Titans of History

His unorthodox views earned him the disapproval of the university authorities, and in 1592 Galileo was forced to move to Padua, where he taught until 1610. Crippled by his family’s financial demands after his father died, Galileo earned extra money by selling home-made mathematical compasses and continuing to tutor private pupils.

In 1609 Galileo heard of a strange device invented in the Netherlands that could make distant objects appear close. It was the telescope, and Galileo immediately set about building his own. Within a year he was investigating the heavens with a device that provided 20x magnification. It was a turning point in his career.

With his telescope Galileo discovered Jupiter’s four moons and noted that their phases indicated that they orbited Jupiter. This evidence dented the Church-approved Ptolemaic model of the universe, in which all heavenly bodies orbit the earth. Galileo also saw stars that were invisible to the naked eye. He immediately published his findings in a short book dedicated to one of his illustrious pupils, Cosimo II de Medici, grand duke of Florence. As a reward, Cosimo brought him back to Tuscany in triumph.

With greater financial freedom, Galileo was able to move his investigations on apace. He studied the rings of Saturn and discovered that Venus, like the moon, went through phases—an indication that it moved around the sun. These discoveries committed him to the theory—proposed by Nicolaus Copernicus a century before—that it was the sun, and not the earth, that was at the center of the universe.

Copernicanism was a dangerous concept for Galileo to flirt with, and around 1613 it earned him the attention of the Inquisition. He traveled to Rome to defend Copernicus’ heliocentric model but was silenced, and in 1616 he was warned explicitly not to promulgate such ideas any further.

By 1632 Galileo felt unable to keep silent on Copernicanism any longer and published his Dialogue

, which drew together all of the major strands of thought about the nature of the universe and discussed them through the mouths of several fictitious characters.

When he was dragged to Rome the next year and asked to explain himself to the Inquisition, Galileo argued that he had obtained ecclesiastical permission to discuss Copernicanism in a hypothetical way. Unfortunately, he had not obtained permission to ridicule the papal attachment to older arguments, which he had done quite unashamedly. The Inquisition sentenced him to life imprisonment.

Fortunately for Galileo, his imprisonment amounted to little more than enforced internal exile to the Tuscan hills, where he was free to continue his work in a more muted form. Though he was going blind, he continued to study, concentrating on the nature and strength of materials and smuggling another book out of Italy to be published in the Netherlands in 1638. He died four years later, at age seventy-seven.

SHAKESPEARE

1564–1616

He was not of an age, but for all time!

Ben Jonson, “To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare” (1623)

It is almost universally acknowledged—and not just in the English-speaking world—that William Shakespeare was the greatest writer ever to have lived. He was a peerless poet, playwright and storyteller, and his understanding of human emotions, and the complexities and ambivalences of the human condition, are unparalleled in literature.

Famously, little is known about Shakespeare’s life. He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, the son of John Shakespeare, a burgess of fluctuating fortunes, and his wife, Mary Arden. William attended the local grammar school, and at the age of eighteen he married Anne Hathaway, who was some years his senior and already pregnant. At some point in the ensuing decade, Shakespeare moved to London. He was probably a jobbing actor but began to make a mark as a poet and a playwright. By 1594 he was the established dramatist for the theater company known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (which renamed itself the King’s Men after James I’s accession).

For the next twenty years Shakespeare wrote play after dazzling play—comedies, tragedies, histories—which brought audiences flocking to the Globe Theatre on the south bank of the Thames. Shakespeare’s fortunes flourished. He probably supported his father’s application for a coat of arms and bought one of Stratford’s largest houses, New Place. On his death in 1616, he was buried in the chancel of Stratford’s parish church. There is little more that we know about Shakespeare’s life.