The Science of Shakespeare (48 page)

Incidentally, suspicion of irreligion was even more dangerous on the other side of the English Channel. In 1623, a French poet and playwright named Théophile de Viau was accused of atheism, tortured, and sentenced to death, though, thanks to his connections, the sentence was commuted to banishment. Like Marlowe, de Viau was also suspected of homosexuality. As A. C. Grayling has noted, this is not entirely a coincidence: The word “atheism” was an all-purpose label for unacceptable beliefs and practices, and homosexuality was “taken to be expressive of atheism, or identical with it.” Things did not go so well for an Italian philosopher named Lucilio Vanini. Like Bruno, he was a priest with radically unorthodox views; and, like Marlowe and de Viau, he was suspected of being a homosexual. Vanini was arrested in Toulouse in 1618 on charges of atheism, and, after a lengthy trial, convicted. Death was too good for him, the authorities believed—so they cut off his tongue and strangled him before burning his remains.

GODLESS SHAKESPEARE?

In the case of Shakespeare, we have no direct evidence, as there are no accusatory letters, no diatribes warning of his disbelief—or, indeed, of any sort of threat to the established order. (How very
dull
his life was, compared with Marlowe's!) And so we turn, with caution, to his dramatic works. The case for Shakespeare's lack of belief has been argued most recently by Eric Mallin in his book
Godless Shakespeare
(2007). Mallin begins by examining a remarkable scene in
Measure for Measure
, in which the hapless Claudio is in prison, awaiting execution. His sister Isabel, in training to be a nun, pays him a visit. At this point, Claudio has an idea: Maybe if Isabel were to sleep with the duke, Angelo, she could secure his release. She (quite reasonably) refuses. And then, as Mallin notes, we have an extraordinary speech on the nature of death. Claudio says:

 … to die, and we go we know not where;

To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;

This sensible warm motion to become

A kneaded cold; and the delighted spirit

To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside

In thrilling region of thick ribbed ice

To be imprison'd in the viewless winds

And blown with restless violence round about

The pendant world …

…'tis too horrible!

(3.1.115–27)

For Mallin, the issue is not Claudio's fear, but its effect on Isabel, whose faith seems truly shaken by what she is hearing. The picture being offered, Mallin writes, is one of “religion as terrified sadism, the product of faith's deep, frustrated inadequacy to meliorate the darkness, or to cope with the complexities of selves who are touched by desire, the law, loneliness, despair.” What happened to Isabel's faith? What we see, Mallin says, here and throughout the canon, is that “spiritual convictions crumble under pressure.”

Shakespeare goes even further in
Titus Andronicus
, by presenting the audience with the only self-avowed nonbeliever in the canon, the Moorish villain Aaron. When Aaron is taken prisoner, he tries to bargain with his captor, Lucius. But Lucius asks, What good is a vow from a nonbeliever? Aaron, however, has a snappy comeback: Those who
do
believe, he says, are often fools and liars; yet we imagine their oaths to be worth something. (Note how quick-witted Shakespeare's villains are!)

Except, Aaron isn't
just
a villain. He is also a master manipulator, as Mallin, who teaches at the University of Texas–Austin, told me in an interview: “Aaron arranges things—he arranges plots, he sets the stage for his deeds, he has props that he uses.” In other words, Aaron is also “one of Shakespeare's early models for his own work. Aaron is a ‘playwright.' The parallel to Shakespeare is really quite compelling.”

What led Shakespeare in this direction? One possibility, Mallin speculates, is that he was following Marlowe's lead—or perhaps trying to one-up his colleague. Consider the plot of
Doctor Faustus
: The doctor makes a pact with the Devil, and God doesn't seem to care. “What never really appears in the play is God's intervention; what never appears is God's goodness,” Mallin says. “This is a very upsetting possibility that Marlowe introduces, and that Shakespeare plays on, particularly in his tragedies.”

*   *   *

And then, of course,
there is
King Lear
. In this most somber of Shakespeare's plays, the gods are often called upon—by the king and Gloucester and others—but they do not respond. As Jay Halio observes, “their presence is nowhere found or felt”; for Greenblatt, the gods “are conspicuously, devastatingly silent.” In their absence, justice cannot be guaranteed; indeed, it becomes fragile in the extreme. Lear, in desperation, hopes that events will “show the heavens more just” (3.4.36), but it is a lost cause. The play ends, as William Elton puts it, “with the death of the good at the hands of the evil.” In one of the play's most famous—and darkest—lines, Gloucester laments, “As flies to wanton boys are we to th'gods / They kill us for their sport” (4.1.36–37). (A line, incidentally, that closely echoes a passage from Montaigne, who wrote, in Florio's translation, “The gods perdie doe reckon and racket us men as their tennis-balles.”)

In
King Lear and the Gods,
Elton presents a kind of checklist of what makes a “Renaissance skeptic”—denying divine providence; denying the immortality of the soul; placing mankind among the beasts; denying God's role as creator of the universe; attributing to nature what is properly the work of God—and then shows that Lear, over the course of the play, develops into precisely such a skeptic. It is a gradual process, but it is relentless: “Lear's disillusionment, once begun, sweeps all before it, toppling the analogical edifices of God and man, divine and human justice.” The play, writes Thomas McAlindon, “must have at least evoked for most Christians the dark night of the soul when faith seems groundless even to the most devout believer.” We live, we die, and, it would seem, that's the end of it. Whether we led good lives or bad, the universe does not seem to care. In the play “there is no firm hint of an afterlife where flights of angels sing the afflicted to their rest, or where the wicked meet with a punishment commensurate with the evil they have done,” McAlindon writes. “Human beings are here left utterly alone with nature, their own and the world's.” Or, as Mallin put it in our interview,
King Lear
is “essentially a godless document”; it describes a world “emptied of divinity.”

We have already spoken of Shakespeare's urge to outdo his colleague Marlowe—to take greater risks, to shock, to subvert. But as Harold Bloom suggests, the character of Edmond—whom Bloom describes as “a pagan atheist and libertine naturalist”—may also have been inspired by Marlowe himself: “Marlowe the man, or rather Shakespeare's memory of him, may be the clue to Edmond's strange glamour, the charismatic qualities that make it so difficult not to like him.” However it came about, the result was bold in the extreme:
King Lear
, writes Elton, is “fraught with danger, both politically and artistically.”

The canon offers other hints of a godless Shakespeare: Hamlet's obsessive contemplation of death and decay, with no mention of an afterlife; Helena's assertion in
All's Well That Ends Well
that “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie / Which we ascribe to heaven” (1.1.216–17); Macbeth's assertion that life is “a tale, told by an idiot, signifying nothing” (5.5.26–27). None of this proves that Shakespeare was an atheist, Mallin acknowledges—but it at least shows that he could
imagine
a godless world. And what better place to exercise that imagination than the London stage—the one place where one could dethrone a king, ridicule a nobleman, compare a prince to a beggar, and ignore the divine; the one place where one might be subversive and yet avoid the gallows.

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHINGNESS

The idea of an “atheist Shakespeare” seems to have taken root in the early years of the twentieth century, by coincidence—or perhaps not—the same time when
King Lear
was first imagined to surpass
Hamlet
in greatness. As George Santayana has written, the playwright was faced with a stark choice:

For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.… The cosmos eludes him; he does not seem to feel the need of framing that idea. He depicts human life in all its richness and variety, but leaves that life without a setting, and consequently without a meaning.

“Nothing,” of course, is one of the great themes in
Lear
; in the very first scene, we hear it four times. The wicked sisters, Regan and Goneril, shower their father with extravagant declarations of devotion. Lear then asks his third daughter, Cordelia, what she can say to top her sisters' claims:

CORDELIA

Nothing, my lord.

LEAR

Nothing?

CORDELIA

Nothing.

LEAR

Nothing will come from nothing, speak again.

(1.1.82–85)

Shakespeare is just setting the stage; the mayhem and darkness are yet to unfold. Did the playwright “choose nothing”? Eric Mallin doesn't go quite that far. But he says that
King Lear
does lack “an image of a benevolent cosmos, of a benevolent deity.” This may be partly due to a lack of belief on the part of its author, Mallin says—but it could also be because the supernatural is not Shakespeare's first concern. “He is interested in the social, in the worldly, in the sexual, in the linguistic,” Mallin says. “He's interested in what happens on this planet. What matters is existence; what matters is what we do while we're here. And that strikes me as pretty modern.”

The philosopher Colin McGinn, author of
Shakespeare's Philosophy
(2006), considers the question of labeling Shakespeare an atheist, but prefers the term “naturalist.” His moral thinking is “entirely secular,” McGinn writes. “He is simply saying,
This is the way things are, like it or not
.” When I met with McGinn in his Miami apartment, we explored these ideas a bit further—including the notion of “cosmic justice,” which seems to be conspicuously absent in
King Lear
. For Shakespeare, “justice is entirely man-made,” McGinn says. “And that may explain why there's so much interest in
law
in Shakespeare, and the way you have to use the law in order to
get
justice—because you won't get justice outside of human constructions or human inventions. You can't rely on nature to mete out justice in the right way.” In
King Lear
in particular we find “a very progressive, radical position,” one that receives relatively little attention until the existentialism movement of the late nineteenth century.

“People always use this phrase ‘Things happen for a reason,'” McGinn says. “But they don't. Sometimes, things happen for no reason at all. I think that's part of his whole worldview [in
King Lear
]. There's a strong vein of pessimism, I think, in Shakespeare. It's a very bleak view of the meaninglessness of everything.”

*   *   *

Shakespeare often emphasizes
the role of happenstance—those “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”—and it was still on his mind when he came to write
The Winter's Tale
in 1609. The play has, as Stephen Orgel puts it, a “disturbingly amoral” flavor. At the start of act 4, “Time,” as the Chorus, declares, “I that please some, try all; both joy and terror / Of good and bad, that makes and unfolds error…” (4.1.1–2). Good or bad, it is all the same to the passage of time.

The atheist-Shakespeare theories may be gaining currency, but they can also be seen as the latest chapter in the never-ending story of Shakespeare's religious beliefs—a subject of boundless inquiry and speculation. He has been called everything from a closet Catholic to an apologist for the Protestant state religion; the truth, one suspects, is murkier. We have already noted the religious turmoil that marred the English psyche in the first half of the sixteenth century; Shakespeare, whatever he believed, was all too aware of the anguish brought on by religious quarreling. As Stephen Greenblatt writes, Shakespeare often “seems at once Catholic, Protestant, and deeply sceptical of both.” While his father may have teetered between being a committed Catholic and its Protestant opposite, “William Shakespeare was on his way to being neither.” Even so, Greenblatt cautions that the playwright's private beliefs are “wholly inaccessible.”

We can't definitively label Shakespeare an atheist, just as we can't call him a scientist—even if we suspect we are seeing hints of such a worldview. All we can say is that he lived at a pivotal time in English history; a time when long-held beliefs were up for debate; a time of competing ideas and clashing values; a time of doubt and confusion. As mentioned, Jonathan Bate sees Shakespeare's mind as poised between “rational thinking and visceral instinct, faith and scepticism.” McGinn, too, sees Shakespeare as inhabiting a world in transition. “Shakespeare is pre-scientific but he's post-magical,” he said. “So I think of him as kind of prescientific naturalist.… Whether Shakespeare was himself an atheist, I just don't think you're able to say. But I wouldn't at all be surprised if he was. I really wouldn't be surprised.”

“A GREAT PIECE OF CLOCK-WORK”

The revival of the ancient theory of atomism was one force that could have pushed a well-read Elizabethan toward atheism—or at least, toward a less religious worldview. But there were other intellectual developments that could have had a similar effect. One of the most profound changes involved the way philosophers came to imagine the kind of world we inhabited. The medieval worldview had been highly
animistic
—treating objects as though they had soul-like properties (from the Latin word for soul,
anima
. We have seen, for example, how the body's organs were imagined to have their own personalities, and how both Kepler and Gilbert had imagined the cause of planetary motion to have involved “souls.” But in 1605, as Steven Shapin notes, Kepler began to have second thoughts. In his new work, Kepler would occupy himself “with the investigation of the physical causes. My aim in this is to show that the machine of the universe is not similar to a divine animated being, but similar to a clock.” The chemist Robert Boyle would express a similar idea half a century later, writing that the natural world was, “as it were, a great piece of clock-work.”
*
In the physical sciences, the clockwork metaphor is most closely associated with Isaac Newton, whose theory of universal gravitation would finally provide the mathematical underpinning of the model of the solar system described by Copernicus and Kepler. This required, among other things, a new conception of God: Rather than imagining a God who constantly interacted with his creation, guiding events from day to day, it was enough to picture God as a sort of divine architect—a cosmic watchmaker. Once set in motion, the universe could look after itself; God had made the universe and the laws that govern it, and that was enough. (Intriguingly, this was not Newton's own vision: A devout if unorthodox believer, he insisted that God was still an integral part of the physical world, and was required to tweak the system from time to time.)