Claudius Ptolemy and Hamlet (Part 7, Claudius series)
But in fact, the astronomer was a Roman citizen with “Claudius” as part of his name.
What does this have to do with Shakespeare’s Danish tragedy?
Ptolemy (circa 100 – 170 AD) was on the wrong side of science from an Elizabethan point of view. He thought that the earth was at the center, and that the sun and other heavenly objects went around the earth.
About 350 years before Ptolemy, Aristarchus of Samos (310 – 230 BC) had said that the sun was at the center, but that idea didn’t catch on until the likes of Copernicus (1473 – 1543) and others.
Certain passages in the Bible claimed that the sun moved, so the church was slow to endorse the Copernican paradigm.
When Polonius reads Hamlet’s love letter to Ophelia, it includes the lines,
Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.
(2.2.124-127)
Hamlet invites Ophelia to doubt what the Bible says, that the sun moves around the earth. Maybe it’s the other way around, the Copernican paradigm [1], with the earth moving around the sun?
The Reformation was a time of profound doubt, not only in things like purgatory, Eucharist, and priestly confession, but also about how the apparently outdated astronomy of Ptolemy had been embraced by a sometimes corrupt church.
Claudius Ptolemy was on the wrong side of science, embracing a corrupt idea: The sun does not go around the earth. It only seems to.
But “I know not ‘seems’” (Hamlet, 1.2.79).
Not only is Denmark corrupted by Claudius having poisoned his brother and lied about it, but even science is corrupt, struggling to reform itself.
I am grateful to Peter Jensen, author of Shakespeare’s Name Code [2] for pointing out Claudius Ptolemy as yet another possible reason for changing Hamlet’s uncle’s name from “Feng” to “Claudius.”
INDEX on the uncle’s name as “Claudius” in Hamlet instead of “Feng” (Nov 19, 2024-)
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2024/11/index-why-claudius-not-feng-whats-in.html
NOTES: All references to Shakespeare plays are to the Folger Shakespeare Library online versions: https://shakespeare.folger.edu
[1] I am indebted on this point to various scholars, including Hilary Gatti’s essays on Bruno and Hamlet:
See my previous post: https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2022/07/hillary-gatti-on-bruno-and-shakespeare.html
For the original, see
Hilary Gatti,
Essays on Giordano Bruno,
chapter 7, BRUNO AND SHAKESPEARE: HAMLET: The Historical Context,
Princeton University Press
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7rmc2.12
There is some debate centered on the fact that in Shakespeare, there are two possible opposite meanings of the word "doubt":
When Hamlet says, "I doubt some foul play" means he suspects foul play.
But here in the love poem, "never doubt" means don't question that I love you. He would not write Ophelia a love poem telling her "Never suspect I love you."
So the meaning of "doubt" in the love poem seems consistent: Doubt this or this or that, but never doubt that I love.
For more on Copernicus and Shakespeare and "doubt" see Natalie Elliot
Shakespeare’s Worlds of Science
in The New Atlantis, Winter 2018,
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/shakespeares-worlds-of-science
Excerpt from section/subheading: The Equivocal Cosmos of Hamlet
In Hamlet, Shakespeare ponders our status as ensouled yet finite beings by reflecting not only upon earthy bodies but also upon starry skies. When we look at the science of the play, we see that Hamlet’s struggles with the Reformation’s conflicting accounts of purgatory are compounded by his contact with conflicting scientific accounts of the cosmos. Through subtle but intriguing references to one of the greatest upheavals in modern science — the Copernican Revolution — Shakespeare shows how theoretical shifts in our cosmology bear on human life, especially on matters of love.
One clue that Shakespeare seems to have been engaging with Copernican astronomy comes from the setting of Hamlet at Kronborg Castle, called Elsinore in the play after Helsingør, the Danish city in which it stands. In The Science of Shakespeare (2014), a survey of the scholarship on the Bard’s contact with science, science journalist Dan Falk points out that the coastal city is just a few miles from the island where Tycho Brahe’s famous observatory was built in the late 1570s, and Brahe entertained the Copernican system. His observatory was well known throughout Europe — James VI of Scotland visited there in 1590. The English were also acquainted with Copernican astronomy through the work of astronomer Thomas Digges, particularly a popular 1576 book that included the first partial English translation of Copernicus.
A likewise conjectural hint that Shakespeare may have known of Brahe’s work can be found in the frontispiece to Brahe’s book Epistolae astronomicae, published in 1596, around three years before scholars believe Shakespeare began writing Hamlet. The image depicts Brahe surrounded by the crests of sixteen members of his extended family. One is named Rosenkrans, another Guldensteren — variants of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the names of two friends of Hamlet. Falk notes that these are among the few character names in the play that are actually Danish. It is not known whether Shakespeare saw this book, and the significance of the frontispiece, along with the origin of the characters’ names, remains disputed by scholars — though the coincidence is striking.
...one of several versions of the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe’s portrait that appeared as a frontispiece in his books in the 1590s. Among the names of his relatives surrounding the portrait are Rosenkrans and Guldensteren, both on the left side of the image.
But the primary evidence that Shakespeare was engaging with Copernican astronomy is that Hamlet himself seems to be doing so in his letter to Ophelia. The letter appears in Act Two, when her father, Polonius, reads it to Gertrude and Claudius. Polonius has taken the letter from Ophelia after she reports to him on Hamlet’s bizarre behavior, and he announces that it contains the explanation for Hamlet’s madness. Polonius sees this as a madness of love, but what he holds in his hands speaks to something deeper than that. The letter reads:
To the celestial, and my soul’s idol, the
most beautified Ophelia….
Doubt thou the stars are fire,
Doubt that the sun doth move,
Doubt truth to be a liar,
But never doubt I love.
The reference to Copernican astronomy — doubting the motion of the sun — seems clear. But readers today may miss what Shakespeare is suggesting about the equivocations of the Copernican world. These cannot be recognized until we know, as noted by Howard Marchitello in The Machine in the Text (2011) and Leon Harold Craig in Philosophy and the Puzzles of Hamlet (2014), that the word “doubt” in Shakespeare’s time could mean two opposing things: either to suspect that something is not true (the only way we use the word today), or to suspect that something is true, to apprehend or fear. We see the latter meaning earlier in the play when Hamlet says, “All is not well. I doubt some foul play.” Indeed, “suspect” or “fear” seem the only coherent meaning in “Doubt truth to be a liar.”
On one possible reading, Hamlet says that in a world where even the most apparent facts — like the motion of the sun — have been called into doubt, his love remains a certainty. Contrasting the mutability of scientific ideas with the constant knowledge of the heart, this is the most obvious, and romantic, interpretation of these lines.
But for Hamlet, of course, matters of the heart are in fact deeply conflicted. The contrast of the final line might well sound like a case of protesting too much: When even the most apparently unquestionable things have become doubtful, when one suspects truth itself “to be a liar,” on what basis should one accept the assurance, “But never doubt I love?”
[...]
By placing us with Hamlet in a world of theoretical flux, Shakespeare invites us to meditate on the experience of uncertainty — on how doubt that begins as merely scientific can become deeply unsettling, working its way into our hearts and minds, permeating our psyches. Scientific theories remind us regularly of our ignorance; it may even be more characteristic of science to introduce uncertainty than to give us answers. Shakespeare gives us occasion to think through what our most significant actions might look like if they are informed by awareness of our ignorance. We see that Hamlet’s offenses — the death of Polonius, the rejection of Ophelia, the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern — result from misplaced resolution. Shakespeare suggests that, in a world of continually conflicting appearances, the ability to act requires philosophical courage, grounded more in understanding what we do not know than in certainty about what we do.
[2] Peter Jensen,
Shakespeare’s Name Code,
Lulu Press (2011):
https://www.lulu.com/shop/peter-jensen/shakespeares-name-codehc/hardcover/product-1gvem7en.html?srsltid=AfmBOoo9uIEGyRks4rNaawemD5qkjBbr131G8RIKg1y-wVPSAhDtj1gz&page=1&pageSize=4
IMAGES:
Left: Justus van Gent (fl. 1460–1480)
Pedro Berruguete (1450–1504)
Ptolemy
circa 1476
Louvre Museum.
Apparently this painting was made for Federico da Montefeltro;
because he had no heirs after his son Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, Guidobaldo adopted Francesco Maria I della Rovere as his heir.
The poisoning of Francesco Maria is alluded to by Hamlet in the playlet, “The Murder of Gonzago,” which Hamlet says was written in “choice Italian” (3.2.289).
Public domain, via
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Ptolemy_1476_with_armillary_sphere_model.jpg
Right: Ptolemaic diagram of a geocentric system,
from the star atlas Harmonia Macrocosmica by the cartographer Andreas Cellarius, 1660.
Public domain via Britannica - dot - com:
https://cdn.britannica.com/36/137736-050-C05FC854/diagram-Ptolemaic-Harmonia-Macrocosmica-Andreas-Cellarius-system-1660.jpg
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Disclaimer: If and when I quote or paraphrase bible passages or mention religion in many of my blog posts, I do not intend to promote any religion over another, nor am I attempting to promote religious belief in general; only to explore how the Bible and religion influenced Shakespeare, his plays, and his age.
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