Troilus, Tycho Brahe and Neville’s Astronomical Circle

Appendix H

In Troilus and Cressida, Ulysses places Earth at the centre of the heavens but gives the Sun the authority of a king. This combination invites a reading alongside the astronomical problem Henry Savile investigated during his travels with Neville: how could Copernicus’s account of planetary motion be used without accepting Earth’s annual revolution around the Sun? Savile’s surviving diagrams and letters document his work on that question in 1581. Dudith then wrote directly to Neville asking him to press Savile for an explanation of Copernicus. The connection begins with an identifiable intellectual problem, pursued by Neville’s tutor and discussed in a letter addressed to Neville himself.¹

Ulysses’s planetary order

The Greek commanders are discussing why their army has failed. Ulysses blames the neglect of rank and authority, turning to the heavens for his governing analogy:

The heavens themselves, the planets, and this center
Observe degree, priority, and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office, and custom, in all line of order.
And therefore is the glorious planet Sol
In noble eminence enthroned and sphered
Amidst the other, whose med’cinable eye
Corrects the influence of evil planets,
And posts, like the commandment of a king,
Sans check, to good and bad. But when the planets
In evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues and what portents, what mutiny,
What raging of the sea, shaking of 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! […]

— Troilus and Cressida, 1.3, Ulysses.²

The speech separates position from power. Earth is “this center,” but the commanding body is “planet Sol,” enthroned among its fellows. Its influence reaches good and bad alike, without obstruction, like a king’s command. Ulysses needs both an ordered place for every body and an authority capable of governing the whole. The Sun supplies that authority.

Thomas Digges gives the comparison a sharper focus. In his Perfit Description, which sets out a Copernican universe, he describes the Sun:

like a king in the middest of all reigneth and giveth laws of motion to the rest.³

Digges joins central position and royal power in the Sun. Ulysses distributes them: Earth is “this center,” while the Sun is enthroned “amidst the other” and exercises the “commandment of a king.” Digges describes the government of celestial motion; Ulysses turns celestial government into an argument about political order. Their shared image of solar kingship makes the difference in the Sun’s position especially interesting.⁴

Savile’s investigations give this comparison a concrete setting within Neville’s life. Copernicus’s mathematical account of the planets could be studied and adapted without accepting his placement of Earth in motion around the Sun. This was precisely the problem Savile pursued with Wittich during the European journey. The reading proposed here places Ulysses’s combination of terrestrial centrality and solar authority alongside that documented inquiry.⁵

Savile, Wittich and Neville

In 1581 Henry Savile was studying with Paul Wittich at Breslau, where Andreas Dudith maintained a household that welcomed scholars and supported mathematical inquiry. Wittich had spent several months with Tycho at Uraniborg in 1580. Neville’s travels with Savile thus brought him into a scholarly circle whose work connected directly with the astronomical investigations taking place at Tycho’s observatory.¹

Savile’s surviving papers show the investigation taking shape. In a draft letter to the astronomer Johannes Praetorius, he proposed a central Earth that still rotated daily on its axis and asked how the planetary circles could be arranged to agree with Copernicus’s calculations. He began by asserting a result, then changed dico (“I say”) to quaero an (“I ask whether”). In later notes and correspondence he recorded five alternative arrangements for the superior planets—Mars, Jupiter and Saturn—discussed with Wittich. Different arrangements could reproduce the same observed motions. His notes and diagrams survive in two Bodleian manuscripts, Savile 47 and Savile 108.⁶

Savile also prepared an explanation of Copernicus’s account of Earth’s threefold motion for Dudith, dated 22 March 1581. Dudith’s interest was sustained: he wanted someone able to make the difficult mathematics intelligible.⁷

Neville himself appears in this correspondence. On 7 August 1581, when Neville and Savile were in Venice, Dudith wrote to Neville asking him to spur Savile to further work:

Urge Savile, I beg you, most earnestly, and press him harder to prepare something for me on the obscure passages of the ancient mathematicians, and on Copernicus, who should be compared with the ancients—or, if Wittich is to be believed, preferred to them.

Dudith’s Latin poses the choice: comparandum aut, si credendum est Wittichio, anteponendum. The question was whether Copernicus should be set beside the ancient authorities or placed above them. In the same letter Dudith asked what Neville wanted done with the books he had left behind and requested further mathematical and philosophical works. Neville was being asked to help obtain both texts and explanations.⁸

Dudith’s request drew Neville personally into a continuing exchange about the old and new astronomy. Savile’s investigations belonged to 1581, seven years before Tycho published his completed system.⁹

Tycho’s solution

Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), a Danish nobleman and astronomer, established Uraniborg on the island of Hven in 1576 with royal support. Working before astronomical telescopes, he built a programme of precise observation using large sighting instruments.¹⁰ His measurements placed the new star of 1572 and the comet of 1577 beyond the Moon, challenging the idea of unchanging heavens and, in the comet’s case, solid planetary shells.¹¹

In 1588 he published his alternative to Copernicus in De mundi aetherei recentioribus phaenomenis: Earth remained stationary, but the five other planets travelled around the Sun, which itself travelled around Earth. The principal arrangements were:

Tycho thus gave the Sun an organising role within an Earth-centred universe. His observations also outlasted his own model: Kepler used them to establish the motions of the planets.¹²

Tycho’s books in the Savile circle

The later correspondence supplies a second connection. Henry Savile’s younger brother Thomas undertook his own European tour in 1588–1591, visiting Dudith and subsequently working with Gian Vincenzo Pinelli in Padua. Like Henry, Thomas combined Greek scholarship with mathematics and astronomy; while at Breslau he completed a Latin translation of the ancient astronomical writer Geminus.¹³

On 20 November 1588 Dudith asked Johannes Praetorius about Tycho’s newly printed book and expressed his wish to inscribe a globe with stars positioned from Tycho’s observations, which he considered more accurate than others. On 11 December he asked Tadeáš Hájek to thank Tycho for his gift, promising to write after studying the whole book. Thomas Savile was then with Dudith and sent greetings in the same letter.¹⁴

Dudith was still seeking Henry’s earlier work. On 14 January 1589, after Thomas’s arrival and the receipt of Tycho’s book, he asked Praetorius to return Henry Savile’s explanation of Earth’s threefold motion, adding a clear diagram and any necessary annotations. The explanation prepared in 1581 remained part of the household’s astronomical discussions eight years later.⁷

Eleven days later, on 25 January 1589, Dudith described a diagram associated with Wittich which resembled Tycho’s new hypotheses and asked Praetorius to examine both. This was the same household in which Henry Savile had worked years earlier, now receiving and discussing Tycho’s published astronomy while Thomas Savile was present.¹⁵

Tycho’s own letter to Thomas Savile, dated 1 December 1590, is still more explicit. Thomas had written to him from Hamburg and had intended to visit Hven, but adverse winds and seas had prevented the journey. He had also requested Tycho’s book eagerly. Tycho responded by sending two copies of his second book on recent celestial phenomena and asked Thomas to show it to John Dee and Thomas Digges so that they could examine it and give their opinions freely. Astronomy travelled through this circle as books to be read, criticised and discussed. Tycho also sought literary recognition. His postscript begins:

Addidi quaterna Exemplaria meæ Effigiei nuper Amsterodami cupro insculptæ.

I have added four copies of my portrait, recently engraved in copper at Amsterdam.

He then asked whether excellent English poets might compose an epigram on the portrait and in praise of his work, mentioning Daniel Rogers as a possible contributor. The request deliberately joined the circulation of astronomy to the circulation of poetry.¹⁶

Thomas also forwarded Italian newsletters to Neville. Sixteen newsletters addressed to Thomas Savell of London in 1591 survive among Neville’s diplomatic papers, carrying reports from Rome and Venice. Discussed in the Othello chapter, they give a concrete example of Thomas passing continental information to Neville: the recipient of Tycho’s books and portraits was also a supplier of Neville’s news.¹⁷

Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and Hamlet

Jacques de Gheyn’s engraved portrait of Tycho surrounds him with the arms and names of his ancestors. Among them are “ROSENKRANS,” on the left side of the arch, and “GVLDENSTEREN,” near the foot of the left column. The conjunction of the two names has long attracted attention in discussions of Hamlet.¹⁸ The portrait and Thomas Savile’s connection with its circulation are already described in the Hamlet chapter.¹⁹

The correspondence gives this comparison a particular interest for Neville. The intended recipient of the portraits was his tutor’s brother, and Tycho expressly wanted them brought to the attention of English poets. The same letter directed Thomas towards Digges and Dee. Here the names in Shakespeare’s Danish tragedy occur on an object that Tycho was sending into an identifiable English scholarly and literary circle.¹⁶

Hamlet’s own astronomical language appears in his letter to Ophelia:

Doubt thou the stars are fire,
Doubt that the sun doth move,
Doubt truth to be a liar,
But never doubt I love.

Copernicans did question whether the Sun moved; both Ptolemy and Tycho retained a moving Sun. Later Hamlet says he could be confined in a nutshell and count himself a “king of infinite space.” That passage survives in the First Folio but is absent from the Second Quarto. Whether these lines invoke a particular astronomer or draw on a broader debate, the movements of the Sun and the extent of the heavens offered Shakespeare material for thinking about certainty, confinement and freedom.²⁰

The comparison begins with words on the page: Digges’s Sun reigns from the centre; Ulysses names Earth as the centre and gives the Sun command. Behind it lies a documented question pursued within Neville’s circle—how to reconcile the old celestial order with the new planetary mathematics. Savile’s papers record the inquiry, Dudith’s letter brings Neville into it, and Thomas Savile’s correspondence continues the exchange through Tycho’s books and portraits.