Tag Archives: science

Shakespeare and the moon

It’s fifty years since the first moon landing in July 1969, and most people who were alive at the time must have memories of it. My father woke me up to watch Neil Armstrong become the first human ever to … Continue reading

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William Blake and creativity in science and the arts

What is creativity and where does it come from? Is there a place for creativity in science? Shakespeare was one of the most creative of people, but the mysteries of his talent are impossible to pin down. William Blake, (1757-1827) … Continue reading

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Shakespeare and the alchemists

I’ve recently been investigating a website that allows us to get a close look at the medical world of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. The Casebooks Project “aims to make available the astrological records of Simon Forman and Richard Napier — … Continue reading

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Shakespeare, medicine and science, 450 years on

A new book is just about to be published linking Shakespeare and science, a pairing that still doesn’t happen very often in the study of Shakespeare.  This is at least partly because scientific methods based on experimentation and logical enquiry were … Continue reading

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Science versus alchemy

The BBC’s series The Genius of Invention carried on, this week with a major documentary on the greatest of scientists, Isaac Newton . But the documentary revealed a more complicated side to Newton: not just the logical man who made … Continue reading

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Shakespeare, Brecht and Galileo

  The RSC are currently staging Bertolt Brecht’s play A Life of Galileo in a new translation by Mark Ravenhill. To accompany this play they have put on two events about Shakespeare and Science under the title ShakesSphere. The second … Continue reading

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Getting inventive in Shakespeare’s England

BBC 2 is currently screening a season, Genius of Invention, accompanied by a listing of 50 Great British Inventions. But although these include the obvious (steam and jet engine) and the quirky (soda water, baby buggy), not one of these … Continue reading

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Simon Forman, Shakespeare and the stage

12 September 2011 is the 400th anniversary of the death of the colourful astrologer-cum-physician Simon Forman – or perhaps it was 11 September, or even 5 September, accounts vary.  Whichever is correct, Forman was a well-known, even notorious figure in Shakespeare’s … Continue reading

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