[Prof. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 2nd ed. p. 25. In the concluding pages of his lecture on Hamlet, Professor Bradley slightly modifies this statement, suggesting that the ghost is made to appear as "the representative of the hidden ultimate power, the messenger of divine justice" (p. 174). Here, it seems to the present writer, Professor Bradley obtrudes the chief error of his admirable book--the constant implication that Shakespeare planned his plays as moral wholes. The fact is that he found the ghost an integral part of the old play which he rewrote; and in making it, in Professor Bradley's words, "so majestical a phantom," he was simply heightening the character as he does others in the play, and as was his habit in the presentment of a king. In his volume of lectures entitled Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1909), Professor Bradley goes more fully into the problem of Shakespeare's religion. Here he somewhat needlessly obscures the issue by contending (p. 349) that it is preposterous to suppose that Shakespeare was "an ardent and devoted atheist or Brownist or Roman Catholic," and makes the most of the poet's sympathetic treatment of religious types and religious sentiments; but still sums up that he "was not, in the distinctive sense of the word, a religious man," and that "all was, for him, in the end, mystery" (p. 353).] This perhaps somewhat understates the case. The Elizabethan drama was not wholly secular; [61] and certainly the dramatists individually were not. Peele's David and Bethsabe is wholly Biblical in theme, and, though sensual in sentiment, substantially orthodox in spirit; and elsewhere he has many passages of Protestant and propagandist fervour. [62] Greene and Lodge give a highly Scriptural ring to their Looking-Glass for London; and Lodge, who uses religious expressions freely in his early treatise, A Defence of Poetry, Music, and Stage Plays, [63] later translated Josephus. Kyd in Arden of Feversham [64] accepts the Christian view at the close, though The Spanish Tragedy is pagan; and the pre-Shakespearean King Leir and his Three Daughters (1594), probably the work of Kyd and Lodge, has long passages of specifically Christian sentiment. Nashe, again, was a hot religious controversialist despite his Bohemian habits and his indecorous vein; Greene on his repentant deathbed was profusedly censorious of atheism; [65] Lilly, as we have seen, is combatively theistic in his Campaspe; while Jonson, as we shall see, girds at skeptics in Volpone and The Magnetick Lady, and further wrote a quantity of devotional verse. Even the "atheist" Marlowe, as we saw, puts theistic sentiment into the mouth of his "atheist Tamburlaine"; and of Doctor Faustus, despite incidental heresy, the dénouement is religiously orthodox. Thomas Heywood may even be pronounced a religious man, [66]