This Month in Oxfordian History – November

By Sara Hill

In November 1572 a celestial phenomenon known as Tycho’s Supernova in the constellation Cassiopeia appeared in the sky. Bright enough to be visible for about two weeks even during the day throughout England, Europe, the Middle East, and as far east as Japan, SN-1572 was thought by common folk to be a portent of impending doom. Edward de Vere perhaps saw it this way too, given the bloody conclusion of Hamlet. He may also have seen it in a scholarly light.

In 1998 in Sky and Telescope, two professors of physics and a professor of English literature claimed that Tycho’s Supernova was the star mentioned in Hamlet: “… yond same star that’s westward from the pole….” A 1999 article, “Hamlet’s Transformation,” by professor of astronomy and astrophysics, Peter Usher, made a plausible case that Hamlet contains allegorical treatment of the cosmological debate over the map of the heavens: Ptolemaic geocentrism, Copernican heliocentrism, or, as Tycho Brahe proposed, something in between. According to Usher, the debate was essentially between appearance and reality. As Hamlet says, “Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems.’” (1.2.76)

In the cosmological debate, what “seemed” was the retrograde motion of the planets, which the geocentric model couldn’t explain. Claudius says to Hamlet: “… your intent / In going back to school in Wittenberg, / It is most retrograde to our desire.” (1.2.111-112) Wittenberg was the center of heliocentrism. Usher proposes that Claudius in Hamlet is named after Claudius Ptolemy, hence is in opposition to the heliocentric Hamlet.

Usher gives other examples of words used within the play, such as “conjunctive,” “opposition,” and “transformation,” that have specific astronomical meanings.

If Shakespeare needed a reason to embed an allegory of astrology into Hamlet, perhaps it was because Brahe’s measurement of SN 1572 was no small revelation. Today understood as a dying or exploding star, the “new star’s” lack of parallax—it stayed still relative to other stars and therefore wasn’t sublunar—shattered the long-held, Aristotelian belief in the immutability of the heavens. Churchmen saw this as a challenge to the Biblical understanding of the cosmos. Luther and Calvin both publicly condemned the Copernican view, and Roman Catholics, initially accepting, finally declared it heretical in 1616. The controversy added fuel to the already kindled theological and political fires between Protestants and Catholics. That it might lead to a (bigger) bloodbath in Elizabethan England was a reasonable expectation. Was this end predicted by the concluding scene of Hamlet with dead bodies littering the stage?

Or does the allegory just fall apart at this point?

Although there are no documented direct connections between Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, and Tycho Brahe, Oxford was connected to the wider scientific community in England and Europe. In a 1590 letter to an Elizabethan scholar, Brahe asked to be remembered to John Dee and to mathematician Thomas Digges. Oxford and Dee definitely knew each other and corresponded. Dee confirmed the relationship when he wrote: “… the honourable the Earl of Oxford, his favourable letters …. ” Some think the two met through Sir Thomas Smith, Oxford’s early tutor. Oxford may also have known Thomas Digges, since Dee was Digges’s mentor.

In addition Oxford had a second-hand connection to Denmark and the royal family of Tycho Brahe through his brother-in-law, Peregrine Bertie. Bertie served as Elizabeth’s special ambassador on a three-month mission in 1582 to Elsinore (Helsingor, the town where Kronberg Castle is located), the setting of much of Hamlet. The castle is located less than ten miles from the observatory where Brahe made his famed calculations.

Bertie also met with two Danish courtiers named Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, both related to Brahe on his mother’s side. These are the names used in the play for Hamlet’s two childhood friends. The report that Bertie wrote of his visit to Elsinore, now in the British Library, was circulated at court, so Oxford would have read it. Of course he had easy access to Bertie himself—his sister’s husband.

Despite Stratfordian claims (and their supposed verification by A. L. Rowse) that their candidate, who was eight years old in 1572, had connections to Brahe through the Digges family, those claims rely on many degrees of separation and only one document at the end of a spurious chain—the 1616 will of Will—which has nothing to do with Tycho Brahe, with SN 1572, or with the cosmological debate of the day.

What they cannot explain is how Will Shakspere might have connected with Saxo Grammaticus’s Scandinavian legend, “Life of Amleth” (anagram of Hamlet), the circa-1200, Latin source of Hamlet. Saxo wrote in a form of “high Latin” that even contemporary scholars found obscure. What are the chances that a 16th century student of “schoolboy” Latin at the Stratford Elementary School could have read Amleth? Or its 1570 French translation by Belleforest, whose changes to the legend Shakespeare kept, proving his access. Neither source was available in English until 1608. Oxford, however, already learned in Latin, was writing fluent letters in French in his early teens.

Interestingly, in Amleth the murdered king’s name is Horvendil, a name that the great linguist, J. R. R. Tolkien, said was associated “with astronomical myth.” You might recognize its Old English form Earendel, which Tolkien used in The Silmarillion for his mariner who wears a jewel representing “the Morning Star” on his brow. In Hamlet the “new star” appears in the night sky at the same time that the ghost of the murdered king appears on the battlements. So if Shakespeare needed a warrant from his source for including astrological content in Hamlet, the murdered king’s name Horvendil in the Amleth legend just might serve.

In conclusion, although Thomas Digges was the first to propose a universe of infinite space, space in the Elizabethan scholarly community was as circumscribed as the gallery of the Globe—and Will of Stratford wasn’t in it.

To surmise that an uneducated businessman had the knowledge and understanding to participate in such a debate as to write it allegorically into a timeless play is asking for the moon on a stick.