Hamlet, Heliocentrism , and Gravity

Hamlet, Heliocentrism, and Attraction

A Text in Three Forms

Edwin Reed drew attention in 1902 to four changes or differences among the early texts of Hamlet that he placed beside changes in Bacon’s natural philosophy. His argument must be restated with greater caution than he used. The First Quarto, Second Quarto, and First Folio are not successive editions in the modern sense, with every alteration necessarily representing the author’s latest opinion. They are distinct textual witnesses whose relations remain disputed. A line absent from the Folio may have been deliberately removed, cut for performance, lost through transmission, or peculiar to a different manuscript. A reading in Q1 may be early, theatrical, reported, revised, or corrupt.

     The necessary caution does not make comparison useless. It changes the claim. The textual record gives us a series of exact variants. Bacon’s writings give us a second record of evolving positions on earth, celestial motion, attraction, tides, and the relation of motion to sense. When the records converge, the convergence deserves examination. It cannot by itself identify the agent who revised the play.

Earth, Stars, and the Moving Sun

In the First Quarto of 1603, Hamlet’s letter to Ophelia contains this stanza:

Doubt that in earth is fire,
Doubt that the starres doe moue,
Doubt trueth to be a liar,
But doe not doubt I loue.

The corresponding passage in the Second Quarto reads:

Doubt thou the starres are fire,
Doubt that the Sunne doth moue,
Doubt truth to be a lyer,
But neuer doubt I loue.

The first variant is precise. “Earth” disappears from the line concerning fire and “stars” take its place. Reed connected the change with Bacon’s Cogitationes de Natura Rerum, usually dated about 1604, and with Bacon’s later account of the earth as a dense and fundamentally cold body. The strongest wording Reed quoted actually comes from the later De Principiis atque Originibus:

The heaven, from its perfect and entire heat and the extreme extension of matter, is most hot, lucid, rarefied, and moveable; whereas the earth, on the contrary, from its entire and unrefracted cold, and the extreme contraction of matter, is most cold, dark, and dense, completely immoveable. . . . The rigours of cold, which in winter time and in the coldest countries are exhaled into the air from the surface of the earth, are merely tepid airs and baths, compared with the nature of the primal cold shut up in the bowels thereof.

The correspondence is worth preserving, though its limits should remain visible. Q1 and Q2 record different lines; they do not tell us why the difference arose. The Q1 phrase does not necessarily assert a technical theory of a molten terrestrial core. The date of the Cogitationes is approximate, and the extended statement quoted above belongs to a later text. No documented line of transmission joins Bacon’s manuscript to the revision of Hamlet. What remains is a narrow and unusual juxtaposition: at approximately the time when the printed play changes “earth is fire” to “stars are fire,” Bacon is developing a cosmology built upon the opposition between a cold, dense earth and hot, rare celestial matter.

     The second line raises the question of heliocentrism. Q1 allows doubt that “the stars do move.” Q2 allows doubt that “the Sun doth move.” Neither sentence is a scientific declaration. The logic of the poem deliberately names things ordinarily accepted as certain and then makes Hamlet’s love more certain still. Yet the language assumes the apparent motion of the heavens rather than announcing the motion of the earth.

     Bacon’s own relation to Copernicus was critical and unstable. He did not accept the Copernican system as demonstrated physical truth. He believed mathematical astronomy could save appearances without establishing the underlying causes of motion, and he distrusted systems that gained elegance by hypothesis. That position led him into serious error. It also differed from simple ignorance or an inability to imagine a moving earth. In Novum Organum II.36 he explicitly formulates the alternatives: whether the daily rising and setting of sun and stars is “a real motion of rotation in the heavenly bodies, or a motion apparent in the heavenly bodies, and real in the earth.” He then asks for a decisive instance that might distinguish them.70

     The same aphorism displays Bacon’s resistance to Copernicus. He suspects that west-to-east celestial motions may have been invented “for the abbreviation and convenience of calculation,” and he prefers an elaborate cosmical motion that ends in an immovable earth. The passage preserves both sides of his method: the demand for a physical test and the prejudgment that deforms the proposed test. Bacon was capable of suspending the question, but he was not free of the cosmology he inherited.

     This is the most useful context for the stanza. The resemblance between Hamlet and Bacon does not consist simply in two men “rejecting science.” It lies in a shared willingness to place even the motion of sun and stars within the grammar of doubt, together with a shared failure to cross fully into the new astronomy. The parallel is intellectually interesting without the exaggerated claim that heliocentrism had already been accepted by the whole scientific world. It had not.

Attraction Before Newton

Bacon’s caution about Copernicus becomes more complicated when set beside his reflections on weight and attraction. He did not formulate Newtonian gravitation. He gave no mathematical law, no inverse-square relation, and no correct account of planetary orbit. He also made false predictions. His proposed experiment at the bottom of a mine assumes that weight should increase with depth, whereas a body descending into the earth would eventually experience less net attraction from the mass below it.

     Yet Bacon identified several elements of the later problem with remarkable clarity. He considered the possibility that weight arises because the mass of the earth attracts heavy bodies. He expected that attraction to vary with distance. He proposed an experiment to test the variation. He also placed earth and falling bodies, moon and sea, and planets and their larger celestial relations within a common class of powers acting across space.

     The relevant passages should be read in Bacon’s own words. In Book II, Aphorism 36, under “Instances of the Fingerpost,” he writes:

Again, let the nature in question be Weight or Heaviness. Here the road will branch into two, thus. It must needs be that heavy and weighty bodies either tend of their own nature to the centre of the earth, by reason of their proper configuration; or else that they are attracted by the mass and body of earth itself as by the congregation of kindred substances, and move to it by sympathy.

     If the latter of these be the cause, it follows that the nearer heavy bodies approach to the earth, the more rapid and violent is their motion to it; and that the further they are from the earth, the feebler and more tardy is their motion (as is the case with magnetic attraction); and that this action is confined to certain limits; so that if they were removed to such a distance from the earth that the earth’s virtue could not act upon them, they would remain suspended like the earth itself, and not fall at all. With regard to this then, the following would be an Instance of the Fingerpost.

     Take a clock moved by leaden weights, and another moved by the compression of an iron spring; let them be exactly adjusted, that one go not faster or slower than the other; then place the clock moving by weights on the top of a very high steeple, keeping the other down below; and observe carefully whether the clock on the steeple goes more slowly than it did, on account of the diminished virtue of its weights.

     Repeat the experiment in the bottom of a mine, sunk to a great depth below the ground; that is, observe whether the clock so placed does not go faster than it did, on account of the increased virtue of its weights. If the virtue of the weights is found to be diminished on the steeple, and increased in the mine, we may take the attraction of the mass of the earth as the cause of weight.

     Aphorism 36 is the stronger anticipation of terrestrial gravity. It converts “weight” from an occult tendency toward a mathematical point into a possible relation between a body and the mass of the earth. Bacon’s magnetic language is not Newton’s, and the experiment is imperfect. The conceptual move remains significant.

     In Book II, Aphorism 45, Bacon broadens the category. The entire aphorism treats the range and limits of powers. The section most relevant to attraction reads:

Among Prerogative Instances I will put in the twenty-first place Instances of the Rod or Rule; which I also call Instances of Range or of Limitation. For the powers and motions of things act and take effect at distances, not indefinite or accidental, but finite and fixed; so that to ascertain and observe these distances in the investigation of the several natures is of the greatest advantage to practice, not only to prevent its failure but also to extend and increase its power.

     For we are sometimes enabled to extend the range of powers, and as it were to diminish distances; as for instance by the use of telescopes.

     Most of these powers act and take effect only by manifest contact; as in the impact of two bodies, where the one does not move the other from its place unless they touch each other. Also medicines that are applied externally, as ointments or plasters, do not exert their virtues without touching the body. Finally the objects of the taste and touch do not strike those senses unless they be contiguous to the organs.

     There are also powers which act at a distance, though a very small one; and of these only a few have been hitherto observed, albeit there are many more than men suspect; as (to take common examples) when amber or jet attracts straws; bubbles dissolve bubbles on being brought together; certain purgative medicines draw humours downwards, and the like.

     So too the magnetic power by which iron and a magnet, or two magnets, are made to meet, operates within a fixed but narrow sphere of action; but if there be any magnetic virtue flowing from the earth (a little below the surface), and acting on a steel needle in respect of its polarity, the action operates at a great distance.

     Again, if there be any magnetic power which operates by consent between the globe of the earth and heavy bodies, or between the globe of the moon and the waters of the sea (as seems highly probable in the semi-menstrual ebbs and floods), or between the starry sphere and the planets, whereby the latter are attracted to their apogees; all these must operate at very great distances.

     The passage does not give a universal law. Bacon still assumes that all powers have a finite limit, and his account of planets being attracted to their apogees belongs to a superseded astronomy. Its importance lies in the grouping. The attraction of bodies by the earth, of the sea by the moon, and of planets within the celestial system are treated as members of one family of action at a distance. Bacon is searching for the range of a power that may operate between great bodies without contact.

     Voltaire recognized the importance of these passages. In the twelfth of his Letters Concerning the English Nation, he wrote that what surprised him most in Bacon was “that new attraction of which Newton passes for the inventor.” He then paraphrased the two aphorisms: “We must search, says Lord Bacon, whether there may not be a kind of magnetic power which operates between the earth and heavy bodies, between the moon and the ocean, between the planets.”71 Voltaire overstated the continuity with Newton, but his testimony shows that the passages were read as anticipations of gravitation within a century of Newton’s work.

     This evidence changes the balance of the heliocentrism discussion. Bacon was wrong about the earth’s place and motion. He was nevertheless asking a question that would become central to the new cosmology: what physical power joins earth and falling body, moon and ocean, planet and heaven? His distrust of a mathematical system without a demonstrated cause contributed to his rejection of Copernicus. The same demand for causes led him toward attraction.

The Moon and the Tides

The textual history of Hamlet supplies a further comparison. The Second Quarto describes the lunar eclipse through three lines absent from the First Folio:

The moist star,
Upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands,
Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse.

Reed treated the Folio omission as a revision corresponding with Bacon’s De Fluxu et Refluxu Maris, in which Bacon rejects a simple lunar explanation for the daily tides. The argument requires qualification. Bacon did deny that the moon’s changing position or phase corresponds directly with the twice-daily flood and ebb. He sought the principal cause in a cosmical westward motion of the waters. He did not eliminate lunar action altogether. Reed himself acknowledged that Bacon continued to associate the spring or semimonthly tides with the moon. Aphorism 45, published in 1620, calls a power between “the globe of the moon and the waters of the sea” highly probable in the semimonthly tides.

     The more exact statement is therefore that Bacon revised and restricted the lunar theory. He rejected the moon as the sufficient cause of the ordinary daily cycle while retaining a lunar relation to the larger monthly variation. The Hamlet lines speak generally of the moon’s influence over “Neptune’s empire.” Their absence from the Folio can be placed beside Bacon’s changing account, but it cannot be made to mirror a complete rejection he never made.

     An earlier Gray’s Inn entertainment traditionally connected with Bacon gives the comparison additional texture:

Your rock claims kindred of the polar star,
Because it draws the needle to the north;
Yet even that star gives place to Cynthia’s rays,
Whose drawing virtues govern and direct
The flots and re-flots of the Ocean.72

     The attribution of the speeches in the Gesta Grayorum is not beyond question, and the lines reflect a familiar belief. Even so, they show the language of “drawing virtues” joining magnet, moon, and ocean in Bacon’s immediate intellectual and institutional world. By 1620 Bacon had converted that language into a program of inquiry into powers acting across distance.

Motion and Sense

Reed’s fourth example comes from the closet scene in the Second Quarto. Hamlet tells Gertrude:

Sense, sure, you have,
Else could you not have motion.68

The First Folio omits the line. Reed placed the omission beside a passage added to De Augmentis Scientiarum in 1623, where Bacon explains why some ancient philosophers imagined souls in all bodies:

Ignorance on this point drove some of the ancient philosophers to suppose that a soul is infused into all bodies without distinction; for they could not conceive how there can be motion without sense, or sense without a soul.73

     This is the weakest of the four correspondences. Hamlet’s “motion” can mean bodily movement, impulse, emotion, or sexual appetite. Bacon’s sentence reports and rejects an ancient philosophical inference. The absence of the line from the Folio may have nothing to do with natural philosophy. The coincidence of date is real, but the proposed explanation remains conjectural.

What the Variants Can Show

The four cases do not have equal weight. “Earth is fire” and Bacon’s cold terrestrial body form the narrowest chronological parallel, though the textual and dating uncertainties are substantial. The cosmological language concerning the moving sun belongs to a wider shared resistance to Copernican demonstration. The tidal case becomes more accurate when Bacon’s continuing belief in semimonthly lunar influence is retained. The motion-and-sense comparison is a conceptual echo whose authorial significance is difficult to establish.

     Taken together, they show that Hamlet can be read within the same evolving field of natural questions that occupied Bacon. They also show why the chapter’s method must remain graded. A parallel may be exact without proving dependence. A chronology may be suggestive without revealing agency. A Folio omission may correspond with a later Baconian statement without having been caused by it.

     The strongest conclusion is therefore also the most limited. The textual history of Hamlet preserves alterations concerning terrestrial fire, celestial motion, lunar influence, and the relation of sense to motion. Bacon wrote on each of these questions and changed or complicated his positions over the same broad period. The convergence deserves preservation. Authorship remains a separate question.