomy may arouse terror, or bewilderment or vague reverie.” Harmonious as it appeared to Lewis, the medieval worldview was therefore what he called “classical,” while our modern scene must be “romantic.” This reading of the past resembles, perhaps, the theologically ideal visions of Etienne Gilson or the aesthetic harmonies limned by Henry Adams’ Mont St. Michel and Chartres, or indeed Umberto Eco’s interpretations of medieval aesthetics. One sees what Lewis had in mind, but something is missing in his distinction: the ideal forms of harmony fluctuate as ideas; there is instability always in our broad depictions of the past—and here one can propose the medieval Passion Play and the wavering narrative lines of the medieval romances, to contradict Lewis’ yearning to establish the Christian “symbolism of the center” as providing a classical model. In my own chosen general terms, one can discern in Lewis a misunderstanding of the different ways one can understand motion—and the ways motion enters our conception of human nature—as a dominant concern for thought and culture. To get clear about stability and instability one needs to develop a sufficiently wide worldview, which in this case means including the chief underlying intellectual change of the early modern period—namely, the scientific change. Only then can one see what Rorty called “a new alternative.” It is tempting to see the widened sense of worldview as a differently imagined idea of empire, an idea that for England began effectively only with Queen Elizabeth’s reign. “Man’s unconquerable mind,” as George Chapman would understand the chief interest of the Homeric epics he translated, is a mind always seeking wider powers and larger domains. Yet we need to accept that, for the queen, “empire” was imagined rather than realized (a condition that would come much later), and that in the early modern period it was normal for poets to praise the hero in these ideal, but not actual, terms. Thus the dramatist Cyril Tourneur on the death of Sir Francis Vere in 1609: His minde was like an Empire, rich and strong, In all defensive pow’r against the wrong, That civill tumult or invasive Hate Might raise against the peace of her estate.7

6

Introduction

This imperial image is poised between external political fact and inward psychic states; yet as the poem proceeds with its allegory of intellectual powers, it focuses increasingly on the hero’s consciousness. And as that Empire of his minde was good; So was her state as strong wherein she stood. Her situation most entirely lay Within itself.

Francis Vere was in fact a noted soldier, but the poetic effect of this funeral elegy is to reinforce the inwardness of the soldier’s courageous and far-seeing soul. It will be said: But this is a poem—what else should we expect? Nevertheless, one need only compare this elegy with later similar works, such as Tennyson’s great ode on the death of the Duke of Wellington, to see how different the poet’s task is when the expansive Elizabethan worldview is replaced by an actual expansion, an actual empire, a real one, as with Victoria’s England. Between the two historical poles lies the time of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, which as epics are designed to show all the differences between an imagined empire of mind and a materialized empire of things and material powers. If intellect is to count, if imagination is to inspire cultural production or activity, as I would argue they must, then the issues surrounding belief and unbelief must always entertain this distinction between theory and actuality, between the two kinds of empire. The distinction underlies my essay on time, space, and motion and the early modern mind, where a striving for hybrids in philosophy discovers the psyche to be an integral part of the world out there, the knowable external world of burgeoning science. With Galilean relativity, critical to my final chapter on Milton, the observer formally enters modern thought, climaxing into a metaphysical crisis that shaped the program of the New Philosophy. To speak of a “program” may seem rather too postmodern to be useful, except that great developments in science (in this respect so different from the arts) appear to thrive on systematic advances, amounting to programs of research and theory. The chief developments in early modern science were not funded by gigantic research foundations; they were largely solo performances. In a sense, even in the universities, the virtuosi of the new sciences were all amateurs. If they wished to be known as professionals, they called themselves “philosophers.” If physicists, they called themselves “mathematicians.” As compared with today’s science, everything in this rising field of expert knowledge

Introduction

7

seems handmade, sometimes literally so. As instrument makers, Galileo and Hooke knew how to make optical devices, while William Harvey actually dissected frogs with knife in hand. Given this situation, early modern science seems almost a kind of poetry. The major question my argument raises and inevitably leaves standing at the doorstep of explanation, is this: Shall we claim that the verbal arts are radically separate from mathematics and science, or is there an intellectual and cultural manifold in which they belong together, almost as twin components of the same discoveries? Despite all the difficulties in asserting this latter position, I believe it is the better one. Had this not been so, Galileo might never have got into trouble with the Church, Bruno might have survived, and so might the inventive tradition of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. Political and religious reasons are usually cited in this last regard, but my sense is that a deeper set of questions, having to do with the theory of stability and security itself, needs to be included along with the more familiar matters of political and religious reform. There is no easy way to describe the obscure relations between verbal expression and mathematical expression, and thus one point is critical: the most important question we will ask in the following chapters is not, “What things are moving in this passage of poetry or drama?” but rather, “What is the nature of motion itself, when its principles animate the material things that are actually moving?” Prime among these things are the members of the human species, whose “self-motion,” or power to initiate their own movements in society (as Aristotelians would put it), becomes an open mystery to be examined in literature during the early modern period. One naturally wonders if our human actions are dependent upon strange inward promptings or result instead from mechanistic processes, as if we were exceedingly complex machines, simulacral robots. This large debate between soul and mechanism cannot here be narrowed as if for scientific inquiry; but tying it to time and space as felt experiences and measured dimensions, we begin to see that change is always a matter of movement. If the following discussion appears to neglect actual gestures, bodily and verbal, that is merely the result of limited exegetical interpretive space—a limit that serves the argument. This book inevitably moves at a level of abstraction, unlike most literary criticism, where we follow the concreteness of imagery and action, where the content of the literature strikes us more forcibly than the form. Whatever the content of literature may be, its form, which determines the force of

8

Introduction

that content, appears to us as symbolic movement. We say stories and poems “move along.” My interest is in the fundamental theory which is required if we are to understand our intuitive sense of literary movement. This approach is basically metaphysical, which explains why the historical comments throughout remain at the level of schematic presentation. That is, most literary people who try to talk about Renaissance science and literature tend to superimpose unduly positivistic evidence on debates whose interest for literature, in principle, was metaphysical and spiritual. This positivistic tendency has much to do with our continuing fascination with alchemy and magic, where the spiritual and material are fused. This fusion of ideas and things makes a strong historical appeal, since common experience always focuses on striking new evidence, such as the circulation of the blood or the imperfections of the moon’s surface—evidence that indeed provides great excitement over the advancement of science. We are all alchemists at heart when “a new planet swims into our ken,” nor is the bold physical evidence unimportant, since it grounds all flights of theory. In a recent study of alchemy, Promethean Ambitions, William R. Newman describes a central alchemical relation to the divine: “According to the Asclepius of Hermes Trismegistus, the magician would gather various materials having a sympathy toward one another and to a particular divinity. . . . [Even in the effort to animate a statue, for example], the raison d’être of such magic was not the replication of a natural product. To the contrary, the end of the theurgist was communication with the formal beings inhabiting the intelligible realms beyond the material world.”8 Such aspirations, extensively studied by Frances Yates and D. P. Walker, appeared as the loosely Gnostic and hermetic practice of “spiritual magic,” a higher pursuit satirized most notably in The Alchemist. Alchemy, theurgy, and hermetic philosophy—custodians of the mysteries of transformation of elements—illuminate the intricate and often obscure relations between nature and art, and hence between the two domains of science and literature. It follows that I am concerned with a widened understanding of historical reading, which here not only entails the transformative interests of alchemy as it prefigures modern science, but also (together with other disciplines) involves a whole broad period of transformation—the period we used to call the “Renaissance,” and which I understand as a changing “manifold” of historical and cultural forces. Manifolds in this sense always require complexity and coherence, rather than raw simplicity and consistent logic. Coherence of diverse things that variously “hang together” may not always or often be

Introduction

9

tidy and neatly categorical, and we are not surprised to find during the early modern period a strong current of skepticism, which in turn, as the English drama shows so forcefully (despite clear restraint from the Court), loosens the creative reins. Wit on every level comes into its own, not merely as a mark of rising and evolving social mobility, but—more seriously for science and art—as the prized human gift of intellection. No wonder that in his elegy on the death of John Donne, Thomas Carew later wrote that the poet ruled “the universal monarchy of wit . . . as he thought fit.” Wit becomes the talisman and cognitive power of a new natural aristocracy, conferring nobility on what the poet George Chapman called “man’s unconquerable mind.” Daring thought experiments mime dangerous voyages across vast empty oceans. New figures of thought animate the poet’s verses, but equally animate the experimental approach to nature advocated in theory by Bacon and practiced in real observations by astronomers throughout Europe. Yet there is a libertine as well as liberating aspect to the exercise of wit, with all its cutting, critical, ironic expression of contradictory beliefs. On the one side wit voices the emotive aspect of skepticism, while on the other it makes an implicit appeal to scientific clarity, to a principled probe into the often shielded facts of the matter, the truth of what is “really going on” in society or nature. Metaphysical poetry of the period thrives on this strategy of oblique exposure, which led Dr. Johnson to say in later times that to write in this metaphysical vein one had, at least, to think. Hilary Gatti has shown the perilous balances in her extensive writings on Giordano Bruno, but—to take a scarcely less remarkable English thinker, Thomas Harriot—she has likewise shown that Harriot’s important discoveries in physics and mathematics were never entirely divorced from an acute awareness of older authorities, notably Aristotle and Roger Bacon. Harriot’s wide reading of early scientific texts, Gatti reminds us, “suggested to him an unorthodox philosophical context in which his scientific activities could develop.”9 Wit analyzes contraries by combining or at least confronting the old with the new, the received with the unprecedented. A wit-driven pursuit of the discordant concord remains the chief mark of the age, and it is a kind of creativity that for a short period in history held sway as the proper aim of both art and science. Harriot is an obvious exemplar of the New Philosophy, for not only did he advance abstract and experimental science—its thought—but he was also an actual voyager to the New World, to Virginia, and from his voyage he gathered and wrote up his “results.” If we are to account for science and literature in their manifold, we can

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Introduction

bring them into conjunction through a process of metaphysical affinity, which seems to me the only proper approach. Historical studies of science that I have read closely, for example those by Thomas Kuhn on the Copernican problem of the planets and Dudley Shapere on Galilean theories and contexts for understanding “local motion,” stand or fall on the merits of their scientific analysis—that is, on the scientific procedures they discover; but, as both historians would argue, these merits once belonged to a wider cultural manifold, which in turn “contained” the general vision of human life.10 Such vision belongs primarily, for individuals and for society, to the poets who make science and philosophy expressive. In my highly selective account of the early modern situation, it thus follows that particulars and the special magic of new observations, especially the materialized form of science using experimental devices, are not always the deeper issue. I am concerned with one main crisis of knowledge and perception and indeed cognition generally: the desire to find a true theory of the chief condition that makes our world what it is—namely, the transitional search for a correct theory of motion, which would end only with Newton’s Laws. This need to understand local motion correctly was beset with vast inherited authoritarian obstacles, so that the achievement of Galileo and others amounted to changing the world. This extreme claim can hardly be impeached, once noticed; yet, surprisingly, not since earlier major scholars—among them Marjorie Nicholson, who did not analyze motion as such—has the problem of motion been imagined to constitute the central cultural issue it must surely be. Indeed, even recent scholars have failed to recall the Parmenidean and Platonic lesson: motion and its absence are inherently the basis of metaphysical conjecture, entailing various philosophical puzzles, as in Zeno’s paradoxes, while at least for the Renaissance period the general economy of motion needs to be understood as the essential problem for all theories of change. Hence, despite all barriers to showing or even suggesting how this is so, we will see that motion is the central concern that alters the Shakespearean “abstract and brief chronicle of the time.” While my temporal focus falls in Chapter 4 upon Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare remains central for me as for others: a radically important play in the canon, Romeo and Juliet, thrives on a panicky awareness of the motion of onrushing, compressing time (“For in a minute there are many days”; III.v.45), as its plot engineers the dynamics of tragic accident. I hope to show that fundamental ideas of motion and its human equivalent—action and the symbolic actions of ordi-

Introduction

11

nary language, as well as the intense imagistic activity within literary language—are finally the cardinal issue for social and intellectual life throughout that most anxious if optimistic transition into modernity. (I have argued on numerous occasions that allegory, the touchstone of medieval literature and preaching, cannot fail over time to produce anesthesia, whereas metaphor, a figure of instant animation, lifts the mind to a fervor of aesthetic activity. Metaphor as structural principle generates restless shift and flexing of sense.) When it seemed to poets and thinkers that human existence was subject to the instabilities of what Hamlet called “outrageous fortune,” the grounds were laid for linking skepticism concerning final purposes with the opposed recognition that the most stable structures of life and thought were in a state of continuous movement, their centers always shifting, turning the idea of position into a source of doubt; hence my periodic emphasis upon skeptical, libertine attitudes. Medieval science had made great strides in this field of the theory of motion. Nevertheless, so basic was the search for correct laws of motion, that for the early modern period it constitutes the deepest metaphysical problem, and this in turn requires the modern scholar to reach an appropriate level of abstraction. We may not, as literary critics, be able to do the mathematics of scientists like Thomas Digges or Galileo, much less Newton, but we need absolutely to grasp the essential role played by their abstract techniques of thought. Otherwise, we would be like Frenchmen praising the Cartesian spirit without ever mentioning that he was a great mathematician. Always, my hope is that the reader will find ideas of motion, and their concomitant dimensions of time and space, evident enough to be clearly at work in the poetry and drama of the period. “Eppur si muove”—“And yet it moves”— were Galileo’s no doubt apocryphal words to the Inquisitors, yet they catch the spirit of the age, which everywhere in literature is reflected clearly enough. In addition to crossovers between scientific and literary expression, I am looking for conceptions underlying the most abstruse metaphysical thoughts—conceptions of the natural that should never be excluded from serious discussions of belief and hence from the workings of imaginative literature as well.

CHAPTER

1

Galileo’s Metaphor

Most scientists even today, in an age of extreme mathematical complexity, are able to use their own native languages in describing what they are looking for, at least roughly. Without actually measuring cubic centimeters or gallons, a researcher finds it helpful to be able to say, “Trees grow in relation to various factors, such as water supply.” Measurement usually comes later. While early modern scientists, especially the astronomers, went beyond their medieval precursors in their search for revealing as well as accurate mathematical expressions, they simultaneously employed natural language—in effect, words—to express natural process. Let us remember that powerful authoritarian ecclesiastical forces were arrayed to keep the Church establishment in place. This we have already said was a critical conservative enterprise, given the widening Reformation deployment of vernacular readings of the Bible. Science on its widest scale could no longer seek to evade the common human problem of the way Christians read their most important texts. Galileo himself famously called mathematics the “language of science,” and this conceptual metaphor follows from a difference between two symbolisms: mathematics is an artificial language, while English is a natural language, using words and grammars but not ratios, numbers, or geometric constructions. For one brief moment the metaphor comes fully to life in a polemical scientific treatise, The Assayer (Il saggiatore), by Galileo. This short account of method, published in 1623, the same year as the Shakespeare First Folio, shows us how that remarkable Renaissance scientist would deal with the medieval poetic and theological figure of the “Book as Symbol.” Galileo’s new approach rethinks this topos, giving it a modern cast and leaving us with what may well be the central obscurity of all modern philosophy: the relation between words and mathematics. 12

Galileo’s Metaphor

13

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these [i.e., without this knowledge], one wanders about in a dark labyrinth.1

Stillman Drake reminds us that here “mathematics” is not an occult term; rather, it stands for a language “necessary for understanding nature, not as an end in itself.” Science combines sense experience with necessary demonstration, a hybrid requiring observation tamed by exact terminology. Terms in physics are never pure or “merely verbal,” but are typically used in a sharply referential manner. In Galileo’s writings and practice, natural language connects to actual physical experience, as when in The Assayer he describes various exemplary problems with observation, such as the difference of touch one experiences when moving one’s hand over a marble statue and then over a living human body. For a poet, this sensation and its implications would be a fascinating problem for poetic expression, no doubt calling for figures of speech. Galileo cites his case of varying touch in order to exemplify the subtle character of exact observation and the accompanying role of the observer. Common to scientist and poet in this period is a growing concern with the skewing effects of human consciousness, so it may well be that eventually, as we understand language better, we will find metaphors and equations close to each other, as different types of mental “figure.” At the very least, we shall wish to juxtapose the two domains, and even if we do not advance much beyond Galileo’s metaphoric equation of mathematics and language, the two skills meet as instances of metaphoric mental power, as if, even in mathematics, metaphor defines the highest order of mental power. So often during the early modern transitional period this figure extends its shapes, so as to include variable metamorphic, Ovidian shifts in schematic figuration—metamorphosis being the chief analogical process in the highest Renaissance art, whether in musical polyphony or literary myth-making. My continual appeal to analogical relations throughout this book owes much to the fact that Renaissance scientists and poets alike were deeply influenced by mythologists like Ovid, whose cosmic storytelling generated a fashion for unifying analogies as a governing principle of the world order. Poetically, as a main source of intense intellectual energy, metaphor

14

Galileo’s Metaphor

is the concentrated form that literature derives from the more schematic shapes of analogy. Metaphor itself is as real as breathing, if by this we mean that we humans frequently resort to it as we speak and write. It is, however, not a little mysterious, much as language in general refuses partition into neat little compartments of linguistics or psychology, nowadays most frequently when hope for linguistic theory is inspired by cognitive science. Some of the oldest issues regarding metaphor are still not easy to clarify. My own teacher, I. A. Richards, a pioneer in this field, hoped to reach clarity through information theory, but he acknowledged to me that this hope was many years away from fruition in cognitive science and its allied scientific fields. To adopt a traditional view is then, paradoxically, not quite as atavistic as it might seem. Let us initially say that metaphor is a linguistic (often vividly imagistic) mimesis that finds sets or classifications of things that strongly but incongruously interact with each other. The emphasis upon incongruity is critical; it threatens authoritarian reductions of real-world subtlety. A classic theorist such as Roman Jakobson would remind us that in similar fashion metonymy figures the curious adjacent juxtapositions of things, including their part-whole relationships. By strict analogy, both of these fundamental operations are always at work in mathematics. In science (and hence, by extension, in literature also) a mathematical reality discovered in the physical world is revealed by mathematics precisely because mathematics is, in its use of variables, metaphoric, for mutatis mutandis the metamorphoses of natural languages share with mathematics a semiotic system with power to discover the similar in the dissimilar. Supposing that mathematics is a metaphoric system using unambiguous terms (unlike terms in natural languages), its complex sequences will reveal similarities between variables whose relationships with each other happen also to hide “occult” dissimilarities. In certain historical periods, where changes in worldview are paramount, such meetings of science and art present the life of the mind as a hybrid of the real and the ideal. Although the point is only a general one, we should note that when Empson devised the arguments in his Seven Types of Ambiguity and his later Structure of Complex Words, he found that the strongest poetic expression shared formal properties with mathematical equations. As his college mentor Frank Ramsey recalled, Empson himself was a gifted mathematician, especially in algebra, and the period of literature most interesting and inspiring to him was the Renaissance, coinciding exactly with the time and general culture of Galileo’s explorations. The example of Galileo as author and rhetorician gives credence to such

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15

conjectures, not least because he constantly adjoined his scientific studies to a literary account, such as The Sidereal Messenger, The Assayer, and especially the two great dialogues (on the Ptolemaic and Copernican world systems, and on the new sciences of mechanics and local motion). Everywhere we find a basic interaction of ideas, mathematical and observational, and we are forced to see that in some sense Galileo “spoke mathematics,” especially geometry, in all his scientific work.2 The metaphor, a sharpened analogy, is obviously appealing; it links up with Galileo’s recognized literary mastery in scientific discourse. In Why Read the Classics? Italo Calvino suggests that for Galileo “mathematics, and in particular geometry, performs the function of an alphabet,” on which Galileo wrote shortly before his death that the book of natural philosophy “is written in different characters from those of our alphabet” and hence can be read only by those who have learned its alphabet.3 But the mathematical “characters” remain for him a kind of alphabet, and his demonstrations, he believes, express the nature of the world—they are in sync, as we would say, with verbal expressions. For Calvino, the Tuscan scientist remains one of the great masters of ordinary language. Combining mathematical statements and verbal narratives at the very least lifts the question of Galileo’s metaphor to a high cultural significance. The Sidereal Messenger (Sidereus Nuncius) reads like an astonishingly suspenseful news story. The major theoretical works composed in dialogue form rival those of antiquity, yet Galileo also wrote criticism of Ariosto and Tasso, anticipating questions in the theory of the Baroque. In the art closest to physics, namely music, he was a life-long performer on the lute, a prime instrumental resource for Renaissance composers. He was as much at home in mathematical technique as with the verbal and musical arts. We are reminded that his father, Vincenzio Galilei, to whom he owed much in early education, was a supremely important musical theorist, in particular as the pioneer of the new art of opera, which deliberately looked back to classical origins.4 This furthermore was a period when painting and architecture and the rapidly changing science of optics were increasingly mathematical, yet their discoveries inflamed the imagination, as Eileen Reeves has documented in her study of science and the visual arts in the age of Galileo.5

Two Cultures or Two Languages? Suppose that in this context of humanism it was impossible to avoid praising the mixed variety of the arts and natural philosophy. Not only do tensions abound in this area of history, but it may be that the imaginative fertility of

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the period owed much precisely to these tensions—the larger logic is one of tension. Even if we identify poets like Shakespeare and Marlowe as drawing upon the humanist manifold of values, we still encounter a twofold difficulty in understanding their mode of thought, as they cross the border between art and science. Similarly, there is a period during which scientists were frequently literary adepts; certainly the theorist Bacon was markedly a literary man. With the arts, there is likewise the fact that music is manifestly a scientific mode of art. Crossovers were commonly experienced in an age of sophisticated hermetic symbolism. Modern musical instruments belonged to the development of instruments in general, including those used by scientists. Already the dawn is slowly rising on C. P. Snow’s “two cultures,” but— owing to religious anxieties about empirical science—we can hardly say whether we are simply looking at two languages developing and intersecting, side by side (the language of art pitted against the language of science), or an actual enemy twinning of two hostile cultural systems. Culture itself is a modern notion, and it might be wiser to speak of two separate faiths. Perhaps Galileo’s metaphor implies only a set of semantic relations, not at all a complete worldview stretching from mere observed fact to the most abstruse metaphysics. The Church, of course, was willing to permit researchers to carry out mathematical speculations about a universal order, so long as these did not pretend to name anything real, and provided that they intended only a hypothetical statement of interesting ideas about nature. Theologians saw clearly enough that the Copernican mathematical arguments could imply a real order of things only if this was admitted to be different from the order required by orthodox notions of stable common sense. Creationists apparently take a simpler position today, when mentioning Darwin; they want Darwinian research to be a semantic equivalent of biblical words, with no qualitative or actual difference of cognitive assumptions, no difference of method, no difference over what in any respect may be called “natural fact.” But Galileo spent his life showing that he never engaged in scientific modeling just to accommodate to the essentialist older views required by the Church. Whether, as Stillman Drake supposed, Galileo wanted to defend his faith in its most important beliefs, or whether he didn’t, he essentially acted on a prior principle that scientific inquiry into the workings of nature was and should be an independent branch of human endeavor.6 His mathematics-as-language metaphor then seems to imply a whole new method of acquiring intellectual independence.

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The Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina shows that Galileo was necessarily opposed to any literalist reading of biblical texts and commentary. Such readings seemed to him a species of irrational magic interpretation, since they prohibited correction of one’s views through the use of sense experience and the reasoning that follows from or leads to further explorations of nature. If various Protestants joined the Catholics in ferociously opposing Copernican thought, they did so in order to prevent a shattering of the allegorical veil cast over the meanings of natural and spiritual truths, as distinct from each other. To preserve this veil, to retain the old magic (recurrent in children’s fiction of our own time) and to recapture C. S. Lewis’ “discarded image”—the medieval synthesis—required a metaphysical unity where in fact, for that period, there could be only a radical split.7 Orthodox Catholic (usually Jesuit) scientists with whom Galileo met and talked, many of whom he respected, differed always in one radical emphasis: they wanted to preserve the Aristotelian heritage of reasoning from axioms, to produce a rationalism, treating nature as a servant of the revealed biblical text with its load of exegetical interpretation. His view would be: If you put all that marvelous interpretive machinery aside, what is left for you to see? The intellectual residue is a set of natural facts and imagined operations, whose laws of motion and stability could be described accurately only by means of geometric demonstration. It then seems inevitable that we take seriously the notion that for Galileo mathematics is, metaphorically, a language for expressing science. The mathematics-as-language metaphor may hide a semiotic truth. By taking this view of mathematics, Galileo is saying that its expressions can be translated. The issue then becomes whether or not the double appearance of nature—the fundamentalist’s “factual” reading of the biblical text, or its translation into a Galilean mathematics—could be tolerated simultaneously. For those in power whose religious inheritance demanded that Earth be the biblical center of divine (and then human) attention, it could only appear that long before a Newtonian science had fully proved the heliocentric consequences, any merely poetic or poetic expression of the New Philosophy was bound to threaten fundamental and fundamentalist beliefs, even more deeply than the technical defense of Copernican thought by an astronomer such as Kepler. Following the suggestion of Galileo’s metaphor, however, the language of mathematics could and should be translated into the ordinary language used by believers in daily speech, and at that moment a new kind of relativism shows up—that is, the relativism of verbal expression.

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Translation must then become an essential and certainly permitted function in preserving the faith. But it will be a controlled translation, moving back and forth between an ordinary verbal language, as in biblical myth, and the highly controlled and realized linguistic concreteness of mathematics, as displayed in the measurement and proportionate description of motion. We may then say that the Church’s more repressive responses were an immediate fear of translation, a fear that the discourse of scientific nature and its motions would translate dangerously into uncontrolled commonsense images of movement on the plane of social, political, and religious behavior and organization. The Church, of course, attempted to translate its verbally expressed philosophy of nature back into the mathematically expressed science that Galileo wished to keep in its separate intellectual and practical role, a basically secular role. A translated mathematical language—if it substituted for an ordinary language that needs a cleaner profile, a more precise logical articulation, an unambiguously nonpersonifying lexicon of terms—might then be a threat to orthodox beliefs. The danger to orthodoxy would be that a scientist might move too freely among social implications of a mathematical trope. The language of science might secretly express a substitute for worded understandings; Galileo himself was exceedingly canny about preserving such ambiguous relations between the twin aspects of his language of science. His metaphor, like many great tropes, hides as much as it reveals. In its earlier form, we discover the same scandalous barrier that Snow found with his “two cultures” in the twentieth century.8 There will be serious losses of subtlety if we follow Snow uncritically, for it is likely that in his contrast he badly underestimated the technological, engineering side of science. There is a sense in which The Tempest is closer to the spirit of theoretical physics than a description of a computer or of a weather vane. C. P. Snow persistently speaks of working with scientists during the day and then retiring for drinks with his literary friends in the evening. The social enjoyment of literature is the key idea here, as if what happened at night were occurring not in a hybrid or translatable version of the daytime work, but in a different language. Frequently poets and even novelists create impressions of how things happen, and this literary vagueness may go so far beyond controlled ambiguities that it creates for the reader and writer a climate of cultural difference. There are also technical skills at issue here. Poets are at home with the intimate sense and public quality of words, while the main reason they could not do science is that they could not do the math, soon finding they became bored

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with counting things. Essentially, then, it does seem that the “language of science” blocks them, not the content or the interests or the amazing wonders of nature. It is just that modern science has to have what Galileo demanded: its own disciplined and disciplining terms. Unfortunately, when either side of the scandalous divide develops to a high pitch of special technique, the danger is that the voice of mathematics will silence the voice of words, or vice versa. Yet the two languages must somehow get along together. It would seem they contribute to each other, but in ways still beyond our understanding. During the transitional and in many ways pre-specialized world of the Renaissance, they walk side by side; but this companionship, as in Donne’s poetry, may have to occur in occult ways. The occult becomes the bridge between the two spheres, which would explain why there always was and often still remains a strong occult cast of speculation underlying the highest orders of scientific as well as literary thought. No easy route to understanding exists here, for the gathering of disparate languages is a most peculiar phenomenon, like certain well-known paradoxes of modern particle physics, where particles seem to disobey logic and the classical Law of Excluded Middle, as if they could simultaneously be and not be. Words and mathematics seem able to cancel each other out, but in fact by bouncing back and forth they preserve each other’s integrity. Not merely for the general reader but also for his fellow scientists, Newton knew that the words of his Principia are as critical to the book as its geometric demonstrations of line and angle. In a 1935 lecture series on the nature of physical theory, P. W. Bridgman, who first formulated the idea of the “operational definition,” suggested that a use of verbal “text” (as he called it), in conjunction with mathematical terms, was the norm for mathematical physics.9 This seems also to have been the case with Galileo, if we can judge from his writings, especially his dialogues; they simultaneously display approach and avoidance, we might say. For literature, of course, numbers are cold, geometric figures are cold, equations are cold, despite their strong resemblance to metaphor, and this lowering of cognitive and emotive temperature virtually defines the gap between the two cultures. What amounts to an emotional bias is always pulling in the opposite directions of quantity and quality. Exactly this divergence was far less strong with the traditional Aristotelian science of causes than with the new post-Copernican science of physical laws; yet in a final paradox, the great writing of the Renaissance was inspired mainly by the new, not the older, science. With the decline of Aris-

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totle’s prestige in science, the heat of the poetry must come from the cold flames of the new science. Older beliefs in Aristotle’s theory of causes, with their strong and ultimately allegorical drive, their vision of telos and final cause, give way to a distanced, cooler, more economical, and in a critical sense much simpler explanation of the central question, What is motion? A rough Wittgensteinian answer would be that motion is the changes of position, substance, and even purpose that scientists in different eras have chosen to study under the rules of that language game. Science then would appear to have little to do with literature, or perhaps might always be leaving literature behind; or, alternatively, we might say that in a seemingly quite disparate world the inspiration of the literary arts derives from a continuous conflict between the still-lively older science and the rapidly developing New Philosophy, wherein accurate and stable cosmic measurements would soon be possible. Or perhaps, as Newton later hazarded in a note, “It may be, that there is no such thing as an equable motion, whereby time may be accurately measured. It may be that there is no body really at rest, to which the places and motions of others may be referred.”10 All through this emergent strife, therefore, no concepts and no issue at large were more important than decoding the subtly varied ways time, space, and motion structure our universe. The code could generate its own new mythology, of course, and with that its new figures of speech and thought. Galileo’s metaphor remains an incitement, if not exactly a guide, when we define the manifold of the rising New Science and, as I should like to call it, the New Poetry. His dream of a second language, the mathematical characters his observations required, remains important to us still, even at our later stage in history, because we do not yet understand how we are to speak intelligently about any of our larger perspectives. Otherwise, we would perhaps know better how to live.

CHAPTER

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The Theme of Motion

“Perhaps the Most Important in Nature” During the later Renaissance, a wide range of discoveries in what was called alternatively the New Philosophy or the New Science began to transform the entire metaphysical enterprise of European thought, and in this transformation no single challenge to research was more critical than the problem we have singled out: What is motion? What are its different forms? Where is it significant? How does it relate to time and space? Plus many other more detailed questions. Distinguishing the innovations in this field has been the laborious task of philosophers and historians of science, leaving the subject immensely rich in scientific meaning but particularly difficult for the student of literature, to whom this book is mainly addressed. Since the issues involved are primarily metaphysical, and not simply a matter of physics and its relation to art, we shall be content with the approximations our undeveloped subject will permit, and no more. Following the lead of E. A. Burtt’s Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (1924; revised 1932) and Dudley Shapere’s Galileo: A Philosophical Study (1974), I inquire into a field rather too wide for comfort—partly scientific, partly literary, and partly psychological. The poetry creates a drama from the psychological values attached to new conceptions of the natural world, while the principles of movement are critical to these conceptions with regard to the more spirited aspects of literature. For that reason, a rough attempt must be made to bring literature and science together at this fundamental level, if we are to grasp the deeper metaphysical promises and troubles besetting Renaissance authors of the highest rank. Skeptical as we may now be of “the very idea of a conceptual scheme,” we can take refuge from its problems of form and content by seeking out the dimensions and dimensionalities of change, rather as if we were to apply the 21

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physicist’s field theory to the particular events of history.1 Here the critical discoveries involve what scientists will say is happening when changes occur, as fundamentally new convictions alter the idea of change itself. Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics use the word “kinesis” for change, which alerts us to the fact that nothing in Galileo or his contemporaries was verbally distinct from ancient verbal usage, since the New Science certainly studied the kinetic and dynamic aspect of movement as objects changed positions in time and space. Change for Aristotle, as for Galileo, is always a matter of motion. This fact in turn leads back to the early modern conception of life, where increasingly everything seemed to be moving, usually too fast for comfort. This almost universal scientific inquiry into why things move had more complexity than one cares to contemplate, but the pertinent trials and errors of ancient science, as analyzed in several volumes by Richard Sorabji (notably in his Matter, Space, and Motion), indicate that no other single field of scientific inquiry has seen such a long, epochal history of newly evolving theories.2 To catch the intellectual feel of this transforming scene, and to epitomize the heroic social aims of the New Science, we can do no better than to quote Galileo’s Dutch publisher, Louis Elzevir, who introduced the Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences in 1638 as follows: Since society is held together by the mutual services which men render one to another, and since to this end the arts and sciences have largely contributed, investigations in these fields have always been held in great esteem and have been highly regarded by our wise forefathers. The larger the utility and excellence of the inventions, the greater has been the honor and praise bestowed upon the inventors. Indeed, men have deified them and have united in the attempt to perpetuate the memory of their benefactors by the bestowal of this supreme honor.3

These words constitute an almost complete program for the modern age, referencing mutual secular service, utility, invention, and a secular deification of worldly benefactions to society, if not to mankind at large. Yet what follows in Elzevir’s note to the reader is even more striking as a recognition of very new ideas, granted that this series of dialogues is the last great Galilean work to be published. Besides lauding the famous discoveries by telescope, (which was “invented in this country but perfected by him,” says Elzevir), the publisher claims that his hero “has restored to the world the science of astronomy and has presented it in a new light.” This kind of

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puff encourages sales, yet its hyperbole is not without warrant, and Elzevir continues with it as he makes his truly central points. Visual sighting is said to “teach more and with greater clarity in a single day than can precept even though repeated a thousand times; or, as another says, intuitive knowledge keeps pace with accurate definition.” The latter is to be found in geometric demonstrations that ultimately yield pathways to precise measurement. But the cardinal moment in the publisher’s note is the announcement of the first of the two new sciences. The second science is concerned with the nature of solid bodies and their tensile strength, yet the first is the more important, since it leads to all others by way of fundamental theory: What is even more remarkable in this work is the fact that one of the two sciences deals with a subject of never-ending interest, perhaps the most important in nature, one which has engaged the minds of all the great philosophers and one concerning which an extraordinary number of books have been written. I refer to motion [moto locale], a phenomenon exhibiting very many wonderful properties, none of which has hitherto been discovered or demonstrated by any one.

If, as the New Science came to understand, motion is indeed “the most important [subject] in nature,” this is perhaps the crucial ideological claim to be made in the coming of the modern age. And the theme is probably just as important for imaginative authors, since to them, too, motion implies momentum and makes kinetic energy available. The New Science identifies a mode of omnipresent power relations, quite unlike that of the inherited Christian providence, where the source of power is a personified divinity whose theological extensions give us the angels, demons, princes, powers, and dominations familiar to all biblically trained poets. Beliefs and their systems must from this point forward take their cue from natural science, where movement is central to the physical problem of “fall,” which, despite its technical sense, cannot fail to influence Christian ideas of the Fall of Man and thence from a religious viewpoint. Ultimately the science of falling objects, since it entails gravity, requires an imagistic rethinking of the human relation to space and time in the Christian fallen world.

The Critical Shift from Impetus to Inertia Literary scholars are unlikely to note that between the birth of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Galileo in 1564 and the death of Milton in 1674 a scien-

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tific revolution occurred that rivals the Copernican revolution in scope of physical and metaphysical meaning. Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) plays a deeply influential role in the larger transformations of the New Philosophy; for while he appears an inspired Pythagorean numerological mystic, he insisted—as Burtt puts it, perhaps too rigidly—that “valid mathematical hypotheses must be exactly verifiable in the observed world.”4 This pragmatic direction of thought—not without precedent in medieval science, it must be said—was to leap forward with Galileo’s discovery of the inertial explanation of movement, an account immediately necessary to the true explanation of gravity, as developed by Isaac Newton. The best way to achieve such pragmatism might have been debated in adventurous scientific circles, perhaps as a Baconian inductive approach or a Galilean mixture of experiment and mathematical hypothesis, but there could no longer be any turning away from the “observed world.” Since for Aristotle, as Jonathan Lear has so clearly shown, “nature is an inner principle of change,” the Aristotelian theory of natural causes, operating as this inner principle of change, must assume the founding position in all later philosophies of nature.5 In order to reach the broad discussion of change in Book 5 of the Physics, Aristotle in Book 4 lays out his views of location, empty space, and time and its relation to the before and after, to the starting and ending point in any process of change, so that the whole program of later science is anticipated, in principle, in this earlier and classic work. The Galilean innovation regarding change focuses on one crucial aspect of the traditional science, the explanation of “local motion.” Here perhaps the best definition comes from James Clerk Maxwell, who makes clear how motion involves place and the displacement of bodies, the latter being understood as systems: When the change of configuration of a system is considered with respect only to its state at the beginning and the end of the process of change, and without reference to the time during which it takes place, it is called the displacement of the system. When we turn our attention to the process of change itself, as taking place during a certain time and in a continuous manner, the change of configuration is ascribed to the motion of the system.6

Moving from one city to another is a displacement, a shift of the place occupied by the body or system. The first and the second placements are what count. But when we look at the way this change occurred—how long it

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took, whether it was continuous (smooth or interrupted), and so on—we are asking what the change was like in itself. This latter interest involves motion and its “available kinetic energy,” while the former involves a sort of geography of things and their changes of location, and hence is referred to as “local motion.” Galileo’s Archimedean interests, and the fact that he was intimately familiar not only with projectile motions in ballistics, but, equally and perhaps more profoundly, with the movements of boats in the water, led him to a relativistic sense of what motion involves. The movement of a boat strikes the mind with wonder, because it displays what we might call fluent motion, motion in a continuous medium, not from one fixed terrestrial point to another. The aquatic background makes no difference in principle (the physicist Richard Feynman learned about this from his father, looking at a ball standing still in his accelerating toy wagon), but as a phenomenon there is something more abstractly free about observing the motions of boats in the lagoon of Venice, studying the motion of water in the bilge of such working boats as they arrive dockside—that is, observing a motion within a motion. For that observation requires a true principle of inertia, which became Galileo’s great interest. For Aristotle, change is the actualizing of a potential for action. Besides change of location, besides local motion, change can also occur, say, in a leaf, as autumn colors replace those of spring and summer, where the causal sequence is to be found within the leaf, owing to its potential for combining different pigments. Such is one branch of Aristotelian motion, the coming into being and passing away, and it is evident everywhere in the world of growing and living creatures. Matter and form and energy fuel such alterations, and they involve the material, formal, and efficient causes Aristotle adduced in order to ground his theory of natural change. Shapere notes that for Aristotle some changes are substantial and some accidental, the latter including increases and decreases of quantity, alterations of quality, and locomotion or change of place, the kind we have already mentioned. “Nature is a source or cause of being moved and of being at rest in that to which it belongs primarily, in virtue of itself and not in virtue of a concomitant attribute” (Physics, 192b, 21–23). Shapere rewords the sentence: “Thus nature is a principle of movement in any thing, by virtue of which that thing alters, grows, or changes place; and that principle must, furthermore, be intrinsic in the sense that it is not an accidental accompaniment (even an internal one) of the thing.”7 We can therefore speak colloquially of “human nature” or “the nature of the beast.”

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When for Aristotle things move in this physical context, there is an obvious model for motion in the movements of animals. But when he has to consider projectiles—things we throw, such as stones—there is no obvious inner nature of the beast that will get the stone to move. Aristotle theorized that the stone not only moved through the air, encountering air resistance ahead, but also was propelled by the air adjacent and behind it as it moved forward. One could ask, as did Jean Buridan in the Middle Ages, whether or how the air got “into” the stone, to keep it moving. Did some property of the throwing hand somehow get into the stone, without however abandoning that hand, yet still pushing or mysteriously impelling the stone forward on a trajectory? When the object was thrown in what was often called “violent motion,” where was the impelling force lodged—in the hand or in the object thrown, or in both? Leaving the thrower’s hand, having left it, how could a stone continue to be pushed forward by a force? It was to explain this paradoxical situation that Buridan and other medieval scientists developed the concept of impetus, so as to think about the idea of the force somehow getting “into” the object thrown. For centuries there had been no correct dynamic theory to account for the stone’s behavior in the air, even though with Buridan and others medieval science developed the theory of impetus, to show how the motion of the stone somehow got injected into its “life” as a potentially moving object. Reading motion this way commits the scientist to imagine the moving body as if it were communicating with the angels, as if perfectly animated, something like an ideal human animal, which momentarily in flight is enabled (along Aristotelian lines) to achieve “selfmotion.” As we shall see, the transition to the modern science of motion required dealing with a natural human desire to personify the dynamics involved. This is not as strange or entirely unscientific as it might at first appear. Richard Feynman’s Caltech course lecture “Time and Distance” referred in his typically amusing and graphic way to the problem, in particular, of imagining what makes stones move and planets go round and round: In those days one of the theories proposed was that the planets went around because behind them were angels, beating their wings and driving the planets forward. You will see that this theory is now modified! It turns out that in order to keep the planets going around, the invisible angels must fly in a different direction and they have no wings. Otherwise, it is a somewhat similar theory. Galileo discovered a very remarkable fact about motion, which was essential for understanding these laws. This is the principle

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of inertia—if something is moving, with nothing touching it and completely undisturbed, it will go on forever, coasting at a uniform speed in a straight line. (Why does it keep on coasting? We do not know, but that is the way it is.)8

The final parenthesis is classic Feynman, making an emphatic admission that we still do not fully understand inertia, despite the impressive achievement of Newton’s laws of motion, the advances of Einsteinian relativity theory, and many other improvements upon Galileo. Once more, we humans are cautioned about false promises regarding the teleological Why of things. What we do perceive for use in the present argument is that in order to understand motion in general, it was necessary for early modern scientists to imagine movement occurring in empty space, free of all externally applied forces, such as impetus theory required. If “free” objects kept on going forever, science would give up on the notion that somehow the thrower’s hand passed its energy “into” the stone to keep it moving. The stone with nothing touching it and completely undisturbed will move forever without stopping. In detail and in the most general theoretical terms, it was impossible for this inertial concept to neglect the inherited notion that planets revolved forever owing to the perfection of circles, and science had to work through a complex set of questions about the difference between circular and rectilinear motion. Nevertheless, inertial theory led Galileo to discover that a projectile fired from a cannon would combine horizontal motion with what Aristotle called its “natural” downward motion, with the result that the overall path of the cannonball would be a parabola. Galileo had found that he could mathematically analyze the overall path of motion, and show that it combined two different vectors of work and the expenditure of energy. The scientist is really asking Why all the time, because theory suggests new ways of looking at nature, but these Why’s are actually versions of How. If there is to be a change in worldview as a result of the discovery of inertia, which led directly to Newton’s complete laws of motion, we must reckon with a new coldness or distancing between what makes the world go round and what we humans may feel we contribute to the universal motion. Our souls and the spirits above seem to need a mathematical, distanced expression that above all separates us when we make our most acute accounts of natural process. In a later chapter, we shall find this separation of individual consciousness operating as the chief resource of power in the dramatic solilo-

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quy. When we think about ourselves and our power to move and act, we in fact are adopting a simplified version of the basic scientific method, that of the independent observer, although these mental processes are filtered through analogies between personal human nature and external objective nature. Our best way to get closer to these analogies as they are used will be to look briefly at the way Renaissance philosophy shares with poetry and especially drama the power to represent the fundamental human desire for identification with others. Drama, in particular, seems designed to show how our thoughts and plans connect with emotion on the subjective side and with the so-called real world on the objective side. Inner feelings and remotely hidden psychic drives bring about action in any number of directions, and all these lead, on stage, to “actions that a man might play,” constantly changing the dynamic where numbers of people interact like many small worlds moving in mutual co-presence. The drama tends always toward such relative motions.

Philosophy and the Dramatic Tendency Ernst Cassirer’s 1927 monograph, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, records the onset of such dramatic thinking, which speaks as much to the human condition as to natural science. Cassirer takes an unusual view of Bruno: “Bruno’s ethics especially, concerned as they are not so much with the form of the universe as with that of man, reach for this specifically human means of expression.”9 If, as Pietro Pomponazzi argued in De Incantionibus (his pioneering 1567 treatise on miracle and astrology), astral influence was not so powerful as to make us mere puppets, then we can reach beyond the stars to gain a more liberated perspective. Again, when Pico della Mirandola studies relations between this natural world and a Platonized medieval Christian worldview, “he succeeds,” says Cassirer, “in becoming master of the confusion and in sharply drawing the lines between the motifs. And therewith he succeeds in enriching and deepening the entire conception of ancient thoughts.”10 Pico anticipates Kepler and Newton, not to mention Galileo and the English astronomers, when he argues for the concept of actual cause (vera causa), which amounts to a general theory of natural process. Furthermore, throughout Pico’s arguments, the belief in causal verification (conclusions based on empirically verifiable observation) accompanies an enhanced belief in the “dignity of man”—that is, a dignity accorded to the powers of thought and observation. Pico in this regard takes

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a distinctly modern view of things, since for him astrological readings of destiny are, to use Cassirer’s phrase, “endowed with demonic power.” Cassirer goes to considerable length to remind us that language thus must change to fit new uses and discover new terms. Science requires a rich and frequently complex semiotic, “but in science, these signs are not something final, let alone something independently existent; rather they merely form a medium of thought; they are a stage on the road that leads from the sensible perception of phenomena to the intellectual conception of their causes. . . . We must be able to follow step by step and member by member the continuous series of changes which originate at a certain point in the universe; we must be able to set a unitary law which all these changes obey.”11 The series is never simple automatism; there are theoretical choices to be made. The task of the poet then would be to negotiate interactions between the divine absolute and a perpetually changing Ovidian worldview. Everywhere in Elizabethan literature we discover the same fascinations with activity as such. Johan Huizinga’s famed Homo Ludens and Edgar Wind’s Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (a study of serio ludere) both point to a governing cultural interest, whereby plays and playing establish the theater. The radical concept is that drama is so named because its Greek root dran means “to do, to act,” and only secondarily “to make.” When Hamlet says in regard to the make-believe of theater, “they are actions that a man might play,” he is actually probing the psyche to ask what it means to take an action. Such investigations are not to the Puritan social taste, despite Calvinist authority in England. When a momentary and not entirely disinterested (that is, pamphleteering) Elizabethan Puritan, Stephen Gosson, attacks the theater and its world in The School of Abuse (1579), he singles out the players and their cohorts, the dancers and tumblers, dicers and carders, bowlers, fencers, and wrestlers. He is out to get the entertainer, who would seduce the worker away from performing his labors “without repining.” One thing we can perceive—namely, that the outrageously kinetic (and epochal) plays of Marlowe, with all their wild bombast and fustian eloquence, were a source of immense theatergoing pleasure. The Puritan would rid the world of pleasure, for various reasons, and in so doing the Puritan must redefine the nature of human social action. The Puritan has no choice but to attack the theater, for plays analyze actions and question their motives. Plays, like Faustian vision (as Lovejoy remarked in The Great Chain of Being), allow for “no finality, no ultimate perfection, no arrest of the outreach of the will.”12 Emblematic of this restless motion, the nova in the night sky portends

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a loosening cosmology. Bruno’s editors, Edward Gosselin and Lawrence Lerner, in a learned introduction to The Ash Wednesday Supper, comment that “uniform circular motion—or at least a motion compounded of elementary circular motions—is essential to a conciliation of Aristotelian physics with the geocentric cosmology”: exactly what is being overthrown all through this Shakespearean period.13 Gosselin and Lerner make it quite clear that in the turmoil of Bruno’s thought there is a clear sense that cosmic changes must be seen to occur “individually and separately,” the local motion implying the universal stability. “All the stars, including the earth, must move in circles in order to maintain the motion proper to eternal beings, but Bruno paradoxically maintains that the motions cannot be either precisely circular or composed precisely of circles, even though the motion of the earth (after Copernicus) must be composed of exactly four circular motions.”14 A willingness to contradict oneself is allowed to serve the broader interest in how and why bodies move—for example, in the vitalist understanding of the heart, explored in anatomical terms by William Harvey. As John Rogers has recently shown in The Matter of Revolution, the irregular pulsating motions of the circulating blood provide another powerful index to a changed social mentality. The New Philosophy is alive with vitalist implications, not solely for living creatures, but, by analogy, for the imagined body politic; and underlying all such vitalism is the deeper idea of motion itself, as in Harvey’s De Motu Cordis (The Motion of the Heart). We can say of Harvey’s great work that in biological terms it parallels the astral visions of Giordano Bruno, given that Gosselin and Lerner observe, “Perhaps Bruno’s most important contribution to the physics (as distinguished from the cosmology) of his day was his implicit stress on the dynamical steady state.”15 Commenting on Bruno’s supremely courageous, if foolhardy, proposals of an infinite universe, Dorothea Singer tells us that “he speaks constantly of the heavenly bodies as ‘animalia’ pursuing their course through space. An ‘animal’ for Bruno is that which is endowed with anima. Not only all life but all being he regards as in some sort animated.”16 Verses embedded in the third dialogue of On the Infinite Universe and Worlds present a picture of cosmic hurly-burly, where “naught standeth still, but all things swirl and whirl.” Singer glosses the end of Bruno’s poem as saying that the turbulence of celestial motions “involves things in all possible movements.” By a kind of libertarian enthusiasm, lasting almost until the closing of the theaters in 1642, the drama remains the most important Renaissance English imaginative activity, for it dramaturgically embodied and projected on the stage those ideas it was analyzing.

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The drama tends always to lessen the grip of exegetic fervor, simply because its actions move too fast, because it does not permit leafing backward and forward as with a book, and perhaps above all because its story is enacted, presented to spectators by the actor. Furthermore, since acting mimetically demands controlled hysteria, the atmosphere of such performance is labile and may be threatening to rigid, noble character types. The actor flows into and back out of the role, and appears in that way to “become the person acted,” an identification of player and persona that seeks to overturn the deliberate, ruminative, and finally obsessive pattern of allegorical moralizing. In the audience, one is simply carried away by Richard III, a leaping, crutch-wielding spider, or the yearning teenager Giselle, danced by a sixtyyear-old Galina Ulanova, or the aging, powdered, corseted aesthete Sir Harcourt Courtly, played by a young Donald Sinden; and all such arts have their politically incorrect aspect. Whenever the actor interprets a role, no matter how much classic discipline and style is required by the play, that role projects idea into action, carrying the audience out of itself. At the highest levels of histrionic art the effect will be virtually ecstatic, so that to emphasize the hysteric roots of the gift of impersonation, and hence of acting a part, is to insist that powerful drama is always a pagan mystery.

Extending the Ethos of Motion The normal ecstasies of drama lead to a weakening of religious authority, in this case complicated by the Reformation, and one may conjecture that theater is a common surrogate for a new secular scientific inquiry into forbidden causes. With no religious sanction, the theater fills a gap left by the loss of religious authority. What is required is that a central subject and aim of science assume something like the position of common and unanalyzed authority once held by religious beliefs. Specifically, theater participates in the larger cultural extension of the idea and the problem of mobility in all spheres of life and thought. The merely physical implications of this problem can no longer be contained behind a narrowly scientific wall, but must now become part of generalized cultural beliefs—in effect, a new basis on which ordinary intelligent people judge the foundations of their world. In this context the motility that counted most, that of the earth’s motion, was invisible to the earthbound eye. Terrestrial limits of perspective are always an issue for thinking about one’s place “on earth.” To give a famous theatrical example, we might be wise to imagine that when Richard III cried out that he would give a whole kingdom for a mere horse—to escape from

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his enemies on the field of battle—Richard’s desperately simple need to escape on horseback would be overwhelmingly graphic to an Elizabethan, displaying great power on a stage where there were no horses anywhere to be seen. A radically earthbound knowledge was the common ground for understanding more mysterious cosmic conditions. When Galileo sought to understand how the tides of the oceans actually came to rise and fall, he thought of water moving inside and beside ships at sea, as Einstein later studied moving trains, and both came to some rather cosmic conclusions as a result. In such cases a thought experiment leads to higher conclusions, and thus in a general cultural fashion the theater produced endless such thought experiments. If Brutus could be instructed on the astral influence of the stars versus human character, “our selves,” this could lead to more abstract considerations and mathematical physics might be generalized to broad social significance. The science of astronomy appears highly abstract in its expression, yet this very science was in fact able to cross slowly into the realm of ordinary belief, into structures that had once been controlled by religious dogma. The Reformation had immeasurably increased the authority of biblical, Christian sources and their religious aura. Such changes belong to the turmoil to be sure, but soon it would become impossible to restrain the mathematical description of the physical universe. By resisting these explorations, the Church made the wrong move in the chess game of cultural power. Prime among the forces running gradually against the old religion was the use of vernacular language, again a medium exploited to the full by the theater. Even well into the seventeenth century, scientists like the early Galileo, or later writers like Pierre Gassendi and Newton, continued to publish their works in Latin; but the increasing use of the vernacular encouraged a widening capacity for the expansion of secular inquiry. This meant that when Galileo published in Italian, as Stillman Drake reminds us, the printed book would carry new disseminations even further, breaking the older university monopoly on “official” scientific books. The new writing involved the composition, editing, and translation of commentaries on classic Greek texts. Furthermore, original researchers began to tout the usefulness of their new work; Niccolò Tartaglia, for example, would publish his New Science, “written in Italian, dedicated to a military commander, and intended for the practical use of soldiers.”17 As Drake says, “This is the first book I know that proclaims novelty of a science as a recommendation.” The word new is about to become the hallmark of science—as Galileo used in it his Dialogues Concerning

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Two New Sciences—with the added effect that priority of discovery soon became a scientific mania. Any authority that depended mainly on its antiquity was bound to suffer from novelty itself, and in response the Church adopted the wrong strategy, developed the wrong attack.

The Unwitting Crossover In Italy the astute Cardinal Bellarmine, and more fervently various Dominican theologians, had always wanted to keep the New Science penned up behind its own wall of mathematical reasoning, as if mathematics were its only reality. But the New Science used calculation and geometry precisely to reach out beyond its thought experiments, describing an observable real world. Euclid did not make up the world of times, distances, and movements found in the natural objects of geometric demonstration. True, the ecclesiastical defense of the perfection of the moon, as having a pure glassy spherical surface, appears to us to display a wild confidence in late medieval wish-fulfillment. We are impressed by Protestant resistance to science, and we are struck by the example of papal astronomers who refused to look through the new telescopes, for fear they would in fact see something in nature that violated their religious creed. Since the beliefs required for such refusals had to be debated in verbal terms, and these terms were publicly changing to vernacular forms, away from Latin, the beliefs could not withstand the mathematical analysis now brought to bear. It would finally not work to cordon off hypothetical wonderment, calling it mere model building, mere calculation, anything but a reflection of the real world. The real world was beginning to be there for all to see, and as Tartaglia’s book on trajectories showed, it might be common soldiers who wanted to count among those who did the seeing. Expectably, since the conflict had to be generalized to cultural extensiveness, Christian orthodoxy—Protestant as much as or even more than Catholic—fell back on its chief resource: biblical authority. This meant that the Bible had to be seen to possess ultimate truth, a claim that Galileo himself examined in a lengthy epistolary treatise, his Letter to Madame Christina of Lorraine, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, Concerning the Use of Biblical Quotations in Matters of Science (1615).18 The general position of the Church was that divine authority and its biblical claims had to coincide with secular knowledge. Unfortunately for its own purposes, by pitting the Bible against science, the Church generally was forced to shift mathematical debate onto a verbal bat-

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tleground. For while we in our times, for example, may wish to “read the Bible as literature,” the more accurate view began to assert itself in the early seventeenth century: the Bible is literature. It exists only as a structure of language expressed in words. Galileo changed the theater of science to make his point and to establish his inquiries. As he said more than once in his Letter to the Grand Duchess, the biblical fathers had never really talked about astronomy at all, or about such matters as would be expressible in terms other than words and metaphors. In this narrative situation, therefore, the Church itself had unintentionally created a crossover from mathematics to the word, by insisting that the Word of God be—not even merely provide—the ultimate arbiter of the debate. It was not Ratios of God, but the Word of God. By insisting on the biblical source of ultimate authority, the Church unwittingly doomed its argument—if not its faith—to a deep-lying coincidence between word and number, between belief and geometrically demonstrable fact. This is not to say the mutual collapse of mathematics and language, a falling into each other’s arms, occurred as an academic exercise; rather, it was stressful for most participants, and fatal for a few. Throughout long, troubled years Galileo was persistently attacked by various churchmen for his defense of science, especially its free inquiry into Copernican ideas, which pivoted on the essential principle of the movement of the earth and the stability of the sun. The war produced inevitable defeat: only by generalizing the earth’s motion, whether diurnal rotation around its own axis or planetary movement around the sun, could the Church give its attack on Galileo broader significance; but then the attack itself gave rise to its own undoing, allowing the science of motion to become the paramount basis for all intellectual inquiry, no matter how this inquiry might be disguised or translated into unusual variations. The orthodox Christian claim that God was an empirically stable, omnipotent Aristotelian prime mover could stand firm only if based upon a metaphoric equation between ultimate cosmic security for the faithful and their centering point of belief, the fixed divine principle. God had to be an unmoving divinity, for reasons of secure belief. Unfortunately for the conservative instincts of those opposing the New Science, the word was out, and rapid widespread publication, creating a general movement of ideas, made the regressive position untenable. Thus it was that the two camps of recalcitrant churchmen and forwardlooking scientists—many of them priests of the Church—were forced into considering the problem of motion, which became generalized because it

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was linked to the central question of the sources of religious security. The irony of this conflict is that not many years would pass before science in its turn, at least in England, would turn back its own clock. It was trying to get rid of the poetic impulse, the use of metaphor. By the end of the seventeenth century, Bishop Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society mounted a notorious attack on metaphoric speech of all kinds, as inimical to science. Sprat was already concerned about the collapsing barrier between mathematics (and experimental proofs) and expressive speech. He could see that earlier papal opposition to the New Science had finally fallen apart from within. Language and mathematics were closer cousins than anyone might have thought, and although scriptural exegesis virtually forced this kinship to involve number symbolism, the relations were inherently even deeper in the literary art traditionally closest to mathematical order—namely, poetry.

CHAPTER

3

On Drama, Poetry, and Movement

Renaissance authors discovered number everywhere in their poetry, because every poem, unlike a piece of prose, is a metric structure designed to move with marked recurrent verbal rhythm. For them a poem that fails to move verbally—that is, musically—is not a poem in one essential aspect: it abandons its own proper abstract goal and instead tries to be written or sung in such a way as to refer solely to isolated things lying outside its embodying order. But a poem, unlike so many written today, should not be an engine of prosaic, positive, material reference. Not only does a poem move by adopting a strong metric ground from which it rhythmically departs, thus gaining a various, shifting sequential order, but also, as with other modes of music, its measure of impersonal abstraction is its way of being in the world, as melody and unfolding structure of harmony. To give one Elizabethan example: in Richard Hooker’s comprehensive treatise on the Anglican faith and its liturgical and spiritual disciplines, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1597),1 we find a representative commentary on music as spiritual mover. In his praise of the Psalms, sung by the congregation, at times antiphonally, Hooker calls their message “the choice and flower of all things profitable in other books,” and goes on to make an even more important point: the Psalms are central elements of worship because they “more movingly also express, by reason of that poetical form in which they are written.” The chief purpose of this moving expression is to order our emotions, so that although we lay altogether aside the consideration of ditty or matter, the very harmony of sounds being framed in due sort and carried from the ear to the spiritual faculties of our souls, is by a native puissance and efficacy greatly available to bring to a perfect temper whatsoever there is 36

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troubled, apt as well to quicken the spirits as to allay that which is too eager, sovereign against melancholy and despair, forcible to draw forth tears of devotion if the mind be such as can yield them, able both to move and to moderate all affections.2

Music, then, has the power to move and moderate our emotions because it virtually enters the mind. “The reason hereof is an admirable facility which music hath to express and represent to the mind, more inwardly than any other sensible mean, the very standing, rising, and falling, the very steps and inflections every way, the turns and varieties of all passions whereunto the mind is subject.” The mimetic powers of music are thus directly linked to its powers of expressing, and in effect analyzing, all the twists and turns of the human soul. Thus, as the ancient Greeks thought, good harmony influences good balance, while bad disharmony can be, in Hooker’s words, “contagious and pestilent.” The passage is a classic case of Hooker’s broad, yet subtly inflected idea of law as a stabilizing power in human society, for which music plays a central metaphoric and practical part, through the idea that poetry is one center of the art of right motion, as an ars bene modulandi. As our great poet Wallace Stevens once wrote, “it must move,” and as he expressed this thought in “Imago,” a poem on the nature of imagery, “It moves its parade / Of motions in the mind and heart, / A gorgeous fortitude.” Retreating to an earlier time, we ask what Elizabethan dramatic verse would have become without the example of Marlowe’s “mighty line,” as Ben Jonson called that oppressive, yet noble rhythm of blank verse. This line is not mighty because it rants about giant figures like Tamburlaine or about world events (although it tends to do that, until Marlowe reaches his last works); inherently Marlovian blank verse acquires its power from its melody. So strong is this melodic procedure that it becomes the ground for all subsequent dramatic poets writing in English during this period. Where would the growth of Shakespeare’s art be and that of his successors, had they not lifted their rhythms beyond the earlier, immensely popular fustian? Obviously, none of this need even be mentioned, except that in our own days of massive mediocrity there has been a virtually complete memory loss. It seems bizarre to say, but one has again to insist that poetry and music are vitally connected with each other, and their bond is always a matter of motion, which the revival of neo-Platonic and Pythagorean notions

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made it common for poets of that period to adduce as their model for perfection.

From Motion to Action in the Drama If we attempt a schematic picture of the way the science of motion gets transformed for poetic purposes, we find that this transformation occurs in four stages of assimilation. First, the physical concept of the movement of objects, of the kind a natural philosopher would study when observing phenomena in the heavens or on earth, is translated to its human equivalent, activity and action, such as one might see on the stage or find in a narrative. Second, we find that action in this humanized sphere creates what we call character, what Aristotle called ethos, to be distinguished from the dramatic part of a role acted by a specific player. Third, this characterizing action is a motion that is generated in and through language. Fourth, the drama gives the moving action its embodiment, as on a stage, acted by the dramatis personae. If such an outline appears to give too much prestige to the drama, my answer can only be that, again as Aristotle remarked in the Poetics, this genre provides more than any other a high degree of philosophic economy. In the first stage, motion humanized is activity. In an ordinary sense the natural and the human, as subjects of contemplation and research, have frequently crossed over to meet each other; we see this even today, when unprecedented powers of technology still cannot diminish our wonder at the fact of human consciousness. In the early modern period, nature—what is out there beyond the human—and mankind, with all its obvious inner life, were busy acquiring many new ways of expressing their mutual relations through their collateral conceptions of science and art. One might say that in the air there is a common but compelling interest in grounding ideas of nature through a newly articulated theory of natural motion—articulated in such a way that, while the theory breaks free of magic notions of causality, it still retains the human interest of medieval theories of motion, with their radically different Aristotelian approaches. How does motion enter the world of human affairs, animating the field where stories and other mythic expressions occupy center stage? The most general answer would be that human nature, like natural philosophy

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broadly construed, would not be what it is without a predominant role given to movement and motion of all kinds. The human body moves, and we call it alive. The symbolic production of stories, dramas, and lyrics seems always to maximize one kind of symbolic movement or other. When we critically transfer our concepts from the scientific to the artistic, and back again from art to science, we may conveniently say that for human purposes Motion has been translated into Activity. This latter term seems right for human affairs, as reflected in commonplace locutions such as “She took action, when she wrote in her diary,” “They went into action,” “The case is actionable,” “Actions speak louder than words.” The list, as we shall see, goes on forever, always referring to the motions occurring in the field of social human existence. If these motions are always a kind of “symbolic action,” as Kenneth Burke would have said, they are nonetheless strictly connected to ideas of Motion in general; they are, for humans, what movements of things are in the external world of environmental fact. A powerful example of this principle might briefly be drawn from Hamlet. “Delay” names an important subsection of Harold Jenkins’ learned introduction to the Arden edition. “Why, then, does Hamlet delay?” Jenkins asks rhetorically, and continues: “After more than two centuries of debate on this celebrated question, one detects in some quarters a critical weariness with it as intrinsically less important than it has been made to seem. But a problem does not diminish because it becomes familiar.”3 Lawrence Olivier’s famed film version of the play begins with a voice-over: the play will be about a man “who could not make up his mind.” Yet the Prince himself will say, “I have the cause, and will, and strength, and means / To do’t.” Surely the editor is right about not being tricked by the familiar, yet his unanswered question seems to constitute the structure of the entire play, so the problem in dramatic terms must always remain compelling. What is missing in Jenkins and in other standard accounts of Hamlet’s delay is that explicitly the drama of the Prince is a matter of motion, of taking action: ”O cursèd spite, that ever I was born to set it right.” Apparently such a thought shares in the misleading power of the familiar! The play represents a tortuous approach to such a taking, and even when the resolving moment arrives, at the end, Hamlet’s revenge is composed as much of accident as of anything designed by will, strength, and means. Quite obviously, this is a play where, as in other cases of drama, the action—and action in general—are the chief sources of our delight; but in Hamlet we have also a play of inaction. Action itself and inaction are what the play explores, as it re-

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flects throughout upon its own unfolding on the stage; strictly, this is an action reflecting upon action. Pernicious delay is only a secondary aspect of the main issue, much as its opposite, the proleptic and precipitous hyperactivity of Macbeth, depends upon that play’s exploration of the converse problem of those who, as Freud put it, are “spoiled by success.” When to his mother Hamlet says of phony protestations, “They are actions that a man might play,” we are to take the action term seriously, knowing that it occurs in a speech about the essence of drama, the questioning of appearances: “Seems, Madam, I know not seems.” Furthermore, this is a play that plays upon the term “philosophy,” so that its continuous semiotic self-regard is meant to unfold the ambiguities of the sheer possibility of “taking action” in a world of seeming. Maybe such takings are always merely showings. When Hamlet later tells the players to “suit the action to the word, the word to the action,” this is patently—in its context of fellowship—something richer and stranger than convenient dramaturgic notions of theatrical gesture, from which, as impresario, Hamlet initially departs. Expressively, the speech centers on a metaphysical view or philosophy of what is natural about the “modesty of nature”—a modesty that indeed makes it possible for a play to “hold the mirror up to nature.” When Hamlet imagines that he must “take action against a sea of troubles,” it is not a matter only of discovering how his own disposition or nature accords with taking any particular initiative. He must first understand the nature of action itself, since his nature requires precisely that he must “think it through.” Action implies a measure of structured anticipation, the suspense of carrying out a plan; in this context, action possesses a more conscious structure than any reflex can possess. By introducing the idea of the play into the drama, Shakespeare presents a Hamlet who must represent reality to himself, in order to act upon it, and the play aligns this mirroring process with the problem of philosophy, as his friend Horatio may have learned it. There is no doubt that the play explores affinities and gaps separating human and natural philosophy, and the interplay between these two ways of thinking makes for a delicate balance. Finally, of course, we find that Hamlet’s delay is his own form of taking action; and his movements, like the motions of Claudius’ words as he tries in vain to pray, compound their own distress. The words fly upward, while the prayers cannot rise to heaven, because their empty signifying lacks any connection to the mind of the murdering usurper. When Claudius prays, nothing happens—his desire for relief moves nowhere. Following the plan of such brief examples, we may say, the entire play works in relation to its

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movements of thought, through their expression in speech or their failure to express. This dramatic plane is the scene where Shakespeare’s study of philosophic issues returns always to question the central equivalence between action and motion. At any moment in this and other plays of the period, we translate back and forth between the implications of these two cardinal terms and their ideas. When Hamlet first discovers the inward nature of action and movement, he makes a cold beginning, when not even the mice are moving—“not a mouse stirring”—while later in Act IV Claudius finds in terror that his power to act is frozen; for him, tongue (for speech), hand (for taking physical action), even accident (for taking the main chance) perversely twist away from the curve of a natural activity. Shakespeare never lets his audience stray far from questions of motivation, as the persons of the play, of its action, drive to achieve some forthright act or other. The playwright intends for us to wonder about motion in the human sphere. In the broadest way, then, as it innovates beyond the dramas of the late medieval period, a play like Hamlet also questions causes, for causation and its understanding on a new ground had been the entire—one might say the imperial—enterprise of the New Philosophy and its shift from questions of Why to questions of How. In the second phase of the transformation of motion science for poetic purposes, action creates character. We have already seen that the ethos in Aristotle is different from any specific “character presented in a story or on stage.” There are warning signs in this area, coming from centuries of philosophic debate, such that we must beware a trap laid for us, regarding character. To avoid being snared in a vicious circle, we should remember that human actions belong to us as human creatures, issuing from our human nature. The idea of Nature itself refers to a supposed outside world, while our inner dispositions import and conceptualize this external Nature. To separate the two natures—that of mankind and that of the cosmos—may seem desirable, but it will not hold up to scrutiny. At best we can only say that the dispositions of human character and the dispositions of Nature are transactionally related, as if one were to say: Looking outward to nature and its laws is always, to an important degree, looking inward to the human capacity for looking outward. Inside and outside are perpetually confounding each other’s ontological independence. My view is generally that the chief value of art and literature lies in the way they preserve the transactional process mentioned here. While the abiding concern of this book is to insist on the predominant

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conceptual, scientific, metaphysical and hence philosophic power of the idea of motion for the poets of the early modern period—as they rejected or modified Aristotelian causes, meanwhile converting science to Galilean principles—simultaneously this concern leads me to examine traditional literary questions. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, for example—the ultimate case where the “idea of the play” determines an action reflecting upon an action—will help us to develop a common and correct sense of such works of art. They clearly fascinate us—fascinate readers and spectators of all eras— by their presentation of characters, whose presence in turn depends entirely upon the primacy of motion as the essential dramatic component. It is said that when Feodor Chaliapin sang the part of Boris Godunov, before letting anything else happen, he would walk down to the footlights and in silence simply stare at the audience for a few moments. Silent command was the correct prelude to imperial speech, and Chaliapin’s presence built upon the powerful contrast between mobility and immobility. These are such radical components of the dramatic and literary process that we scarcely pay attention to their ultimately determining power. Indeed, the power of character can, onstage, be only momentarily iconic or allegorical. To persist throughout an entire play, to become heroic, the actor must be allowed to enact a continuing and developing set of symbolic motions through which the plot works in the mode of process. Allegory checks the flow of process, periodically encapsulating the meanings of its images and actions, so as to project separate meanings tied to separate icons. By contrast, when mimetic drama develops character, it enhances process, interweaving complex relations between various actors enacting the separate roles of various characters. Mimesis keeps things moving, but only as development and change among characters; their fluxional grouping onstage—or significantly offstage—produces something quite different from human behavior fixated into a sequence or set of icons. Instead, character is what continuously persists, leaving its emotively powerful tracks and traces in our memory, as we live through an accumulating sense of the dramatic destiny or fate of a hero like Falstaff or Cleopatra or King Lear. Character then is a mimetic consequence of signal persons simply moving through the worlds in which they are staged. In this way, character results when persons are imagined to be what Shakespeare called men and women: “merely players.” The ensuing line from As You Like It, “they have their exits and their entrances,” logically implies these men and women must always be moving, and then—according to a thoroughly Aristotelian rule—they inevitably will

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be changing, even when the seeds of their actions are slowly perceived by us to have been so deeply planted, they could not possibly know why they behave as they do. This is the opposite of allegory, where persons always, as it were, know only too well why they are behaving this way or that. Allegorical determinism fits a medieval reading of Aristotle’s four causes, and against this worldview the new and, I shall have to say, almost scientific mimetic drama resolutely pursues a dynamic of changing social paradigms. “Paradigm” suggests the establishment, the fixation even, of patterns of behavior that might—by extrapolation from Thomas Kuhn’s work on scientific revolutions—seem inevitably closer to allegory than to mimesis. Nevertheless, the purport of the great English drama of this early modern period is precisely to show that movement of character can have a deepening ambiguity at all moments of its development. This uncertain passage betokens the Renaissance restlessness so many poets of the time expressed, with mingled melancholy, delight, and dismay. Contemporary readers of this account of character in action will inevitably think of A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy, where “action is essentially the expression of character,” and where “the center of the tragedy, therefore, may be said with equal truth to lie in action issuing from character, or in character issuing in action.”4 Bradley took great pains to specify his sense of dramatic dynamics—noting, for example, that Shakespeare went far beyond “psychological interest,” beyond the ancient dictum that “character is destiny,” and above all beyond any reliance upon “abnormal conditions of mind,” supernatural agency, and determinism through chance or accident, though all these elements play strong subordinate parts. In this argument an extremely rich account of character itself emerges, much of it concerned to show how the souls of heroes may be divided by warring impulses, whose inner strife is presented on a level of exceptional intensity. Given Bradley’s powers of observation and articulation, given his philosophic approach to Shakespeare, one might ask in what sense my own account differs from his. Let us turn back to his view of the “center of tragedy.” It is not clear how Bradley can escape the circularity of his theory: Does character precede action, does action precede character, or is it convincing that the two causes endlessly circle about each other? On this point we diverge, because I believe that the second principle is undoubtedly the correct one—action precedes character, since it provides a philosophic explanation for Bradley’s concern with character, yet on a level deeper than he cared to explore. For his purposes the reciprocal function was neatly efficacious, yet

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it may be that the predilections of his time, the late Victorian period, led him always to suggest that somehow character and ethos were the finally determining dramatic agencies. As Lytton Strachey was later acidly to show, this had been the period of the Eminent Victorians, and there is no doubt that much of our current prejudice against Bradley’s approach derives from a rejection of the Victorian ethos. This is most unfortunate, since Bradley was a true inheritor of the great interpretive tradition of Shakespearean drama. He knew the classics (his brother was a celebrated and brilliant philosopher, incidentally the subject of T. S. Eliot’s doctoral dissertation); he was an impressive student of Romantic poetry; and so on—altogether a critic working on a far higher level of philosophic and detailed comprehension than all but a few later Shakespearean scholars. Nevertheless, I believe that to show the causal primacy of action over character, by relating action back to more fundamental ideas of movement itself, will serve to honor Bradley’s insight. Above all, my own interest seeks to emphasize the role of probable causes among prime movers of both Shakespearean plots and Galilean motion. In the third stage, dramatic action is motion generated in words. Similarly, in stories the particular words generate the moving, cohering action. Suppose we understand action and motion, whether in nature or in human society; our critical question will then be to ask about the gap between words and numbers, since our archetypal example, action on the stage, is mediated almost entirely by the use of words in natural languages. Mime and gesture do without words, but one’s recognition of a performance by Marcel Marceau or Jean-Louis Barrault would at once translate in our minds into a verbal construction. In classical ballet the standard lexicon of gestures amounts to a secondary form of semantic behavior, even though performed through the dancer’s physical body motions. Finally, however, action on stage is traditionally a matter of language, and chiefly verbal communication. Much effort continues to be spent on discovering how language in general functions, cognitively and otherwise, and therefore my own principle will be to accept not only that it does work, but that its poetic use—on stage, let us say—reveals, more than most things, the true nature of the crossover between words and numbers, art and science, the one culture and the other; and this to a greater degree than would happen if we started our research from an entirely materialist base of the model of physical movement alone. We must combine the merely physical with the merely semiotic. Action, let us say, appears of itself to be not only a kind of action, but perhaps the most

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revealing of all ways in which humans show they are capable of taking action. In most complex cases in life, we think through our words and wording, and we are not to be daunted by the tricky question: How does thought relate to language? Let us simply say that when language is manifestly used in a complex way, as sensitive readers of poetry can testify, it not only will mirror the complexity of the world, but will make actions within that world possible for us. Wallace Stevens’ great essay “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” is perhaps the finest encomium to the powers of poetic language that we possess. There he remarks: “Those of us who may have been thinking of the path of poetry, those who understand that words are thoughts and not only our own thoughts but the thoughts of men and women ignorant of what it is that they are thinking, must be conscious of this: that, above everything else, poetry is words; and that words, above everything else, are, in poetry, sounds.”5 Stevens holds for the nobility of words in their resonance and their sounding of a connection to “things that do not exist without the words.” He was fully aware of philosophic questions concerning the independence of being, of things in themselves, and the like. But he insists that sounding language creates a new condition for thought: it gets us to know our own and others’ thoughts through perhaps the fullest sense of their being thought—namely, that words can express our thinking and the thinking of others. Not without ambiguity, not without uncertainty, not without cause for hesitation in the act of responding to such language; but always with an emotional conviction that when we think, we experience the process of thinking and the possibility that we are perhaps failing to think hard enough, or with sufficient emotive truth, or in some genuinely satisfying way. Such is the concern of literature and drama, where words count among the basic moral issues. The artistic question underlying the great Renaissance verbal power in poetry is to be understood only if we grasp the central role played by music during the period. For the higher levels of musico-poetic development, one need only think of the expert theoretical justifications given by Galileo’s father, Vincenzio Galilei, which led to the invention of modern opera. Closer to home, in England, an equally high level of musical art is obvious enough, with the great Elizabethan and Stuart composers, whose works rank with the finest in Europe, in both aria and madrigal and formal Masses, as in the solo music work for virginals and for the lute. Among modern accounts of the links between poetry and music during this epoch, one may cite “Poetry and Music,” Hallett Smith’s informed essay in his Elizabethan Poetry (1966).

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More comprehensive and running deeper is John Hollander’s Untuning of the Sky (1961), where we learn, we might say, the meaning of Andrew Marvell’s “mosaic of the air”—the conceit that music informs all orders in the universe and hence inspires poetry according to a cosmic musical model. As if directly following ancient Greek precepts on the moral effects of music, this is an art that will, in Thomas Morley’s words, “carrie the spirit and (as it were) that livelie soule which the dittie giveth.”6 This art of making verses with music’s precision—metric, rhythmic, and harmonic—arises from what Agnes Latham called a “baffling and beautiful” mixture of the impersonal mathematical side to music, and the heightened emotional expressiveness of music as performed, a subject on which Renaissance composers wrote with eloquence and precision, as befits their art. Impersonality becomes intensely personal here. In the most general sense, Smith concludes, “the interrelations between the lyrics and music of the Elizabethan age are thus numerous and complex,” culminating in the ultimately refined expressive art of the madrigal, whose polyphony is capable of intense emotive effects, hence ethical persuasion. Among those who have most strongly and effectively insisted on the relations between music and verse in the Renaissance, W. H. Auden stands out as insisting that the musicians inevitably sensitized their poets to hear quantity as well as stress in the sounding of poetry, and in recent years John Hollander has written masterfully on the interplay of what he calls “vision and resonance.” In many essays Hollander has seconded his own poetic practice, much of it reminiscent of the rarefied verse of Ben Jonson, by showing that metric pattern, rhythmic form, and hence the “numbers” of poetic composition will always take precedence over the easy “facts” or slack imagism a poet might insert into the texture of his poems. Poets like Auden and Hollander, and their poetic siblings—and, more important, those they admire who may differ stylistically from them—continue to remind us that poetry would be prose, if it did not deploy all the forces of a controlled and “numbered” motion. There is little doubt that during the Renaissance such transcendent art is indebted to newly revived studies of Platonism, where there is always a considerable bias toward the sciences of number, and this constitutes the chief link for the period between the word and the musical note. But more simply, words thence gain a melodic role in Stevens’ “sound of poetry,” appearing in many forms of poetic utterance, which in turn influence stylized prose styles, and which altogether conduce to a link between poetry and an acute sensitivity to what had been called poetic numbers. While we

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can impressionistically understand this link between word and Pythagorean tones, we learn also that music is central to the spiritual magic of a Marsilio Ficino, who in De Triplici Vita will ask, following Aristotle’s Problemata, “Why is hearing the only perception which affects the moral character?” Then this question is followed by a further question: “Why are rhythms and melodies, which are sounds, similar to moral characters, while flavours, colours and scents are not?” Our expert on these matters, D. P. Walker, tells us: “The answer in both cases is that sound, alone of things sensed, has movements; movements and actions are of the same nature, and actions have a moral character (ethos) or are symptomatic of it.”7 Poetry, movement, and action are thus bound together in the artistic process by what Milton called “the willing chains and sweet captivity” of melody and harmony. The affiliation of music and magic should not surprise students of Renaissance literature, nor should neo-Platonic excursions in art elicit surprise; rather, especially when embodied in artistic media, these interleaved influences foster—and in the process create—an exalted poetry such as we virtually never hear in the duller poetic circles of today’s prosy world. Music in this Renaissance period is a universal idea for harmony, force, and purpose in any work of art. Meanwhile we shall insist on the simpler, more ordinary vernacular resources of common speech as it is bent to an increasingly sophisticated art of verse, whether in the public theater or in the most refined lyric forms. The mere wording of that art needs always to be insisted upon, for as Ben Jonson expressed this simple thought (though on the high level of his elegy to the memory of his friend Shakespeare), “a good Poet’s made, as well as borne.” This making, this learning of art, this cultivation of wit and its powers of light, must partake of a deeper power over and through language. Nature herself was proud of his designes, And joy’d to weare the dressing of his lines! Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit, As, since, she will vouchsafe no other Wit.8

To fully demonstrate these powers so quickly recognized by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, the most acute readers and producers of his plays have labored to notice all the subtlety and intelligence behind his verbal ordering of speeches and plots. The closest possible reading can hardly catch these nuances; hence, dealing with Shakespeare and the other masters of his day, I resist the temptation to comment in detail upon his texts. A reader like Empson may be commended as a model, yet one senses that even inter-

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preted by such a remarkably strong critic, the intellectual and emotional force of poetic language eludes our most acute critical skill. In his Structure of Complex Words, Empson comments on his system of semantic and emotive equations: “We must not develop tender feelings towards our little bits of machinery; they need to be kept sharply separate from the delicacy and warmth of the actual cases they are to be used on.”9 A logician or scientist might make the erroneous suggestion that this final obscurity of the art is the direct result of too much delicacy and warmth, with a resulting vagueness. I believe with Empson: ambiguous the poetry may be, but vague almost never, if the poetry is designed to incite strong imagination. Surely, to analyze the full range of the achievements of verbal art would seem to be an endless task, and it is made no easier today by a rapid loss of ear and of sensitivity to verbal nuance—a loss that has infected the entire body politic. We live in a time of poisonous clichés and hapless jargons, everywhere abetted by the demands of a lowering, as well as elevating, technological culture. Granted, it is true that bright young people of today are remarkably gifted in the decoding of sound bites and accelerated visual arrays, as experienced in video games; intelligence is definitely there, albeit at times astonishingly shallow. One senses that a crucial attribute of the greater, earlier linguistic powers was their access to the sound and signifying force of tradition, to the way the higher literary languages express their own evolution, while simultaneously expressing their unexpected modernity. In the fourth stage, drama gives the moving action its embodiment. There are sculptors so sensitive to their chosen medium that they refuse to walk through sculpture gardens and galleries, for fear they will suddenly feel compelled to touch the sculptures on display. What they understand so well as art and form is also what they would caress. And so it is also with the drama, and with the greater narratives that fully render the dramatic experience. Through the medium of stylized gestures and declamations, the audience succeeds in touching the actors who present the action on a stage; and even when scripts are silently read, readers privately draw the meanings of the words into their innermost thoughts. In theater this effect of contact is called the experience of presence, and all great actors have this uncanny gift of stage presence, which of course takes many forms, while it always permits a rare intimacy of participation that reaches its acme with the stage. Film, however skillfully managed, diminishes this projection of presence the actor

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employs, although the art of film often manages to keep as much presence as possible. One can hardly doubt that the difference between the two dramatic media, stage and film, follows from a different dimensionality—simply the difference between three actual dimensions and the two-dimensional illusion of three dimensions presented to an audience. Sound is critical in this difference, and its issues take as many forms as the projection of the presence in the dramatis personae. The importance of this embodying aspect of dramatic literature is that it brings an effect of character, of personhood, immediately into play. It is one thing to imagine that somehow philosophy can translate motion in physics to action in literature, and quite another to see how this translation actually works, when actual human bodies—speaking bodies, gesturing bodies, standing and falling human bodies, waking, weeping, and sleeping bodies—are the carriers of the most abstract levels of meaning. The mathematical dimensionalities become completely real and palpable, because actors present the play of motions with absolute somatic physicality. Such a translation of the abstract into concrete movements on a stage, or into the secondary means of recounting a narrated story, tells much about the trick of representing life in motion. Strictly, in a psychoanalytic sense, the dramatic translation is the hysterical formation of an elaborate and artfully rendered conversion syndrome. On the level of imagination, where tradition always starts from the dream, drama provides us with an experience of ideas, images, and actions always metamorphosing into new shapes, however momentarily, as they undergo the discontinuous movement that Aristotle labeled “metabolic” change. Such intense and variegated presentations of the actions of living men and women are bound to strike at the heart of what it is, philosophically, to be human. Our theorem of the primacy of motion is once again pivotal to what may be called the center of literature: the dramatic art that builds from an awareness that all human existence is subject to a law of perpetual change.

The Unmoved Mover and the Restless Mind The center itself has never been an idea free of prejudice and false ideas of what may be counted as normal or natural, yet history shows no period when the common people (as Galileo called the average faithful of his day) did not imagine the absolute center to be God. The aim of the centering belief is that it will confer serenity. With this ancient disposition clearly in mind,

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the medieval Church had sought to adapt Aristotelian metaphysics as the prime naturalistic ground for proving the existence of God. The grand design had much to do with ideas of motion that the New Philosophy had to develop, and which therefore the drama accompanying that changed worldview also recognized. Father Copleston’s History of Philosophy reminds us that motion gives Saint Thomas Aquinas the first of his five proofs.10 Since movement requires a mover in Aristotle’s Physics, his Metaphysics locates the end to an infinite series of movements caused by the Prime “Unmoved” Mover, who becomes a metaphysical model for God. This view must eventually oppose the Galilean conception of a Copernican universe, such that once again questions of motion are critical well beyond the confines of physics. When the major shift of intellectual climate occurs, it initially leaves Aristotle in a powerful position, even enhancing his claims to greatness, his theme of the bonds of nature and kinesis hardly touched. Nevertheless, by countering the medieval legacy of the Physics, Galilean science slowly and painfully reshaped theoretical ideas of motion that had long enjoyed pride of place, as defined by Aristotle. Galileo’s experimental and mathematical approach to physics finds other parallels, as when William Harvey discourses on the motion of the heart, or a more or less mechanical approach to politics animates thinkers like Niccolò Machiavelli, Hugo Grotius, Francesco Guicciardini, and Jean Bodin. The reason (ragion di stato) of the new mode of the sovereign state would soon lead to extreme materialism, while later, in Hobbes’s Leviathan, it was assumed the state could and should be designed to control the motions of all its parts, all its members. This politics of motion, as David Gauthier describes it, is only one consequence of a rapidly developing mobility, not always “upward,” in all levels of society.11 A new and disturbing worldview follows from this generalized sense that society, politics, theology, philosophy, and art all share in the heightened awareness that every event occurs in a state of perpetually renewing movement. Furthermore, general motion is also a matter of the psyche, of psychology. Montaigne, who is the most revealing humanist thinker of the age, Shakespeare aside, dwells always upon the incessant activity of the awakened mind. His typical stance, according to William Bouwsma, could be summed up as follows: “A spirited mind never stops within itself; it is always aspiring and going beyond its strength; it has impulses beyond its powers of achievement. If it does not advance and press forward and stand at bay and clash, it is only half alive. Its pursuits are boundless and without form; its food is wonder, the chase, ambiguity.”12 William Bouwsma’s Waning of

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the Renaissance identifies the “liberation of the self” with Montaigne, yet Bouwsma also finds such liberations in another essayist and scientific theorist, Francis Bacon, who remarked in the Novum Organum that “the human understanding is unquiet; it cannot stop or rest, and still presses onward, but in vain. Therefore it is that we cannot conceive of any end or limit to the world, but always as of necessity it occurs to us that there is something beyond.”13 In parallel terms, Pascal was to say: “Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death.” Thoughts of driven, universal inconsistency populate this intellectual landscape. In his late essay “Of Diversion,” Montaigne places himself in the midst of the turmoil: “Everywhere else it is the same. A painful notion takes hold of me; I find it quicker to change it than to subdue it. I substitute a contrary one for it, or, if I cannot, at all events a different one. Variation always solaces, dissolves, and dissipates. If I cannot combat it, I escape it; and in fleeing I dodge, I am tricky. By changing place, occupation, and company, I escape into the throng of other occupations and thoughts, where it loses my trace and so loses me.”14 Such is the problem posed by the freedom of the libertine intelligence. In another late essay, “Of Repentance,” we read: “The world is but a perennial movement. All things in it are in constant motion—the earth, the rocks of the Caucasus, the pyramids of Egypt— both with the common motion and with their own. Stability itself is nothing but a more languid motion. . . . I cannot keep my subject still. It goes along befuddled and staggering, with a natural drunkenness. . . . I do not portray being; I portray passing.”15 John Donne’s “Elegy XVII” may begin, “The heavens rejoice in motion,” but his Juvenalian satires more typically imitate and attack excesses of frivolous activity, the busy pursuit of “place” or wealth, the shocking machinations of lawyers, the doctrinal or cultic strife among sectarian preachers—all of these strongly rendered in the poems with a rueful sense that religious beliefs in God’s Providence will no longer stabilize human society. “Satire III” observes the turmoil: As streames are, Power is; those blest flowers that dwell At the rough streames calme head, thrive and do well, But having left their roots, and themselves given To the streames tyrannous rage, and themselves driven Through mills, and rockes, and woods, and at last, almost Consum’d in going, in the sea are lost: So perish soules, which more chuse mens unjust Power from God claym’d, then God himselfe to trust.16

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Taking a phrase from “Satire IV,” which attacks false and foolish courtliness (or what Kenneth Burke might have labeled “mysteries of courtship”), in that new world of excessive competition for attention there is never “Time enough to have beene Interpreter / To Babells bricklayers.” “All are players,” and all are therefore false to their inner natures. As in Aesop’s fable, the desperate lust to get and devour is a lost game: “Thou art the swimming dog whom shadows cosened, / And div’st, neare drowning, for what vanished” (“Satire V”). Donne the satirist must gleefully have seized his invitation to compose the Anniversaries, since anatomy was his passion, as it was for many of his contemporaries. The “Second Anniversary” expresses universal decay as a breakup of physical phase: . . . when all these motions which we saw, Are but as ice, which crackles at a thaw: Or as a Lute, which in most weather, rings Her knell alone, by cracking of her strings.

The satires, elegies, anniversaries, verse letters, and assorted lyrics speak the language of incessant change, irresistible catachresis, unstoppable collision, whose turbulent effects the reader will find on every page of Donne. Emergent motion as topos organizes the prose in all its Donnean forms, whether the ironic games of Biathanatos, the wild polemic farrago of Ignatius His Conclave, the ritually controlled Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, or, even more flamboyantly and persistently, the Sermons. Jonson’s remark to Drummond of Hawthornden—that Donne, “for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging”—perfectly fits the aesthetic of expressing too much turbulence.17 In pamphlet wars, this ragged scene demands the speed of rapid verbal transport. Another near-great author, Thomas Nashe, fits this bill of disturbance perfectly, especially in his evocations of monstrous civil and military cruelty in The Unfortunate Traveller, or in his over-the-top pamphlets, where he sets a new standard for flyting. Bristling like a porcupine in the face of “Doctor” Gabriel Harvey, his pamphlet Have with You to Saffron-Walden asks: “More letters yet from the Doctor? Nay, then we shall be sure to have a whole Gravesend barge full of Newes, and heare soundly of all matters on both eares. Out upon it, heere’s a packet of Epistling, as bigge as a Packe of Woolen cloth, or a stack of salt-fish. Carrier, dist thou bring it by wayne, or on horse-backe? By wayne, sir, & it hath crackt me three axeltrees, wherefore I hope you will consider me the more. Heavie newes. Heavie newes, take them againe, I will never open them,” and so on.18 Nashe is the most completely Dickensian author of the time, but lacks kindness. He knows

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how to carry the reader off and away on the wings of wild anatomy; he could expound for eternity on “The Praise of the Red Herring,” discovering an insane journalism, whose premise of instant gratification from each frenzied stimulus persists in modern literature, well beyond the age of Thomas de Quincey’s essay “The English Mail Coach.” Despite all such cultural accelerations, poetry alone knows also how to slow up, entering upon meditation. We have celebrated examples, whether in the formal songs of Jonson’s masques, or his Cary and Morison ode (our first Pindaric), or in the solemn verses of Shakespeare’s strange threne, “The Phoenix and the Turtle.” Even a public drama like The Merchant of Venice will affirm the silence and night music of Belmont, for partially ironic purposes. By contrast, these gardens of repose have little importance for the more realistic Montaigne, except in his quiet reading. His view of ethics parallels Galileo’s study of local motion, which underscores the importance of “neighboring circumstances,” whose study parallels the dramatist’s search for richly seen immediacy, the very stuff of action. Stresses between recurrence and novelty are always present in this period, to the extent that Jacob Burckhardt later questioned the idea of progress as explaining the Renaissance: All those who postulate such constructions about the world in motion, or, as they call it, history, have not grasped the fundamental truth of philosophy: that, philosophically speaking, what really is remains the same at all times. . . . The fools, however, believe that it will develop and one day arrive. . . . Thus they regard the whirling world as they perceive it as the ultimate reality, and see its final meaning in a meager bliss on earth which, even if cultivated evermore by man and favored by fate, will remain a hollow, deceptive, fickle, and sorry thing of which nothing essentially better can ever come through either constitutions, or legal codes, or steam engines, or telegraphs. Those philosophers and glorifiers of history are therefore realistic simpletons, optimists, and eudaimonists, which is to say, mediocre fellows and obstinate philistines and, in addition, bad Christians. . . . A real philosophy of history ought to bear in mind what for ever is and never develops. It can, indeed, not consist in raising the temporal aims of man to the rank of absolutes, and furthermore, in constructing in an artificial and fanciful manner man’s progress.”19

In spite of recurrent medieval themes, however, the new literature thrives on strangely unexpected rhythms. As Anthony Nuttall puts it in his book on Timon of Athens, these rhythms in Shakespeare at least owe much to “the cu-

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rious way in which Shakespeare’s mind continually races ahead of itself.”20 Similarly, Harold Bloom has spoken about Macbeth’s “proleptic imagination,” an insane drive to accumulate and annihilate the traces of his past, whipping them into his future before he has time to think. When Prince Hal thunders at Falstaff, “What a devil hast thou to do with the time of day?” we feel the stress tearing at an ancient people’s way of life, for almost at once the Prince tells us he will redeem the time, “when men think least I will.” At that moment he steps into the modern role of Doctor Faustus, who would possess time itself, and he loses Falstaff, who would give it away. The end of an age coincides with the coming of a future whose limits no one can yet foresee, whose changes rush at us before we are ready.

CHAPTER

4

Marlowe Invents the Deadline

The unrivaled fame of Shakespeare has been such that he makes the exercise of abstract intellect, the savage kind Christopher Marlowe displays, appear a far inferior achievement. To be sure, Marlovian thought veils its implicit metaphysic under clouds and surges of relentless hyperbolic eloquence, to the extent that one wonders if a line like, “Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?” is scarcely more than a mere conceit, all the while failing to notice that throughout Doctor Faustus there is a play upon the magic visage and epiphanic beauty of a mythic Helen. By holding his concepts to the service of rhetoric, Marlowe breaks out beyond normal discursive controls, thus managing some of the most powerful speculations in English literature; he thinks of things most of us would imagine unthinkable, such as brutal imperialistic slaughter perpetrated by inscrutable romantics (like Tamburlaine) or monstrous conmen poisoning wells (like Barabbas in The Jew of Malta), describing all these excesses with Sadean delight in the macabre. Nor is it common for readers to appreciate that Marlowe establishes the category of the aesthetic, not just in plays about the aesthete’s perilous life, as in Edward II, but more profoundly in the continuing praise of beauty itself. With Marlowe, all nature is “clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.” Such ideal conceptions are his chief fascination. It is no accident, then, that he bets all the devices of hyperbole on one great invention: the archetype of modern man, Faustian Man, who searches always for the harmonic order underlying every transformation. This sometimes covert, sometimes strident promotion of the beautiful and its accompanying aesthetic life Marlowe manages to achieve in a shockingly brief life, writing plays for only a few years, suspiciously murdered by the age of twentynine. 55

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Temporality and Faustian Gnosticism The play Doctor Faustus turns upon the elemental magic belief that angels, daemons, and other intermediary beings (including the stars) have power to control or influence human behavior, especially in the intellectual pursuit of spiritual knowledge, the gnosis. Leftover icons from the morality-play tradition are understandable in a play like this, for they always accompany daemonic actions. Daemonic agents, we have long known, are also the normal characters in allegorical narratives, and they occur regularly throughout all forms of Gnosticism. In relation to my present discussion, it is also important to note that—as Walter Benjamin argued at length and Paul de Man seconded in his “Rhetoric of Temporality”—allegory is the traditional mode whereby narratives encapsulate the irresistible passing of time. In this regard, allegory is the opposite of “High Symbolism,” where time stands still in moments of epiphanic unity; it then follows, necessarily, that the Faustian deadline and its temporal saturation in the death-directed passage of time require daemonic presences and a measure of allegorical expression. Good and bad daemonic forces are given equal power in the story, making the link between magic and Gnostic quests for intellectual power over the darkened fallen world of mankind. D. P. Walker’s Spiritual and Demonic Magic finds a lively coexisting polarity of the kind that much later, in a materialist age, Henry James called “the two magics”—a phrase he took as the title of a volume containing “The Turn of the Screw.” Owing to the nature of the daemonic as ghostly power, spirits can be either good or bad, and both may inhabit the same intellectual space. Walker’s account of an intellectually liberated Catholic author in the field, the political theorist Jean Bodin, author of La Démonomanie (1580) and Le Théâtre de la nature (1597), indicates just how avant-garde the intermixing of good and evil in Gnostic and magic debates could be.1 The mixture appears in the mysterious Elizabethan “School of Night,” where—perhaps guided by Raleigh, Harriot, or Chapman—a varied crew of alchemists, mathematicians, telescopic observers, and astrologers, all legitimate inquirers, could not fail to rub shoulders with conjurers, con men, and poets. This late mode of Gnosticism had a potential for the literary sublime—its religious fervor reaching into an intellectual mode—as the search for a higher knowledge took fire from a distanced contemplation of nature, while mysterious and magic researches could not maintain their distance from a reigning Calvinist religious worldview.

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In The Alternative Trinity, A. D. Nuttall tells us that “Dr. Faustus is a vertiginous play as medieval drama is not, because of a very sixteenth-century sense of the intermittent unreality of human time-sequence.”2 Jacques le Goff would have contrasted this unreality with that unanalyzed medieval time described by Marc Bloch, who coined a memorable phrase to sum up the medieval attitude regarding temporality: “a vast indifference to time.”3 Nuttall catches the situation in a colloquial phrase: “Calvinists are weird about time. . . . We are uncertain whether we are being given a linear causal sequence (with recapitulation and back-tracking) or something eerily timeless.”4 A. J. Ayer had said of the Calvinists that they were in a double bind: “they believed that only salvation mattered, and yet they attached great importance to their conduct, while being convinced that it would make no difference to what lay in store for them. . . . We may suppose that they abstained from sin in order to have been saved.” Thus, Calvinists were living in the future anterior tense, acting now (in their present) so that they will have been saved (in their future). They were compressing the future into the present moment of choice, and as we shall see with alchemical formulations, they in fact were attempting to accelerate time in order to look back upon its future effects. Faustus is a Calvinist gambler betting against the absolute latering of time—a gambler betting against Thomas Hardy’s grim “dicing Time.” Religious orthodoxy must become an issue for Marlowe not only because the received Faustus story entails this interest, but, more radically, because the play adopts an atheist’s ironic position facing that orthodoxy. Compare this attitude with Shakespeare’s, where George Santayana noted the “absence of religion.” As atheist—in the loose and politically burdened parlance of that time—Marlowe takes every opportunity to undermine the claims of the Almighty. He is wildly in earnest about this task, like an activist seeking to protect the environment, whereas Shakespeare seems to avoid doctrinal confrontations, burying their turmoil in the confusions of social activity at large. In this regard Marlowe, unlike the greater poet, resembles Machiavelli, who analyzed and wrote about ancient religious custom in his Discourses on Livy, having shown, in The Prince, that politic uses of religion are but one avenue to secular power. In Fortune Is a Woman, Hannah Pitkin discovers “several dimensions” to Machiavellian theory, as distinct from the ideologically “more consistent theorist,” and along with this Situationist method goes a rejection of fixed sacred orders in the universe.5 The Prince must accept the contradiction of history: that secular power will require reli-

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gious support. Thinking in the same vein, Marlowe presents his characters as appearing religious, but in fact obeying the iron laws of nature. Whether it is Tamburlaine besieging a helpless city inhabited by hundreds of innocent virgins, or the Duc de Guise planning the massacre on Saint Bartholomew’s Day, Marlowe only appears to enjoy the rampage of endless hostility and rage, while in fact he is balancing a strife between frightening alien elements. (He was the J. G. Ballard of his age, an Elizabethan author of Crash and The Day of Creation and The Atrocity Exhibition.) On a Marlovian and Machiavellian view, the struggle for power follows inevitably from what Dr. Johnson’s Rasselas called the “insatiable hunger of the imagination.” Not for itself alone is this hunger an absurd rage to possess, but in its unrestrained expectation that the hero has more than all the time in the world, this dream of empire becomes a monstrous Gnostic experiment.

The Forbidden Experiment The play we know familiarly as Doctor Faustus tells the story of a man driven to move beyond what is allowed, and it raises the profound question: Who is it, or what is it, that gives or withholds such permission? A more useful title is that of an early edition, The Tragicall History of the Horrible Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, while the original and most newsworthy source for Marlowe was even more pointed, The Historie of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus (1592), a translation by one P.F. from the German Faustbuch of 1587. Horror, damnation, and deserved death belong to the lexicon of Christian belief. All three terrors are believed to be the consequences of sin; hence an Elizabethan audience would have found the play extremely powerful, far removed from the cool rationalism of Machiavelli, author of The Prince—and yet, as stereotyped villain, Machiavelli speaks the choral introduction to The Jew of Malta. Marlowe’s chorus to The Jew of Malta, his “Machiavel,” knocks on the door of that savagely cool play and, I take it, speaks for the analytic, rational, and skeptical poet: “I count religion but a childish toy, / And hold there is no sin but ignorance.” As comment on such superstition, the theologically driven play of Faustus comes replete with religious apparatus, the Devil and his demonic ambassador Mephistophilis, two learned magician friends, good and bad angels, the Seven Deadly Sins, along with pious Christians and an atmosphere of essentially pious academic inquiry. Much must depend on the way we, and the Elizabethans, imagine acting these parts. Marlovian characters burn with the libido dominandi, as Saint Augustine

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named the sinful imperialist drive to possess domains as far as the eye can see and even beyond. These heroes are perverse masters of material and spiritual conquest—Gnostic in the latter sphere, Machiavellian in the former. Despite falling prey to ignorant predators, as happens to Edward II when he seeks to be surrounded by beautiful things, the Marlovian suitor for perfection always acts like a mad scientist setting out to prove a theory. Aestheticism is inherently theatrical, and nothing is allowed to keep this show from going on, even if theater ends up in the hands of professional magicians. The ideal Marlovian life thrives on beauty, never the tedious piety of “religious caterpillars,” nor can we fail to notice that role playing is almost more important than anything in this imperialism of beauty. Wanting to be an actor, having lived a scholar’s inactive life, Doctor Faustus becomes a higher kind of actor, a magician, hardly restrained by Christian mystery and dogma. The moment he renounces hair-splitting scholastic labors, he abandons private skepticism for a scene of public revelation, projected by the public theater, where heroic thinking goes on display before crowds of admiring spectators. As if to reduce the stature of God, the actor achieves for thought and dramatic self-absorption an instant celebrity—we cannot doubt that Burbage had his fanatical followers. Such heroes of stagecraft were like prophets of a new secular knowledge—a theatrical gnosis, we might call it. God is of course not metaphysically subject to reduction, so Marlowe must invent a way to show what a rival godhead would require, which is exactly what he manages when his Faustus makes an epochal deal with the Devil.

The Contract and Its Half-Hidden Consequence Doctor Faustus signs a contract including one critical clause, written, as is usual with such things, in very small print, whereby the contract acquires an uncanny desperation, a weird admission that tragic fate is finally always beyond our foresight and our control. Faustus signs a contract with the Devil in rapidly congealing blood, but not, as most believe, to gain worldly goods and pleasures. His aim, rather, is to gain control over the length of his life on earth. His magic powers will have a fixed and rationed duration, since he asks for twenty-four years, which the play gradually and somewhat mysteriously shows to equal the twenty-four hours of any single complete day. The contract enforces a deadline, because the twenty-four years must inevitably reach their terminus, at which point Faustus is bound by law to deliver his body and soul to his creditors. Such a contractual, materially legalistic arrangement is the most modern

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invention conceivable, since from it stream all the most characteristically modern phenomena, such as capitalism, technology, global discovery, and finally a wide river of rationalist philosophic positions. From it, we might add in passing, comes the characteristically Renaissance obsession with priority of discovery. Furthermore, the contract is just that—a secular assignment of powers by one party to another, treating the deal with the Devil in the most common of commercial terms. Such legalism is as ubiquitous as business dealings ever were, and its archetypes can be found in the Bible, or ancient Greece; but for some reason the tone of the contract, treating the soul as a real thing, rings oddly modern, while an uncanny contradiction of metaphysics gives to the event its tone of the forbidden and its secret aspect. Yet the purpose of the contract, as indicated by its small print, has not always been carefully read, for it specifies a measured quantity of time, and not the things a period of time may bring. Faustus contracts with the Devil to enjoy time as a particular possession, but how does a person come to own time? We say, “My time is my own,” but what in fact can that mean? Theatrically, if only theatrically, twenty-four years may be specified by contract, and the audience imagines, with the hero, that such will be the temporal extent of freedom from physical limits. Blindness to nature and vision of magic freedom are the polarities between which the hero must negotiate his dream. In this blind belief, Faustus is to have discovered the mechanism of his tragic error. Repeated motifs throughout the play point to the heart of the delusion, as when the Chorus in Act IV speaks typically of Faustus taking pleasure in sights he will now report to his friends, who “admir’d and wond’red at his wit.” The audience shares in this théâtre du spectacle—“your eyes shall see perform,” we are told. Like an entrepreneurial star, the magician delusionally promotes the medium of his own public existence, as if he and his plays went far beyond Macbeth’s “poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more.” This toying with the art of dramatic self-representation leads in due course to questions about the Unity of Time, asking what such unity might be, if time can have no beginning and no end. As an experience of theatrical events, time passing in the action of a play is only a pulsating fictive experience, a time withdrawn by the play from the normal diurnal or calendrical temporal range. If in the theater the play may pretend to an image of unity in both action and time, it seems doubtful that time itself can share this simulacrum of oneness. The player can act the opening scene of the drama with shocking, dismaying coldness: a dedicated life-long scholar makes a final decision to abandon his

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intellectual home. We sense a shock to the experience we usually count on, common time, which in this case would permit time enough for endless, uninterrupted study. Quitting his study in every sense of the word, Faustus commits to a pilgrimage into an unknown land, where he seeks his own exile in the freedom of control over temporality—and given that control, he thinks, he will command all natural forces. In this sense force itself, a modern scientific focus, defines his demand of his demonic servant, Mephistophilis: . . . Wait upon me while I live, To do whatever Faustus shall command, Be it to make the moon drop from her sphere Or the ocean to overwhelm the world. (A-text: I.iii.38–40)6

Shortly thereafter Faustus endorses the legal deed of gift of body and soul, as he calls it, in which he agrees that he will be “a spirit in form and substance,” that Mephisto will be his obedient servant, will do for him whatever he wants, will be invisible to all observers, especially indoors “in his chamber or house,” will “appear to the said John Faustus at all times in what form or shape soever he please.” This agreement seems simple and clear enough, as if a good lawyer had written it. But then comes the deed itself, for Faustus now covenants that at a certain moment in time he will give himself up to Lucifer “and his minister Mephistophilis.” This donation, however, is only to come about, as agreed, if twenty-four years have elapsed. The contract in fact is for a certain length of time; it follows legal “form,” but it specifies a legally most unusual “consideration.” In return for his gift, Lucifer is to get all of Doctor Faustus, at the end, when Faustus reaches his deadline. On his side of the bargain, Faustus gets to possess the most mysterious of all things: time itself. He abandons the traditional belief, as expressed by the poet Samuel Daniel in his Defence of Rhyme (1602), that “we must herein be content to submit ourselves to the law of time, which in a few yeares will make al that for which we now contend Nothing.”7 The contract will permit a conditional defiance—powerfully enunciated in a line of one of Daniel’s sonnets—“against the dark and time’s consuming rage.” Yet the secret purpose of the contract, as indicated by its small print, remains just that—a secret purpose—and metaphysically it suggests there is such a thing as a quantity of time. Time as quality of existence disappears,

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while time as quantity of duration measured on the clock supervenes. The contract only appears to be about the folly of material possession, as if intending merely to specify the things a period of time may bring. If then Faustus contracts with the Devil to enjoy time as a particular possession, we must ask: How does a person own time? We say, “My time is my own,” but what in fact can that mean? Further, as we have seen, although the amount of time—twenty-four years, no more and no less—is fixed by contract, within that limit the contract allows the twenty-four years to be a time of freedom. Faustus is assured that he can blindly do with the time just as he pleases. The obscure puzzle we have found thus needs to be laid out rather schematically, which perhaps would look like the following list of five recapitulating aspects. First, the plan is secular, and in this framework of existence Faustian time must be capable of use. For that to happen, this particular time must be owned by someone. Second, if the use of one’s time requires prior ownership, then one can ask: What will this use be for? The medieval answer to ‘What for?” would have been roughly to obey the Commandments, to believe in the sacrament of Holy Communion, and to trust in God’s Providence. (The second of these purposes is exactly the impossible one for Faustus, as C. L. Barber showed in a justly celebrated article, “The Form of Faustus’ Fortunes Good or Bad.”)8 Indeed, the Faustian life as a magician is a relentless travesty of Christian ritual devotion. The reliance upon Providence is the central issue here, however, for in this reliance the true Christian gives up any idea that he owns his own time and that he may use it as he pleases. Third, there is no way, other than being sophistically clever, to defend what Faustus does with his life, once he is granted time and apparently infinite powers; and this foolishness poses a problem for any argument that he has dealt with the Devil only to acquire a lot of selfish material power. His actions are demonstrably pure farce, and indeed children at performances of Doctor Faustus routinely laugh their heads off at the silliness of it all. So, we ask, what is this contract with the Devil really for? Fourth, by focusing on the small print of the contract, on the twenty-four years (or hours), we begin to see. The purpose is to gain or get possession of time, to be sure; but this in turn implies that Faustus wants time because he sees it as a value. Time here has its price, and its price is exactly that it comes

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with a deadline; but only if one invents the final deadline can one discover this new sense that time has value, or, as moderns say, time is money. What this temporal hoard will buy is another matter—fame perhaps, “that last infirmity of noble mind”; or material comfort and things “of rare price”; health perhaps, if one could find the right doctor; the chance to be restlessly active and inventive, perhaps. Fifth, in any case the contract confers in principle a right to own the only thing that will make secular existence meaningful: the continuous possession of all the hours of day and night. Such possession, prideful or not, had been the one thing no medieval Christian could believe possible, while most would have called it blasphemy; so in the largest sense the Faustian contract creates an entrance into modernity, for it proposes the complete freedom to use and to possess one’s own time. All modern activities requiring this freedom are bound to make time into an artificially clocked possession. When, by contrast, other plays of that period conventionally bade farewell to their audiences in the final lines of each performance, they enabled a different temporality to reset and synchronize itself with the clock of the “outside world.” Shakespeare’s technique would be exemplary. Henry VIII, for example, requires of its Epilogue this separation between two different time frames—“some come to take their ease / And sleep an act or two,” but then suddenly the snoring sleep of these theatergoers is “frighted by our trumpets.” Such lines give comic value to the more famous sentence, “our little lives are rounded with a sleep.” When comedies revolve around aspects of time as separated free play, as holiday time, we get the effect of the clown’s final song in Twelfth Night, an archaic atmosphere. A great while ago the world began With hey, ho, the wind and the rain; But that’s all one, our play is done, And we’ll strive to please you every day.

In The Winter’s Tale, the chorus framing the action after Act III is simply called Time, whose wording of his own powers covers a wide range of temporal meanings, from the hourglass of time to “Time’s news” to the larger “argument of Time.” One could hardly envision a more profound analysis of the temporal than Leontius’ final speech, which captures an obscure sense of the distance between theatrical and common time.

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In a late mythic romance like Pericles, the once-upon-a-time of “a song that old was sung” pushes theatrical time into the domain of dreamland, with the poet Gower as archaic chorus. At the conclusion of Hamlet, the gap between actual and theatrical time is made perhaps sharper yet more subtle than usual when an outsider to Denmark, the invading Fortinbras, speaks the noble envoi to the fallen Prince, who “like to a soldier” will be raised “to the stage”; no wording could be more double, yet more deeply affecting. Such farewells of course interrupt the fictive flow of the action, to end it, breaking its imaginary freedom from common time and space. In a fairly real world, time does pass and things do change, and heroes die, but there is a dreaming alternative to this: the world of magic shows, where appearance is reality.

Seeing the Disappearance of the Moment Sublime explorations of the metaphysics of duration yield a different picture. In Doctor Faustus the strident agon to possess time, as in Tamburlaine the hero would possess space, forces upon us a metaphysical story in which we must analyze a very special form of the visible and the invisible. Whenever humans try to hold back the flux of change, the fixed image always disappears. Faustus therefore tries to defines his power as an accelerated perfection of seeing, glimpsing the momentary appearances so quickly as to make them permanent. Hence the plot hinges on the visual and, as it draws to a close, makes obsessive use of the word “see.” The play must achieve its greatest rhetorical power at exactly that moment when Faustus isolates the perfect thing to be seen: the visage. “Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?” he will ask himself. His vision of Helen is a dramatic expansion of that magic moment in Hero and Leander: “Who ever lov’d that lov’d not at first sight.” At the very beginning of the action, long before he cries out, “O I have seen enough to torture me,” Faustus has thrown away all inwardness of meditation and deep theological pondering and metaphysical study. He

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has chosen “lines, circles, schemes, letters and characters”—all of them visual signs inscribed, to be read, to be seen as the talismans of alchemy: “A sound magician is a demi-god.” His newfound “strange philosophy” is a picturing of natural and artificial powers, such as make up the definition of luxurious sights, sounds, tastes, and “princely delicates.” This desire will involve a pathos of the sense of time passing, but with Faustus it is initially focused on his profession—his scholarship, his solitary learning, his almost mad intellectual removal from the field of common time, the field of action in what is usually called the “real world.” Similarly in the powerful opening of the play, where we are transfixed by the Prologue’s portrait of the scholar: “And this the man that in his study sits.” What Faustus wants is a world where there are no temporal absolutes, hence no fixations of what can be seen, what can come to us in a vision, an epiphany, a magic enlightenment. The aim of the new vision is to escape absolute frames of reference, choosing instead all sorts of relativities, for only in this way will such visions come to the seeker—not for truth, but for experience. In the most modern and most theatrical fashion, he wants now to feed off a table of appearances and changing conditions, so that he will know “life itself” rather than any fixed ideas about life, any fixed formulations. Yet he is no Montaigne, for he desires all in excess. But even if he is not Montaigne, his play is entirely concerned with failed introspective reflections on his escape from scholarly time, and in this respect the Faustian anticipates a deep strain of later Romantic thought: its passion for reflection upon its private drama, what Husserl would later call “internal time consciousness.”9 In this alliance of sight and time, Faustus resembles Tamburlaine. Declaiming one last time, the Scythian shepherd delivers his last speech, dying beside the hearse of his dead queen, Zenocrate. Tamburlaine, not one to give up easily, commits himself, one last time, to his daemonic role. He recalls Leontius in Plato’s Republic, addressing his own eyes with helpless rage. Now, eyes, enjoy your latest benefit, And when my soul hath virtue of your sight, Pierce through the coffin and the sheet of gold, And glut your longings with a heaven of joy.10

And to his sons and his loyal friends he bids farewell in the same visionary tongue:

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In simplest dramatic terms, the time of Tamburlaine’s existence is bounded by what he can claim to see, a thought driven deeper by the analysis of thought in Faustus. Commenting on the role of debate in the play, David Bevington observes that all theological doctrine here seems equally balanced on the edge of poised dispute. He goes on: “The antithesis of voices generates an anxiety that is both theological and artistic. Faustus’s often flippant agnosticism is not simply his own pathway to hell; it is also, for Marlowe, a shifting point of view from which to explore uncertainties.”11 The original German Faustbuch had presented this story in common enough terms, and in the “Oration of Faustus to the Students” (chapter 68), the magician admits: “I have lived, practicing all manner of life of conjurations and wicked exercises.” Magic sights and wonders—favorites in the court masques also—would be increasingly difficult for the faithful to see in the older mystical sense; for although many might not have known it, seeing was about to be conscripted for empirical or even scientific research purposes. Seeing through a glass darkly would now have to be understood in a more critical vein, almost as a pun on the use of the new optical devices. Such attitudes were new, and the idea of the new itself was becoming a burgeoning modern interest. By making sight a motif, Doctor Faustus was asking questions about the instantaneous speed of sight and seeing. The transition from magic studies of the occult to a scientific rethinking of hidden forces was redefining the very idea of sight and vision, for which the fundamental change was a new understanding of time, space, and motion, all three dimensions taken together. We are here concerned with metaphysical aspects of these dimensions, but we gain some clarity from more common instances. Working labor is differently ordered, mainly clocked, as distinct from earlier customs. As Jacques Le Goff has shown in Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, there had been a strong medieval tendency to identify labor as spiritually significant, leading to a “theology of labor,” which included ideas of joyous labor, imitating the Creation itself, or penitential labor, imitating the penalty of Adam’s fall;12 and if we read the Faustian contract in that light, we discover a radically different temporal consciousness at work in Marlowe. Generally, owing to the agricultural base of economics on

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the land, medieval temporality had been governed by the daylight hours and by the diurnal passage of time, from day to day. There was almost no artificial light—a visual deficit for theatrical illusion, which instead depended more powerfully upon the evocations of the spoken word. Such differences regarding sight and the seeable are critical to any fundamental theory of human time. What we cannot see, we can hardly count as temporally passing; hence the torture of solitary confinement, where there is finally no way to see anything move. Unless we take other measures, we are what we see. Le Goff notes that in the fourteenth century advances in clockmaking “made it possible for the hour to achieve its mathematical sense, the twenty-fourth part of the day. It was undoubtedly in the fourteenth century that this essential step was taken.”13 By the late sixteenth century these early developments had reached a more mature stage, as endless literary works of the period will attest. For this reason, Doctor Faustus is designed to explore time as a necessary modern illusion, something like the pure invisibility of desire (“do for him and bring him whatsoever”). Here time begins to seem such a riddle that to have it at one’s command is tantamount to possessing divinity, which explains why Faustus early in the play says that necromantic books are heavenly, and why at the end of life he swears he will burn them. These metaphysics of magicians And necromantic books are heavenly; Lines, circles, schemes, letters and characters: Ay, these are those that Faustus most desires.

If this hero is to own his own time for twenty-four years, as his contract states, the story must explore the tragic emptiness of an ever more perfectly invisible medium—a dimension for measuring motion, as the scientist would have it. A strong production of the play must therefore emphasize its inner psychic Augustinian dimension of the mere consciousness of time. We feel the passing of time in this play, for every sight and vision accorded to the magician is yet one more marker of the ideal emptiness of the one thing he thought he could have: time in which to live. The invisibility-plot of Marlowe’s play measures out time in action, while its spatial adventures are made entirely imaginary in the same fashion—as if both space and time could be compressed into hallucinatory warps and leaps across gaps in the continuum. My sense of the play is that its play of time is designed to enhance a metaphysical dimension of our human existence, or more exactly to

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show us that time, like space, is utterly mysterious, with a mystery far transcending anything our religions customarily present to us by means of personifying figures and narrative parables. This would have to be a modern interest. Time corresponds to the ideal emptiness of geometric abstractions. Thus Faustus plots for access to the truly invisible, and to this end he invents the deadline, since the time he wants will need its measure, which can happen only if it has a terminus, an end, a deadline. The modern deadline finally is a natural rather than mystical idea. Familiar to us from the world of modern journalism, where each day’s issue is “put to bed” as the final stage of “meeting a deadline,” this time-cut anticipates what would later be mathematically recognized as a fundamental dimension in virtually every scientific description. Business is about meeting deadlines; raising and lowering the curtain is about deadlines; time’s seemingly unending flow needs to be divisible into temporal cuts, into sections of its otherwise undifferentiated flux. Clocks make this possible, and clocks, though not widely manufactured in England, were the increasingly prevalent monitors of human behavior. Furthermore, as G. J. Whitrow said in What Is Time (1972), clocks, by themselves, encouraged the kind of measurement and dimensionality that science requires. While monasteries had once needed to ring accurately to begin prayers, now industry and commerce called, on a secular basis, for equally stringent temporal accounting. A parody of science among medieval clerics permits Robert Greene to end his play Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay with the scene of the talking statue, an alchemical creation, that pronounces the long-desired oracle: “Time is, Time was, Time is past”—and this play, we remember, is an anti-Marlovian satire. Altogether the Elizabethan public theater was fully aware of the time of starting and finishing its performances, and it often took special measures, perhaps a choral speech or jig or clowning burlesque, to incise especially the endpoint of the performance. Puritans disliked holidays and their loose forms, but they must strangely have felt quite at home when the doomed man cried out, “Ah Faustus, / Now hast thou but one bare hour to live, / And then thou must be damned perpetually.” Nothing could be tonally more different from the quiet way of the great morality play, as Everyman and Good Deeds descend into the grave. Here too the ending is radically modern: “Terminat hora diem, terminat author opus”—while the actual performance coincides with a fictive life within the play, both for the hero and for the play itself. “The hour ends the day, the author ends the play,” or, to be more suggestive, author and

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work have the power to end each other. Secular obligation takes precedence over what Everyman had called “singular virtue.” Friendship has been redefined in secular terms. All by itself the force of contract removes the force of Aristotelian philia, the socially binding spirit of kinship that grounds Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Faustus, who learned his solitude as a scholar— and all scholars will recognize this travail—is now to be alone, in torment, forever, as if he has unconsciously chosen to remain alone at all costs, during the time of his contract, and thereafter. The puzzle runs finally in the following direction: Faust wants to escape the fetters of limitation, but the first thing we find him doing is performing a whole series of petty actions, or immediately vanishing shows, that are in terms of the play so manifestly trivial that one can only wonder why he needed his contract in the first place. But his contract makes it ruthlessly clear that even the famed magician cannot escape being human, which in this changing world of magic skills seems to him to require rivalry with God, which in turn gives a unique importance to human time. The play must show that time involves moving beyond our psyches to the “objectivity” of experience, and this demonstration takes Faustus away from reverence for God and toward reverence for man’s powers, paramount among them the power to see, admire, and estimate. There is something natural, but also diabolic, about trying to fix these powers as kinds of sight, for to see is to stop time, to limit by inventing a deadline, by wishing to possess it. These make an icon of a process, fixity from flow, and they reveal the tragedy of the new world that Marlowe foresees—a world of busy, zealous, trivial pushing to encase beliefs and unbeliefs, as if they were material objects. Time is the one dimension of movement that will not tolerate such a vision, in spite of clocks, in spite of the secular workday, in spite of useful measurements the clock makes possible. Time, finally, can only be thought. Out of such mysteries Marlowe creates his tragedy of the intellectual. A rarity among great plays, Doctor Faustus is the story of a philosopher looking for a new philosophy, a hero ready to be reborn, discovered in the opening scene of the play, sitting alone in his study, thinking.

CHAPTER

5

The Defense of the Interim

One knows few poets so time-beguiled as Shakespeare, yet few are as free from ritual repetitions of the temporal theme. He uses the word “time” well over a thousand times in the plays, making it a memorable usage, as also in the sonnets, where its idea virtually dominates the drama of two love stories. In Shakespeare’s Words, David and Ben Crystal adduce fifteen categories of temporal usage, whereby “time” can imply an age or epoch in human society or world history; a present state of affairs; a lifetime or life; a person’s age; a past period of history; the future; a circumstance or occasion; a right moment or opportunity; a period or interval; a seasonal cycle; a moment of birth or deliverance; an allotted time; a use of time, experience, or occasion; a mere passing of time; a rhythm, tempo, or measure as in music.1 Adding special idioms, such as “time-pleaser” and indeed “time-beguiling,” we find a vast display of different temporal perceptions, as if the poet could not stop the theme from erupting in always more unexpected ways; in play after play, line after line, he rings the changes on this dimension of change and duration. The fourteen lines of every sonnet concentrate the experience of temporal passage and anxiety—“that time of year thou mayst in me behold.” In entire plays such as The Tempest, there is an ominous yet also comic commentary on how we may spend or lose the brief span of our living aboveground. The Tempest, whose title encrypts the Latin tempus, is located on a temporal as much as spatial island, readily accepting the constraints of the three dramatic Unities. A dark side to the matter is never absent from this play, however, and the tone can be casual and mocking, or will speak prophetically of “the dark backward and abysm of time.” If in Macbeth destiny is written in the “syllables of recorded time,” if in Troilus and Cressida a personified Time with a wallet at his back carries “alms for oblivion,” time remains also the 70

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objective, material limit upon human existence—life measured by the clock. The associations of temporality are extremely various, whether from diurnal changes in light, or the waves moving toward the pebbled shore, or apocalyptic moments of religious faith and ritual. We range with this imagery and its concerns from the most extreme personification all the way to the most material description. Perhaps an inevitable gap in the useful list given by Shakespeare’s Words is that throughout Shakespeare the cardinal term “time” also possesses a philosophic sense, where it implies the problem of time, as when a philosopher considers the relations of time, space, and motion, or time and memory, time and expectancy, time and tense, time and eternity. Yet a high level of abstraction is also metaphysically implicit in common usage, as if mechanically clocked time had no ultimate status for human understanding and human dreams. Human time is thus not just a metaphysical theme, a learned philosophic problem, but more often in the plays is an experience of being alive in a world of perpetual change—much as this frequently occurs in the essays of Montaigne, although ideas of universal instability are to be found all through late Renaissance literature, even in vast and apparently stable poetic structures like Spenser’s Faerie Queene, particularly in the Mutability Cantos, where the most unstable claims for mutability are dramatized in the most stable form, namely the masque. All such visions focus finally on the vanishing present moment, the nunc stans, as Coleridge said in a lecture on Shakespeare transcribed by J. P. Collier in 1812, where we read how the poet enables us to “see, however dimly, that state of being in which there is neither past nor future, but which is permanent, and is the energy of nature.”2 This moment between the past and future, this state of natural energy, is what I associate, after a line in Timon of Athens, with the interim. While a fascination with time matures as dream elements take over the late Romances, ideas about the disappearing present moment give thematic structure to the entire Shakespearean canon. Strikingly, in the plays the profound preoccupation with the ravages and promises of time has no parallel in regard to space. The term “space” is used only a few times in the plays, once powerfully and ironically at the beginning of King Lear, where space is identified with free space, with freedom to move about in the world (Goneril’s line is “Dearer than eyesight, space and liberty”). A few of these mentions are slightly eerie evocations of locale, but space as such does not obsess the author. When spatial relations play an obvious “musical” role (in the parlance of G. Wilson Knight), as in Antony and Cleopatra, the playwright

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identifies it with the extension of an empire as magic sphere. This extension has the effect for hero and heroine alike of their sharing a perfect congruence between Alexandria and Rome and their ocean of middle earth, their Mediterranean. Space here is “world,” transcending common space and time entirely, through the fantasy of love’s imperial power. The lesser privilege of space, despite such moments of montage, surely arises from the fact that for the poet significant space is not our familiar experience of places that we know, but instead the space of the theater itself. At the Globe, in theatrical space, he and his colleagues achieve a “production of space,” to use Henri Lefebvre’s phrase.3 The theater builds imaginary places whenever an action occurs on stage, such that imagined poetic space is all the space that counts. Prospero’s masque of “insubstantial pageant” demands a deliberate lack of realistic substance, for it had been designed to work magically upon a mesmerized audience. With primitive theatrical magic, A Midsummer Night’s Dream personifies theatrical illusion in Wall and Moon. When Doctor Faustus asks his new friend, “Tell me, where is the place that men call hell,” the theater allows Mephisto’s convincing reply, “Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.” An actualized space of condemned existence makes immediate sense to the spectator because, though fictive, it fills the eye, and its noises fill the ear of the spectator; crucially, theatrical space is what the actor imagines it to be. Similarly with time, but more subtly, the action of the play projects time as human experience, for if all the world’s a stage, as the poet said, it is equally true that we are all the “fools of time.”

Defending the Interim A single question in Timon of Athens—“What shall defend the interim?”— captures the dramatic accident upon which the whole play hinges. The interim is generically a middle moment falling somewhere within the larger continuity of temporal flow. The play begins with a revealing discussion between a poet, a painter, a jeweler, and a merchant, in the course of which the poet recreates the traditional story of Fortune’s Wheel, which here is adapted to the particular luxurious life Lord Timon enjoys. The poet imagines the ascent to fortune as a climb up a steep hill, where one suitor stands upon the head of another, but the painter thinks this a trivial verbal conceit. His visual sense is that in one moralizing work of art he could “demonstrate these quick blows of Fortune’s / More pregnantly than words.” It is

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not much further along (I.i.255–260) that Shakespeare introduces the pun which the action of the entire play extrudes into a massive metaphysical conceit. Two of the fawning suitors enter, meeting the cynical courtier Apemantus, who throughout the play is both chorus and foil to Timon. First Lord: What time o’ day is’t, Apemantus? Apemantus: Time to be honest. First Lord: That time serves still. Apemantus: The most accursed thou that still omitt’st it. Second Lord: Thou art going to Lord Timon’s feast? Apemantus: Ay, to see meat fill knaves and wine heat fools. This obvious pun on time and Timon is not a verbal effect one notices strongly, unless the players stress the sounds of name and word, yet even so the pun quietly generates the structuring sense that “time” in this play is one of William Empson’s complex words, whose link to the hero’s name is gradually shown to be inevitable. Significantly, the two lords are on their way to a grand repast, to celebrate the mere passing of time, to spend the interim between one long tedious hour and the next. Despite what Brutus says in Julius Caesar about “a tide in the affairs of men,” and as if to question the spectacular haste of villains like Richard III or Macbeth, Shakespeare wants, in general, to defend the interim. In almost every play he sees each moment as a dilated liminal passage from one small piece of action to another, from one event to the next or the event just past. Liminality and liminal passage were defined for modern anthropology by the great Belgian folklorist Arnold van Gennep, who showed how all ritual passage may be subdivided into the three phases of rites: separation, transition, and incorporation.4 Funerals focus on separation, betrothals on transition, marriages on incorporation, and there is an inherent doubleness in all three phases: Is a birthday a separation from the prior time, or an entrance into the later time? In The Rites of Passage, van Gennep noted that the segmented unfolding of life will be most usefully treated as a series of typical “life-crises” layered by ambiguous overlaps between one stage and another. Furthermore, the idea of changing social roles involves a measure of protective intervention, for every new role is “strange,” often requiring the initiate to have a guide (Dante’s Virgil, for example). In short, although the initial moment of separation lifts the initiate into a new status, and although the final incorporation (or aggregation) lifts the individual into a “higher” state, all three phases of passage share an openness to the liminal. Although in van

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Gennep’s formulation the middle phase alone is raised to the level of pure passage, valued in and for its special intensity, there are also authors—like Montaigne—who insist on the perpetual liminality of all significant existence. Traditional cultures often try to hold on to such visions, through annual rituals. In an important extension of anthropology, perhaps influenced by Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner showed that transitional ritual and experience could be theatrically staged, usually in what Turner called the “social dramas” of procession, pageant, masque, festival, and the like. Such actions Ben Jonson had richly invented for popular theater, notably with Bartholomew Fair, and on a coterie level or for the Court with his stylized masques. While The Tempest is Shakespeare’s most stringent essay in the dramatic modes of liminal passage, controlled as it is by Prospero, Timon of Athens shows what happens when a structured human life, with unexamined temporal expectancy, falls outside the Marlovian illusion that we humans can really invent our own timelines. In this insanely austere play, not many lines into the second act, the play asks if we have any control at all over the passing of time. Scarcely any catastrophe in the canon can match for speed and completeness the crash of the fortunes of the noble and nobly (if blindly) generous Timon. Suddenly, as it were, the bank forecloses. The sudden arrival of creditors strikes a catastrophic blow against Timon’s obsessional need to ape the generosity of God, foreclosing his perpetual benefactions, in effect putting an end to his infantile dream that time is “forever.” The catastrophe has fallen upon him like an avalanche, almost before the play has begun to unfold, as if this were a Shakespearean version of Greek tragedy, not unlike the later neoclassical tragedies of Racine, where the tragic error has been made even before the play begins. In this Shakespearean version of the tragic flaw, the resulting plot is entirely consequence, in that none of the violent interruptions to Timon’s downward fall have any effect upon his spiraling trajectory. Ruined by fawning suitors—and some he believes to be genuine friends— to whom he had given untold sums of money, he learns from his loyal but now desperate steward, Flavius, that he is totally bankrupt. We hear that he was notorious for holding the finest court in Athens, extending his foolhardy generosity to anyone who even hinted at some need. Yet his servants remain concerned for him in a way that resonates throughout the play; in particular, when disaster finally strikes, his steward Flavius, having warned and attempted to restrain him on many occasions—warnings Timon claims

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never to have received—now finds there is absolutely nothing left to sell, to pay off the newly arrived creditors who want their money at once. The story of the debacle is itself complex, but we can pause upon one moment of its course—the moment on which the action hinges. Stunned by his master’s profligate folly, yet loyal to him, the steward cries out: “What shall defend the interim?” (II.ii.154). Money to meet the creditors’ demands should obviously be readily available, but the oldest and most stable of noble possessions, the land, is no longer Timon’s to sell. He cannot imagine this pass. Timon: Let all my land be sold. Steward: ’Tis all engag’d, some forfeited and gone, And what remains will hardly stop the mouth Of present dues. The future comes apace. What shall defend the interim, and at length How goes our reck’ning? Timon: To Lacedaemon did my land extend. Steward: O my good lord, the world is but a word: Were it all yours, to give it in a breath, How quickly were it gone! This crisis would not be unfamiliar to anxious Elizabethan aristocrats; onstage the voyeuristic fascination of the disaster would be, as if astrologically determined, a powerful one. “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” was the excessively wise advice of Polonius. Such bromides (or, as I might say, sorry saws) fail the situation, for now a complete crisis falls between one determining perception and an equally determining consequence. All of a sudden, there is nothing to say; the time for words is over—which implies the loss of any true friend (Flavius does not count, nor do those servants who remain faithful to their master). Speech having shrunk to nothing, Timon begins to curse his former friends. His cursing acquires obsessive momentum, and finally anathematizes the whole human species, by cursing our most cherished gift: speech itself. The curse prays for a return of the plague, a pandemic that so often had led, among other disasters, to the closing of the theaters; plague is the ultimate cosmic breakdown of communication: “Lips, let four words go by and language end. / What is amiss, plague and infection mend!” (V.i.219). “To the last syllable of recorded time”: one remembers this from Macbeth’s thudding, chaotic, murderous agony. “Let four words go by and language end”: the desperate sentence encapsulates the utter extremism of

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this play. All words must die with Timon. Utterly isolated at the “beached verge of the salt sea,” his time is measured out in a dying language, as if curses were the speech of a mortally wounded animal. But how can that be? It would be a strange world, where language itself could end—no, an unimaginable world. Yet that is the deeper sense of the tragedy of Timon’s fall from wealth and prestige; he has been reduced in epitaph to a mere fragmentary sequence of four monosyllables. His last procession follows a stumbling trail of speech thrown down into the grave, enraged, for in perverse excesses of generosity he had once entertained virtually all the nobility of his society. To the sycophants—now scurrying away, “all in motion,” at the disaster of his faked feast—he had given gifts beyond measure or desert. Only now, buried in the foam of his own Apemantean curses, Timon knows that language, the medium of the socius, has abandoned him. Those left standing are soldiers like Alcibiades; a society now mainly composed of “dull and speechless tribes” can no longer function or even exist, its intercourse among friends replaced by the brutal bargains of war. Timon and his double—speech—die together, cursing. Language, social and otherwise, normally works sequentially and in time, and one is therefore tempted, following our general principle, to say that Timon cannot hear his steward’s advice, because he has already denied the fact of disappearing time. If one were to act his role in a delicately aesthetic way, one could give him a repertoire of gestures, elegant and weary, waving time away like an unwanted and unbidden guest at table. Timon is denying dangerous truths not about wealth, but about their relation to the passing of the moment; wealth, its use and abuse, is oddly irrelevant to our understanding of his plight. What he cannot grasp is that money is an unreal language, depraved by its inherent emptiness (and utility) and deluding the speaker into believing the speech has a true referent, friendship; whereas when Timon runs out of language, he has run out of the only thing worth having. In this story, to be speechless is to experience the end of time.

The Augustinian Moment In the sixteenth century, even as clocks were becoming more accurate and more widely available, especially for commercial purposes, giving people a new sense of the value of the present moment, the older, more natural diurnal time-sense remained embedded in a social consciousness that was deeply Christian in outlook. Saint Augustine, of course, had placed time at

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an inscrutable crossroads; the Augustinian description of time is both ontological and psychological. In his Confessions, he begins on the former plane: “At any rate it is now quite clear that neither future nor past actually exists. Nor is it right to say there are three times, past, present and future. Perhaps it would be more correct to say: there are three times, a present of things past, a present of things present, a present of things future.”5 Psychologically, these three modalities correspond to the powers of memory, sight, and expectation. Much can be learned from analyzing the tenses (as J. M. E. McTaggart, D. H. Mellor, and other philosophers later showed), largely because, as Augustine says, “we measure time in its passing.”6 Yet “we cannot measure what does not exist” (XI.22). Despite his material knowledge that we can measure time passing, with clocks and other devices, and despite his having “heard a learned man say that time is simply the movement of the sun and moon and stars,” Augustine will assert, against this cosmic clocking, that he cannot agree with the learned man. He perceives seasonal change; but because he believes the sun moves east to west, while the earth stands still, he cannot know the causes of the relativity of annual “times” (the seasons) and hours, and he cannot relate ideas of time to the actual physics of the rotations of the earth around the sun. Nor can he see clearly how we are to understand the temporal aspect of objects moving and at rest (XI.24). Thinking of spoken language, he decides he cannot find a unit in which to measure moments passing: “Do I measure a longer time by a shorter one, as we measure a beam in terms of cubits?” Finally, Augustine decides he cannot measure the future, for that has not yet happened; or the present, for it is not extended in space; or the past, which no longer exists (XI.26). Time, for Augustine, depends upon remembering events occurring in the past; hence thoughts of time incite gratitude to God for his kindness and blessing, an idea that immediately illuminates Timon of Athens and its theme of ingratitude. At this juncture, Augustine’s famous remark—“I know what time is, until someone asks me”—also helps to clarify vision in relation to poetry. Time’s passing is the chief theological question for the Confessions, whose aim is to understand its own memory. Modern authors like Proust and Woolf deal with memory in this confessional way: as a fading, always renewing consciousness of “what is past, or passing, or to come,” as Yeats phrased it. Woolf, in particular, experiments endlessly with the question of temporal passage—as, for example, in The Waves, where moments are like rippling, disappearing waves at the seashore. She seems always to be searching for something that would give drama back to her. The story of natural

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forces is inherently dramatic, but can it be recaptured by the modern period? To quote Alfred North Whitehead, “The Greek view of nature, at least that cosmology transmitted from them to later ages, was essentially dramatic. It was not necessarily wrong for this reason: but it was overwhelmingly dramatic. It thus conceived nature as articulated in the way of a work of dramatic art, for the exemplification of general ideas converging to an end. Nature was differentiated so as to provide its proper end for each thing. . . . Nature was a drama in which each thing played its part.”7 This Pre-Socratic vision leads to an Aristotelian view of the ancient sciences, but it still enlists teleology in the fashion that early modern science demanded, for the dramatic reading of nature always asks the question: “What is the purpose of this action, this movement, this motion?” Aristotelian purposive teleology would have to change—for, as Whitehead said, “the pilgrim fathers of the scientific imagination as it exists today are the great tragedians of ancient Athens, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. Their vision of fate, remorseless and indifferent, urging a tragic incident to its inevitable issue, is the vision possessed by science.” The upshot remains, in any case, that the influx of a dramatic sense of things, which seems to recur periodically throughout history, is bound to enhance the status of a science studying the real world, with its limiting fate. The effect of the play of mind in periods of opening consciousness, like the Elizabethan period, is to prevent ignorant conformity from gaining general approval. As Whitehead says in Modes of Thought, “Life degenerates when enclosed within the shackles of mere conformation. A power of incorporating vague and disorderly elements of experience is essential for the advance into novelty.”8

Shakespeare and the Language of Nature Natural process and the virtual chaos of actual (as opposed to idealized) life are inherently opposed to rigid conformity, so that if we are to see how Shakespeare allies his sense of time with the medieval conception, while reflecting the emergencies of his own epoch, we must fully accept the traditional notion that on a commonsense view he is the “poet of nature.” The empirical order of scientific truth crosses over into the dramatic “rhythm of decorum,” as defined by Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism—in effect, “suiting the word to the action”—and to that extent, drama projects individual style and voicing as the expression of natural philosophy, a scientific inquiry that will in time come to include the study of “human nature.”

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For our natures are but one aspect of Nature writ large. The drama also makes full use of poetic language, so that any account of nature in Shakespeare is bound also to be an account of his lexicon and its metric ordering. As his admirers have always said, his language has more activity of thought and movement of feeling—the emotions—than almost any other poetry we know. His plots and speeches convey every aspect of change, so that the familiar loosening of his late Romances amounts to a drama of movement incarnate. By emphasizing the question of nature for Shakespeare, we are drawn to his astonishing use of metaphor—change of meaning, as it has often been called. Of course, without regard to final religious principles and ends, the greater Elizabethan drama presents natural sequences of causes and probabilities, driving toward probable if not always cheerful ends. In every play, there is much chaotic suspense, of the kind that precedes clear general formulations of deep problems. When early modern science repudiates medieval rationalism, it aligns itself with the same forces that produced a secular drama, reviving the ancient Greek model for naturalistic thought. As described by Jean-Pierre Vernant, the ancient Greeks “sketched on a pinax [a wooden tablet] a map of the whole earth, putting on public view the shape of the inhabited world, with its lands, its seas, and its rivers, [and] they constructed mechanical models of the universe, such as the sphere that Anaximander is said to have made. In thus presenting the cosmos ‘for inspection,’ they made of it, in the fullest sense of the term, a theïôria, a spectacle.”9 This allusion to the past hardly proves that through the plays of Seneca the Elizabethans learned a proper cosmology—as if the monstrous Titus Andronicus could provide a model of rational, observing research! Yet a picture comes through: that from the Ancients descended a theoretical sense of theater, and, loosely speaking, it was the most natural thing in the world to make this theater central to a burgeoning culture. We are thus surprised to find that a recent 500-page Companion to Shakespeare says simply nothing concerning Shakespeare’s relation to the question of nature. (This critical loss of a natural perspective seems connected to the way the humanities have lost authority during the past three decades.) Nature is never any single system, and of course we know that the poet is strictly not the single voice of anything, but rather the maker of successful multivocal plays. In a general sense, whether in staged performance or attentive reading, the question of nature in Shakespeare becomes theatrically reducible to the question of voice—of how things are spoken, or “spoken

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out,” so as to convey what Roland Barthes called “the grain of the voice . . . the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs.”10 This being so, the Timonian death of language implies the death of theater. All the critical talk in the world will not obliterate our mortality and its corollary, our being born—our human physics, including speech. The poetry discovers a multiplicity of meanings hidden in the mere word “nature.” Invoking our powers of mirroring nature, Hamlet holds the mirror up to his own actors—but recall that his actors are actors acting the parts of actors who are acting for the Prince a “natural” reenactment of an “unnatural” crime, all of which provides a recessive structure as the model of what acting really does. Our repetition of terms for action in the previous sentence is required, because mimesis always involves a layering of different observed levels of likeness; and the Chinese box finally takes us to the inner truth, the innermost secret. Although Hamlet is simply telling the players what he wants in the way of immediately staged performance, his advice reveals what amounts to a cryptic oscillation between the dramatic script and the words and actions as performed. The stability of human nature seems always to assert itself, paradoxically, in the hysterical instability of histrionic art. On an open stage, sharing a mimetic thrill directly with the audience, sharing presence with them, the Elizabethan theater projected scenes and actions that could hardly fail to seem natural, because bound to representations of a constantly renewed present moment. This pressure of the present moment incited Hamlet to say to his mother, “Seems, madam! Nay, it is; I know not seems.” Our task, as we study the histrionic equation of action and motion, will be to determine the reciprocity pertaining between nature and mimesis. This question leads to the most persistent doubts about truth, knowledge, evidence, fact, and human consciousness—all of which involve our reciprocal relation to a world or scene we can only with difficulty represent. If we are the children of natural cycles, we are also characters in some sort of drama, and hence we have to accept, as the precession of acting suggests, the possible splintering of Hamlet’s mirror. We may or may not wish to see the comedies opting (in Pauline Kiernan’s phrase) for a “repudiation of mimesis,” a rejection of realistic miming in favor of a patently fictive performance.11 Because mimesis tests the reciprocal relationship between mirror and object, any new sophisticated consciousness may destabilize the use of the mirror, and either the art of acting may have changed, or Nature herself may have

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changed, or, more probably, they have both changed by influencing their conceptions of each other. The lesson of nature is precisely such essaying of trial and error. In Mimesis, Erich Auerbach says that the poet’s variety went quite beyond “the ever-varied nuances of the profoundly human mixture of high and low, sublime and trivial, tragic and comic.” He admitted that the essential problem is “so difficult to formulate in clear terms, although everywhere to be observed in its effects, of a basic fabric of the world, perpetually weaving itself, renewing itself, and connected in all its parts, from which all this arises and which makes it impossible to isolate any one event or level of style.”12 Noteworthy here is the Auerbachian method, which looks always to “levels of style,” permitting his chapter “The Weary Prince” to draw a strong contrast between Shakespeare and Dante. Paradoxically, Henry James thought The Tempest such a magical work that in it, as elsewhere, he found Shakespeare’s style to be “the very home of his mind,” sufficiently hospitable in its “lucid stillness” to entertain sharp contrasts of character within the deep-diving play.13 More recent versions would be typically those of Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, where cultural conflict is the issue.14 One might say that the darker satirical malcontented view of stress occurs on this view with virtually “motiveless” force, whereas Shakespeare attempts to almost explain natural excesses in a play like Timon, in the hope that our tragic sense will bring a deeper if not a more comfortable understanding. With the poet, we are always hearing and observing a spoken dialectic between approach and avoidance. Metaphors, as I. A. Richards and William Empson always wished to say, project a strong sense that the points of similarity—the conjoining of two different items in a single class—are sharply opposed by indices of unlikeness, of “disparity action,” as Richards called it. Metaphor appears to be a necessary linguistic component of growing, natural languages, by which we perceive that a nature-leaning poet like Shakespeare will paradoxically be caught in a strife “against Nature,” to use Ben Jonson’s expression. This phrase frames his commendatory poem directly facing the famous Droeshout engraving, in the First Folio. To the Reader This figure that thou here seest put, It was for gentle Shakespeare cut; Wherein the graver had a strife With nature, to out-do the life.

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The poem uses the familiar Renaissance topos of inexpressibility. If the poet cannot engrave or mechanically reproduce thought by somehow imprinting it visually in iconic form, and if Nicholas Hilliard’s Fine Art of Limning cannot show how to depict the mind as such, there will always remain a desire to compensate for this defect, in “strife with nature.”15 Like a painter, the poet will strive to “out-do the life.” Art may not physically catch the breath of nature, but insofar as that spirit is the life of the mind, the wit of the poet and the engraver will seek to get beyond the limits of physical exteriors. Because the life of the poet is imaginative, a special place is given to the book as index to the process of thought. Jonson’s word “print” cuts both ways: it makes a failed engraving, but it prints the ensuing book that gravely succeeds. A dense concatenation of ideas and allusions—for example, “a sounding brass”—twists back and forth, but the abiding question “Can we out-do nature?” emerges prominently linked to thoughts of dying and living. One Jonsonian point seems to be that nature does not reside in oppositional polarities, once one begins to think about expression, or about “playing.” A natural poetic language will resist the polarization of mind and body. Beyond this, it is as if Jonson were suggesting that, while one is tempted to identify “nature’s bounty” in the plays with their full acceptance of contradiction, this external observation is not enough. The language of the plays, or rather their expression, has to insert itself into the acceptance, into its midst. Language must include the poet’s many ways of doing things—tone, character, gesture, grammar, lexicon, and so on, including interpretive subtleties such as exploring the difference between truth and opinion, as registered by Troilus and Cressida. As Frank Kermode reminds us, the maturing of the later Shakespearean style follows and partly creates the curve of English Renaissance literature at large, until in a late play like Coriolanus, a great speech is a new thing: “the representation of excited, anxious thought; the weighing of confused possibilities and dubious motives; the proposing of a theory or explanation followed at once by its abandonment or qualification, as in the meditation of a person under stress to whom all that he is considering can be

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a prelude to vital choices, emotional and political.”16 Kermode develops a view implicit in Charles Lamb’s defining essay on the Tragedies “considered with reference to their fitness for stage presentation,” where Lamb notes that the terrible crimes we see on stage are somehow diverted from their dread materiality by the eloquent subtlety of the language of the play. We are diverted from things to thoughts. Lamb, of course, was arguing that Lear “cannot be acted,” since for the play “it is his mind which is laid bare.”17 In general, Lamb holds that “those characters in Shakespeare which are in the precincts of nature, have yet something in them which appeals too exclusively to the imagination, to admit of their being made objects to the senses without suffering a change and a diminution”; and this principle is yet more true for the characters of “wild and supernatural elevation.” Lamb was arguing that the imaginative and metaphysical subtleties of Shakespeare evade theatrical staging, even when characters live “within the precincts of nature.” Language can go only so far in this direction, but that far is a great distance. Culture epitomized in heroic action, as Lamb perceived, is truly presentable only if a precise linguistic expression inflects or pulls heroic character away from any brute material effect. On this view, if King Lear cannot be experienced as a linguistic texture, its terrors, storms, and passions will remain effectively hidden from the perceiver. The cultural implications of the play depend entirely on the poet balancing internal linguistic details against external material actions on the stage, although a deep critical irony runs through these implications—namely, that the action of Elizabethan drama comes to us almost entirely through the medium of linguistic detail. We need to accept the complexity inhering in this latter fact. It might help to recall that if we recognize C. P. Snow’s “two cultures” of science and literature, it would be more exact to understand them as a single culture speaking two languages. If, as Wittgenstein once proposed, Shakespeare is “the inventor of language,” that would mean that the poet invents language in some strict sense; that is, he comes into language, by discovering it to be his true surrounding—not the world, but the language of the world.18 When Wittgenstein calls Shakespeare a Sprachschöpfer—a creator of language—he is trying to specify an unusual capacity: this Shakespeare is not “true to life” in his character studies; rather, he “has such a supple hand and his brush strokes are so individual, that each one of his characters looks significant.” On this view we examine language, rather than wisdom and insight; we rethink the traditional concept of character. Wittgenstein says we would not really want

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to speak of Shakespeare’s “great heart,” as we might of Beethoven’s great heart. It seems closer to the facts to say: “the supple hand that created new natural linguistic forms” [die neue Naturformen die Sprache]—that is what does it. A more accurate translation, “new nature-forms of speech,” gets closer to the central issue. Language is then virtually the poet’s Nature, a circle from whose enclosure, while we still draw breath, none can escape. We may escape finally our ideas, our fixations, our opinions, our history, but our nature we cannot escape; thus it pays to rehearse the theme of nature in early and late responses to the plays. Virtually no critic before Johnson’s 1765 edition of the plays or Maurice Morgann’s 1777 “Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff” can account for the poet’s preeminence without invoking the idea of nature and its genial variety. What Francis Beaumont in 1615 called “the dim light of Nature” was to expand its rays; Ben Jonson in 1623 wrote that “Nature herselfe was proud of his designes”; John Heminge and Henry Condell called him “the happy imitator of Nature . . . a most gentle expresser of it.”19 Milton in 1630 compared Shakespeare’s lines to the gentle flow of a river, while in 1668 Dryden’s “Essay on Dramatic Poetry” proclaimed: “All the images of Nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily.” Dryden enhances the earlier perception that the poet draws or expresses human passions with “extremely natural” lines, no doubt because he never fell prey to neoclassical theories of what human emotions should be. He did not, as Dryden says, “reduce Nature to method.” One traditional test for this naturalness was Caliban, whose language, as Nicholas Rowe observed in 1709, was “divised and adapted” to that strangest of characters. To be natural in his monstrosity, Caliban needed “his own language,” and this invention was to be increasingly seen as a Shakespearean wonder. The poet could articulate a seemingly endless variety of idiolects. Dryden was an inventor of neoclassical values, but when comparing Shakespeare to his own Augustan contemporaries, he acknowledged that Shakespeare “is that Nature which they paint and draw.” This sense of the secondary and derivative is not a long way from believing that the poet’s genius is magical, an unprecedented demiurgic power, which was often unfortunately identified with what were supposed to have been the poet’s untutored, hence “natural” beginnings. Granted, it remains hard not to assume that invention of many characters is a phenomenon of nature, something like a jungle of forms, exfoliating all by itself; and finally such native exuberance begins culturally to define the wealth of English as a natural language. The native and the natural are always approaching each

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other, especially in later reflective ages, when the burden of the past gets heavier. Alexander Pope, to give another example in our ever-expanding list, said that Shakespeare is “not so much an Imitator, as an Instrument, of Nature. . . . She speaks through him.” This vision of the plays perhaps reaches its apogee, in neoclassical form, with Johnson’s preface to the plays: “Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature”—a claim Johnson repeats over and over, elevating the term to what he calls “general nature.” These early opinions simply modify their frames of reference when, with Coleridge and the Romantics, Shakespearean nature takes on an even more intense coloration, as the idea of natural growth, including that of the mind, leads to a vision of organic form and original genius. A minor addendum to this view is that the poet learned from the outdoors, growing up in the countryside adjacent to Stratford. He was a “countryman,” as his Stratford friends would have said. In every respect, he was the exact opposite of his urban friend Ben Jonson. A raven to Shakespeare was always a real raven, but for Jonson the raven would always be Corbaccio; a country fly was a fly, but in the city drama of Volpone, that same fly would be “Mosca, a parasite.” The ruder country language of the provinces never dies for a poet, owing to the dynamic of poetic language, because our most powerful metaphors all come from subtly observed natural process, as if one were, say, a creature of the cat’s intelligence, the cat’s prowling watchful gait, as he patrols the house at night—as if nature’s images (in a later Romantic sense) are the icons of all thought, as humans experience thought. Why else, to motivate their fictions, would poets still call on the Moon to rise and set, to lighten our obscure lives, to mollify the tyranny of the Sun? Why must floods and fires express our inner terror? The place of flood and fire should give us pause. Milton thought that “native woodnotes wild” might well epitomize the Shakespearean lighter side, while his Delphic vision arose from a more profound reverence for natural mysteries, receding into the archaic mists of origin. Emerson once said that Shakespeare “wrote the text of modern life.”20 Yet archaism appears to be the ground of a language of natural awareness, and while later plays such as Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale are properly called romances, they might more accurately be called archaisms. They present a mythic archeology, in which heroic, archaic orders are shown twisting into modern actuality as the polis is invented. In the polis, citizens are encouraged to take many sides in an argument. Commenting on Troilus and Cressida, Empson once said that “Shakespeare is always willing to take the dramatic assumptions wholeheartedly. . . . All his people change

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their minds on the stage and use heightened language where the rest of us use lapse of time.”21 Such change-speaking characters will be at home in ordinary affairs; and as Empson contemplated these breakdowns in Troilus, he understandably sought a principle of dramatic order, which he found in what he called “the coherence of subdued puns.” There could be no better way to imagine the workings of a natural language than in the plays. They are composed from strings of cohering subdued double meanings. Given a cosmic weakening of teleological purpose during the Renaissance, language had to change, to keep pace with this decline; and its particulate structure needed to change into an increasingly metaphoric complexity, which it would hold suspended in Empson’s “subdued” fashion. So extreme was Shakespeare’s method of keeping up with change that Dryden found he in turn had to constrain such style for his own Troilus and Cressida. An ambiguous defense of the original manner ensues. When the Prologue to Troilus speaks for Dryden’s version, he is no longer the Prologue Armed; he transmigrates and becomes the Ghost of Shakespeare, who asserts that the great founder of British drama was not entirely “Untaught, unpractised, in a barbarous age.”22 Nevertheless, as Dryden’s lengthy prose Preface showed, this founder exploited a wild and untamed linguistic invention, which the Restoration version would domesticate. It is clear, from Dryden’s excisions and restyling that he recognized the hyperactivity of his originals, which in a scientific age decorum could not assimilate. We know from Bishop Sprat (the most apposite name in critical history) that metaphor and figures of speech were now under suspicion, and, we may ask, if metaphor is suspect, then Newtonian science would appear to be suppressing (at least before the arrival of Romantic thought) our knowledge that we are involved in nature’s metamorphoses. Newtonian science wishes to dismiss Ovid from the classroom, almost as if its celestial mechanics had forgotten that Galilean science gave inherent privilege to all ideas of change. By the time of Dryden, however, the earlier hybrid mentality, with which Galileo had to contend, was at last more or less purified of its animism, although Newton’s own later obsession with alchemy, numerology, and magic, as he pondered the age of the world, are strong indications that magic is not so easy to abandon.

The Space of Poetry and Philosophy The question then becomes: How much space in poetry is to be allowed to philosophic reasoning? In all ages, philosophical poems have included ideas

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and even arguments more readily expressible in prose. Alexander Pope’s deistic and Newtonian Essay on Man, like earlier infusions of Lucretian ideas in the Renaissance philosophic drama Mustapha of Fulke Greville, display an aesthetic of prose discourse while seeking rhetorical power through the formal devices of versification. In 1930, introducing G. Wilson Knight’s book of Shakespearean interpretations, The Wheel of Fire, T. S. Eliot wrote that Shakespeare is not “a philosophical poet in the sense of Dante and Lucretius,” and that furthermore these two ancient masters were themselves in a strict sense “not really philosophers at all.” There is Thomism in Dante and Epicureanism in Lucretius, yet those systems or patterns of general theory do not directly control all the details of the narrative. Even so— and this is the cardinal point—as Whitehead observed, “every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its trains of reasoning.”23 Such is the borderland where the most important crossings happen. Eliot goes so far in this loosening direction that he says of Dante: “the philosophic system gives us a kind of criterion of consciousness.” Similarly, a loosened role for philosophy in a poet’s vision equally affects the way literary works are composed, if only by making those inventions more self-aware. Many critics today, to be sure, have little interest in the way poets actually think and the way they inject thought into their works—a fact that makes a critic like Eliot important, since he combined his philosophic interests with a keen sense of the way poets actually have to survive. In this connection, Eliot paints a shrewd and lively picture of the Elizabethan dramatist’s life. Shakespeare’s contemporaries were for the most part busy hack writers of untidy genius, sharing a particular sense of the tragic mood: this sense, such as it is, merging into the mere sense of what the public wanted. They confuse us by the fact that what at first appears to be their “philosophy of life” sometimes turns out to be only a felicitous but shameless lifting of a passage from almost any author, as those of Chapman from Erasmus. This, indeed, is a habit which Shakespeare shares; he has his Montaigne, his Seneca, and his Machiavelli, or his Anti-Machiavel like the others. And they adapted, collaborated, and overlaid each other to the limits of confusions.24

And yet, as Eliot goes onto suggest, these haphazard “philosophers” do exhibit patterns of thought. Like him, in her “Notes on an Elizabethan Play” Virginia Woolf denied approval to the “incessant, improbable, almost un-

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intelligible convolutions” of the Elizabethans, thought their “impromptu felicities” and “lip-moulded profusion and unexpectedness” were “flung and hurried into existence.” True enough, we say; the sentiment reflects Bloomsbury. Yet Woolf fully understood the creative role of the actor and his fans. “A dramatist of course has no volumes to fill,” she dourly observes. Indeed, she thought, “half the work of the dramatists one feels was done in the Elizabethan age by the public.”25 If there is philosophy here, it cannot be formal. To find serious philosophy in the public theater can therefore only be to locate it, as Aristotle’s Poetics had done, on the plane of an almost hidden set of ideas. Coleridge later would say that these plays embody an “implicit metaphysic.” This may seem an unsure conceptual construction, but in fact it opens the door properly to the situation of poets like Shakespeare; they had to let the New Philosophy have its principles of open demonstration, but they knew enough to perceive older questions, links to a primordial hermetic vision, where the occult was always a major human concern. The real battle was between Aristotle and Galileo. Commenting on Galileo’s refusal to separate mathematics from physics, William R. Shea remarks that “one of the striking features of Aristotelian science in the seventeenth century is its strict division of knowledge into watertight compartments.” Typically, a contemporary Aristotelian, Vincenzo di Grazia, had summarized the position: “It follows that we are not allowed to use the principles of one science to prove the properties of another. Therefore, anyone who thinks he can prove natural properties with mathematical reasoning is simply demented, for the two sciences are very different.” Yet Galileo himself saw no such obstacles, “as if truth could ever be more than one; as if geometry in our day was an obstacle to the acquisition of true philosophy.”26 The early modern function of philosophy, in using mathematics, was thus to make a bridge to natural science—flexibly if possible. There is no doubt that here a fissure separates two worldviews. Di Grazia had also said “the natural scientist studies natural bodies that have motion as their natural and proper state, but the mathematician abstracts from all motion.”27 Here “natural’ and “abstraction” are placed in false opposition, assuredly because the Aristotelian fears that science may become bilingual. The quarrels over the use of quantitative measurement and its place in natural history, over new methods of experiment as a regulative control over the use of geometric abstraction, were quarrels with an Establishment and its inherited, entrenched rationalist authority. For the new scientist, the dangers could be real and frightening enough; but it is important to

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note that the new methods did not simply show that traditional and sophisticated Aristotelian approaches were “wrong” and were producing wrong explanations. The deeper effect is the critical one: the new approaches with their theoretically based empiricism were simply making the older “qualitative” mode irrelevant. Meanwhile, there still remains the troubled relation between mathematics and philosophic thought and their equivalents in the field of imaginative art. One thing seems likely: without giving a privileged place to metaphor in the life of the mind, we shall never go far in a useful confrontation of art and science. G. Wilson Knight, himself not obviously concerned with science, still came close to such insights and ideas, drawing on his “musical” conception of dramatic form, whereby he saw image and action composed by the poet in a loosely symphonic or concerted style. A sexualized mystical Christian strain runs all through Knight’s criticism. His vision of Shakespeare is ecstatic in a way that limits the role of mere material cause and effect in the plays. “My animadversions as to ‘character’ analysis were never intended to limit the living human reality of Shakespeare’s people. They were, on the contrary, expected to loosen, to render flexible and even fluid, what had become petrified.”28 A. C. Bradley indeed is acknowledged to have uncovered the key dimension of “atmosphere” in the drama, from which Knight admits to having developed his own “musical” readings. These in turn required what he calls a “spatial” approach to the plays, and we should highlight the term, for in one sense Knight was thinking as a scientist might think about the disposition of forces at work “in space.” Knight was interested in transformations of patterns. The solid particle was now seen as a dynamic, self-transforming event occurring in measurable spatial regions. Knight summarized this change: “Rigidly distinct and unchanging atoms have become ‘patterns’ occupying certainly a ‘measurable region of space’ but yet themselves, as patterns, dynamic, self-transforming. The pattern itself moves; space and time coalesce; such is the mysterious ‘design of nature.’ But, as too with Shakespeare, the old theories are not to be peremptorily dismissed. . . . We must not think of patterns as if they were built out of particles, but that what we have called particles, may ultimately be better explained as components of patterns.”29 The path forward into Knight’s “fluid” interpretations—those of an actor and theater director, to be sure—indicate that in this theatrical context ideas are functional only so long as they lead to a kind of “open society” of participants in dramatic actions, where, as Virginia Woolf had suggested, the spectators play a creative role. This public process generates what may be

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the most important dramatic innovation of the Elizabethans: onstage the speaker is at once observer and observed—an art finding its fullest expression in the soliloquy.

Separation and the Soliloquy The main obstacle to such flexed cosmological procedures had been the centering ideal itself, but now the style of the New Philosophy encouraged a new attitude—namely, an art of conscious detachment. Basing our conception of this attitude on liminality and the first phase of the rites of passage, we may call the new stance separation. Since poetry expresses human feelings and the human condition in general, one might ask how the New Science could favor the flowering of literature during the early modern period. After all, the Aristotelian theories of nature proposed a causal system, developed, as Jonathan Lear has said, in four aspects. These four aspects of Aristotelian “cause” had slowly evolved into a massive rational system, purporting to explain all of nature and nature’s works. Now it happens that all four causes are origins (archai) of change, and they provide perhaps the most completely “human” ideas about nature that we possess, even when Aristotle’s final cause is lifted up to its ultimate level of teleological power, as the Unmoved Mover. It is important to note that Aristotle’s causes are in fact conditions of being, not immediate sources of changed state, although such change may be involved in their originating powers. Another way to put this would be to say that Aristotelian causes are well on their way toward a metaphysical statement of the conditions of being, but this statement is made “as if” its components, the causes, were almost living beings or animated circumstances. The four causes are in effect four different modes of personification, all subsumed under the idea that change is a life process. The four causes are capable of subtle rearrangements and interactions with one another. Now a different question arises: If Aristotle’s physical and metaphysical worldview is so comprehensive, why is it that the neoclassical literature produced under its influence so egregiously failed to achieve great drama? In theory, this is a matter of the survival of ancient pagan ritual forms, including choral song; these needed to be brought into living connection with a specifically Christian culture, which would finally begin to break toward a new paganism in the Renaissance period. Dante may call his great narrative a “comedy,” which in Christian terms it is; in the Commedia, ritual ecstasy is

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subject to theological and exegetical restraints. The lack of a ritual of genuinely accepted human mortality limits the nobility of tragic heroism, which is earthly by its very nature. Medieval drama has its almost tragic triumphs, such as Everyman, but such works are exceptional. Comedy does best, for formal reasons—as in a drama of social forces, like Sir David Lindsay’s Satire of the Three Estates. At this point in the argument we find what appears a startling connection between the New Science and the New Poetry. I call this separation—by which I mean a major principle of Galilean science is that one should stand aside from the animated “feel” of processes like motion, and separate one’s own emotions, ideas, and beliefs from the phenomena one is observing and then describing. This stance confers objectivity, but further it separates the perceiver from the perceived, the latter being the observer’s own self, as if he had embarked on a rite of passage and had taken the first step. When Galileo shows that change and especially “local motion” need to be described in geometric demonstrations, he is showing that motion and its causes are entirely separate from human causation. Such change is equally separate from divine causation working immediately, since the divine is always shaped under the influence of Aristotle as a kind of personified activity based on a human model. The abstract Unmoved Mover is assimilated to a remote “human agency,” as soon as this scientific approach is adapted to artistic aims. By contrast, Galilean science always tries to remove authoritarian iconography and personifications of any kind, substituting instead an abstract, lawdriven geometric and arithmetic description of a process that is radically removed from human interference on a metaphysical basis. When readers decide that the New Science is cold and even inhuman, they are not entirely wrong. This new mathematized science in fact separates us humans from the physical world out there, in a way that Aristotle’s science could hardly tolerate, and did its best to prevent. The key issue is that the New Science demands such separation between human desires and the proper study of natural fact and theory. A revolution is now bound to result from this universal separateness, and in parallel fashion the poet can now stand aside from the dramatic projection of the self. Soliloquy in the drama is the immediate beneficiary of this separating stance. A soliloquy is a speech in which the speaker stands aside from himself or herself at the very moment of entering deeply into that self, hence doing something paradoxical to combine the separate and the connected in one moment. This process of soliloquy permits in the most radical form the

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exposition of change, and it could not occur without the distanced closeness provided by the New Science. When a character like Hamlet speaks to himself, he watches the movements of his own mind changing with infinite speed through metaphoric transfers, and in this respect his speech comprises a condensed version of the rites of passage, the fundamental structure of all social change. Let us recall the anthropologists’ three-part structure of liminal changes. We have seen that they begin at a moment of separation, pass through a liminal interphase, and finally conclude with a changed state of incorporation or aggregation. In a soliloquy, the speaker enhances the role of separation from the self, to increase incorporation into the self, through a liminal loosening of all conventional stereotypes. The soliloquy is defenseless. In ritual passages, there is a traditional custom of introducing protective guides and guardians whose role is to prevent the liminal flux and uncertainty from drowning the participant. In the great dramatic soliloquies of Renaissance drama, there is thus a special poignancy in that the audience is made fully aware of the vulnerability of such a speaker, who is in a single speech enacting a much larger social drama. This account provokes an obvious historical objection that needs to be addressed. In fact, the New Science never demands complete or perfect conceptual separation. Throughout the early modern period, Aristotelian ideas of the causal remain extremely powerful as a metaphysical residue. To put it most simply, God does not suddenly disappear from the scene of explanation. Nor is it possible to expunge all traces of personification in the causal system of nature. The Galilean approach is dedicated to a mathematical cleansing of physics and astronomy, so that we should say that Galileo’s separating science gives a new permission to the prior Aristotelian science— which is now, as it were, allowed to inspire the poet’s work with interior knowledge, on the condition that the four causes are no longer believed to represent physical fact. Galilean thought manages the new permission by letting the older science move to the inside of psychological knowledge, if need be, by resolutely staying outside the psyche and its desires. This science, like the plays it resembles, takes occult motives and translates them into an externally available physical energy, by liberating the occult from its mysterious crypt. Both science and the drama say, “We are the occult, and in various languages we can be known.” What results is that the new drama parallels the new science in balancing objective externality against subjective internal psychic states, by fully ac-

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cepting the psychological implications of the problem of change. This predominantly secular drama acquires new techniques of participation and mimesis. It enhances the role of the actor. It develops mimetic representation exactly as it must, in a fashion often noted and condemned by Elizabethans, especially Puritans—namely, it promotes hysteria. This is not Freudian exaggeration. The relation of hysteria to the histrionic belongs centrally to the history of drama in all forms and at all times; it connects with the romance of the theater and of theatrical performance—a relationship Chaplin caught perfectly when he imitated an old bent tree in his film Limelight. In a classic treatise, Neurotic Styles, David Shapiro reminds us what hysterical patients are like during therapy: “It is not emotionality as such that distinguishes theatrical behavior. It is, rather, the exaggerated or unconvincing quality of the emotionality.” Shapiro describes how “the hysteric’s romantic, fantastical, nonfactual, and insubstantial experience of the world also extends to his experience of his own self.” We might here be talking about Hamlet and The Tempest, for “as flagrant as the play-acting or dramatic exaggerations of hysterical people may sometimes be, these people do not seem simply insincere. They do not seem, in other words, to be exaggerating or dramatizing their feelings in a conscious effort to accomplish some clear aim or produce some specific effect. The fact is that they are not clearly aware that they are acting at all.”30 Besides conferring an actual motion upon literature, the actor’s task is to embody natural process, through speech, gesture, and every movement of physical stage presence. By speaking for and by himself, the actor, in his soliloquy, doubles the experience of the audience members, who are split between observing and (through the play) finding their own behavior observed. The speaker on stage is doing the same thing, crossing his own footlights, so to speak. Even syntax and rhythm will imitate this splitting, as Eliot noted in regard to Marlovian soliloquies, with “the rapid long sentence, running line into line.”31 In the final soliloquy of Doctor Faustus, perhaps the greatest such Elizabethan or Jacobean speech (it is rivaled only by later operatic mad-scene scenas), Eliot finds that the poet “broke up the line, for a gain in intensity.” Not only is intensity gained, however, but even more important is the effect of mirrored selfhood that the separating soliloquy virtually thrusts upon the audience. The irony of Faustus’ final outcry, with all its agonized awareness of the seconds ticking away, is that soliloquy itself as fluent self-mirroring speech creates an illusion that life will continue forever. Such is the irony of entrances and exits. When Timon of Athens—as if intending to make the en-

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tire story after the first act a single gigantic interrupted soliloquy—focuses on the defense of the interim, the poet invents a temporal and spatial field though which action may continue, a field where language will not end, where every hero’s words are not merely his own epitaph. Tracing the course of a life of language and, in Timon, the course of its death, we are in fact retracing the meaning of Doctor Faustus, which ends: “The hour ends the day; the author ends his work.”32 If we regard the Shakespearean obsession with time as an obsession with this life of language, then we must focus on the increasingly ambiguous and fugitive character of the poet’s imagery, where every moment is felt, but is still also experienced as passing. Hamlet is the most extended treatment of this dilation of the present, while Timon of Athens is the most concentrated treatment of any attempt, however late in the day, to arrest this passage, to correct an error. The savage pathos of Timon is largely due to the fact that tragedy falls upon its hero before he has time to think, and such thoughtful awareness is precisely what the defended interim of a passing moment should afford. Yet where is the defense to come from? Our blind complacency or our fatal impatience stops us all too often from imagining that we may someday need to be protected from outrageous fortune.

CHAPTER

6

Structure of an Epitaph

Like many another ancient memorial, Ben Jonson’s epitaph cuts two ways. Carved into stone at Westminster Abbey, the epitaph suggests at once the opposite ideas of dreaming hope and ultimate fact, for while the inscription obviously praises the poet, it also conveys a thought beyond that praise. At first sight, the famous words seem clear enough: “O Rare Ben Jonson.” But some, perhaps thinking of his jovial life and Christian redemption, have believed that the words intended to say, in Latin, “Pray for Ben Jonson”— Orare Ben Jonson. I like the rhyme of “prayer” and “rare,” for it points in the right direction, leading directly to the alchemy of a distinctly rarefied art and thought, a mating of exquisite metrical control and harshly realistic representations. In all his finer works, avoiding any preciosity, with much unexpected grit, such rarefaction is this great poet’s game. He mints a style of neoclassical refinement whose effect is to picture society with atomistic particularity, yet always revealing his fascination with magical processes. His notable London realism is strange, for its rarefaction casts a spell, almost as if the “atomies” of an urban world could find expression only through an uncanny style of found objects. Atomism is an ancient scientific interest, but in this period it was becoming more and more critical, as chemistry advanced critically upon magic and alchemy. In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault suggests that a well-known Renaissance doctrine of influences and resemblances bespoke the real world in special languages evoking occult powers.1 The so-called signatures of things were coterminous with magic naming, whereby each term carried or exerted its alchemical force in the sphere where its referent was to be found. Given this mixing of fact and language, the task for the poet was to articulate the opposing pull of charms and objects, hence leading to the rarefied style. The city, especially an unusually large city like London, provides the proper scene for exploring 95

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such matters. Since in the city of Aesopian conflict all citizens (as in Jonson’s Volpone or The Alchemist) are particles or fragments of an unbounded pullulating ensemble, the urban structure and texture support a mostly rarefied atmosphere, where motivation is a distinct “humor” controlling a system or field of interpersonal networks. Today, poets like John Hollander and Richard Howard show the same learned humor. If in Doctor Faustus the tragic hero had no choice but to bargain for a new dimension of existence—time itself—whose fateful capture that play demonstrates, in Jonson’s comedies, where time is money, the bargaining predators everywhere grab what Volpone the Fox himself calls “each greedy minute” (I.i.80). The Alchemist contracts all urban space into one neighborhood and a single house, to emblematize the eventual crowding of humanity that occurs in cities, and here—even more loud and clear—there are temporal consequences. As the action of the play speeds up, the experience of time is more and more crowded and events accelerate, as if pulled by a gravitational field which in Jonson’s symbolism almost inevitably, for his time, requires an evocation of alchemy. Despite an almost agrarian ambience of woods, fields, hills, and ponds, with the great river always flowing through it, London already showed the pressures of the modern city. Jonson’s own library perished in a typical city fire, leading him to write his satirical “Execration upon Vulcan.” The Dickensian problem in Our Mutual Friend—the accumulating London refuse, sewage, and slag heaps—could only get worse every day, year after year, as waste and effluvia flowed riverward along the “Ditch.” Urban savvy and accurate perceptions—all that lies behind the warning Caveat emptor—equally assume living conditions whose main property was their accelerating spread and their increasingly dense populations: in short, crowding. The overall demand for literature is therefore a recrudescence of atomistic thoughts, communicated with Democritean economy. In his preface to the tragedy Sejanus, Jonson spoke of the “splendor of plays”; here we may speak of the splendor of realistic comedy. The climate is composed of endless witty juxtapositions, the kind of talk that cities alone make possible. In The Alchemist, Lovewit the householder finally forgives Face, his scheming servant: “I love a teeming wit, as I love my nourishment.” At such close quarters it can be asked whether place is not always a function of time, since we define the unity of place as a single setting, where a series of actions occurs through the time of performance, an illusionary time believed parallel to the time of possible actions believed to be possibly hap-

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pening “outside” the theater. Jonson typically subjects the problem of social mobility to the exigencies of limited space. Indeed, performance time suggests that the theater itself—say the Globe Theatre—constitutes a most unusual “place out of place,” where materially events unfold for an imagining spectator, who is almost conned into believing he has left the so-called real world, the world elsewhere. It seems unlikely we can separate two such unities as time and place, artificially holding them distinct from each other. The theater blends them; and once blended, they may never come apart, perhaps most necessarily because they depend upon a more profound unity— that of the action of the play, which we would call its plot. The intermixing of time and place is nowhere more evident than in the genre of The Alchemist, which specifically is farce, a work overstuffed with action—like anything French cuisine would call farci, “stuffed.” Whatever placement provides the setting of the play, its action stuffs that scene with more comings and goings, more unforeseen reversals of fortune, more comical stage business than the play somehow should contain or entertain. The play, first performed in 1610, is a Jacobean version of The Sting. Its action is outlined for the reader in “The Argument,” where we are alerted that the con men, the “cozeners at large,” contract with each other for each to have a share in the proceeds. These are privateers on the ocean of greed; in a sea of urban cupidity they will cheat and steal from their marks, by exerting on their victims an alchemical con game. One assumption appears immediately: all con games are psychologically a kind of alchemical trick. As Paul Goodman formally showed in The Structure of Literature (1954), farce inevitably leads to some sort of dramatic explosion; and in fact such is the moment of major reversal in The Alchemist, whose intrigue literally explodes when the alchemist’s machine blows up. This is the con game’s prime failure to meet a deadline—for Lovewit, the master of the house, returns to the premises while the cozeners are still in full career. At the moment of reversal “they and all in fume are gone.” Most critics of the play rightly admire its plot, its perfection of exit and entrance, and its great characters, such as the chief cozeners Subtle and Face, with their Queen of the Night, Doll Common, not to mention their gulls, notably Sir Epicure Mammon and Abel Drugger. There is no reason to underplay such virtuoso inventions, but if we enter the Jonsonian “idea” more deeply, we find that all alchemical archetypes concern the use and ownership of time. Alchemy was of course a fashionable interest in those days, as we have seen with the Faust story. Jonson himself wrote a Masque of

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Alchemists, the masque being an inherently magic type of drama, a theatrical subtype inherently alchemical in a loose sense, since all the Court masques were based on magic thinking and magic symbolism. Like alchemy, that quasi-science, the masque form evinces a central interest in transformation, and indeed all the great Jonsonian masques contain what we might call a “transformation scene.” Someone or some group of participants are transformed, often under the influence of music or dance and all their spiritual harmonies, into a higher form of being, perhaps stronger, more loyal, more beautiful, more courteous, or simply more civilized according to any number of criteria. The magic of the masque is intended to raise its participants to a higher degree of spiritual or courtly power. A cynical political correctness might discern here satires upon Jacobean favoritism, with all its dangerous games of “place,” but this misses the point. Those were still times when Machiavellian purposes had to spiritualize the language of the secular, owing to what Kenneth Burke would called the magic of courtship.2 There is unquestionably a critical difficulty in reaching so far back into an earlier popular or sophisticated culture, not least because two very different attitudes pertained: on the one side the fashion for alchemy as a fanciful, courtly intellectual game, and on the other side a serious exploratory connection with the new secular sciences, to which alchemy had always played the role of harbinger, as far back almost as the comparative history of religion will carry us. Furthermore, it is never easy to tell when expert knowledge, here that of the alchemist, is genuine thinking or a clever con game. This subject, so fully treated by historians such as John Reed, belongs to the cultural manifold and “scene of thought” I have been outlining.3 If we look back to the radical core of alchemy, to the central idea that Jonson’s Alchemist most richly exploits, we discover that alchemy and time have a unique relationship. This is by no means a new discovery; it was charted by Mircea Eliade, whose classic study The Forge and the Crucible illuminates the Jonsonian manipulation of time as a dimension of experience.4 As time itself becomes increasingly short, the way in which people experience it in life becomes more and more rarefied.

Alchemy and Time Alchemy accelerates time, in that it seeks to speed up the effects of the passing of time. The Forge and the Crucible devotes many pages to elucidating the activities and beliefs of early alchemists, those “masters of fire,” for whom

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combustion was the governing process in their scientific pursuit of the Philosopher’s Stone and the Elixir of Life. Surveying the transition from alchemy to modern chemistry, the historian of science John Reed asks why combustion and fire are so important, and he answers that combustion is first “the most spectacular and fundamental of all familiar chemical processes. Secondly, it is a process that concerns all four of the Aristotelian elements. A piece of wood burns: air is necessary; fire is produced; water is an important product of the burning; earth (ashes) is left. Thirdly, there is the literally ‘vital’ importance of combustion; for it is a slow and regulated combustion that maintains animal heat in the metabolic processes upon which animal life depends. The alchemists looked upon air as ‘the food of fire’; it is equally ‘the food of living organisms,’ both plant and animal.”5 Gaston Bachelard, expert in chemistry, was able to carry the modern physical science back to earlier perspectives; and hence with him we can speak of a psychoanalysis of fire, and indeed of all four elements, as he showed in a series of remarkable books. Underlying both the modern chemist’s sense and the alchemist’s intuition, there are more or less controlled definitions of certain fundamental natural concepts—the systematic distinctions among the elements, for example, and the nature of chemical changes, especially when compounds are burning. Reed observes that chemistry was slow to catch up with Renaissance cosmology, owing to the extreme difficulty of observing the precise nature of elemental changes. Of the antiquity of alchemical research there can be no doubt; the ancient Egyptians seeking fusion of gold are shown in their artworks to be heating metals in hopes of discovering more fundamental processes. But alchemy stood still for centuries, and seems to be much the same in Chaucer’s day as in 2500 b.c.e. Yet owing to the lack of a correct understanding of fire and burning, the science could not proceed beyond its iconic goal of understanding the vital, living role of the elements. It remained a religion without a god, or one where God was thought to look down in cheerful scorn at human ignorance of the exact principles to be invoked. This is, of course, precisely what breeds Gnostic wisdom and Gnostic explanations of the human condition, on an earth so imperfectly understood in its origins and course of change that it breeds impervious mystery, whose darkness can be acceptable to us only if we give it all sorts of strange and occult names—an army of magic names, in fact. In terms of symbolism, alchemy, while it accelerates time, thereby accelerates the spread of words in the social scene (the city), and in this metaphoric sense manages to en-

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gender what the linguistic and cultural theorist Yuri Lotman once named “hypersemiosis”—a plethora of names, verbal distinctions, multiple meanings, and lexical overload of the actual by the verbal. This hypersemiosis of the Enlightenment period is paralleled by what Ian Hacking has shown to be an “avalanche of numbers,” a vast increasing accumulation of statistics in all areas that could be quantified.6 Yet not all human life lends itself to this jumped-up numbering. Perhaps magic spells alone can profitably use this paronomasia, for magic sidesteps the Occamite problem of scientific economy, an economic principle shared as a goal by all the best dramas. The magician, spiritual or demonic, uses the semiotic excess to earn a chance of hitting a magic target; as in The Alchemist, he will employ an excess of rhetoric inherently sufficient to guarantee that somewhere in the plethora one particular magic term will cast the correct spell. There is a comedy of linguistic madness that cannot fail to thrill the verbally acute. The spectator wonders at the terms and names themselves, their crazy code suggesting all sorts of science that has no basis in fact, but immense depths in fiction and dream. Reed observes one source of unity among these signs, namely the four elements (hence an “elemental” view of the world), but balances this reasonable point of departure by noting that “alchemy took over as an inheritance from prehistory the use of symbols for expressing abstract and illcomprehended ideas.”7 Certainly this inheritance suggests magic in a primitive sense, promising the fulfillment of wishes; this promise is the comic basis for questioning, but also for valuing, the alchemical pursuit. Here the question of time comes clearly to the fore, as analyzed by Eliade. In the background of The Alchemist and of the climate in which alchemy held out a kind of dreamlike promise, subverting normal human patience, there is a deeply held ancient belief that all natural beings, and especially precious metals, grew like magic vegetation out of the bowels of the earth. Through alchemy the magus touches the mysteries of time. According to this model of chemistry, metal ores grow, develop, and slowly “ripen.” Eliade quotes a forerunner of modern chemistry, Johann Rudolf Glauber (1604–1670), who says that “if the metal reaches its final perfection and is not extracted from the earth, which is no longer providing it with nourishment, it may well, at this stage, be compared to an old and decrepit man. . . . Nature maintains the same rhythm of birth and death in metals as in vegetables and animals.”8 This rhythm of the natural gestation of metals gives the alchemist his sense of magic time, and with this time he plays the central alchemical game. The alchemist seeks then to imitate the process of gestation and birth of the precious metal—the archetype of na-

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ture’s power—and differs only, in an ideal sense, by seeking to yield the precious object “in a single moment,” the moment of projection in the so-called Great Work. We can now see how Eliade’s lengthy history of this materialistic troping reaches its striking conclusion: so powerfully did the masters of fire ply their skills that “by aiding the work of nature, they accelerated the tempo of change.”9 So complete is the alchemical analogy that the masters in effect substituted change for time itself. In a sense, they aimed at the elimination of time—that is, the acceleration of time to such an extent that its usual duration hardly counts, giving mankind sovereignty over the fourth dimension. As we hear in The Alchemist: Subtle: The same we say of lead, and other metals, which would be gold, if they had time. Mammon: And that Our Art doth further. Mammon makes hardly any effort to disguise his greed and gluttony, but is redeemed, since his tastes can be incredibly delicate—he wants his bed “blown up, not stuffed,” thus anticipating a modern invention. A true spiritual magus, here travestied by Subtle in order to gull Sir Epicure, believes that he is perfecting God’s works, that he is a “white magician,” that he is ennobling when he works his magic. The acceleration of temporal process by technological means, which proceeds apace up to the present moment, is in fact the implementation of the alchemist’s desire to control time so radically as to eliminate all slow natural processes. Modern technology seems magical, when it still retains its novelty, precisely because it fabricates artificial diamonds that Nature would have taken millennia to produce.

Alchemy and the Acceleration of Time Jonsonian farce stands at the threshold of the modern world, where, in Eliade’s wording, “henceforth science and labour are to do the work of time. . . . Modern man takes upon himself the function of temporal duration; in other words he takes on the role of Time.”10 Eliade sees the dark side of this presumption, a dream seemingly realized by technology. Thus, in The Forge and the Crucible: “The tragic grandeur of modern man is bound up with the fact that he was the first to take on the work of Time in relation to nature. . . . But there is more yet: man in modern society has finally assumed the garb of time not only in his relation to nature but also in respect to himself.”11 This last is the Faustian reading of the work of the magus. Faust is cu-

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rious and daring, insofar as he produces magic shows of past and future, displays of alchemically controlled time; but he is a tragic figure, a worldhistorical figure, in that such mastery of time is a self-imposed destiny of his own being, of his own Faustian nature as a rare human being. He is not gold, or the epitome of the Philosopher’s Stone, but he is the Man of that belief and that “ideology,” as we might say. He lives in a world defined by secular yearnings and by the secular arts of temporal measurement, of living in the intense quest to accelerate the passing of time itself—that is, to defy the clock. His story, especially as it grows slowly into Goethe’s version, symbolizes the drama of Western modernity itself, as Spengler recognized when he identified the modern world as “Faustian.” Accelerated temporality and its new role is what makes this identification possible, and gives to the myth of the magus its new character as a model of tragic existence—the tragedy of temporal man. But had not this always been our human tragedy, that we are bound upon a wheel of fire, the circle of time’s relentless advance? And if different worldviews had unwritten the tragedy, even including the medieval world described by Le Goff, then how, we may ask, does this modern Faustian modernity differ from the older scenes of thought?12 Our answer must focus on the notion of acceleration. Acceleration of time—a science fiction idea, as we have seen in relation to Marlowe—remains almost inconceivable. It seems the reverse of Saint Augustine’s meditations on time, where that dimension is known only through the power of memory, which then casts our idea of time back into the condition (however vague or inaccurate) of a remembered past—Proust’s temps perdu. Not available to the future, not existing in the present, but available as clues to the past engraved on the rolls of memory. For Augustine, memory conferred upon temporality a full, rich, older Christian significance, shaped within the drama of salvation. Whether time seen in this way can also matter for the future is exactly what alchemy tried to produce materially, and in a broader context such attempts and actual techniques for accelerating time are what give modern man his famed “future.” Not only an immediacy of future expectations, but also, more critically, these materialistic visions abet the belief that the modern world is always moving forward, as if progress were a fundamentally alchemical goal.

The Alchemical Plot The Alchemist obeys the Renaissance laws of the three unities of time, place, and motion, and in the play we see that such principles of unity imply a dy-

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namic process, whereby Jonson gets his audience to feel the limits and the dreams of space, time, and energetic movement. In short, the play studies what any alchemist would have recognized as his magical “subject”— namely, the alchemical plot of reaching higher elements from lower ones, gold from lead. Farce and satire though it be, The Alchemist portrays the Great Work, hoping to produce the Philosopher’s Stone and its rewards; because this is a travesty, the play shows how ready the language of magic is for the misuses of con men. City life and its dangers to innocent people are the ancient stock-in-trade of this comic vision. Volpone had analyzed the social chemistry and the confidence game of greed, while Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman presented the ever-increasing and always more noticeable problem of urban crowding and noise. Bartholomew Fair, while extending the dramatic scene into a remarkably free space and medieval time, maintained its aim of urban satire. In such various directions Jonson’s realism studies new changes in scale of life and “social energy,” as if the new secular society were a system of interacting particles, kept separate by what might be called interests, whether of style or religion or business. With its play of humors, this is a scene of newly revived Theophrastian Character. Stylistic and substantial rarefaction now arises from an almost surreal compression of urban space and alchemical time. If a Shakespearean or romantic characterization has no place here, it is partly because, following the models of classic comedy, Jonson probes the material senses of space and time, dimensions now defined by the idea that “time is money.” These plays aspire to reveal social structures, their dimensions and their interpersonal chemistry. Prime among such concerns is the thought that rarefaction has to do with rarity, as in objects of rare value, rare qualities, rare experiences, and the like. Rarity is a mark of value when such value is seeking a translation into price, as in Oscar Wilde’s epigram, “He knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Timon of Athens deals throughout with these questions, but Shakespeare has a mystical idea of the rare, as in “Those are pearls that were his eyes,” or (in Othello’s last great speech before he dies) the pearl of great price is “worth more than all his tribe,” implying a mysterious fusion of the two systems—value and price—so that we discover rarity is not without deeper meaning. Rarefaction and rarity stimulate something like the “perfect plot” Coleridge discerned in The Alchemist. As we attend to the rapid-fire comings and goings of the plotters and their victims, we find ourselves asking: Will there be space for any more victims to come into the picture? It seems that Jonsonian space is the poet’s chief aesthetic interest, for he wants always to explore the most manifestly refined expressions of

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taste and style, as if to be rarefied were the highest praise for the artist. This dramaturgy requires all parts of the action to be exquisitely chosen, as a collector might choose a gem. They require manipulating the scales of perception, since a gem is rare when it occurs only “rarely” within a given terrain or population or number, thus breaking into the undifferentiated plane of usual appearances, standing out distinctly from numerous roughly similar items. The Alchemist has long been esteemed as the fine flower of Renaissance intellectual comedy, and furthermore a farce of exquisite timing, social significance, and finesse. The plot handles time and space by farcical compression of the action, until an explosion occurs and all is “undone.” The classic obedience to the three unities would be an extreme obedience to clock time and measured space; but here the alchemical acceleration of time, accompanying a correlative compression of space, gives to this play a level of dimensional paradox so extreme that it can only be called a metaphysical drama of extreme material desires. Such is its metaphysical conceit, its philosophical metaphor of the collapse of time and space, exploiting a hysterical tone of farcical economy. The formal principle in fact is expressed in a single line: “I love a teeming wit, as I love my nourishment,” says Lovewit, to round the action of the play within the circle of forgiveness, which is here nothing less than a humorous discordia concors. Of all the teeming discourses imaginable, none is fuller than the lore of alchemy, a plenitude leading in turn to the problem of the occult, and occult causes, and the radical transformations wrought by the New Philosophy. If we make Jonson the central figure in Renaissance English drama, which means allowing neoclassical tastes, we will then discover, I believe, one of the most important general principles for the emergence of early modern thinking—namely, a new interpretation of the role of magic occult causation.

The Liberation of the Occult Along with a radically new Galilean theory of inertia to explain motion and hence along with a radically new way of thinking about change in the world, there can be no doubt that, with many fits and starts, the early modern period saw a liberation of the occult. This was to give a new understanding of the visible and the invisible, to allow a nonpersonifying sense of movement in nature, and finally to encourage a simultaneous approaching/

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avoiding way of estimating nature’s wonders—as for example in the use of mathematical demonstrations, where the invisible was made mathematically understandable and therefore available to knowledge. If we try to imagine the history of Western science from its earliest days to the seventeenth century, it might appear that science flourishes only in slow pragmatic approximations, gradual approaches to rigor, as the distance between the scientist and his object diminishes. Lucian of Samosata (120–180 c.e.), who wrote early equivalents of Calvino’s Cosmicomics and T-Zero, also wrote a satire against Alexander the false prophet of Aesculapius, indicating that in Antiquity there was no shortage of skepticism about magic confidence tricks. Socrates himself was never free from such accusations, it would seem, which suggests that science has always to establish its clear distance from human affairs, yet without losing significance for human uses, while the humanist dabbling in science is always vulnerable to attack from the opposite corner. The earliest great achievements occur in astronomy, whose objects are spatially most remote from human contact. To reach clear understanding of physics at the terrestrial level, on a human scale, we await ancient researches such as those of Archimedes (ca. 287–212 b.c.e.). Historically, although early and late there are exceptions to this rule, it may said that science progresses from an early command of the most remote celestial scale differences, until it becomes capable of analyzing and observing nature at all sizes, from largest to smallest, as its labors draw closer and closer to the human scale of things. We find an equivalent in the art of poetry, if we note the scientist’s epistemic constraints as parallel to the poet’s need to study mankind at various symbolic distances, modulating between close-ups and long shots. Scales of perception shift rapidly and without warning, as in nature’s various appearances. In early modern literature the most notable symptom of scale shifting is the mixed decorum of Elizabethan drama, with its variety of social classes. The most noble heroic dramas will contrast heroic excesses with the middling scales and magnitudes of common social experience; that middling scale is also the scientific background to the new manifold of a Galileo, who studies local motion, the terrestrial event. Science begins to measure the vastly distant astronomical event in relative terms, as the far distant is linked to the closely observed local phenomenon. Similarly, the natural historian who attempts to analyze common sizes of creatures and events will not fail (as did the poets Spenser and Drayton) to mention the delicate forms of the

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tiniest creatures and things. As during the early modern movements into chemistry, there is a growing tendency to think at the detailed level, here of language and its subtle expressive powers, by focusing on what Robert Boyle would call the “internal textures” of compounds being observed.13 During this late Renaissance period, literary authors, like scientists, began to use close-ups of detail, of poetic textures, to counterpoint—and not only in the drama—the power of a poetic measure like Marlowe’s “mighty line,’ which acts for poetry as something of a First Principle. For later Shakespeare, there is a shifting into the collateral powers of “internal texture,” as the unexpected grouping of metaphor and rhythmic musicality produces a lyric paragraphing of dramatic language. In many moments of literature, as of science, there occurs what B. J. T. Dobbs called “a long, circuitous, even torturous journey” between earlier and later, more developed understanding of Nature’s wiles.14 What happens in science (here the example was Newton’s seemingly aberrant fascination with alchemy) occurs equally in the case of a poet’s often errantly developing command of language. Yet for the philosopher’s matter to be correctly materialized, there must be a new seeing of the natural process of forces at work. In the Renaissance, ideas of matter are far more mysterious than we today can imagine. Somehow the correct view of the mysterious must emerge from a clear view of a demystified nature, which brings us to the question of a radically new rethinking of the old theories of the occult. Hence, modern physics takes a paradigmatic, originating step when Galileo asserts the nonessentialist nature of physical motion, gradually demystifying the causal aspect of nature. Margaret Osler maintains, in her 1972 paper “Galileo, Motion, and Essences,” that the early De motu (1590) had continued to hold the medieval view that motion resulted from an “essential heaviness or lightness of the moving body.”15 Always open to new possibilities, however, Galileo also supposed that light and heavy were relative qualities; they could vary in amount, depending on the way objects were seen to be moving. But he was not yet ready to assert, as he did much later in Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences (1638), that his scientific aim would be to “investigate and demonstrate some of the properties of accelerated motion (whatever the cause of this acceleration may be).”16 The parenthesis carries the whole program of the New Philosophy in its strongest if tentatively stated form, for here Galileo is rejecting the entire apparatus and attitude of Aristotelian science, with its deeply mystifying and deeply human concern for fourfold causes, with which humans might identify their own

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volition and formal dispositions. The “lightness” of a body may be or may become one of its qualities, as Aristotelians believed happened when a stone is thrown up in the air. It acquires an apparent lightness, and hence rises. Lightness becomes a quality of the stone, or, more precisely, that quality is brought into the open by the act of projecting the stone upward. (Punning and calling upon the old essentialist philosophy, Portia says: “The quality of mercy is not strained. / It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.”) As the stone rises, its quality of lightness—its essential lightness—dissipates as if weary, and almost immediately another quality (heaviness) takes over, causing it to fall downward. Motion in the Aristotelian universe is determined by the secreted influences of the occult qualities of objects. Such thinking is not far from a belief that things have emotions, needs, desires, and other such human attributes, all of which somehow inhere inside the nature of each thing, causing it to move and arrive at its “natural” destination. The critical fact for Aristotelian science is that the essential mechanism of inner qualities is perceived and analyzed as a system of causes (material, formal, efficient, final), and these are assumed to play a powerfully determining teleological role, encouraging us to subdivide the fourth and final cause as natural, unnatural, inherent, or qualitative in some other way. If we drew analogies between such a theory and the practices of playwrights, we would say that dramatic events occur as they do only because each person acts according to his or own character, which is an inward and inherent quality of that person’s nature. Because so much in literature depends upon legitimate concerns with character, we still find great explanatory depth in Aristotelian approaches to literature, even though, in the manner of this present account, we also include quite different springs of motion in the field of human activity. To escape the traditional Aristotelian theory of causation, the entire idea of motion—still the greatest of questions for physical science—must be envisaged anew. Or we can put this inversely: the New Science will almost inevitably arise at the moment when the traditional theory of causes falls to the side, for whatever reason—indeed, whenever reasons are made secondary to the whole scientific enterprise. (“Reason not the need,” says Lear, in a moment of anguish.) Quality is about to lose its radical explanatory power, in any case, and the method of showing why motion occurs in the Aristotelian system loses for Galileo a self-evident persuasiveness. As Osler observes, “The unnatural upward motion of a projectile, then, indicates that a change

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in the body’s essence has taken place. The change is only temporary, as the unnatural motion eventually dies out.”17 In true Aristotelian fashion the process of motion is understood, Jonathan Lear observes, as a changing which actualizes an object’s inner potential, and this can happen because form and matter cooperate in the object so that finally form confers a power to bring about change and motion; in Lear’s words, “the exercise of this power is the change itself.”18 From a Galilean or Newtonian point of view, all such beliefs are suspiciously circular—as I think Aristotle meant them to be, following his sense that motion and change are immanent to whatever is changing and moving. Aristotelian philosophers of nature remained intricately satisfied that the theory of the four causes “explained” motion, of course; but to hold this belief, they were forced to assume that motion involved an inward, essential, qualitative character disposing the object toward its motion. In Aristotle, things had to act like persons. One soon finds that such essentialist pictures of change are amazingly useful for poets, who act as if the springs of action on the stage or fictional events in narratives or emotional effusions in the lyric are readily attributable to the characteristic “nature” of the human beings portrayed. Now, although the poet often has to be as archaic as possible, to reach back to archetypal levels, his need to motivate action in the present moment of a drama requires an immediacy of psychological insight that relates each action to things falling outside the individual person’s inner nature. We begin to see activity in a different light. We ask, for example: How can a temporary qualitative condition and its resulting motion imply a general process? Before looking for the laws of motion, do we, like Aristotle, need only to believe that the physical process is an organic one, a process some animal might demonstrate, as if the stone wanted to rise or else felt tired and decided to fall? The larger question of a general rule that escapes the particular nature of qualities will remain, however, for we ask what is involved on a paradigmatic level, when causes and essences are rejected as the center of explanatory demonstration. It seems that early modern science must rethink the whole idea of human individuality, of what makes a person rare and his relationships rarefied, in order to establish the soul’s independence. This is an old-fashioned way of expressing the poet’s new task, since persons, like objects in nature as now understood, are only to be looked at from the outside. In this vein Hamlet asks, “Why seems it so particular with thee?” And The Winter’s Tale uses the phrase: “. . . so singular in each particular.” The poet’s task of adjusting the individual to the group is paralleled, there-

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fore, in the scientist’s question: What is the relation of externally assessed, objective knowledge to the occult? In fact, during the Renaissance the business of the occult is entering with equally strong force into literature and science, even if they diverge in their treatment of the issue. For this reason, magic attains perhaps its highest reach of interest in the early modern period. Prospero is a magician; Faustus wishes to become “a sound magician”; The Alchemist satirizes the pretended simulacra of a false magic; and all these dramatic actions serve to reveal that the occult is now opening its doors to a renovated version of itself. There are various changing faces of the occult, and Keith Hutchinson, its chief historian, has shown how the hidden forces of nature such as gravity, magnetism, and the like do not disappear but become the forces of modern physics.19 Despite all that we know about Newton’s mechanics of gravitational attraction, despite his lawful description of how this force operates, we cannot say that we know what gravity is. In order to understand electromagnetism, James Clerk Maxwell did not recur to a hidden alchemical nature of the desires and needs of iron filings or electric currents, but instead devised equations to bring the phenomena of electricity and of magnetic attraction into the same “field,” as he called it.20 This was to be a slow emancipation of the occult, which could only follow Newtonian mechanics, but nonetheless there is a hint of field thinking in the alchemist’s transitional belief that his experiments were serving a spiritual end. As we have seen, the Aristotelian system had created a confusion in this domain, for its theory of causes had ascribed the source of motion to inner qualitates—hidden hypostatic forms residing in nature like inhabitants of a house, providing nature with elemental virtues or powers, of the kind we noted above. For an Aristotelian the magnetic force would be occult, deriving its power from a magnetic essence inhering in the lodestone. Its occulted quality would follow from the fact that the stone wanted to attract bits of iron, and the geometric description of this process would be of no rational interest, because it was much too external to the soul of the lodestone. The operation or mechanism was given personhood, paradoxically, because it appeared necessarily occult; it needed to be occult, deliberately hidden from plain sight, kept secret. Thus, we earlier discovered a relation in Doctor Faustus between the visible and the invisible, on the one side, and, on the other, the problem of understanding autonomous movement. If planets influenced human behavior, this too was an occult and mysterious operation, since no process available to the senses could indicate why the influence worked. Hutchison quotes the early seventeenth-century physician and scientist

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Daniel Sennert: “Qualities are divided in respect of our knowledge into Manifest and Occult. The manifest are those, which easily evidently and immediately, are known to, and judged by the Senses. So light in the Stars, and heaviness and Lightness. . . . But occult or hidden Qualities are those, which are not immediate known to the Sences, but their force is perceived mediately by the Effect, but their power of acting is unknown. So we see the Load-Stone draw the Iron, but that power of drawing is to us hidden and not perceived by the Sences. . . . We perceive the Actions but not the qualities whereby they are affected.”21 The strong Aristotelian stress upon the senses and sense experience led many to doubt that insensible entities could be corporeal, and to exclude occult powers from any scientific consideration at all, as being supernatural phenomena. Biblical influence played a large role in such thought, while scriptural exegesis could contribute to the obsession with magic abracadabra; Aquinas, for example, could not understand the “need” for very small creatures, because such animals could never have appeared in the Adamic parade of animals mentioned in Genesis 2:19–20. Medieval scientists had lived in an era where invisible beings were by definition spiritual beings, so there could be little analytic thought brought to bear on the topic. As Hutchison indicates, spiritual magic in the Renaissance (as with Cornelius Agrippa, perhaps the best-known among the adepts) plays an important part, for it allowed speculation on the question: How does an occulted invisibility relate to the operation of forces in nature? Agrippa’s famed treatise, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, observed that if some quality of an object could not be explained in terms of Aristotle’s four elements, it was necessarily occult. In general, for Agrippa, if some “elementary virtues are hidden from the senses, they are called occult qualities, because their Causes lie hid, and mans intellect cannot in any way reach, and find them out.”22 It was not obvious how material density and material rarefaction could be explained, except on a principle of secret natures inhabiting each thing in nature. Here too Galileo was a pioneer, as shown in his Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, where he debated questions about tensity and strength in relation to the magnitude of objects. Clearly the central issue again concerns causality and Aristotle’s legacy in that respect. In strong contrast, all adherents of the new science were at least agreed that actions beyond these four qualities (hot, cold, moist, and dry) pervaded the universe, and that such “occult” actions were within the scope of the human intellect. “Furthermore, such agreement was not merely implicit in

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their work, visible only to the retrospective gaze of the historian, but it was explicit and self-conscious. These innovators openly argued that the ability to accommodate occult qualities was one of the signs of the superiority of their new science.”23 Descartes makes the sharpest possible such statement, in the seventeenth century: “There are no qualities which are so occult, no effects of sympathy or antipathy so marvelous or so strange, nor any other thing so rare in nature (granted that is produced by purely material causes destitute of thought and free will), that its reason cannot be given by [the principles of the mechanical philosophy].” As Hutchison says, Descartes is then able “to give an explanation based on an insensible mechanism.”24 Galileo had to struggle past his own early philosophical training, which was inevitably Aristotelian in bias. His keen awareness of the authority of the Bible and its interpretation inspired him to argue even more forcefully for mechanism and its correlate, a functionally useful geometry (as opposed to mere mathematical speculation). In the most extreme statement of the change from medieval to modern science, it is said that modern science rejects the manifest surfaces of sense experience, while it probes the secret depths lying beneath that surface. In this fashion, I would argue, its radically opposite point of view on nature parallels the new grasp of hidden consciousness which animates all the great plays of the period, most notably those of Shakespeare. With him, the occult seems as natural as breathing—even at its wildest, as in the frightening tumult and macabre witchery of Macbeth or the scarcely hidden rages of a late romance such as The Winter’s Tale. Among the barriers to liberation of the occult, none was more troubling for Galileo than action at a distance, gravitational attraction being a prime example. He worked with the problem constantly and from an early stage in his career—for example, in seeking new ways to determine centers of gravity. His lifelong concern with the mechanics of moving objects located on earth and in proximity to each other was such that he appears to have thought action at a distance dangerously close to the older occult forces operating secretly and hermetically in nature. This partial resistance on his part to the full transformation of the occult into a free acceptance of action at a distance is not unlike his refusal to abandon the earlier theory of perfectly circular planetary motions, whose elliptical orbits Kepler had already proved. But he saw the liberation coming, having done more than any contemporary to ensure its arrival, and his way of thinking about motion—whose shape and extent he learned to measure—is exactly what animated the parallel liberation that makes Paradise Lost the great and unexpected work we recognize.

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The Miltonic world of space travel is in every sense of the word elliptical, Keplerian; nor can one think of any literary work so given to soaring flights, sweeping over equal areas across great distances at virtually infinite speeds—and these imagined planetary motions of God’s messengers seem to be ideal examples of force acting at a distance, owing all to their transcendent invisibility. This charged invisibility, this emptiness, and the plenum of objects that apparently fill most natural scenes become the focus of Romantic poetry, heralded by the Miltonic sublime. Milton’s cosmos, however vast, needs to be filled, its space populated. Jonson’s contemporaries had perceived that in order to explore the actual extent and extensiveness of the world, the poets sought a darting wit; and mostly this Renaissance wit grounds metaphysics in the immediate social present, as when Jonson probes purity in the terms of fashionable cosmetics. He often asks how we discover things previously unknown, for he knows that wit is not quite cosmic illumination, not what we call “vision”—and indeed, on the cosmic scale, to be witty seems faintly ludicrous. Forces and persons are at odds. Invisibility, emptiness, and the plenum of filled space may, however, be charged as fields of force. Understood in this way, all nature, even when mechanically understood, appears to be sublime. Donne’s Anniversaries and expansively exegetical sermons foresee this electrified neutrality, and within such fields mere objects cannot adulterate the void. Uncanny islands of purity, rare things, and precious objects ideally restructure our thoughts, for rarefaction is not so much an essence of particular things as it is their disposition within a field, the sign of their dispersal, bringing texture into our lives. Hence, Ben Jonson dwelled upon the possible existence of isolated perfections, as these punctuate the undifferentiated vagueness of the open and empty, transforming life into a fluent fair, as in his great comedy. By asking how value is distributed, he moves inevitably into alchemical inquiries, as if to test our most primitive as well as our most sophisticated use of talismanic language. In sum, Jonson walks along the boundary of the real and the occult, questioning value itself.

CHAPTER

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Donne’s Apocryphal Wit

Donne shares with the New Philosophy a special obscurity, since neither the poet nor the natural scientist can describe any clear link or difference between fundamental questions of time or space and questions of ethical value. The natural philosopher and the metaphysical poet may see God as omnipresent in all senses, spatially and temporally; but such absolute power must be spiritualized, if we speak of God, and at that moment there is no obvious fashion for saying how we humans share in the divine space or time. Only when these two dimensions are aligned with motion—their consequent, in effect—will a connection be possible between mankind and metaphysics. To be sure, most natural philosophers of the age were not atheists; they wished to believe their research would promote the greater glory of God. In general we know that actions, behaviors, deeds, motions are required if time and space are to become ethical concerns. Without such translations, time and space remain empty mental categories, blank absolutes without human embodiment, hence without human value. In the sixteenth century, however, space and time began to appear matters of geographic concern, as overseas explorations fueled the advance of capitalist ventures and millennial apocalyptic thinking. Even so, all these conceptually new interests were temporally and spatially neutral for ethics. Their time and space had to acquire value from a third mode of existence: action alone could define the ethical domain. Like so many poets of his time, Donne is perturbed by speed and by the way our lives just seem to slip away from us. When we turn to his poetry or the sermons, we find him pondering the fact that metaphysical language also moves too fast. Over and over, his Songs and Sonets speak to the issue of our not being able to make time stand still, while space opens out before us, like a receding shadow on the ground. This trouble he finds when 113

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contemplating the new discoveries of his day, on land and sea, or in the heavens, or indeed in the human body and its journeys within itself, whose most inward part is the mind. The whole purpose of Donne’s literary works is to imbue the natural cosmos with spirits of mysterious intuition, and this holds for the poems as much as the sermons, although as dean of St. Paul’s he had free rein to expand his conceits to cosmic proportions. All the issues confronting my present account are given full cosmic range in Donne, and we may take him as the ideal expositor of cosmic extensions. Nothing comes easier to him than beginning the divine poem “Good Friday: Riding Westward” with the lines, “Let man’s Soule be a Sphaere, and then, in this, / The intelligence that moves, devotion is.” Cosmic expansion up to this sphere, but here mediated by the new optical science, is precisely the interest of another poem, “To Mr Tilman after he had taken orders.” If then th’Astronomers, whereas they spie A new-found Starre, their Opticks magnifie, How brave are those, who with their Engine, can Bring man to heaven, and heaven againe to man?1

Like many poets of the older age, Donne achieves his most powerfully elegiac effects by writing of departures, going on dangerous journeys, fearing never to return, never to see the beloved again. This journeying imagination brings the theme of motion down to earth, and we find its antitype in poems where the opposite of chaotic movement is celebrated, as in “The Extasie” or the verse letter “The Calme,” where Donne describes the unnatural stillness aboard ship when one is becalmed: “and in one place lay / Feathers and dust, today and yesterday.” His thoughts always negotiate with the New Science over this desire for calm, for in that incipient restructuring of cosmic knowledge he sees a source of perpetual hyperactivity. One way to imagine such negotiations is to see them as what Garrett Mattingly would have called “Renaissance diplomacy,” where either side to a debate could send its “message” to the other, as Galileo did in his famed pamphlet The Sidereal Messenger. In the normal course of things diplomatic correspondence involves a considerable degree of ultimate secrecy, and in that way might be regarded as a version of spying, feinting, probing the opponent’s intentions. With Donne, what is less openly announced in the earlier poems becomes often an explicit concern in the sermons, after the king appoints him dean of St. Paul’s.

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Preaching at the funeral of Sir Aston Cokayne in 1626, he says: “I need not call in new Philosophy, that denies a settlednesse, an acquiescence in the very body of the Earth, but makes the Earth to move in that place, where we thought the Sunne had moved.” He advances instantly, however, to the religious position: “I need not that helpe, that the Earth it selfe is in Motion, to prove this, That nothing upon Earth is permanent; The Assertion will stand of it selfe, till some man assigne me some instance, something that a man may relie upon, and find permanent.”2 The sermon questions the official forms of order established upon earth, such as monarchies, and then rushes into a rapidly shifting cento of Scriptural imagery, philosophical concept, scientific diction, adducing a wide variety of traditional beliefs compounded from various sources. The traditional basis of the compilation in this Aston Cokayne sermon is the familiar figure of speech, “The world is a great volume, and man the Index of that Booke. Even in the body of man, you may turne to the whole world; This body is an Illustration of all Nature.” The preacher generally attempts to settle excessive activity among men by referring to the one great central Christian mystery, the Incarnation. Familiar clusters of analogy are centered upon the symbols of their incarnational rhetoric: “Nay, not in a Metaphor, or any other similitudinary thing, but as it was really and truly the very body of god, in the person of Christ. And yet this body must wither, must decay, must languish, must perish.” There is nothing surprising about Donne’s rhetoric or his presentation of doctrine, and medieval followers of the “Old Religion” would have familiarly recognized incarnation in Holy Scripture, as follows: “And now out of the Text, which we See, we shall see the rest, That as in spirituall things, there is nothing Perfect, so in temporall, there is nothing Permanent.” There is comfort in knowing, as Donne says in Sermon 9 of Easter Sunday (1628), “So then thy meanes are the Scriptures; That is thy evidence: but then this evidence must be sealed to thee in the Sacraments.”3 Final certainty is to sustain the believer in the midst of present turmoil. A sermon that seals the message to the believer does so in full congregation, before witnesses, and its aim is to redeem the text of the Bible. Fascinated by mirrors, preaching here on the famous verses of I Corinthians, Donne asserts that “the whole frame of the world is the Theatre, and every creature the stage, the medium, the glasse in which we may see God.”4 “Here is a new Mathematickes,” says the dean in a 1626 sermon; “without change of Elevation, or parallax, I that live in this Climate, and stand under this Meridian, looke up and fixe my self upon God. . . . We all fixe at

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once upon one God, and meet in one Center; but we doe not so upon one Sunne, nor upon one constellation, or configuration in the Heavens; when we see it, those Antipodes doe not; but they, and we see God at once.”5 Our temporal understanding and our spiritual “sight” encounter the “new mathematics’ in the service of knowledge both secular and sacred. The mixture of such a wide cosmic extent, I would argue, is a sign of the baroque sensibility that more than any penchant marks the Catholic side to Donne’s preaching. His fascination with the New Philosophy would not have surprised an educated Catholic of the time, but it remains a sign of the changing climate of thought. Playing rhetorically with the “sound” of logic, alluding to God’s “grammar,” Donne’s sermons have been influenced by the New Philosophy, at first in ways of speaking, and then in ways of imagining. As Thomas Kuhn showed in The Copernican Revolution, Copernicus was initially opposed much more strongly by Protestants, starting with Luther and Calvin, than by Catholics. While Donne is Anglican, hence to a degree Catholic, the notable fact is that he allows the power of cosmic movement to enter so strenuously into his discourse that he seems to desire deliberately to destabilize it. When he says (in Sermon 15) that “Plato speaks probably, and Aristotle positively; Platoes way is, It may be thus, and Aristotles, It must be thus,” the hard interpretation of Aristotelian metaphysics builds a wall against a middle way; but in any case, Donne is orthodox to the degree that he will say “Onely the Holy ghost is Dogmaticall.”6 We are left wondering how the poet’s passion for mental travel is to express itself in orthodox terms, mercurial and terrestrial at once. The pandemic motion of all beings and images is no longer a perfectly circular movement; it belongs to the breaking of the circle and cannot fail to upset many different modes of belief. The sphere is an oblate sphere. What increasingly comes forward is the possibility that although a widely imaginative thinker like Donne represents the transitional stage of thought, paying compulsive attention to imagery drawn from the scientists, his work never loses a Counter-Reformation sensibility, especially when he is in high poetic mood. Mystery and reason collide in the now familiar discordia concors, and since this is wit, it belongs to the type Alexander Pope mockingly called “apocryphal,” meaning prophetic but not entirely orthodox. That was the point made at the end of Pope’s Augustan version of Donne’s Fourth Satire. The original version of the Satire says the poet hopes his wit will be ultimately received as “canonical,” despite its intermixture with the New Philosophy.

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Analogies from Heaven Feed This Kind of Wit It was a period of rampant analogies. Commenting on this widespread addiction, Francis R. Johnson, the noted authority on English astronomical thought, called these analogies a pseudoscience. “We would be making a serious error, however, to assume that the average literate Englishman of Elizabethan times was inferior to his twentieth-century descendent in his knowledge and intelligent understanding of the principles and problems of the science of his own day.”7 The preponderant use of scientific books printed in the vernacular, the revival of a mathematically oriented neo-Platonism, strengthened any impulse to accept the Copernican hypothesis—including, with Thomas Digges, the most daring hypothesis of all: that our own solar system was not alone in the universe, hence could not be the sole concern of God. Giordano Bruno had undertaken a major journey to England, where he talked with members of the aristocracy and then, engaging the printer John Charlewood in London, without fear of papal censorship, published a number of major works. The most important effect of Bruno’s presence in England (or indeed anywhere during his peripatetic life) was that he might or actually did generate enthusiasm for the idea that there probably existed an infinite number of solar systems like our own, an idea Empson and others have shown was anathema to the Church, for such an infinity made individual Christian salvation an impossible enterprise. Heliocentric thinking clearly had a tendency to open its doors to yet more expansive or more complicated hypotheses. Typically, we can imagine a text such as this one from Plutarch’s Life of Numa Pompilius, as translated by Sir Thomas North: “For they [the ancient Pythagoreans] are of opinion, neither that the earth is unmoveable, nor yet that it is set in the middest of the world, neither that the heaven goeth about it: but saye to the contrarie, that the earth hanged in the ayer about the fire [the sun], as about the center thereof.”8 Since Plutarch was a favored humanistic teacher of ethics in the late sixteenth century in England, many reading him would have agreed that the sun held “the most honorablest place” in the heavens. Although conceptual barriers to a full grasp of Copernican consequences were bound to block full scientific understanding, the atmosphere of empirical curiosity was such that when the brilliant Thomas Harriot voyaged to Virginia in 1585, he of course brought a telescope with him. Later (in June 1609) he anticipated Galileo in his use of the telescope to observe the moon. Despite all this enthusiastic activity, it must be said that the Copernican

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Revolution, as Kuhn wrote in his book on the subject, in fact induced a “loss of coherence” for many.9 As Kuhn dryly remarks, “Old conceptual schemes never die.” Or at least they die hard and often not without a fight. It is therefore important for us to realize that in England there was intense interest in the new astronomy—for example, on the part of the Digges family and Thomas Harriot. It is surely no accident, as Frances Yates demonstrated at great length, that Giordano Bruno made perhaps his most important journey to England. Bruno in himself was a drama, and his proposal of infinite worlds was the great—forbidden—dramatic idea for the age.

Collisions of Motion and Serenity Our conclusion so far must be that while the concept of motion obviously animates the great Renaissance scientists, early and late, this physics problem must be carried over into human affairs if motion is to center on actions aspiring to dramatic interest. Standing back from our general scheme, we picture drama and action, the latter including the deeper concept of motion, as constituting a link to a society of debate. As Frank Kermode once commented, on the requisite style for the Brunonian moment, “We cannot think of Donne without thinking of relentless argument. He depends heavily upon dialectical sleight-of-hand, arriving at the point of wit by subtle syllogistic misdirections, inviting admiration by slight but significant perversities of analogue, which re-route every argument to paradox.”10 No doubt the longer forms of the two Anniversaries, like the expansive prose declamation of the Sermons, lent itself to this mode of thought, particularly because Donne worked, as Joseph Anthony Mazzeo tells us, within the new mode of the baroque or metaphysical sermon. Such sermons were built upon a system of “preachable conceits” which correspond closely to the extensively elaborated metaphors characteristic of metaphysical poetry and spiritual alchemy . . . a pedagogical device [as Croce had shown in a 1924 article] whereby the truths of faith were inculcated by showing how the particular truth was contained symbolically or analogically in a fact, a word or phrase of Scripture, an historical event, or in a phenomenon of nature. The points of departure did not matter, nor their relationship to each other. What did matter was that the preacher, by the exercise of his learning and ingenuity, showed how all or any of seemingly heterogeneous loci converged on the same moral truth.11

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Convergence upon a point is the aim, when heterogeneous excess marks the material body of ideas to be coordinated into a unifying sermo humilis, and this aim in turn is markedly baroque as a stylistic desideratum. With Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson our critique has naturally focused on the affinity between theatrical movement and the philosopher’s treatment of motion as this arises in the sciences. Now that we turn to John Donne and John Milton, both in their different ways intensely dramatic poets, it becomes even more obvious that the early modern intellectual manifold sees the cosmos in dramatistic terms—far more so than the Christian medieval system, where all life paled beside the magnificence of the Creator and his divine providence. Despite intensely vivid creatural realism such as Erich Auerbach might have discovered in Langland or Chaucer’s Tales, the medieval vision of things had left the lives of men and women creatural by accident; the determining interest of the fiction always remains God’s providential surveillance of human destiny. The question of the changes now happening in the late sixteenth century seems to be indeed dramatistic. Who gets to play the hero? What does it mean (to use a phrase from The Winter’s Tale) for “sensible warm motion” to animate life in the secular world? What in essence is heroic action? What is it to be an extra? Who wants to upstage the Divine Being? Such questions had long been held in check by a grand biblically inspired medieval scheme, but now began the gradual erosion of theological defenses against the idea of life as a staged performance. Ernst Cassirer’s illuminated and illuminating monograph The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy (1927) everywhere records disturbing “dramatic oppositions” between cultural system and individual consciousness. The Renaissance desires “a poetry completely inspired and penetrated by the breath of a new idea. And this idea is not burdened with any Scholastic appendages; it exists, so to speak, in the free space of thought. The problems are not presented and elaborated through abstract philosophical meditations; rather, we see life itself, asking itself the eternal questions concerning its origin and its value. All merely dialectical oppositions now become dramatic oppositions. But the dialogue only presents us with the oppositions themselves, not with their solutions.”12 Like the organic development sketched by The Birth of Tragedy, but reversing the developmental order, this initiatory move into the Renaissance is the reverse of the Nietzschean process; here the dialectic becomes drama, and, I shall emphasize, this occurs because the static of Plato is replaced by the dynamic of

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showing forms of life in continuous change and motion. The new picture of human destiny and character is determined by the “gift of movement.”13 The poet and philosopher practice a virtually complete and infinite art, as Cassirer suggests, and in this secondary resemblance they come to rival the godhead. Such in the broadest terms is the vision of a demiurgic Renaissance poet, the only artist sufficiently cosmological to express what Montaigne was seeing: Our ordinary practice is to follow the inclinations of our appetite, to the left, to the right, upwards, downwards, according as the wind of chance bears us. We think of what we want only at the moment we want it, and we change like that little creature which takes its color from what it is laid upon. What we have just now proposed to ourselves, we immediately alter, and presently retrace our steps again: it is nothing but wavering and inconstancy. . . . We float between different opinions. We desire nothing freely, nothing absolutely, nothing constantly.14

Here the familiar translation by Cotton and Hazlitt is muted and almost neoclassical, as compared with a slice of John Florio’s 1603 version: “Every day new toyes, each hour new fantasies, and our humours move and fleet with the fleetings and movings of time.”15 Given such a broil, it is no wonder that Montaigne concludes as follows: “Constancy itself is nothing but a more languid motion. I cannot fix my object; it goes muddled and reeling by a natural drunkenness.” John Donne’s lyrics can be excerpted to indicate a violent, even tortured sense of heterogeneous motions, whose tension for him lacks the final serenity that brings down the curtain on the masque-drama of Spenser’s Mutability Cantos: “Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone, / Let Maps to other, worlds on worlds have showne”; “Poore Heretickes . . . thinke to stablish dangerous constancie”; “There, the faith of any ground / No schismaticke will dare to wound”; “Kill, and dissect me, Love”; “Thy head is like a rough-hewne statue of jet, / Where marks for eyes, nose, mouth, are yet scarce set”; “There Engins farr off breed a just true feare, / Neere thrusts, pikes, stabs, yes bullets hurt not here”; “And from our tatter’d sailes, rages drop downe so, / As from one hang’d in chaines, a yeare agoe.” These deliberately chosen fragments reflect the jagged rhythms of the strong line; but overall their effect is not so much morbid, as a challenging awareness that mankind must serve two ideals at once: be tough and naturalistic in vision, but also always imply some higher harmony that life fails to afford.

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If we wanted a hero for this dangerous purpose, it would be Giordano Bruno, spectacular magus who treats the proposed infinite universe as a theatrical scene. Bruno is nothing if not theatrical in his conception of man’s place in the universe. Poetry generally begins to serve the drama, whose chief aim in the Renaissance is to show forth the independent powers of mankind. In De Incantionibus (1567), a pioneering treatise on miracle and astrology, Pietro Pomponazzi had analyzed the power of astral influence upon human action, largely to show that we are not helpless puppets; we can reach beyond the stars to our more liberated perspective on sublunary things. Again, when Pico della Mirandola studies relations between this natural world and a Platonized medieval Christian worldview, “he does succeed [as Cassirer says] in becoming master of the confusion and in sharply drawing the lines between the motifs. And therewith he succeeds in enriching and deepening the entire conception of ancient thoughts.”16 Earlier nominalist accounts of physical causation, questioning Aristotle’s doctrine of the four causes, had began to question immanent teleological causation as a case of the occult. Pico thus anticipates Kepler and Newton, Galileo and the English astronomers, arguing for the concept of actual cause or vera causa, which amounts to a general theory of natural process. Furthermore, throughout Pico’s arguments, the belief in causal verification—conclusions based on empirically verifiable observation—accompanies an enhanced belief in the dignity of man, accorded to the powers of thought and observation. Pico in this regard takes a distinctly modern view of things, since for him astrological readings of destiny are, to use Cassirer’s phrase, “endowed with demonic power.” Cassirer goes to considerable length to remind us that language thus must change to fit new uses and discover new terms. Science requires a rich and frequently complex semiotic, “but in science, these signs are not something final, let alone something independently existent; rather they merely form a medium of thought; they are a stage on the road that leads from the sensible perception of phenomena to the intellectual conception of their causes. . . . We must be able to follow step by step and member by member the continuous series of changes which originate at a certain point in the universe; we must be able to set a unitary law which all these changes obey.”17 The series is never simple automatism; there are theoretical choices to be made. The task of the poet then would be to negotiate interactions between the absolute and the perpetually changing—to encourage, as it were, a more perfectly Ovidian worldview. Everywhere in the broader background to the poetry of Donne we dis-

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cover a fresh cultural delight—an urban involvement, in considerable measure—with all manner of civic life, taken as the mark of true civilization, even when subject to satirical attack, even when inviting such satire. One senses, for example, the ever-present busyness of lawyers and merchants, but these are always agencies perceived as engaged in show of some sort. Theater with its sudden uprising art, its “marvels,” is furthermore never far distant from performance in church—indeed, the preacher’s skill consists often in combining soliloquy with a broad impersonal declamation, wisdom delivered ex cathedra. Common to all grand rhetoric of the Renaissance there is always a measure of impersonation, since the orator assumes an eloquent public role. Meanwhile, on a more secular plane, the almost religious revels and comic implications of an Ovidian metamorphosis are often replaced by the drama of sudden reversals and recognitions drawn from some “real world,” where the drama often finds its aptest scene by showing how the law works and how particular legal quarrels are played out in a court of law, or simply in open undisciplined conflicts of arms. If Johan Huizinga, Edgar Wind, and various recent anthropologists find serio ludere to be agonistic, this ties drama to the laws of emotion, inherently a matter of acting at the edge between fiction and fact. When Stephen Gosson (an accomplished hack, to be sure) attacked his list of theatrical mountebanks, he was attacking free movement of mind, implicitly attacking the classic agon of traditional drama, and in that sense he and his iconoclastic Puritan allies fully merited Sir Philip Sidney’s sharp countermeasures against The School of Abuse.18 Sidney defends the Psalms, along with the ballad of an old blind singer, from which we see that his aim was to appreciate a range of differing aesthetic delights. In the wide field of the theater the aim was always entertainment, not least when players performed a revenge tragedy or a romantic comedy, a Spanish Tragedy or an As You Like It. We have suggested that the Puritan attack is an attack upon such pleasures; it requires rejection of any Faustian openness in attitudes and energies, for indeed Lovejoy clearly stated the philosophic issue, when his great book on the Platonic principle of plenitude commented that the Faustian vision of life permits “no finality, no ultimate perfection, no arrest of the outreach of the will.”19 On the level of the individual psyche and of society and custom, the chief engine of response (so as to generate aesthetic delight) is what Elizabethans called “wit,” and we are not about to limit its domain. Wit is the power to expand or contract hori-

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zons at will. If Falstaff is the cause of wit in others, he is a god of a rather disreputable but nevertheless indisputable power, and every fiber in him resists the ice that chills the wintry veins of a John of Lancaster. Prince John, like a Puritan capitalist, wants no holidays to get in the way of business, even if it be killing on the battlefield. Just so long as a place is allowed for aesthetic pleasure, felt as a bond of society, there will be room for sacred and secular to speak to the common plight, honestly enough, but in their different ways. What we need as critics now is to perceive that for the early modern period—the time of rebirth—as it was previously called, there had to be new dimensions of loosened understanding. In that context Giordano Bruno was the great prophet, so that his editors were right to observe, regarding The Ash Wednesday Supper, that Bruno wanted to get away from the constraining pinch of “perfect motion,” a movement modeled on the medieval Aristotelian ideal of the circle, no matter how sophisticated its accommodating mathematics might become.20 Bruno believed that numerous particular local motions did not, as perfectionist ideas suggest, prohibit larger cosmic ideas of a greater stability— hence, by analogy, preventing order within the psyche. This we shall find with Milton and Galileo. If Bruno thought, as Lerner and Gosselin say, that the motions informing the new cosmology “cannot either be precisely circular or composed precisely of circles,” this betokens a break in the icepacks of medieval science. The New Philosophy suffers from logical contradictions, breaking with scholastic perfection. John Rogers’ recent study of political vitalism has shown a pulsing order in William Harvey’s “circulation” of the blood, for the heart plays a secret role on the stage of our biological existence, whose health is never noticed until pulse goes awry. Heart palpitations parallel Spenserian mutability, fitting the Brunonian worldview, picturing a universe of incessant hurly-burly in what Lerner and Gosselin call “a dynamical steady state.”21 From Dorothea Singer we recall that Bruno “speaks constantly of the heavenly bodies as ‘animalia’ pursuing their course through space. An ‘animal’ for Bruno is what is endowed with anima. Not only all life but all being he regards as in some sort animated.”22 Montaigne in his drifting, digressive essays; Spenser with his errant Italianate epic style; John Donne with his perpetual twists of exegesis and conceit, are all engaged in expressing the difficulties, tensions, and promises of a Brunonian world. These are indeed the “worlds in motion” described by William R. Shea in his book Galileo’s Intellectual Revolution.

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Instability of mind in picturing the universe is necessarily compensated by an enhanced professional use of the drives, the motives that make for good acting. The fact is that acting demands hysteria, for acting is mimetic, which, as Freud observed, implies a creative cultural “parody” of what in psychoanalysis is called a “conversion symptom.” For the actor to participate in a role demands a complete somatic fluency, the ability to flow back and forth between role and reality, between the stage and the world. In this translation of the mind’s hysterical “identification” of player with person, there is also a resistance to the deliberate, ruminative, and finally obsessive pattern that produces allegory and its “reception” as interpretive commentary. Imagine any great miming: the hysterical drives of impersonation, and hence of acting a part, enhance the prime effect of theater—a lively sense that the story told is a story moving faster than its commentary, moving free of any allegorical gloss. There is a fine line to be drawn here, since every actor of a “realistic” role still has an “idea” of the overall sense of the “character”—and note that all three key terms require scare-quotes. We ask, then, what differentiates dramatic impersonation from the rhetorical figure of personification. Usually the answer will point to the dependence of the latter figure upon what used to be called “personified ideas,” as when a poet said that “terror bore the misbegotten children of desire”—a patent mixture of abstract ideas and physical embodiment. In all figurations like this, there is a primitive element of the dramatic, since the expression betrays a somewhat mysterious capability we humans possess—namely, to participate in the other, whether that other be an actual other human, or an idea abstracted from human existence. Such is the essential theatrical process: a Platonic participation, or methexis, as idea becomes person.

Donne Meets the Fear of Incoherence Donne gave his First Anniversary the comprehensive main title An Anatomy of the World, and in that large signification it has been read in many ways, starting from its mystical praise of the young dead girl Elizabeth Drury; but for my purposes, only one attribute of note needs affirming. This particular theme was clearly described in a letter T. S. Eliot wrote to Herbert Read as Eliot was preparing to write his 1926 Clark Lectures on the Metaphysical Poets. Starting from Dante as a foil, Eliot wrote that he was planning “to treat subsequent history as the history of the disintegration of that unity [i.e., Dante]—disintegration inevitable because of the increase of knowledge

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and consequent dispersion of attention, but bringing with it many undesirable features. Disintegration which, WHEN the world has crystallized for another moment into a new order, can be treated as a form of generation; but which the historian at the present time, who does not anticipate, must regard as the history of corruption. That is to say, to consider and criticize the poetry of the XVII century from the point of view of the XIII.”23 In the fifth lecture, Eliot drew an invidious comparison between a “faked” Donne satire and Dante’s ability to be “co-ordinated to one intent.”24 This comparison was to stay with Eliot all his life, and it has been much criticized as arch-conservatism and bad Anglo-Catholicism. Yet Eliot better than any other critic was able to see what he was afraid to like and what in The Waste Land he had nonetheless practiced: “a keen eye for common observation” and “an active ratiocination,” which he famously labeled as the strength of a sensibility not yet “dissociated.” Indeed, in another lecture Eliot caught the exact manner of Donne’s longer poems, such as the First Anniversary: “In the loosest of Donne’s compositions there is a kind of continuity in change so that there is an effect of the whole poem which is not the effect of any of its parts.”25 Although Eliot’s remark is critically intended here, nothing could better catch the spirit and aim of The Anatomy of the World, where despite the traditional tone of the funeral elegy, including lines of ritual lament, the whole work speaks for an amazing new life of scientific knowledge. All the sources of stress the poem attacks are the very discoveries and excess that gave rise to “a new form of generation.” Eliot’s resistance to his own historical understanding is remarkable, and in this he seems to be cross-examining his own witness. In fact, what the poem reveals is that for Donne, like so many of his contemporaries, the passion to discover the new—revealed as sharply in the New Philosophy as in the actual New World of North America—was so extreme as to need purification of its desire; this it might achieve, poetically at least, through an almost medieval contemplation of mysteries such as the death of Elizabeth Drury. In this virtually Catholic atmosphere of belief, all discovering manias may experience calming grace, given freely by the translated soul and blessed innocence of Elizabeth Drury, who, as Donne told Drummond of Hawthornden, was only intended to be “the idea of a woman, not as she was”—that is, not as a real person, which of course would be easy enough for the poet, since indeed he did not personally know this young victim of untimely death. This spiritual rescue of the decayed world would have to follow from powers not available to the New Science,

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however, and would indeed hark back to the analogical, correspondenceridden world of Aristotelian Causes—that is, occult causes. Donne manages to combine immiscible compounds from the earlier and the later science; and when he laments the loss of cosmic “coherence,” he is actually allowing the new theories in astronomy and the like to enter the strife-torn scene of conflict. His poem therefore gains a coherence of its own, like an experimental study of chaos by means of our currently developing Complexity Theory. Another way to put this would be to say that Donne understood full well what the New Science, as practiced by Bruno, Dee, Digges, Harvey, and Harriot, was telling the Elizabethans (and he alludes to William Gilbert’s research on magnetism, so he has range in these matters). In Ignatius His Conclave he saluted the telescopic discoveries of Galileo. He understood the Copernican implications and saw their necessity in argument and fact. He understood the problems of geometric projection in map-making. These and other similar scientific concerns were evidently correct concerns. But he allowed the older vision of things to enter the picture even as he was showing his knowledge of the new. This double mirror, this twinned antithetical knowledge, is what makes his work begin to possess a baroque combination of classical structure and external flux of surface. On many occasions, the poetry seems to accuse the new striving as mere greed—“Thou art the swimming dog whom shadows cozenèd”—but then at the very moment he invokes the traditional Christian vision of the Virgin, he will say something utterly newfangled: she is animated by “all Magneticke force alone.” The tragic loss of Drury is precisely defined as her aborted promise of bringing all sorts of new material powers to bear on the world that so needs renovation. She is the one who saw that men straying on the oceans of worldliness “needed a new compass for their way.” But then she is gone, and the new world’s reason has in that moment disappeared. We need not believe that Donne had his own scientific theory about the incoherence of a worldview he anatomizes in the First Anniversary, so much as we should praise his openness to the mere statement of the changing times in which he lived. The first step toward solving a problem is its admission into the laboratory of thought. Such is the intellectual drama I have been trying to suggest throughout this book—the drama of ideas old and new colliding with each other, as changes of intellect and knowledge enforce different visions of the universe and human destiny. Whether the risks are worth taking remains a debate, yet Donne is certainly a hero for staying within the conflict and not pretending it is over when in fact it is not.

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Souls of the Infinite Universe Eliot’s epochal naming of the “dissociation of sensibility” and its opposite, the fusion of thought and feeling, formed much critical response to Donne, not long after Herbert Grierson published his two-volume 1912 edition of the poems. More important for my own views, Empson the mathematical critic of literature perceived that Donne’s fascination with cosmology, combining with a virtually Catholic theological training and an exceeding delight in unusual images as such, led the poet almost inevitably to beliefs bordering upon or, as the Church saw things, actually constituting heresy. Bruno’s arguments for infinite worlds, and his fate—to be burned alive in the year 1600—are the frightening, cardinal example here. If then we go back to the historical researches of Marjorie Nicholson, Grant Colley, and Francis Johnson in the 1930s, we find two relevant things in relation to a cosmological Donne. First, the proposal of Giordano Bruno and Thomas Digges that the universe was infinite led to the question: How could the souls of creatures living on other planets be saved without the presence of Christ, which was astronomically impossible? Second, the infinite universe had to be of an enormously increased physical scale. To the first of these issues Empson devoted many pages, and he seems to have seen correctly one source of tremendous strain in the Donne poems and sermons. If personal salvation was the aim of religion, how could one accept a cosmology that made salvation patently impossible on a scale to match the size of the universe? And if this could not happen, then how could one believe in the coherence of divine plan? Empson in his later essays, now collected by John Haffenden, was but amplifying and analyzing Nicholson’s point: “The idea of a plurality of worlds, which Donne had suggested in his earlier poetry, was indeed for a churchman a dangerous, even, as it came to be called, the ‘new heresy.’”26 The Empsonian argufying on these matters, of course, betrays his lifelong resistance to unthinking orthodox Christian dogma, and therefore it is most helpful that he reminds us (in “Donne the Space Man”), “When we study a man in the past grappling with a problem to which we have learned the answer, we find it hard to put ourselves in his position.” For Empson, then, “The young Donne, to judge from his poems, believed that every planet could have its Incarnation, and believed this with delight, because it automatically liberated an independent conscience from any earthly religious authority.”27 My approach to all such issues has been deliberately nontheological, so far as possible; but these Empsonian views are a critical re-

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minder, for they place us in the right framework for understanding the tensions and dangers surrounding belief in the New Science. Thomas Digges might speak with immense eloquence of our Copernican sun, “that fixed Orbe garnished with lightes innumerable and reachinge up in Sphericall altitude without ende”; he could speak of the universe as “an infinit place surmountinge all both in quantity and quality.”28 But the dangers to salvationist Christianity remained evidently threatening to the orthodox. A poetry flexible enough to express and therefore handle cultural incoherence will need simultaneously to impose and to retract its own selfcensorship, thereby producing a new mode of almost scientific, at times metaphysically tangled, apocryphal wit. Among all our greater earlier poets, Donne remains the most taxing to read, because when one tries to decode his metaphysical style—as Dr. Johnson once ironically remarked— one has at least to think. Donne’s strikingly colloquial vernacular speaking style in making imagistic points reveals an important issue raised by Empson, discussing what he called “Donne’s foresight”—namely, that in those days “a great deal of thinking and talking went on without direct publication, not only in universities but usually with their connivance.”29 “Connivance” catches the atmosphere: the truth in this period of struggling transition had almost to be a kind of stealing the truth from its lockbox. The stolen truths of the New Philosophy found in poetry a paradoxical task for their expression, since the poet speaking for a self and for an individual being is asked to raise this mere individual up to vast, infinite heights. The expanding scale of the Brunonian universe is intolerable to the Church and to Christianity generally, since in the world of universal fractionation the soul, now a dispersed soul, can find no single, unitary spiritual home or homing point. It is tempting to read the later Mower Poems of Marvell within this field of vision. When the Mower says, “I shall never find my home,” it is not a mere confession that passion causes blindness; this has the tone of a new, cosmic, world-denying loss of center. Such losses mean that there will be no here wherein redemption can work its magic. Changes wrought upon poets and mystics and believers generally were producing a sense of metaphysical dislocation, as long as one sought to continue examining the soul’s relation to a world at times now lacking in empathic warmth. Keith Thomas’ massive historical treatise Religion and the Decline of Magic observes that the earlier intellectual clime of Aristotelian causes and sympathetic correspondences, employed in astrology, was coming under scrutiny from science, not least in this vast field of the stars.30 Their magic astral influ-

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ence was to be impaired, alongside the newly stressed quest to believe in personal salvation, as the Galilean worldview gradually took over. Given these changes, nothing is more important than the radical Brunonian expansion of the universe where the soul lives; the issue was epic in scale. The placed here of the soul will henceforth find a larger orbit and will translate its sphere to a higher, if more fearsome domain: the world of “outer space.” After the expansionist but still local eloquence of Donne’s sermons, this emptying translation awaited Milton to discover its proper dramatic expression and staging in the field of epic narrative.

CHAPTER

8

Milton and the Moons of Jupiter

Galileo is mentioned three times in Paradise Lost, once in epithet as “the Tuscan artist.” As artist he may be the maker of telescopes—the artifex, or inventor of new devices for acquiring knowledge. Along with Columbus, who appears in Book IX of the poem at its climax, Galileo belongs to secular history; and more dramatically he is the only contemporary of Milton to be actually named in the whole vast composition. As a distinct historical agent of immediate importance to the early modern world—indeed, as maker of that world—Galileo alone among other great thinkers is not anonymous, for Milton accords him a heroic authorial identity granted to no other historical person in the poem. The effect of such singularity is to confer upon him the role of a second author to the work, given that Paradise Lost speaks or sings through the symbolism of celestial bodies that Galileo made his own especial domain of thought and research. To us, he is known as the initial discoverer of the law of inertia, upon which in its perfected form Newton based his grand scheme of universal celestial mechanics; but for history and drama, Galileo is the persecuted champion of the Copernican Revolution. In that role he caused endless controversy, much of it fueled by his own rhetoric and arguments, until his confrontation with the Holy Office led to his legendary status. Ending up so much later as the hero of Brecht’s Galileo, even in his own lifetime he had come to be everybody’s favorite scientific hero, as historians have sometimes said. The present account simultaneously limits and extends the role that Galileo’s discoveries played for Milton; yet before making my argument for this intellectual drama, I should recall a comment by Keith Thomas, in his Man and the Natural World: “The great philosophers Galileo, Descartes, Gassendi and Leibniz all rejected the idea that the natural world was created for man alone.”1 This judgment is by no means new, but it deserves to be repeated again and again, for therein lives the conundrum of conflict between science 130

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and religion, a seemingly never-ending struggle. By claiming to limit to a single work the reach of Galilean influence upon Milton, I only mean that so great is the scientist’s range and achievement in different areas of inquiry, that he enjoys almost universal presence during the early seventeenth century. His thinking permeates the entire composition of Paradise Lost; and as a heroic model of what revolutionary independence might be, poetically, Galileo acts the role of a presiding spirit. In a sense, as Milton well knew, those scientific discoveries and opinions were one distinct cause of our losing Paradise, of our needing to conceive it as an entirely spiritual notion.

Icons of a Lost Stability It is crucial to recall the idea of a world well lost, or lost in tragedy, depending upon one’s vision. In The Elizabethan World Picture—that recently much maligned classic—E. M. W. Tillyard summarily argued that the reign of Elizabeth was intellectually and symbolically governed by ideas and analogies of “due degree,” “place,” “state,” “ceremony,” or indeed any number of elemental hierarchic frameworks which together combine to produce a single “supreme commonplace,” the Elizabethan version of an ancient archetype: the Great Chain of Being.2 The standard Elizabethan “Homily of Obedience” admonished all members of the congregation to imitate the ordered celestial model. With Ulysses’ speech in Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare memorably epitomized the model as follows: The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre Observe degree, priority and place, Insisture, course, proportion, season, form, Office and custom, in all line of order. (I.iii.85–88)

Disordered planetary motions are to blame if social order goes awry, and there is no limit to the natural disasters that will follow “when the planets / In evil mixture to disorder wander.” It follows that the assembled Greek warriors must by act of will reinstate the principle of degree, at all costs. Thus counsels the cunning, ambitious, and ambiguous Ulysses, projecting a deep fear shared by his contemporaries, insofar as they were a people obsessed by chaos and mutability, or, as Tillyard calls it, “an obsession powerful in proportion as their faith in the cosmic order was strong.”3 This anxiety

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has to be the case when dynastic succession to the throne was unavoidably doubtful. The Elizabethan symbolism of the center found perhaps its most powerful iconic expression in the Aristotelian idea of “perfect motion”: that of rotation around a point, as in Ptolemaic astronomy. Here movement draws in upon “the still point of the turning world,” and it specifically shares in an ideal, perfect, unchanging order of things. Of course, whatever is conceived as central, and hence authoritative, may somehow lose its privileged position. Hence, there is a stultifying danger in any excessive pursuit of fixated centrism, and the aim of all the greater poets of the time is virtually to dislocate the fixed centers of belief, whether political, religious, or otherwise. Nevertheless, Queen Elizabeth’s “Golden Speech” of 1601, in which she professed politic “love” toward her people and to the 140 members of her final parliament, would be a critical example. The queen proclaimed, “Of myself I must say this: I never was any greedy, scraping grasper, nor a strait fast-holding Prince, nor yet a waster. My heart was never set on any worldly goods. What you bestow on me, I will not hoard it up, but receive it to bestow on you again.” This principle of reciprocal gift-giving affirms the regular returns of a cyclical process; and just as the Copernican Revolution provided a hidden justification for this schema, its Ptolemaic predecessor was even more strongly a centrist arrangement. While the Copernican model and its ejection of earth as cosmic focus appeared to orthodox Christians a fundamental attack on Aristotelian and biblical vision, the much deeper difficulty—in the view of the present argument—was not so much one of central position in the universe, as the privilege now given to motion. This privilege takes many paradigmatic forms, as seen, for example, in Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood, or in the capitalist circulation of money (with many analogues, as in the gift-giving of Shakespeare’s Timon), or in the new physics and astronomy of Galileo. We may say that circles were beginning to look more elliptical, as they had been in the “Pythagorean” astronomy of Kepler. When Tillyard chose Sir John Davies’ Orchestra: A Poem of Dancing to illustrate the ideal Elizabethan world picture, he privileged a fundamentally static model of movement. Ideally the archetypal dance of the spheres comprised circular perfect motions, reducible to human scale, where a system of round dances reinforced formal social structures of degree. On this view, the dance evolved the ladder of the Great Chain of Being into a circle, yet the scientific implications of this turn were not to be examined. Iconically the Poem of Dancing cleaved to a late medieval design, and Tillyard wisely ob-

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served that “if Davies knew (as here he shows he does) the Copernican astronomy, he must have known that this science had by then broken the fiction of the eternal and immutable heavens. But he trusts in his age and in the beliefs he has inherited, and like most of his contemporaries refuses to allow a mere inconsistency to interfere with the things he really has at heart.”4 Perhaps the aside is a “mere inconsistency,” or perhaps it lets fall a serious anxiety: Only the earth doth stand forever still; Her rocks remove not, nor her mountains meet; (Although some wits enricht with learning’s skill Say heav’n stands firm and that the earth doth fleet And swiftly turneth underneath their feet); Yet, though the earth is ever stedfast seen, On her broad breast hath dancing ever been. . . . (Stanza 51)

These throwaway lines recall the much more serious ideas of Spenser in the Mutability Cantos, and we recall that mutability provides the new centering principle of the universe. Both ancient and modern astronomy appear now to inspire the later lines of Milton’s Paradise Lost, where the Archangel Raphael imagines that the sun as center “incites” the planets, including earth, to “dance about him various rounds.”5 These “various rounds” need not be Keplerian ellipses; rather, as we shall see, a composite cosmology of mixed Ptolemaic, Tychonic, and Copernican ideas organizes a loosening of the universe of Paradise Lost. The whole epic, its larger effect, aims to dissolve ideal centers, as if defying a poet like Sir John Davies, who foresaw the much wider and at first much more disturbing version of the universe in motion. The form, if not always the sense, of Paradise Lost carries much further that ambivalence toward motion that had brought ritual drama to the Mutability Cantos. Milton’s Eden may in the poem appear exactly located; but owing to the swirl of various motions in the narrative, we can never be sure of that location. And therefore, to acquire a better framework, we turn to the masters of movement in this narrative: Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo.

Copernicus and the Medicean Stars The most dramatic report comes from Galileo himself: “Accordingly, on the seventh day of January of the present year 1610, at the first hour of the

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night, when I inspected the celestial constellations through a spyglass, Jupiter presented himself. And since I had prepared for myself a superlative instrument, I saw (which earlier had not happened, because of the weakness of the other instruments) that three little stars were positioned near him— small but not very bright.”6 This extraordinary and remarkably precise description of the telescopic appearance of four tiny new planets, along with a series of carefully recorded and carefully illustrated successive orbital observations, occupies much of the second half (about thirty pages) of Galileo’s epochal report The Sidereal Messenger (1610). This small book, published in Latin no doubt to increase its circulation among scientists, was called Sidereus Nuncius, a title with oddly significant ambiguities. Nuncius seems intended to have meant “message,” but soon the word came to mean a person, the “messenger,” and it has retained that primary sense. The status of personhood exactly fits the otherwise different aim of a papal nuncio, who as trusted carrier of true information would bring official news to important Catholics in distant places. An overnight sensation, this little book sold out almost at once, and it was quickly known in England through the efforts mainly of Donne’s friend Sir Edward Wotton, the English ambassador to Venice. Following directly upon this electrifying Italian publication came Donne’s 1611 satire, Ignatius His Conclave—which contains what may be the first reference to Galileo in English literature, and in which, among other contemporary scandals, we have a mock conversation between Lucifer and Copernicus, the latter claiming that he “gave motion” to the earth. Copernicus, refused admission to the conclave, is presented as wanting entrance to discuss the astronomical and theological issues now emerging. The question here is not so much who is scientifically right, as how much interest the telescopic discoveries could immediately generate abroad. On three quite spectacular counts, the Sidereal Messenger is exciting evidence of change. First, it recounted precisely and in detail Galileo’s observations made by telescope, an instrument he did not invent (it came from the Low Countries) but which he instantly improved, giving him greater magnifying power, showing him the method which that power was soon to adopt in all its most important advances—namely, an instrumental capacity to observe and even measure previously inaccessible information. Second, the Messenger described the true character of the surface of the moon—a body the orthodox theologians and Church astronomers had claimed was perfect, of an ideal smoothness and polished reflectance, according to Aristotelian belief. The telescope revealed that the moon’s surface

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was full of irregularities and imperfections, mountains, gullies, and crags, and Galileo deduced that its hidden side would be similar. This was a shock to the system, and became a notorious scientific point of argument. Third, and for me far more important than the lunar-surface discoveries, was the discovery of the four Medicean Stars, which Galileo too found to be of greater astronomical (though perhaps lesser propagandistic) interest. This dramatic observation he first made on the night of January 7, as we have noted. Immediately he set to work to replicate his discovery, and using his improved 30-power telescope almost every night between the 10th and the 28th, he found that the planet Jupiter was accompanied by these four “moons of Jupiter,” or, as he soon cleverly renamed them in order to flatter Duke Cosimo de’ Medici, the “Medicean Stars.” They were “discovered by me, for the first time,” and he immediately understood why this was so important for astronomy in general. As The Sidereal Messenger clearly states, Jupiter and his tiny court of satellites appeared to be a miniature Copernican system, closely analogous in their motions to the order of things in the vastly larger solar system. Albert van Helden summarizes: “In the Ptolemaic system the Earth was the single center of all motions; in the Copernican system there were two centers of motion, the sun and the Earth. Why, opponents of the Copernican system asked, should the Earth be the only planet to have a moon? The telescope supplied the answer: the Earth is not the only planet with a moon; Jupiter has no fewer than four.”7 Jupiter today is known to have more than twenty such tiny satellites, which Galileo’s telescope could not reveal;8 but he had produced a powerful systemic analogy that could only suggest Copernicus was right. Prior to these discoveries it had been widely thought, in pre-Copernican fashion, that earth alone could be circled by orbiting bodies; but now the earth would now have to give up its claim to being the cosmic center. To find another center behaving with exactly the same holding power, to find a double for the Ptolemaic ordering of spheres or other such regulations of celestial motion, was entirely to upset fundamental cosmic expectations. Among the many consequences of the Copernican Revolution that required slow assimilation, it seems that none was more startling than Galileo’s telescopic observation of the Medicean Stars. And he certainly thought so himself, for his pamphlet took great pains to show how he had recorded observations made not just once, but on successive nights, starting with that night of January 7, 1610.9 In terms of the diffusion of scientific knowledge, it is critical that Galileo’s illustrations in print could, by their clarity, make a

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magic impression on their first readers. Graphic in regard to the depiction of the moon’s face, detailed in regard to the distinctiveness of the fixed stars, here, with similar exactitude, the astronomer reported on Jupiter’s very small orbiting bodies at a level of astonishing telescopic detail. In the Messenger Galileo makes certain his readers take a larger view; he now has “an excellent argument for taking away the scruples of those who, while tolerating with equanimity the revolution of the planets around the Sun in the Copernican system, are so disturbed by the attendance of one Moon around the Earth while the two together complete the annual orb around the Sun that they conclude that this constitution of the universe must be overthrown as impossible.”10 The moon had always been the troubling exception, even for Copernicans, but now that scruple could go the way of all refusals to accept a revolutionary image of the universe. Finally, the universe was a vast system, it seemed, of potentially varied orbiting bodies, with endless multiplications of the center. As van Helden observes in a note to his translation of the Sidereal Messenger, “Jupiter’s moons demonstrate that our Moon can revolve around a moving body”11— in short, did not require the earth to be a perfectly fixed body; and since this point was immediately evident to Galileo, Jupiter’s four satellites indicated that cosmic centrality no longer had to depend upon the medieval passion for fixity. In the Galilean terms we shall soon describe, any sufficiently massive moving body might become a center, upon which second, third, or fourth subcenters might in turn depend, producing an expanding system of multiple, moving cynosures. When Kepler suggested to Galileo that he should call the four little moons “satellites,” or hangers-on at court, he was implying that any sufficiently important court favorite would always have his own lesser favorites, and so on, down the line. We stand at the doorstep of a new cosmic understanding, where the planets could wander and stand with ever-changing relationships to each other. That such a relativistic design could have its inventor, its discoverer, was not lost on the young Milton, who must have felt Protestant anger against the Church for harassing Galileo, as Areopagitica suggests. On the higher plane of creative destiny, the two inventors, one a poet and the other a scientist, should meet in the epic story of Paradise Lost. Their encounter implies that the poem will be unlike any predecessors, especially those that invoked earlier science, such as Guillaume du Bartas’ La Sepmaine; or Dante’s epic, so influenced by Aristotle and Aquinas; or Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, where story is displaced, however theatrically, by cogitated Epicurean philosophy.

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Three Times the Poem Meets Its Second Author Three times the Tuscan artist interrupts the flow of Milton’s narrative, but certainly the first entrance is the most perturbing and complex. It is also a dramatic moment, reminding us that originally Milton had thought of composing his Paradise Lost or Adam Unparadized as a gigantic morality play, with acts, scenes, debates, and many abstract persons such as Justice, Mercy, Wisdom, Labor, Grief, Envy, Fear, and Death, all in the earlier manner.12 Such a view of the poem as a conflict of abstract ideas or icons makes an indirect mark on the later work as composed (actually dictated orally), but what mostly counts is the conception that the Fall of Man must be seen dramatically. For Milton, a dramatistic conception governs epic narrative; yet when we read this kind of epic drama instead of seeing it staged, the work provides a deep experience. If only as a sketch or initial blueprint, Adam Unparadized makes it clear that Milton intended his drama to include masque and masque-like effects: “The angel is sent to banish them out of Paradise but before causes to pass before his eyes in shapes a masque of all the evils of his life and world.”13 Finally, in the narrative poem we have, Galileo’s first entrance has the effect of a highly ornamented iconic wonder, linked as it is to the moment when Satan rises from the burning lake of Hell. Satan’s gigantic figure looms like an optical illusion of immense dramatic presence. Prone on the burning surface, the fallen angel Beelzebub has replied to Satan’s great speech that echoes Mephistophilis describing Hell to Faustus (“For this is hell, nor am I out of it”). Then we read: He scarce had ceased when the superior fiend Was moving toward the shore; his ponderous shield Ethereal temper, massy, large and round, Behind him cast; the broad circumference Hung on his shoulders like the moon, whose orb Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views At evening from the top of Fesole, Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands, Rivers or mountains in her spotty globe. (I.283–291)

There follows an extremely complicated simile in two parts, wherein all possible questions of scale and scale-differences confront the reader, producing an effect at once both intricate and impressive. This passage seems de-

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signed to embed the picture of Satan at his first appearance, at his first being observed, against or within the Galilean landscape of Florence and the hills north of the Arno and “the brooks in Vallombrosa.” The image of the fallen leaves, while traditional for fallen warriors in heroic poetry, has the sublime effect of heightening an impression that the fallen angels together make a vast army of dying heroes. Even supposing we can imagine this catastrophic rout, we are instructed by Milton’s simile to read its vision as an instrumental observation, made possible only by the use of a telescope, an optical device unknown to biblical times. The simile warps both time and space at once. It draws the narrative, at least on Satan’s behalf, into the orbit of the New Philosophy and into the excitement of the new avenues of knowledge that, as I have wished all along to emphasize, constitutes the chief obstacle to all older religious worldviews. Galileo is the modernist here, and it is his device that makes Satan visible. Of course, this happens in simile only, yet the narrative suddenly enlarges its scale and scope through the allusion to Galileo as artist of the telescope. The realism of scale-differences, registered by the natural scientist, is subject to figurative control. If the opening narrative gesture is thus controlling our perspective on the power of daemonic agencies, then the whole ensuing poem will have to follow with similar optical controls of its story line, the idea being that a cosmically true account of biblical and pagan historical events is for Milton subjected to control by an actual historical person, be it Milton himself or Galileo. The latter seems to bring a principle of perspective transformation into the poem at its first moment of action, and we shall find this a determining factor throughout the work, giving it the baroque turbulence and folded interleaving structure that Gilles Deleuze associates with baroque displacements of fixed classical forms, especially in the thinking of Leibniz.14 The poet is not unaware that scientists like Galileo are now the arbiters of fact in the study of nature, while older systematic beliefs are only metaphors and myths for the new knowledge. According to this metonymic reading, Satan and his grandeur appear optically generated; and if we take this thought to the extreme, we might say that he appears to us with the splendor and surprise of a newly discovered telescopic phenomenon. While this reading might appear too literally scientistic, the fact remains that Satan’s towering figure has fallen into the orbit of telescopic science. His shield, itself a flattened orb, his spear a peeled Norwegian tree trunk, are known to us here only as images. They are present only as likenesses, and even the shield’s protective shape has been reduced to the geometry of a “broad cir-

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cumference.” These epithets may be read simply as the language of vast size, and nothing more, but virtually occult philosophy points through such scalar images to things only the telescopic scientist can see. A. D. Nuttall makes the general point that Galileo’s initial observations of the moon gave a “glimpse” every bit as striking as Herschel’s 1781 discovery of the planet Uranus.15 The discovery was mainly phenomenological, possibly related to the formation of planets, but its symbolic effect was instantly available to nonscientists and appeared to affront the Church’s idealized, rationalized Aristotelian vision of the virgin moon. By the same token, the Miltonic simile of Galileo’s observation, with its overlapping complexities of reference, formally also undoes the older belief that the earth’s moon was a simple and perfect sphere. To perceive this distracted aberration of the divine Creation is to understand that Galileo in this pursuit of knowledge is spiritually closer to Doctor Faustus than one might think, because he, too, looks perilously close to being a Gnostic heretic. Galileo is certainly a “hero of knowledge,” and would have been so recognized, had he lived in England. There he would have known the circle around Raleigh, Dee, Digges (father and son), Chapman, Harriot, and for a short time even the visiting Bruno, and in England the dark shadow of heresy could fall on any of these men. Years later, during Sir Walter Raleigh’s outrageous trumped-up trial, in which Lord Chancellor Bacon played an infamous part, Thomas Harriot was called a “devil”; but we must not exaggerate the historical significance of a School of Night to which such men were thought to belong. Surrounded by an aura of occult practices, any learned gathering of speculative minds would suggest an imaginary exploration of the “new world,” in whatever magic direction that voyaging might choose.16 The chief magus of the period, Dr. John Dee, was also for many years a trusted adviser to the queen on matters of navigation, owing to his considerable mathematical skills and his interest in overseas ventures.17 We are reminded of Einstein’s comment about his own youthful plans to be a physicist. At school in Aarau, at the age of seventeen, he wrote “My Plans for the Future,” an essay where, besides praising “the theoretical part of these sciences,” he went on to announce that he was “much attracted by a certain independence offered by the scientific profession.”18 When Milton casts Galileo as a telescopic voyager in strange seas of thought, he opens the door to connecting poetry with the scientific method as embodied in the Sidereal Messenger, a method depending (for science) on optical precision and (for poetry) on the complex use of visual images, moving

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thence into synesthetic imagery deriving from the originally optical starting point—the shield, the spear, the ship, and so on. Independence of vision seems to be the keynote for the way Milton uses such episodes as Satan’s rise from the burning lake of Hell. These days we have sophisticated ways of analyzing the semiotic procedures by which Milton produces such effects. Everything in the epic seems to depend upon its free play with space and time, and its sense that on a cosmic level the story must voyage outward, like a carrier of light. As we contemplate the initial appearance of Satan in Paradise Lost, however, we can pull back to the more general description given by Dr. Johnson: [Milton] seems to have been well acquainted with his own genius, and to know what it was that Nature had bestowed upon him more bountifully than upon others; the power of displaying the vast, illuminating the splendid, and forcing the dreadful; he therefore chose a subject on which too much could not be said, on which he might tire his fancy without the censure of extravagance. The appearances of Nature, and the occurrences of life, did not satiate his appetite of greatness. To paint things as they are, requires a minute attention, and employs the memory rather than the fancy. Milton’s delight was to sport in the wide regions of possibility; reality was a scene too narrow for his mind. He sent his faculties out upon discovery, into worlds where only imagination can travel, and delighted to form new modes of existence, and furnish sentiment and action to superior beings; to trace the counsels of hell, or accompany the choirs of heaven. But he could not always be in other worlds; he must sometimes revisit earth, and tell of things visible and known. When he cannot raise wonder by the sublimity of his mind, he gives delight by its fertility. Whatever his subject, he never fails to fill the imagination; but his images and descriptions of the scenes or operations of Nature do not seem to be always copied from original form, nor to have the freshness, raciness, and energy of immediate observation. He saw Nature, as Dryden expresses it, “through the spectacles of books”; and on most occasions calls learning to his assistance.19

Johnson continues his discussion with an idea that scientific allusions combine memory and imagination in a complex learned style, whose aim is to afford precisely that freedom in ranging widely, as we have just heard. In effect, the mixing of learning and immediate sensations forces the poet to change the scale of his vision, from moment to moment, thus making the reader constantly aware of scale changes. These perspectival shifts are

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precisely what the complex Miltonic similes create; and when the similes are extruded by association, the effect of the whole becomes sublime. An ancient rhetorician would have called this procedure “transumptive” or “metaleptic.” If the question of uncertain scale dominates Satan’s first appearance, his second appearance carries us directly into the scene of sublime motion. In Book III Satan lands on the surface of the earth, an event that permits the poet to describe space travel in magnificent rolling rhythms—the same oceanic effect Stanley Kubrick achieved in 2001, when he suddenly shifted his musical score into Strauss’s Blue Danube Waltz. Our uncertainty about knowing how to orient our perspective is Milton’s chief interest; and in this passage, as so often in the poem, we are reminded that for Sergei Eisenstein the archetype of film montage was the Miltonic style in Paradise Lost. Thither his course he bends Through the calm firmament; but up or down By center or eccentric, hard to tell, Of longitude, where the great luminary Aloof the vulgar constellations thick, That from his lordly eye keep distance due, Dispenses light from far; they as they move Their starry dance in numbers that compute Days, months, and years, towards his all-cheering lamp Turn swift their various motions, or are turned By his magnetic beam, that gently warms The universe, and to each inward part With gentle penetration, though unseen, Shoots invisible virtue even to the deep: So wondrously was set his station bright.

Again, as narrative interruption, the figure of the astronomer enters to point the meaning of Satan’s space travel. There lands the fiend, a spot like which perhaps Astronomer in the sun’s lucent orb Through his glazed optic tube yet never saw. (III.573–590)

The landing site is like an area of the sun’s surface that even Galileo, who wrote the well-known Letters on Sunspots (1613), would have failed to observe or explain correctly. The analogy here places knowledge of the greater

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universe in the hands of the scientist, taking it away, a second time, from the poet’s mythography pure and simple. The wonder of unprecedented discovery (“yet never saw”) is exactly what the great mannerist poet Giambattista Marino celebrated in his Adonis, published in 1623. Six elaborate stanzas of Canto X are devoted to the “marvelous new instrument / through which things distant can appear close by,” whose hero is the celebrated scientist: Through thee, O Galileo, the telescope, To present age unknown, shall be composed, The work which brings remotest object close, And makes it show much larger to one’s sense. Thou only, the observer of her motion And of what in her parts she has concealed, Thou shalt, without a veil to shroud her form, Behold her nude, O new Endymion.20

Alluding to the Grand Duke Cosimo de’ Medici, Galileo’s patron, Marino conveniently enhances the appeal of his poem by invoking the most celebrated mythical explorers, the Argonauts. Similarly the Portuguese epic celebrating Vasco da Gama, the Lusiads of Camoëns, had associated actual exploration with a vision of cosmic coherence; hence its use of the myth of Venus. In Marino’s Adone, a complex transumption tells us that Galileo and the Argonauts were virtually shipmates and explorers sailing with Columbus, a compression of temporal passage that recalls the mysterious final allusion to the shadow of the Argo on the sea-floor, at the end of the Divine Comedy.21 As Donne’s “Elegy XIX” had referred to the Atlantic coast of North America, so here the Italian poet bends his delight in the latest science, to make an admittedly rather silly mannerist comparison of Galileo to Endymion, a shepherd boy who fell in love with the moon. After the 1611 publication of the Sidereal Messenger, everyone was falling either in or out of love with the moon. In all respects, the poetry and journalism of the time indicate just how extraordinary the 1610 telescopic sightings appeared to Europeans of every persuasion. Technique was beginning to acquire its magic fascination in the West. The third and final entrance of Galileo is initially less mysterious than the first two, but it is the one where he is named, in his own person, with his particular Christian name conferring on the moment an uncanny overtone, a prophetic sense more powerful for scriptural reasons than anything the poet might have said to describe the careworn astronomer. The Archangel Raphael is now on his way to earth, to instruct the hapless pair in Eden,

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and he soars through space with unprecedented speed and freedom. This is one of the great lyric passages at which Milton excels. The Archangel, “up springing light,” divides the choiring angelic host. Then, like a ship, He speeds, and through the vast ethereal sky Sails between worlds and worlds, with steady wing Now on the polar winds, then with quick fan Winnows the buxom air. (V.267–270)

His voyage ended, Raphael makes landfall on earth, in the Garden, As when by night the glass Of Galileo, less assured, observes Imagined lands and regions in the moon: Or pilot from amidst the Cyclades Delos or Samos first appearing kens A cloudy spot.

Not for the last time in the poem is this suggestion of celestial navigation given a context of actual space travel; for Milton, there is an odd fascination with the idea of the pilot, the cybernetes, the voyager across strange seas— one remembers the doomed voyage of Lycidas. One remembers how dangerous all ocean travel was in Milton’s day, when one hears sailors like Conrad or recent scholarly types like Edwin Hutchins tell of the dangers of making landfall. Navigation is one Miltonic archetype of governing any craft, and he makes much of the image, as had Virgil; and when we realize that sea voyages and space travel have much in common, we grasp why Galileo used this shared archetype, recounting landfalls on the unknown coastlines of remote celestial islands in space. What, in a poetic sense, is it for such an observer to discover tiny planets never before seen by the naked eye? Our question from earlier pages must now finally be: How does this Miltonic motif of Galileo’s telescopy bear upon our major theme, the question of the new “less assured” science of motion? What here is the link between the poet and the Tuscan artist? The presence should reveal a bond between art and science.

Galilean Relativity The only way to perceive such affinities is to uncover a deeper level of understanding, some principle that invisibly supports the tenor of ordinary

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things and events happening in a story. Looking for these hidden principles had always been the aim of science, going all the way back to the Greeks, although specific material observations appeared to lie on the surface of the phenomenal world. Yet theory always looks deeper, and in the present case it searches out the Galilean principle of relative motion. “Galilean relativity,” as it is called, is the “Newtonian” forerunner of modern light-based relativity theory, as Einstein himself observed in Chapters 4 and 5 of Relativity: The Special and the General Theory. Used in a mechanistic universe—the world of the stars and planets that Paradise Lost explores in the vein of science fiction—the “Galilean system of co-ordinates” works perfectly, enabling astronomers to calculate “the actual motions of the heavenly bodies with a delicacy of detail little short of wonderful.”22 The discrepancies from which Einstein’s relativity theory arose would not have been apparent to Galileo or Newton, although Newton especially, as a master of optics, was seemingly aware that the speed of light and nothing slower must somehow figure in a final theory; and certainly Milton understood, and repeatedly hinted in his epic, that light, by moving faster than even thought itself, was bound to affect what we consider to be “fixed” and “moving.” Over many centuries, of course, there had developed in the West a metaphysics of light, a luminous cosmology of descending and ascending powers identified as “lights” that possessed influence analogous to the “divine names” of Pseudo-Dionysius; and this magic naming, too, would influence the scene. Embracing in a universal dance of light, the stars and the Word of God were imagined to feed the harmony of all things, at all levels of being. Mythographically, the poet now comes to anticipate the scientist—yet never obliged to know “exactly why,” and while preserving a bridge back from science to magic and mystery, he engages his full powers in a proleptic vision where the relativity of motion was the most mysterious example of a higher power. Nevertheless, in the Galilean and hence Miltonic universe these judgments of rest and motion were capable of sensed observational analysis. In this context, Copernicus and Ptolemy seemed not very different, each theorizing that his system required a determining center, whether earth or sun; and in this regard, Copernicus had been anticipated in the third century b.c. by Aristarchus of Samos. Despite different theories of the center, the advance into the modern world came when thinkers like Galileo saw that motion became interesting when one understood it in this way: if I am standing on the deck of my boat, the shore passes by me as I sail along—yet the observer on the shore sees and thinks that I am passing him by, the situation being sym-

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metrically reversed. What, then, is a state of rest? Our judgments are relative, first, to our viewing positions, and then to our beliefs regarding which observer shall be considered to be at rest. The concept of rest versus motion had long been a puzzle; it appears, we have seen, in Plato’s dialogue The Sophist, where the discussion touches on which is the more perfect case of Being, rest or motion.23 Now science was looking mechanically—and in that sense realistically—at this most fundamental of questions, for the new concept of inertia gave equal stress to states of rest and states of uniform motion, since either condition will continue forever, as long as there is no outside force (such as friction or propulsion) impeding or impelling the object. With Galileo, the problem begins to acquire the correct worldly setting, and a usable poetic setting as well. Shakespeare’s Troilus had asked, “What’s aught but as ’tis valued?” Galileo and the poets of his early modern period could also ask, “What’s aught but as ’tis observed?” The observer’s role is already beginning to acquire its fully modern status. A persistent theme for Galileo derived, as I have more than once suggested, from his experience with vessels on the water. In regard to the role of the moving observer, he had noticed that if an individual were below decks when the sea was absolutely calm and the boat steadily moving ahead without any noticeable interference to its perfectly calm motion, the person would never know he was moving at all. He would know this only if he could see the shoreline passing by; he would have to go up on deck. This problem—the need to gain standpoint and perspective—is one that the modern astronaut experiences in the most radical fashion in space travel, which Galileo could only imagine. Without some external coordinate framework against which to compare and measure their own movement, astronauts would be lost in a limbo of absolute stasis, weightless, directionless, and motionless forever—yet they might be moving at 4,000 miles per hour relative to earth. In all such cases, motion is evidently significant only when related to, seen relative to, some framework of observation. For the poet imagining the story of a cosmic catastrophe, such as Paradise Lost, it is evident the ground of the actions must somehow be stabilized. Milton, as I read him, shares the general Galilean picture of relative motion. We have just seen that a person traveling on a ship and observing a moving object, such as a shoreline, is in effect the double of an observer standing opposite to him on that shore, able, in turn, to observe the moving ship. On this plan, observations of motion are always relative to the standpoint of the ob-

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server, who may be observed by the very person he is observing. Any object can seem to be in motion, from someone’s point of view. On the other hand, as Galileo showed in the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, if we accept the mutual equivalence of rest and continuous steady motion, we find that motion is in fact a kind of stability.24 The assumption required is simply that the motion here is uniform, as if we were in the cabin of a ship moving at a constant velocity over a smooth body of water, changing neither speed nor direction, neither rolling nor pitching. Under these conditions, our experience would be identical to that of a person in a ship in port. The identity of these two states of motion and rest means that we have two identical “inertial frames.” It is impossible to distinguish absolute motion from absolute rest; we have to think of motion only in terms of inertial frames (for example, two bodies moving, or at rest, some distance from each other). Meanwhile, as the Dialogue set out to show, objects inside a steadily moving ship and then by extension all objects—including ourselves, as we live on earth—are not flung off into the chaos of outer space, because we and our earth share the same inertial frame. Our stability derives from our belonging to our own inertial frame. We are free to move, and to see the boundaries of that freedom. The net result of Galileo’s theory is that not only is the universe in which cosmic events occur relativistic in the above sense, but its relativism of motion, with endless nodal points of rest, allows its boundaries to expand forever, so as to include what Bruno had called “an infinity of worlds.” In Paradise Lost, the primary aesthetic effect of such relativizing is that we are more aware of acceleration, and what Aristotle called “violent motion,” than of any constant movement, and it is hard not to believe that once again the poet has anticipated later science, since the effulgent light of the Divine Creator traverses the universe with the greatest possible velocity. In terms of mere vision, it would not be necessary to wait for Maxwell’s equations, the Michelson-Morley experiment, or Einstein’s relativity theory to see that the boundary of the universe was defined by the speed of light. Short of this cosmic expansion in perspective, the story of the Fall could treat the results of the infinitely variable gravitational attractions between bodies as the source not of a primal descent from above to below, but—in the far more human context—of a lateral fall, where every single body has its own center of gravity and its own inertial frame, which is the world of Galilean relativity. Traditionally the axis of the Fall was vertical, from Heaven above down to Hell below; but owing to Galileo’s discovery of the “Law of Fall,” which, in

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studying the paths of projectiles, he related to lateral motions, the vertical axis has lost some of its privileged status. When undisturbed, uniform motion of any object will persist forever in a straight line, and the direction of movement makes no difference at all. Gravity, as Newton was to show conclusively, is in the larger sense omnidirectional. A spaceship will “fall upward,” if the presence of a larger planetary mass pulls it away from earth. In his foreword to Stillman Drake’s translation of the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Einstein puts the issue this way: “Once the conception of the center of the universe had, with good reason, been rejected, the idea of the immoveable earth, and, generally, of an exceptional role of the earth, was deprived of its justification. The question of what, in describing the motion of heavenly bodies, should be considered ‘at rest’ became thus a question of convenience.”25 “Up” and “down” lose their status in a scientific sense—though of course not mythologically, since myths appeal to archaic sources of belief. It then follows that given this new idea of gravitational fields pulling every which way, any story based on the idea of a fall will essentially have to understand this to be a lateral fall. Already in Spenser and the medieval Romance tradition, this lateral principle had been understood, so that the Myth of the Lateral Fall was given expression in stories not of descent, but of errant sidewise wandering in ethical and spiritual digression. It is no accident that the story of Adam and Eve chronicles their wandering in the Garden, that wandering planets are a feature of the night sky above them, and that when they must leave, “They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way.” It is likewise no accident that when Satan would tempt Eve, he comes at her like a ship tacking back and forth until it reaches port. One is reminded of Lycidas and the ominous implications of venturous voyaging by sea, a topic on which Donne had written his two brilliant elegies, “The Storm” and “The Calm.” Lycidas falls victim to such a Lateral Fall: while at sea, he becomes the victim of a ship, . . . that fatal and perfidious bark Built in the eclipse, and rigged with curses dark, That sunk so low that sacred head of thine.

In Book IX, in one of his greatest passages of abstract description, Milton depicts Satan as a moving, sailing, undulant spiral form whose purpose is to deceive by “tract oblique.” At the moment of approaching dramatic catastrophe, Satan weaves circuitously toward Eve, reminding us that the source

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of any spiritual Fall will always result from some action we take in a world through which, like Eve, we wander. Our destiny is to stray from the beaten path. When it comes to poetry, a principle of universally relative motion supports the modern belief that moving centers may, despite and also because of their motion, provide significant stability in all areas of life, as in the celestial universe. Gravity operates everywhere, we might say; given the correct relativistic arrangements, a stable overall result ensues. And in the same way, the multiple displacements of events in Paradise Lost are simply the poet’s way of understanding the best contemporary scientific theory. Instead of a fixed platform, the poem seeks a moving, rotating, homing, stabilizing gyroscope—earth herself—leaving to the sun the role of a life-sustaining star, the remote source of all our energy. The Copernican reordering of the heavens was a commentary on Heaven, Galileo clearly thought, and Milton followed by ascribing to God all the main properties of a light-emitting source. Above all this is a matter of getting the universe right, and letting all epic actions work within that uncertain but highly promising new conception of worlds in motion. To the interest this interpretation may possess for the scientist and historian of ideas, one may then add the poet’s concern that life be truly represented. Thus, although Johnson is surely right that Milton lacks “raciness,” he is also right to suggest, if reluctantly, that the tumbling world of Paradise Lost truly represents the world as learning has shown it to be— “communion with all the elements,” to use a Coleridgean phrase—and as its learned style must permit, properly for an epic justifying the ways of God to man.

The Sublime and Its Humorless Wit If Paradise Lost is cosmic and sublime to the highest degree, then we would do well to look for its peculiar mode of wit, which I take to be the play of ambiguous terms expressing the high degree of abstraction that cosmic thinking requires. If the archetype of common jokes is the cartoon image of an exaggerated particular (“feet way too big”), the archetypes of the sublime are distant, noble, and transcendent in their appeal to higher thoughts. The sublime needs no detail, as would be the case with its antitype, the picturesque. The sublime can be radically simple, and thus there is an inherent problem about the poem’s mode, for it simultaneously engages in endless details of astonishing complexity, while overall asserting its sublime simplic-

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ity. It is as if Milton’s God had said, “Let there be light . . . and a lot of other things as well,” so that the poem invests simplicity with all the categories of earthly and celestial information. In his recent book, Delirious Milton, Gordon Teskey has said: “Except for T. S. Eliot, who argued that Milton had turned English poetry away from the clear, sharp, intellectually challenging images of Donne into the path of hollow eloquence, critics have not been much concerned with Milton’s relation, as a poet, as an artist, to the future.” Teskey shows with great learning and imagination that Milton indeed turns to the future, by adopting a new stance toward the oldest of all supposed events, the Creation. Milton, Teskey says, manages this by speaking in modern tones like an ancient shaman. There is a special sense in which the future in question is definitively the future imagined by Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, the future whose outline is provided classically by Newton’s Principia Mathematica. An irony persists here, however, for this modern cosmic interpretation is precisely “a path of hollow eloquence,” because only if the poet hollows out the scene of time, space, and motion will the poem achieve its future-looking modernity. Donne and Milton were equally perturbed by the New Philosophy, but Milton found a relativistic solution for Donne’s lament, “all coherence gone.” There is a price to pay for all advances; and in the case of Milton’s grand style, the reader will always find a lack of creatural realism. What is lacking in the poem is the vast mid-range where humans debate exactly how they are to accomplish their ends—it is as if they were being created as instruments for measuring forces in nature, not as mixed human creatures. Hence, a lack of middle ground marks the vast distance between Marlowe and Shakespeare and this later poem. It is as if Milton acknowledged how much he admired the earlier dramatists (which he manifestly did, quoting from both authors many times), but then complained they were not “mathematical enough.” Is this a humorless wit? Or is there a grander and more savage wit in Milton, whereby he tells us of the massive sufferings that lie ahead of Adam and Eve, after their expulsion from the Garden? This seems often so, for there is precious little common kindness expressed in the poem, as if that might be trivial and too close to the raciness Johnson said was severely lacking. The common comes across here with ponderous Wordsworthian honesty—“no fear lest dinner cool” is the comment on cookery in the Garden of Eden. Wit on the sublime scale, therefore, pertains to the style of monstrous plays like Tamburlaine, where Marlowe had seen that world-conquering designs require world-conquering rhetoric, but

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nothing lowly. What saved Milton, as perhaps the “mighty line” had not saved Tamburlaine, is the incredibly complex Miltonic syntax and rhythm that weave the strings of interrelations making our vast universe possible. This syntactic weave seems to me exactly the result of the poet’s acceptance of a Galilean universe, where all motion is significantly relative—that is, where the telling stability of things comes from their being forever on the move, but in orderly fashion. By allowing reminiscences and hints of allegiance to the Ptolemaic world system to persist alongside the Copernican system, the poem simply increases the general baroque sense of hyperactive harmony. For centuries, cosmic movement had been central to all serious cosmological speculations, including the great system of Ptolemy, with all its complex mathematical proofs of planetary movement, so we are not denying motion to the superseded system. It is as if the poem superadded Copernicus to Ptolemy and then let the newer vision dominate the larger cosmic effect of the poem’s vision. In the end, the original critical question returns: Is there a way of using poetic language that indeed aspires to mathematical precision and mathematical abstraction from the common reality of things, the felt qualitative reality things possess in use by humans? Perhaps Galileo’s own conception of his enterprise will help us to imagine such a language, to imagine that while the New Science was uncovering new foundations of coherence in the natural world, these very finds were threatening a more general cultural disintegration. There is no reason to think that societies really ever know what they are doing, and this period of nascent enlightenment is no exception. As we shall see, while full of inspiring vistas, the evolving scientific methods of the early modern period did not clearly address the broader social need for coherent verbal expression, unless we agree with members of the Royal Society that language should be pared down to exact perspicuous referential speech—in which case the future of a great literature was left out in the cold, to survive in the forms of prosy wit. A taste for neoclassical verse will not develop unless such verse is studied as a perfection of rational economy, and it may be hard for post-Romantic readers to grasp how Johnson could say the final lines of The Dunciad were “noble lines”; but one can only wonder whether Milton’s late style is not partly an antithetical counterforce raised against the new advances in which the poet himself was participating. Even as the humanist’s worldview was losing its allusive lore and its spiritual command, poetic language itself revealed the distress of the conflict; such a confrontation virtually forced the rise of the novel, in order to fill the imagi-

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native power vacuum. Alternatively, it may be that a deeper level of knowledge informs the writing of the New Philosophy, which so often recalls a gradual progress through mathematics toward dialectical thinking, as sketched in Book VII of Plato’s Republic. Paradise Lost presses similar claims, for it sets our gaze toward the heavens and the starry firmament, those paradigms of the highest, while unavoidably insisting upon the paired solitude of our first parents, Adam and Eve. Invoking light itself, the poem sustains a massive inquiry into mysteries of our world. Yet nature remains obscure to the poet, beckoning his thought toward deep space, as if somehow he could understand the ratios and relations between all things and all events. This almost forbidden pursuit of knowledge—we might call it the liberation of occult causes—becomes, as we saw with Donne and Jonson, the modern way for metaphor to assimilate science. As figures of relative motion, metaphor and metonymy are clearly basic to all literature, especially poetry, and—as their rhetorical master Milton certainly knew—they remain quite mathematical enough.

Conclusion

Crossing many intersections between poetry and the scientific question, hoping to gain a finer sense of what movement is and how time and even space are aspects of movement, we have seen how these dimensions of nature help to structure the poetic imagination. That such concerns have the power to structure the most important metaphysical questions ought not to shock anyone, including those holding orthodox religious beliefs. At the end of this discussion I am reminded of Herbert Butterfield’s avowal in his Origins of Modern Science: “Of all the intellectual hurdles which the human mind has confronted and has overcome in the last fifteen hundred years, the one which seems to me to have been the most amazing in character and the most stupendous in the scope of its consequences is the one relating to the problem of motion—the one which perhaps was hardly disposed of by Galileo, though it received a definitive form of settlement shortly after his time in the full revised statement of what every schoolboy learns to call the law of inertia.”1 Commenting on this broad claim, Gerald Holton says that Butterfield may even be understating the importance of the problem of motion, which fans out in so many directions that without entertaining it, we can hardly understand where and what we are, and what our world may be.2 Holton aptly calls this intellectual venture “the changing allegory of motion,” and there is every reason to see that while post-Newtonian thoughts about it were already differing from Galilean thoughts, with the development of Maxwell’s and Einstein’s theories and mathematics, the allegory would continue to change the focus of its narrative. This indeed seems to be a mutable story, always changing its definition of change, constantly advancing into greater reflexivity. Galileo’s Metaphor, according to my account, always implies an approach, however obscure its mechanism may be, to an accommodation; the poet 152

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and scientist alike must negotiate between the syntactic artifice of mathematics and the semantic fervor of natural language. All the poets I have dealt with betray an awareness of this obscure interaction—this crossover, as I often call it. Yet there is one great poet, so far unconsidered, who deserves to be treated in depth regarding the crossover, and that is Andrew Marvell. For English poetry, “To His Coy Mistress” virtually establishes the theme of time, space, and motion in classic form. Everywhere in his lyrics he broaches the vaguely experimental aspect of the natural magic of his epoch—as, for example, in his evocation of composite color phenomena: “Like golden lamps in a green night” or “Annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade.” Thus the observing poetic mind participates in nature’s most mysterious shadings and shades of difference, as, in another line, there is a play between a color (pink) and the artificial trimming of a flower: “The pink grew then as double as his mind.” Such images belong to the naive mode of natural history, to be sure, but their precision leads to a larger empathy: the desire to join art and nature by situating the mind halfway between science and imagination. This poet is clearly concerned with the issues of science in his day. In his “Dialogue, between the Resolved Soul and Created Pleasure,” Pleasure says: Thou shalt know each hidden cause; And see the future time: Try what depth the center draws; And then to heaven climb.

To which the Soul replies: None thither mounts by the degree Of knowledge, but humility.

And the Chorus rounds out the dialogue: Triumph, triumph, victorious soul; The world has not one pleasure more: The rest does lie beyond the pole, And is thine everlasting store.

The elegant formal exercise typically introduces and understates its terms of art, such as “rest,” “the pole” “hidden cause” and “center,” achieving a manner and even mannerism that fill the entire perfect evocation in another poem, “On a Drop of Dew,” which is altogether an homage to experi-

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mental science, tracing through and around the dewdrop its “pure and circling thoughts.” When the more famous “To His Coy Mistress” begins, Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime,

it drives relentlessly toward its end: Let us roll all our strength, and all Our sweetness, up into one ball: And tear our pleasures with rough strife, Thorough the iron gates of life. Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Who could decode this alchemy of love into its separate parts? Marvell, like Shakespeare in another context, is defending the interim; like Marlowe, he is confronting the deadline established by Eros and his coy resister; like Ben Jonson, he rarefies; and like Donne, he makes his private love into a cosmological affair. All these affinities in some sense lead to the model Milton provides, where the first marriage is allowed to expand in all the dimensions, including the fourth, of what Marvell called “the degree of knowledge.” Wanting too much coherence to arise from any particular theory is not the wisest purpose, yet it is hard to resist the temptation here. These poets all share a fascination with worlds in motion, and from this interest, in their different ways, they sustain and complicate their more studious metaphysics. As spokesmen for more common realities, they draw upon the pretechnological variety of the lives they lived so long ago. We should be instructed by Empson when he casually remarks, concerning Marvell’s “Damon the Mower”: “I do not know that any other poet has praised the smell of a farm hand.”3 This inscrutable metaphysical poet, this mind of a bicameral consciousness, was as pragmatic and political as anyone ever could be; yet the sharp realism Empson found is always metaphysically joined to a search for the more abstract idea. Intellectually, this was an era of natural magic and nascent modern science, of radical new politics and leftover ancient beliefs, an era of Sir Thomas Browne’s “divided and distinguished worlds.”4 Such was the condition of thought and poetic creation, that poets at their best were virtually forced to consider and express the ways their world was changing—often

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too quickly, certainly in the direction of modern science, and hence plagued by unforeseen puzzles over the nature of metaphysical understanding. With secret force, traditional religious attitudes continue to weigh upon any attempt to resolve such puzzles; and much later, in Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (1733–1734), we are not surprised to find a rationalized Christianity returning to sentiments not unlike those of an early modern Donne. Man seems never to escape the perils of his own powers, “whether he thinks too little, or too much.” Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus’d; Still by himself abus’d, or dis-abus’d; Created half to rise, and half to fall; Great Lord of all things. Yet a Prey to all; Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurl’d: The Glory, Jest, and Riddle of the World! (Epistle II, lines 13–18)

Nevertheless, despite a resounding ambiguity in the biblical “lord of all things,” despite the residual Catholicism coloring such verses, there persists even in Pope and certainly in more free-thinking philosophers, a shift toward rejecting the mere occult. With Locke, the distinction between subject and object, between secondary and primary qualities of the world and of our knowledge, there develops apace the ancient Lucretian thought that sensations like heat and cold are “in us,” not out there in the objects of perception, and hence we begin to separate the inner from the outer with increasing scientific rigor. Galileo’s The Assayer had foreseen this symptomatic modern development, nor would its message falter until the divorce reached certain extremes of Positivist dogma. If, as Galileo argued, our sensations “have no real existence except in ourselves,” the door opened to reveal the inevitably critical role that language would play in all discussions of whatever may be deemed objectively true. Our locutions and “vocables,” as he called them, abandon their earlier scholastic or incantatory roles, making possible a clear resistance to the occult, and since a materialist epistemology devolves from Galileo’s metaphoric saying that mathematics is the language of science, thinkers ever more fervently embrace the riddle wrought by this conjunction of mathematics and ordinary language. The bond between the two is figurative, to be sure. It suggests the most taxing problems of mental freedom, since fact and vision often appear radically opposed to each other.

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Does the scientific enterprise imply the death of art and poetic imagination? In principle, I have wished to suggest, that conflict need not supervene. Meanwhile the alignment of mathematics and ordinary language remains as obscure as when Galileo first commented upon their kinship, and to this day, perhaps more ominously than ever, we live within the shadow of their strange embrace. If there is no escape from the interaction of science and art, nor from a collision of the material and the ideal, we have every reason to pursue the interests of a lively, intense, moving metaphysics, for only through such metaphysical inquiry will we see how to balance the claims of both the imagined and the perceived. Poetry and science need at the very least to respect each other’s powers and concerns, so that we may come to understand their deeper purposes, not to say their shared implication that the idea of meaning itself must always change, as they move to occupy different spaces in our mental world. In recent years there has been much empty talk of the disappearance of the public intellectual, whereas the real problem is a general failure to recognize the private intellectual, the solitary thinker on whatever plane or station in society. Often societies collapse because they confuse material advantages with spiritual quest, measured technical control with understanding the world already around us, while uncritically endorsing the dogmas of organized religion. Many cultures, after all, refuse to examine the imaginative components of their religious faiths, with fatal authoritarian consequences. Under these conditions, it may be that only if we grasp the affiliating differences between art and science can we ever see who we, as thinkers, actually are. In the moment of perceiving those differences we are alerted to the nature of the human, which forcibly always involves an interest in the larger and more obscure metaphysical issues that no mechanism will neatly dislodge. Certainly there is no successful superficial bargain to be captured in the market of instrumental concepts; technological expansion is no answer to anything, by itself, let alone as the chief ally of war. There is no final, fixed, contractual Faustian escape; there is only the moving of our thoughts and feelings, as we allow their stabilizing motions to balance our way forward.

Notes Acknowledgments Index

Notes

Introduction 1. Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais, trans. Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). Among essay collections that I have found useful are the following: Margaret J. Osler and Paul L. Farber, eds., Religion, Science and Worldview: Essays in Honor of Richard S. Westfall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), especially the essays by Grant, Osler, Millen, and Ruestow; Stephen Pumfrey, Paolo L. Rossi, and Maurice Slawinski, eds., Science, Culture and Popular Belief in Renaissance Europe (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1991) especially the essays by Clark, Ernst, and Curry; Hilary Gatti, ed., Giordano Bruno: Philosopher of the Renaissance (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2002), especially the essays by Finocchiaro, Rowland, Gatti, Spruit, Mendoza, and Brown. Virtually all biographical study of Galileo, like the writings of Yates or Gatti on Giordano Bruno, will be found to introduce religious issues—none of which are simple, once one establishes the broad area of the problem of doctrinal authority. My sense of relations between literature, science, and religion between the 1560s and the mid-seventeenth century is that all of the important attitudes were in flux and turmoil. Margaret Osler (in Osler and Farber, Religion, Science and Worldview, 163) summarizes: “Many of the points of contention dividing these philosophies of nature were theological. . . . Each of the views was theologically problematic. The mechanical philosophy was perceived by some as leading to materialism and atheism.” These errors in turn were seen by many in the Church as undermining true doctrine. In this context, however, it is more than ever necessary to recall progressive Catholic responses when they occur. 2. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. R. M. Wallace (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), 234. 3. Ibid., 389. 4. Ibid., 390. 5. Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief, 400. 6. C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Litera-

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Notes to Pages 5–10 ture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 99. For background to transformations of this “image,” see Stephen Pumfrey, Paolo L. Rossi, and Maurice Slawinski, eds., Science, Culture, and Popular Belief in Renaissance Europe (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1991). This “Funerall Poeme” is found in The Works of Cyril Tourneur, ed. Allardyce Nicoll (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), 158–159. In the same volume, anyone concerned with Renaissance atheism will benefit from reading “The Atheist’s Tragedy.” W. R. Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 32. Hilary Gatti, “The Natural Philosophy of Thomas Harriot,” in Thomas Harriot: An Elizabethan Man of Science, ed. Robert Fox (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2000), 68. Gatti (77ff.) develops a portrait of Harriot as a “philosophical sceptic,” particularly in his treatment of Aristotle’s Physics, Book 6, on the nature of the infinite. Further, on Harriot, see John W. Shirley, Thomas Harriot: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983); and the important essays in John W. Shirley, ed., Thomas Harriot: Renaissance Scientist (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974). More generally, on religious backgrounds, see Margaret J. Osler and Paul L. Farber, eds., Religion, Science, and Worldview: Essays in Honor of Richard S. Westfall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Deep sources of religious and scientific conflict appear in all studies of Giordano Bruno, on whom, besides Frances Yates, the reader will need to consult especially Hilary Gatti, Giordano Bruno and Renaissance Science (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999); the essays in Hilary Gatti, ed., Giordano Bruno: Philosopher of the Renaissance (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2002); and Antoinette M. Paterson, The Infinite Worlds of Giordano Bruno (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1970). For a major text by Bruno on the infinite universe, see his Cause, Principle, and Unity; and Essays on Magic, trans. and ed. Robert de Lucca and Richard J. Blackwell, introd. Alfonso Ingegno (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957); Dudley Shapere, Galileo: A Philosophical Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); see also idem, Philosophical Problems of Natural Science (New York: Macmillan, 1965). A useful bibliographic aid for literary as well as scientific historians can be found appended to Steven Shapin’s splendid summary account, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), while perhaps the most vivid rendering of the climate of discovery is still to be found in Stillman Drake’s many articles and books on Galileo, which follow upon Alexandre Koyré’s pioneering Etudes Galiléennes (1940), in English as Galileo Studies, trans. John Mepham (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1978). See also Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968; orig. pub. 1957), ch. 4, “Things Never

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Seen Before and Thoughts Never Thought: The Discovery of New Stars in the World Space and the Materialization of Space” (88–109).

1. Galileo’s Metaphor 1. Galileo, The Assayer, excerpted in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, trans. and ed. Stillman Drake (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957), 237–238. To the extent that Galileo figures or tropes his physical theory, he must invent or evoke schematic models, which for him are always imagined in basically geometric or dynamic form. On problems of such troping, see Max Black, Models and Metaphors (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1962), 25–47. The critical literature on metaphor and scheme is large and labyrinthine. In Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being (New York: Basic Books, 2000), George Lakoff and Rafael E. Nuñez draw on their work in linguistics and cognitive science; they argue against the “Platonic” Fregean view of math as a permanent, transcendentally ideal system which humans can only “discover,” asserting instead that the “embodied mind” is biologically programmed to invent mathematical forms. Mind can do this, they hold, because its system is organized as a producer of conceptual metaphors. (The latter notion is not original with Lakoff and Nuñez.) The real difficulties here do not derive from believing that math and nature are inherently linked; rather—for my present purposes—they inhere in the fact that metaphor and its rhetorical theory, early and late, developed as a verbal process. Cognitive science is still a long way from showing how an enriched as opposed to a minimally competent language gets its form and force. The present chapter intends to illuminate the difficulties here, as much as to claim any final notion of what I call the “crossover” between math and ordinary language. In fact, to repeat the stance of the chapter, it is precisely the unstable crossover itself that inspires much of the energy of the new cultural manifold, in many different areas of life and thought. It may well turn out that we get a better idea of the interactions of language and thought, in their uses of metaphor, from Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971), 69–129, and from various works by Ernst Cassirer and Suzanne Langer on myth and symbol. Thinking of Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality (1929), where geometry is perceived as alive, I allude more than once to Whitehead in what follows, and here too there will be clarifications of crossover, on which see Isabelle Stengers, Penser avec Whitehead: Une Libre et sauvage création de concepts (Paris: Seuil, 2002). The late Gilles Châtelet presented the mathematized but essentially metaphoric activity required for the construction of theory; Châtelet’s difficult analysis may be summed in his statement: “One could even say that the radical thought experiment is an experiment where Nature and the Understanding switch places.” As a mathematician and philosopher of science, Châtelet says: “Galileo sometimes puts himself in Nature’s place”; we then get the basic condition of metaphoric response to the

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Notes to Pages 13–20 world, in that numbers and ratios (Galileo’s “language of science”) would be seen to “participate” (via methexis) in the external world. See Châtelet, Figuring Space: Philosophy, Mathematics, and Physics, trans. Robert Shore and Muriel Zagha (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000), 12. On the central Galilean issue of the uses of mathematics, see Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). For the English-speaking reader unable to consult the twenty-volume Italian edition of Galileo’s works, edited by Antonio Favaro, there is much to be gained from Stillman Drake’s two books, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo and Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography, where we gain an unfolding sense of the scientist’s remarkably varied writings on what the historian Peter Dear calls “physico-mathematics.” From these writings, as edited and analyzed by Drake, we get an impression of Galileo persistently returning to his analogy between mathematics and ordinary language. Italo Calvino, Why Read the Classics? trans. Martin McLaughlin (New York: Vintage, 2000), 85. Galileo, letter dated January 1641 to Fortunatio Liceti. For the correspondence, see Le Opere di Galileo Galilei: Edizione Nazionale, ed. Antonio Favaro (Florence: G. Barbera, 1890–1909; reissued 1968), vol. 10. Fred Kersten, Galileo and the Invention of Opera: A Study in the Phenomenology of Consciousness (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997). Eileen Reeves, Painting the Heavens: Art and Science in the Age of Galileo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Among other notable matters, Reeves comments throughout on the “secondary light” of the Moon. She does not discuss the Medicean Stars in detailed scientific terms. Stillman Drake, Galileo (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980), 2, 5–7. See also Galileo, Discoveries and Opinions, 145–172, on the Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina; and Stillman Drake, Essays on Galileo, vol. 1, ed. N. M. Swerdlow and T. H. Levere (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 153–166. Recent accounts of these conflicts are W. R. Shea and Mariano Artigas, Galileo in Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Pietro Redondi, Galileo Heretic, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). See also the recent works M. A. Finocchiaro, Retrying Galileo, 1633–1992 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); and Ernan McMullin, ed., The Church and Galileo (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005). The bibliography on Galileo’s encounter with Church resistance is—understandably, given the doctrinal and political issues involved—very large. See C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964). C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1959), originally published in New Statesman, 6 October 1956. We await a proper treatise on what I am calling “the two languages.” P. W. Bridgman, The Nature of Physical Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1936), ch. 3, “Thought, Language,” 16–32. James Gleick, Isaac Newton (New York: Vintage, 2003), 186, quoting from An-

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drew Motte’s 1729 translation of Newton’s Principia (rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1947), 8.

2. The Theme of Motion 1. The quoted phrase refers to Donald Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” in Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), 183–198. 2. Richard Sorabji, Matter, Space, and Motion: Theories in Antiquity and Their Sequel (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988). 3. Louis Elzevir, “The Publisher to the Reader,” in Galileo, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences (1638), trans. Henry Crew and Alfonso de Salvio (New York: Dover, 1954), xix–xxi. Elzevir virtually repeats the dialogue of the Third Day, where Galileo not only speaks of his “very new science dealing with a very ancient subject,” but also relates it to the acceleration of falling bodies (153). 4. Edwin A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, 2nd rev. ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1932; rpt. New York: Dover, 2003), 71. Mathematical truths, Kepler knew, were provable as such, but only within the deductive entailments of mathematics itself. However, Burtt argues that Kepler the associate of Tycho Brahe would depend conceptually on a “verification” afforded to pure mathematics, in this case through the astronomer’s modeling of “perceived motions.” Perception leads to mathematical design. Nature herself is once again a model mathematician whose workings clarify the laws of thought. We may imagine here a sense of geometric thinking that is at once “purer” than nature, but still not quite detached from the modeling of order and syntax that nature displays to the eye. 5. Jonathan Lear, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 55, and throughout his whole section on nature and change. In Mary L. Gill and James G. Lennox, eds., Self-Motion: From Aristotle to Newton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), there appears the important 1978 essay “Self Movers,” by David Furley, with other chapters on movement of animate beings and hence in the field of ethical decisions. My own essay “Winning the Initiative,” in Marshall Grossman, ed., Reading Renaissance Ethics (London: Routledge, 2007), shows how the political power to initiate self-movement was achieved by the use of Committees of the House in early seventeenth-century England. My title is from the 1924 British Academy Lecture by Wallace Notestein, “The Winning of the Initiative by the House of Commons”—an account, naturally enough, not without its later critics. Needless to say, the key idea of finding methods of autonomous self-starting is critical to any ethical reading of the ancient Aristotelian self-mover or of the divine “Unmoved Mover.” 6. James Clerk Maxwell, Matter and Motion (1877), ed. Joseph Larmor (New York: Dover, 1991), 18. An early manuscript note of Newton’s (quoted in James Gleick, Isaac Newton [New York: Vintage, 2003], 200): “Place (locus) is a part of

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9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Notes to Pages 24–45 space which something fills. . . . Body (corpus) is that which fills place. . . . Rest (quies) is remaining in the same place. . . . Motion (motu) is change of place.” The last is usually called local motion, or locomotion. Dudley Shapere, Galileo: A Philosophical Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 30, 31. Richard Feynman, Lectures on Physics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1963– 1965), vol. 1, ch. 7, secs. 1–8, “Theory of Gravitation.” Newton here (sec. 3) gets credit for the term “force,” as meaning “the only way to change the motion of a body.” On the latter conception, see P. C. W. Davies, The Forces of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), ch. 1, “Forces and Fields.” On gravity, see also Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965). Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963), 74. Ibid., 126. Ibid., 128. A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), 249. Giordano Bruno, The Ash Wednesday Supper (La Cena de le Ceneri), trans. and ed. Edward A. Gosselin and Lawrence S. Lerner (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 30. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 33. Dorothea Waley Singer, Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought (New York: Henry Schuman, 1950), 75. Stillman Drake, Essays on Galileo, vol. 3 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 128. For this text see Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, trans. and ed. Stillman Drake (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957), 173–216.

3. On Drama, Poetry, and Movement 1. I have used the Everyman edition of Hooker: Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 2 vols. (New York: Dutton, 1964–1965; orig. pub. 1907). The well-located reader should consult the magisterial edition edited by W. Speed Hill. The passage in question is Book 5, chapter 37, section 2. 2. Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, vol. 2, 146. 3. Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins, Arden edition (London: Methuen, 1982), 203, 136. 4. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, 3rd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992; orig. pub. London: Macmillan, 1904), Lecture 1. 5. Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1951), 32. For more formal essays on Stevens’ theme, see many pages in the critical works of John Hollander, beginning with his brilliant Re-

Notes to Pages 45–51

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naissance musical iconography, The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry, 1500–1700 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961; rpt. New York: Norton, 1970). In later books Hollander the poet as well as critic has shown how song and vision are twinned, as it were, in their powers and depth of inspiration. See on this theme his Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Melodious Guile: Fictive Pattern in Poetic Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); and finally, because it explicitly deals with the poem’s “articulate energy,” The Work of Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). Hallett Smith, Elizabethan Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), 267. D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1958; rpt. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 11. See also G. E. R. Lloyd, Magic, Reason and Experience: Studies in the Origins and Development of Greek Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). If we agree with Goethe that architecture is frozen music, we can proceed further along the lines drawn by Kenneth Gross in his book The Dream of the Moving Statue (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993; rpt. forthcoming, 2006). Gross studies the fantasy that poets and novelists have expressed—most notably through the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea—in which a cold marble statue is infused with the blush and movement of human life. This uncanny happening tests certain conceptions of love and passion, as these arise within the story of art, artist, and artistry. In brief, what does it mean to say that art can “bring someone to life in the story”? These lines are from the commendatory poem in the First Folio, entitled “To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author, Mr William Shakspeare, and What He Hath Left Us.” William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (New York: New Directions, 1951), 19. Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy, Volume 2: Medieval Philosophy from Augustine to Duns Scotus (New York: Doubleday, 1993), 340. David P. Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan: The Moral and Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 2–3. On motion as an extended rhetorical issue, see Lisa Jardine, Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 113. William Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550–1540 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 24. Ibid. “Of Diversion,” in the Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), 634–635. “Of Repentance,” ibid., 610. I quote from The Complete English Poems of John Donne, ed. C. A. Patrides, Everyman edition (London: Dent, 1985; rpt. 1991).

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Notes to Pages 52–65

17. Jonson, Ben Jonson, ed. Ian Donaldson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 506. 18. The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. Mckerrow (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), vol. 3, 33–34. 19. Jacob Burckhardt, Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen (Reflections on World History; 1905), quoted in Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind (London: Penguin, 1961), 67. 20. A. D. Nuttall, Timon of Athens (Boston: Twayne, 1989), 14.

4. Marlowe Invents the Deadline 1. D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1958; rpt. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 171–177. 2. A. D. Nuttall, The Alternative Trinity: Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe, Milton and Blake (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998). 3. Marc Bloch, quoted in Jacques Le Goff, Medieval Civilization, 400–1500 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2000), 174. 4. Nuttall, Alternative Trinity, 33. 5. Hannah Fenichel Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 285. 6. Quoted from the new Revels Plays edition of Doctor Faustus (includes both the AText and the B-Text of 1604 and 1616), ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1993). 7. William Bouwsma cites Daniel in The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550–1540 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 123. For the complete work, see Samuel Daniel, Poems and a Defence of Rhyme, ed. Arthur Colby Sprague (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1930; rpt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965). 8. Barber’s article, often reprinted, appeared in the remarkable Marlowe Issue of the Tulane Drama Review, 8, no. 4 (Summer 1964): 92–119. 9. Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, trans. James S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966). The relevant section is Appendix 8, “The Double Intentionality of the Stream of Consciousness,” 157– 160. Different conceptions of time are mentioned throughout my chapters, while the following readily available texts are useful for general orientation, especially since the three volumes listed have good bibliographies: G. J. Whitrow, What Is Time? with new introd. by J. T. Fraser and new bibliographic essay by J. T. Fraser and M. P. Soulsby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Robin Le Poidevin and Murray MacBeath, eds., The Philosophy of Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), which includes J. M. E. McTaggart’s classic essay, “The Unreality of Time”; and Robin Le Poidevin, Travels in Four Dimensions: The Enigmas of Space and Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). To connect ideas of time with the problem of language, see Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of

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10.

11. 12. 13.

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Symbolic Forms, Volume 1: Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), ch. 3, sec. 2, “The Representation of Time.” Tamburlaine, Part II (V.iii.224–227; 245–248). I quote from Christopher Marlowe, Complete Plays and Poems, ed. E. D. Pendry and J. C. Maxwell, Everyman edition (London: Dent, 1976), 120–121. Bevington and Rasmussen, Introduction, in Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, 31. Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 115. Ibid., 49–50.

5. The Defense of the Interim 1. David Crystal and Ben Crystal, Shakespeare’s Words: A Glossary and Language Companion (London: Penguin, 2002). In contrast to common modern usage, “temporal” is glossed in the old manner, as “secular, civil, worldly,” to fit phrases like “lords spiritual and temporal.” This phrase tells, in its wording, a major difference between then and now. 2. Coleridge on Shakespeare: The Text of the Lectures of 1811–12, ed. R. A. Fowkes (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 971), 105. 3. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). Lefebvre’s “monumental space” includes theatrical space (220–227). Physical space in the theater is designed to project what we may call psychological space, which in turn is largely a function of rhetoric in the drama. Although apparently subordinate to the paramount function of music and speech, physical space (let us say, in the Theater of Dionysus in ancient Athens) designs and develops its own visual, kinesthetic techniques of persuasion, and hence rhetoric; yet even with all the effects the drama displays, its central force seems to be projection of human or divine presence, as given through highly controlled gestures along a spectrum from active to passive. 4. Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. M. B. Vizedom and G. L. Caffee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). For further work along these lines, see Victor Turner, The Ritual Process (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), and numerous other studies; also Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973). 5. Saint Augustine, The Confessions, trans. F. J. Sheed, rev. ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993; orig. pub. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1943), Book XI, sec. 20. Subsequent references to this work will appear in parentheses in the text. 6. D. H. Mellor, Real Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Robin Le Poidevin, Travels in Four Dimensions: The Enigmas of Space and Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Robin Le Poidevin and Murray MacBeath, eds., The Philosophy of Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Time in such contexts is a matter of psychic values and ritual or social attributions of the “meaning” or the “function” of time. A physical scientist, by using clocks—even in-

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14.

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Notes to Pages 77–85 cluding the human pulse (as Galileo did)—dispenses with many of the metaphysical issues that so beset the philosophy of time. A. N. Whitehead, Modes of Thought (New York: Free Press, 1968), 79. Ibid. Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), 120. The lore and scholarship on ancient drama is of course vast. Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), “The Grain of the Voice,” 179–189. Pauline Kiernan, Shakespeare’s Theory of Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), ch. 10. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. W. R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 327. For Sidney Lee’s 1907 Renaissance Edition of Shakespeare’s Complete Works, James wrote an essay on The Tempest. The essay is reprinted in Henry James, Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Morris Shapira (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), 297– 310. For an extended critique of cultural materialism, including the views of Dollimore, Alan Sinfield, John Drakakis, Terry Eagleton, and various American scholars, see Graham Bradshaw, Misrepresentations: Shakespeare and the Materialists (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993). Nicholas Hilliard, The Arte of Limning, ed. R. K. R. Thornton and T. G. S. Cain (Manchester, U.K.: Carcanet, 1992), 54–55. In the mid-fifteenth century appeared the most important of Renaissance theoretical texts in this pictorial field: Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting (1435–1436), trans., introd., and notes by John R. Spencer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966). Alberti introduced a central role for the mathematics of pictorial art, as befits a chief discoverer of modern perspective, and he linked the geometry of the artwork to its powers of historia, in effect to its dramatistic powers. Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2000), 16–17. For an overview regarding Shakespearean language, style, and gesture, see David Scott Kastan, ed., A Companion to Shakespeare (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), chs. 14–18. Charles Lamb, “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Presentation,” in Lamb, Works, vol. 3, Critical Essays, ed. William Macdonald (London: Dent, 1903), 32. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 83–86. These examples of “Shakespeare and nature” (quoting seriatim Morgann, Beaumont, Heminge and Condell, Milton, Dryden, Rowe, Pope, and Johnson) are drawn from Frank Kermode, ed., Four Centuries of Shakespearian Criticism (New York: Avon, 1965). This anthology usefully illustrates the wide range of earlier critical opinion. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures: Representative Men, ed. Joel Porte (New

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23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

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York: Library of America, 1983), 721. The essay quoted is “Shakespeare; or, The Poet.” William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (New York: New Directions, 1960), 36. I quote from Dryden’s Preface as it appears in The Works of John Dryden, ed. Sir Walter Scott (London: William Miller, 1808), vol. 6, 238–266. Betterton spoke the Prologue “representing the ghost of Shakespeare,” reminding the audience, ominously, that “Dulness might thrive in any trade but this.” On the unusually turgid language of this play, see W. R. Elton, Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida” and the Inns of Court (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2000); and Kenneth Palmer in Troilus and Cressida, ed. Palmer, Arden Shakespeare 3rd Series (London: Routledge, 1994), 40–41, 58, 63. In Second World and Green World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), Harry Berger Jr. shows that Thersites is the chief “soliloquist and interpreter of the action,” whose “soliloquies have the effect of addresses to the audience: therefore they work to extend the logic of the play from the relation among characters to the relations between characters and audience” (140–141). Apemantus plays such a role in Timon of Athens; similar roles abound throughout the canon. Such crossing has the effect of merging the action and the audience, to debate a larger system of degree—that is, the system of social nature shared contrariously by actors and audience. Cynics may be called negative entertainers, who require audience permission; hence, rhetoric and poetic language are tested by soliloquy more than by any other mode of dramatic speech. A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, Lowell Lectures of 1925 (New York: New American Library, 1956), 8. T. S. Eliot, Introduction, in G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Sombre Tragedies (London: Methuen, 1930), xiii–xiv for all quotations. Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1925), 76. William R. Shea, Galileo’s Intellectual Revolution: Middle Period, 1610–1632 (New York: Neale Watson, n.d. [1972]), 35ff. on Di Grazia. Ibid. G. Wilson Knight, “On the Principles of Shakespearean Interpretation,” in The Wheel of Fire, 9–13. Ibid. David Shapiro, Neurotic Styles (New York: Basic Books, 1965), 119–120. The Freudian position regarding such “parodies” of cultural actions was that hysteria was the cultural parody of art—meaning not that Freud’s parallelism between art and neurosis covers all art, but that he envisaged the latter as a primarily mimetic process. T. S. Eliot, Essays on Elizabethan Drama (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960), 61. My article “Timon and the Death of Language,” in The Shakespearean International Yearbook (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2006), vol. 6, 349–365, argues that through a breakdown in defending the interim, Timon’s tragedy leads to the death of language itself, as curse replaces “discourse of reason.” Liminality in

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Notes to Pages 94–101 this way allows the poet to show how the mind and its thinking sustain a deep narcissistic wound, along with the breaking of speech.

6. Structure of an Epitaph 1. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994), chapter entitled “The Prose of the World.” 2. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 208–243. 3. John Reed, Through Alchemy to Chemistry (New York: Harper and Row, 1963). Alchemy takes its eccentric place in the evolution of theories of evidence, on which see James Franklin, The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability before Pascal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 131–227. On the metaphysical ambition of alchemists and its relation to the debate between art and nature, see, in addition to the Eliade work referred to below, William R. Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Useful articles on crossover between modern science and alchemy will be found in R. van den Broek and W. J. Hannegraaff, eds., Gnosis and Hermeticism from Antiquity to Modern Times (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1998). Music is actively a hermetic subject, as studied in Penelope Gouk, Music, Science, and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); and Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Music, like the other arts of the Renaissance, shares a complex involvement with cosmology, as reflected in Spenser’s Four Hymns honoring earthly and heavenly love and beauty, where we learn that “Love is a celestiall harmonie, / Of likely harts composd of stares concent, / Which joyne together in sweete sympathie, / To worke each others joy and true content” (“Hymne in Honour of Beautie,” lines 97–100). The reciprocal travel from heaven to earth gives magic power even to Love’s largely pagan authority. 4. Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible, trans. Stephen Corrin (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). 5. Reed, Through Alchemy to Chemistry, 119. 6. Ian Hacking, “The Autonomy of Statistical Law,” in Nicholas Resscher, ed., Scientific Explanation and Understanding (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1983). See also Hacking, The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 24, where Hacking observes that when physicians and alchemists made probable guesses, they contributed to “the evolving concepts that make our kind of probability possible.” 7. Reed, Through Alchemy to Chemistry, 41. 8. Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible, 45. 9. Ibid., 171, and all of ch. 15, “Alchemy and Temporality.” 10. Ibid., 174.

Notes to Pages 101–109

171

11. Ibid., 175. 12. Jacques Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 86–92, details uses of gesture in Purgatory. “Gesticulation reminded Christians of two things they abhorred and combated: the theater and possession by the devil” (86). 13. See Peter Dear, ed., The Scientific Enterprise in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). See also J. Henry, “Occult Qualities and the Experimental Philosophy in Pre-Newtonian Matter Theory,” History of Science, 24 (1986): 335–381. Newton’s interest in alchemy no longer surprises; it has been the subject of numerous studies. 14. B. J. T. Dobbs, “Newton’s Alchemy and His Theory of Matter,” in Dear, The Scientific Enterprise, 239. On the same general topic, see K. Figala and U. Petzold, “Alchemy in the Newtonian Circle: Personal Acquaintances and the Problem of the Late Phase of Newton’s Alchemy,” in J. V. Field and Frank A. J. L. James, eds., Renaissance and Revolution: Humanists: Scholars, Craftsmen and Natural Philosophers in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 173–192. 15. Margaret Osler, “Galileo, Motion, and Essences,” in Dear, The Scientific Enterprise, 109. 16. Ibid., 108. 17. Ibid., 110. Osler concludes: “Galileo’s work, which reflects the transition from medieval to modern science in so many ways, also represents a transition from essentialist to nonessentialist assumptions about the nature of scientific inquiry.” 18. Jonathan Lear, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 64. 19. Keith Hutchison, in Dear, The Scientific Enterprise, 85–106: “What Happened to Occult Qualities in the Scientific Revolution?” When medieval thinkers failed to see that invisibility did not necessarily mean unintelligibility, they left the way open for occult causes to become magic secrets. Early modern science—for example, dealing with gravity—took exactly the opposite view: that the invisible force did not lack effects, indeed suggested strongly to Galileo and others that this occulted truth about nature had to imply the power of mathematics to illuminate natural process. Hutchison’s argument reverses the role of the occult, and thus preserves it in a new way: mathematics replaces mystery, as we might express the shift. No transition of beliefs and intellectual procedures could be metaphysically more important for imaginative authors, who in a sense had always dealt lucidly in secret causes. 20. Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory [1916] (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1961). Einstein (166–167) notes the psychological revolution required for a mechanical Newtonian system to be replaced by James Clerk Maxwell’s equations, which in effect turned optics into an electromagnetic science. Einstein considers Maxwell to be of the highest importance for modern physics, as well as essential to Relativity Theory, owing to Maxwell’s develop-

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21. 22.

23. 24.

Notes to Pages 109–117 ment of the concept of field, which had been only a vague idea in earlier centuries. That poets have often thought in terms of field is clear from their development of atmosphere and ambience in almost all the great literature and drama. Yet theirs was only (if we may so reduce things with this “only”) a hallucinated vision of worlds that would someday be known more exactly and more intimately to mankind, after the sacred mysteries surrounding a prior ignorance were removed. For this change to occur, as Gordon Teskey has written in his Delirious Milton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), there would have to be a complete revision, if not reversal, of the way we imagine the Creation of the World, which had to include all its mathematized attributes of universal motion. Hutchison, “What Happened to Occult Qualities in the Scientific Revolution?” 87, quoting Daniel Sennert. Ibid., 92. Hutchison’s revealing interpretation of the occult in early modern science indicates a period of ambivalent attitudes. On the one hand, hidden qualities and causations were seen as an attribute of ultimate mystery, while on the other hand “these innovators openly argued that the ability to accommodate occult qualities was one of the signs of the superiority of their new science” (ibid., 95). Occult and manifest eventually entered upon a workable communication, according to this vision of science, so that Walter Charleton in 1654 could write chapters entitled “Occult Qualities Made Manifest” and “Manifest Qualities Made Occult” (ibid., 97). Newton’s interest in alchemy would be a case of such communication between the open and the hidden. Ibid., 95. Ibid. Hutchison quotes from Descartes, Principia Philosophia.

7. Donne’s Apocryphal Wit 1. The Complete English Poems of John Donne, ed. C. A. Patrides, Everyman edition (London: Dent, 1985; rpt. 1991), 46–49. 2. The Sermons of John Donne, ed. E. M. Simpson and G. R. Potter, 10 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953–1962), vol. 7, 271. 3. Ibid., vol. 8, 228. 4. Ibid., 224. 5. Ibid., vol. 7, 307. 6. Ibid., vol. 6, 301. 7. F. R. Johnson, Astronomical Thought in Renaissance England (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1937), 4. One index among many signaling English astronomic advances is Thomas Digges, Perfit Description of the Caelestiall Orbes (London, 1576), where Digges became, as Thomas Kuhn says, “the first to describe an infinite Copernican universe” (Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957], 233). This infinity of worlds soon became the hallmark of Giordano Bruno’s heretical conjectures, which of course turned out to be conceptually on target for the vast numbers of galaxies and stars in the universe.

Notes to Pages 117–127

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

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On Bruno’s connection to the publisher Charlewood, see Tiziana Provvidera, “John Charlewood, Printer of Giordano Bruno’s Italian Dialogues, and His Book Production,” in Hilary Gatti, ed., Giordano Bruno: Philosopher of the Renaissance (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2002), 167–186. Ibid., 36. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution, 243–244. Frank Kermode, Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne: Renaissance Essays (New York: Viking, 1971), 121–122. Joseph A. Mazzeo, Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), chapter entitled “Notes on Donne’s Alchemical Imagery,” 89. The aesthetic of such imagery, as Pallavicino said, “consists in the marvelous” (56), and in the late sixteenth century almost always involves theatrical effects, as in the Court masque. Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in the Renaissance (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963), 93. Ibid., 68. “Of the Inconsistency of Our Actions,” in Montaigne: Selected Essays, rev. and ed. Blanchard Bates from the translation by Charles Cotton and William Hazlitt (New York: Modern Library, 1949), 108–109. The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, trans. John Florio, World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1910), vol. 2, 3. Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos, 126. Ibid., 128. Gosson is now available in an Elibron reprint, but also in G. Gregory Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays (London: Oxford University Press, 1967). A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), 249. E. A. Gosselin and L. S. Lerner, in Giordano Bruno, The Ash Wednesday Supper, ed. and trans. Gosselin and Lerner (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 30. Bruno, in his Third Dialogue, rejects the authoritative status of circular motions of celestial bodies. See Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 244. Bruno, The Ash Wednesday Supper, 33. Dorothea Waley Singer, Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought (New York: Henry Schuman, 1950), 75. The volume includes Bruno’s treatise On the Infinite Universe and Worlds (De l’infinito universo et mondi; 225–380). T. S. Eliot, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, ed. Ronald Schuhard (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1996), 10. Ibid., 142. Ibid., 191. See Angus Fletcher, “Complexity and the Spenserian Myth of Mutability,” Literary Imagination, 6, no. 1 (2004): 1–22. Also, for a more extended current literary/scientific discussion, see idem, A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), esp. ch. 11, “Meditating Chaos and Complexity.” William Empson, Essays on Renaissance Literature, vol. 1: Donne and the New Philos-

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27. 28. 29. 30.

Notes to Pages 127–139 ophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), especially Haffenden’s comments on the astronomy of the period (34–39). Ibid., 81. Digges is quoted in Empson, “Thomas Digges His Infinite Universe,” ibid., 219. Empson, “On Donne’s Foresight,” ibid., 204. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997; orig. pub. 1971), 349–357.

8. Milton and the Moons of Jupiter 1. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural world: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500– 1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 167. 2. E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Chatto and Windus, 1952). 3. Ibid., 13. 4. Ibid., 99. 5. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Gordon Teskey (New York: Norton, 2005), VIII.125. Subsequent references to this edition will appear in parentheses in the text. 6. Galileo, Sidereus Nuncius, or The Sidereal Messenger, trans. and ed. Albert van Helden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 64. 7. Ibid., 24. 8. On the current state of research, see Reta Beebe, Jupiter: The Giant Planet (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997). 9. See Stillman Drake, Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography (New York: Dover, 1995), 145–169. 10. Galileo, Sidereus Nuncius, 84. 11. Ibid., 85, note 95. 12. Draft quoted from Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, 2nd ed. (London: Longman’s, 1998), 3. 13. Ibid. 14. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). 15. A. D. Nuttall, The Alternative Trinity: Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe, Milton, and Blake (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 85. See Nuttall’s discussion of the “homologated” similes. 16. Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 244, note 3, quoting Alexandre Koyré to the effect that Bruno’s universe remains vitalistic, magical, animistic: “his planets are animated beings that move freely through space of their own accord, like those of Plato or Patrizi.” In that respect Bruno is not at all a modern thinker, but his speculation regarding the infinite extension of the universe is definitely modern in its tendency.

Notes to Pages 139–154

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17. See Frances Yates, Theatre of the World (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969). Also John Dee on Astronomy: Propaedeumata Aphoristica (1558 and 1568), trans. Wayne Shumaker, introduction by J. L. Heilbrun (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 18. Thomas Levinson, Einstein in Berlin (New York: Bantam, 2003), 15. 19. The Works of Samuel Johnson, First Complete American Edition, 2 vols. (New York: Alexander V. Blake, 1843), vol. 2, 42. 20. Adonis: Selections from the Adone of Giambattista Marino, trans. H. M. Priest (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967), 190. 21. See Frank Manuel, Isaac Newton: Historian (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), ch. 5 (“The Primitive Sphere of the Argonauts”), 78–88. 22. Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory [1916] (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1961), 16–17. The fundamental question of “simultaneity” opens a conceptual door leading beyond the Newtonian mechanical universe. On simultaneity versus relativity, see, among various sources, Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps (New York: Norton, 2003), 19–23. 23. Plato, The Sophist, trans. with commentary by Seth Benardete (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 255A–256B. 24. Galileo, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican, trans. Stillman Drake, Foreword by Albert Einstein, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), xv. 25. Einstein, Foreword, ibid., xv.

Conclusion 1. Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science: 1300–1800, rev. ed. (New York: Collier, 1962), 15. 2. Gerald Holton, Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought: Kepler to Einstein (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), 431. 3. William Empson, Using Biography (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 15. Empson the realist is only one issue; work needs to be done on his mathematical training and his verbal equations. Alastair Fowler’s studies of Renaissance numerology are well known, but for a daring and illuminating critique that shares my own rather different path, see Barbara M. Fisher, Noble Numbers, Subtle Words (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998). 4. Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici and Other Works, ed. L. C. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), 33 (sec. 34). Browne is giving a synopsis of the spiritual and physical life of humans, concluding thus: “Man is that great and true Amphibium, whose nature is disposed to live not onely like other creatures in divers elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds.”

Acknowledgments

My gratitude for help with this book goes especially to the distinguished poet and scholar John Hollander, not only for his own critical writings, but in particular for detailed suggestions regarding my argument. Professor O. Bradley Bassler of the University of Georgia steered me away from pitfalls in the history of mathematics and science, and I am most grateful to him for all his help and encouragement. Marie-Rose Logan, Professor of English at Soka University and the learned editor of Annals of Scholarship, inspired me to make certain critical comments on the work of Montaigne. Maria Ascher provided expert assistance in preparing my text, and as always I can hardly begin to say how pleased I am to acknowledge the support and advice of Lindsay Waters, Humanities Editor at Harvard University Press. Several chapters of this book began life long ago, in lectures at SUNY Buffalo; I always remember Bruce Jackson’s enthusiasm for Ben Jonson, one among many encouragements I received while teaching in Buffalo. The present moment is of course what counts, and there it is easy to record my chief debt—to my dear wife, Michelle, to whom this book is most affectionately dedicated.

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Index

Adams, Henry, 5 Agrippa, Cornelius, 110 Aquinas, Thomas, 50, 136 Archimedes, 105 Aristarchus, 144 Aristotle, 9, 20, 22, 24–26, 34, 38, 41–43, 47, 49–50, 69, 78, 88, 90–91, 106–109, 132, 134, 136 Auden, W. H., 46 Auerbach, Erich, 81 Augustine, Saint, 76–78 Ayer, A. J., 57 Bachelard, Gaston, 99 Bacon, Francis, 2–3, 16, 51, 139 Ballard, J. G., 58 Barber, C. L., 62 Barrault, Jean-Louis, 44 Bartas, Guillaume du, 136 Barthes, Roland, 80 Beaumont, Francis, 84 Bellarmine, Robert, 33 Benjamin, Walter, 56 Bloch, Marc, 57 Bloom, Harold, 54 Blumenberg, Hans, 2–3 Bodin, Jean, 50, 56 Bouwsma, William, 50–51 Bradley, A. C., 43–44, 89 Brecht, Bertolt, 130 Bridgman, P. W., 19

Browne, Thomas, 154 Bruno, Giordano, 7, 9, 30, 117, 121–123, 129, 139, 146 Burckhardt, Jacob, 53 Burke, Kenneth, 52 Burtt, E. A., 21 Butterfield, Herbert, 152 Calvino, Italo, 13 Camoens, Luis de, 142 Carew, Thomas, 9 Cassirer, Ernst, 28–29, 119–120, 121 Chaliapin, Feodor, 42 Chapman, George, 5, 9, 56 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 99 Cokayne, Aston, 115 Coleridge, S. T., 71, 88, 103 Colley, Grant, 127 Collier, J. P., 71 Columbus, Christopher, 130 Condell, Henry, 84 Copernicus, Nicholas, 16, 144, 149–150 Copleston, Frederick, 50 Cotton, Charles, 120 Crystal, David and Ben, 70 Daniel, Samuel, 61 Dante Alighieri, 73, 87, 124–125 Darwin, Charles, 16 Davies, John, 132 Dee, John, 139

177

178

Index

De Man, Paul, 56 De Quincey, Thomas, 53 Descartes, René, 130 Dickens, Charles, 96 Digges, Thomas, 11, 117, 118, 128 Dobbs, B. J. T., 106 Donne, John, 2, 9, 19, 51–52, 112, 113– 129, 142, 149 Drake, Stillman, 13, 16, 32, 147 Drummond, William, 52, 125 Drury, Elizabeth, 125–126 Dryden, John, 84, 86 Einstein, Albert, 27, 139, 144, 146, 152 Eliade, Mircea, 98–99, 100–102 Eliot, T. S., 87, 93, 124–125 Elizabeth I (queen), 5, 132 Elzevir, Louis, 22–23 Emerson, R. W., 85 Empson, William, 14, 47–48, 81, 127–128 Febvre, Lucien, 1–2, 3 Feynman, Richard, 25–27 Ficino, Marsilio, 47 Florio, John, 120 Foucault, Michel, 95 Freud, Sigmund, 40 Frye, Northrop, 78 Galilei, Galileo, 7, 10–11, 12–20, 22–25, 27, 32, 33–34, 49, 50, 88, 91–92, 105– 107, 110, 114, 117, 129, 130–151, 155 Galilei, Vincenzio, 15, 45 Gama, Vasco de, 147 Gassendi, Pierre, 32, 130 Gatti, Hilary, 9 Gauthier, David, 50 Gennep, Arnold van, 73–74 Gilbert, William, 126 Glauber, Rudolf, 100 Goodman, Paul, 97 Gosselin, E. A., 30, 122 Gosson, Stephen, 29, 122 Grazia, Vincenzo di, 88 Greene, Robert, 68 Guicciardini, Francesco, 50

Hacking, Ian, 100 Haffenden, John, 127 Harriot, Thomas, 9, 56, 117–118, 139 Harvey, Gabriel, 52 Harvey, William, 7, 30, 50, 132 Helden, Albert van, 135, 136 Heminge, John, 84 Hermes Trismegistus, 8 Herschel, William, 139 Hilliard, Nicholas, 82 Hobbes, Thomas, 50 Hollander, John, 46 Holton, Gerald, 152 Hooke, Robert, 7 Hooker, Richard, 36–37 Huizinga, Johan, 29, 122 Hutchins, Edwin, 143 Hutchison, Keith, 109–111 Jacobson, Roman, 14 James, Henry, 56 Jenkins, Harold, 39 Johnson, F. R., 117 Johnson, Samuel, 58, 84, 140–141 Jonson, Ben, 37, 46, 47, 53, 81–82, 84, 85, 95–112, 151 Kepler, Johannes, 3, 17, 24, 111, 136, 149 Kermode, Frank, 82–83, 118 Kiernan, Pauline, 80 Knight, G. W., 71–72, 87, 89 Koyré, Alexandre, 123 Kubrick, Stanley, 141 Kuhn, Thomas, 10, 43, 116, 118 Lamb, Charles, 83 Langland, William, 119 Latham, Agnes, 46 Lear, Jonathan, 24 Lefebvre, Henri, 72 Le Goff, Jacques, 66–67 Leibniz, G. W., 130 Lerner, L. S., 30, 122–123 Lewis, C. S., 5, 17 Locke, John, 155 Lotman, Yuri, 100

Index Lovejoy, A. O., 29 Lucretius, 87, 136, 155 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 50, 57–58 Marceau, Marcel, 44 Marino, Giambattista, 142 Marlowe, Christopher, 10, 16, 23, 37, 55– 69, 72, 74, 122, 149–150 Marvell, Andrew, 46, 153–154 Mattingly, Garrett, 114 Maxwell, J. C., 24, 109, 146, 152 Mazzeo, J. A., 118 Medici, Cosimo de, 135, 142 Milton, John, 85–86, 119, 130–151 Montaigne, Michel de, 50–51, 65, 71, 120 Morgann, Maurice, 84 Morley, Thomas, 46 Nashe, Thomas, 52–53 Newman, William, 8 Newton, Isaac, 10, 20, 27, 32, 130, 144, 147, 149, 152 Nicholson, Marjorie, 10, 127 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 119 North, Thomas, 117 Nuttall, Anthony, 53–54, 57, 139 Olivier, Lawrence, 39 Osler, Margaret, 106 Ovid, 13, 121

Reed, John, 99 Reeves, Eileen, 15 Rey, Abel, 3 Richards, I. A., 14, 81 Rogers, John, 30, 123 Rorty, Richard, 4–5 Royal Society, 35, 150 Sennert, Daniel, 110 Shakespeare, William, 4, 10, 12, 16, 23, 37, 39–44, 53–54, 63–64, 70–94, 149 Shapere, Dudley, 10, 21 Shapiro, David, 93 Shea, W. R., 88 Singer, Dorothea, 30 Smith, Hallett, 45–46 Snow, C. P., 16, 18 Sorabji, Richard, 22 Spenser, Edmund, 71, 120, 135 Sprat, Thomas, 35 Stevens, Wallace, 37, 45 Strachey, Lytton, 44 Tartaglia, Niccolò, 32 Tennyson, Alfred, 6 Teskey, Gordon, 149 Thomas, Keith, 128, 130 Tillyard, E. M. W., 131–132 Tourneur, Cyril, 5–6 Ulanova, Galina, 31

Pascal, Blaise, 51 Pico, Giovanni (della Mirandola), 28–29 Plato, 119, 144 Plutarch, 117 Pomponazzi, Pietro, 28 Pope, Alexander, 85, 87, 116, 150, 155 Proust, Marcel, 77 Pseudo-Dionysius (Dionysius the Areopagite), 144 Ptolemy, Claudius, 144, 150 Pythagoras, 24, 37–38 Racine, Jean, 74 Raleigh, Walter, 56, 139 Ramsey, Frank, 14

179

Vere, Francis, 5–6 Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 79 Walker, D. P., 8, 56 Whitehead, A. N., 78, 87 Whitrow, G. J., 68 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 83–84 Wilde, Oscar, 103 Wind, Edgar, 29, 122 Woolf, Virginia, 77–78, 87–88, 89 Wordsworth, William, 149 Wotton, Henry, 134 Yates, Frances, 8, 118, 123