Francis Bacon, Hamlet, and Heliocentrism
Francis Bacon, Hamlet, and heliocentrism
Argument paraphrased from Edwin Reed, Francis Bacon Our Shakespeare (1902)
Bacon is sometimes faulted for his reluctance to embrace Copernican heliocentrism, as if this reflected a failure of scientific imagination. Yet this judgment overlooks an important counterpoint. Bacon did speculate about a universal attractive power operating between the Earth, the Moon, and other celestial bodies—an anticipation of gravitation later remarked upon by Voltaire. His caution toward heliocentrism stemmed not from hostility to new science, but from his insistence that explanatory systems rest on demonstrated physical causes rather than mathematical elegance alone. In this respect, Bacon appears less as a reactionary and more as a thinker whose standards of proof were unusually exacting.
One curious feature of Hamlet is the way in which certain scientific and philosophical assumptions appear in early versions of the play, only to be revised or removed at moments that coincide precisely with changes in Francis Bacon’s own thinking. Taken individually, such alterations might be dismissed as accidents of transmission or theatrical revision. Taken together, they form a pattern that is at least suggestive, and perhaps more than coincidental.
The first instance concerns the letter written by Hamlet to Ophelia, preserved in the early text of the play. Hamlet was composed in or about 1586 but was not printed until 1603. In this first printed version, Ophelia reads a stanza in which Hamlet urges her to doubt any proposition whatsoever before she doubts his love:
Doubt that in earth is fire,
Doubt that the stars do move,
Doubt truth to be a liar,
But do not doubt I love.
Among the certainties Ophelia is invited to question is the doctrine that the earth contains a central fire. At the time, belief in a molten interior was widespread and rarely challenged. Yet in the second edition of Hamlet, published in 1604, the first line of the stanza was altered to read, “Doubt that the stars are fire.” The reference to a fiery earth had disappeared.
This change is remarkable not merely because it is precise, but because it runs directly against the prevailing consensus of natural philosophy. How is it to be explained? Was there, at that moment, any figure of comparable intellectual stature who had begun to doubt the earth’s interior heat? There was—Francis Bacon. In a tract entitled Cogitationes de Natura Rerum, written in late 1603 or early 1604, Bacon advanced the highly unconventional view that the earth is a cold body, cold to its core, and indeed the only cold body in the universe, all celestial bodies being composed of fire. Bacon reiterated and elaborated this position in later works, describing the earth as dense, immobile, and fundamentally cold, in contrast to the heat and luminosity of the heavens. The temporal coincidence is exact: Bacon’s rejection of the doctrine of central fire emerges in the same narrow interval during which the corresponding line in Hamlet was revised.
A second coincidence appears in the very next line of the stanza. In the first edition it reads, “Doubt that the stars do move”; in the second edition, the wording is adjusted to “Doubt that the sun doth move,” a change necessitated by the promotion of “stars” to the first line. In both cases, however, the underlying cosmology remains unchanged. The play assumes a geocentric universe in which the sun and stars revolve around the earth.
This is striking given the state of astronomical knowledge at the time. Copernicus had published his heliocentric theory in 1543; Giordano Bruno taught it across Europe in the 1580s and was executed for heresy in 1600; Kepler announced his laws of planetary motion beginning in 1609; Galileo’s telescopic discoveries in 1610 decisively supported heliocentrism; and yet, throughout this period and to the end of his life, Bacon persistently rejected the Copernican system. He adhered instead to modified versions of the Ptolemaic model, even while acknowledging that heliocentrism had become widely accepted. The author of the plays does the same. In Hamlet, as in the rest of Shakespeare’s corpus, the Copernican system never appears. The cycles and epicycles of Ptolemy remain unchallenged long after most of the scientific world had abandoned them.
Bacon’s discomfort with the new astronomy is well documented. At one point he expressed skepticism toward both systems, and in successive editions of The Advancement of Learning subtly altered his remarks on celestial mechanics. In 1605 he criticized mathematicians for insisting on perfect circles and rejecting eccentrics; by 1623 he quietly removed the reference. Modern commentators have long noted that Shakespeare appears never to have moved beyond the Ptolemaic framework. The parallel stubbornness of both figures in the face of overwhelming astronomical evidence is difficult to ignore.
A third coincidence concerns the tides. In the 1604 edition of Hamlet, the ocean’s ebb and flow are attributed, in accordance with popular belief, to the influence of the moon:
The moist star,
Upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands,
Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse.
These lines were retained in multiple quartos published before 1616. Yet in the First Folio of 1623, they were omitted entirely. Why?
In his early years, Bacon accepted the lunar theory of tides. In the Gray’s Inn Masque of 1594, a work universally attributed to him. he explicitly describes the moon’s “drawing virtues” as governing the “flots and re-flots of the ocean.” Later, however, Bacon undertook a detailed investigation of tidal phenomena and, in De Fluxu et Refluxu Maris, written around 1616, he rejected the lunar theory outright. He argued that the motions of the sea show no consistent correspondence with the moon’s phases or position and warned against attributing terrestrial phenomena to celestial bodies out of reverence rather than evidence.
The textual history of Hamlet mirrors this shift exactly. In every edition published before Bacon’s change of mind, the lunar theory appears and is endorsed; in every edition published after 1616, it is absent. Other Shakespeare plays attribute the tides to the moon as well, but all were written before Bacon’s revision of his views, and there is no evidence that they were subsequently altered. Modern editors have restored the omitted lines to Hamlet, but the historical pattern remains.
A fourth coincidence arises in the realm of moral philosophy. In the 1604 quarto of Hamlet, during the chamber scene in which Polonius is hidden behind the arras, Hamlet says to his mother:
Sense, sure, you have,
Else could you not have motion.
Commentators have long been puzzled by this line. Some emend “motion” to “notion” or “emotion”; others reinterpret “sense” to mean sensation or sexual impulse. Yet the line was removed entirely from the revised version of the play in the First Folio of 1623, a fact rarely discussed.
In Bacon’s philosophical writings, however, both the meaning of the line and its disappearance find a clear explanation. In the early Advancement of Learning (1605), Bacon still entertains, though tentatively, the ancient doctrine that motion implies sense—a view associated with animism and the belief that all moving bodies possess a kind of soul. By 1623, in De Augmentis Scientiarum, Bacon explicitly repudiates this doctrine. He argues that there can be motion in inanimate bodies without sense, though such bodies may possess a kind of rudimentary perception. He attributes the older doctrine to philosophical ignorance: unable to conceive of motion without sensation, the ancients posited souls everywhere.
The folio revision of Hamlet appeared in the same year. The line asserting that motion implies sense, which had survived through all previous editions, no longer aligned with the author’s views and was removed.
Taken together, these coincidences do not prove identity of authorship. But they do reveal an extraordinary convergence of intellectual revision. In matters of natural philosophy, cosmology, tidal theory, and metaphysics, changes in Hamlet track changes in Bacon’s thought with a precision that is difficult to explain away as mere chance. At the very least, they suggest a mind deeply engaged with the same evolving problems, revising both philosophical doctrine and dramatic expression in tandem.