Abstract
In the mid-1960s, Harlow Shapley (1885–1972), a renowned astronomer, observatory director and author, wrote of G-d’s interrogation of Job in Chapter 38 of the Book of Job. “This is no elementary quiz … I would call it a swift-moving doctoral oral.”1 To this ancient parable, Shapley gives a 1960s’ interpretation: a tortured man struggling to understand his relation to the cosmos. “Were you there,” the Almighty demands, “when I created the stars of the Pleiades or Orion?”2 The creation of a star is one of the most beautiful and violent events that our galaxy has to show. A long period of dark, impenetrable cloudiness is followed by a flash as the ignition of the nascent star takes place and begins nuclear fusion, which is the primary course of action of a star. At the end of the process of birth, the new star’s surrounding nebulosity, called a Bok globule after the astronomer Bart J. Bok (1906–1983), evaporates.
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Notes
Harlow Shapley, Beyond the Observatory (New York: Scribner, 1967), 143.
Thomas Digges, “A Perfit Description of the Cœlestial Orbes … by Geometricall Demonstrations approved,” in Leonard Digges, A Prognostication Euerlastinge of Right Good Effect (London: Imprinted by Thomas Marsh, 1576), unnumbered pages.
Hilary Gatti, Essays on Giordano Bruno (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). See particularly her essay, “Bruno and Shakespeare: Hamlet,” 140–160.
For more on the arrest, trial and execution of Bruno, see Gatti, Essays on Giordano Bruno, 309–333; Ingrid D. Rowland, Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008); Francis Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), and Dorothea Singer, Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought (New York: H. Schuman, 1950). Hilary Gatti also edited an excellent collection of essays on Bruno in her Giordano Bruno: Philosopher of the Renaissance (London: Ashgate, 2002). See also in this collection Pietro Daniel Omodeo’s details on Bruno’s theories, his interests and views in “Heliocentrism, Plurality of Worlds and Ethics: Anton Francesco Doni and Giodano Bruno.” See also Omodeo’s discussion of Bruno in Copernicus in the Cultural Debates of the Renaissance. Reception, Legacy, Transformation (Brill, 2014).
William Bourne, Inventions or Deuices. Very necessary for all Generalles and Captaines, or Leaders of men, as wel by Sea as by Land: Written by William Bourne. An. 1578 (London: For Thomas Woodcock dwelling in Paules Churchyard, at the signe of the black Beare, [1590?]).
Donald K. Yeomans, Comets: A Chronological History of Observation, Science, Myth, and Folklore (New York: John Wiley, 1991), 416.
Allan Chapman, “Thomas Harriot: The First Telescopic Astronomer,” Journal of the British Astronomical Association 118.6 (December 2008), 322.
Nick Pelling, “Who Invented the Telescope?” History Today 58.10 (2008), 26–31.
Scott Maisano, “Shakespeare’s Last Act: The Starry Messenger and the Galilean Book in Cymbeline,” Configurations 12 (2004), 404.
Donald W. Olson and Marilyn S. Olson and Russell L. Doescher, “The Stars of Hamlet,” Sky and Telescope 96.5 (1998), 68. See also Shakespeare’s Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, Arden Shakespeare Series (London: Thomson Learning, 2006), 1.1.35n35.
James Joyce, Ulysses (1922; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 210.
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© 2016 David H. Levy with Judy A. Hayden
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Levy, D.H., Hayden, J.A. (2016). An English Renaissance Astronomy Club? Shakespeare, Observation and the Cosmos. In: Hayden, J.A. (eds) Literature in the Age of Celestial Discovery. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-56803-8_4
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