Much Ado About Nothingness

[rug]

Was Shakespeare an atheist? Or more of a secular humanist?



Photo illustration by Slate. Image courtesy Joe Campbell/Flickr.

April 23 2014 5:28 PM
By Dan Falk
Adapted from The Science of Shakespeare: A New Look at the Playwright’s Universe by Dan Falk, out now from Thomas Dunne Books.

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. The word “atheism” begins to crop up in English writing in the 16th century, almost always as a put-down; the term was used as a derogatory label, bestowed on anyone imagined to hold heretical views of one kind or another.

Even so, the seeds of unbelief had been planted. In A Short History of Atheism, Gavin 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 (he was born 450 years ago); and, just as his works hint at the beginnings of science, so, too, do they hint at the possibility of unbelief.

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 … ” Doctor Faustus, Marlowe’s most important play, was even more dangerous. Faustus declares, “I think hell’s a fable”—and the playwright may well have agreed.

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 II, the doomed love between the young king and his “sweet favorite,” Piers Gaveston. Marlowe, in other words, lived quite far from the respectable mainstream of Elizabethan life.

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2014/04/shakespeare_and_atheism_what_his_works_tell_us_about_the_playwright_s_religious.html

[Jim__]

1. To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;

It appears that Hamlet was not quite certain:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action. - Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd.