Introduction

Jarrett, Joseph

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-26566-3_1

Joseph Jarrett⁴

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine ((PLSM))

151 Accesses

Abstract

This introductory chapter sets out the scope of the book as a whole. It locates it in its critical and scholarly context, and provides a brief history of the technical and conceptual overlap between the mathematical and literary arts, before traversing the large body of intellectual-historical information necessary to situate contextually the ensuing five chapters. This includes a survey of mathematical practice and pedagogy in Elizabethan England.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Chapter: USD 29.95; Price excludes VAT (USA)

eBook: USD 69.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Softcover Book: USD 89.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Hardcover Book: USD 89.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

1.
Dates in parentheses after play-titles are approximate dates of those plays’ first performances. Where possible, I am following the dates provided in Martin Wiggins and Catherine Richardson, British Drama 1533–1642: A Catalogue, 7 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012–).
2.
Aristophanes, Frogs, ed. and trans. Jeffrey Henderson (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002). Line numbers appear parenthetically within the text.
3.
See the entry for ‘Number(s)’ in The New Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (Princeton and Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 845.
4.
Ibid.; Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London, 1579), L3^v; The Norton Shakespeare, Based on the Oxford Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katherine Eisaman Maus (New York: Norton, 1997; repr. 2008). Unless stated otherwise, all citations from Shakespeare are from this edition. Act, scene and line numbers are given parenthetically within the text.
5.
George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589), K1^r.
6.
The Elements of Geometrie of the Most Auncient Philosopher Euclide of Megara, ed. and trans. Henry Billingsley (London, 1570), Hh3^v.
7.
Puttenham, Arte, K1^r.
8.
Aristotle, Poetics, ed. and trans. Stephen Halliwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). Section numbers appear parenthetically within the text.
9.
See William H. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995); Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964); Hilary Gatti, The Renaissance Drama of Knowledge: Giordano Bruno in England (London: Routledge, 1989); Hilary Gatti, Giordano Bruno and Renaissance Science: Broken Lives and Organisational Power (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Robert Goulding, Defending Hypatia: Ramus, Savile and the Renaissance Rediscovery of Mathematical History (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010); and Mordechai Feingold, The Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship: Science, Universities and Society in England 1560–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
10.
Thomas Harriot’s Artis Analyticae Praxis: An English Translation with Commentary, ed. and trans. Muriel Seltman and Robert Goulding (New York: Springer, 2007).
11.
Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism, ed. Linda Woodbridge (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
12.
Shankar Raman, ‘Death by Numbers: Counting and Accounting in The Winter’s Tale’, in Alternative Shakespeares 3, ed. Diana E. Henderson (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 158–80; Patricia Parker, ‘Cassio, Cash, and the “Infidel 0”: Arithmetic, Double-Entry Bookkeeping, and Othello’s Unfaithful Accounts’, in A Companion to the Global Renaissance: English Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion, ed. Jyotsna G. Singh (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 223–41.
13.
See the following essays in Arts of Calculation: Quantifying Thought in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Glimp and Michelle R. Warren (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004): Carla Mazzio, ‘The Three Dimensional Self: Geometry, Melancholy, Drama’, pp. 39–65; Patricia Cahill, ‘Killing by Computation: Military Mathematics, the Elizabethan Social Body, and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine’, pp. 165–86; and Eugene Ostashevsky, ‘Crooked Figures: Zero and Hindu-Arabic Notation in Shakespeare’s Henry V’, pp. 205–28.
14.
Shankar Raman, ‘Specifying Unknown Things: The Algebra of The Merchant of Venice’, in Making Publics in Early Modern Europe: People, Things, Forms of Knowledge, ed. Bronwen Wilson and Paul Yachnin (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 212–31; Edward Wilson-Lee, ‘Shakespeare by Numbers: Mathematical Crisis in Troilus and Cressida’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 64 (2013), 449–72.
15.
James Beaver, ‘Donne, by Number: Quantification and Love in “Songs and Sonnets”’; and Derek Dunne, ‘“Superfluous Death” and the Mathematics of Revenge’, both in Journal of the Northern Renaissance, 6 (2014) [http://www.northernrenaissance.org/issues/ accessed 24 Feb 2017].
16.
The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science, ed. Howard Marchitello and Evelyn Tribble (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
17.
Henry S. Turner, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts 1580–1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Mary Thomas Crane, Losing Touch With Nature: Literature and the New Science in 16th-Century England (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2014); Linda Woodbridge, English Revenge Drama: Money, Resistance, Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
18.
Mazzio’s has the working title The Trouble with Numbers: The Drama of Mathematics in the Age of Shakespeare (under advance contract with the University of Chicago Press). Williams’ has the working title Literature, Mathematics, and the Writing Arts in the Age of Shakespeare (at the time of writing, publication details have yet to be announced).
19.
On the deeply complex nature of paradigm shifts, the seminal text is Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
20.
Roy Porter, ‘The Scientific Revolution and the Universities’, in A History of the University in Europe, ed. Walter Rüegg, 4 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992–2011), II: Universities in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800), ed. Hilde de Ridder-Symoens (1996), pp. 531–62 (pp. 537–38).
21.
Feingold, The Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship, p. 7.
22.
Ibid.
23.
Ibid., p. 16.
24.
Feingold, The Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship, p. 16.
25.
See the following chapters in A History of the University in Europe, I: Universities in the Middle Ages, ed. Hilde de Ridder-Symoens (1992): Gorden Leff, ‘The Trivium and the Three Philosophies’, pp. 307–36; John North, ‘The Quadrivium’, pp. 337–59.
26.
North, ‘The Quadrivium’, p. 337.
27.
See Collection of Statutes for the University of Cambridge, ed. James Heywood (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1840), p. 7.
28.
Robert Goulding, ‘Testimonia humanitatis: the early lectures of Henry Savile’, in Sir Thomas Gresham and Gresham College: Studies in the Intellectual History of London in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. Francis Ames-Lewis (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 125–45 (p. 128).
29.
John Dee, in his ‘Mathematicall Præface’ to Elements, pasted between A4^v and B1^r.
30.
Dee, Elements, between A4^v and B1^r.
31.
Yates, Giordano Bruno, p. 402.
32.
Gatti, Giordano Bruno, pp. 43–238; Carla Mazzio, ‘Introduction’ to ‘Shakespeare and Science, c.1600’, a special edition of South Central Review, 26 (2009), 1–23 (p. 3); Crane, Losing Touch.
33.
Gatti, Giordano Bruno, p. 2.
34.
Ibid.
35.
Crane, Losing Touch, pp. 4, 5.
36.
Gatti, Giordano Bruno, p. 3.
37.
Ibid., p. 2.
38.
Ibid., p. 3.
39.
Ibid.
40.
See N. M. Swerdlow and O. Neugebauer, Mathematical Astronomy in Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1984), p. 33.
41.
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 133.
42.
Niccolò Tartaglia, Nova Scientia (Venice, 1537), A1^r.
43.
Stephen Clucas, ‘“No small force”: natural philosophy and mathematics in Thomas Gresham’s London’, in Sir Thomas Gresham and Gresham College, pp. 146–73 (p. 164).
44.
Dee, Elements, between A4^v and B1^r.
45.
Feingold, The Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship, p. 16.
46.
Feingold, The Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship, p. 21.
47.
Ibid., p. 29.
48.
Ibid., p. 98.
49.
Ibid., p. 97.
50.
Joseph Mede, [Account Books], archives of Christ’s College Library, no shelf-mark, fols 1–60.
51.
See Feingold, The Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship, p. 104; and J. J. Roche, ‘Harriot, Thomas (c.1560–1621)’, ODNB (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, Oct 2006) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/12379 accessed 24 Feb 2017].
52.
Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman (London, 1634), p. 126.
53.
Philip Sidney, Sidney to Robert Sidney, 18 October 1580, in The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Roger Kuin, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), II, 1005–10 (pp. 1006, 1008).
54.
Grace Book Δ: Containing the Records of the University of Cambridge for the Years 1542–1589, ed. John Venn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), p. 356.
55.
Ibid., p. 414.
56.
Robert Goulding, ‘Humanism and Science in the Elizabethan Universities’, in Reassessing Tudor Humanism, ed. Jonathan Woolfson (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 223–42 (p. 234).
57.
See BL, MS Harley 6796, fol. 150^r. The translation adopted here is from Goulding, ‘Humanism and Science’, pp. 234–35.
58.
Feingold, The Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship, pp. 166–89.
59.
Ibid., pp. 169–70.
60.
See Roche, ODNB; and John W. Shirley, Thomas Harriot: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983).
61.
For the appearances of Savile and Bruno in Harriot’s notes, see BL, Add. MS 6787, fol. 200^r; and BL, Add. MS 6786, fol. 349^v. On Harriot and Dee, see Feingold, The Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship, pp. 136–37.
62.
Feingold, The Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship, p. 137.
63.
Sherman, John Dee, pp. 6–7.
64.
Ibid., p. 25.
65.
Ibid.; John Dee, ‘Compendious Rehearsall’ (1592), in Autobiographical Tracts of Dr. John Dee, ed. James Crossley (Manchester: Chetham Society, 1851), p. 40.
66.
Francis R. Johnson, Astronomical Thought in Renaissance England (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1937), p. 138.
67.
Frances Yates, Theatre of the World (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 12.
68.
Sherman, John Dee, pp. 38–45.
69.
Ibid., p. 40.
70.
BL, MS Harley 6796, fol. 154^r. The translation adopted here is from Goulding, ‘Humanism and Science’, p. 236.
71.
I. R. Adamson, ‘The Administration of Gresham College and its Fluctuating Fortunes as a Scientific Institution in the Seventeenth Century’, History of Education, 1 (1980), 13–25 (p. 19).
72.
Olaf Pedersen, ‘Tradition and Innovation’, in A History of the University in Europe, II, pp. 451–88 (p. 466).
73.
Wilson-Lee, ‘Shakespeare by Numbers’, p. 461.
74.
John Tapp, The Path-Way to Knowledge (London, 1613), A2^v.
75.
Feingold, The Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship, p. 174.
76.
Wilson-Lee, ‘Shakespeare by Numbers’, p. 461.
77.
All the books cited in this sub-section were printed in London. Their respective years of publication are included parenthetically within the text.
78.
John Denniss, ‘Learning arithmetic: textbooks and their users in England 1500–1900’, in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Mathematics, ed. Eleanor Robson and Jacqueline Stedall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 448–67 (pp. 448–49).
79.
Robert Recorde, The Castle Of Knowledge (London, 1556), A1^v (Proclus, Sacrobosco and Orontius were staples of university astronomy); Robert Recorde, The Whetstone of Witte (London, 1557), a1^r.
80.
Thomas Hylles’ The Arte of Vulgar Arithmeticke (London, 1600) employed precisely the same tactic. Its poems, without any of the book’s other matter, can be found collected in a neat hand in CUL, Add. MS 9597. It is not evident whether the manuscript dates from before or after the publication of Hylles’ book.
81.
The biblical aphorism was placed on the final page of the paratextual matter of the 1573 edition of The Ground of Artes, B8^v.
82.
Robert Recorde, The Pathway to Knowledg (London, 1551), ϛ3^r; Robert Recorde, The Ground of Artes (London, 1551), a2^r.
83.
Leonard Digges, A Boke Named Tectonicon (London, 1562), A1^r.
84.
William Cunningham, The Cosmographical Glasse (London, 1559), A1^r; John Blagrave, The Mathematical Jewel (London, 1585), [title-page].

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Magdalene College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Joseph Jarrett

Authors

Joseph Jarrett
View author publications
You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Joseph Jarrett .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Jarrett, J. (2019). Introduction. In: Mathematics and Late Elizabethan Drama. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26566-3_1

Download citation

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26566-3_1
Published: 01 December 2019
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-26565-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-26566-3
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics