‘Let us put on the shade of Newton’: Isaac Newton on stage, 1829–2006

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Notes

¹ Five, in fact: Craig Baxter's Let Newton Be!, which had its first performance late in 2009, very unfortunately came to my attention too late to be discussed in this article.

² I am very grateful to Professor Brody for his kind permission to quote from and discuss this unpublished text, which recently received its first performance in Bangalore. Subsequent references are to page numbers in the unpublished typescript (there are no scene divisions).

³ Fara (2002) says nothing about Newton on stage, hence this essay.

⁴ The children's picture-book of good and great men, London, 1860, 150–156.

⁵ Pinner, 105, 106. The reference is to the title of Jungk 1958.

⁶ Shaw, 221–222 and 154–155: ‘Not since Shakespear [sic] made Hector of Troy quote Aristotle has the stage perpetrated a more staggering anachronism’.

⁷ ‘Isaac Newton's Personal Life’, in www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk

⁸ Djerassi, 113; see also Shepherd-Barr 2006, 182–198, which discusses the issue of ‘truthfulness’ in science plays in depth.

⁹ I'm thinking of the scene in the film of Amadeus (it doesn't appear in the play) where Mozart composes at a billiard table.

¹⁰For example, Brody, 9: ‘the unity of the cosmos…’.

¹¹According to Caroline, George I's daughter-in-law: Stengers, 113.

¹²See Stengers, 31, 78, 114, 137; the (controversial) ‘death of nature’ reading of early modern and modern science is articulated in Merchant 1980.