Scholars are only figuring out lately that William Shakespeare, through his plays like
Hamlet that he wrote way back almost a generation before the Age of Enlightenment in Europe, had already embraced the world of science and so was able to create poetic worlds that reflect deeply and philosophically on scientific insights and their human implications.
This finding was presented by Natalie Elliot, tutor at the St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in “Shakespeare’s Worlds of Science,” an article published in the Winter 2018 issue of
The New Atlantis Journal.
Elliot writes: “Shakespeare takes up references to the morbid art (of death), and to other new discoveries, to show that when scientific investigations yield new ideas about nature, what ensues is an altered relation to ourselves. Shakespeare explores the philosophical, psychological, and cultural impact of many more scientific fields besides human anatomy, reflecting poetically on theories about germs, atoms, matter, falling bodies, planetary motion, heliocentrism, alchemy, the humors, algebra, Arabic numerals, Pythagorean geometry, the number zero, and the infinite. The inquiries that drove Renaissance science, and the universe it disclosed, are deeply integrated into Shakespeare’s poetic worlds."
Read “Shakespeare’s Worlds of Science” in the Winter 2018 issue of The New Atlantis Journal now!Check out a related 2014 reading in the Forum, “Aside from plays and poetry, did Shakespeare also dabble in sci-fi?”, and this 2013 reading, “Shakespeare wasn’t just a literary giant but also a hard-headed businessman.”
