“Find out Moonshine”: Shakespeare in the Age of Galileo
Location
Janet Ayers Academic Center, JAAC 4094
Presentation Type
Event
Start Date
16-9-2019 3:00 PM
Description
Shakespeare is one of our great poets of the moon. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he simultaneously depicts the theatrical impossibility of bringing moonshine on stage in a “play within a play” plot, and repeatedly enacts the poetic reality of bringing moonshine on stage in the play’s lyric poetry. Shakespeare ponders the theatrical problem of making the orb of the night a part of a daytime stage play in the same decades Galileo is building on the work of Copernicus and Brahe to fully revise the understanding of the moon and solar system, and by implication, the place of the human in that system. Though no specific evidence exists that Shakespeare and Galileo knew of each other’s work, do these two great imaginations of the early modern era, the poetic and the scientific, have anything to say to each other, and to us today?
Recommended Citation
McDonald, Marcia, "“Find out Moonshine”: Shakespeare in the Age of Galileo" (2019). Humanities Symposium. 24.
https://repository.belmont.edu/humanities_symposium/2019/2019/24
“Find out Moonshine”: Shakespeare in the Age of Galileo
Janet Ayers Academic Center, JAAC 4094
Shakespeare is one of our great poets of the moon. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he simultaneously depicts the theatrical impossibility of bringing moonshine on stage in a “play within a play” plot, and repeatedly enacts the poetic reality of bringing moonshine on stage in the play’s lyric poetry. Shakespeare ponders the theatrical problem of making the orb of the night a part of a daytime stage play in the same decades Galileo is building on the work of Copernicus and Brahe to fully revise the understanding of the moon and solar system, and by implication, the place of the human in that system. Though no specific evidence exists that Shakespeare and Galileo knew of each other’s work, do these two great imaginations of the early modern era, the poetic and the scientific, have anything to say to each other, and to us today?
Comments
Convocation Credit: Society and the Arts & Sciences