| Budget Amount *help |
¥1,900,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,900,000)
Fiscal Year 1996: ¥500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥500,000)
Fiscal Year 1995: ¥1,400,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,400,000)
|
|---|
| Research Abstract |
This project is to point out unique aspects of the 'heavenly spheres' which Elizabethan dramatists depicted, and make clear their political ideas reflected in them.
Astronomy, as is widely observed, reached a critical phase in the sixteenth century Europe. After 1550's, Astronomers had had to choose an alternative system, traditional Aristotelian-Ptolemaic or radical Copernican, unless one sought such a solution as an eclectic model by Tycho Brahe. Even ultra-conservative geocentricists, if they would remain Ptolemaist, had to change some details of the traditional system for explaning with more plausible reasons various irregular movements of 'heavenly spheres' which Copercican seemed to solve ingeniously.
'Heavenly spheres' were drastically changed in the Renaissance Europe----------sometimes arbitrarily transformed into a reflection of particular ideas. This project has analyzed corresponding phenomena in contemporary English literature, particularly in Elizabethan dramas. Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare depicted an apparently Ptolemaic world in their plays, Doctor Faustus and Troilus and Cressida. They both deleted from their description of 'heavenly spheres' and apriori existence of invisible spheres, etc. Consequently, their 'heavenly spheres' were turned into a kind of imaginary canvass in which the dramatists freely drew their own political ideas, the fear of anarchism and absoluteness of kingship.
This project collected and analyzed various materials of Renaissance astronomy in 1995. In the second year, it focused on political ideas reflected in astronomical references by Elizabethan dramatists.
|
