Note 70 — Chapter XIII · THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT—(Continued)

In the words of a clerical historian, “the religious phrases which are thinly scattered over his work are little more than expressions of a distant and imaginative reverence. And on the deeper grounds of religious faith his silence is significant.... The riddle of life and death ... he leaves ... a riddle to the last, without heeding the common theological solutions around him.”70 The practical wisdom in which he rose above his rivals no less than in dramatic and poetic genius, kept him prudently reticent on his opinions, as it set him upon building his worldly fortunes while the others with hardly an exception lived in shallows and miseries. As so often happens, it was among the ill-balanced types that there was found the heedless courage to cry aloud what others thought; but Shakespeare’s significant silence reminds us that the largest spirits of all could live in disregard of contemporary creeds. For, while there is no record of his having privately avowed unbelief, and certainly no explicit utterance of it in his plays,71 in no genuine work of his is there any more than bare dramatic conformity to current habits of religious speech; and there is often significantly less. In Measure for Measure the Duke, counselling as a friar the condemned Claudio, discusses the ultimate issues of life and death without a hint of Christian credence.