The Joy of Reading

chapter five

The Renaissance,

Part One

It is an odd fact that some people do not know what the word “renaissance” really means. To them it is simply a term that describes a period in Western literary history—the period from Dante to Shakespeare, maybe. But the word has a definite meaning and it is important to know and remember it.

A renaissance is a “rebirth.” Perhaps most people more or less clearly recognize that. But the question is, what is the Renaissance a rebirth of?

At the beginning, in the fourteenth century, it meant the rebirth of Classical learning. It was not the birth of something entirely new, but instead the rebirth of something very old. Two men were among the first to realize that something that had been lost could be found again, and together they set out to find it.

Francesco Petrarch, who was born in 1304 and died in 1374, and Giovanni Boccaccio, who was born in 1313 and died in 1375, hoped to find something they knew very little about although they believed it was important and beautiful. This was the great tradition of Latin and especially Greek Classical literature that was referred to in a few texts they knew but that existed in very few actual examples. There were synopses of The Iliad and The Odyssey, but no texts of the complete poems. There were a few letters of Cicero that referred to many more that were lost—or perhaps not, Petrarch and Boccaccio thought. One or two Greek plays had come down in obviously very corrupt editions, but there were hints that many more could be found. And the philosophical works of Plato and Aristotle were somewhere, because certain Arabic philosophers were said to know about them, but the Italians could no more read Arabic than they could read Greek, and these hints were simply not good enough.

Some things they did know, one of which was that in the Classical world that fascinated them because of its remoteness and mystery it had been the custom to crown poets with laurel leaves. Petrarch was a poet and a very good one, and he suggested to Boccaccio that they ought to find a way to crown him as poet laureate of the “new” world. This was arranged, Petrarch was crowned on the Capitol at Rome, and he then laid the crown at the marble feet of St. Peter in his great church. This ceremony was big news. But the lack of ancient texts was still a serious problem. Petrarch and Boccaccio together traveled around Italy, searching in the archives of old monasteries for any texts that might be lying around and unreadable by the monks themselves. In this way they discovered many of Cicero’s letters that were important not so much because of what they said but because of the Latin in which they were written. It was quite different from the Latin of the Church, the language priests spoke and in which they celebrated mass. And so Petrarch, especially, began to try to write in this old Latin. But the very few examples of Greek were still unreadable.

This remained the fact for nearly a century after the deaths of our two wily and hopeful Italians, despite unremitting efforts on the part of others to seek out ancient manuscripts written on parchment that was very much the worse for wear. But in the year 1453 everything changed, and in a sense the Renaissance began.

What brought it about was a tragic event, from a Christian point of view. For centuries the city of Constantinople had remained as the capital of what was left of the Roman Empire, but it was situated in a part of the world that was surrounded on all sides by Ottoman Turks. In that fateful year the Turks finally captured Byzantium, as the city had been called for centuries, renamed it Istanbul, and celebrated by praying in the great basilica of Hagia Sophia, at the time the largest church not only in Christendom but also in the world.

For weeks and months before the city’s fall refugees had begun to flee the city and travel westward. Many of them were scholars and most of them read and spoke Greek as their native language. And they carried with them priceless manuscripts written not on parchment but on paper, which Muslims had been using for centuries unbeknownst to Christians in the West and which, among other things, was much easier to transport. Of course the refugees came first to Italy bearing their priceless treasures: complete texts of the Homeric poems, of many plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, of the dialogues of Plato and the treatises of Aristotle. What was at first only a trickle soon became a flood, and our world began to take shape.

FRANÇOIS RABELAIS

1483?–1553

Gargantua and Pantagruel

François Rabelais was a doctor and like many of the best doctors he possessed an earthy sense of humor. Doctors, like lawyers, do not usually see us at our best; we are in physical (or legal) trouble when we visit them. The response of many lawyers is to become cynical; the response of many doctors is to become jovial. There is so much pain and so little they can do about it that the only thing to do, they seem to be saying, is to smile. Or even to guffaw—to react with a belly laugh directed at that old bully, the world.

This, at least, is the kind of doctor Rabelais was. He was probably born about 1483 and he took holy orders (he was a Franciscan priest) as well as receiving his doctorate from Montpellier, the best medical school in France. He never conducted a general practice, instead serving as personal physician to several members of the Du Bellay family, one of the most powerful families in France because of its closeness to the king. He possessed a great deal of medical knowledge, which keeps showing up in Gargantua and Pantagruel, the strange, wonderful book to which he devoted the last half of his life. Of course other kinds of knowledge also appear in the book: medieval versions of geography, astronomy, alchemy, and history, and much Renaissance lore as well. Rabelais was as cognizant of the new learning as anyone in the France of his time.

But humor, not learning, characterizes this book. Rabelais was one of the funniest men who ever lived; he clearly thought all the basic things that doctors know more about than anyone else are hilariously funny. He knew sex was a great pleasure but he also thought it was vastly amusing; he thought defecation was terribly funny; he thought micturation, breaking wind, and eructation were terribly funny; he even thought death was funny. Nor would he have used any of the pretentious euphemisms that I used in that sentence. He would have said pissing and farting and belching, and in fact he did use those and scores of other funny, weird words for things that are never mentioned in polite society but are nevertheless thought about there just as often as anywhere else. In this respect he was irrepressible. If these graphic words offend you, do not bother to read Rabelais. He is an X-rated author.

You should also not bother to read Rabelais if you believe that alcohol, instead of being one of God’s greatest gifts, is the bane of man’s existence. For Rabelais was a drinker and a lover of drinkers, and after laughter he surely thought that wine was the sovereign remedy for the ills of the world. Everyone in Gargantua and Pantagruel (except a few churlish priests) drinks all the time, and a great deal. If at any time they are not drinking this is probably because they are eating, which they also do frequently and in large quantities. Rabelais is the patron of all societies of eaters and drinkers, especially in France, and that is as it should be, for if you are going to eat and drink excessively you might as well have fun doing it, and Rabelais had fun doing everything.

Gargantua and Pantagruel is in five books, written over a period of twenty or thirty years. Book Two was composed before Book One, a fact that mostly concerns scholars. Together, Books One and Two are about the jovial, benevolent giant Gargantua and his equally enormous and good-hearted son, Pantagruel. In Book One Gargantua receives several different educations, and you can choose among them. First, he is “educated” by the puppies and kittens in his father’s barn. Then he is given a medieval education by Master Tubal Holofernes, but this is soon followed by the Renaissance education administered by the scholar Ponocrates. The latter is demanding, but he provides the kind of humanistic education that survived in good colleges until quite recently. It includes, by the way, a lot of physical exercise, which helps to distinguish it from Holofernes’ regimen, which takes place entirely indoors with the lads bent over dusty tomes.

Book One (which follows Book Two) ends with a fine and foolish war won by Gargantua with the help of the scruffy monk Friar John for whom, in gratitude, Gargantua builds the Abbey of Theleme. Here the monks and the nuns have friendly dinners together and wear colorful modern dress (i.e., fifteenth-century) instead of black habits. The motto of the abbey is “Do as thou wilt.” All the inmates are excellent persons, says Rabelais, so it is both safe and a great promoter of happiness to allow them to do what they want instead of telling them how to do it or to do something else. The Abbey of Theleme is one of literature’s most beguiling resorts: it deserves three stars in the Michelin guidebook of imaginary places.

Book Three (which follows Book One) belongs not to Gargantua or Pantagruel but to their scapegrace friend and penniless follower, Panurge, the perennial student of the University of Paris. Panurge is one of the most delicious villains in literature. He is a very bad young man but you cannot help smiling at the things he says and does—for example, at his plan for reinforcing the walls of Paris or his account of his revenge on a certain lady who refused his advances. Panurge engages in a ridiculous scholastic debate conducted entirely in sign language and performs many other scurvy tricks and bawdy entertainments for the benefit, as Rabelais says, of all good Pantagruelists everywhere. Indeed, by the end of Book Three it is clear that the author of this strange, unique work knows that he has created not just a book but also what the Germans call Weltanschauung—a special way of looking at the world.

Book Four is not as good as Book Three, and Rabelais probably did not write Book Five. It can be skipped. But no Pantagruelist can afford to skip Books Two, One, and Three (in that order).

Rabelais wrote at a time when French was not yet a fully formed language (just as Shakespeare wrote when English was not yet fixed in its grammar and vocabulary). Rabelais’s bent was fantastical anyway, and Gargantua and Pantagruel contains hundreds, maybe thousands, of neologisms—words that Rabelais made up just because he liked the sound of them, or because there was no French word yet that meant what he wanted to say, or because there were only two or three French words and he wanted five or six. How, then, to translate such a work?

One of the miracles of literary history is that Rabelais found his ideal translator in Sir Thomas Urquhart, who produced a version of Books One and Two and part of Book Three (published 1653, 1693) that is fully as fantastical as the original. A second miracle: Urquhart did not complete his task; Pierre Motteux came along to finish it (in 1693-4) and if anything was better at the job than Urquhart. All good modern translations are based on their work, which you may read if you wish. In places, however, it is now rather antique, and so I recommend the fine modern redaction of Urquhart and Motteux prepared by that remarkable Pantagruelist Jacques LeClercq and published by the Modern Library.

NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI

1469–1527

The Prince

The life story of Niccolò Machiavelli is a sad one. Fortune, “that great strumpet” whom he described in colorful terms at the end of his little book, The Prince, did not deal with him either well or courteously.

Machiavelli was born in Florence in 1469, the son of an impecunious lawyer who was unable to give him a good education. As a consequence Machiavelli was largely self-educated, reading the many tattered old books in his father’s library and being forced, through lack of teachers, to decide for himself what they meant.

He had been born in the year when Lorenzo the Magnificent, the greatest of the Medici, came to power in Florence, thus inaugurating a period of wealth and splendor in the city but also subverting its civil liberties. In 1498 the Medici were exiled, and a new government appointed Machiavelli, now twenty-nine, to be Florentine Secretary—in effect the ambassador of the city-state to the other city-states of Italy and to the great European powers. Machiavelli’s family had always been civil servants, and he performed well in this post. He visited France three times and Germany once, writing reports on those countries that are still read. And he came to know Cesare Borgia, the son of the Borgia pope Alexander VI, at the time when the young man was attempting, at his father’s behest, to unify the Papal States. Machiavelli was struck by the skill and ruthlessness with which Cesare controlled his followers and eliminated his enemies. Niccolò learned another kind of lesson a few months later. He was present in Rome when Cesare suffered ruin and disgrace following the death of his father, the Pope, and the elevation to the papal chair of an enemy of the Borgia family.

In 1512, after fourteen years as Florentine Secretary and many signal achievements for his native city, Machiavelli was himself deposed and exiled when the Medici returned to power. Exile was not the worst of it; he was also suspected of being involved in a plot to overthrow the new government and was tortured on the rack and imprisoned. The strumpet Fortune, having carried him high on her wheel, had now brought him low.

He was released from prison and, with his wife and children, retired to a small farm close to Florence. There, in the last part of his life, he worked in the fields by day but in the evening, after dinner, took succor from his memories not only of the great men he had met and talked with, but also of those he had known only through books. He would repair to his study, where, he wrote:

At the threshold I take off my work-day clothes, filled with dust and mud, and don royal and curial garments. Worthily dressed, I enter into the ancient courts of the men of antiquity, where, warmly received, I feed on that which is my only food and which was meant for me. I am not ashamed to speak with them and ask them the reasons of their actions and they, because of their humanity, answer me. Four hours can pass, and I feel no weariness; my troubles forgotten, I neither fear poverty nor dread death.

Alone in his study, he “conversed” with Livy, Aristotle, and Polybius, and considered the reasons of human history and of the rise and fall of cities and states. He composed a long book, a commentary on the first ten books of Livy’s History, and a short one, The Prince. The latter is one of the most famous books ever written.

Machiavelli attempted to use these works to regain the favor of the Medici in Florence. Curiously, it was not his brilliant political writings that brought him again to their attention but his comedies, one of which, Mandragola, was even performed before the Medici pope, Leo X, in 1520. He was asked to give advice and to write a history of Florence and a later Medici pope, Clement VII, exacted from him a plan for a national militia to defend Italy against the invaders from the north, most notably the King of France and the Emperor Charles V.

“I compare [Fortune] to one of those raging rivers,” Machiavelli wrote in The Prince, “which when in flood overflows the plains, sweeping away trees and buildings, bearing away the soil from place to place; everything flies before it, all yield to its violence, without being able in any way to withstand it.” Such was the descent into Italy in 1527 of the troops of Charles V who, mutinous and their pay in arrears, sacked Rome. There and then ended Machiavelli’s hopes, as well as many other beautiful things. He died a few weeks later.

The Prince, understood in modern terms, is a book about management. A prince, of course, differs from a corporate executive in a number of ways, most notably perhaps in that if he fails the prince is likely not just to be dismissed but to have his head cut off. But the similarities are many, too. For the prince and the executive alike the hardest problem is trying to get people to do what he wants them to do and not what they want to do.

Machiavelli views mankind as under the control of two overriding passions, fear and love (or desire). The successful leader balances these two passions, manipulates them, and so controls his followers. In modern terms, the leader must balance the conflicting claims of the carrot and the stick, of reward and punishment. He who only rewards fails to retain the loyalty of his servants/employees; a high salary is not enough by itself to make a worker do his best for you. But threats alone do not avail, either; the organization of the most brutal tyrant is not thereby more efficient—in fact, such institutions are notoriously inefficient.

If the prince must choose between being loved and being feared, Machiavelli says, he should choose to be feared. This was but one of the judgments that led readers to say publicly that they despised this wily Italian, this “Machiavellian” adviser to rulers—while they read him in secret and heeded his advice.

Are such dismissals of Machiavelli fair? Was the author of The Prince himself Machiavellian? I do not think so. He was a sad and lonely man seeking to curry favor with rulers—the Medici—who he may have thought to be even more cynical than they really were. But one basic belief of Machiavelli may justify the disgust that his name evoked throughout the Renaissance—his belief that most men, and women too, are, for the most part, bad: greedy, selfish, untrustworthy, fickle, and as cruel as their circumstances allow them to be. Was Machiavelli right about this? Is it, in short, merely sentimental to say he was wrong? That, finally, is for every reader, indeed every human being, to decide. The decision is one of the most important that people ever make, guiding and directing their relations with other human beings at every turn.

NICOLAUS COPERNICUS

1473–1543

On the Revolutions of the Heavenly

Spheres

The life of Nicolaus Copernicus was very neatly divided into almost equal parts. Of his seventy years, the first half was spent getting educated. For Copernicus this was a very serious business. Born in Poland in 1473, he attended first the University of Cracow, devoting his time to liberal studies but concentrating in mathematics. He then went to Italy where, at the University of Bologna, he completed the course in canon law preparatory to a career in the Church. He gained a doctorate in this subject, but he also studied for four years at the medical school at Padua. When he returned to Poland in 1506 at the age of thirty-three he was not only a humanist learned in Greek, mathematics, and particularly astronomy, but also a jurist and a physician.

The second half of the life of Copernicus was essentially devoted to the writing of a book that would radically change men’s thinking about the order and structure of the world. The book was titled On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, and although it existed in its basic parts as early as 1520, Copernicus was reluctant to publish it and did not do so until the very end of his life. Indeed, he died on the very day that an advance copy from the press was delivered to him—May 24, 1543. Many date the beginning of the modern world from that day.

It is important to understand what Copernicus did and also what he did not do. He did not discard the Ptolemaic idea that the planets are carried around their orbits on transparent, crystalline spheres—in other words, that it is the spheres that move, and the planets only because they are attached to the spheres. He did not discard the Ptolemaic idea that the motion of the planetary spheres is both regular and circular—because, as he wrote, “the motion of a sphere is to turn in a circle; by this very act expressing its form, in the most simple body, where beginning and end cannot be discovered or distinguished from one another, while it moves through the same parts in itself.” Nor did he discard the basic Ptolemaic idea that, with the above assumed, it was necessary, in order to “save the appearances,” to suppose many regular circular motions in the heavens rather than a single one for each planetary sphere. In these assumptions and retentions of the Ptolemaic system, Copernicus laid himself open to the corrections of Kepler a half century later.

But Copernicus did not retain all of Ptolemy. He made two extremely important changes. The first was to assume that the Sun and not the Earth was placed at the center of the universe, which is to say that the center of the Sun was the point around which the planets (including the Earth), together with the great sphere of the fixed stars, revolved. The second was to assume that the diurnal movement of the Sun and Moon, of the planets and of the fixed stars, around the Earth—from east to west—was not a movement intrinsic to those bodies (or spheres) but instead only an apparent movement caused by the daily rotation of the Earth on its axis.

Ptolemy had “proved” that the Earth is stationary by stating that if it rotated (as, he admitted, certain of his Greek predecessors had believed), at the great speed necessary to bring it around on itself once a day, then everything would fly off into space and there would be complete chaos in the sea and in the air. But such chaos is not observable, he said, and therefore the Earth does not rotate.

Ptolemy, however, had also held that the sphere of the Fixed Stars was so far away from the Earth that the Earth could be considered, for all practical purposes, as a mere point in relation to the size of that great sphere. This meant, of course, that as rapid as would be the motion of the Earth if it turned on its axis, so much the more rapid would be the motion of the great sphere of the Fixed Stars if the Earth did not turn. Ptolemy, like most men before and after him, believed the crystalline sphere of the Fixed Stars to be somehow divine, so this did not bother him too much. At any rate, he found this enormously rapid motion of the great sphere to be more credible than the rotation of the Earth itself on its own axis.

Copernicus reversed the credibilities. In a brilliant argument at the beginning of On the Revolutions he shows how it is not at all hard to believe that the Earth rotates, for such motion is quite natural and a motion that is natural is not violent and chaotic. What is impossible to believe, said Copernicus, is that the enormous sphere of the Fixed Stars revolves around the Earth at almost unimaginable speed once a day.

These two radical changes made by Copernicus had the effect of greatly simplifying astronomy. To place the Sun and not the Earth at the center of the planetary spheres allowed for great progress in explaining the apparent motions of the planets. The Earth turning on its axis, rather than the universe turning around it, also made sense to thinking minds. But not all minds in Copernicus’s day, or in any day (including our own), were “thinking.” Copernicus’s new suppositions about the heavens contradicted what people had taught and believed for centuries. Worse, they contradicted the conclusions of Aristotle.

But if one were to contradict Aristotle on two important points, on what other points might one feel free to contradict him—or his great follower, Thomas Aquinas? The early sixteenth century was not a time when most people enjoyed or looked forward to change in their beliefs and ideas about the world. They preferred to have things stay pretty much the same. Copernicus knew that the publication of his book would create a great controversy, at the best—and at the worst might result in severe attacks upon him. He therefore held off publishing it until the end of his life—and died before he could see the changes its publication would produce.

Copernicus’s book need not be read through from beginning to end. There are, for example, many complex geometrical theorems whose demonstrations are hard to follow. The main argument, though, is clear and set forth in lucid prose.

WILLIAM GILBERT

1540?–1603

On the Lodestone

William Gilbert was a famous physician who carved out a prosperous London practice for himself during the last half of the sixteenth century. Born at Colchester in about 1540, he was named in 1601 physician to Queen Elizabeth and thereupon moved to court. The Queen died shortly thereafter but her successor, James I, reappointed Gilbert royal physician immediately. Gilbert took considerable satisfaction in the fact that the only personal legacy in the Queen’s will provided a fund for the prosecution of his experiments. But all these high hopes came to an end with Gilbert’s death, probably of the plague, in 1603.

Gilbert’s reputation as a physician was local, but he was famous throughout England and Europe for a book, De Magnete (On the Lodestone), which he had published in the year 1600. This book, which remains highly readable today, is full of things that were wonderful to Gilbert’s contemporaries and that are still of interest.

Gilbert was not the first to recognize the existence of lodestone (that is, magnetic iron oxide). The Greeks and the Chinese, among other peoples, had known of the magnetic properties of this iron ore compound since at least 500 BCE. But he was the first to conduct careful and duplicable experiments with lodestone. Most important, he was the first to recognize that the Earth itself is a great lodestone and that there is no difference except in size between a simple spherical magnet held in the hand and the great globe on which we stand.

As a young man, Gilbert had traveled on the Continent and had there met many persons who later became notable in science. He corresponded with them throughout the rest of his life. In his London house he possessed a large collection of minerals, instruments, and books, and he held regular meetings of other Londoners interested in scientific subjects, where his experiments were presented and discussed and where he reported on discoveries made abroad. These meetings, which are thought to have anticipated the later organization of the Royal Society, helped to create a wide respect for Gilbert and his ideas not only about lodestone but also about the Earth and its place in the universe. Thus, when Gilbert accepted without a murmur the revolutionary assumptions of Copernicus about the structure of the cosmos, it was easy for learned Englishmen to do likewise. This is one reason why English science during the seventeenth century—the century following Gilbert’s death—was the best in the world.

Gilbert’s most vigorous arguments in On the Lodestone are reserved for his demolition of the Ptolemaic hypothesis of the so-called primum mobile, or first mover. According to Ptolemy, the second-century astronomer, the Earth stood still at the center of a nest of concentric spheres, each bearing a planet (or the Moon and the Sun), all of which revolved once every day around the Earth. But why did the spheres move? What provided their motive force?

For Ptolemy there were nine material (though quintessential) spheres that turned around the Earth: the spheres of the Moon, of Mercury, of Venus, of the Sun, of Mars, of Jupiter, of Saturn, of the Ecliptic, and of the Fixed Stars. Each of these spheres had its specific motion or motions—some of them very complicated. But they all shared a common diurnal motion as they were swept around from east to west by the primum mobile. This was a tenth sphere, material but invisible, that surrounded all the other heavens and whirled them around with inconceivable force and, as Copernicus noted, inconceivable speed.

For Gilbert, this primum mobile was sheer nonsense. It “presents no visible body, is in no wise recognizable; it is a fiction believed in by some philosophers (i.e., scientists), and accepted by weaklings.”

Surely that [notion of the primum mobile] is superstition, a philosophic fable, now believed only by simpletons and the unlearned; it is beneath derision; and yet in times past it was supported by calculation and comparison of movements, and was generally accepted by mathematicians while the importunate rabble of philophasters egged them on.

What chance had the Ptolemaic geocentric theory against such fierce eloquence—and such good sense?

Gilbert’s hard-headed insistence that scientists look not at books but at things helped to shape the future of English science. It also helped to shape the future of all science. The year 1600, which saw the publication of De Magnete, was crucial in human history. Before that, the world was primarily medieval. After it, the world was becoming modern.

JOHANNES KEPLER

1571–1630

The Epitome of Copernican

Astronomy

Johannes Kepler was a German who, unlike his predecessor Copernicus, had to struggle to obtain an education. He was born in Wurtemburg in 1571. His father was a soldier of fortune and a tavern keeper, but he himself was a sufficiently brilliant student on the rare occasions when he was allowed to go to school that influential persons noticed him. The Church, that discoverer of talent wherever it might exist, determined that, if properly trained, Kepler might become a faithful servant. He was sent to seminary and college and finally (in 1589) to the University at Tubingen, where for the first time he was introduced to the astronomical theories of Copernicus. He very soon decided that he could do better, although it was many years before he was willing to publish his theories.

His most important book was both a paean of praise of and an apology to the memory of Copernicus. Entitled The Epitome of Copernican Astronomy (1618–21), it hewed to the Copernican line wherever its author felt he could. But it made substantial and significant departures from Copernicus at crucial points.

Kepler agreed with Copernicus (and disagreed with Ptolemy) in holding that the planets, including the Earth, revolve around the Sun, which is the center of the universe, and that the Earth rotates on its axis from west to east thus producing the apparent motion of the heavens around the Earth from east to west. He agreed with Copernicus on many minor points as well. But he disagreed on three main points.

The first had to do with the supposed crystalline spheres that both Ptolemy and Copernicus—and everyone else—had believed to carry the planets around their orbital center (for Ptolemy, the Earth; for Copernicus, the Sun). No one before Kepler had thought of the planets as bodies moving through empty, or nearly empty, space (in fact, Kepler could not conceive of empty space and so assumed the existence of an “ether” through which the planets moved). For, as they said, what would move them? Why would they not fall into the Earth, or Sun, as center? Only if they were supported on the great transparent spheres that in their turn revolved around the center would the planets be held in their places in the cosmos. The crystalline spheres were thus necessary in order to “save the appearances.”

But they do not do that! wrote Kepler. In the first place, if there were such spheres, they would refract the light from the Fixed Stars—but we observe no such refraction. In the second place, the crystalline spheres of certain planets would at certain times have to intersect the crystalline spheres of other heavenly bodies—but how could this be? Finally, the hypothesis of the crystalline spheres is unnecessary—and that is the worst thing about it!

The second disagreement had to do with the supposed regular circular motions of the heavenly bodies (or their spheres). This too is incorrect, said Kepler. Assuming that the Moon, say, or Venus always moves at the same speed in a perfect circle around its center of revolution will never save the appearances. Instead, the planets—as bodies in space—move in elliptical rather than circular orbits around the Sun, which remains fixed at one focus of the ellipse. Nor do the planets always move at the same speed; the farther away from the Sun they are, the slower they move, and the closer, the faster. This assumption about elliptical orbits much simplified the computations of astronomers everywhere.

These two disagreements would have been in vain without a third. To the question, why do the planets move around the Earth (the Sun)? Ptolemy and Copernicus had given the same answer: because the planets are on great crystalline spheres that revolve around their center, and it is the natural movement of a sphere so to move. Kepler had discarded the spheres and also the regular circular motion. He needed something to replace them. In seeking it he came very close indeed to being the greatest astronomer who ever lived. He just missed it—that honor belongs to Newton.

Kepler supposed that there must be some sort of invisible, but still physical or material, relationship between the Sun and the planets such that the Sun causes the motion of the planets around itself. Taking his clue from Gilbert’s On the Lodestone, he realized that this relationship must be allied to the force that causes things on the Earth to fall, but he did not discover the simple inverse-square law of gravitation that is Newton’s glory. Instead, Kepler thought of the Sun’s light as somehow reaching out and sweeping the planets around in their elliptical orbits. It was a noble effort and all the more astonishing when you consider that Kepler had probably never looked through a telescope when he died in 1630.

Kepler’s Epitome comprises five books. Only the last two need to be read; the first three are Kepler’s homage to the memory of Copernicus. The fourth book discusses the motions of the heavenly bodies, viewed in a new way. The fifth book deals in more detail with the orbits of the planets and shows how these may be much more easily understood on the new assumptions.

These two last parts of the Epitome are not hard to read—Kepler himself did not approve of “boring demonstrations”—and they are fascinating. Kepler went so far and came so close, but he was unable to take the next steps that led to Newton and Einstein.

GALILEO GALILEI

1564–1642

Two New Sciences

Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa in 1564, the son of a mathematician and musician who had had bitter experience of the impecunious nature of both those professions. He therefore determined to make of his son a doctor and sent him to the University of Pisa to study medicine. But Galileo, sitting in the chapel one day in 1581, began to notice a certain lamp that hung from the ceiling and was swinging in the wind. The wind blew harder and softer and the lamp swung through longer and through shorter arcs—but, Galileo observed, the time it took to swing through its arcs was always the same. At the age of seventeen he had discovered, without at the time naming it, the isochronicity of the pendulum (he later worked out its use in clocks) and, what is more, had become hooked on mathematical physics.

Indeed, he had discovered mathematical physics. Until his day, mathematics and nature were held to have no connection; mathematics was philosophical speculation and had no basis in reality. Galileo was the first man to put them together, to declare, as he did in one of his works, Saggiatore, that the “book of Nature is …written in mathematical characters.”

Galileo’s mathematical bent was confirmed, and his reputation made, soon after the episode of the lamp when he disproved Aristotle’s ancient dictum that heavy bodies fall faster than light ones. At twenty-five he managed to obtain a position that supported his scientific researches. He taught mathematics first at Pisa, then at Padua, from 1592 to 1610, where he was a popular lecturer.

In 1609 he learned of experiments being conducted by Dutch lens makers to construct a telescope, and he immediately sent for information. He combined the lenses as directed by them but was disappointed in the result. He soon saw what the trouble was, corrected it, and produced a telescope having ten times the magnifying power of any other. That very night he took it outdoors and pointed it at the Moon. The surface of the Moon, he discovered, was not smooth but rough and pitted; there were mountains and valleys just as on Earth. This was extraordinary. Everyone believed that the heavenly bodies were made out of a special stuff, the quintessence, which was immutable. But the surface of the Moon as seen through Galileo’s telescope showed clear signs of having changed, as the Earth’s surface changes. Aristotle, Galileo concluded, was wrong again.

The battle between Galileo and the Aristotelians continued throughout his life. His discoveries with the telescope confirmed Galileo in his belief that the Copernican hypothesis, that the Sun and not the Earth is the center of the solar system, was not just a hypothesis but was true, and in several works he defended this position. The Aristotelian teachers complained to the Inquisition, which recognized the danger in a man who did not care where truth led him. Galileo was tried, convicted, and forced to recant. The picture of the greatest living scientist being forced to declare in public that everything he knew to be true was false, and that he had been foolish to believe it, is terrifying. It is one of the worst things the Church of Rome ever did, and even a number of Galileo’s clerical friends believed his condemnation inexcusable.

Galileo’s completed Two New Sciences in 1634, only a few months after his trial and condemnation. He had been confined to his house, where he remained for the rest of his life, but he never stopped working and experimenting, and writing. Two New Sciences has the surprising form of a conversation among three persons, one of whom represents Galileo himself, a second the intelligent layman, and a third—Simplicio—the naive common man. The two sciences, on which Galileo had worked throughout his life, are statics and dynamics, and together they comprise what was known of mechanics in the early seventeenth century. The book presents many new and surprising theorems, and the dialogue form turns out to be an effective way of explicating them.

One reason to read Two New Sciences is because of the book’s charming naïveté. Galileo was looking at the world when it was new; he was like a child finding pretty pebbles and bringing them to his mother to be appreciated. Science as it is conducted today is for the most part unintelligible. The mathematics that underlies it is difficult for everyone to understand, and the results of experiments are processed on computers and presented in a form totally lacking in romance. From time to time a great scientist calls a press conference and earnest science writers try to understand his announcements and find a way to present them to readers of the early edition. The scientist, if he writes at all, offers the results of his labors in papers that are readable only by a handful of other specialists in his field. Probably this is the way it has to be now that all the easy truths have been discovered.

But they had not been discovered yet in Galileo’s day. He was learning astonishing things about nature just by looking at it, thinking about it, conducting experiments on it. No one had done that before. It is the sense of wondrous discovery in Two New Sciences that makes the book so attractive and so moving. Reading it, you learn more about the scientist than about the nature he studies and attempts to control. And if you are of a scientific bent I think you cannot but envy Galileo despite the crudity of his instruments, despite all the things he did not know, despite his shameful punishment.

FRANCIS BACON

1561–1616

Novum Organon

The Advancement of Learning

Essays

Francis Bacon was born in London in 1561, the younger son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Elizabeth’s Lord Keeper. After studying law he entered Parliament in 1584. He met the Earl of Essex, the royal favorite, who attempted to advance Bacon’s career. When Essex fell, Bacon was willing to be his official prosecutor, a fact that has always disturbed Bacon’s admirers. Under King James I his career was meteoric, and he rose from Solicitor-General to Lord Chancellor in a mere ten years. But in 1621 he was charged before the House of Lords with having accepted bribes. He confessed and was convicted and condemned. The king was lenient with him, but Bacon never held office again, instead devoting himself to revising his many literary works until his death in 1626.

The life of Bacon remains an enigma. About few men living in the Age of Elizabeth do we know more facts: facts about his long struggle for political influence, facts about his career as James’s chief advocate and the defender of the royal prerogative against Parliament, facts about his trial and conviction and his fall from grace, facts about his philosophical career and publications. But we do not know his heart.

Sir Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam, Viscount St. Albans … Strictly speaking, he was not Lord Bacon, but Lord St. Albans. It is one of his great distinctions that he rose above a mere title and is called simply Bacon to this day.

His contributions to the history of thought are important and extensive. In a letter to his friend, the Prime Minister Lord Burleigh, he wrote, in a famous phrase, “I have taken all knowledge to be my province.” The claim was not, for Bacon, so all-encompassing as it would be today; he did not mean what we would mean if we said it. Put the emphasis, when you say those words, on “knowledge”; “I have taken all knowledge to be my province”—knowledge as distinct from and opposed to poetry, religion, and practical experience. Formal knowledge, in short, or science, as Bacon called it. He not only took it as his province but also defended it against the numerous attacks that were common in his day. And he wrote a fine book about it, to which he gave the overall title The Great Instauration. It is a special book even though unfinished; in fact, only small pieces of it were completed by Bacon. No single man could have written it all.

The Great Instauration is comprised of a number of parts, only some of which were written by Bacon. First, there is magnificent introductory matter—a few pages only, but breathtaking in their eloquence and scope. Second, there is the “Novum Organon,” or “New Logic,” an account of a new method, as Bacon conceived it, of acquiring knowledge—the so-called inductive method—together with warnings about the obstacles that stand in the way of knowledge. Third, there is “The Advancement of Learning,” a classification of the sciences based on an analysis of the powers of the human intellect. Finally, there are a group of chapters, papers, and fragments dealing with particular questions in philosophy and the sciences that, if expanded indefinitely, would have been the exemplification of all that Bacon thought and of what he planned to do—or wanted the human race to do.

Much of this makes for excellent reading, and there are pages of both the “Novum Organon” and “The Advancement of Learning” that soar. Of particular note in the “Novum Organon” is the analysis of what Bacon called the Idols, or deep fallacies of mind, that hinder clear sight and understanding. Of these, the “Idols of the Tribe,” or fallacies incident to mankind in general, are probably the most important. Humans, as Bacon knew, are inclined to believe what they want to believe, to see what they want to see, to assume more regularity in nature than they have reason to assume, to lend credibility to the evidence of their senses more than they have reason to do. There are also “Idols of the Cave,” as Bacon said, which are the fallacies caused by individual quirks and fancies. Words, too, though necessary for discourse, make discourse difficult, and systems of thought and received methods of investigation make it difficult for new ideas to be accepted. All of this is excellent and true.

But Bacon knew that, hard as it is to comprehend the world of external nature—which can be controlled, as he was one of the first to observe, only by obeying its laws—it is even harder to comprehend man himself. His attempts to do so, and to convey his comprehension and understanding, in short his wisdom, are incorporated in his famous Essays, undoubtedly his most popular and most loved book. In the introduction to this short work he wrote that, unlike his philosophical and scientific works, his essays would “come home to men’s business and bosoms.” And indeed they do.

They are full of trenchant and memorable statements or aphorisms that sum up Bacon’s thinking on a subject and often sum up our own as well. In the “Novum Organon” he had made the revolutionary proposal that there are in nature a small number of “forms,” or essential natures, or—as we would call them—fundamental laws that govern all of nature’s operations and that must be understood if we are to understand nature as a whole. In the Essays he is suggesting something similar about human nature, and the first sentences of the Essays, most of which appear in books of quotations because of their pithiness and truth, are the forms that Bacon has discovered in a long life of observation of both people and things.

“A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure,” he states in the essay “Of Truth.” “Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark.” “Revenge is a kind of wild justice.” The essay “Of Parents and Children” begins with this cryptic remark: “The joys of parents are secret, and so are their griefs and fears.” Parents who have been forbidden by the rules of common politeness to boast of the achievements of their children and who have had to resist the temptation to bore others with an account of their children’s troubles know well the truth of that aphorism; its truth, in fact, is confirmed by the fact that the parent who disobeys these rules may be shunned and ridiculed.

“He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.” So begins the essay “Of Marriage and Single Life,” whereas the essay “Of Love” begins: “The speaking in a perpetual hyperbole is comely in nothing but in love,” which is, I believe, the closest to a smile that Bacon ever takes us. The essay “Of Seditions and Troubles” offers this down-to-earth advice: “Money is like muck [manure], not good except it be spread.” “Of Innovations,” which Bacon feared less than most men of his time—and most people of any time, perhaps—he had this to say: “He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.” “Of Friendship” contains this observation: “A crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures.” The essay begins with a profound comment upon a famous statement of Aristotle’s: “It had been hard for him that spake it,” says Bacon, “to have put more truth and untruth together, in few words, than in that speech: “Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.” “Virtue is like a rich stone, best plain set,” begins the essay “Of Beauty,” and—to conclude this litany—“Of Gardens” begins thus: “God Almighty first planted a garden; and, indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.” What gardener will disagree?

MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

1533–1592

Essays

Michel de Montaigne had a wonderful upbringing. Born near Bordeaux, France, in 1533, he was never beaten or treated severely, as was the custom in his time; his father waked him each morning with music. To reveal to him more clearly the character of the humble people of his country he was given peasants for godfather, godmother, and nurse. He learned Latin from a German tutor who knew no French; Montaigne did not speak his own language until he was six. The Latin authors remained his closest literary friends throughout his life.

That life was exciting and full of incident. One of his closest friends was Henry, King of Navarre from 1572, who became Henry IV of France in 1589. Only at the end of his life (he died in 1592), when he was suffering from kidney stones, was Montaigne permitted to retire from business and political affairs. He had been writing his book of Essays off and on for years; now he devoted himself to it.

The book is about himself. “I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without pose or artifice; for it is myself that I portray … . I am myself the matter of my book.” What does he mean by that famous statement? And was Montaigne such a great man that a book about him should be great, too?

We know different things in different ways and with different degrees of certitude. We do not know very well what happened yesterday in Bangkok even if we have seen a news show about Bangkok. We know better, but still not very well, our own city or town. Better still, the news of our own family. We know best what we ourselves did, felt, suffered, feared.

That is a truism, except that most of us do not take advantage of the opportunity afforded by our closeness to our own selves. We live with ourselves with a unique intimacy, yet we do not know ourselves. Socrates, who was Montaigne’s hero and exemplar, insisted that to know oneself was the hardest thing to do, as well as the most important.

Why do we resist knowing ourselves? It must be because we don’t want to. We are unwilling to admit that we are no more beautiful, no wiser, no richer, no more successful than we actually are. Concerning ourselves we are steeped in a brew of illusions; what we wish we were is more important than what we are, and in fact we don’t want to face what we are because that would mean accepting that we are not what we would like to be. Such illusions are well nigh universal. Very few men or women have ever been able to escape them, to look at themselves, in a mirror on the wall or in the mirror of the mind, truly and frankly face to face.

Montaigne was one of those few. Perhaps it was in some way because of his strange education, perhaps it was just because he was a genius, but he did not care to be anything other than what he was. This did not mean he did not strive to be better, to be more moderate, prudent, kind. No one should ever stop striving for those qualities. But he was able to forgive himself for his failures, to accept himself.

Most of all he could forgive himself for being human. This is much harder than it seems. As human beings, we are animals as well as spiritual creatures; but we deny the animal in us. Or deny the spiritual—which is equally foolish. Most of all we find it difficult simply to live. We think we must always be busy at something in order to justify ourselves, to validate our existence. But life itself is sufficient justification.

We are great fools. “He has spent his life in idleness,” we say; “I have done nothing today.” What, have you not lived? That is not only the fundamental but the most illustrious of your occupations. “If I had been placed in a position to manage great affairs, I would have shown what I could do.” Have you been able to think out and manage your own life? You have done the greatest task of all … Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately.

What does it mean to live “appropriately”? As a man should, says Montaigne; that is, moderately, sanely, wisely, enjoying all things but nothing too much, eating, drinking, making love, but also conversing, reading, and thinking well. These are the appropriate things to do, and a few more. Actually, we all know what they are, but we do not do them. Montaigne did.

He first began writing his Essays—they were the first “essays” ever written—when he was about forty. He did not know how to write them at the outset, so the book grew and changed as he worked on it. At first he tried to be clever and “interesting” and to show off his learning. But he soon realized that he himself was the most interesting of subjects if he could only manage to present himself honestly to his reader, and so he more and more concentrated on that. The last of the essays, coming at the end of Book III, is called “Of Experience.” It is entirely about Montaigne, what he is, what he thinks, what he feels, what he knows to be true.

Many of the essays are well worth reading; most are much more than that. “Of Idleness,” “Of the Education of Children,” “Of Cannibals,” “Of the Inconsistency of Our Actions,” “Of Giving the Lie,” “Of Repentance,” “Of Vanity,” “Of Experience”—that is just the beginning of a list of recommended selections. Read those first, perhaps, or start with Book I and read all the way through to the end of Book III.

Montaigne wrote about himself, but you will recognize yourself. That is the mystery, the secret of his greatness. He knew himself so well, he looked at himself so honestly, that he saw through himself to the general human nature, which is ours as well (it has not changed much since the sixteenth century). He knew other men, and women too, I think, in high places and in low, and he also forgave them. For they too were human. He would forgive you—even you!

This is the way the book ends. It is Montaigne’s gift to all of us.

It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being lawfully. We seek other conditions because we do not understand the use of our own, and go outside of ourselves because we do not know what it is like inside. Yet there is no use our mounting on stilts, for on stilts we must still walk on our own legs. And on the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting on our own behind.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

1564?–1616?

Plays

I confess to believing that the biography of William Shakespeare is a great puzzle. It is hard to believe in “the man from Stratford"; to accept that the provincial actor who is ordinarily put forward as the author of the greatest poetic works ever written actually wrote them. It is possible, I admit, to think that “William Shakespeare” was a pseudonym and that the actual author of the plays was quite a different sort of man. Or perhaps a man named William Shakespeare, who did exist, allowed his name to be placed on the plays for purposes not fully understood but that can be surmised. Some people think the author of Shakespeare’s plays was Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford. Though I once believed this, I no longer do. Nor do I believe Francis Bacon wrote the plays, nor Christopher Marlowe, nor the Countess of Pembroke, nor any of several others who have been suggested. Feeling thus, I cannot recite the traditional version of the so-called facts of Shakespeare’s life. For that you will have to turn to a biographical dictionary.

And after all these years—four centuries more or less—it hardly matters. Someone wrote the plays, certainly one person—they are too alike in too many ways to have been the work of a committee. And whoever he was, he was possibly the most thoughtful man and probably the greatest writer who ever lived. And since genius is always a mystery, he may have been that “man from Stratford” after all.

The plays of Shakespeare fall into four quite distinct categories, although the First Folio recognized only three. There are tragedies, comedies, and histories, as the First Folio has it, but there are also romances, and they are quite different from the others. One must therefore approach Shakespeare from at least these four points of view. (And then, of course, there are the sonnets and the other scattered lyric poems—but among such riches how can we taste all?)

The categories sometimes become confused. Is Antony and Cleopatra a history or a tragedy? What about Richard II? Or Julius Caesar? Or Timon of Athens? There is a lot of history in all of these plays. Yet they are tragedies, too—the special kind of tragedies that Shakespeare wrote (which is to say very different from the kind that Aristotle approved).

Hamlet may, like the others, have a historical core, but if so it is very remote and finally unimportant. No play of Shakespeare is more purely tragic than Hamlet. No play so touches the heart, which is why the work has enjoyed an almost uninterrupted run, somewhere or other on this Earth, since it was first written in London around the year 1599.

Hamlet is about loss: loss of a father and loss of love, loss of beauty, charm, and wit, loss of life. The play’s great subject, therefore, is heartbreak.

It is heartbreaking that this glorious young man, “the glass of fashion and the mold of form,” should have had to dress in tatters and play the fool. It is heartbreaking that he had to lose his love and that she, Ophelia, had to lose her young life before she had more than just tasted its sweetness. It is heartbreaking that Denmark had to suffer any king but young Hamlet who, his rival Fortinbras said, “would have proved most royal if he had been put on.”

The play is heartbreaking but it is not sad. It is funny, sharp, challenging, full of movement and extraordinary changes. Only when we think back on it do we realize how much we miss our young friend, Prince Hamlet.

I don’t think that in all of literature there is any person more interesting. Perhaps Odysseus is his equal, but no other. That being so, how can anyone ever decide not to go to the trouble to meet him? After all, that’s easy enough; he’s there, waiting, between the pages of his book. Hold out your hand.

The tragedy of King Lear is even more intense than that of Hamlet, but Lear is an old man and perhaps we don’t feel his loss so bitterly. The tragedy of Othello is, if possible, even more intense than that of Lear. We cry out at the end of it, hoping that what we have seen is not so. As plays, Lear and Othello may be better than Hamlet, which is flawed in ways that scholars have been pointing out for two centuries. But Lear and Othello are not, as men, as interesting as Hamlet. Read their plays second, after you have read Hamlet’s. There is the incomparable place to start.

Not only do the plays of Shakespeare fall into four distinct categories (categories that, nevertheless, sometimes overlap), but the literary career of their author also falls into four distinct periods. The dates are not at all certain, but the sequence is fairly clear. During the first period, Shakespeare was trying his hand at various types of drama current during the last third of the sixteenth century in England: comedies, often based on classical originals, histories, and outrageously ranting tragedies.

During this first period, or perhaps the second, Shakespeare also composed the 154 sonnets that, alone and if all the plays were lost, would ensure his fame. Numerous attempts have been made to discover a narrative or plot or secret message in the sonnets. Maybe it is there, but I have never been convinced of it. What is there is incomparable poetry, verses that possess a grandeur of thought and a perfection of execution not surpassed in the language. Curiously, most of the sonnets also have a major defect: their last two lines, usually a couplet, are often artificial and banal. Usually it’s prudent not to read the last two lines but to assume the sonnet ends after the twelfth, instead of the fourteenth, line.

The best-known comedy of Shakespeare’s first period is The Taming of the Shrew; the best-known history is Richard III. One tragedy originates in this period: Titus Andronicus, which only a devoted Shakespearian can love.

The second period produced five luminous comedies, the four best histories, and one more tragedy, the captivating Romeo and Juliet. The comedies were Midsummer Night’s Dream, that thimbleful of moonshine which gives us two delicious quotations: “The course of true love never did run smooth,” and “What fools these mortals be!”; The Merry Wives of Windsor, written, according to tradition, at the request of Queen Elizabeth I, who wished to be presented with the spectacle of Falstaff in love; and Much Ado about Nothing, which is only exceeded in grace, charm, and wit by the greatest of all Shakespearian comedies, As You Like It, with its incomparable heroine, Rosalind. The four histories constitute a tetralogy, four plays that tell a continuous story from the reign of Richard II to the final triumph of Henry V.

The first of these four is Richard II, which tells of a weak king, albeit a marvelously poetic one, who is overthrown by his sturdy, courageous, treacherous, and cunning cousin, the future Henry IV. Henry V tells of the final victory over all odds of the son of Henry IV, who justifies and vindicates his father’s misdeed at Agincourt, one of the most important battles in western European history. Between fall the two parts of Henry IV.

Shakespeare had been writing, or rewriting (to accord with official court prejudices about the past) the history of England for several years before he undertook the story of Henry IV. By this time he was impatient with history alone and desired more action, fun, and frolic than reality could provide. At the same time he did have a good story to tell: of how the son of Henry IV, Prince Hal, had been a daredevil and a scapegrace while his father was alive, but settled down to be a good and beloved monarch when he inherited the throne. It would be an even better story, Shakespeare felt, if he could show Prince Hal in the company of some amusing villains. It’s not certain whether Sir John Falstaff is based on the life of a real person, known to the prince; but Shakespeare was perfectly capable of inventing what he needed.

There was another good story to tell, of the rivalry between Hotspur, a legitimate claimant of the throne and a man known far and wide for his courage, and Prince Hal, about whom little that was good was known by anybody. Nevertheless, Prince Hal must be the hero of the tale because he became king and was an ancestor of Elizabeth, the reigning monarch. Shakespeare had to modify history in some respects to make it all come out, but few readers have ever complained of these liberties. Henry IV has its own reality, of a distinctly higher sort.

Hotspur is a magnificent character; in many respects he anticipates Hamlet, although he is more narrow-spirited than the young Dane. Henry IV, Part I reveals how Prince Hal rises to the occasion and defeats Hotspur in battle. But it also introduces the villainous Falstaff, the whoremongering, blaspheming, thieving friend of the prince who is nevertheless beloved of every reader and playgoer. How indeed can you not love Falstaff, for he is not only witty in himself but “also the cause,” as he says, “that there is wit in other men.” He is the greatest comic character in English literature, and perhaps that is enough to say about him. Read Henry IV to find out why.

Henry IV, Part II ends sadly, although it could not have ended any other way. Henry IV dies, and Prince Hal becomes King Henry V. Falstaff hears the news while on a recruiting mission in the country, far from London, and immediately drops everything to ride as fast as possible to the capital, where he expects that his friendship with the prince will be convertible into high and lucrative office. But King Henry V is a different man from Prince Hal; he is very aware of his responsibilities as a monarch and he knows he must put his past life well behind him. Falstaff is crushed to hear from the King’s lips that he is to be punished rather than rewarded and, although this may be right and proper, hardly any reader or viewer fails to be shocked and also hurt by this denouement. Justice is a very great thing in the world, but laughter is also great, and we hate to see the one fall victim to the other.

The purest comedy leaves no doubt about who is good and who is wicked. The good are more than good; they are angelic. And the wicked are devilish. But the wicked are incapable of doing real harm, nor are the good prudish and unlikable. The comic world is a fairyland in which all receive their just deserts, or a little bit more; punishments are bearable; and at worst a man is forced to marry a maiden he has betrayed. In the end love conquers all. If only life were really like that.

As You Like It discharges the obligation that its title implies. This is the comedy that audiences want and it shall not fail in any respect. Audiences have been delighted for four centuries.

The play is based on a perfect comic theme. A Duke has been deprived of his dukedom by his usurping brother; the former is good, the latter wicked. The good Duke has fled to the Forest of Arden, a better place than ever was, where he lives in peace and contentment, at one with nature and his fellow man. He has a daughter, Rosalind, and the usurper also has a daughter, Celia. The daughters are inseparable friends. Rosalind, in particular, is sharp of wit and tongue, although Celia is not far behind her. But suddenly Rosalind falls in love. Unfortunately, the object of her affections is distrusted by the usurper and banished; then Rosalind herself is also banished, for the usurper suspects she would always be faithful to her banished father. As indeed she would.

Celia will not let Rosalind depart by herself, but how will two girls travel alone through a dangerous world? Rosalind, who is tall for a girl, decides to dress as a boy and pretend Celia is her sister. They head for the Forest of Arden; but Orlando, the banished beloved of Rosalind, is also there. They meet, but Orlando does not know that Rosalind is his Rosalind; he thinks she is a young man. Rosalind, partly for her amusement and partly because she can’t bear to be apart from Orlando, forces him to pretend to woo her as if she were Rosalind. Orlando does so and of course it all comes out right in the end.

Rosalind is a charming young woman, at the beginning and end of the play; she is an even more charming “young man” all during the middle of it. Never did a woman mock love so thoroughly at the same time that she is practically dying of it. From time to time she gets herself into verbal difficulties, but she always squirms free. Her comic ruses appeal to everyone. It is one of the great parts for an actress to play.

There are other fine parts, especially that of the old fool, Jaques, he of “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” and the young one, Touchstone, a professional Fool who has accompanied Rosalind from the court into the forest and has there met the bewitching Audrey, whom he confesses he will marry, although he would have her if he could without benefit of clergy. Touchstone is amused at his own folly; this is the first time the Fool has ever been a fool. “I press in here, sir, amongst the rest of the country copulatives, to swear and to foreswear, according as marriage binds and blood breaks. A poor virgin, sir, an ill-favour’d thing, sir,” he adds, producing the gorgeous, simpering Audrey, spilling out of her bodice, “but mine own; a poor humour of mine, sir, to take that no man else will.” And so they are all married—even Celia has found a mate—and the usurping Duke, to make all perfect, is converted to a life of religious penitence and gives up his stolen title to its rightful owner.

All of this is consummate silliness, of course; there is no honesty in it, as Touchstone would say. And yet it is also just and true. When Rosalind says, “The poor world is almost six thousand years old, and in all this time there was not any man died in his own person, videlicet, in a love-cause,” we know she is right; and when she adds that “Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love,” we know that is right, too. And yet in no play of Shakespeare, or in hardly any other play, is love so potent, do we feel its great power so deeply. If Rosalind can be so much in love, she the mocker, the sprite, the free woman, then love must be strong indeed. Which is, after all, as good a moral as one is likely to get from a comedy.

Around the year 1600, the author of Shakespeare’s plays—whoever he was—seems to have undergone a radical change in temperament and outlook, which ushers in the third period of his career. Gone, never to be found again, is the delicious merriment of Much Ado and As You Like It, the inspired foolishness of Falstaff, even the warmly touching love-tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. “Shakespeare” continues to write comedies, but of a very different sort; there is a bitterness in Troilus and Cressida, in Measure for Measure, and in All’s Well That Ends Well that has not been seen before. Indeed, this third period is not noted for comedy. It is the period of the great tragedies, from Julius Caesar and Hamlet, both about political treachery, to Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, about political failure. In between lie Othello, Lear, and Macbeth, which plunge the reader-viewer into depths of feeling and experience not equaled in any other works in any language.

One of the many miracles of Shakespeare’s career is that he did not founder in despair, but lived and worked his way through it and came out, safe and sound, on the other side. The fourth period is almost the best of all. Five plays mark it, one rather boring history, Henry VIII, and four wonderful romances, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. Of these my own favorite is Cymbeline, partly, I admit, because it is probably the least known and most infrequently performed.

Cymbeline is a long, immensely complicated play; I would not try to outline the plot in fewer than ten pages. Suffice it to say that it is about all of Shakespeare’s favorite subjects: love, loss, and treachery; the unequal conflict between the good and the wicked; the fragile balance between men and women. The love story here is particularly moving; Imogen and Posthumus are one of Shakespeare’s finest couples, and Imogen especially is a magnificent creation; she is another Rosalind, but on a higher and more dangerous plane. The treachery is also devastating, as it is in Othello, and the friendship of Posthumus and Pisanio reminds us of Hamlet and Horatio. But none of these things, rich and fine as they are, defines or orders the play.

When you have written thirty plays and know everything about writing plays, and in particular know that your skill will not allow you to make any really bad mistakes, you may be willing to take some very big chances and try things that have never been tried. This is what Shakespeare does in Cymbeline, and it is the reason above all why I love the play.

Aristotle was the first to observe that the denouement, or unwinding, of the plot is the test of a good playwright. If this is awkwardly or ineptly done the play cannot be good, no matter what other merits it has. In most plays, the denouement occupies only a portion of the last act; even when it is well done it does not take much time to do it. But the denouement of Cymbeline dominates the play; it is the reason for the play’s existence.

The complexities of the plot are all set forth in the first few scenes, and they are many and various. Once the basic complexities are presented, changes are rung upon them so that the audience, to say nothing of the characters themselves, are simply bewildered. Everyone on the stage during the denouement is under one misconception or another, and these misconceptions are serious matters; if they continue, almost all the main characters will go to their deaths. But Shakespeare doesn’t want such an unhappy ending to his lovely story. Slowly, one by one, he unties the knots, picks apart the web of confusions and mistakes, and reveals everyone to everyone else: daughter to father, husband to wife and wife to husband, sister to brothers, master to servant, friend to friend. At the end the poetry of the play, which has never been base, rises to heights. And Cymbeline himself, the old King of Britain to whom is now restored all that he has ever loved and lost, sums up the theme in these lines:

Never was a war did cease Ere bloody hands were wash’d, with such a peace.

This is the great peace of Shakespeare’s last plays. This peace, in the solitary certainty of a task superbly done, is what Prospero refers to in the famous speech that closes The Tempest:

Let me not

Since I have my dukedom got, And pardon’d the deceiver, dwell In this bare island by your spell; But release me from the bands With the help of your good hands.

As you from crimes would pard’d be Let your indulgence set me free.

MIGUEL DE CERVANTES

1547–1616

Don Quixote

It would be good to know more about Miguel de Cervantes, but records are sparse. He lived long ago, not an important man as importance was measured in the Spain of four centuries ago. In another sense, of course, he was more important than anyone else in Spain, including King Philip II, and his only peer in Europe and, indeed, the world, was an Englishman who was writing plays for the Globe Theatre when Cervantes was composing Don Quixote. In fact, some reference books still report Shakespeare and Cervantes as dying on the same day, April 23, 1616, and that is very pleasant to think about, although it probably is not true. At any rate, we can imagine the two of them arriving together at Saint Peter’s Gate, perhaps even hand in hand, but more likely arguing about the relative merits of plays or novels, of comedy or tragedy, or whatever.

We do know that Cervantes had an eventful life before he sat down in the kitchen of his little house in Esquivias and wrote the first part of Don Quixote. He had been born in 1547, in the university city of Alcala de Henares, the son of an itinerant barber-surgeon. He received little or no formal education but read all the books he could get his hands on. While still a young man, he was stage struck to the extent that he spent much of the rest of his life dreaming of success as a playwright. When he was twenty-four he sailed from Messina, in Sicily, on board the Marquesa in the armada led by Don John of Austria against the Turks, and he fought valiantly at the Battle of Lepanto, receiving three gunshot wounds, one permanently maiming his left hand—“to the greater glory,” he said, “of the right.” Recovered, he served in other campaigns and was an effective soldier, a fact confirmed by letters of commendation given him by Don John and the Viceroy of Sicily. He left Naples with these letters in hand to return to Spain in the fall of 1575.

A few days later, off Marseilles, his ship was taken by Turkish pirates. Cervantes, because of the important letters in his possession, was considered to be a valuable prize; consequently a high price was set for his ransom. It was five years, full of adventure, before his family could raise the large amount needed, but they finally did so. On September 19, 1580, Cervantes, already on board a ship that was to take him, as a slave, to Constantinople, instead received his freedom.

Once more back in Spain, he tried various occupations, including several attempts to write for a living. His first efforts were plays and a pastoral poem, “Galatea,” which gained him some small reputation but no riches. For the next fifteen years he struggled to support his wife and several female relatives by what we would call today civil service activities for the Spanish navy. He was not, however, very adept at keeping accounts, and he was imprisoned more than once during these years for not being able to make a proper accounting of funds that had been given him in charge.

According to tradition, Cervantes began to write Don Quixote around 1600, in the house in Esquivias whose two small rooms provided both living and working space for Cervantes and four or five women relatives. Doubtless he began by simply sitting and dreaming in the kitchen of the house, or so it is said. The women stepped around and over him, going about their business, and perhaps he told them stories of his adventures in the great world, but at any rate he pondered his life and the failure of his hopes. What could he look forward to, at the age of fifty-three, but penury, illness, and death? He laughed at that, for he was a great comic spirit.

For years he had read voraciously the popular literature of chivalry—the romances of that day—and he loved the old stories, just as everyone did throughout Spain. At first he thought he might write a chivalric romance, but then he decided to make fun of those foolish popular stories. And so he created Don Quixote, an elderly knight, as poor as a church mouse in all but books, whose brains had been addled by the reading of romances to the point where he had come to believe they were real.

The work thus began simply; Cervantes cannot have had any idea, at the beginning, of the majesty of his conception. Don Quixote sets out on his first sally, meets with a few adventures, manages to get himself made—according to his own crazy lights—a knight, and returns home again. The whole episode fills twenty pages.

Did Cervantes read the story to his womenfolk, and did they like it? At any event he determined to proceed. Don Quixote needed someone to talk to on his travels. So Cervantes created the squire, a certain Sancho Panza, a man of the neighborhood with his head screwed on tight and his feet on the ground, and sent him out to watch Don Quixote and to bring him home safely should he get into too much trouble.

The greatness of the book Don Quixote begins here, when the two, the one tall and gaunt, a dreamer, the other short and round, a realist, ride the roads of a Spain of long ago. These two immortal figures talk to one another about all the really important subjects: life, death, and immortality; the whole duty of a man; the meaning of kingship and the reality; the rules of art and poetry. Meanwhile they have adventures, in all of which Don Quixote is bested and beaten and betrayed. Finally, at the end of the book that Cervantes published in 1604, the poor old man is brought home in a cage, close to madness, and deposited before his own door. Sancho returns sheepishly to his family, but he knows that real life was out there and not here in his little village.

Don Quixote was an immediate success, being reprinted several times the first year and attracting two pirated editions in Portugal from which Cervantes, of course, received no revenues. In fact, he received almost nothing from the legitimate editions of the work. But he was pleased with himself because all Spain, and soon all Europe, was talking about the Knight of the Woeful Countenance and his faithful squire who spouted proverbs as he rode his donkey behind his master.

Cervantes did not know it, but the best was yet to come; he was not through with Don Quixote. Just as Cervantes had imitated the popular romances of the day, so now another author imitated Don Quixote. In mock rage and indignation Cervantes responded with his own genuine Second Part. This, the longer of the two parts and the greater, tells of the third and last sally of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and shows how they come truly to know one another for what they are, and to love one another, too, although each is so different from the other.

In the First Part, Cervantes had not been sufficiently confident of his characters to let them run on as he would have liked, and instead interrupted their conversations, and the narrative, with extraneous stories and unnecessary literary exercises. But now he knows that the best thing is simply to let his characters be what and as they are and so, more and more as the book progresses, they talk to one another, endless conversations that run on through day and night so that neither is able to sleep for fascination and interest.

Finally, they come to share not only friendship but an equal vision. They meet a band of wandering actors, and they reach the same conclusion, although in different words: We are, all of us, but a band of strolling players, who take our roles and play our parts as well as we can, but we take our exits, too, as our great Author wills. Thus has Sancho taught Don Quixote about the real world, and Don Quixote has taught Sancho how to dream.

At the very end of what may be the best of all books, their roles are reversed. They have returned from the third sally and Don Quixote has become ill. His illness seems to be mortal and Sancho is desolate. “Master,” he cries, “come with me yet another time, and we shall have adventures together and teach the world to love and respect knights!” “No, Sancho,” replies Don Quixote gently, “for there are no birds in last year’s nests.” It is the saddest of all the wonderful proverbs that are sprinkled throughout Don Quixote. (But heretofore it has always been Sancho Panza who has remembered the proverbs.) And so the old man dies of a broken heart because he thinks he has been a fool.

He is not a fool, of course; to find real adventures in this workaday world is the signal achievement of a noble and great spirit. Such is Don Quixote. There has never been anyone else like him. Nor has there been such a pair as those two, the old knight on his tall, skinny horse, and the short squire on his fat donkey. They wend their way, forever, in our imaginations. I wish we could call them back.