A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2: Third edition, Revised and Expanded, in two volumesRobertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Religion
A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2: Third edition, Revised and Expanded, in two volumes
Robertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Free thought -- History
So silent is the dramatist on the ecclesiastical issues of his day
that Protestants and Catholics are enabled to go on indefinitely
claiming him as theirs; the latter dwelling on his generally kindly
treatment of friars; the former citing the fact that some Protestant
preacher--evidently a protégé of his daughter Susannah--was allowed
lodging at his house. But the preacher was not very hospitably
treated; [72] and other clues fail. There is good reason to think that
Shakespeare was much influenced by Montaigne's Essays, read by him in
Florio's translation, which was issued when he was recasting the old
Hamlet; and the whole treatment of life in the great tragedies and
serious comedies produced by him from that time forward is even more
definitely untheological than Montaigne's own doctrine. [73] Nor can he
be supposed to have disregarded the current disputes as to fundamental
beliefs, implicating as they did his fellow-dramatists Marlowe, Kyd,
and Greene. The treatise of De Mornay, of which Sir Philip Sidney began
and Arthur Golding finished the translation, [74] was in his time
widely circulated in England; and its very inadequate argumentation
might well strengthen in him the anti-theological leaning.
A serious misconception has been set up as to Shakespeare's cast
of mind by the persistence of editors in including among his works
without discrimination plays which are certainly not his, as the Henry
VI group, to which he contributed little, and in particular the First
Part, of which he wrote probably nothing. It is on the assumption that
that play is Shakespeare's work that Lecky (Rationalism in Europe,
ed. 1887, i, 105-106) speaks of "that melancholy picture of Joan
of Arc which is perhaps the darkest blot upon his genius." Now,
whatever passages Shakespeare may have contributed to the Second
and Third Parts, it is certain that he has barely a scene in
the First, and that there is not a line from his hand in the La
Pucelle scenes. Many students think that Dr. Furnivall has even
gone too far in saying that "the only part ... to be put down to
Shakespeare is the Temple Garden scene of the red and white roses"
(Introd. to Leopold Shakespeare, p. xxxviii); so little is there to
suggest even the juvenile Shakespeare there. (The high proportion
of double-endings is a ground for reckoning it a late sample of
Marlowe, who in his posthumously published translation of Lucan had
approached that proportion. Cp. the author's vol. on Titus Andronicus,
p. 190.) But that any critical and qualified reader can still hold
him to have written the worst of the play is unintelligible. The
whole work would be a "blot on his genius" in respect of its literary
weakness. The doubt was raised long before Lecky wrote, and was made
good a generation ago. When Lecky further proceeds, with reference to
the witches in Macbeth, to say (id. note) that it is "probable that
Shakespeare ... believed with an unfaltering faith in the reality
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