The New Atlantis - Winter 2018 (Issue 54) uncompressed with cover

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Shakespeare’s Worlds of Science Wikimedia Commons This is 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. Winter 2018 ~ 35 Copyright 2018. All rights reserved. Print copies available at TheNewAtlantis.com/BackIssues.
Natalie Elliot 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?” Here the alternate meaning of “doubt” in the final line suggests itself: Hamlet is warning Ophelia that his love, like the sun’s motion, may be mere appearance. Later, he chides her: “You should not have believed me....I loved you not.” We might be tempted to argue for one reading over another. But the ambiguity of the passage seems to be deliberate, indeed, to be its point. Like his ostensible madness, which seems almost incorrigibly equivocal, Hamlet’s love is full of equivocation. Shakespeare connects cosmological doubt with psychic inconstancy — inconstancy of both the heart and the mind. Hamlet’s love for Ophelia seems to oscillate between two views: that she is a celestial, spiritual being to be treated with awe, or that she is simply a material being, lusty and lowly. Hamlet’s advice to Ophelia, “Get thee to a nunnery,” captures the equivocation of his soul in this regard, for the word “nunnery” in Shakespeare’s time referred both to a spiritual home for celibate women and to a brothel. This double, opposed characterization mirrors the opposition between the Ptolemaic and the Copernican worlds, the one emphasizing the spiritual perfection of the heavenly spheres, the other destroying the basis of that ideal, opening up the idea that the celestial world is no different in kind from our lowly material one. Hamlet cannot, as he says at the conclusion of the letter, “reckon my groans.” He can’t solve for truth in his beloved or in the cosmos. 36 ~ The New Atlantis Copyright 2018. All rights reserved. Print copies available at TheNewAtlantis.com/BackIssues.
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