To unsphere the stars: exploring the early modern ontological/cosmological crisis in English Renaissance literature

Abstract

The early modern era is traditionally defined by its significant shifts in a myriad of fields. Advances in one of these fields, astronomy, eventually redefined the physical and philosophical/theological nature of the known universe. This study attempts to connect much of this societal unrest to a previously neglected factor - the impact of Copernicanism on Renaissance thought. This work, epistemological in nature, explores the manner in which selected Renaissance writers, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and John Donne, responded to the shifts in philosophy and cosmology that affected their culture. The crisis that heliocentrism brought to early modernists unfolded over almost seventy years. Copernicus's De Revolutionibus, which first proposed the new system was published in 1543 and Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius, which confirmed the system, was published in 1610. It is this period of uncertainty that this study addresses, examining the era through the lens of selected literary works. This lost certainty was eventually replaced by an alternate form of certainty as defined by Francis Bacon's scientific method and reified in the body of the Royal Society of the mid seventeenth century. As the former concept of the microcosm/macrocosm model was destroyed, I argue that these writers attempted to turn its fragments into metaphors or similes which were devoid of the validating foundation which gave them their substance as well as their attraction. I maintain that Renaissance writers responded to these shifts in various ways, often adopting metadramatic tropes, specific terminology and astronomical concepts lifted from the "new philosophy" into their works in an effort to process and anesthetize the new world order that included a radically altered cosmos.