Now all this about the stars might, as it seems to me, have been omitted altogether. To assert that the fixed stars are “fire” is surely not to be taken as a proof of scientific ignorance! The sun itself is but a star, and all of us have read of the “mighty flames,” as Sir Robert Ball calls them, that leap from the surface of the sun.[86] But to affirm “that the sun doth move” as one of the certainties of human knowledge was in Shakespeare’s time tantamount to a rejection of the heliocentric teaching of Copernicus and Bruno in favour of the old Ptolemaic system, or, at any rate, of a system in which the earth is supposed to be at rest.[87] Now, that Bacon had failed to profit by the teaching of Copernicus is certain, for in his Descriptio Globi Intellectualis and Thema Cœli (1612) he condemns all the then existing systems of Astronomy as unsatisfactory. His biographer, Dr. Abbott, who is very far from being an indulgent critic, finds much excuse for him here in the fact that Copernicus “himself advocated his own system merely as an hypothesis,” and that it was inconsistent and incomplete until Newton had discovered the Law of Gravitation. He adds: “It is creditable to Bacon’s faith in the uniformity of nature, that he predicted that future discoveries would rest ‘upon observation of the common passions and desires of matter’—an anticipation of Newton’s law of attraction.”[88]
But granting that Bacon and Shakespeare were at one in their rejection of the teaching of Copernicus, Bruno, and Galileo, it seems to me that no argument on behalf of the Baconian theory can be safely founded upon that fact. For the “Stratfordian” answer is very simple, viz., that William Shakspere, the Stratford player and supposed author, very naturally was not abreast of the most advanced scientific teaching of his day. He, of course, conceived that the sun moved round the earth as Ptolemy taught, and not vice versâ. The argument therefore can only be effective (if at all) as against those Shakespeariolaters who conceive that player Shakspere was omniscient, or, at least, wrote, as it were, by plenary inspiration.
Mr. Edwin Reed, however, makes another use of these lines. He points out that in the Quarto of 1603 they do not run as above quoted, but as follows:
Doubt that in earth is fire,
Doubt that the stars do move,
Doubt truth to be a liar,
But do not doubt I love,
and he refers to Bacon’s Cogitationes de Natura Rerum, assigned to the latter part of 1603, or the early part of 1604, and quotes a passage from his De Principiis atque Originibus, in order to show that at that date Bacon had changed his mind in regard to the commonly accepted belief in the existence of a mass of molten matter at the centre of the earth, and maintained that, on the contrary, the terrestrial globe is cold to the core. He goes on to suggest that the substitution of “the sun” for “the stars,” giving us the line,
Doubt that the sun doth move,
in the 1604 edition, is indicative of a deliberate intention on the part of the writer to retain “the doctrine that the earth is the centre of the universe around which the sun and stars daily revolve.” So that, in spite of Copernicus, and Bruno, and Kepler and Galileo, Bacon and the author of the Plays “were agreed in holding to the cycles and epicycles of Ptolemy, after all the rest of the scientific world had rejected them, and they were also agreed in rejecting the Copernican theory after all the rest of the scientific world had accepted it.” And the same doctrine is, of course, retained in the Folio edition of Hamlet, published in 1623, in which same year Bacon wrote, in the third book of the De Augmentis, that the theory of the earth’s motion is absolutely false!
All this is ingenious, but how far it is convincing must be left for the reader’s consideration.
Let us take yet another example. Bacon in his Natural History (s. 464) tells us that “as terebration doth meliorate fruit, so upon the like reason doth letting of plants blood,” the difference being that the blood-letting is only to be effected “at some seasons” of the year. And so also the gardener in Richard II says:
We at time of year
Do wound the bark, the skin of our fruit trees,
Lest, being over-proud with sap and blood,
With too much riches it confound itself.