Shakespeare and Saturn ─ Accounting for Appearances

Author Peter Usher is emeritus professor of astronomy and astrophysics at The Pennsylvania State University; he has written several books and papers on science in Shakespeare. In this work, he focuses on Hamlet and the three plays involving Saturn: All’s Well That Ends Well, Much Ado About Nothing, and The Comedy of Errors. The author finds evidence in Shakespeare’s plays that Shakespeare was aware of the revolution in scientific understanding that was taking place during his lifetime, but because that scientific knowledge was politically and religiously controversial, Shakespeare wrote allegorically about the latest astronomic discoveries. The author also demonstrates that plays of the celestial genre share an emphasis on the planet Saturn and its ring system, which during Shakespeare’s time had recently become visible with early telescopes. The book includes about 30 pages of appendices and notes, including a summary of celestial data and properties of Saturn. Annotation c2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

Peter D. Usher is Emeritus Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at The Pennsylvania State University. He received his MSc from the University of the Free State in South Africa and his PhD from Harvard. He is the author of Hamlet’s Universe and Shakespeare and the Dawn of Modern Science and has published more than one hundred papers in peer-reviewed journals. His research accomplishments include the analytic derivation of the equations of invariant imbedding, the discovery of the renormalized Poincare-Lighthill perturbation expansion, a generalization of the method of shoot and fit, and a survey of medium-bright quasars. His papers on Shakespeare and science have appeared in The Elizabethan Review, The Oxfordian, and The Shakespeare Newsletter.