Note 61 — Chapter XIII · THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT—(Continued)

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.