English Language and Literature Commons^™

Shakespeare And The Making Of Early Modern Science: Resituating Prospero's Art, Elizabeth Spiller

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Some readers may ask what it means to use the term "science" in conjunction with Shakespeare. From a modern perspective, science may not seem to be able to tell us much about Shakespeare or Shakespeare about science. Looking backwards, it is fair to say that Aristotle would probably have agreed with such a perspective: what scholasticism came to call scientia has nothing to do with ars. In between Aristotle and Einstein, though, matters stood differently. The late sixteenth and early seventeenth century saw the historic transition from Aristotelian models of scientia to modern "science." Both classic and modern epistemologies of …