Copernicus, Galileo and Hamlet :: Hamlet Copernicus

Copernicus, Galileo and crossroadsIf imagination is the lifeblood of literature, then each in the raw scientific antenna which extends our scope of the universe is as fruitful to the poet as to the astronomer. External and environmental change stimulates internal and personal tropes for the poetic mind, and the new Copernican astronomy of the late 16th- and early 17th-centuries may have altered the literary composition of the era as much as any contemporaneous governmental shifts. Marjorie Nicolson, in The Breaking of the Circle, argues that the heliocentric system greatly influenced the metaphysical poets, especially John Donne, as it necessarily mated the concept of a usual human beings with the preexisting nonions of a personal microcosm and earthbound geocosm. Nicolson claims that the Elizabethans, Shakespeare included, failed to apply the new motion of heavenly bodies to their own bodies of work, and that their obsolete cosmology confers obsolescence upon their literary e ndeavors. I will argue that Hamlet, written in the aftermath of Copernicuss De Revolutionibus and Tycho Brahes cosmological observations, not only follows many of Nicolsons tenets for the metaphysical poetry of the time, but stands as a central metaphor for the ambiguous period between Copernicuss initial theories and Galileos optical proofs in Sidereus Nuncius. The conflict of Hamlet is the geocentric pitted against the heliocentric Hamlet the son/Sun must revenge his Hyperion fathers death by affirmation of his traitorous and swinish uncle from the English throne, the center of the action and royally emblematized through and through the Sun. But the addition of the macrocosmic/heliocentric view to Hamlets preexisting microcosmicthat is, self-centered or, to use a word that rings of etymological irony, solipsisticobsessions does not make for a happy marriage rather, the two spheres, representing externality and internality, sales booth Hamlets geocentric developmentearthly, physi cal action. Hamlets legendary propensity to delay stems not from a mere excess of thought but from a divisive thought process that clouded Shakespeares times its fractured and debated cosmology. As Nicolson postulates, Correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm, which man had accepted as basic to faith, was no longer effectual in a new mechanical universe and mechanical worldly concern (Nicolson, xxi). In Nicolsons eyes, King Lear reflects Shakespeares preoccupation with the new cosmology more in astrological than astronomical terms Disruption in the heavens presaged intermission upon earth, the storms of the geocosm paralleled those in the microcosm, but our attention and Shakespeares is centered on Lear, the man, rather than on the world and the universe (Nicolson, 149).