Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
May 2008
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008aas...212.9708u&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #212, #97.08; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 40, p.273
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
In Shakespeare's Hamlet, Prince Hamlet states, "I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw." This celebrated yet perennially baffling passage is readily understood in the context of the cosmic allegorical interpretation of the play (BAAS 28, 1305, 1996; Hamlet's Universe, 2006). The first direction points from Tycho Brahe's observatory on Hven to the fictional home of the geocentric Pyolemaic worldview at Elsinore, and the second from Hven to the home of Copernican heliocentricism at Wittenberg. The directions correspond to the two influences on Tycho's geo-heliocentric World model. Anyone at Elsinore who advocates the new organon of the New Philosophy is "mad," whereas sanity prevails at Wittenberg. "Hawk" refers to a bird of prey, the leonard, and to Leonard Digges, inventor of the world's first two-element telescope. "Handsaw" refers to the artistic tool necessary to sever the hands depicted in de Gheyn's two quasi-mirror-imaged portraits of Tycho at age 40, which show hands affixed to the wrong arms. Elsewhere in Hamlet, Shakespeare substantiates the New Astronomy through descriptions of planets and stars that could only have been determined telescopically. Therefore, the passage in question contrasts two modes of observing in the early modern era, viz. visual and telescopic. Shakespeare completed writing Hamlet in about 1601 and the Second Quarto appeared in 1604, so the first substantial account of astronomical telescopy is now over 400 years old. In addition, 432 years ago Thomas Digges published the first account of the New Astronomy in a popular almanac. These two means of presentation may seem odd by present standards, but contemporary culture was intolerant of 'natural magic,' and furthermore, it was prudent to minmize the risk of domestic persecution and threats from Continental armies and the European and Spanish Inquisitions.
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