Note 58 — Chapter XIII · THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT—(Continued)

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.”