Giordano Bruno and William Shakespeare

“..an entirely new approach to the problem of Bruno and Shakespeare will have to be made. The problem

goes very deep….” from Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, page 391, by Dame Frances Yates

When I was in graduate school, 22 years ago

A professor patiently explained to me that there is no coherence in Shakespeare. There is no way to unify his works, I was told. Shakespeare has a collection of concerns and issues he addressed, but nothing that sweepingly could be a basic framework.

Intuitively, I was just not so sure about that.

I wondered why millions of people were spending so much time on Shakespeare if there really was no coherence.But I did not argue the point. After all, I was only 25 years old. What did I know?

Then a few years ago, I started researching imagery related to fossil fuels.

After a little while, I noticed the first two lines of Romeo and Juliet were about coal:

Sampson: Gregory, upon my word, we’ll not carry coals.Gregory: No, for then we should be colliers.

I wondered about it.

Then I discovered the secret play about Man and the Sun.

“Juliet is the sun”

It was only natural for me to wonder if this theme exists in Shakespeare’s other plays.

YES. The answer is Yes.

For example,

Why is Hamlet’s cloak “inky”? Why does he have “windy suspiration of forc’d breath” and “the fruitful river in the eye”? (I.ii.76-80)

These are the signs of exposure to heavy coal smoke. London was powered by coal.

Giordano Bruno (1548-1600)starts off Lo Spaccio della bestia trionfante with an interesting sentence:

“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 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.”

Lo Spaccio della bestia tronfante,(The Expulsion of the Triumphant

Beast, translated by Arthur D. Imerti, U. of Nebraska Press, p. 69)

Giordano Bruno

-Agreed with the Copernican idea of a heliocentric solar system-Bruno went beyond Copernicus however. Bruno recognized the sun’s energy made it very special and UNIQUE for us on Planet Earth.-Bruno said the universe was infinite-He also said the universe was all one system

My idea is that Shakespeare used Bruno’s philosophy, including

Bruno’s art of memory to sketch out allegories. Actually, “Juliet is

the sun” points to the cosmic allegory in Romeo and Juliet.

Shakespeare was an Hermeticist, cloaking his ideas in disguises. Drama

was the perfect form for him, of course.

My ideas are simple, radical, original, and new and explain a lot

about Shakespeare.Recently, what I have to say has been getting a lot of attention

online.

(Thank you, by the way)

Giordano Bruno’s Art of Memory

– “….the thoughts singled out for attention could be into what Bruno called ‘a distilled and developed order of conceivable species, arranged as statues, or a microcosm, or some other kind of architecture…by focusing the chaos of the imagination’”.

-Giordano Bruno: Philosopher, Heretic by Ingrid Rowland, p. 123

Or look at this quote by Bruno:

“When you conform yourself to the celestial forms, ‘you will arrive from the confused plurality of things at the underlying unity’. For when the parts of the universal species are not considered separately but in relation to their underlying order-----what is there we may not memorize, understand, and do?”

Giordano and the Hermetic Tradition, Dame Frances Yates, page 219

Shakespeare used just such an “architecture”, or “microcosm”

Romeo: But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.

Shakespeare has given away the secret identity of Juliet here! Shortly thereafter, in the same speech, Romeo uses words like “lamp” “daylight”, “stars”, “heaven”, “airy region” and “bright” to further describe Juliet and subtly imprint upon the minds of listeners her identity in the parallel play.Romeo is Man embracing an agricultural era. In such an economy, everything is from the sun in one way or another; fish, grain, baskets, cotton, meat, leather, feathers, linen, wood, and more.

–My real name is Marianne Kimura and I’m on Academia.com if you’re interested in further details of my work.– I’m a very obscure academic, an

expat off the beaten track, in many ways. (And to be really original, that is what you have to be……)–And I never use any boring and

difficult theory! A 6-year old could understand my ideas!–So have a look!

eeeeeee

And….

Why don’t you also buy my novel

Juliet is the Sun…..all about passion, love, ghosts, Japan, ninjas, Shakespeare and solar energy…..(it’s delightful, it cracks the code, and it pays homage to the sun!)---I used the pen name Gemma Nishiyama

….since Marianne Kimura only writes academic articles.

(Gemma Nishiyama, my alter ego, is a bit more of a wild child…..)

My novel is on Amazon.com and it’s only available as an ebook right now.

“The End”Thank You for reading this !