The Globe and the Moon: Shakespeare's Astronomical Imagination

Works That Shaped The World

English - September 10, 2019 02:20 - 39 minutes - 35.8 MB
Society & Culture Science Social Sciences apollo brian schmidt environment humanities neil armstrong space universe aborginal lore anu apollo 11 Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed

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How did Shakespeare understand the moon?

In plays and poems of the 16th century, the moon carried the imaginative freight of centuries. The moon is invoked to express longing, chastity, coldness, changeability, envy, and the passage of time. As from ancient times, it was also understood to convey portents of disaster – both political and natural – and to exert strange meteorological influences. But in Shakespeare’s time the moon came closer.

Born in 1564 – the same year as William Shakespeare – Galileo Galilea propounded a version of the organisation of the heavenly bodies that saw the sun, not the earth, at the centre of the system. This, in turn, revealed that the moon belonged to earth; bore it a special proximity. This system had been adumbrated by the ancients and set down by Nicolaus Copernicus, but Galileo carried it into the battleground of the public imagination by taking on the Church. Scholars are beginning to investigate how Shakespeare's imagination was influenced by this Copernican Scientific Revolution and the debates it prompted. Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre was so-named to reflect its function as a creative microcosm; a little world that reflected the real one.

Did Shakespeare’s plays really play out the major scientific and ideological dramas of his day?

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