The Science of Shakespeare

by Dan Falk

  We have already looked at the atomic theory of the ancient Greeks, championed by Lucretius in his epic poem—and it is not hard to see why it could be taken as an affront to the established faith. As Greenblatt notes, wherever Lucretius’s poem surfaced, “the implications—for morality, politics, ethics, and theology—were deeply upsetting.” The reasons were straightforward enough: Atomism challenges the idea of divine providence; it eliminates the need for a prime mover (another challenge to the divine); and it does away with the idea of an afterlife. And because of the deeply intertwined relationship between religion and politics, believing in atoms was a hairsbreadth away from treason. (Well into the seventeenth century, young Jesuits at the University of Pisa were required to recite a prayer denouncing Lucretius’s atomic theory. The prayer concludes, “Atoms produce nothing; therefore atoms are nothing.” It was, as Greenblatt notes, an attempt “to exorcise atomism” and to declare the universe to be God’s handiwork.)

  Lucretius imagined life to end with death, as the atoms that make up one’s body disperse back into the chaos from whence they came—and by Shakespeare’s time he was not alone. In his book De animi immortalitate (On the Immortality of the Soul), published in 1545, the Italian philosopher Girolamo Cardano wondered “whether human souls are eternal and divine or whether they perish with the body”—and goes on to list dozens of arguments for and against the immortality of the soul. The debate quickly took root in England. In 1549, the reformer Hugh Latimer warned against the “great many in England who say there is no soul, that think it is not eternal, but like a dog’s soul; that think there is neither heaven nor hell.”

  No heaven or hell—and thus, one might ask, what place for the gods? To the extent that the atomists bothered with the gods at all, they imagined them to be utterly disinterested in human affairs. But even without the atomic theory, one might question the plausibility of divine providence—as a few bold thinkers were prepared to do. Did God in fact have a plan for each living creature, past, present, and future—the “special providence in the fall of a sparrow” that Hamlet imagined? As early as 1550, a theologian named Roger Hutchinson warned against those who would deny God’s direct providence over his creation:

  Others grant God to be the maker of all things: but they suppose that, as the shipwright, when he hath made the ship, leaveth it to the mariners, and meddleth no more therewith; and as the carpenter leaveth the house that he hath made; even so God, after he formed all things, left all his creatures to their own governance, or to the governance of the stars.…

  And then there were the peculiar (and highly unorthodox) views of Giordano Bruno, whose writings on science and philosophy we looked at in Chapter 4. Bruno wasn’t an atheist; as we’ve seen, his science and his theology were deeply intertwined. Perhaps the best word to describe his worldview is pantheism: For Bruno, God and the universe are as one. Christianity, in this view, is little more than a delusion; Christ was not divine but, as Jennifer Michael Hecht puts it, “merely an unusually skillful magician”; he also dismissed heaven and hell, the Virgin Birth, and the Resurrection. As mentioned, Shakespeare is unlikely to have met Bruno himself. However, Shakespeare was certainly friendly with England’s most famous alleged atheist of the time, the playwright Christopher Marlowe. Just over a dozen lines into Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, the Italian political thinker Niccolò Machiavelli (anglicized to “Machevil”) declares, “I count religion but a childish toy…” (prologue, line 14). Doctor Faustus, Marlowe’s most important play, was even more dangerous. “This was no simple morality play,” notes Susan Brigden, “but a work terrifying in its intensity and daring which hinted at a dangerous questioning.” Faustus declares, “I think hell’s a fable” (5.129)—and the playwright may well have agreed.

  THE CURIOUS CASE OF CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE

  Matters are complicated, however, by the fact that Marlowe wasn’t just an atheist—he was also a government spy; while traveling in France, he monitored the activities of English Catholics living in exile. He was also openly gay in an age when homosexuality was punishable by death—and was daring enough to portray, in Edward the Second, the doomed love between the young king and his “sweet favourite,” Piers Gaveston. Marlowe, in other words, lived quite far from the respectable mainstream of Elizabethan life. In Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, there is a portrait said to be of Marlowe; it bears the mysterious motto Quod me nutrit me destruit—“That which nourishes me destroys me.”

  Accusations of Marlowe’s atheism stem from several sources, beginning with testimony from another famous playwright, Thomas Kyd. When a fragment of a heretical tract was found in Kyd’s living quarters, he said it belonged to Marlowe, with whom he had once shared the rooms. But the most damning testimony delivered to the Privy Council came from a man named Richard Baines (who was, just to make things even more convoluted, also a spy). In addition to condemning Marlowe, Baines’s testimony is notable for referencing astronomer Thomas Harriot, whose work we looked at in Chapter 5. Baines tallies Marlowe’s heretical views regarding specific passages in the Bible, and adds that the playwright believed “that Moses was but a Jugler, & that one Heriot being Sir W Raleighs man Can do more than he.” As we’ve seen, Harriot was dogged by accusations of atheism, and so, too, was Sir Walter Raleigh. (Compared with Marlowe, however, there is little evidence that Raleigh was much of an atheist; what little of his writing that has survived, says George Buckley, contains “no evidence of religious incredulity.”) And then there were the harsh words of Thomas Beard, a Puritan churchman. In a book called The Theatre of God’s Judgement (1597), Beard outlines the array of punishments that await various kinds of sinners—and he wasn’t afraid to name names. Most of his victims are Italian or French, but one Englishman is singled out (even if he mangles the name somewhat):

  Not inferior to any of the former in Atheisme and impiety … was one of our own nation, of fresh and late memorie, called Marlin, by profession a scholler, brought vp from his youth in the Vniuersitie of Cambridge, but by practice a Play-maker … [who] denied God, and his sonne Christ, and not only blasphemed the Trinitie, but also (it is credibly reported) wrote bookes against it.…

  Not surprisingly, Marlowe’s death is seen as somewhat suspicious: Just twelve days after a warrant had been issued for his arrest on suspicion of heresy, the playwright was fatally stabbed—just above the right eye—during a brawl in a Deptford bar. (Did the Crown take out a “hit” on a particularly irksome troublemaker?) It all has the flavor of a 1960s-era Cold War spy movie, with secret lives, dangerous documents, and double agents. As George Buckley puts it, Marlowe “was evidently playing some kind of very deep game”; and no doubt the charges of atheism were linked to the ongoing political machinations. A man named Richard Cholmeley said he had been “converted” by the playwright, claiming that “Marlowe is able to show more sound reasons for atheism than any divine in England is able to give to prove divinity,” and that Marlowe once read an atheist lecture “to Sir Walter Raleigh and others.” Most likely, however, Marlowe’s atheism was not so much rooted in his philosophy, but was rather, as Buckley puts it, “a temper of mind that expressed itself in life and action.” Being a man of the theater didn’t help: The stage had always been linked to sinfulness and debauchery. The theater, as Bertram puts it, served as a symbol “of a society insufficiently committed to God”; its actors and playwrights were imagined to have “no proper place in the social order; they blasphemed God, engaged in homosexuality, and followed Machiavelli.”

  Incidentally, suspicion of irreligion was even more dangerous on the other side of the English Channel. In 1623, a French poet and playwright named Théophile de Viau was accused of atheism, tortured, and sentenced to death, though, thanks to his connections, the sentence was commuted to banishment. Like Marlowe, de Viau was also suspected of homosexuality. As A. C. Grayling has noted, this is not entirely a coincidence: The word “atheism” was an all-purpose label for unacceptable beliefs and practices, and homosexuality w
as “taken to be expressive of atheism, or identical with it.” Things did not go so well for an Italian philosopher named Lucilio Vanini. Like Bruno, he was a priest with radically unorthodox views; and, like Marlowe and de Viau, he was suspected of being a homosexual. Vanini was arrested in Toulouse in 1618 on charges of atheism, and, after a lengthy trial, convicted. Death was too good for him, the authorities believed—so they cut off his tongue and strangled him before burning his remains.

  GODLESS SHAKESPEARE?

  In the case of Shakespeare, we have no direct evidence, as there are no accusatory letters, no diatribes warning of his disbelief—or, indeed, of any sort of threat to the established order. (How very dull his life was, compared with Marlowe’s!) And so we turn, with caution, to his dramatic works. The case for Shakespeare’s lack of belief has been argued most recently by Eric Mallin in his book Godless Shakespeare (2007). Mallin begins by examining a remarkable scene in Measure for Measure, in which the hapless Claudio is in prison, awaiting execution. His sister Isabel, in training to be a nun, pays him a visit. At this point, Claudio has an idea: Maybe if Isabel were to sleep with the duke, Angelo, she could secure his release. She (quite reasonably) refuses. And then, as Mallin notes, we have an extraordinary speech on the nature of death. Claudio says:

  … to die, and we go we know not where;

  To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;

  This sensible warm motion to become

  A kneaded cold; and the delighted spirit

  To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside

  In thrilling region of thick ribbed ice

  To be imprison’d in the viewless winds

  And blown with restless violence round about

  The pendant world …

  …’tis too horrible!

  (3.1.115–27)

  For Mallin, the issue is not Claudio’s fear, but its effect on Isabel, whose faith seems truly shaken by what she is hearing. The picture being offered, Mallin writes, is one of “religion as terrified sadism, the product of faith’s deep, frustrated inadequacy to meliorate the darkness, or to cope with the complexities of selves who are touched by desire, the law, loneliness, despair.” What happened to Isabel’s faith? What we see, Mallin says, here and throughout the canon, is that “spiritual convictions crumble under pressure.”

  Shakespeare goes even further in Titus Andronicus, by presenting the audience with the only self-avowed nonbeliever in the canon, the Moorish villain Aaron. When Aaron is taken prisoner, he tries to bargain with his captor, Lucius. But Lucius asks, What good is a vow from a nonbeliever? Aaron, however, has a snappy comeback: Those who do believe, he says, are often fools and liars; yet we imagine their oaths to be worth something. (Note how quick-witted Shakespeare’s villains are!)

  Except, Aaron isn’t just a villain. He is also a master manipulator, as Mallin, who teaches at the University of Texas–Austin, told me in an interview: “Aaron arranges things—he arranges plots, he sets the stage for his deeds, he has props that he uses.” In other words, Aaron is also “one of Shakespeare’s early models for his own work. Aaron is a ‘playwright.’ The parallel to Shakespeare is really quite compelling.”

  What led Shakespeare in this direction? One possibility, Mallin speculates, is that he was following Marlowe’s lead—or perhaps trying to one-up his colleague. Consider the plot of Doctor Faustus: The doctor makes a pact with the Devil, and God doesn’t seem to care. “What never really appears in the play is God’s intervention; what never appears is God’s goodness,” Mallin says. “This is a very upsetting possibility that Marlowe introduces, and that Shakespeare plays on, particularly in his tragedies.”

  * * *

  And then, of course, there is King Lear. In this most somber of Shakespeare’s plays, the gods are often called upon—by the king and Gloucester and others—but they do not respond. As Jay Halio observes, “their presence is nowhere found or felt”; for Greenblatt, the gods “are conspicuously, devastatingly silent.” In their absence, justice cannot be guaranteed; indeed, it becomes fragile in the extreme. Lear, in desperation, hopes that events will “show the heavens more just” (3.4.36), but it is a lost cause. The play ends, as William Elton puts it, “with the death of the good at the hands of the evil.” In one of the play’s most famous—and darkest—lines, Gloucester laments, “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’gods / They kill us for their sport” (4.1.36–37). (A line, incidentally, that closely echoes a passage from Montaigne, who wrote, in Florio’s translation, “The gods perdie doe reckon and racket us men as their tennis-balles.”)

  In King Lear and the Gods, Elton presents a kind of checklist of what makes a “Renaissance skeptic”—denying divine providence; denying the immortality of the soul; placing mankind among the beasts; denying God’s role as creator of the universe; attributing to nature what is properly the work of God—and then shows that Lear, over the course of the play, develops into precisely such a skeptic. It is a gradual process, but it is relentless: “Lear’s disillusionment, once begun, sweeps all before it, toppling the analogical edifices of God and man, divine and human justice.” The play, writes Thomas McAlindon, “must have at least evoked for most Christians the dark night of the soul when faith seems groundless even to the most devout believer.” We live, we die, and, it would seem, that’s the end of it. Whether we led good lives or bad, the universe does not seem to care. In the play “there is no firm hint of an afterlife where flights of angels sing the afflicted to their rest, or where the wicked meet with a punishment commensurate with the evil they have done,” McAlindon writes. “Human beings are here left utterly alone with nature, their own and the world’s.” Or, as Mallin put it in our interview, King Lear is “essentially a godless document”; it describes a world “emptied of divinity.”

  We have already spoken of Shakespeare’s urge to outdo his colleague Marlowe—to take greater risks, to shock, to subvert. But as Harold Bloom suggests, the character of Edmond—whom Bloom describes as “a pagan atheist and libertine naturalist”—may also have been inspired by Marlowe himself: “Marlowe the man, or rather Shakespeare’s memory of him, may be the clue to Edmond’s strange glamour, the charismatic qualities that make it so difficult not to like him.” However it came about, the result was bold in the extreme: King Lear, writes Elton, is “fraught with danger, both politically and artistically.”

  The canon offers other hints of a godless Shakespeare: Hamlet’s obsessive contemplation of death and decay, with no mention of an afterlife; Helena’s assertion in All’s Well That Ends Well that “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie / Which we ascribe to heaven” (1.1.216–17); Macbeth’s assertion that life is “a tale, told by an idiot, signifying nothing” (5.5.26–27). None of this proves that Shakespeare was an atheist, Mallin acknowledges—but it at least shows that he could imagine a godless world. And what better place to exercise that imagination than the London stage—the one place where one could dethrone a king, ridicule a nobleman, compare a prince to a beggar, and ignore the divine; the one place where one might be subversive and yet avoid the gallows.

  MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHINGNESS

  The idea of an “atheist Shakespeare” seems to have taken root in the early years of the twentieth century, by coincidence—or perhaps not—the same time when King Lear was first imagined to surpass Hamlet in greatness. As George Santayana has written, the playwright was faced with a stark choice:

  For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.… The cosmos eludes him; he does not seem to feel the need of framing that idea. He depicts human life in all its richness and variety, but leaves that life without a setting, and consequently without a meaning.

  “Nothing,” of course, is one of the great themes in Lear; in the very first scene, we hear it four times. The wicked sisters, Regan and Goneril, shower their father with extravagant declarations of devotion. Lear then asks his third daughter, Cordelia, what she can say to top her sisters’ claims:
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  CORDELIA

  Nothing, my lord.

  LEAR

  Nothing?

  CORDELIA

  Nothing.

  LEAR

  Nothing will come from nothing, speak again.

  (1.1.82–85)

  Shakespeare is just setting the stage; the mayhem and darkness are yet to unfold. Did the playwright “choose nothing”? Eric Mallin doesn’t go quite that far. But he says that King Lear does lack “an image of a benevolent cosmos, of a benevolent deity.” This may be partly due to a lack of belief on the part of its author, Mallin says—but it could also be because the supernatural is not Shakespeare’s first concern. “He is interested in the social, in the worldly, in the sexual, in the linguistic,” Mallin says. “He’s interested in what happens on this planet. What matters is existence; what matters is what we do while we’re here. And that strikes me as pretty modern.”

  The philosopher Colin McGinn, author of Shakespeare’s Philosophy (2006), considers the question of labeling Shakespeare an atheist, but prefers the term “naturalist.” His moral thinking is “entirely secular,” McGinn writes. “He is simply saying, This is the way things are, like it or not.” When I met with McGinn in his Miami apartment, we explored these ideas a bit further—including the notion of “cosmic justice,” which seems to be conspicuously absent in King Lear. For Shakespeare, “justice is entirely man-made,” McGinn says. “And that may explain why there’s so much interest in law in Shakespeare, and the way you have to use the law in order to get justice—because you won’t get justice outside of human constructions or human inventions. You can’t rely on nature to mete out justice in the right way.” In King Lear in particular we find “a very progressive, radical position,” one that receives relatively little attention until the existentialism movement of the late nineteenth century.