![]() 'Claudius personifies Ptolemaic geocentricism while Rosencrantz and Guildenstern personify Tychonic geocentricism. 'Claudius is named for Claudius Ptolemy who perfected the geocentric model,' says Usher. The term 'retrograde' follows hard upon the use of the term 'opposition' - which is the configuration when the planets Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, undergo retrograde motion in the sky whenever they lie in a direction opposite to that of the Sun. Such perversity was a puzzling feature of the heavens for it contradicted the perfect simplicity of geocentricity. Retrograde motion occurs around the time of Opposition and is a perverse westward motion relative to the sphere of the stars. 'The double meaning refers to Hamlet's retrograde - or contrary - motion to the place of learning which is a seat of Copernican cosmology,' Usher says. When Hamlet announces a desire to return to study in Wittenberg, the King demurs, saying: It is most retrograde to our desire. Hamlet is a student at Wittenberg, a centre for Copernican learning. When Hamlet says: By my fay, I cannot reason, he means that his freedom to reason is restricted at Elsinore,' Usher claims. The paper notes that the play is set in Elsinore Castle, named for Helsingør Castle which was being built at the time that Tycho was constructing his observatory at Uraniborg. 'When Hamlet states: I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, he is contrasting the shell of fixed stars in the Ptolemaic, Copernican, and Tychonic models with the Infinite Universe of Digges,' Usher says. This paper suggests that Hamlet dramatizes the struggle of Renaissance scholars to discover the real picture of the universe from the appearances in the sky. Tycho's model of the universe was similar to Ptolemy's in two major ways: it was Earth centered and was embedded in a spherical shell of stars. 'Through Digges, Shakespeare knew also of the astronomer Tycho Brahe, and he named the characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for Tycho's ancestors,' the paper states. Shakespeare would have known of the existence of these competing cosmological models through his acquaintance with Digges. Eight years later similar ideas were published in a book by the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno. He was therefore the first Renaissance scholar to publish the idea of an infinite universe. By contrast, in 1576 when Shakespeare was 12 years old, the English scientist and military scholar Thomas Digges extended the Copernican model by suggesting that the stars were like the Sun and were distributed through infinite space. However, both the Ptolemaic and the Copernican systems were contained in a crystalline sphere, beyond which lay Paradise and the realm of the Prime Mover. ![]() Though the Copernican model had been published before Shakespeare was born, it was not yet in vogue in his lifetime. ![]() In 1543, Nicholas Copernicus of Poland published a revolutionary model (which is essentially the one in use today) in which the Earth rotates on its axis once a day and is merely one of several planets that revolve about the Sun. ![]() In this model, the Earth was stationary at the center of the universe and everything else revolved around it. that remained the standard model into the sixteenth century. 'The play therefore manifests an astronomical cosmology that is no less magnificent than its literary and philosophical counterparts.' Claudius Ptolemy perfected a model of the universe in the second century A.D. 'As early as 1601, Shakespeare anticipated the new universal order and humankind's position in it,' Usher states. presents evidence that Hamlet is 'an allegory for the competition between the cosmological models of Thomas Digges of England and Tycho Brahe of Denmark.' Usher says the paper is significant because Shakespeare favors the Diggesian model, which is the forerunner of modern cosmology. Reported by: Reuters Financial Service, 13 Jan Science Now, AAAS, 13 Jan UPI Science News, 13 Jan Times of London, 14 Jan London Daily Telegraph, 14 Jan Global Electronic Shakespeare Conference SHK 8.0054, 14 Jan Ottawa Citizen, 14 Jan Toronto Globe and Mail, 18 Jan Dallas Morning News, 20 Jan de Volksrant, Utrecht, 25 Jan Times Union, Albany, 28 Jan UniSci, 29 Jan Boston Globe, 3 Feb De Standaard, Brussels, 10 Feb. Press release on January 13, 1997: Astrophysicist Finds New Scientific Meaning in "Hamlet." A paper read today at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Toronto, Canada, offers a new interpretation of Shakespeare's play Hamlet. A New Reading of Shakespeare's "Hamlet" (1996)
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