Book Smart

The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics and Practical Spatial Arts in England, 1580-1630 (Oxford University Press, 2005-06)
Henry Turner, assistant professor of English

As we pause to commemorate what is believed to be the birthday of William Shakespeare (April 23, 1564?), Henry Turner would like to call our attention to a lost historic moment.

“Elizabethan writers collaborated with carpenters, surveyors and engineers, and poets borrowed ideas about literary form from the field of practical mathematics,” he says.

Shakespeare and his contemporaries — Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, Philip Sidney, George Puttenham and others — all had a keen interest in mathematics and science, Turner says, especially in their applied forms: carpentry, surveying, navigation and engineering, to name a few. He says writers saw themselves, and others saw them, as artisans.

“Thanks to the Romantics in the early 19th century, we think of these Elizabethans as quintessentially ‘literary’ authors who anticipated modernity and who wrote ‘for all time.’ However, more than we realize, they drew on the techniques of practical, applied fields to compose their plays and poems. As a literary scholar, I study language as a dominant system of representing the world, values, sensation and perception. I came to realize in doing the research for this book that mathematics also is a very powerful system of representation, not unlike words, and one that was new to Renaissance thinkers — thus, very exciting to them,” he says.

Turner cites the Chorus’ famous prologue from Shakespeare’s “Henry V” as a particularly clear example.

“We’re asked to imagine theatrical performance as a kind of mathematical multiplication, where only a handful of actors can represent an entire army. Writing in the same year, Thomas Dekker sees the stage like the geometry of a map or globe — Shakespeare’s theater was called The Globe, so these metaphors were right out in the open for the audience,” Turner says.

He used rare books and facsimiles to do his research. “I encountered a used-book dealer on Long Island who had bought stacks and stacks of facsimiles of Renaissance books at auction. He didn’t understand the typefaces and wanted to unload them as quickly as possible. So, for about $1 apiece I bought as many as I could load into boxes — normally the facsimiles would have cost anywhere from $40-$100. It literally made my research possible – — rather than travel to rare book libraries in London and other places I could read them at home and even write in them if I wanted to!” Turner says.

On leave through fall, he then will teach a proseminar to incoming graduate students and an honors section of the medieval-Renaissance-Restoration literature survey course. His research will be part of those classes, he says; meanwhile, he will be at work on another book.

“It’s a history of the concept of corporation,” he says. “Its defining characteristic is what legal scholars call the ‘artificial person’ — that’s what distinguishes a corporation from trusts or from partnerships that aren’t intended to be permanent. There were many corporations in the Renaissance: guilds, cities, the church, the Crown, the university — all were technically corporations.”

Shakespeare himself participated in a corporation, Turner says.

“His own play company, the Chamberlin-King’s Men, was a joint-stock form of corporation, and Shakespeare was a stockholder in his own company,” Turner says.

In other words, as playwright, actor, amateur scientist and business owner, a true Renaissance man.

— Barbara Wolff