Southwold’s premier entertainment venue
Box office: 01502 722572
There are a wealth of astronomical references in Shakespeare’s plays, demonstrating his deep knowledge of the night sky. Michael Rowan-Robinson, whose career was as an astrophysicist working with both ground-based and space-based telescopes (and a former President of the Royal Astronomical Society), argues that there are several tantalising allusions to the new world- order of Copernicus, with the earth going round the sun, published just twenty years before Shakespeare’s birth.
Michael traces the reception of Copernicus’s ideas on the continent and in England and investigates how an actor and glove-maker’s son could have encountered these ideas. And did Shakespeare in fact invent the modern concept of the universe?
