Those earthly godfathers of Heaven’s lights
What was it that Ernest Rutherford said about science and stamp-collecting? It seems Shakespeare had much the same idea!
Study is like the heaven’s glorious sun,
That will not be deep-search’d with saucy looks;
Small have continual plodders ever won,
Save base authority from others’ books.
These earthly godfathers of heaven’s lights
That give a name to every fixed star,
Have no more profit of their shining nights
Than those that walk and wot not what they are.
from Love’s Labour’s Lost (Act I, Scene I) by William Shakespeare.
P.S. “wot” in the last line is an archaic form of the verb “wit”, meaning “to know”; cf “I wot not what I ought to have braught” from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
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In the Dark 
May 2, 2012 at 9:16 am
You wot?
Presumably it has the same origin as the German verb ‘wissen’, meaning the same thing.
May 2, 2012 at 12:24 pm
I find, somewhat surprisingly, that the OED does indeed give “wot” as an alternative form of “what”…
May 2, 2012 at 12:34 pm
According to the OED “wit” derives from the Sanskrit “veda”, meaning knowledge so forms of it appear in all Indo-European languages including Latin (“videre”) and Welsh (“gwyddom”) as well as the German.
May 2, 2012 at 12:40 pm
German also has “kennen” for the verb to know a person, and it too made it over the English Channel, as in the song about the famous DJ, “Do ye ken John Peel…”
May 2, 2012 at 3:17 pm
The fact that “ken” is mainly a dialect word in Scotland and Northern England suggests a Norse influence, and according to the OED it came into Old English from a Germanic origin by a variety of routes, including Frisian and Old Saxon.
May 2, 2012 at 11:07 am
It was that dull plodder Ptolemy who catalogued the positions of the 1028 stars visible with the naked eye from Egypt. In looking over Ptolemy’s stamp collection, sorry, star catalogue, Halley realised that some of them had moved, rather undermining Shakespeare’s blinkered view that stars are fixed, and opening people’s minds to the nature of the Universe (that Rutherford forebade his underlings even to talk about).
May 2, 2012 at 12:07 pm
Methinks he doth protest too much
May 2, 2012 at 12:35 pm
It’s a well-known fact that most of Shakespeare’s plays were not actually written by Shakespeare, but by someone else who had the same name.
May 2, 2012 at 12:37 pm
Agreed Peter. Sir Henry Neville in my opinion.