Note 72 — Chapter XIII · THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT—(Continued)

So silent is the dramatist on the ecclesiastical issues of his day that Protestants and Catholics are enabled to go on indefinitely claiming him as theirs; the latter dwelling on his generally kindly treatment of friars; the former citing the fact that some Protestant preacher—evidently a protégé of his daughter Susannah—was allowed lodging at his house. But the preacher was not very hospitably treated;72 and other clues fail. There is good reason to think that Shakespeare was much influenced by Montaigne’s Essays, read by him in Florio’s translation, which was issued when he was recasting the old Hamlet; and the whole treatment of life in the great tragedies and serious comedies produced by him from that time forward is even more definitely untheological than Montaigne’s own doctrine.73 Nor can he be supposed to have disregarded the current disputes as to fundamental beliefs, implicating as they did his fellow-dramatists Marlowe, Kyd, and Greene. The treatise of De Mornay, of which Sir Philip Sidney began and Arthur Golding finished the translation,74 was in his time widely circulated in England; and its very inadequate argumentation might well strengthen in him the anti-theological leaning.