The Heretic Hiding in Shakespeare’s Plays

Giordano Bruno in Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It and Hamlet

Giordano Bruno (1548-1600)

• Giordano Bruno was a philosopher and natural scientist.

• He used Copernicus’ heliocentric model to propose a thermodynamic heliocentric model of the solar system.

• He said the sun was a star.• He was executed for heresy (burned at

the stake) in Rome on February 17, 1600. (After a trial that started in 1592 in Venice and ended in Rome.)

Some images….

In this presentation

• I will demonstrate that Giordano Bruno (I mean his ideas, or events in his life) is hiding in some of Shakespeare’s plays.

• This idea is based on my own idea that “Juliet is the sun” identifies Juliet as the sun (not coal or fossil fuels) in a secret play in “Romeo and Juliet”. The secret play is composed of the scenes where the lovers appear together. First, man (Romeo) meets the sun and the language, puns on religion, refers to the time when man worshipped the sun. Next, as time passes, man is a bit separated from Juliet, who appears on the balcony. Then by 1603, England became the first country where fossil fuels became #1 (Romeo leaves Juliet). Finally, as fossil fuels drain away from our system, due to depletion, man returns to the sun (Juliet).

Twelfth NightAct 2, scene 4

Maria: “Nay, I prithee, put on this gown and this beard; make him believe thou art Sir Topas the curate: do it quickly; I'll call Sir Toby the whilst.”

Twelfth Night (written 1601)

Scholars have not looked at Act IV scene ii as a parody of a 16th century religious Inquisition. This is most odd since Feste, the clown, is dressed as the curate, Sir Toby, and quizzes an imprisoned Malvolio with a question touching on religion.

The question concerns the Pythagorean concept of the soul

Feste: What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl?Malvolio: That the soul of our grandma might haply inhabit a bird.Feste: What think you of his opinion?Malvolio: I think nobly of the soul and no way approve of his opinion.Feste: Fare thee well. Remain thou still in darkness: thou shalt hold the opinion of Pythagoras ere I will allow of thy wits, and fear to kill a woodcock, lest thou dispossess the soul of they grandma. Fare thee well.(Act 4, scene 2)

From Essays on Giordano Bruno

“Already, in the crucial third session of the trial at Venice, Bruno had admitted that he considered the universe infinite and eternal, populated by infinite worlds, and governed by a universal providence identifiable with nature herself. He….declared that he believed in a world soul according to the doctrine of Pythagoras.” (Hilary Gatti, Essays on Giordano Bruno, 2011: 314)

Giordano Bruno was executed in Rome the year (1600) before Twelfth Night was written (1601). (All of Bruno’s books were declared heretical works too). Twelfth

Night is Shakespeare’s fierce and direct commentary on Bruno’s trial. The parody of Bruno’s inquisition is only the most extensive reference in the play,

but not the only one.

The play alludes to a mysterious heretical text…

Olivia. A comfortable doctrine, and much may be said of it. Where lies your text? Viola. In Orsino's bosom. Olivia. In his bosom! In what chapter of his bosom?Viola. To answer by the method, in the first of his heart. Olivia. O, I have read it: it is heresy. Have you no more to say? • (I.v. 512-17)Also there is a strange line that combines the words “Roman” and “executed”Malvolio: Not black in my mind, though yellow in my legs. It did come to his hands, and commands shall be executed: I think we do know the sweet Roman hand. (Act III. Scene 4)

At the beginning of Twelfth Night, there is also a reference to a key scene in Bruno’s book Gli Heroici Furori

(“The Heroic Furies”)

Curio. Will you go hunt, my lord? Orsino. What, Curio? Curio. The hart. Orsino. Why, so I do, the noblest that I have:O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first, Methought she purged the air of pestilence! That instant was I turn'd into a hart; And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds, E'er since pursue me.

In Gli Heroici Furori, Bruno uses the Actaeon/Diana myth to illustrate his concept of a heroic lover who grasps “Divine

truth”….

“…..Whence from common, ordinary, civil, and popular, he becomes wild, like a stag, an inhabitant of the woods; he lives god-like under that grandeur of the forest; he lives in the simple chambers of the cavernous mountains, whence he beholds the great rivers; he vegetates intact and pure from ordinary greed, where the speech of the Divine converses more freely, to which so many men have aspired who longed to taste the Divine life while upon earth…”.

Some beautiful paintings of the Actaeon/Diana myth…

Malvolio is an anti-Bruno

Malvolio is a Puritan, a pedant (Bruno disliked pedants and pedantry more than anything else in the world), and Malvolio gets associated with coal (Shakespeare’s own “pet peeve”) in Act III, scene 4. Sir Toby Belch is performing a mock exorcism on Malvolio and addresses “Satan” (the tricksters pretend Satan is ‘possessing’ Malvolio)…

Sir Toby Belch: Ay, Biddy, come with me. What, man! 'tis not for gravity to play at cherry-pit with Satan: hang him, foul collier!

“foul collier…….”

Why “foul collier”?? Coal mines were considered to be hellish places. They were extensive by the late 1500s and early 1600s in England (in the north mostly, where the coal was.) Brimstone was also another word for sulfur---and coal has a lot of sulfur.Shakespeare was an artist quite out of love with fossil fuels. He seems never to have liked them and in Romeo and Juliet (in act I, scene 1, line 1) he hints hopefully at the day (far in the future) when they would no longer be economical to produce “Gregory, on my word, we’ll no longer carry coals.”

Bruno had come up with a thermodynamic model of our solar system and…..

• The opening lines of Bruno’s Lo Spaccio della besta trionfionta (1584) (“The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast”) are all about the sun:

He is blind who does not see the sun, foolish who does not recognize it, ungrateful who is not thankful unto it, since so great is the light, so great the good, so great the  benefit, through which it glows, through which it excels, through which it serves, the teacher of the senses, the father of substances, the author of life. (Bruno, Lo Spaccio della besta trionfante

In De Immenso (1582), Bruno wrote:

“The Earth, in the infinite universe, is not at the center, except insofar as everything can be said to be at the center. In this chapter it is explained that the Earth is not central among the planets. That place is reserved for the Sun, for it is natural for the planets to turn towards its heat and light and accept its law.” (De Immenso, III.iii)

So, by having Malvolio (the anti-Bruno) undergo a parody of a religious inquisition….and have fossil fuels, associated with

Malvolio (through being addressed as “foul collier”), (the anti-sun) “lose” (by being expelled from the text)…

• Shakespeare could turn the tables on those who had tortured and executed Bruno. (The anti-Bruno loses, so Bruno “wins”—though Bruno was dead by then…).

• The parody of the religious inquisition is very bitter, expressing Shakespeare’s own sadness at the treatment of Bruno.

• But Malvolio is not burned; Feste is only sporting with him. Malvolio makes his own exit later…..and promises revenge……

On revenge….

• It’s tempting to think that this call for revenge (“I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you!”) might be Shakespeare trying momentarily to shout out his emotions…

• But no, Shakespeare wasn’t the kind of person to do that. Feste, one of the characters (besides Orsino) who masks Shakespeare himself, says instead “the whirligig of time brings his revenges”. (I.e. that time would vindicate Bruno, and it has. His ideas are widely accepted. He is also known as the father of the “Gaia” theory.)

When Olivia says “He hath been much abused..”

• It may be an allusion to Bruno’s treatment at the hands of the Roman Inquisition.

• And therefore it is also probably a direct comment from Shakespeare expressing solidarity with the executed heretic.

• A public comment, in a basic disguise like this, could clear the censors.

• An Hermetic idea, covert, yet also extremely brave!!

Next, Much Ado About Nothing

• Written 1598 or 1599• Bruno was still in prison, the Castel

Sant’Angelo, in Rome, at this time, but his trial was drawing to a close.

• Things must have looked pretty hopeless for Bruno….and indeed, they were. He was sentenced to death in January 1600.

Much Ado About Nothing is, like Twelfth Night, one of Shakespeare’s great festive comedies….about LOVE (alluding

to the important Heroic Lover in Bruno’s Gli Heroici Furori) and publicly but covertly CELEBRATING Bruno’s life and

brilliant contributions to humanity.

Bruno’s approaching execution by fire (ALL heretics found guilty by the Inquisition were burned at the stake) is directly referenced in a discussion (about Hero, who masks Bruno) cloaking the real agony of the playwright between Benedick and Don Pedro: • Benedick: That I neither feel how she should be lov’d,

nor know how she should be worthy, is the opinion that fire cannot melt out of me; I will die in it at the stake.

• Don Pedro: Thou wast ever an obstinate heretic in the despite of beauty. (I.i.230-5)(my emphasis)

It’s kind of awful but I must bring up this dreadful detail…

• The Inquisition would only burn alive those heretics who did not confess their heresy.

• Those heretics who confessed their heresy were strangled first before being burned.

• So Shakespeare is aligning Benedick (who masks Shakespeare) with an “OBSTINATE” heretic, the kind who will “die at the stake”, who has not and will not confess. (I.e. one who does not die of strangulation first). Bruno also refused to confess that he was a heretic

Hero is Bruno

• She is unjustly accused and denounced.• She “dies” (or pretends to).• She is “brought back to life” by Friar

Francis.• Among Shakespeare’s hopes was the

idea that he could cloak and disguise, and then unveil Bruno as a vibrant presence in the same way that Friar Francis cloaks and then unveils Hero.

In the same way,

• In A Winter’s Tale, Hermione (whose name shares some similarity with Hero) is brought back to life in a rather similar way, also after an unjust denunciation by the man in her life.

• You may notice that the sculptor of the statue of Hermione who comes to life is said to be “A rare Italian master, Julio Romano, who had himself eternity and could put breath into his work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly is he her ape.” (V.ii.96-100)

Short digression….

• It is very likely that Julio Romano, “a rare Italian master” is a direct allusion to Giordano Bruno.

• Once again, the names seem similar and they share the same country, Italy.

• I could also interpret A Winter’s Tale but I will leave it to you, my dear readers….

Hero is associated with the sun

• We can only be truly sure that Hero is a sun figure after her “funeral” when Don Pedro says (to a group of three or four with tapers, and to Claudio, who has recited the epitaph and believes Hero is really dead):

Good morrow, masters, put your torches out.The wolves have preyed, and look, the gentle day,Before the wheels of Phoebus, round aboutDapples the drowsy east with spots of grey.Thanks to you all, and leave us. Fare you well. (V.iii.25-8)This passage can be understood on the same level as a code in that it secretly references a sunrise in the context of the (soon to come) resurrection of Hero.

Friar Francis….

• In Much Ado About Nothing, Friar Francis, besides being a Friar who is supposed to marry the couple, as Friar Lawrence married Romeo and Juliet, also has special ontological access to Hero’s esoteric roles as 1) a sun figure and 2) a symbol—or a sort of a double--- of Giordano Bruno. Friar Francis is therefore also a stand-in for Shakespeare, who also “knows” of the secret status of Hero. What Friar Francis says, what he does and what he proposes, therefore has special significance because it will have parallels in Shakespeare’s own actions as a playwright who also “rescues” and rehabilitates Hero/Bruno.

References to fires again….

• Friar Francis has the only other lines (Besides Don Pedro’s) that point (ever so gently) to Hero’ status as a sun figure: “I have marked a thousand blushing apparitions to start into her face” (IV.i.259) , “in her eye there hath appeared a fire to burn the errors that these princes hold…(IV.i.162-3)”. (We may note that this reference to fire and burning, besides referencing the sun, also resonates with the burning at the stake of Bruno, also a victim of the errors of different powerful “princes” in Venice and Rome)). Second, Friar Francis strongly defends Hero and calls her innocent, as Shakespeare wishes to defend Bruno in his own coded way in this play.

Friar Francis (Shakespeare) looks forward to the day when mankind would collectively recognize the mistake made in rejecting

Giordano Bruno’s ideas about the sun and our Planet…

• “but on this travail look for greater birth;• She dying, as it must be so maintained,• Upon the instant that she was accus’d,• Shall be lamented, pitied, and excused• Of every hearer; for it so falls out• That what we have we prize not to the worth• Whiles we enjoy it, but being lack’d and lost, • Why then we rack the value; then we find• The virtue that possession would not show us• Whiles it was ours; so will it fare with Claudio:• When he shall hear she died upon his words,• Th’idea of her shall sweetly creep • Into his study of imagination,• And every lovely organ of her life• Shall come apparell’d in more precious habit,• More moving, delicate, and full of life,• Into the eye and prospect of his soul,• Than when she liv’d indeed. Then shall he mourn; (IV. i. 213-230)

Gaia….

• Shakespeare is here predicting that mankind will one day make a sort of a collective philosophical turn towards Bruno’s ideas of a unified heliocentric system and realize its mistake in executing him as a heretic. (Perhaps, as we observe the Gaia hypothesis, as well as the environmental and “green” ideas gaining popularity, we might reason that Shakespeare’s allegorical prediction of the vindication of Bruno’s heretical ideas, made hundreds of years ago, was indeed correct.)

The somewhat mysterious titleMuch Ado About Nothing

• Can also be seen to comment on Bruno’s trial and the charges against him.

As You Like It

• Written in 1599, just before Bruno’s execution.

• This time, Giordano Bruno hides in the melancholic character Jaques.

• Shakespeare wants to celebrate Bruno’s life and contributions, but he has this core of sadness that cannot be lifted, the sadness of watching Bruno’s chances for life and hope slipping away….

First glimpse of Jaques…indirectly, in a speech reported by a Lord serving Duke Senior

1st Lord: Today my Lord of Amiens and myselfDid steal behind him as he lay alongUnder an oak whose antique root peeps outUpon the brook that brawls along this woodTo which place a poor sequest’red stagThat from the hunter’s aim had ta’en a hurt,Did come to languish; and indeed, my lord,The wretched animal heaved forth such groansThat their discharge did stretch his leathern coatAlmost to bursting; and the big round tearsCours’d one another down his innocent noseIn piteous chase; and thus the hairy fool,Much marked of the melancholy Jaques….(I.iii.29-41)

Then this Lord reports how Jaques talked to the stag

Duke Senior: But what said Jaques? Did he not moralize this spectacle?1st Lord: Oh, yes….“Poor deer,” quoth he, “thou mak’st a testamentAs Worldlings do, giving thy sum of more To that which hath too much...”

• Jaques is therefore first (indirectly) seen talking to the wounded stag, sympathizing with it. And he calls the stag “that poor and broken bankrupt there” who is being ignored by others. This can sum up Bruno’s situation in late 1599, a poor broken man, ignored by everyone and lying friendless in prison in Rome and waiting for his death.

And of course,

The wounded stag references, Hermetically, the important Actaeon/Diana passage in Bruno’s Gli Heroici Furori. You’ll recall that Actaeon becomes a stag and is then hunted by his own hounds and dies…

(Jaques and the wounded stag)

At the end of As You Like It

• Jaques, like Bruno’s Heroic Lover, will be found in a “cave” in the forest.

• Jaques: To seek no pastime I. What you would have, I’ll stay to know at your abandoned cave. (V.iv.195-6)

• “Whence from common, ordinary, civil, and popular, he becomes wild, like a stag, an inhabitant of the woods; he lives god-like under that grandeur of the forest; he lives in the simple chambers of the cavernous mountains…” (Gli Heroici Furori)

The basic action of As You Like It is related to the issue of coal & fossil fuels

• Orlando (opening lines of the play)….”my brother…mines my gentility with my education…” (I.i.22)

• It’s esoteric, I know, but “mines” here is a Hermetic reference to coal mines. Orlando is any culture of the sun, subsumed and colonized by all the dominating cultures that promote and revere and expound coal and fossil fuels (symbolized by his brother, Oliver).

The flash of a golden ring is the image of the golden sun…..

• Orlando is later freed from his colonized state. He gets in touch with Jaques and they mention golden rings. This all happens while Rosalind, hidden, looks on.

• Jaques (to Orlando): you are full of pretty answers; have you not been acquainted with goldsmith’s wives and conn’d them out of rings? (III.ii.210-211)

Giordano Bruno and magic…

• Bruno believed in magic, but not supernatural magic. He thought that if you could understand nature well enough, then you could use nature to your advantage. And such a thing might seem like magic to those who didn’t understand it.

• Later, Rosalind claims that an old hermit in the forest will help her. He is said to be a “great magician, obscured in the circle of this forest” (V.iv.34)

Who is the “you” in As You Like It?

• By ending the play by leaving Bruno/Jaques meditating in the forest, peacefully contemplating and undertaking a hermetic life, Shakespeare pays tribute to Bruno, who, he covertly asserts, has achieved the goal of the Heroic Lover, and who has attained Divine Truth.

The “You” in the title is therefore Giordano Bruno himself…..

Bruno can also be seen in Love’s Labor’s Lost

• In another work, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), Yates calls the character of Berowne (in Love’s Labor’s Lost) “an echo of (Giordano) Bruno’s visit to England” (Yates 391). She makes apt note of the similarity between Bruno’s and Berowne’s names. Yates draws a direct comparison between Bruno’s Spaccio della bestia trionfante, “in which all the gods speak in praise of love in one of the constellations” and Berowne’s great speech on love (Yates 391).

But let us now proceed to Hamlet

• Prince Hamlet masks only one person, Shakespeare himself. Everyone knows this, naturally.

• But Bruno appears here and there in the play as his ideas are often mentioned in a slightly coded way.

To see the details of the Bruno/Hamlet connection

• You should really have a look at the presentation I gave at Shakespeare 450 in Paris in April, 2014.

• It goes into much more detail than I will here.

Hamlet is an allegory but it is quite coded. This was on purpose.

• Momus, the god of satire in the classical world, was expelled from Olympus by the gods for his caustic wit, and Bruno claims that his role in the celestial court of Jove in Lo Spaccio is similar to the Fool or court jester in an earthly court: “where each (jester) offers to the ear of his Prince more truths about his estate than the rest of the court together; inducing many who fear to say things openly to speak as if in a game, and in that way to change the court of events.” (Gatti EOGB 149) Speaking “as if in a game”, including the Hermetic need and practice to use enigma, riddles, or allegory in order to hide a message, can be seen as of course, Hamlet’s “antic disposition”, but also, more broadly, in my reading, as the whole play itself, which is an allegory, another sort of ‘game’ or mind tool.

Who are the figures in the allegory?

Hamlet’s father=old sun economy/cultureHamlet’s mother= England, English peopleClaudius=new coal economyHamlet=ShakespeareOphelia=green fields, meadows, natureRosencrantz & Guildenstern=enemies of the sun culture/sun economy paid by the coal/fossil fuel economy to support it.

Hamlet was written in 1601

• Just after Giordano Bruno was executed.• In addition, by the end of the reign of Queen

Elizabeth I in 1603, coal had become the NUMBER ONE fuel for England. (No longer wood, which was number 2 at that time.) The transition putting coal in first place was slow at first but in the last 2 decades of the 1500s it was much more rapid.

• Wood is renewable energy driven by the sun.• Claudius (coal) had usurped the kingdom!!• London’s air became steadily more polluted.

Hilary Gatti’s FASCINATING book The Renaissance Drama of Knowledge (1989) opened my eyes to

which book Hamlet is reading!

Polonius: …What do you read, my lord?Hamlet: Words, words, words.Polonius: What is the matter, my lord?Hamlet: Between who?Polonius: I mean the matter that you read, my lord.Hamlet: Slanders, sir; for the satirical old rogue says here that old men have grey beards, that their faces are wrinkled, their eyes are purging thick amber and plum-tree gum, and that they have a plentiful lack of wit, together with most weak hams; all which, sir, though I most powerfully and potently believe, yet I hold it not honesty to have it thus set down….(II.ii. 191-202)Gatti and others seeking a Bruno-Shakespeare connection have noted the strong echoes in the above with one passage from Dialogue I of Lo Spaccio:

Look, my body is wrinkling and my brain getting damper: I’ve started to get arthritis and my teeth are going; my flesh gets darker and my hair is going grey; my eyelids are going slack and my sight gets fainter; my breath comes less easily and my cough gets stronger; my hams get weaker and I walk less securely. (Bruno, quoted in Gatti RDK, 142)

“the old satirical rogue”….is Giordano Bruno!

• Hamlet’s description of this book as “slanders” can be an ironical reference to the fact that Lo Spaccio was the only work of Bruno’s singled out by name by the Roman Inquisition in its summation of his trial (although all of Bruno’s books were banned by the Church). Hamlet’s phrase “the satirical rogue” also points to Bruno, unnamed of course since he had been executed for heresy, and Bruno’s dialogues have many satirical elements. Hamlet’s daring to allude to his own agreement with the book -----“I most powerfully and potently believe”------yet his subtle comment---“yet I hold it not honesty to have it thus set down”-----also may be seen to imply that Lo Spaccio, though an allegory itself, was too easy for the Roman Inquisition to see through, and therefore to use against Bruno. In other words, Hamlet hints, may it not be possible to expect something more opaque, secretive and Hermetic from this play?

• Allegorized as Hamlet reading a book, Shakespeare’s initiation into Bruno’s ideas, then his application of them to what Yates calls “the miseries of the age”--- explains how Shakespeare undertakes to channel or route his problem with his coal-hungry society.

Giordano Bruno & Shakespeare..

• Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It and Hamlet were all written a few years before or after 1600, the year of Giordano Bruno’s execution.

• Shakespeare stood up for Giordano Bruno, expressed solidarity with him, expressed support for his ideas and had all of this performed in public on a stage, repeatedly. Incredible!!

• The coded references are not difficult to spot, as you can see!

Thank you!

PS....

• Did you notice that the name of the prison in Rome where Giordano Bruno was held is shared by one character in Measure for Measure (which also features many prison scenes)?