When all the things you think you know about the world's touch ground and dash themselves to pieces,

where do you turn for answers?

From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited.

I'm Michael Whitmore, the Folgers director.

It's out of fashion to say it these days, but for a long time, the era when Shakespeare was

writing was called the Renaissance, a time when parts of Western Europe were moving away

from centuries under a dogmatic reliance on a biblical understanding of the way

the world worked.

As that story goes, in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, scientific breakthroughs

were upending the way people understood the heavens, the earth, and the air, even numbers.

Just like today, not everyone fell in line with what science was telling them,

and just like today, the societal upheaval could be enormous and unsettling. Back then,

like now, it's often artists who help us understand profound change in the world.

And if you look closely at Shakespeare's plays, you'll see characters wrestling with the

era's new understandings of science all over the place.

Shakespeare referred to autopsies, to germs, to physics.

He wrote lines that show he knew about the slow revolution going on in Europe as the theories

of Copernicus began to drive out the long-held ideas of the first-century mathematician, Ptolemy.

He also appears to have known the work of Lucretius, the Roman poet and philosopher who first broached the idea that atoms exist.

This link between art and science in Shakespeare has long been a fascination of Dr. Natalie

Elliot.

And a couple of years back, she wrote an article about it for the science publication, The New Atlantis.

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