[Gloria Lee McMillan]

Hello,

A group of us have been thinking and rethinking a documentary film project that would show the value of crossing the line between science and the arts.

At first we were going to make it a conversation between Galileo and Shakespeare–roughly contemporaries.
But granting agencies didn’t like the fictional parts.

So then we opened up to making the documentaries more a chronicle of the two men’s adventures in writing. We looked at Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems as a dramatic text and Shakespeare’s knowledge of the Digges Perspective Glass, a British proto-telescope.
These were not thrilling to the granting agencies.

I have been stuck what is not working but it occurred to me that, instead of stretching only weak evidences of boundary crossing, especially in Shakespeare, we could do a film about the uproar over all the astronomical claims that upset Shakespearean scholars so (over-interpreting scant textual data and all that). Maybe this would be entertaining for audiences to watch tempests in a teapot and also could be very enlightening about the nature of what counts as evidence for science as opposed to what counts in the humanities.

My goal is to assist the project of bringing science and the arts into closer contact and heal some very old rifts.

Do any of you on this list want to share your thoughts? Do you think this is a promising premise for a documentary?

Other comments?

Thanks,
Gloria

[Author]

Posts