How to be a Shakespearean Atheist

during the first two lectures in this series we followed the emotional story of doubt of unbelief and what they call atheism in Europe during the Middle Ages and the Reformation era so we've been gulping down whole centuries at a time but now we need to slow down a little for this lecture and the next two we'll be looking at the 17th century which I think is the real crux of this story when unbelief in something like the modern sense of the world emerged and our principle our geographical focus is going to narrow a bit as well we're going to be looking chiefly at England because by the early 17th century it was genuine that generally agreed that England was drowning under a rising tide of atheism one scholar in 1599 lugubriously invited his readers to consider how atheism does daily prevail among men yay far more than it did either among the superstitious papists or the idolatrous heathen nowadays few do make any account of religion or the worship of God the author of the first homegrown anti atheist tract in English published in 1605 disarmingly explained that his reason for writing it was because there are so many atheists by the middle of the 17th century a level-headed commentator could write the state of the controversy then is this which of the parties is in the wisest way the Atheist thinks that the religious is a fool the religious that here's a fool that saith in his heart there is no God the atheist that the souls of men are mortal as the souls of beasts the religious that the Atheist is a beast to say so etc but never mind the arguments listen to the weary familiarity with which he's describing an apparently equal division between two well established factions now I think this testimony is serious it's important and it's wrong not in the sense that atheism was impossible in this period I clearly the word had a much wider range of meaning than it does now as as we've seen its original meaning is closer to godless than postulating that there is no God insofar as it related to doctrine it tended to include denials of fundamental Christian beliefs like the immortality of the soul or the inspiration of the Bible as well as the being or non being of God and atheism in those senses absolutely existed in this period up to and including blanked denials that there is a God but the very fact that there's a surge of moral panic about it doesn't tell us very much I'm afraid that moral panic is something to which Christians are rather susceptible a panic about so-called atheism draws our attention to the subject but by itself it doesn't tell us that it's real so what I want to do with you this evening falls into three parts first of all I want to look at the panic the stereotypical atheist of the early 17th century is quite a well drawn vividly developed character and I want to sketch him it's virtually always a hymn out for you second I want to look at the best-known and suddenly the best documented case of what could be called real atheism during that period and compare it to the stereotype and then third and last I want to dig further into what I think is the most significant divergence between the two and having enticed you here with an implicit promise I should say that it is then that we will finally get to Shakespeare and we will find out that a Shakespearean atheist is not quite the same thing as a modern atheist now as we noted in an earlier lecture the English word atheist whose first recorded use is in 1553 is throughout this period a term of abuse and a pretty elastic one I sometimes compare the way the word atheist is used in this period to the way the word fascist is used in everyday talk nowadays it's a usefully vague insult which can be stretched in many directions but it's not an obscenity compared devoid of meaning in particular atheist elided two distinct claims a claim about someone's beliefs and about their morals an atheist can be somebody who believes there is no God it can also be someone who lives as if he believes there is no God as one preacher asked in 1643 if people truly believed in God were it possible for them to live as they live and to do what they do and sometimes this is just pulpit rhetoric but the logic is sound enough if people act in ways that flagrantly violate the beliefs that they profess well then it's fair to guess that those beliefs may not be very deeply held hence the core fact which everybody knew about atheists in this period that they're monsters they're their moral vacuums enslaved to their lusts they've either abandoned their faith in order to wallow in sin or they've become so sunk in sin that they've lost hold of their faith I'm not asking you to believe this grotesquely self-serving caricature very much not I just want you to follow its end with me and see where it leads us in 1611 the English playwright Cyril Turner published his play the atheists tragedy I'm afraid this is not one of the jewels of the Age of Shakespeare it it mostly rolex along merrily enough helps buy a slew of filthy jokes but then the wheels really come off in act 4 which most of which is one long scene in which the plays entire cast converge independently on the same churchyard at night mostly intent on murder seduction or both and they spent a lengthy scene missing each other bumping into each other swapping the same increasingly threadbare disguise mistaking ridiculous oh you make it through this with a straight face you then are rewarded with the concluding trial scene in which after a convoluted set of claims and counterclaims the plays hero decides for an a very good reason to submit himself to being beheaded the eponymous and villainous atheist Danville takes it on himself to act as the executioner but the printed stage direction tells us that as he raises up the axe he strikes out his own brains and he dies but not before delivering an improving little speech of repentance in which he confesses to his various crimes and admits that there is a power above that have overthrown the pride of all my projects it's one of the less emotionally compelling tragedies of the age but we need to pay attention to it because Danville the name means evil spirit it was a distillation of all of the ages stereotypes about atheism the play opens with Danville and his henchmen discussing the nature of humanity they swiftly decide that we're no different from animals that death is the end for us in which case danville concludes that pleasure only flows upon the stream of riches and he rejects any notion of morality let all men lose so I increased my gain I have no feeling of another's pain and the rest of the plays action is driven by his fiendish plots to kill his brother and his nephew to seize their inheritance and also to seduce or to rape the virtuous and beautiful cast Abela his designs on cast Abela are particularly villainous because he's already forced her to marry his own loathsome son and therefore when he propositions her she protests that that would be incest and he replies incest hush these distances affinity observes our articles of bondage cast upon our freedoms by our own subjection 'he's nature allows a general liberty of generation to all creatures else humans should be able to copulate as freely as any animal now incest was going to become a hallmark of the imaginary 17th century atheist and not by accident early-modern ethicists held that we know that incest is wrong only by revelation by God's direct commandment neither nature nor Reason teaches it by that logic atheists will naturally be drawn to incest and the incestuous will naturally be drawn to atheism in fact of course most human societies loathe incest even if they struggle to articulate a reason for doing so and so associating atheism with incest is more than just a logical deduction it's a powerfully effective scare tactic and the result is that the incestuous atheist becomes a stock figure a best-selling ballad first published around 1600 tells the shocking story of how Jasper Cunningham of Aberdeen tries to seduce his sister and when she warns him that hell's quenchless flames of fire are prepared for anyone who could commit such a dreadful sin he replies that both heaven and hell are devised fables to keep poor fools in fear these things are nothing so he says to her no God nor devil is biding no heaven nor hell I know all things are wrought by nature the earth the air the sky there's no joy nor sorrow after that man doth die therefore let me have pleasure while here I do remain I fear not God's displeasure nor hell's tormenting pain and of course no sooner has he finished speaking those words than he struck down by fire from heaven by contrast John Ford's 1628 plate his pity she's a has a brother and sister who willingly give way to their incestuous lusts and in the final scene as they face death he declares that he no more believes in Heaven and Hell than he believes that water can burn she protests but he insists it is a dream a dream and if you found these literary inventions too fanciful there was a classical exemplar the Emperor Caligula a notable scorner and condemned nur of God and his incest and other notorious crimes in the arguments of this period followed his atheism like his stench following a corpse Caligula story was particularly juicy because of another detail that for all the blasphemous bluster he was guilty of he was so terrified of thunder that he hid under his bed during storms Thunder is as much a part of the cliche of atheism as incest its proverbial in early modern times that thunder and lightning are a notorious and terrible judgment from God in a generally hushed world thunder was the loudest noise most people ever heard unless they're unlucky enough to be close to a cannon who heareth the Thunder that thinks not of God it was a proverbial question he did no answer the pious huddled together during storms full of terror sublimating their fears with their prayers as they reminded each other that thunder was but as a taste and touch of thy power even the impious could be shocked into temporary righteousness Duff not every thunderclap constrain you to tremble at the blast of his voice one writer asked the godless and he added a cautionary tale of three soldiers who were caught out in a thunderstorm which as he said commonly maketh the greatest atheists to tremble but one of these soldiers was fool and foolhardy enough to falter blaspheming and was promptly killed by falling tree that's the stereotypical way that atheists dealt with thunderstorms with brittle and usually short-lived bravado inevitably in the atheists tragedy there's a thunderstorm scene in which Danville tells his terrified sidekick it's all a mere effect of nature in Sir Philip Sidney's new Arcadia the Wicked Queen tries to corrupt her pious niece by claiming that all religion is merely foolish fear and she explains that in ancient times when they heard it thunder not knowing the natural cause they thought there was some angry body above that spake so loud in a rather more lowbrow dialogue published in 1608 the despicable atheists is so panicked by thunder that like Caligula he dives under his bed but then a tremulous voice issues from beneath the covers to explain it all away it's merely he says without coming out that the viscous vapors in a cloud are condemned into a small solid stone which is then violently expelled from the cloud like a cannonball his claim that this is all merely natural is somewhat undermined when as soon as he finished speaking another thunderclap strikes him dead so now we can start to assemble our identikit early modern atheist he's almost always male women's unbelief certainly existed in reality as we'll see especially in the next lecture but not so much in the popular imagination he's a figure of some wealth and social standing it is nothing but plenty and abundance maketh men atheists one writer said he's educated at least to some degree a little or superficial taste of philosophy it said may perchance incline the mind of man to atheism he's in good health he's perhaps a young fool given over to pleasure that's partly because his atheism is flimsy a matter of bluster rather than of conviction he doubts his own dance many would be a theists if they could want one preacher warned but a secret whisper haunts and pursues them Sir Francis Bacon who was suspected of atheism himself maintained that atheism is rather in the lip than in the heart of men a theists will ever be talking of that their opinion as if they fainted in it within themselves and would be glad to be strengthened by the consent of others another preacher warned that the atheists armory of arguments against God are in truth an effort to fight against his own conscience John Donne challenged the atheist directly in a sermon if there's truly no God he said who do you swear by who do you cry out to in danger who do you tremble at and sweat under at midnight Dunn was impatient with the lugubrious cliche that atheists would eventually discover for themselves at first hand that there really is a hell he thought that he could wrap the question up more quickly atheists might blaspheme boldly with their witty friends but he asked them to wait by six hours but till midnight wake then and then dark and alone remember that I asked thee now is there a god and if that darest say no of course done had no idea what atheists did alone in the dark but he took it for granted that no one could be truly convinced that there's no God and therefore that atheists conscience is must gnaw at them like worms one thing that these stereotypical atheists had surprisingly little to say about is whether or not there's a God they're anti religious positions are more immediate more pragmatic they would typically deny the inspiration of the Bible but above all they deny the immortality of the soul and any notion of eternal reward or punishment which doesn't necessarily entail rejecting God but what the dachsies defenders weren't wrong either immortality was so central to Christian culture of this age that to deny it really was to tear the heart out of religion but the question wasn't usually addressed in doctrinal or philosophical terms the stereotypical atheist didn't find the notion of immortality incredible he found it intolerable his real reason for rejecting Christianity was to shrug off Christian morals if you are enslaved by your lusts you might well become ambitious to be like the beasts that perish well content to be annihilated and if you've despaired of heaven then you will be eager to dismiss hell and damnation as trifles and mere old wives tales bugbears used to frighten children and the less certain you are that this really is true well the more brazenly you will assert it to your comrades and the more anxiously you'll repeat it to yourself so in contemporary eyes the the atheism of this age was less a doctrinal error than it was a form of wishful thinking men and very occasionally women who won to reject constraints on their own behavior preferred to imagine that there was no eternal judgment to fear and no gods to lay bare the secrets of their foolish hearts men become first atheists in their life and conversation one preacher argued and wallow in their sins and sensuality but because they can't avoid occasional thoughts of God they then become atheists in their desire and affection wishing that there were not a gods to be avenged upon them for their wickedness and in the end the Lord giveth them up to atheism in their judgment and opinion it was proverbial that atheists could wish there were no God or devil as thieves would have there be no judge or jailer and as one more or list perfectly correctly pointed out what we would have to be we are apt to believe this leap from wish to conviction was perfectly natural but as they pointed out it was also willful and therefore culpable one preacher argued that atheists had voluntarily violently extinguished to themselves the light of divine revelation and natural reason in order that they might prodigally act the works of darkness and this means that atheism was not a philosophical stance it was an ethical one and that meant it didn't threaten the moral economy of Christendom if anything it reinforced it because it lined unbelief up with intolerable antisocial depravity this is a very convenient conclusion it means that unbelief doesn't need to be listened to it simply has to be condemned so this is the stereotype is there any reason to believe a word of it well the atheism of preachers and balladeers imagination was a caricature but as with most caricatures you can catch the glimpses of the real people underneath it we've got much less direct evidence of real unbelievers but as we turn to look at them directly we will see that some of them at least seem from England in 1592 was already facing a daunting series of foreign and domestic dangers when a new scandal erupted claims of a nest of atheists close to the heart of the state Sir Walter Raleigh was accused of presiding over a school of atheism luring young gentleman into gatherings at which the old and new Testament adjusted at and God Himself mocked the tang of atheism hung around Raleigh for the rest of his life he was rebutting the charge even on the scaffold in 1618 the reputation of the rest of his supposed school of night was even more alarming a whole coven of them were allegedly plotting to draw Her Majesty's subjects to be atheists and after Her Majesty's deceased to make a king among themselves and live according to their own laws and the scandal provoked a unique event a full-scale legal inquiry authorised by the court of high commission into atheism in and around rallies estates and this inquiry offers an unprecedented opportunity to see how the atheist of popular fear and rumor looked when dragged out into the cold light of day the commissioners knew what they were looking for the questions drawn up for witnesses asked about anyone who had argued or spoken against the being of any God or what or where God is or anyone who denied a whole series of more specific doctrines over two days of proceedings in March 15 94 they heard from at least 16 witnesses but as the testimony mounted the allegations dissolved into hearsay and contradiction plenty of witnesses could be found to say that Sir Walter Raleigh and his retinue are generally suspected of atheism but getting past rumours to hard evidence proved frustratingly difficult juicy secondhand reports kept dissolving into nothing once the direct witnesses were called a promising report about a servant who had spoken in derogation of God and the scriptures and who had reviled Moses turned out to mean simply that once when drunk he had grumbled about a sermon going on too long and had become confused between Moses and King Solomon this sort of thing is not a threat to Christendom the most serious reports centered around a dinner at the house of a local night in which Sir Walter and his elder brother kuru had denied the immortality of the soul but it so happened that the minister they'd been arguing with a man named Ralph Ironside was now acting as the Commission's secretary and once they'd heard other evidence he informed his colleagues that the matter was not as the voice of the country reported he explained that one guest at this dinner had gently reproached kuru rally for using foul language and ironside the clergyman had sententiously weighed in to add to that the wages of sin is death what followed was a three-way exchange between Ironside the hapless clergyman and the to rally brothers Carew who clearly didn't like moralizing clergymen retorted the death comes to the good and to the bad alike ion side replied that when he talks about the wages of death he of course meant the death of the soul soul said Carew what is that Ironside sidestepped the trap saying that it was more important to save your soul than to be able to define it but now Sir Walter intervened on his brother's side he said that he had studied at Oxford with great scholars but had never found a satisfactory answer to the question what the reasonable soul of man is and he asked so how does it relate to the brain nor to the heart Ironside put on the spot tries for an Aristotelian definition which Sir Walter rejected is too obscure an intricate he then tries a theological definition Sir Walter dismisses that as a circular argument at last Ironside said that spirits are beyond the reach of reason like God himself and Sir Walter agrees that the two questions are alike for neither could I learn hitherto what Gordy's Ironside who is now committed ventures a definition of God defines him as an centium one who has being of himself yay but what is this n centium says Sir Walter an iron sight could only reply it is God whereupon so also growing tired of his game called for grace to be said to end the meal for that is better than this disputation the Commission wrapped up without any prosecutions they had not discovered a school of atheism they had discovered a clique of loose-tongued young men with a soldier's taste for danger which extended to banter and debate the rally brothers didn't deny the existence of the soul or of God the questions of how to define those terms were real ones on which scholars disagreed but nor were they holding a disinterested metaphysics seminar across the dining table they were testing the limits of what they dared to say and they were using a difficult and dangerous question to tease a man who was both at their educational and their social inferior their playing games and they are tweaking the noses of the self-important so besides who disapproved of it if there's a unifying note to this it's not serious rejection of Christian doctrine it's defiance defiance of any orthodoxy magistrate churchmen monarch or God who might presume to tell these Lords of the world how they should speak and live there was one vital witness though who was beyond the commissioner's reach the playwright Christopher Marlowe is now the most famous supposed a theist of the age one informant said that he had read the Atheist lecture to Sir Walter Raleigh and others and that he was able to show more sound reasons for atheism than any divine in England is able to give to prove divinity it's certainly true that Marlowe was part of Raleigh's circle but his supposed a theism is a Hall of Mirrors we have no hard evidence we have rumors we have hints and conspiracies and we have the texts of his plays and poems most of which only surviving copies made after his death without going through the place let's say that Marlowe proved himself very a to give voice in them to startlingly atheistic --all and anti-christian anti religious sentiments he does it in Tamburlaine he does it in the massacre of Paris in the Jew of Malta which opens with a prologue delivered to the audience in which a self-identified Machiavelli says I count religion but a childish toy and then there's dr. Faustus Marlowe is not Faustus himself but at the least Marlowe's Faustus is a compelling portrait of a particular kind of unbeliever a man who claims not to believe in Hell while having explicitly made a pact with the devil the conventional caricature would call that an outrageous example of wishful thinking in fact it reads to me more like a defiant refusal to submit to reality when mephistopheles humbly explains to Faustus that being excluded eternally from the presence of God is the sum of all torments Faustus will have none of it learn thou of Faustus manly fortitude he mocks the demon and scorn those joys that never shall possess I want you to hold on to that note of defiance our direct evidence about Marlowe's supposed unbelief is just as problematic there are plenty of rumors and vague allegations the detailed claims though come from two hostile documents written in the last month of his life in May 1593 shortly before what he was killed in what may simply have been an argument over a dinner bill and may not have been we know that Marlowe had been a spy at some point we can rely on almost nothing that was said by or about him during this period all that we can do with these lurid allegations is take them as they are they do at least paint a fairly consistent picture they don't accuse him of openly denying God the closest we get is his reported statement that if there be any God or any true religion then it's in the Papists because the service of God is performed or ceremonies even there I think the focus isn't on that if but with his contempt for the established religion of England all Protestants he says are hypocritical asses if he were put to write a new religion he'd undertake both a more excellent an admirable method but this isn't about preferring one form of Christianity to another he also criticizes Christ himself for having surrounded himself with fishermen and base fellows neither of wit nor of worth and also for not having instituted the sacrament with more ceremonial reverence as befits a member of Raleigh's Circle Marla suggested that Christ should have used tobacco rather than bread and wine now according to the stereotype you might expect a hint of incest next but we get a variation on that theme he claims that Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest dishonest meaning unchaste that he was the son of a carpenter and that if the Jews among whom he was born did crucify him well they best knew him and whence he came he deserved better to die than Barabbas though Barabbas were but a thief both a thief and a murderer why did he deserve to die well in part because the women who accompanied Christ and His disciples were horse and Christ knew them dishonestly nor was it only the women the Apostle John was bedfellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosom he used him as the sinners of Sodom now assume for a minute that all of these claims about what Marlowe said are true what kind of atheist would he be well not a skeptical rationalist his reported statements are not even consistent Christ might have been the son of a carpenter or the angel Gabriel might have pimped the Virgin Mary to the Holy Spirit but both can't be true what holds together Marlowe's reported statements and the hints of skepticism in this place is not theory but in emotion its fury a wild bitter refusal to submit to Authority amidst that string of explosive supposed quotations he famously said that they all they that love not tobacco and boys were fools if you loved tobacco and boys in late Elizabethan England then your only choices were either to renounce them or to defy the church the Christ and the God in whose name you were commanded to do so one whit writing shortly after this scandal said that the name of the devil who chiefly inspired atheism was not doubt nor lust but derision whose profession is atheism because he loves above all to mock the simplicity of the just Marlow and rally whatever else they were were mockers or to put it more kindly there gadflies their jesting about things that are too serious for jest playing with an orthodoxy without committing themselves consistent only in their refusal to bow to Authority the difference between them is chiefly one of mood marlowe's mockery in defiance is furious while rallies was coolly mischievous and so Marlow is swiftly murdered while Raleigh is beheaded twenty-five years later different routes to the same destination sketchy is all this is the rally Marlow Circle I think gives us a fairly broad consistent picture of what unbelief could actually mean in this period and this Restless reckless insolent atheism if that's what we want to call it has echoes elsewhere on the rare occasions when early modern courts dealt with allegations of atheism they usually turn out more to be about moral authority than about belief or unbelief in 1635 one Brian Walker was sentenced to a year in prison prison plus whinging fine for saying that I do not believe there is either God or devil neither will I believe anything but what I see but while he admitted speaking the words he had not been expressing a metaphysical piñon he was embroiled in a long bitter dispute with a neighboring family he fell to cursing them and he uttered the dread words when one of them had said to him don't you fear God he was simply in no mood to acknowledge any authority to which his enemies appealed now this kind of thing you might think scarcely deserves to be called unbelief but defiance of this sort could become more settled especially if it was directed at the world's most ever-present and intrusive moral authority the Christian churches one of the side effects of the age of the Reformation is a kind of arms race between the competing religious parties as Catholics and Protestants tried to stymie one another's missionary efforts and bolster their own moral authority by asserting control over their own populations and so churches of all kinds began trying to regulate the everyday life of ordinary people more and more consistently than had ever been the case before naturally some people disliked being regulated and they cursed the clergy for officious hypocrites the clergy equally naturally insisted their merely messengers the new moral severity was not their own whim but God's will and so what is a resentful layperson to do but to shake the fist at God - especially if the clergy encrust in question really are hypocrites one of the more memorable characters in Turners atheists tragedy is the minister longer bows snuff whose hypocrisy is so gross that Danville the Atheist reckons that he aims only to divert the world from sin that he more easily might engross it to himself importantly Danville claims that it's the ministers behavior that persuades him that atheism must be true a churchman of course responded to these charges the way institutions always do they point out that the flaws of a few messengers have no bearing on the truthfulness of the message which isn't quite adequate it's not simply that Quran grasping or tedious clergy can't invest their teaching with moral authority Danville's point was that clergy like longer bow snuff are practical atheists they demonstrate by their conduct that they do not believe the gospel that they preach and since they're the religious professionals who are supposed to know the truth what is a layperson supposed to do but learn from them for good Christians the unbelief of the kind that we see coming out of the rally Marlowe circle is appalling but it's also reassuring this is what unbelief ought to be this is why the words libertine and atheist or virtual synonyms throughout this period atheists of this sort of monsters but they're manageable ones because whatever other appeal they might have by definition they've got no moral authority one more trope about men like this recurs that they want their wives to stay pious because they don't wish to be cuckold it this Machiavellian argument that religion is a lie which it's necessary for everybody except me to embrace is is self-limiting if not actively self-defeating and if you believe that religion and morals are inextricably linked and that social order depends on almost everybody accepting both it doesn't really matter if you contract out of them it makes you a sort of parasite on Christian society an annoyance perhaps but not an existential threat unfortunately there's not much evidence that real unbelievers frankly abandoned ethics in this way and some hints that they didn't for some of the best of these we would need to range outside England and so I don't have time this evening to do more than mention for example Uriel Acosta a Portuguese Jew turned unbeliever who in the 1620s argued that he based his ethics not on God's commandments but on the law of nature the common rule of action to all men which distinguishes between wrong and he argued that those natural ethics were actually superior to the religious variant or we could bring in the great Dutch ethicist der cornet who saw himself as standing in succession to the ethical vision of Christianity that Erasmus and the Renaissance humanists had taught and when he wrote his his treatise on ethics he deliberately avoided quoting the Bible at all he wanted to show that a truly Christian moral code could be reached simply by reason let's have an English example instead in 1606 an Apes which physician named ELISA Duncan wrote a tract warning against using unlicensed untrained healers even if their religion seemed impeccable instead he urged a patient should resort to the learned physician even though he may have no religion the medical profession was notorious for atheism it should be said Duncan's claim was that even an atheist physician could be trusted to care for his patients and he said that this was because the urge to save others lives is naturally implanted in the heart of man and he asked why else would anyone ever leap leap into deep water to rescue someone from drowning or run into a burning building to save the occupants there's nothing specifically Christian he says about the desire to help and serve others it's an instinct as natural as breathing now he's trying to drum up business it's a self-serving argument but there's a kind of corroboration from a surprising quarter amid the comforting caricatures of Turner's atheists tragedy one character strikes a discordant note Sebastian the younger son of the villainous danville he's an atheist like his father he's a self-confessed coward and a serial philanderer yes unexpectedly he's also a man of principle he opposes a forced marriage being plotted by his father as tantamount to rape and stands firm on the point even when he's cut off without an income eventually his father relents and gives him some money which he promptly gives as bail to free a man whom his father had unjustly imprisoned at the end of the play when sebastian has at last managed to arrange an assignation with a lustful noblewoman whom he's been courting since act to her vengeful husband and his soldiers tracked the two of them down and set about breaking down the door of their chamber if you love me save my honour she begged Sebastian and he does she flees through the back door and to give her time to escape he stays barring the way with swords drawn when the husband bursts in he demands that Sebastian stand aside or I will make passage through thy blood my blood would make it slippery my lord he replies to her better you take another way and he dies with that quip on his lips killing the cuckold it husband in the process he is not a pious Christian he is not a virtuous pagan he is not a villainous atheist Sebastian represents a dangerous possibility that unbelief might discover ethics of its own if the Renaissance stage really did foster atheism as its Puritan critics argued I think this is how it happened not by dealing in reassuring stock villains like Danville nor by directly attacking the question in plays like Faustus but by the accumulation of hints and examples suggesting that atheism wasn't a uniquely depraved spectacle of horror but a tolerable everyday phenomenon something to be joked about rather than to be feared Ben Jonson used the word atheist half a dozen times in this place usually to refer to the profane and the impious preachers had been denouncing commonplace sins as atheism for so long that atheism was starting to seem commonplace in Johnson's play over his co-written play rather Eastwood ho the jailor Wolfe reels off a list of the different religions he's had in his prison first all the Christian sects and then Jew Turk infidel atheist Goodfellow etc when he's asked which is the best he replies truth master 'deputy they that pay fees best we never examined their conscience is further so an atheist is halfway between an infidel and a good fellow someone that no man of the world ought to lose sleep over in Johnson's play the new in a rake tries to seduce a lady and she teasingly questions whether there is any such thing as love and he pretends to be shocked and replies I didn't expect to meet an infidel much less an atheist so for Johnson atheism is a joke it's it's like when Shakespeare's Juliet calls Romeo the god of my idolatry these are lines that would cause a free song in an audience but audiences had come in part to witness dramatists playing with fire and to do it with a thrill rather than with a shudder as to Shakespeare himself well his personal religion remains hidden from us all we need to say on that front is that he wasn't an atheist at least not in any dogmatic or embittered sense of the word but it is striking but nowhere in any of his surviving works did he use the words atheist or unbeliever or any of their cognates and when he uses infidel which he does a few times that's only to refer to non-christian religions given how widely used and how emotionally charged these words were at the time and the famous breath of his vocabulary that silence suggests that he is consciously avoiding the topic he's not indulging either in Turners self-righteousness or or in Johnson's fun and games but if he sidesteps the word he is still capable of putting shockingly atheistic sentiments into his characters mouths human life according to Macbeth's famous nihilists Creed is a walking shadow a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more it's a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing klaudia in measure for measure quails at the prospect of death and begs his sister to prostitute herself to save his life a proposal incidentally which she calls a kind of incest and he says to her to die and go we know what not where to lie in cold obstruction and to rot this sensible warm motion to become a needed clod tis too horrible starkest of all is the villainous aaron in titus andronicus thou believeth no god his captors say to him as they kill him at the end of the play what if I do not as indeed I do not he replies mocking their piety an idiot holds his bauble for a god and as he dies he reveals his enemies declaring if there be devils would I were a devil proudly claiming that I've done a thousand dreadful things as willingly as one would kill a fly and yet unsettlingly like Turner's Sebastian the audience knows which his executioner's don't that this defiantly unrepentant death is a ploy by submitting to it Aaron hopes to save the life of his own bastard son now all of these staged atheists are villains certainly none of them speak for their creator but if Shakespeare could give voice to atheists one thing that he didn't do anywhere in his dramatic works is to put earnest and spiritually alive piety on the stage he could argue about his ability measure for measure whether it's one or not as the great literary critic George Santayana put it if the works of Shakespeare were all that some alien civilization or future age had of humanity they would hardly understand that man had had a religion Santayana concluded that the Silence of Shakespeare on religion had something in it that's still heathen and that maybe going too far but it's certainly true that Shakespeare's stage could be a startlingly secular space Shakespeare's King Lear is based on a source the 1605 true chronicle history of King Lear which tells the story of the elderly king and his three daughters and it tells it as a moral tale governed by God's providence which ultimately comes to a happy ending by the time Shakespeare's finished with it it has become an exceptionally bleak tragedy set in a world with no sign of God's presence let alone of his justice almost the closest of the play comes to a religious vision is blind Gloucester's claim that as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods they kill us for their sport if there's any meaning or morality to be found on this stage and that question is open the characters have to find it for themselves so the popular caricature of the atheist wasn't entirely wrong in particular the mood was right there really was a vein of unbelief whose emotional register was anger resentment mockery scorn it's temperature ranging from Johnson's cool amusement through rallies Barbara's playfulness to Marla's fire and fury but those emotions were lived out in ways that were both better and worse than the preachers feared better because this angry unbelief seems in facts to have still been inchoate more a matter of skepticism and defiance and carving out of new secular spaces than direct and earnest denials of core Christian doctrines but also from the preachers point of view worse because it wasn't simply a cloak for moral bankruptcy as they insisted it was what makes Marlowe's defiance and even Danville's anti-clerical contempt compelling is that they have a moral edge and in their different ways Uriel Acosta Derek corn heartily is a Duncan Turner's Sebastian Shakespeare's secularized ethical vision suggests that it wasn't only possible it was even natural for unbelief to be fired by its own moral code either implicit or explicit the preachers wanted the atheist to stick to his role as the villain in Christendom moral economy they should have known that the problem with an atheist is that he doesn't do as he's told thank you [Applause] you

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 52,767

Rating: 4.8728523 out of 5

Keywords: Gresham, Gresham College, Education, Lecture, Public, London, Debate, Academia, Knowledge, religion, divinity, religious history, history of religion, Shakespeare, atheism, atheist, witches, Europe, Renaissance, 16th century, Christopher Marlowe, Michel de Montaigne, alec ryrie

Id: xRCaIoVkR3k

Length: 49min 8sec (2948 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 01 2019