Infinities and Infinitesimals: Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Jarrett, Joseph

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-26566-3_5

Joseph Jarrett⁴

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine ((PLSM))

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Abstract

This chapter considers how the infinitely large and the infinitely small permeate the language and structure of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It argues that the play is subtly embroiled with the mathematical implications of Copernican cosmography and its Brunian atomistic extension, and offers a potential linkage between the social circles of Shakespeare and Thomas Harriot. Hamlet, it goes on to suggest, courts such ideas at the cutting-edge of contemporary science in order to complicate the ontological context within which Hamlet’s revenge act must take place.

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Notes

1.
Alain Badiou, Theoretical Writings, ed. and trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 32.
2.
Friedrich Schlegel, in The Romantics on Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Bate (London: Penguin, 1992; repr. 1997), pp. 307–11 (pp. 307–308).
3.
Eliot wrote: ‘Few critics have ever admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary problem, and Hamlet the character is only secondary’, in ‘Hamlet’, in Selected Essays (London: Faber, 1999), pp. 141–46 (p. 141).
4.
Schlegel, in Romantics on Shakespeare, p. 307.
5.
Ibid., p. 308.
6.
See Crane, Losing Touch, pp. 131–47; and Turner, The English Renaissance Stage, pp. 155–85.
7.
See Amir Alexander, Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World (New York: Scientific American and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), p. 17.
8.
See Morris Kline, Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 32.
9.
Ibid., p. 35.
10.
Aristotle, Physics, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996; repr. 2008). All citations from the Physics are from this edition. Section and line numbers are given parenthetically within the text.
11.
Kline, Mathematical Thought, p. 36.
12.
See, for instance, the disagreement between David Bostock, ‘Aristotle, Zeno, and the Potential Infinite’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 73 (1972–73), 37–51; and William Charlton, ‘Aristotle’s Potential Infinites’, in Aristotle’s Physics: A Collection of Essays, ed. Lindsay Judson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 129–50.
13.
The consecutive pages are found in BL, Add. MS 6782, fols 362^r–375^r. A few of these pages are not headed ‘De Infinitis’ but their subject matter and positioning clearly align them with those that are. Other pages headed ‘De Infinitis’ are found at BL, Add. MS 6784, fol. 429^r; and BL, Add. MS 6785, fols 190^r–190^v, fol. 436^r.
14.
BL, Add. MS 6782, fols 362^r, 367^r.
15.
Ibid., fol. 365^r.
16.
Gatti, The Renaissance Drama of Knowledge, p. 58.
17.
BL, Add. MS 6782, fol. 368^r.
18.
Ibid., fol. 369^r.
19.
Robert Kargon, Atomism in England from Hariot to Newton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p. 24.
20.
BL, Add. MS 6786, fol. 349^v.
21.
Stephen Clucas, ‘Thomas Harriot and the field of knowledge in the English Renaissance’, in Thomas Harriot: An Elizabethan Man of Science, pp. 93–136 (p. 100).
22.
Gatti, The Renaissance Drama of Knowledge, p. 60.
23.
Alfonso Ingegno, ‘The New Philosophy of Nature’, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, Eckhard Kessler and Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 236–63 (p. 254).
24.
Gatti, Giordano Bruno, p. 117.
25.
BL, Add. MS 6782, fol. 374^v.
26.
BL, Add. MS 6785, fol. 436^r.
27.
Kargon, Atomism in England, p. 25.
28.
BL, Add. MS 6785, fol. 436^r.
29.
BL, Add. MS 6789, fol. 460^r.
30.
Ibid.
31.
BL, Add. MS 6782, fol. 369^r. My emphasis.
32.
Ibid., fol. 374^v.
33.
See John Dee’s Library Catalogue, ed. Julian Roberts and Andrew G. Watson (London: Bibliographical Society, 1990).
34.
Charles B. Schmitt, John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1983), p. 142.
35.
See Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve (London: Vintage, 2012), p. 243; and Robin Robbins, ‘Poets, Friends, and Patrons: Donne and Jonson’, in A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Hattaway, 2 vols (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), I, pp. 221–47 (p. 234).
36.
Jonathan Gil Harris, ‘Atomic Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Studies 30 (2002), 47–51.
37.
Walter Raleigh, History of the World (London, 1614), D3^v.
38.
Hilton Kelliher, ‘Manuscript Extracts from Henry IV, Part I’, in English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700, Vol. 1, ed. Peter Beal and Jeremy Griffiths (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 144–81.
39.
Laurie Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The ‘Bad’ Quartos and their Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 125–35; Clucas, ‘Thomas Harriot and the Field of Knowledge’, pp. 129–35.
40.
See Clucas, ‘Thomas Harriot and the Field of Knowledge’, pp. 129–35.
41.
See BL, Harley MS 6848, fols 183–90.
42.
Kelliher, ‘Manuscript Extracts from Henry IV, Part I’, p. 149.
43.
Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts, p. 127.
44.
Kelliher, ‘Manuscript Extracts from Henry IV, Part I’, p. 167.
45.
Ibid., p. 168.
46.
Ibid.
47.
Crane, Losing Touch, p. 134.
48.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Arden, 2006). This edition is based upon the 1604 quarto (Q2), but prints additions that appear only in the Folio (F) as appendices. In this chapter only, all citations from Hamlet are not from The Norton Shakespeare but from this Arden edition, unless stated otherwise. Act, scene and line numbers are given parenthetically within the text. If preceded by an ‘F’, this demarcates a reference to the Folio line numbers.
49.
After the instance in Hamlet, the OED cannot find another example until 1699.
50.
Brian Melbancke, Philotimus (London, 1583), p. 185; Garrard, The Arte of Warre, Nn1^v.
51.
Philip Barrough, The Methode of Phisicke (London, 1583), ∗2^v; Anthony Munday, The First Booke of Primaleon of Greece (London, 1595), p. 46.
52.
Suggested in, for example, Scott Maisano, ‘Infinite Gesture: Automata and the Emotions in Descartes and Shakespeare’, in Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life, ed. Jessica Riskin (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 63–84.
53.
Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie (London, 1586), R2^r.
54.
Ibid., C4⁴, D4^v, C8^v.
55.
Ibid., D7^r–D7^v, C4^r; Polonius seems to understand such a relationship when he professes to ‘know / When the blood burns, how prodigal the soul / Gives the tongue vows’ (1.3.114–16).
56.
Ibid., E1^v.
57.
Ibid., E2^r–E2^v.
58.
Ibid., E2^v.
59.
This is how Thomson and Taylor gloss the passage.
60.
Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 177.
61.
See, for instance, Edward Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200–1687 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 422–87.
62.
Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution, especially pp. 185–228.
63.
John Donne, An Anatomy of the World (London, 1611), B1^r.
64.
See John Donne, ed. Janel Mueller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 423–24.
65.
Donne, Anatomy, B1^r.
66.
Curiously, modern astronomers have suggested that the star Barnardo points to in the play’s first scene (‘yond same star that’s westward from the pole’ [1.1.35]) may have referred to the supernova in Cassiopeia in 1572, which was first spotted at Wittenberg.
67.
See Stefan Kirschner and Andreas Kühne, ‘The Decline of Medieval Disputation Culture and the Wittenberg Interpretation of the Copernican Theory’, in The Making of Copernicus: Early Modern Transformations of a Scientist and His Science, ed. Wolfgang Neuber, Thomas Rahn and Claus Zittel (Leiden: Brill), pp. 13–41 (p. 16).
68.
In the portrait of Tycho Brahe printed in the 1596 and 1601 editions of his Epistolarum Astronomicarum, the names ‘Rosenkranz’ and ‘Guldensteren’ appear under coats of arms representing Brahe’s ancestry.
69.
Nicholas Hill, Philosophia Epicurea, Democritana, Theophrastica Proposita Simpliciter, Non Edocta (Paris, 1601). As cited in Crane, Losing Touch, p. 136; and Antonio Clericuzio, Elements, Principles and Corpuscles: A Study of Atomism and Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century (Dordrecht and London: Kluwer, 2000), pp. 76–77.
70.
A pithy contemporary example is Simon Patericke’s translation of Innocent Gentillet, A Discourse Vpon the Meanes of Wel Governing (London, 1602), which chastised Machiavelli for ‘following the doctrine of Epicurus, (the doctor of Atheists, and master of Ignorance) who esteemes, that al things are done and come to passe by Fortune, and the meeting and encountring of atomes’, p. 92.
71.
William Drummond, Flowres of Sion (London, 1623), p. 77.
72.
Sermons of Master Iohn Caluin, Vpon the Booke of Iob, trans. Arthur Golding (London, 1574), p. 255.
73.
Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet Without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 43.
74.
Ibid.
75.
De Grazia, Hamlet Without Hamlet, pp. 32–33.
76.
Donne, Anatomy, B1^r.
77.
Richard Hakluyt, Diuers Voyages Touching the Discouerie of America (London, 1582), B4^v; Lord Burghley, in a Letter to Henry Unton, dated 24 September 1591, in Correspondence of Sir Henry Unton, ed. Joseph Stevenson (London: W. Nicol, 1847), p. 88.
78.
William Bourne, An Almanacke and Prognistication for X. Yeeres (London, 1581), A2^r; Joachim Hubrigh, An Almanacke and Prognostication for the Yeare of Our Lorde God 1568 (London, 1568), A1^r; Gabriel Frende, A New Almanacke and Prognostication for the Yeere of our Lord God. M.D.LXXXIX (London, 1589), A1^r; Gabriel Frende, A New Almanacke and Prognostication, for the Yeere of our Lorde God. M.D.XCIII (London, 1593), A1^r. Nashe wrote of Frende: ‘’Tis maruaile if some of you amongst your vnsatiable ouerturning of Libraries, haue not stumbled on such an approued architect of Calendars, as Gabriel Frend the Prognosticator. That Frend I not a little suspect […] would be found to bee no Frend, but my constant approued mortall enemie Gabriel Haruey’, in Haue With You to Saffron Walden (London, 1596), L2^v.
79.
Gabriel Frende, An Almanacke and Prognostication for this Yeere of Our Lord Iesus Christ M.D.XCIX (London, 1599), A1^r.
80.
It is surely no accident that only one scene later Hamlet will refer to the ghost as a ‘mole’ (1.5.161), as if its insubstantial nature will prove to be Hamlet’s own ‘vicious mole’. Intriguingly, Horatio refers to the ghost in terms of infinitesimals, labelling it a ‘mote […] to trouble the mind’s eye’ (1.1.111).
81.
Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London, 1623), PP5^v.
82.
William Shakespeare, The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (London, 1604), M3^r.
83.
Rhodri Lewis, ‘Young Hamlet’, Times Literary Supplement, 31 August 2016. [http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/young-hamlet/ accessed 1 Nov 2016]
84.
Raleigh, History, D3^v.
85.
Brian Cummings, Mortal Thoughts: Religion, Secularity and Identity in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 210.
86.
William Empson, Essays on Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 80.
87.
Ibid.
88.
Ibid.
89.
The most comprehensive calculation of such averages is Alfred Hart’s, in ‘The Length of Elizabethan and Jacobean Plays’, RES, 8 (1932), 139–54.
90.
Brian Gibbons, Shakespeare and Multiplicity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 2–3.
91.
Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language (London: Allen Lane, 2000), p. 96.
92.
Ibid., pp. 96–97.
93.
Selections from Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Bertrand H. Bronson with Jean M. O’Meara (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 344.
94.
Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language, p. 96.
95.
Stephen Booth, King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition and Tragedy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 16.
96.
Sophie Read, ‘Shakespeare and the Arts of Cognition’, in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare’s Poetry, ed. Jonathan Post (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 62–76 (p. 62).
97.
Booth, King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition and Tragedy, p. 16.
98.
Ibid.
99.
Ibid., p. 15.
100.
Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. Philip Edwards (London: Methuen, 1959; repr. 1965). Act, scene and line numbers are given parenthetically within the text.
101.
Booth, King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition and Tragedy, p. 17.
102.
Harold Bloom, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2003), p. 131.

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Jarrett, J. (2019). Infinities and Infinitesimals: Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In: Mathematics and Late Elizabethan Drama. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26566-3_5

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26566-3_5
Published: 01 December 2019
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