by Jim Bernhard
Jonson rejoined the Church of England in 1610 because of his indignation over the assassination of the French Catholic King Henri IV, who had been tolerant of Protestants and was allegedly done away with on the orders of the pope. Nonetheless, Jonson remained interested in Roman Catholic doctrine and rituals for the rest of his life.
The quick-witted Jonson was very much a man of the world, and there is little evidence in his work that he spent much time thinking about death. But in his Epigram LXXX, “Of Life and Death,” he wrote:
The ports of death are sins; of life, good deeds:
Through which our merit leads us to our meeds.
How willful blind is he then, that would stray,
And hath it in his powers, to make his way!
This world death’s region is, the other life’s:
And here, it should be one of our first strifes,
So to front death, as men might judge us past it.
For good men but see death, the wicked taste it.
He urged a carpe diem philosophy in this bit of doggerel:
Drink today, and drown all sorrow;
You shall perhaps not do it tomorrow;
Best, while you have it, use your breath;
There is no drinking after death.
And drink he did: his pension as Poet Laureate was raised by King Charles I to £100 plus a tierce (about thirty-five gallons) of wine per year. In 1626, Jonson suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. He had another stroke in 1628, and lingered in failing health for another nine years, until his death on August 6, 1637, at the age of sixty-five.
Jonson was buried upright in the nave of Westminster Abbey in a grave measured to his specifications: exactly eighteen inches square, its small size possibly being an indication that he was short of cash. The stone marker bears an inscription commissioned by a friend as an afterthought: “O rare Ben Jonson.” The stone does not include the epitaph—with its allusion to Jonson’s snail’s pace as a writer—that was reputedly begun by Jonson and finished by his drinking pal Shakespeare during a merry evening in a tavern:
Here lies Ben Jonson
That was once one,
Who while he lived was a slow thing,
And now, being dead, is no thing.
JOHN MILTON
Some might think it smacked of hypocrisy for the author of a monumental treatise condemning censorship to become the official government censor for Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth. But, as John Milton must have figured, a fellow has to make a living.
Like the earlier poet John Donne, Milton greeted the world in London’s Bread Street. The son of John Milton, a prosperous composer of religious music, the younger John was born on December 9, 1608. A bright boy, he studied at St. Paul’s School and then at Christ’s College in Cambridge, earning an M.A. degree cum laude. While at Cambridge, he began to compose poems, among them “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.” He changed his mind about becoming an Anglican priest, and retired in a leisurely manner to his father’s home in Buckinghamshire for six years of private study, immersing himself in Greek, Hebrew, Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, Old English, and Dutch.
When he was thirty, he embarked on a Grand Tour of the Netherlands, France, and Italy, where he met Galileo and was entertained by Cardinal Francesco Barberini, the pope’s nephew and a noted arts patron. Returning to England, Milton took sides with the Puritans and Parliamentarians against the established episcopacy of the Church of England and the monarchy.
Milton married seventeen-year-old Mary Powell, who left him after a short time, provoking him to write a defense of divorce—the subsequent criticism of which led to his famous anti-censorship essay, Areopagitica (the name of a hill in Athens). He must have sweet-talked Mary, for she came back to him two years later—her impoverished parents in tow—bore four children, and then died in childbirth at the age of twenty-seven. By this time, the English Civil War had overthrown King Charles I, and Milton received a political payoff as Secretary for Foreign Tongues in Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth. This was a job that required him to write pro-government propaganda and to act as censor of all printed materials. Opinions are divided as to how much actual censoring Milton ever did.
His eyesight began to fail—either retinal detachment or glaucoma is thought to be the cause—and by his mid-forties, Milton was completely blind. After the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Milton was imprisoned until freed through the influence of the poet Andrew Marvell, who was a member of Parliament.
Milton retired to his home in Bunhill Row, Finsbury, and completed his masterpieces—Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes—composing in his head at night and dictating to his secretary the next day. He was married twice more: to Katherine Woodcock, who died in childbirth after two years, and then to Elizabeth Mynshull, his wife at the time of his death.
Although unquestionably a devout Christian, Milton never allied himself with any organized religious group, spurning not only Roman Catholics, but also the Church of England and dissenting nonconformist sects. He apparently felt some kinship with the Quakers, but did not attend any kind of religious services in his later years.
Religious affiliations aside, Milton’s belief in the afterlife and the power of Christ’s redemption shines through his verse. In Paradise Lost, he paints a vivid picture of Satan and hell, and in Paradise Regained, he reveals his trust in the salvation earned for mankind by Christ’s death and resurrection.
His early poems, many composed to commemorate the death of friends, illustrate Milton’s view of the life to come for the believing Christian. In one, he writes:
When Faith and Love, which parted from thee never,
Had ripen’d thy just soul to dwell with God,
Meekly thou didst resign this earthly load
Of Death, called Life; which us from Life doth sever.
Thy Works and Alms and all they good Endeavour
Stayed not behind, nor in the grave were trod;
But as Faith pointed with her golden rod,
Followed thee up to joy and bliss for ever.
And in Lycidas, an elegy for Edward King, a friend who drowned, Milton imagines the heavenly kingdom in poetic imagery:
Weep no more, woeful Shepherds, weep no more,
For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead,
Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor,
So sinks the day-star in the Ocean bed,
And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled Ore,
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky:
So Lycidas sunk low but mounted high,
Through the dear might of him that walk’d the waves.
. . .
In the blest Kingdoms meek of joy and love
There entertain him all the Saints above
In solemn troops, and sweet Societies
That sing, and singing in their glory move,
And wipe the tears forever from his eyes.
Milton lived simply. He drank wine sparingly, and each evening after supper, about nine o’clock, he would smoke his pipe, drink a glass of water, and retire. Despite his moderate habits, he suffered frequently from gout, the effects of which were apparent in stiffened hands and finger-joints.
On Sunday evening, November 8, 1674, one month shy of his sixty-sixth birthday, he had a severe gout attack, leading to kidney failure, and—according to biographer Jonathan Richardson—Milton’s life drew peacefully to a close “with so little pain or emotion, that the time of his expiring was not perceiv’d by those in the room.”
He was buried the next Thursday in the Church of St. Giles, Cripplegate, beside his father, and the funeral, wrote one biographer, was attended by “his learned and great Friends in London, not without a friendly concourse of the Vulgar.”
MOLIÈRE
Jean-Baptiste Poquelin—better known by his stage name Molière—was born on January 15, 1622, to a prosperous Parisian family. His
mother died when he was ten, and he and his father lived in the fashionable rue St. Honoré while Jean-Baptiste attended the academically rigorous Jesuit Collège de Clermont. After leaving school, he took up the royal appointment that his father had held before him—Keeper of the King’s Carpet and Upholstery—and seemed destined for a cushy court career.
The theatre beckoned, however, even though it was regarded in polite society as a disreputable profession, and at age twenty-one, Jean-Baptiste joined the actress Madeleine Béjart to found the Illustre Théâtre—which went bankrupt within two years, leaving Jean-Baptiste with a pile of debts, for which he had to serve time in prison. After his release, he resumed his acting career, adopting the stage name of Molière—taken from the name of a village in the Midi—probably to avoid his creditors, as well as to spare his father the shame of having a son in the theatre.
Through the patronage of the Duc d’Orléans, brother of King Louis XIV, Molière won a command performance at the Louvre before the king, for whom he performed a Pierre Corneille tragedy and one of his own farces, The Doctor in Love. He won the king’s favor and was granted the use of two theatres, the Petit-Bourbon and the Palais-Royal, where he enjoyed great success. When he was forty, he married Armande Béjart, who he thought was his partner Madeleine’s sister, although she was more likely her illegitimate daughter.
Although Molière preferred to write and perform tragedy, he found he could attract bigger audiences with comic satires spoofing the foibles of French professions and Parisian society (always exempting the monarchy from criticism). Among the most notable of the thirty-one comedies he wrote were The Affected Ladies, School for Husbands, School for Wives, The Doctor in Spite of Himself, The Miser, The Would-Be Gentleman, The Misanthrope, Tartuffe or The Hypocrite, and The Imaginary Invalid. Naturally they were roundly attacked by the professions he satirized, by the literary establishment, and especially by the Catholic Church. Despite his critics, Molière maintained a wide public following and always had the support of the king.
For many years, Molière suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis—probably acquired during his prison stint—but for him, illness and death were always subjects for satire, like almost everything else. In this scene from The Imaginary Invalid, the hypochondriac Argan pretends to be dead and instructs his maid Toinette to tell the bad news to his wife, Béline, in order to see how she will react:
TOINETTE: Your husband is dead.
BÉLINE: My husband is dead?
TOINETTE: Alas, the poor man is gone.
BÉLINE: You’re sure?
TOINETTE: Oh, I’m sure. No one knows yet, and I was all alone when I found him. He died in my arms. Look how he’s stretched out in that chair.
BÉLINE: Thank heavens! A great weight has been lifted from me. You are silly, Toinette, to grieve so over his death!
TOINETTE: Well, I thought I ought to cry.
BÉLINE: Nonsense, it’s not worth the trouble. What loss is he to anyone, and what earthly purpose did he have when he was alive? A man who was nasty to everyone, rude, disgusting, always taking enemas or stuffing his stomach with nostrums, always sniveling, coughing, spitting—a tedious man, never having any fun, always in a bad temper, wearing out all his friends, and yelling at the servants day and night.
TOINETTE: That’s quite a eulogy, Ma’am.
BÉLINE: You must help me carry out my plan, Toinette, and you can be sure that I will reward you. Now, don’t let anyone know about this yet. We’ll put him in bed and keep his death secret till I’ve finished what I have to do. There are some papers and some money that I want to get hold of—don’t think I’ve given him the best years of my life for nothing! Come on, Toinette, help me look for the keys.
(Argan rises)
ARGAN: So, my dear wife, this is how you loved me!
TOINETTE: Uh-oh! The corpse isn’t dead!
ARGAN: I am very happy to have seen you express your love in that beautiful tribute you gave me. You’ve certainly tipped me off to what I ought to do in the future—and spared me from doing some things that I might otherwise have done!
Molière’s death, on February 17, 1673, at the age of fifty-one, was no laughing matter. He was, in fact, getting lots of laughs performing the comic role of Argan in The Imaginary Invalid when he was stricken with a tubercular seizure—coughing and hemorrhaging. Earlier that day, he had felt so weak that his wife urged him not to go on, but he insisted, reminding her of how many people’s livelihoods depended on him. When the performance began, just after four in the afternoon, Molière seemed in top form to the audience, although his colleagues watching from the wings could tell that he was suffering. In the play’s final scene, in which Argan ironically decides to become a physician himself, Molière had a sudden coughing attack, which he attempted to disguise with laughter. But then he began to hemorrhage and the curtain was rung down.
He was taken home and put to bed, requesting a “drugged pillow” to ease his pain. With more blood streaming from his mouth, he realized his time was near, and even though he had been a scoffer of religion, he asked for a priest to administer the last rites. His wife and an actor friend, Michel Baron, hurried to the nearby Church of St. Eustache, where two priests, tut-tutting at Molière’s anti-clerical Tartuffe, declined to come to his aid. Another, more amenable priest was found, but he arrived too late. Molière was already dead in the arms of two nuns, whom he had for many years helped during their Lenten visits to Paris, and who, quite by chance, arrived at his door as he was dying.
French law prohibited actors from being buried in the consecrated ground of cemeteries, but Molière’s widow appealed to King Louis XIV, who granted permission for him to be laid to rest in the dark of night in a plot reserved for unbaptized infants. In 1792, after the Revolution, his remains were transferred to the National Museum of French Monuments, and in 1817 to the Père Lachaise Cemetery.
BLAISE PASCAL
Blaise Pascal must have been a pretty glum fellow. Chronically ill most of his life, he rejected most medical treatment, saying, “Sickness is the natural state of Christians.” This dour French philosopher-scientist was born on June 19, 1623, in Clermont-Ferrand, but after the death of his mother when he was three, he moved with his father, a tax collector, and two sisters to Paris.
A home-schooled child prodigy, Pascal became not only a religious thinker, but also a physicist, mathematician, and inventor who devised a mechanical calculator, made important discoveries about fluids, and developed a probability theory that influenced economics and social sciences.
Pascal got religion for the first time at the age of twenty-three, when two Jansenist doctors treated his father for a broken hip. The family fell under the doctors’ spell and became eager adherents of the teachings of Cornelius Jansen, a theologian with Calvinist tendencies, who preached a doctrine of the total depravity of mankind and the predestined salvation of only a select few.
After a time, Pascal drifted away from the church and led a worldly life until he was thirty-one, when he got religion for a second time. He had a mystical vision on the night of November 23, 1654, possibly the result of banging his head in a carriage accident. During the next eight years, he practiced a more orthodox Catholicism and began writing Pensées (Thoughts), his monumental defense of the Christian faith. In it, he posited his famous “wager,” a logical justification for belief in God. A simplified approximation of the wager is: If you erroneously believe God exists, when death comes, you lose nothing. But if you correctly believe in God, you gain eternal bliss. On the other hand, if you are correct in disbelieving in God, you gain nothing at death. But if you are wrong in your disbelief, you suffer eternal damnation. The smart money would obviously be on believing.
Suffering frequently from severe headaches and digestive disorders, Pascal accepted his afflictions as a sign of God’s grace. In the Pensées, he wrote: “Thus I extend my arms to my Savior who, having been foretold for 4,000 years, came to suffer and die for me on earth in the time and under t
he circumstances that were foretold, and, by his grace, I await death in peace, in hope of being eternally united with him; and I live meanwhile joyously, both in the blessings that he gives me, and in the evil that he sends for my benefit and teaches me to endure by his example.”
In 1662, Pascal’s health grew worse, and he finally sought admission to a hospital for the incurable, but his doctor pronounced him too ill to move from his home. He began to have convulsions on August 18 and was given the last rites by the Reverend Paul Beurrier, the curé of Pascal’s parish church, St. Étienne-du-Mont. Pascal died the next morning at the age of thirty-nine, having uttered his last words, “May God never abandon me.” An autopsy disclosed disease of the stomach and other internal organs, as well as brain lesions. Although never precisely determined, the cause of death was probably a combination of stomach cancer and tuberculosis.
A funeral mass was offered on August 22 at St. Étienne-du-Mont, the shrine of Saint Geneviève, a patron saint of Paris. Beurrier officiated, and following the mass, Pascal’s body was interred in a tomb behind the high altar.
The Enlightenment
JONATHAN SWIFT
Illness and death haunted Jonathan Swift throughout his multi-faceted life. Widely hailed as the foremost satirist in the English language, Swift is remembered for Gulliver’s Travels, A Modest Proposal, A Journal to Stella, Drapier’s Letters, The Battle of the Books, An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, and A Tale of a Tub.
He was born on November 30, 1667, his father having died a month earlier. His mother moved to England, leaving young Jonathan in the care of an influential uncle. Swift received his B.A. degree in 1686 from Trinity College in Dublin, and then joined his mother in London, where he became secretary to Sir John Temple. While in England, he also earned an M.A. from Oxford.
