Note 76 — Chapter XIII · THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT—(Continued)

While, however, Shakespeare is notably naturalistic as compared with the other Elizabethan dramatists, it remains true that their work in the mass tells little of a habitually religious way of thinking. Apart from the plays above named, and from polemic passages and devotional utterances outside their plays, they hint as little of Christian dogma as of Christian asceticism. Hence, in fact, the general and bitter hostility of the Puritans to the stage. Even at and after Shakespeare’s death, the drama is substantially “graceless.” Jonson, who was for a time a Catholic, but reverted to the Church of England, disliked the Puritans, and in Bartholomew Fair derides them. The age did not admit of a pietistic drama; and when there was a powerful pietistic public, it made an end of drama altogether. To Elizabeth’s reign probably belongs the Atheist’s Tragedy of Cyril Tourneur, first published in 1611, but evidently written in its author’s early youth—a coarse and worthless performance, full of extremely bad imitations of Shakespeare.76 But to the age of Elizabeth also belongs, perhaps, the sententious tragedy of Mustapha by Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, first surreptitiously published in 1609. A century and a half later the deists were fond of quoting77 the concluding Chorus Sacerdotum, beginning: