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Shakespeare and the Mismeasure of Renaissance Man.

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Shakespeare and the Mismeasure of Renaissance Man

By Paula Blank

Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006

And now I have only one favor more to ask (else injustice to me may perhaps imperil the business itself)--that men will consider well how far, upon that which I must needs assert (if I am to be consistent with myself), they are entitled to judge and decide upon these doctrines of mine; inasmuch as all that premature human reasoning which anticipates inquiry, and is abstracted from the facts rashly and sooner than is fit, is by me rejected ... as a thing uncertain, confused, and ill built up; and I cannot be fairly asked to abide by the decision of a tribunal which is itself on trial.

--Francis Bacon

Several decades ago, historian of science Thomas S. Kuhn made the controversial claim that Western science--despite the popular fantasy of its "development-by-accumulation"--does not truly progress. (1) On the contrary, the scientific establishment resists rather than welcomes challenges to its existing paradigms. Kuhn does not so much judge this process as explain it: how could any scientist, after all, function without taking certain facts about the universe as givens? As far as science is concerned, discrepancies and anomalies simply must be regarded with great skepticism and interpreted in terms of established "paradigm-induced expectations" whenever possible (52). When not possible--when significant anomaly forces an epistemological crisis--a new paradigm will finally triumph over the old, but usually only after having encountered substantial resistance (consider the fate of Galileo). Members of the previous establishment, having resisted the change and perhaps even lacking the tools to participate in the new conversation, must assimilate or become irrelevant. What had been marginalized soon becomes the new orthodoxy, equally unequipped to recognize paradigm shifts on the next horizon.

Three and a half centuries before Kuhn, another controversial historian of science argued that long-overdue changes in natural philosophy demanded a radical paradigm shift: but this theorist, Francis Bacon, offered to provide that paradigm shift himself. Self-fashioned as a new Adam, Bacon in his prefatory epistle "The Great Instauration" (to his confrontationally titled...

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