The Science of Shakespeare (47 page)

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Shakespeare never got around
to teaching psychology at Berkeley—but it would seem that he had some sense of these ideas four centuries ago. At the very least, he recognized that the idea of an inherently just world stretches credulity. He either knew, or suspected, that the universe does not have a moral aspect; that things
just happen
. Sometimes, as disturbing as it may be to witness, good things happen to bad people, and, even worse, bad things happen to good people.

Nowhere is the idea of cosmic justice explored more thoroughly than in
King Lear
. The word “nature” is used more often in
Lear
than in any of the other dramas, and the play itself can be seen, as David Bevington asserts, as “a battleground over which rival concepts of nature are being fought.” As Thomas McAlindon puts it, the play is an investigation of “the nature of nature.” It asks what sort of universe we inhabit. The choice is between one that is “essentially moral, dictating altruism, community, limit, and reason” versus a newer view in which “nature is an amoral system which encourages egoism and the unscrupulous use of force and cunning to achieve one's desires.” And the answer is not comforting. Samuel Johnson asked if Lear was “a play in which the wicked prosper,” and it certainly looks that way. The wicked often go unpunished, and the good reap few rewards. No one who has seen the play will forget the blinding of Gloucester, surely one of the most cruel (even sickening) scenes in Renaissance drama. But note what one of the servants says upon witnessing the horror inflicted by Cornwall on his victim: “I'll never care what wickedness I do / If this man come to good” (3.7.98–99).
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The servants, as Bevington notes, “pose disturbing questions about the threat of universal disorder that must surely result if crimes are unpunished by the gods.” The gods similarly fail to punish Iago, in
Othello
, so the Venetian authorities have to make up for the gap in cosmic justice: “If there be any cunning cruelty / That can torment him much and hold him long, / It shall be his” (5.2.332–4). This sounds more like vengeance than justice, but it is needed, Stephen Greenblatt writes, as “a gesture, however inadequate, toward repairing the damaged moral order.” The gods seem similarly uninterested in the protagonist in
Macbeth
, but at least in that play the title character meets his match, and we have the satisfaction of seeing Macduff come on stage carrying Macbeth's decapitated head. But in
Lear
, the gods, if they exist at all, seem to be looking the other way. In Shakespeare's time, churchmen often condemned the theater as immoral, but
Lear
presents something far worse than immorality. It suggests a universe that is neither just nor unjust, but rather one in which justice, unless we take steps to establish it ourselves, is simply absent. We are confronted with a universe that is terrifyingly
amoral
.

Edmond, the bastard son of the Earl of Gloucester, is one of Shakespeare's great villains. What is alarming about his role in
Lear
is that he prospers: He is resolutely evil—he is more than willing to harm others to achieve his own selfish goals—and he gets away with it. Bevington writes:

What is truly frightening about
King Lear
is that the battle over “nature” seems to run in Edmond's favor to such an extraordinary degree and for so long a time. His creed of self-reliance gives him, as he readily perceives, a tactical advantage over those who credulously submit to the moral restrictions of the social order. Holding the view that moral codes are simply part of the mythology by which the power structure enforces its grip on society, Edmond sees no reason not to lie, cheat, or otherwise overwhelm those who stand between him and the goals of his limitless ambition. Confident that there are no gods to reward or punish, and no afterlife in which to suffer eternal pain, Edmond proceeds with relentless energy and tactical brilliance.

Edmond is, along with Aaron, Iago, and Richard III, one of a set of characters that provide Shakespeare with “the stage panache of the unapologetic villain,” as Jonathan Bate puts it. But Edmond is more than a brilliant, calculating, manipulative villain. He is also a skeptic. We have already seen (in Chapter 10) his refusal to buy into astrology, rejecting the superstitions embraced by his father, but he is also—as Bevington suggests in the above passage—perfectly willing to reject the notion of life after death, and, indeed, to reject the gods themselves.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF ATHEISM

Just as “science,” in the sense we use the word today, didn't quite exist in Shakespeare's day, atheism, too, was absent in its modern, Dawkins-like form. There had been millennia of debate on the extent of the involvement of God (or the gods) in human affairs—but the idea of the complete nonexistence of God is, as Gavin Hyman writes in
A Short History of Atheism
(2010), “an intrinsically modern disposition”; a way of seeing things whose birth was “roughly contemporaneous with the birth of modernity itself.”

The word “atheism” begins to crop up in English writing in the sixteenth century, almost always as a put-down; the term was used as derogatory label, bestowed on anyone imagined to hold heretical views of one kind or another. Even so, the seeds of unbelief had been planted, and Hyman points to the years from 1540 to 1630 as a period in which “the notion of a worldview that was entirely outside a theistic framework was … gradually becoming conceivable.” As it happens, Shakespeare's life falls wholly within this transitional period; and, just as his works hint at the beginnings of science, so, too, do they hint at the possibility of unbelief.

Once can easily perceive the danger that irreligion presented to the established faith; and, given the very real connections between religion and politics, it is hardly surprising that Parliament eventually passed laws against atheism. The first of these was enacted in 1667, calling for anyone “who denies or derides the essence, persons, or attributes of God the Father, Son or Holy Ghost given in the Scriptures…” to be jailed (at least until the payment of a fifty shilling fine). A similar piece of legislation, from 1678, requires that if any person over the age of sixteen “not being visibly and apparently distracted out of his wits by sickness or natural infirmity, or not a mere natural fool, void of common sense, shall … by word or writing deny that there is a God … [that person] shall be committed to prison.” For the authorities to have sensed so much smoke, there must have been at least the occasional fire. As Benjamin Bertram writes, atheism “must have flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”

We have already looked at the atomic theory of the ancient Greeks, championed by Lucretius in his epic poem—and it is not hard to see why it could be taken as an affront to the established faith. As Greenblatt notes, wherever Lucretius's poem surfaced, “the implications—for morality, politics, ethics, and theology—were deeply upsetting.” The reasons were straightforward enough: Atomism challenges the idea of divine providence; it eliminates the need for a prime mover (another challenge to the divine); and it does away with the idea of an afterlife. And because of the deeply intertwined relationship between religion and politics, believing in atoms was a hairsbreadth away from treason. (Well into the seventeenth century, young Jesuits at the University of Pisa were required to recite a prayer denouncing Lucretius's atomic theory. The prayer concludes, “Atoms produce nothing; therefore atoms are nothing.” It was, as Greenblatt notes, an attempt “to exorcise atomism” and to declare the universe to be God's handiwork.)

Lucretius imagined life to end with death, as the atoms that make up one's body disperse back into the chaos from whence they came—and by Shakespeare's time he was not alone. In his book
De animi immortalitate
(
On the Immortality of the Soul
), published in 1545, the Italian philosopher Girolamo Cardano wondered “whether human souls are eternal and divine or whether they perish with the body”—and goes on to list dozens of arguments for and against the immortality of the soul. The debate quickly took root in England. In 1549, the reformer Hugh Latimer warned against the “great many in England who say there is no soul, that think it is not eternal, but like a dog's soul; that think there is neither heaven nor hell.”

No heaven or hell—and thus, one might ask, what place for the gods? To the extent that the atomists bothered with the gods at all, they imagined them to be utterly disinterested in human affairs. But even without the atomic theory, one might question the plausibility of divine providence—as a few bold thinkers were prepared to do. Did God in fact have a plan for each living creature, past, present, and future—the “special providence in the fall of a sparrow” that Hamlet imagined? As early as 1550, a theologian named Roger Hutchinson warned against those who would deny God's direct providence over his creation:

Others grant God to be the maker of all things: but they suppose that, as the shipwright, when he hath made the ship, leaveth it to the mariners, and meddleth no more therewith; and as the carpenter leaveth the house that he hath made; even so God, after he formed all things, left all his creatures to their own governance, or to the governance of the stars.…

And then there were the peculiar (and highly unorthodox) views of Giordano Bruno, whose writings on science and philosophy we looked at in Chapter 4. Bruno wasn't an atheist; as we've seen, his science and his theology were deeply intertwined. Perhaps the best word to describe his worldview is
pantheism
: For Bruno, God and the universe are as one. Christianity, in this view, is little more than a delusion; Christ was not divine but, as Jennifer Michael Hecht puts it, “merely an unusually skillful magician”; he also dismissed heaven and hell, the Virgin Birth, and the Resurrection. As mentioned, Shakespeare is unlikely to have met Bruno himself. However, Shakespeare was certainly friendly with England's most famous alleged atheist of the time, the playwright Christopher Marlowe. Just over a dozen lines into Marlowe's
The Jew of Malta
, the Italian political thinker Niccolò Machiavelli (anglicized to “Machevil”) declares, “I count religion but a childish toy…” (prologue, line 14).
Doctor Faustus
, Marlowe's most important play, was even more dangerous. “This was no simple morality play,” notes Susan Brigden, “but a work terrifying in its intensity and daring which hinted at a dangerous questioning.” Faustus declares, “I think hell's a fable” (5.129)—and the playwright may well have agreed.

THE CURIOUS CASE OF CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE

Matters are complicated, however, by the fact that Marlowe wasn't
just
an atheist—he was also a government spy; while traveling in France, he monitored the activities of English Catholics living in exile. He was also openly gay in an age when homosexuality was punishable by death—
and
was daring enough to portray, in
Edward the Second
, the doomed love between the young king and his “sweet favourite,” Piers Gaveston. Marlowe, in other words, lived quite far from the respectable mainstream of Elizabethan life. In Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, there is a portrait said to be of Marlowe; it bears the mysterious motto
Quod me nutrit me destruit
—“That which nourishes me destroys me.”

Accusations of Marlowe's atheism stem from several sources, beginning with testimony from another famous playwright, Thomas Kyd. When a fragment of a heretical tract was found in Kyd's living quarters, he said it belonged to Marlowe, with whom he had once shared the rooms. But the most damning testimony delivered to the Privy Council came from a man named Richard Baines (who was, just to make things even more convoluted,
also
a spy). In addition to condemning Marlowe, Baines's testimony is notable for referencing astronomer Thomas Harriot, whose work we looked at in Chapter 5. Baines tallies Marlowe's heretical views regarding specific passages in the Bible, and adds that the playwright believed “that Moses was but a Jugler, & that one Heriot being Sir W Raleighs man Can do more than he.” As we've seen, Harriot was dogged by accusations of atheism, and so, too, was Sir Walter Raleigh. (Compared with Marlowe, however, there is little evidence that Raleigh was much of an atheist; what little of his writing that has survived, says George Buckley, contains “no evidence of religious incredulity.”) And then there were the harsh words of Thomas Beard, a Puritan churchman. In a book called
The Theatre of God's Judgement
(1597), Beard outlines the array of punishments that await various kinds of sinners—and he wasn't afraid to name names. Most of his victims are Italian or French, but one Englishman is singled out (even if he mangles the name somewhat):

Not inferior to any of the former in Atheisme and impiety … was one of our own nation, of fresh and late memorie, called Marlin, by profession a scholler, brought vp from his youth in the Vniuersitie of Cambridge, but by practice a Play-maker … [who] denied God, and his sonne Christ, and not only blasphemed the Trinitie, but also (it is credibly reported) wrote bookes against it.…

Not surprisingly, Marlowe's death is seen as somewhat suspicious: Just twelve days after a warrant had been issued for his arrest on suspicion of heresy, the playwright was fatally stabbed—just above the right eye—during a brawl in a Deptford bar. (Did the Crown take out a “hit” on a particularly irksome troublemaker?) It all has the flavor of a 1960s-era Cold War spy movie, with secret lives, dangerous documents, and double agents. As George Buckley puts it, Marlowe “was evidently playing some kind of very deep game”; and no doubt the charges of atheism were linked to the ongoing political machinations. A man named Richard Cholmeley said he had been “converted” by the playwright, claiming that “Marlowe is able to show more sound reasons for atheism than any divine in England is able to give to prove divinity,” and that Marlowe once read an atheist lecture “to Sir Walter Raleigh and others.” Most likely, however, Marlowe's atheism was not so much rooted in his philosophy, but was rather, as Buckley puts it, “a temper of mind that expressed itself in life and action.” Being a man of the theater didn't help: The stage had always been linked to sinfulness and debauchery. The theater, as Bertram puts it, served as a symbol “of a society insufficiently committed to God”; its actors and playwrights were imagined to have “no proper place in the social order; they blasphemed God, engaged in homosexuality, and followed Machiavelli.”