“….the glorious planet Sol”: Ulysses,

master of rhetoric, reveals that

Bruno’s heliocentrism is also hidden

in “Troilus and Cressida”

It is a truism to refer to Ulysses’ speech in Act I, scene 3 of Troilus and Cressida

in similar terms to Anne Barton’s characterization of it as “Shakespeare’s most

elaborate presentation of the medieval great chain of being”. (Evans, 447)

However, this prevailing, unexamined and standard judgment of it, also evident on

the internet all over the place, is not accurate. The speech certainly reflects

Shakespeare’s knowledge of the medieval concept of the great chain of being, but

it uses this knowledge quite deviously as a deliberate front to overthrow the model

and crush it, giving pride of place not to God, angels or to human kings (none of

whom are even mentioned), but instead, the attention and the “eminence” is

bestowed on the sun. The only “king” mentioned is a simile used to describe the

sun (it “posts like the commandment of a king” (I.iii.93)), and no other planet is

mentioned by name. The speech contains a solid defense of heliocentrism as it

was conceived by Giordano Bruno. The entire play enacts in allegory1 a cosmic

situation which Elizabethan Londoners and anyone else using fossil fuels must be

familiar with.

Examining the speech of Ulysses, the first thing to be considered is that

Ulysses is the Roman name for Odysseus, a master at rhetoric and known for his

slippery verbal tricks. This speech, which (I shall show) hermetically presents

Giordano Bruno’s radical and heliocentric cosmic conception under cover is then

perfectly vocalized by a figure with a slippery reputation that was famous in

Elizabethan London:

Ulysses, also known as Odysseus, was as much a mythical figure in

Elizabethan England as he is in the XXI century. As Denis Kohler

explains, Ulysses was originally the favorite of Athena, the goddess of

wisdom and intelligence. However, being the son of Laertes, he was

also the son of Anticlea. Thus, his great-grandfather was the god

Hermes, famous for his tricks and deceptions. It is this genealogical

link that makes the association between Ulysses and manipulation or

cunning possible (1350-3). These two sides of Ulysses’ personality

was to lead to a fluctuation of opinion towards him. Indeed, while

Homer’s Ulysses is an eminently positive hero, Kohler explains that

during the twelfth century only the negative image of Ulysses

remained. He is a trickster and a liar in Benoit de Saint-Maure’s Le

Roman de Troie – “The Romance of Troy” (1356). During the

Renaissance, however, especially with Shakespeare, Ulysses benefits

again from a relatively positive reputation. He is recognized as the

King of Ithaca, and therefore, described as being noble. His eloquence

and good statesmanship were known by all. Besides being a skilled

1 I’ll cover this allegory in another paper at a later time.

manipulator, he was also crafty and was credited with devising the

Trojan Horse. Ulysses was, therefore, a man to whom people

listened.2

Ulysses is not a misanthropic liar; he is wise, but he is capable of speaking in

such a way as to mislead the easily misled. Within Troilus and Cressida, what he

has to say in this speech in Act I is obviously meant to be taken very seriously

since within his first lines on stage he pleads for the others to “hear what Ulysses

speaks” (I.iii.58) and “to hear Ulysses speak” (I.iii.69) and then Agamemnon, the

king, promises, in the very line before Ulysses starts off his speech, that “we shall

hear music, wit, and oracle” (I.iii.74) from Ulysses. The content of the speech is

certainly important, but it needs to be correctly understood as reflecting

Shakespeare’s solar energy/heliocentric/Brunian-cosmic concerns in a hermetic

way.

Besides Ulysses’ reputation for devious, though brilliant, speech, another issue

to consider regarding the idea that the “great chain of being” is being presented

ironically (and as a front for Giordano Bruno’s ideas) here is that Ancient Greece

and Troy were also not the intellectual setting for the “great chain of being”, the

catchall phrase for Church-sanctioned cosmic thought based on Claudius Ptolemy’s

2 Revillet, Sophie, “Ulysses, the Ambiguous Stage Manager in Troilus and Cressida”, (Unpublished dissertation) Université Stendahl de Grenoble. May 21, 2013. http://dumas.ccsd.cnrs.fr/docs/00/92/64/53/PDF/REVILLET_Sophie_M1R_Etudes_anglophones_2013.pd f .Retrieved March 26, 2014.

model of the solar system. The anachronistic and culturally shallow aspect of the

presentation of the “great chain of being”, besides its vocalization by a man

famous for being a slippery rhetorician, also calls into question its surface-level

authenticity.

Moreover, despite E.M. Tillyard’s thesis about the monopoly on thought

dictated by the monolithic “Elizabethan worldview”, alternative cosmic ideas had

been readily available for decades and were even being embraced by intellectuals

by 1590. Copernicus, whose book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the

Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), which posited a new position for the earth as

orbiting the sun, came out in 1543, while Giordano Bruno spent time in England,

mostly in London, from 1583 to 1585, where he wrote Ash Wednesday

Supper(1584) (La Cineri de la Cineri) where he used Copernican theory to argue for

an infinite universe with no center, yet whose center is everywhere. Bruno also

wrote De Immenso(1581), proposing a thermodynamic model for the earth’s orbit

around the sun. (The concept of a “center” as all relative was a radical proposition

at the time):

The Earth, in the infinite universe, is not at the center, except in so

far as everything can be said to be at the center. In this chapter it

is explained that the Earth is not central amongst the planets.

That place is reserved for the Sun, for it is natural for the planets

to turn towards its light and heat, and accept its law. (Bruno, De

Immenso, III, 10, quoted in Michel, 1962: 181)

With the Brunian concept of the new radical “center”, everywhere and nowhere

at once, in mind, we can turn to Ulysses’ speech, which begins by presenting a

general situation which seems on the surface to indeed portray conditions as they

were expressed in the medieval idea of “the great chain of being”.

The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre,

Observe degree, priority, and place,

Institure, course, proportion, season, form,

Office, and custom, and all line of order; (I.iii.85-88)

The interesting word is “this centre”, which seems on the surface so Ptolemaic.

Remembering Ulysses’ reputation as a slippery rhetorician, however, the phrase

“this centre”, which Ulysses uses to define the position of humans, is ambiguous

first because “the earth”, (considered the center in the Ptolemaic system), is not

explicitly specified. Second, the wording of “this center” can imply that there may

be other centers too. Deviously, Shakespeare has left room for the Brunian

concept of a relative center to be quite possible.

Proceeding in his speech to the topic of the important sun, Ulysses’ then subtly

turns the Ptolemaic geocentric conception on its head, and fully, but in a cloaked

way, based on fine distinctions of rhetoric, Ulysses embraces heliocentrism:

And therefore is the glorious planet Sol

In noble eminence enthron’d and spher’d

Amidst the other ; whose med’cinable eye

Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil,

And posts like the commandment of a king,

Sans check, to good and bad. (I.iii.89-94)

The “great chain of being” places the sun above the other planets in rank, not

“amidst” them, as this list, a summary of Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture,

shows:

Sun

Moon

Planets

Stars

“The Elizabethans referred to all celestial objects,

including the sun, moon, planets, and comets, as "stars."

Thus, "the watery star" refers to the moon, the star that

controls the tides. The Earth is (in Ptolemaic models) the

center of the universe, but it is not ranked on the Chain of

Being as a star. Instead, the Sun is the primate of the

celestial objects because it is the brightest object in the

sky.”3

“Amidst” could therefore indicate “in the middle” of the planets, and

hermetically point to a heliocentric model, rather than a Ptolomaic one. “This

centre”, in Ulysses’ earlier lines, then becomes not the “earth” in the Ptolomaic

sense, but rather it is the center in the Brunian one: (“the earth cannot be said to

be at the center except insofar as anything can be said to be the center”). The

word “spher’d” in the above line “In noble eminence enthron’d and spher’d” is also

notably and significantly not “sphere”, an Aristotelian cosmic concept that Bruno

repudiated. “In noble eminence….spher’d” simply implies that it is surrounded by

‘noble eminence’ here. There is no doubt, however, that the word “spher’d” was

chosen to vaguely refer to the concept of the heavenly spheres as it appeared in

“the great chain of being” and therefore to deliberately mislead.

3 “The scholars E.M.W. Tillyard and A. O. Lovejoy argued that the medieval and Renaissance world inherited a special worldview, the idea of a hierarchical universe ordained by God. "The Chain of Being" describes this medieval and Renaissance structure as an interconnected web of greater and lesser links. Each link in the Chain was an individual species of being, creature, or object. Those links higher on the Chain possessed greater intellect, mobility, and capability than those lower on the Chain. Accordingly, the higher links had more authority over the lower.”

https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/Tillyard01.html. Retrieved February 28, 2014.

Another odd feature of Ulysses’ lines is that a speech portraying the medieval

“greatchain of being” would also be likely to mention at least one of the other (so-

called) “planets” in order to highlight the hierarchical relationships. Yet the sun is

the only one mentioned, as if it belongs in a special category, not in a chain, along

with the others, but in a class of its own. (Indeed, Bruno pointed out its special

place for the Earth as a generative body.) The speech then turns from the

emphasis on the beneficial and kingly “Sol” to the problems at hand. The problems

are related to “disorder” among the planets:

….But when the planets

By evil mixture to disorder wander,

What plagues and what portents, what mutiny!

What raging of the sea, shaking of the earth!

Commotion in the winds! frights, changes, horrors!

Divert and crack, rend and deracinate

The unity and married calm of states

Quite from their fixture!......

…….the bounded waters

Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,

And make a sop of all this solid globe. (94-101, 111-113)

Besides this speech, Shakespeare wrote at least two other long, expressive and

emotional monologues in other plays where central characters complain about nature

being ‘out of order’4, and in both, we see the natural disorders include flooding. King

Lear uses the word “crack” also in his speech about similar problems with the nature

around him, and he mentions flooding

Blow, winds, and crack our cheeks! rage! blow!

You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout

Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!

You sulph'rous and thought-executing fires;

Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,

Singe my white head! (III.2.1-6)

4 I am far from completing my investigations into the sun/coal dichotomy in Shakespeare’s works and it is possible that more speeches in his plays fit into this category.

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titania uses similar imagery of flooding:

the winds, piping to us in vain

As in revenge, have suck’d up from the sea

Contagious fogs; which, falling over the land,

Hath every pelting river made so proud

That they have overborn their continents…(II.1.88-92)

I will argue that these three speeches, Ulysses’, King Lear’s and Titania’s, on

nature being out of order have many things in common, besides the imagery of

floods, and as a consequence of all the important similarities, which I shall list,

Ulysses’ speech needs to be seen in a new context, not as a set piece

demonstrating the ‘Elizabethan world picture’, or the ‘great chain of being’, but as

an important hermetic signal of disorder, oriented around coal. I say this because all

three speeches contain secret references to coal; all are spoken by major

characters in authoritative positions and who have a stake in the outcome or

possible resolution; and all the speeches are long and include other symptoms of

natural disorders, besides flooding.

I have covered how the word “sulph'rous”5 (and also, probably “singe”) in Lear’s

speech above refers hermetically to coal, and also I have described how Titania’s

monologue6 is a hermetic complaint about the effects of a switch to a coal-based

economy: the loss of play and merriment (Elizabethans weren’t engaging as much

in rural games like making mazes in fields as urbanization resulted from a booming

fossil-fuel based economy); the way that coal pollution caused diseases that could

be referenced by the word “contagious”, or the smoke from coal fires could be seen

as “contagious fogs”. In Ulysses’ speech, there are two hermetic references to coal:

these occur in the last two lines below (“suffocate” and “choking”):

And make a sop of all this solid globe:

Strength should be lord of imbecility,

And the rude son should strike his father dead:

Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong,

Between whose endless jar justice resides,

Should lose their names, and so should justice too.

5 To read how Cordelia is the sun figure (addressed ‘fair daylight’ by Lear at one point), and Regan and Goneril are coal figures, please see my unpublished article “ “6 To see how Bottom is the sun figure in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, (with a speech about Phibbus) please see my article “And Phibbus’ car shall shine from far”; “

Then everything includes itself in power,

Power into will, will into appetite;

And appetite, an universal wolf,

So doubly seconded with will and power,

Must make perforce an universal prey,

And last eat up himself. Great Agamemnon,

This chaos, when degree is suffocate,

Follows the choking. (I.iii.113-126)

The last sentence, unlike the ones that have come before is very short, with only 11

words: “Great Agamemnon, this chaos, when degree is suffocate, follows the

choking”. This short sentence, referencing the suffocating and choking aspects of

coal smoke, serves to diagnose the problem just described in great length in the

whole speech (and summed up as “this chaos”) in a pithy, but hermetic, way. (The

sentence actually is quite mysterious and obscure unless the reader/listener is

familiar with Shakespeare’s anti-coal aims.) The chaos seems to be caused at root

by the problem indicated in a previous sentence (lines 101-103) (“O, when degree is

shak’d, which is the ladder to all high designs, then enterprise is sick!”):

O, when degree is shaked,

Which is the ladder to all high designs,

Then enterprise is sick! How could communities,

Degrees in schools and brotherhoods in cities,

Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,

The primogenitive and due of birth,

Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,

But by degree, stand in authentic place?

Take but degree away, untune that string,

And, hark, what discord follows! each thing meets

In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters

Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores

And make a sop of all this solid globe:

Strength should be lord of imbecility,

And the rude son should strike his father dead:

Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong,

Between whose endless jar justice resides,

Should lose their names, and so should justice too.

Then every thing includes itself in power,

Power into will, will into appetite;

And appetite, an universal wolf,

So doubly seconded with will and power,

Must make perforce an universal prey,

And last eat up himself. Great Agamemnon,

This chaos, when degree is suffocate,

Follows the choking. (I.iii. 101-126)

This important sentence (“O, when degree is shak’d, which is the ladder to all high

designs, then enterprise is sick!”) is directly preceded by the word “unity”

What raging of the sea, shaking of the earth!

Commotion, in the winds! frights, changes, horrors

Divert and crack, rend and deracinate

The unity and married calm of states

Quite from their fixture! O, when degree is shaked,

Which is the ladder to all high designs,

Then enterprise is sick! How could communities….(I.iii.97-102)

I will posit that the two words “ladder” and “unity” which occur within two lines of

each other are hermetic references, again by this duplicitous master rhetorician

Ulysses, to the ideas of Giordano Bruno. Bruno posited a universal “unity”, a

universe that was infinite yet all one, with no separate place for God and the angels,

and with no ‘quintessence’ or separate substance that qualitatively separated

heaven, where God was located, from Earth. Bruno also referred, from time to time,

to the concept of a “ladder of nature” (in the original Italian, Bruno uses the Italian

“scala”, which means steps or a ladder7). Bruno’s “ladder of nature” was a

conceptual way of linking different species of matter to each other, in what we now

think of as a system, ecosystem, or generative relationships, to produce this

“unity”. (One of the ways matter (at least on earth) is linked is generatively is

through the sun, and Bruno stressed this nascent thermodynamic idea in his

concept of heliocentrism.) This famous passage from Lo Spaccio della bestia

trionfante (The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast) (1584 illustrates the concept of

Bruno’s “ladder of nature”:

7 http://www.letteraturaitaliana.net/pdf/Volume_5/t112.pdfRetrieved March 17, 2014.

Sophia:….“And this, oh Momus,” said Jove, “…you know that animals

and plants are living effects of Nature; this Nature (as you must know)

is none other than God in things.”

Saulino: So, natura est deus in rebus.

Sophia: “However,” he said, “diverse living things represent diverse

divinities and diverse powers, which, besides the absolute being they

possess, obtain the being communicated to all things according to

their capacity and measure. Whence all of God is in all things

(although not totally, but in some more abundantly in others less).

Therefore, Mars can more efficaciously be found in a natural vestige

and mode of substance , not only in a viper and scorpion but also in

an onion and garlic, than in any manner whatsoever of inanimate

painting or statue. Think thus, of the Sun in the Crocus in the

narcissus, in the heliotrope, in the rooster, in the lion; you must think

thus of each of the gods for each of the species under various genera

of the entity. Because just as Divinity descends in a certain manner,

to the extent that one communicates with nature, so one ascends to

Divinity through Nature, just as by means of a life resplendent in

natural things one rises to the life that presides over them. ”

“What you say is true, “answered Momus, “because indeed I see

how those wise men through these means had the power to make

intimate, affable, and friendly towards themselves the gods, who, by

means of cries they sent forth through statues, gave these wise men

advice, doctrines, divinations, and superhuman institutions; whence

with magic and divine rites they rose to the height of Divinity by

means of the same ladder of Nature by which Divinity descends even

to the lowest things in order to communicate herself. ” (Bruno, Lo

Spaccio della Bestia trionfante 235-6) (My underlining for emphasis.)

If Ulysses’ phrase “the ladder to all high designs” directly references Bruno’s

concept of a “ladder of nature” (which I think is extremely likely, given the

important word “unity” directly nearby), then the disruption (or ‘shaking’) of the

“degree”, the natural relationships between higher and lower material species on

the generative scale is due to some discontinuity in the way that materials are

generated. No longer generated from solar flows, but from coal, the material items

generate new human economic relationships and new systems that Ulysses (or

rather, Shakespeare) thinks are unhealthy in the long term. (“Then enterprise is

sick”).

Casting around for Ulysses’ speech for a hint of a ‘cure’, we can see that it is

planet Sol “whose med’cinable eye/Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil”.

Shakespeare may have been hoping that performances of his plays, by paying

covert homage to the sun, would present some sort of ‘cure’ against the impact of

fossil fuels. In this sense, all of Shakespeare’s plays that participate in this sun-

honoring project may be considered the “rough magic” that Prospero refers to in

Act V of The Tempest.

Shakespeare’s approach to ‘playwright’s “magic”’ definitely now needs to be

considered in light of Bruno’s ideas on the topic of magic, since it seems very

likely, as I will show, that there are many important similarities in their approach to

magic. Luckily, the long passage about the “ladder of nature” I quote above from

Bruno’s Lo Spaccio della bestia trionfante is, in fact, one of the key passages that

Hilary Gatti discusses in connection with Giordano Bruno’s philosophy of magic.

The following long section from her essay “Science and Magic: the Resolution of

Contraries” will be highly illuminating since it explains Bruno’s philosophy of magic

(which, I will try to show later, was also Shakespeare’s):.

The central concept considered by Bruno on this page of The

Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast can be defined as an idea of magic

that respects the processes of nature, and therefore of natural laws,

rather than rudely contradicting them. This concept undoubtedly

includes a reference to the voice of Isis. It also relates to a theme that

is central to Bruno’s early works from their beginnings in the drama

Candelaio where Bruno (who here defines himself as an ‘Academic of

No Academy’) proposes as his comic hero the odious and ironically

named Bonifacio who places all his hopes in the vanity of magic

superstitions. Bruno invites his public to laugh at Bonifacio’s absurd

dreams of magic potions of such power that ‘they would make rivers

flow in directions contrary to their natural bent’ Such dreams are

likened to his desire to stop the passing of the years, and his pretense

of being still young, without realizing that it is only by allowing oneself

to be carried willingly by the current of time, ‘which gives all things

and takes all things away’, that ‘the spirit can be enlarged and the

intellect magnified’. Equally negative are the cunning and often genial

tricks of the conjurer Scarumuré, who is quite aware that the comedy

he is playing in ‘is a good one’, but ‘could easily become a much too

troublesome tragedy’. So that what appears necessary is the quest

for a kind of magic that acts in harmony with the processes and

metamorphoses of nature---a magic seen as a way of inserting

oneself into the secret workings of nature’s ways in order to make

them work better, rather than to wreak havoc and destruction.(Gatti

EOGB, 284-285)

Finally, I’d like to present another longer passage from the same essay by

Gatti. This one returns to the topic of the “ladder of nature” as Bruno used it in his

later magical writings (Lo Spaccio is not one of these). Gatti considers very

carefully why Bruno used such relatively archaic terminology which denoted the

cosmological ideas he did not believe in. Ultimately, after considering some

opinions of some other scholars of Bruno, she concludes that Bruno was putting his

magical philosophy into practice through this use of archaic terminology. Because I

want to speculate later that this was Shakespeare’s purpose in using the “great

chain of being” (an archaic structure in his opinion) to present quite radically

different ideas, I will again quote at length from Gatti’s essay since it can show a

good base for this theme of magical practice through words: :

The magical doctrine of the Renaissance was firmly founded on

the concept of a hierarchical ladder of being, both material and

spiritual which constituted a vertically oriented connecting link

between the natural world and the sphere of the divine. It was

difficult, if not impossible, to rethink that doctrine without referring

to this axis, which found one of its most essential supports in

precisely this Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmology that Bruno had

spent so many years denying. So it is perhaps not surprising to

note that many of his references to ‘the ladder of nature’ in these

magical works of his later years tend to lead the reader back into

the perspective of the traditional cosmology that Bruno had fought

against so valiantly at Oxford, in London, in Paris and again in

Wittenberg and Frankfurt. To cite a single example, we find a page

in the text titled De Magica Mathematica, where, in the context of

a long digression on divine names, Bruno appears to be arguing in

relation in relation to the traditional Aristotelian primo mobile, or

“first mover,” as well as to equally traditional cosmological entities

such as “the sphere of the fixed stars” or the lower planetary

spheres of Aristotelian fame. That is to say, these pages, which

include no comment on the contradiction they represent with

respect to his earlier cosmological thought, appear to deny

precisely those cosmological theses that Bruno had argued for so

strenuously from his first work on cosmology, The Ash Wednesday

Supper of 1584, to the final De Immenso of 1591. It comes

naturally to ask oneself, as many commentators have already

done, whether these late magical works should not be considered

as purely didactic in nature, written with an entirely explicatory

aim, or perhaps even personal notes of his reading on the subject.

If so, it would be a mistake to attempt to consider them as an

essential part of Bruno’s philosophy.

This argument was put forward by Felice Tocco in the

nineteenth century and carries with it the weight of his prestige as

still today one of Bruno’s most acute and perceptive critics, as well

as being the editor of the volume in which those so far

unpublished manuscripts made their first appearance in print.

Nevertheless, the many pages of the new volume of Opere

Magische, including the major work titled Lampas triginta

statuarium (The Lamp of the Thirty Statues), appear too dense

and complex to justify such a reductive reading of these various

and varied texts. The editor of the new volume, Michael Ciliberto,

makes an alternative suggestion in his introduction to this volume

worthy of note, where he claims that these final magical works of

Bruno show him passing from a sphere of pure speculation toward

a sphere of practice. In the latter sphere, according to Ciliberto,

conceptual contradictions can be justified in a Machiavellian

sense, insofar as the concepts called into account are those

accepted by the culture of the time. It may be added that in

relation to Bruno’s scientific speculation, the doctrines of

Renaissance magic appear at times to act as a surrogate of a

modern empirical science, for neither the new infinite cosmology

nor the new atomistic doctrine of matter could offer Bruno, at that

time, many means of intervening in the world of action or of

things. For that to happen, new technologies and scientific

instruments would have to be developed that for the moment

appeared only as dim possibilities on the horizon of an uncertain

future. Nor was Bruno alone in his awareness of a hiatus between

the new scientific theories that were revolutionizing the idea of

nature, and the still limited possibilities of applying them in

technological terms. Francis Bacon, to take only one example,

would solve the problem only a few decades later by developing

an imaginary and utopian vision of the new scientific and

technological society in his New Atlantis. Bacon’s text, too, as

Marta Fattori underlines, calls the traditional doctrines of magic to

account insofar as they connect the res naturales (the things of

nature) to the res artificiales (the things of artifice). Surely this is

what Bruno had in mind too when he referred to magic in the

Sigillus Sigillorum as one of the rectores actuum (the axes of

action).

At the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the

seventeenth, the operative powers of the new science appear

more clearly in words than in deeds, even if a new empirical

science can be seen as gradually emerging in the background.

Perhaps this is the reason why Bruno’s final works on magic take

an increasingly interior bent passing from the ontological to the

psychological sphere. That is to say, magic appears in this final

phase as increasingly the work of the mind. It is above all the

imagination that is called upon in the attempt to penetrate

lovingly into the secret links that bind all things togetherin a series

of complex and always varying relationships implying both

dominion and submission. For through such penetration, it

becomes possible to manipulate intelligently the processes of

natural evolution. The necessary instrument in such manipulation

is seen to be the word, and it is of interest to note that Maurizio

Cambi, in a study of Bruno’s final works on magic has underlined

the increasing importance assumed in them by the art of rhetoric.

(Gatti, 290-2)

Ulysses’ “great chain of being” speech then relies on its recognized

and archaic structure to perform verbal magic---by honoring the sun. in a

radical new infinite and thermodynamic cosmos, as an energy source

Shakespeare felt was superior to coal----through the skilled use of rhetoric

which can shelter and protect the real solar meaning by obscuring it,

possibly with the idea that the very same vicissitudes (another Brunian

concept, the flux and change of the material situation or circumstances)

that necessitated its hiding would one day necessitate its emergence out

into the open..

References

Bruno, Giordano. 1584. The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast. Trans. Arthur D. Imerti. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1964. Reprint 2004.

Gatti, Hilary, “Science and Magic: the Resolution of Contraries”, in Essays

onGiordano Bruno. (Princeton: Princeton University Press). 2011.

Michel, Paul. The Cosmology of Giordano Bruno. Translated by Dr. R.E.W.

Maddisson, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY 1962 (La Cosmologie de

Giordano Bruno) first English translation in 1973.

Revillet, Sophie, “Ulysses, the Ambiguous Stage Manager in Troilus and

Cressida”, (Unpublished dissertation) Université Stendahl de Grenoble.

May 21, 2013.