Giordano Bruno's execution and suffering before his execution affected Shakespeare profoundly and influenced his plays.

1. “I have read it; it is heresy”: Shakespeare’s plays in the years
surrounding Giordano Bruno’s Execution in 1600
While Giordano Bruno was in London between 1582 and 1585, he completed and published his six
important "Italian Dialogues," including Lo Spaccio de la Bestia Trionfante (The Expulsion of the
Triumphant Beast, 1584) and Gli eroici furori (The Heroic Enthusiasts, 1585). A printer in London named
Thomas Vautrollier, a Protestant refugee from Paris, published some of these, and he employed an
apprentice named Richard Field, a man from Stratford-upon-Avon whose father worked with
Shakespeare’s father. (Greenblatt 2004: 193) Therefore it is possible that Shakespeare had access to them
through Field (and gained knowledge to the other Italian dialogues by Bruno not published by Field).
Also, did Shakespeare know Italian? He may have known it and if he did not, many of his educated
contemporaries did. He could have encountered educated Italians in London and he may have known
John Florio, an Italian who was tutor to the Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s patron. In any case,
according to my research, Shakespeare was definitely familiar with Giordano Bruno’s work and
moreover, he was convinced and inspired by it.
The aspects of Bruno’s work that Shakespeare particularly liked were thermodynamic heliocentrism
and pantheism. Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet in 1596, and it’s a play that contains an ingenious
allegory about man and the sun, the main energy source for our planet. Man meets the sun (this is the
party scene); Man becomes a bit separated from the sun through Christianity (this is the balcony scene);
Man leaves the sun economy to burn coal; Man returns to using the sun when fossil fuels are depleted

2. (this is the tomb scene: Juliet looks dead but she is alive; the sun economy doesn’t function though the
sun burns brightly). Without Bruno’s science, it is very doubtful that Shakespeare could have gotten such
clear confirmation on the situation of Planet Earth in our solar system so clearly.
As for Bruno’s pantheism, especially Bruno’s call for inclusion of a goddess, which Bruno sets forth
in allegorical form in Gli eroici furori, Shakespeare also agreed with this idea and used it extensively in his
early comedies, such as The Taming of the Shrew and The Comedy of Errors, where we see references to the
Diana-Actaeon myth, which Bruno makes use of in his narrative about the Heroic Lover in search of the
Divine Truth. (In Bruno’s retelling of this myth, Actaeon is a Heroic Lover who, being turned into a stag, is
devoured by his dogs, consumed by the Divine Truth he was seeking and in this way united with it.)
So for example, in The Comedy of Errors, Antipholus says “Against my soul’s pure truth why labor
you/ To make it wander in an unknown field?/ Are you a god? Would you create me new?” to Luciana,
(whose name means “light”, echoing the moonlight illuminating the naked body of the goddess Diana as she
bathed in a pool as she was observed by Actaeon).
In The Taming of the Shrew, Lucentio reveals that his purpose in coming to Padua is to study
“philosophy” (I.i.18). Later, Petrucchio compares Katherine to Diana: “Did ever Dian so become a grove as
Kate this chamber with her princely gait?” and once again the “grove” recalls the spot where Actaeon saw
Diana. Then Petrucchio says to her “by this light whereby I see thy beauty/Thy beauty doth make me like
thee well”. Bianca is compared to the goddess Minerva (Athena) when Lucentio exclaims “Hark, Tranio,

3. thou mayst hear Minerva speak!” So in these early comedies, Shakespeare makes an effort to bring in
Bruno’s ideas, especially from Gli Eroici Furori. Petrucchio pursues Katherine, Lucentio pursues Bianca.
These are allegorical depictions of the Bruno’s Heroic Lover pursuing the Divine Truth.
Another early comedy, Love’s Labor’s Lost, is a conceited play that disguises, in various ways,
Bruno’s Gli eroici furori. Shakespeare’s play about men who look for wisdom without women disguises
Bruno’s narrative about nine blind philosophers who have been stricken blind and must find someone to help
them open a magic vessel in order to have the water sprinkled on their eyes so they can see again.
In Bruno’s work, it is a nymph on the River Thames who performs this service for them and by
combining the two supernatural female characters, Diana and this Thames river nymph, we can see Bruno’s
composite idea of the perfect Goddess: she combines the beauty of nature with a firm and impressive
Protestant and British interest in science and knowledge.
To refer to this idiosyncratic Brunian goddess, Shakespeare consistently used a pattern of two female
characters in all his comedies. So we see Hermia and Helena (who is called “goddess” by Demetrius),
Bianca and Katherine, Adriana and Luciana. He kept using female pairs in later comedies: Nerissa and
Portia, Olivia and Viola, Rosalind and Celia, Mariana and Isabella.
As Bruno’s execution neared and then occurred, on February 17, 1600, Shakespeare seems to have
become intensely and poignantly affected by Bruno’s suffering. Shakespeare must have suffered himself,
feeling the injustice of Bruno’s treatment. And this suffering resulted in deeper artistic inspiration.

4. I’ll address three comedies, Much Ado About Nothing (1598-9), As You Like It (1599) and Twelfth
Night (1601), plus one tragedy, Hamlet, written in 1600. These three comedies amount to a secret celebration
and formal honoring of Bruno’s life and work, sort of like dramatic festschrifts. Hamlet, on the other hand, is
a radical but cloaked defense of Bruno, where Shakespeare also shows how he was immensely influenced
and inspired by the Italian philosopher and natural scientist.
First, I’d discuss Much Ado About Nothing
In Romeo and Juliet, Friar Lawrence is privileged above other characters: he is allowed to share a
brief scene with the couple, as no other character is (Romeo and Juliet otherwise play alone when they are
together and their scenes in sequence constitute the secret allegory), and this reveals Friar Lawrence’s
special ontological status, though not exactly knowledge of Romeo’s and Juliet’s secret identities, which
parallels the playwright’s own privileged knowledge. Second, Friar Lawrence is allowed to formulate
strategies to keep the couple together. (His actions parallel Shakespeare’s strategic attempts through his
professional dramatic productions to reunite, in a thematic and philosophical way, the sun and man together
in a future resilient economic system).
Similarly, In Much Ado About Nothing, Friar Francis has special ontological access to Hero’s esoteric
roles as 1) a sun figure or nature goddess, who is compared to the goddess Diana by Claudius (“You seem to
me as Dian in her orb” (IV.i.57); and 2) a symbol—or a sort of a double--- of Giordano Bruno. Friar Francis’
actions have parallels in Shakespeare’s own intentions as a playwright to rescue, defend and rehabilitate

5. Hero/Bruno. Bruno was Shakespeare’s real “Hero”. Francis says, “in her eye there hath appeared a fire to
burn the errors that these princes hold” (IV.i.162-3), a reference to the burning at the stake of Bruno, also a
victim of the errors of different powerful “princes” in Venice and Rome.
Through the Hero/Bruno parallel, Shakespeare predicts that mankind will one day make a sort of a
collective philosophical turn towards Bruno’s scientific and pantheistic ideas. (If we observe the Gaia
hypothesis, as well as environmental and neo-pagan ideas now gaining popularity, Shakespeare’s allegorical
prediction of the vindication of Bruno’s heretical ideas, made hundreds of years ago, was indeed correct.)
The title of this play Much Ado About Nothing is a direct comment by Shakespeare on his opinion of
the justification for the trial and execution of his hero, Giordano Bruno. Moreover, Benedick (who as “The
Prince’s jester” is another stand-in for Shakespeare, this time the aspect of him that was a professional
writer) says: “That I neither feel how she should be lov’d, nor know how she should be worthy, is the
opinion that fire cannot melt out of me; I will die in it at the stake.” To this, Don Pedro replies, “Thou wast
ever an obstinate heretic in the despite of beauty.” (I.i.230-5) With the phrase “obstinate heretic”, I believe
that Shakespeare was directly and daringly quoting the Avviso of February 19, 16001, published by the
Catholic Church after the execution of Bruno:
…Thursday morning in Campo dei Fiori that vile Dominican friar from
Nola was burnt alive. He was a most obstinate heretic who had
1 https://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-74523895.html

6. capriciously convinced himself of a number of dogmas contrary to our
faith…(my emphasis)
Shakespeare was showing that he was also a “heretic” in that he agreed with Bruno’s ideas 100%.
Next I’d like to discuss As You Like It.
Given the immense importance of the Actaeon-Diana passage in Gli Eroici Furori for
Shakespeare, it is no coincidence that the image of a hunted stag appears in As You Like It, and it
appears at the same time that one prominent character, Jaques, is first introduced and then described in
relation to it, for it is Jaques who talks to it and spends time with it, and therefore becomes associated
with it
First Lord: …….
To-day my Lord of Amiens and myself
Did steal behind him as he (Jaques) lay along
Under an oak, whose antique root peeps out
Upon the brook that brawls along this wood,
To the which place a poor sequest’red stag,
That from the hunter’s aim had ta’en hurt,
Did come to languish; and indeed, my lord,
The wretched animal heav’d forth such groans
That their discharge did stretch his leathern coat
Almost to bursting, and the big round tears
Cours’d one another down his innocent nose
In piteous chase; and thus the hairy fool,
Much marked of the melancholy Jaques,
Stood on the extremest verge of the swift brook,
Augmenting it with tears. (II.i.21-43)
Duke Senior: But what said Jaques? Did he not moralize the spectacle?
First Lord: O yes, into a thousand similes,

7. First, for his weeping into the needless stream:
“Poor deer”, quoth he,”thou mak’st a testament
As worldlings do, giving your sum of more
To that which had too much.” Then being there
Alone,
Left and abandoned of his velvet friends:
“’Tis right”, quoth he, “thus misery doth part
The flux of company”. Anon a careless herd,
Full of the pasture, jumps along by him
And never stays to greet him. “Ay”, quoth Jaques,
“Sweep on, you fat and greasy citizens,
‘Tis just the fashion. Wherefore do you look
Upon that poor and broken bankrupt there?”
Thus most invectively he pierceth through
The body of the country, city, court,
Yea, and of this our life, swearing that we
Are mere usurpers, tyrants and what’s worse,
To fright the animals and to kill them up
In their assign’d and native dwelling place. (II.1.21-64)
Many allusions to both Bruno’s situation and his ideas are inscribed in the passage. The wounded
deer is suffering and on the verge of death, as Bruno was before his execution: “sequest’red” refers to
Bruno’s imprisonment, while the word “innocent” stands as Shakespeare’s own private verdict on the
accused man. The sad “groans” and “tears” of the deer recall the sufferings of Bruno, burned at the
stake.
Brunian philosophy, “whose antique root peeps out” like that of the oak, in that Bruno used classical
thinkers, is also alluded to in the passage. “Flux” and the repeated references to streams and movement
of water recalls the important Brunian concept of vicissitudes, while “he pierceth through the body of
the country, city, court, Yea, of this our life” Hermetically expresses Shakespeare’s high evaluation of

8. Bruno’s philosophy. In fact, with this lengthy and secret allusion to the wounded deer in the Actaeon
myth, Shakespeare associates Jaques with Bruno, who had probably been executed by the time As You
Like It was written.
At the end of the play, Duke Senior asks Jaques to “stay, Jaques, stay” (V.iv.194), but Jaques refuses
and says he will go to “your abandon’d cave” (V.iv.196). These lines are a personal tribute to Bruno in
that Shakespeare wants him to still be alive (”stay”). Visualizing the best, most ideal place for Bruno’s
spirit, Shakespeare returns to Gli eroici furori and places ‘Jaques’/Bruno in a “cave”, echoing Bruno’s
own description of the Heroic Lover “one who comes to understand to such an extent”, one who is
sitting in “simple chambers of the cavernous mountains, whence he beholds the great rivers; he
vegetates intact and pure from ordinary greed, where the speech of the Divine converses more freely”.
(The Heroic Enthusiasts, Bruno 67) (my emphasis). Shakespeare’s idea is probably just as Bruno would
have liked it.
By grieving over the wounded deer, Jacques gives voice to the perspective of the creatures of the
forest. The image crystallizes a picture of a person in sympathy with a huge cosmic nature, and this is
Giordano Bruno. The “tongues on trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in
everything” (II.i.16-7) are a poetical characterization of Giordano Bruno’s heroic efforts to capture
nature correctly in his writings and ideas, in a sense, to give the whole cosmos a voice through his
writings.

9. Next, I’ll talk about Twelfth Night
In Much Ado About Nothing, Hero is a positive and admirable character; Jaques, in As You Like It, is
a bit cynical and world-weary, but he is nevertheless a positive character. However, in Twelfth Night, the
character who stands in for Bruno (because he is subjected to a religious inquisition) is a pedant named
Malvolio, a sort of anti-Bruno. Bruno hated pedants, and Bruno’s works, such as Il Candelaio, always
show pedants in an unfavorable light: the mocking of pedants in Bruno is the “Brunian reaction against
a culture conceived primarily in ‘grammarian’ terms as quantity and refinement of words rather than
attention to things” (Gatti 1989: 142)) By putting the pedantic Malvolio into the situation that Bruno
himself had faced in reality, or rather into a nasty parody of it, Shakespeare seems to have wanted to see
the tables turned on the stage.
One strange and awkward line of Malvolio’s, spoken when he goes to Olivia when he is dressed in
yellow stockings and cross-gartered, contains two words, “executed” and “Roman”, together: ”It did
come to his hands and commands shall be executed. I think we do know the sweet Roman hand.”
(III.iv.37-38) (my emphasis) This line, I believe, Hermetically establishes the play’s connection to Bruno,
executed in Rome.
But the most important moment arrives when Feste, the clown, is dressed as Sir Topas and quizzes
Malvolio, locked and bound in a dark room, on Pythagoras’ view of the transmigration of the soul:
Feste: What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild-fowl?

10. Malvolio: That the soul of our grandam might happily inhabit a bird.
Feste: What thinks’t thou of his opinion?
Malvolio: I think nobly of the soul and in no way approve his opinion.
Feste: Fare thee well. Remain thou still in darkness. Thou shalt hold the
opinion of Pythagoras ere I will allow of your wits…(IV.ii.50-58)
At his trial, Bruno had cited Pythagoras in the context of the Pythagorean doctrine of the “world
soul”:
Already, in the crucial third session of the trial at Venice, Bruno had admitted
that he considered the universe infinite and eternal, populated by infinite worlds,
and governed by a universal providence identifiable with nature herself. He
confessed to doubts about the incarnation of Christ and about the Trinity, and he
declared that he believed in a world soul according to the doctrine of Pythagoras.
(Gatti 2011: 314)
More specifically, Ingrid Rowland writes “Bruno seems also to have thought, like Pythagoras, that souls,
once embodied, were immortal, destined to endless reincarnation”. (Rowland, 220-1) In a radical inversion,
Feste, the fool, here voices the opinion of the soul that Bruno (and by implication, Shakespeare) hold. The
prisoner, Malvolio, holds the ordinary Christian view. Now, on stage, this common viewpoint is ‘heresy’,
the unenlightened viewpoint: “Remain thou still in darkness”, says Feste. The tables have been turned and

11. the stage becomes the place to conduct secret ‘heretical’ reforms.
Invested with the attitudes and ideas that were hostile to or inconsistent with Bruno’s thought,
Malvolio becomes a scapegoat figure, first punished and then expelled from the festive ‘magic circle’ of
the loving couples. His very last line, “I’ll be reveng’d on the whole pack of you” (V.i.378) seems to be
a shout that embodies Shakespeare’s own desire to revenge Bruno’s execution, but this desire is
paradoxically expressed and dismissed at the same instant as ridiculous. Revenge (the realization that
Bruno was right) will not occur by any one hand, but by “the whirligig of time“: “And thus the whirligig
of time brings in his revenges” (V.i.376), says Feste shortly thereafter, subtly echoing one of the songs
of the nine philosophers in Gli eroici furori after the urn has been opened:
Puts down the high and raises up the low,
He who the infinite machine sustains,
With swiftness, with the medium, or slow,
Apportioning the turning
Of this gigantic mass,
The hidden is unveiled and the open stands. (Bruno Gli eroici furori 122)
Olivia then dismisses Malvolio with the line “he hath been most notoriously abus’d” (V.i.379), a
critique of Giordano Bruno’s treatment by the Inquisition.
Orsino, a Brunian Heroic Lover, bids Viola to “unfold the passion of my love” (I.4.24) in his pursuit of a
chaste woman representing an ideal (Olivia). Orsino’s innermost longings are explained through the metaphor
of a mysterious, heretical and unnamed “text”: “Where lies your text?” (I.5.223) asks Olivia, to which Viola
replies, “in Orsino’s bosom.”(I.v.224) To which Olivia counters “What chapter of his bosom?” (I.5.225); to

12. which Viola answers “in the first of his heart”(I.5.226); to which Olivia dismissively replies, “O, I have read
it; it is heresy.”(I.v.227) (It is worth noting that all of Bruno’s works were placed on the Catholic Index, the
list of banned works.)
In addition, Twelfth Night starts with a reference to the Actaeon-Diana myth:
Curio: Will you go hunt, my lord?
Orsino: What Curio?
Curio: The hart, my lord.
Orsino: Why, so I do, the noblest that I have.
O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first,
Methought she purg’d the air of pestilence!
That instant was I turn’d into a hart,
And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds,
E’er since pursue me. (I.i.16-22)
The passage, placed so significantly at the opening of the play, signifies the sustained but hidden
presence of Giordano Bruno’s philosophy from Gli eroici furori, where Actaeon’s fate is used as a
metaphor for the heroic intellect approaching the Divine:
…But yet, to no one does it seem possible to see the sun, the universal
Apollo, the absolute light through supreme and most excellent species; but
only its shadow, its Diana, the world, the universe, nature, which is in
things, light which is in the opacity of matter, that is to say, so far as it
shines in the darkness.
Many of them wander amongst the aforesaid paths of this deserted
wood, very few are those who find the fountain of Diana. Many are content

13. to hunt for wild beasts and things less elevated, and the greater number do
not understand why, having spread their nets to the wind, they find their
hands full of flies. Rare, I say, are the Actaeons to whom fate has granted the
power of contemplating the nude Diana and who, entranced with the
beautiful disposition of the body of nature, and led by those two lights, the
twin splendor of Divine goodness and beauty become transformed into
stags; for they are no longer hunters but become that which is hunted. For
the ultimate and final end of this sport, is to arrive at the acquisition of that
fugitive and wild body, so that the thief becomes the thing stolen, the hunter
becomes the thing hunted; in all other kinds of sport, for special things, the
hunter possesses himself of those things, absorbing them with the mouth of
his own intelligence; but in that Divine and universal one, he comes to
understand to such an extent that he becomes of necessity included,
absorbed, united. Whence from common, ordinary, civil, and popular, he
becomes wild, like a stag, an inhabitant of the woods; he lives god-like
under that grandeur of the forest; he lives in the simple chambers of the
cavernous mountains, whence he beholds the great rivers; he vegetates
intact and pure from ordinary greed, where the speech of the Divine

14. converses more freely, to which so many men have aspired who longed to
taste the Divine life while upon earth, and who with one voice have said:
Ecce elongavi fugiens, et mansi in solitudine. Thus the dogs---thoughts of
Divine things---devour Actaeon, making him dead to the vulgar and the
crowd, loosened from the knots of perturbation from the senses, free from
the fleshly prison of matter, whence they no longer see their Diana as
through a hole or window, but having thrown down the walls to the earth,
the eye opens to a view of the whole horizon. So that he sees all as
one…..(Bruno, The Heroic Enthusiasts, 66-68)
Shakespeare may have recognized in himself such a degree of emotional suffering related to Bruno’s
violent public execution that Shakespeare may almost have felt the world was a place of “madness”: the
word “mad” appears again and again in this play.
Finally, I’ll address Hamlet.
In Hamlet, it is not Gli eroici furori that is the main Brunian text hidden but present, but another of
the Italian dialogues, Lo Spaccio della besta trionfante. Hilary Gatti develops the idea, which other critics
have supported, that Hamlet and Giordano Bruno’s Lo Spaccio della besta trionfante, share many
fundamental similarities. Gatti focuses on the concept of the working out of a total reform as one common
point:

15. All he can hope from his studies and his writings, states Bruno wryly is
‘material for disappointment’: any prudential reckoning will consider silence more
advisable than speech. What spurs Bruno to write at all is what he calls ‘the eye of
eternal truth’. It is in relation to this higher and divine dimension of justice that his
message must be unfolded, the terms of a total reform worked out. The Explicatory
Epistle then goes on to indicate briefly the vices associated with the various
constellations and to visualize their defeat followed by the reinstatement of
corresponding virtues. What (Lo Spaccio) involves is thus the visualization of a new
era, the arduous working out of a plan of total reform. Only when this task has been
completed can the heroic intellect allow itself to rest: ‘There is the end of the stormy
travail, there the bed, there the tranquil rest, there a safe silence.’
Hamlet, confronted like Bruno by a world become ‘rank and gross’, weighs the
dangers and uses of words in very similar terms: ‘It is not, nor it cannot come to
good./But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue’. Then the Ghost, who
announces himself as Hamlet’s ‘eye of eternal truth’, spurs him to speak. Only when
Hamlet, like Bruno, has penetrated and denounced the vices which dominate his world
does he reach the end of his stormy drama with the advent of a new Prince. There, too,
he finds ‘the bed’, the ultimate moment of quietness and safety: ‘the rest is

16. silence’.(Gatti, 1989: 120-1)
In a later version of her essay, Gatti notes that Hamlet and Lo Spaccio also share a major
fundamental dynamic and structural plot similarity: a strong but increasingly decrepit power center
(Jove and Claudius) is vexed and challenged by a powerless but witty, brilliant and radical outsider
(Momus and Hamlet):
Lo Spaccio narrates the story of a macroscopic, universal reform undertaken trough the
transformation of signs of the zodiac from bestial vices into reformed virtues, the entire
operation being carried out by a Jove who considers himself an absolute prince, both in a
political as well as a religious sense. Bruno, however, reminds his readers that even Jove,
like all things that are part of the material world, remains subject to the laws of
vicissitude, suggesting he is far from infallible, as he wishes to be considered. In order to
underline this point, Bruno sees him as being accompanied throughout his long and
meticulously organized reform by the suggestions of an ironic and satirical Momus, who
gets dangerously close to appearing as the real hero of the story. (Gatti 2011: 149)
Momus, the god of satire in the classical world, was expelled from Olympus by the gods for his
caustic wit, and Bruno claims that Momus’ role in the celestial court of Jove in Lo Spaccio is similar to
the Fool or court jester in an earthly court: “where each (jester) offers to the ear of his Prince more
truths about his estate than the rest of the court together; inducing many who fear to say things openly

17. to speak as if in a game, and in that way to change the course of events.” (Gatti 2011: 149) Speaking
“as if in a game”, including the Hermetic need and practice to use enigma, riddles, or allegory in order
to hide a calculated message, can be seen as of course, Hamlet’s “antic disposition”, but also, more
broadly, in my reading, as the whole play itself, which is an allegory, a mind tool. In my reading,
Hamlet is an allegory about Shakespeare as a fighter against fossil fuels. Fossil fuels, or coal is
symbolized by Claudius, the strong and corrupt power.
Gatti also sees the Brunian art of memory at work in Hamlet, first as a function of the Ghost’s
insistence that Hamlet “remember” him, and then in the “eternalizing” of Claudius’ murderous act in
the play-within-the play that Claudius must watch. (Gatti 1989: 153). Gatti concludes that, “(Hamlet)
as a whole becomes a complex memory system, chronicling the times and thus eternalizing their acts,
submitting them to the eye of absolute justice and eternal truth.” (Gatti 1989: 153)
Gatti points out that it is Mercury, a god traditionally associated with rhetoric, who in Lo Spaccio
is connected with ‘eternalizing acts in memory’: “to Mercury, the gods gave the task of ascertaining
the vicissitudes of time down to the barest minimums and also of recording those vicissitudes in the
tables of memory.” (Gatti, 1989: 162) Hamlet, alone on stage after the Ghost has disclosed that he has
been murdered by his brother, also resolves to “set it down” on “tables”:
Remember thee!
Ay, thou poor ghost , whiles memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee!
Yea, from the table of my memory

18. I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there.
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmix’d with baser matter. Yes , by heaven!
O most pernicious woman!
O villain, villain, smiling damned villan!
My tables----meet it is I set it down. (I.v.95-107)
If we follow Gatti’s analysis of what she calls “the Brunian core” (Gatti 1989: 139) (basically Act
II scene ii) of Hamlet, we can even peer very specifically into the intellectual initiation of the
playwright. First, it is important to understand which book Hamlet is in all likelihood reading:
Polonius: …What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.
Polonius: What is the matter, my lord?
Hamlet: Between who?
Polonius: I mean the matter that you read, my lord.
Hamlet: Slanders, sir; for the satirical old rogue says here that old men have
grey beards, that their faces are wrinkled, their eyes are purging thick amber
and plum-tree gum, and that they have a plentiful lack of wit, together with
most weak hams; all which, sir, though I most powerfully and potently
believe, yet I hold it not honesty to have it thus set down….(II.ii. 191-202)
Gatti and many others have noted the strong echoes in the above with one passage from Dialogue
I of Lo Spaccio:
Look, my body is wrinkling and my brain getting damper: I’ve started to get
arthritis and my teeth are going; my flesh gets darker and my hair is going grey; my
eyelids are going slack and my sight gets fainter; my breath comes less easily and
my cough gets stronger; my hams get weaker and I walk less securely. (Bruno,
quoted in Gatti 1989: 142)
Hamlet’s description of this book as “slanders” can be an ironical reference to the fact that Lo

19. Spaccio was the only work of Bruno’s singled out by name by the Roman Inquisition in its summation
of his trial. Hamlet’s phrase “the satirical rogue” also points to Bruno, unnamed since he had been
executed for heresy, and Bruno’s dialogues exhibit many witty elements. Hamlet’s daring to allude to
his own agreement with the book -----“I most powerfully and potently believe”------yet his subtle
comment---“yet I hold it not honesty to have it thus set down”-----also may be seen to imply that Lo
Spaccio, though an allegory itself, was too easy for the Roman Inquisition to see through as a negative
commentary on their own temporary nature.
Allegorized as Hamlet reading a book, Shakespeare’s initiation into Bruno’s ideas explains how
Shakespeare undertakes to channel his problem with his coal-hungry society. Coal displaced the sun
economy just as Claudius killed Hamlet’s father, the dead king.
In the new infinite and radically centerless universe that Bruno posited, the earth depends finally
and only on the sun (Bruno was the first natural scientist to argue for thermodynamic heliocentrism).
Bruno’s Lo Spaccio, the very book Gatti convincingly asserts is in Hamlet’s hands, starts off with:
He is blind who does not see the sun, foolish who does not recognize it, ungrateful
who is not thankful unto it, since so great is the light, so great the good, so great the
benefit, through which it glows, through which it excels, through which it serves,
the teacher of the senses, the father of substances, the author of life. (Bruno, 1584:
69)

20. In particular, the “father of substances” and “the author of life” shows Bruno’s awareness of the
sun’s role in generating the material to support life on earth. Bruno looked beyond just the Copernican
mechanics and said the earth circles the sun:
The Earth, in the infinite universe, is not at the center, except in so far as everything
can be said to be at the center. In this chapter it is explained that the Earth is not
central amongst the planets. That place is reserved for the Sun, for it is natural for the
planets to turn towards its light and heat, and accept its law. (Bruno, quoted in
Michel, 1962: 181)
Gatti also notes that both Bruno’s Cena delle Ceneri and Hamlet, demonstrate a “concern with
deciphering the language of a new and larger cosmos” (Gatti 1989: xi). These cosmological concerns
and ideas are intrinsic to Hamlet, but what has been missing is how Hamlet is a demonstration of
Bruno’s heliocentrism brought to life and shown to be the energetic winner, outlasting its opposition,
coal and fossil fuels, through time. Hamlet, the main character within the play, as a thought tool, is a
scientific and intellectual basis for an opposition to coal, and this was a role that Shakespeare himself,
using drama, also wished to play.
Works Cited:
Bruno, Giordano. The Heroic Enthusiasts, (Gli eroici furori) An Ethical Poem, Part the Second.
London: Bernard Quartitch, 1889 (translated by L. Williams)

21. Bruno, Giordano. The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast. Trans. Arthur D. Imerti. Lincoln and
London: University of Nebraska Press. 1964. Reprint 2004.
Gatti, Hilary. 2011. Essays on Giordano Bruno. Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press.
Gatti, Hilary. 1989. The Renaissance Drama of Knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press.
Greenblatt, Steven. Will in the World. New York, NY: W.W. Norton&Co., 2004. Print.
Michel, Paul. The Cosmology of Giordano Bruno. Ithaca, NY: Cornell U. Press, 1962. (translated
by Dr. R.E.W. Maddisson.) First English translation in 1973.
Rowland, Ingrid. 2008. Giordano Bruno: Philosopher, Heretic. Chicago: Chicago U. Press.
Shakespeare, William. As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet, and Twelfth Night in The
Riverside Shakespeare. Eds. Levin, Blakemore et al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974.
Print.