While France was thus passing from general fanaticism to a large measure of freethought, England was passing by a less tempestuous path to a hardly less advanced stage of opinion. It was indeed a bloody age; and in 1535 we have record of nineteen men and five women of Holland, apparently Anabaptists, who denied the “humanity” of Christ and rejected infant baptism and transubstantiation, being sentenced to be burned alive—two suffering at Smithfield, and the rest at other towns, by way of example. Others in Henry’s reign suffered the same penalty for the same offence; and in 1538 a priest named Nicholson or Lambert, refusing on the King’s personal pressure to recant, was “brent in Smithfield” for denying the bodily presence in the eucharist.1 The first decades of “Reformation” in England truly saw the opening of new vials of blood. More and Fisher and scores of lesser men died as Catholics for denying the King’s “supremacy” in religion; as many more for denying the Catholic tenets which the King held to the last; and not a few by the consent of More and Fisher for translating or circulating the sacred books. Latimer, martyred under Mary, had applauded the burning of the Anabaptists. One generation slew for denial of the humanity of Christ; the next for denial of his divinity. Under Edward VI there were burned no Catholics, but several heretics, including Joan Bocher and a Dutch Unitarian, George Van Pare, described as a man of saintly life.2 Still the English evolution was less destructive than the French or the German, and the comparative bloodlessness of the strife between Protestant and Catholic under Mary3 and Elizabeth, the treatment of the Jesuit propaganda under the latter queen as a political rather than a doctrinal question,4 prevented any such vehemence of recoil from religious ideals as took place in France. When in 1575 the law De hæretico comburendo, which had slept for seventeen years, was set to work anew under Elizabeth, the first victims were Dutch Anabaptists. Of a congregation of them at Aldgate, twenty-seven were imprisoned, of whom ten were burned, and the rest deported. Two others, John Wielmacker and Hendrich Ter Woort, were anti-Trinitarians, and were burned accordingly. Foxe appealed to the Queen to appoint any punishment short of death, or even that of hanging, rather than the horrible death by burning; but in vain. “All parties at the time concurred” in approving the course taken.5 Orthodoxy was rampant.

Unbelief, as we have seen, however, there certainly was; and it is recorded that Walter, Earl of Essex, on his deathbed at Dublin in 1576, murmured that among his countrymen neither Popery nor Protestantism prevailed: “there was nothing but infidelity, infidelity, infidelity; atheism, atheism; no religion, no religion.”6 And when we turn aside from the beaten paths of Elizabethan literature we see clearly what is partly visible from those paths—a number of freethinking variations from the norm of faith. Ascham, as we saw, found some semblance of atheism shockingly common among the travelled upper class of his day; and the testimonies continue. Edward Kirke, writing his “glosses” to Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar in 1578, observes that “it was an old opinion, and yet is continued in some men’s conceit, that men of years have no fear of God at all, or not so much as younger folk,” experience having made them skeptical. Erasmus, he notes, in his Adages makes the proverb “Nemo senex metuit Jovem” signify merely that “old men are far from superstition and belief in false Gods.” But Kirke insists that, “his great learning notwithstanding, it is too plain to be gainsaid that old men are much more inclined to such fond fooleries than younger men,”7 apparently meaning that elderly men in his day were commonly skeptical about divine providence.

Other writers of the day do not limit unbelief to the aged. Lilly, in his Euphues (1578), referring to England in general or Oxford in particular as Athens, asks: “Be there not many in Athens which think there is no God, no redemption, no resurrection?” Further, he complains that “it was openly reported of an old man in Naples that there was more lightness in Athens than in all Italy ... more Papists, more Atheists, more sects, more schisms, than in all the monarchies in the world”;8 and he proceeds to frame an absurd dialogue of “Euphues and Atheos,” in which the latter, “monstrous, yet tractable to be persuaded,”9 is converted with a burlesque facility. Lilly, who writes as a man-of-the-world believer, is a poor witness as to the atheistic arguments current; but those he cites are so much better than his own, up to the point of terrified collapse on the atheist’s part, that he had doubtless heard them. The atheist speaks as a pantheist, identifying deity with the universe; and readily meets a simple appeal to Scripture with the reply that “whosoever denieth a godhead denieth also the Scriptures which testifie of him.”10 But in one of his own plays, played in 1584, Lilly puts on the stage a glimpse of current controversy in a fashion which suggests that he had not remained so contemptuously confident of the self-evident character of theism. In Campaspe (i, 3) he introduces, undramatically enough, Plato, Aristotle, Cleanthes, Crates, and other philosophers, who converse concerning “natural causes” and “supernatural effects.” Aristotle is made to confess that he “cannot by natural reason give any reason of the ebbing and flowing of the sea”; and Plato contends against Cleanthes, “searching for things which are not to be found,” that “there is no man so savage in whom resteth not this divine particle, that there is an omnipotent, eternal, and divine mover, which may be called God.” Cleanthes replies that “that first mover, which you term God, is the instrument of all the movings which we attribute to Nature. The earth ... seasons ... fruits ... the whole firmament ... and whatsoever else appeareth miraculous, what man almost of mean capacity but can prove it natural.” Nothing is concluded, and the debate is adjourned. Anaxarchus declares: “I will take part with Aristotle, that there is Natura naturans, and yet not God”; while Crates rejoins: “And I with Plato, that there is Deus optimus maximus, and not Nature.”

It is a curious dialogue to put upon the stage, by the mouth of children-actors, and the arbitrary ascription to Aristotle of high theistic views, in a scene in which he is expressly described by a fellow philosopher as a Naturalist, suggests that Lilly felt the danger of giving offence by presenting the supreme philosopher as an atheist. It is evident, however, both from Euphues and from Campaspe, that naturalistic views were in some vogue, else they had not been handled in the theatre and in a book essentially planned for the general reader. But however firmly held, they could not be directly published; and a dozen years later, over thirty years after the outburst of Ascham, we still find only a sporadic and unwritten freethought, however abundant, going at times in fear of its life.

Private discussion, indeed, there must have been, if there be any truth in Bacon’s phrase that “atheists will ever be talking of that opinion, as if they ... would be glad to be strengthened by the consent of others”11—an argument which would make short work of the vast literature of apologetic theism—but even private talk had need be cautious, and there could be no publication of atheistic opinions. Printed rationalism could go no further than such a protest against superstition as Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), which, however, is a sufficiently remarkable expression of reason in an age in which a Bodin held angrily by the delusion.12 Elizabeth was herself substantially irreligious,13 and preferred to keep the clergy few in number and subordinate in influence;14 but her Ministers regarded the Church as part of the State system, and punished all open or at least aggressive heresy in the manner of the Inquisition. Yet the imported doctrine of the subjective character of hell and heaven,15 taken up by Marlowe, held its ground, and is denounced by Stubbes in his Anatomie of Abuses16 (1583); and other foreign philosophy of the same order found religious acceptance. A sect called the “Family of Love,” deriving from Holland (already “a country fruitfull of heretics”),17 went so far as to hold that “Christ doth not signify any one person, but a quality whereof many are partakers”—a doctrine which we have seen ascribed by Calvin to the libertins of Geneva a generation before;18 but it does not appear that they were persecuted.19 Some isolated propagandists, however, paid the last penalty. One Matthew Hamont or Hamond, a ploughwright, of Hetherset, was in 1579 tried by the Bishop and Consistory of Norwich “for that he denyed Christe,” and, being found guilty, was burned, after having had his ears cut off, “because he spake wordes of blasphemie against the Queen’s Maiistie and others of her Counsell.”20 The victim would thus seem to have been given to violence of speech; but the record of his negations, which suggest developments from the Anabaptist movement, is none the less notable. In Stow’s wording,21 they run:—

There is record also of a freethinker named John Lewes burned at the same place in 1583 for “denying the Godhead of Christ, and holding other detestable heresies,” in the manner of Hamond.22 In the same year Elias Thacker and John Coping were hanged at St. Edmonsbury “for spreading certaine bookes, seditiously penned by one Robert Browne against the Booke of Common Prayer”; and “their bookes so many as could be found were burnt before them.”23 Further, one Peter Cole, an Ipswich tanner, was burned in 1587 (also at Norwich) for similar doctrine; and Francis Kett, a young clergyman, ex-fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, was burned at the same place in 1589 for heresy of the Unitarian order.24 Hamond and Cole seem, however, to have been in their own way religious men,25 and Kett a devout mystic, with ideas of a Second Advent.26 All founded on the Bible.

Apart from constructive heresy, the perpetual religious dissensions of the time were sure to stimulate doubt; and there appeared quite a number of treatises directed wholly or partly against explicit unbelief, as: The Faith of the Church Militant, translated from the Latin of the Danish divine Hemming (1581), and addressed “to the confutation of the Jewes, Turks, Atheists, Papists, Hereticks, and all other adversaries of the truth whatsoever”; “The Touchstone of True Religion ... against the impietie of Atheists, Epicures, Libertines, Hippocrites, and Temporisours of these times” (1590); An Enemie to Atheisme, translated by T. Rogers from the Latin of Avenar (1591); the preacher Henry Smith’s God’s Arrow against Atheists (1593, rep. 1611); an English translation of the second volume of La Primaudaye’s L’Académie Française, containing a refutation of atheistic doctrine; and no fewer than three “Treatises of the Nature of God”—all anonymous, the third known to be by Bishop Thomas Morton—all appearing in the year 1599.

All this smoke—eight apologetic treatises in eighteen years—implies some fire; and the translator of La Primaudaye, one “T. B.,” declares in his dedication that there has been a general growth of atheism in England and on the continent, which he traces to “that Monster Machiavell.” Among English atheists of that school he ranks the dramatist Robert Greene, who had died in 1592; and it has been argued, not quite convincingly, that it was to Machiavelli that Greene had pointed, in his death-bed recantation A Groatsworth of Wit (1592), as the atheistic instructor of his friend Marlowe,27 who introduces “Machiavel” as cynical prologist to his Jew of Malta. Greene’s own “atheism” had been for the most part a matter of bluster and disorderly living; and we find his zealously orthodox friend Thomas Nashe, in his Strange News (1592), calling the Puritan zealot who used the pseudonym of Martin Marprelate “a mighty platformer of atheism”; even as his own and Greene’s enemy, Gabriel Harvey, called Nashe an atheist.28 But Nashe in his Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem (1592), though he speaks characteristically of the “atheistical Julian,” discusses contemporary atheism in a fashion descriptive of an actual growth of the opinion, concerning which he alleges that there is no “sect now in England so scattered [i.e., so widely spread] as atheisme.” The “outward atheist,” he declares, “establishes reason as his God”; and he offers some sufficiently primitive arguments by way of confutation. “They follow the Pironicks [i.e., Pyrrhonists], whose position and opinion it is that there is no hell or misery but opinion. Impudently they persist in it, that the late discovered Indians show antiquities thousands before Adam.” For the rest, they not only reject the miracles of Moses as mere natural expedients misrepresented, but treat the whole Bible as “some late writers of our side” treat the Apocrypha. And Nashe complains feelingly that while the atheists “are special men of wit,” and that “the Romish seminaries have not allured unto them so many good wits as atheism,” the preachers who reply to them are men of dull understanding, the product of a system under which preferment is given to graduates on the score not of capacity but of mere gravity and solemnity. “It is the superabundance of wit,” declares Nashe, “that makes atheists: will you then hope to beat them down with fusty brown-bread dorbellism?”29 There had arisen, in short, a ferment of rationalism which was henceforth never to disappear from English life.

In 1593, indeed, we find atheism formally charged against two famous men, Christopher Marlowe and Sir Walter Raleigh, of whom the first is documentarily connected with Kett, and the second in turn with Marlowe. An official document,30 preserved by some chance, reveals that Marlowe was given—whether or not over the wine-cup—to singularly audacious derision of the received beliefs; and so explicit is the evidence that it is nearly certain he would have been executed for blasphemy had he not been privately killed (1593) while the proceedings were pending. The “atheism” imputed to him is not made out in any detail; but many of the other utterances are notably in keeping with Marlowe’s daring temper; and they amount to unbelief of a stringent kind. In Doctor Faustus31 he makes Mephistopheles affirm that “Hell hath no limits ... but where we are is hell”—a doctrine which we have seen to be current before his time; and in his private talk he had gone much further. Nashe doubtless had him in mind when he spoke of men of “superabundance of wit.” Not only did he question, with Raleigh, the Biblical chronology: he affirmed “That Moyses was but a juggler, and that one Heriots” [i.e., Thomas Harriott, or Harriots, the astronomer, one of Raleigh’s circle] “can do more than he”; and concerning Jesus he used language incomparably more offensive to orthodox feeling than that of Hamond and Kett. There is more in all this than a mere assimilation of Machiavelli; though the further saying “that the first beginning of religion was only to keep men in awe”—put also by Greene [if not by Marlowe], with much force of versification, in the mouth of a villain-hero in the anonymous play of Selimus32—tells of that influence. Marlowe was indeed not the man to swear by any master without adding something of his own. Atheism, however, is not inferrible from any of his works: on the contrary, in the second part of his famous first play he makes his hero, described by the repentant Greene as the “atheist Tamburlaine,” declaim of deity with signal eloquence, though with a pantheistic cast of phrase. In another passage, a Moslem personage claims to be on the side of a Christ who would punish perjury; and in yet another the hero is made to trample under foot the pretensions of Mohammed.33 It was probably his imputation of perjury to Christian rulers in particular that earned for Marlowe the malignant resentment which inspired the various edifying comments published after his unedifying death. Had he not perished as he did in a tavern brawl, he might have had the nobler fate of a martyr.

Concerning Raleigh, again, there is no shadow of proof of atheism, though his circle, which included the Earls of Northumberland and Oxford, was called a “school of atheism” in a Latin pamphlet by the Jesuit Parsons,34 published at Rome in 1593; and this reputation clung to him. It is matter of literary history, however, that he, like Montaigne, had been influenced by the Hypotyposes of Sextus Empiricus;35 his short essay The Sceptick being a naïf exposition of the thesis that “the sceptick doth neither affirm neither deny any position; but doubteth of it, and applyeth his Reason against that which is affirmed, or denied, to justifie his non-consenting.”36 The essay itself, nevertheless, proceeds upon a set of wildly false propositions in natural history, concerning which the adventurous reasoner has no doubts whatever; and altogether we may be sure that his artificial skepticism did not carry him far in philosophy. In the Discovery of Guiana (1600) he declares that he is “resolved” of the truth of the stories of men whose heads grow beneath their shoulders; and in his History of the World (1603–16) he insists that the stars and other celestial bodies “incline the will by mediation of the sensitive appetite.”37 In other directions, however, he was less credulous. In the same History he points out, as Marlowe had done in talk, how incompatible was such a phenomenon as the mature civilization of ancient Egypt in the days of Abraham with the orthodox chronology.38 This, indeed, was heresy enough, then and later, seeing that not only did Bishop Pearson, in 1659, in a work on The Creed which has been circulated down to the nineteenth century, indignantly denounce all who departed from the figures in the margin of the Bible; but Coleridge, a century and a half later, took the very instance of Egyptian history as triumphantly establishing the accuracy of the Bible record against the French atheists.39 As regards Raleigh’s philosophy, the evidence goes to show only that he was ready to read a Unitarian essay, presumably that already mentioned, supposed to be Kett’s; and that he had intercourse with Marlowe and others (in particular his secretary, Harriott) known to be freethinkers. A prosecution begun against him on this score, at the time of the inquiry concerning Marlowe (when Raleigh was in disgrace with the Queen), came to nothing. It had been led up to by a translation of Parsons’s pamphlet, which affirmed that his private group was known as “Sir Walter Rawley’s school of Atheisme,” and that therein “both Moyses and our Savior, the Old and the New Testaments, are jested at, and the scholars taught among other things to spell God backwards.”40 This seems to have been idle gossip, though it tells of unbelief somewhere; and Raleigh’s own writings always indicate41 belief in the Bible; though his dying speech and epitaph are noticeably deistic. That he was a deist, given to free discussion, seems the probable truth.

In passing sentence at the close of Raleigh’s trial for treason in 1603, in which his guilt is at least no clearer than the inequity of the proceedings, Lord Chief Justice Popham unscrupulously taunted him with his reputation for heresy. “You have been taxed by the world with the defence of the most heathenish and blasphemous opinions, which I list not to repeat, because Christian ears cannot endure to hear them, nor the authors and maintainers of them be suffered to live in any Christian commonwealth. You know what men said of Harpool.”42 If the preface to his History of the World, written in the Tower, be authentic, Raleigh was at due pains to make clear his belief in deity, and to repudiate alike atheism and pantheism. “I do also account it,” he declares, “an impiety monstrous, to confound God and Nature, be it but in terms.”43 And he is no more tolerant than his judge when he discusses the question of the eternity of the universe, then the crucial issue as between orthodoxy and doubt. “Whosoever will make choice rather to believe in eternal deformity [=want of form] or in eternal dead matter, than in eternal light and eternal life, let eternal death be his reward. For it is a madness of that kind, as wanteth terms to express it.”44 Inasmuch as Aristotle was the great authority for the denounced opinion, Raleigh is anti-Aristotelean. “I shall never be persuaded that God hath shut up all light of learning within the lantern of Aristotle’s brains.”45 But in the whole preface there is only one, and that a conventional, expression of belief in the Christian dogma of salvation; and as to that we may note his own words: “We are all in effect become comedians in religion.”46 Still, untruthful as he certainly was,47 we may take him as a convinced theist of the experiential school, standing at the ordinary position of the deists of the next century.

Notably enough, he anticipates the critical position of Hume as to reason and experience: “That these and these be the causes of these and these effects, time hath taught us and not reason; and so hath experience without art.”48 Such utterance, if not connected with professions of piety, might in those days give rise to such charges of unbelief as were so freely cast at him. But the charges seem to have been in large part mere expressions of the malignity which religion so normally fosters, and which can seldom have been more bitter than then. Raleigh is no admirable type of rectitude; but he can hardly have been a worse man than his orthodox enemies. And we must estimate such men in full view of the low standards of their age.

Against the aspersion of Harriott at Raleigh’s trial may be cited the high panegyric of Chapman, who terms him “my admired and soul-loved friend, master of all essential and true knowledge,”49 and one “whose judgment and knowledge, in all kinds, I know to be incomparable and bottomless, yea, to be admired as much as his most blameless life, and the right sacred expense of his time, is to be honoured and reverenced”; with a further “affirmation of his clear unmatchedness in all manner of learning.”50

The frequency of such traces of rationalism at this period is to be understood in the light of the financial and other scandals of the Reformation; the bitter strifes of Church and dissent; and the horrors of the wars of religion in France, concerning which Bacon remarks in his essay Of Unity in Religion that the spectacle would have made Lucretius “seven times more Epicure and atheist than he was.” The proceedings against Raleigh and Kyd, accordingly, did not check the spread of the private avowal of unbelief. A few years later we find Hooker, in the Fifth Book of his Ecclesiastical Polity (1597), bitterly declaring that the unbelievers in the higher tenets of religion are much strengthened by the strifes of believers;51 as a dozen years earlier Bishop Pilkington told of “young whelps” who “in corners make themselves merry with railing and scoffing at the holy scriptures.”52 And in the Treatise of the Nature of God, by Bishop Thomas Morton (1599), a quasi-dialogue in which the arguing is all on one side, the passive interlocutor indicates, in the process of repudiating them, a full acquaintance with the pleas of those who “would openly profess themselves to be of that [the atheistic] judgment, and as far as they might without danger defend it by argument against any whatever.” The pleas include the lack of moral control in the world, the evidences of natural causation, the varieties of religious belief, and the contradictions of Scripture. And such atheists, we are told, “make nature their God.”53

From Hooker’s account also it is clear that, at least with comparatively patient clerics like himself, the freethinkers would at times deliberately press the question of theism, and avow the conviction that belief in God was “a kind of harmless error, bred and confirmed by the sleights of wiser men.” He further notes with even greater bitterness that some—an “execrable crew”—who were themselves unbelievers, would in the old pagan manner argue for the fostering of religion as a matter of State policy, herein conning the lesson of Machiavelli. For his own part Hooker was confessedly ill-prepared to debate with the atheists, and his attitude was not fitted to shake their opinions. His one resource is the inevitable plea that atheists are such for the sake of throwing off all moral restraint54—a theorem which could hardly be taken seriously by those who knew the history of the English and French aristocracies, Protestant and Catholic, for the past hundred years. Hooker’s own measure of rationalism, though remarkable as compared with previous orthodoxy, went no further than the application of the argument of Pecock that reason must guide and control all resort to Scripture and authority;55 and he came to it under stress of dispute, as a principle of accommodation for warring believers, not as an expression of any independent skepticism. When his pious antagonist Travers cited him as saying that “his best author was his own reason”56 he was prompt to reply that he meant “true, sound, divine reason; ... reason proper to that science whereby the things of God are known; theological reason, which out of principles in Scripture that are plain, soundly deduceth more doubtful inferences.”57 Of the application of rational criticism to Scriptural claims he had no idea. The unbelievers of his day were for him a frightful portent, menacing all his plans of orthodox toleration; and he would have had them put down by force—a course which in some cases, as we have seen, had in that age been actually taken, and was always apt to be resorted to. But orthodoxy all the while had a sure support in the social and political conditions which made impossible the publication of rationalistic opinions. While the whole machinery of public doctrine remained in religious hands or under ecclesiastical control, the mass of men of all grades inevitably held by the traditional faith. What is remarkable is the amount of unbelief, either privately explicit or implicit in the higher literature, of which we have trace.

Above all there remains the great illustration of the rationalistic spirit of the English literary renascence of the sixteenth century—the drama of Shakespeare. Of that it may confidently be said that every attempt to find for it a religious foundation has failed.58 Gervinus, while oddly suggesting that “in not only not seeking a reference to religion in his works, but in systematically avoiding it even when opportunity offered,” Shakespeare was keeping clear of an embroilment with the clergy, nevertheless pronounces the plays to be wholly secular in spirit. While contending that “in action the religious and divine in man is nothing else than the moral,” the German critic admits that Shakespeare “wholly discarded from his works ... that which religion enjoins as to faith and opinion.”59 And, while refusing the inference of positive unbelief on the poet’s part, he pronounces that, “Just as Bacon banished religion from science, so did Shakespeare from art.... From Bacon’s example it seems clear that Shakespeare left religious matters unnoticed on the same grounds.”60 The latest and weightiest criticism comes to the same conclusion; and it is only on presupposition that any other can be reached. One of the ablest of Shakespearean critics sums up that “the Elizabethan drama was almost wholly secular; and while Shakespeare was writing he practically confined his view to the world of non-theological observation and thought, so that he represents it in substantially one and the same way whether the period of the story is pre-Christian or Christian.”

This perhaps somewhat understates the case. The Elizabethan drama was not wholly secular;61 and certainly the dramatists individually were not. Peele’s David and Bethsabe is wholly Biblical in theme, and, though sensual in sentiment, substantially orthodox in spirit; and elsewhere he has many passages of Protestant and propagandist fervour.62 Greene and Lodge give a highly Scriptural ring to their Looking-Glass for London; and Lodge, who uses religious expressions freely in his early treatise, A Defence of Poetry, Music, and Stage Plays,63 later translated Josephus. Kyd in Arden of Feversham64 accepts the Christian view at the close, though The Spanish Tragedy is pagan; and the pre-Shakespearean King Leir and his Three Daughters (1594), probably the work of Kyd and Lodge, has long passages of specifically Christian sentiment. Nashe, again, was a hot religious controversialist despite his Bohemian habits and his indecorous vein; Greene on his repentant deathbed was profusedly censorious of atheism;65 Lilly, as we have seen, is combatively theistic in his Campaspe; while Jonson, as we shall see, girds at skeptics in Volpone and The Magnetick Lady, and further wrote a quantity of devotional verse. Even the “atheist” Marlowe, as we saw, puts theistic sentiment into the mouth of his “atheist Tamburlaine”; and of Doctor Faustus, despite incidental heresy, the dénouement is religiously orthodox. Thomas Heywood may even be pronounced a religious man,66 as he was certainly a strong Protestant,67 though an anti-Puritan; and his prose treatise The Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels (1635) exhibits a religious temperament. The same may be said of Dekker, who is recorded to have written at least the prologue and the epilogue for a play on Pontius Pilate,68 and is believed to be the author of the best scenes in The Virgin Martyr, in which he collaborated with Massinger. He too uses supererogatory religious expressions,69 and shows his warm Protestantism in The Whore of Babylon, as he does his general religious sentiment in his treatise The Seven Deadly Sins. Chapman was certainly a devout theist, and probably a Christian. In the “domestic” tragedy, A Warning for Fair Women (1599), which is conjecturally ascribed to Lodge, the conclusion is on Christian lines, as in Arden; and the same holds of The Witch of Edmonton, by Dekker and others. Of none of these dramatists could it be said, on the mere strength of his work, that he was “agnostic,” though Marlowe was certainly a freethinker. The others were, first or last, avowedly religious. Shakespeare, and Shakespeare alone, after Marlowe, is persistently non-religious in his handling of life. Lear, his darkest tragedy, is predominantly pagan; and The Tempest, in its serener vein, is no less so. But indeed all the genuine plays alike ignore or tacitly negate the idea of immortality; even the conventional religious phrases of Macbeth being but incidental poetry.

In the words of a clerical historian, “the religious phrases which are thinly scattered over his work are little more than expressions of a distant and imaginative reverence. And on the deeper grounds of religious faith his silence is significant.... The riddle of life and death ... he leaves ... a riddle to the last, without heeding the common theological solutions around him.”70 The practical wisdom in which he rose above his rivals no less than in dramatic and poetic genius, kept him prudently reticent on his opinions, as it set him upon building his worldly fortunes while the others with hardly an exception lived in shallows and miseries. As so often happens, it was among the ill-balanced types that there was found the heedless courage to cry aloud what others thought; but Shakespeare’s significant silence reminds us that the largest spirits of all could live in disregard of contemporary creeds. For, while there is no record of his having privately avowed unbelief, and certainly no explicit utterance of it in his plays,71 in no genuine work of his is there any more than bare dramatic conformity to current habits of religious speech; and there is often significantly less. In Measure for Measure the Duke, counselling as a friar the condemned Claudio, discusses the ultimate issues of life and death without a hint of Christian credence.

So silent is the dramatist on the ecclesiastical issues of his day that Protestants and Catholics are enabled to go on indefinitely claiming him as theirs; the latter dwelling on his generally kindly treatment of friars; the former citing the fact that some Protestant preacher—evidently a protégé of his daughter Susannah—was allowed lodging at his house. But the preacher was not very hospitably treated;72 and other clues fail. There is good reason to think that Shakespeare was much influenced by Montaigne’s Essays, read by him in Florio’s translation, which was issued when he was recasting the old Hamlet; and the whole treatment of life in the great tragedies and serious comedies produced by him from that time forward is even more definitely untheological than Montaigne’s own doctrine.73 Nor can he be supposed to have disregarded the current disputes as to fundamental beliefs, implicating as they did his fellow-dramatists Marlowe, Kyd, and Greene. The treatise of De Mornay, of which Sir Philip Sidney began and Arthur Golding finished the translation,74 was in his time widely circulated in England; and its very inadequate argumentation might well strengthen in him the anti-theological leaning.