the Spiritual World the inward qualities of each soul govern its external clothing. To clothe the soul ! Must the soul too be clothed? I protest Sir, I would rather have no soul Than to be tormented with the clothing of it. (Muses Looking Glass IV. 2.) 1638. The grave of Marston in the Temple Church is a plain stone slab inscribed OBLIVIONE SACRUM. It is noteworthy that the tomb of Ben Jonson is said to have been unmarked until an admirer paid a few pence to a passing mason to carve O RARE BEN JONSON!" Marston and Ben Jonson were not alone or singular in their disdain of the pomp and circumstance of funeral rites. Their sentiments were shared by their fellow dramatists and by the philosophers Bacon and Browne. I bequeath my soul to God above by the oblation of my Saviour. My body to be buried obscurely. My name to the next ages and to foreign nations. BACON (Last Will and Testament) 1621. When I am dead Save charge let me be buried in a nook, FORD (Lovers Melancholy III. 1.) 1628-1629. HUGHES, BACON, and others (Misfortunes of Arthur) 1587. Be content to live unknown, and die unfound. LYLY (Campaspe) 1582-1584. At my death I mean to make a total adieu of the world, not caring for a monument, history, or epitaph; not so much as the memory of my name to be found anywhere but in the universal register of God. SIR T. BROWNE (Religio Medici) 1635-1643. What care I then though my last sleep Be in the desert or in the deep No lamp nor taper, day and night To give my charnel chargeable light I have there like quantity of ground And at the last day I shall be found. WEBSTER (Devils Law Case 11. 3) 1623. 'Tis all one to lie in St Innocent's churchyard as in the Sands of Egypt ready to be anything in the ecstasy of being ever; as content with six foot as the Moles of Adrian. SIR T. BROWNE (Urn Burial) 1658. The appearence of principles so pure, SO elevated, and so intellectual, amid surroundings so unutterably evil, is as astonishing as a find of jewels on a mudheap. Writing of the awful state of Theology at Cambridge and contrasting with it more recent views, Mullinger observes that, "this serene philosophy, like the light gleaming from some remote snow clad peak, reached only at rare intervals the dwellers in the misty valleys below. The Cambridge student, if he yearned for certainty, for sympathy and for definite belief, found it for the most part in docile assent to some one or other of the warring creeds of his day and in fierce denunciation of all who subscribed to another Shibboleth than that to which he had yielded up his own spiritual independence. And if here and there there was to be found some isolated thinker to whom the prostration of the intellect seemed but a perilous expedient whereby to purchase the longed for mental assurance; who reasoned, doubted, and enquired, and, though ever baffled, still returned to his Sisyphian toil if such a one there were—, we cannot but think that as regarded intellectual satisfaction and enlightenment, his position was little better than, was in some respects less enviable than that of his antetype of a century before. As we have seen, the dramatists display a complete unity of Religion and like one man were pushing at the stone of Sisyphus. 1 Hist. of Cambridge University. Vol. 2, p. 439. CHAPTER VI EDUCATIONAL PURPOSE The moral influence of Shakespeare, while universally conceded, is usually assumed to have been the unconscious outpouring of a noble mind; the magic and involuntary working of a wayward genius. Richard Grant White goes so far as to say, "That Shakspere did his work with no other purpose whatever, moral, philosophic, artistic, literary, than to make an attractive play, which would bring him money, should be constantly borne in mind... He wrote what he wrote merely to fill the theatre and his own pockets. There was as much deliberate purpose in his breathing." 1 Of the minor Elizabethan Dramatists there exists a similar but stronger misconception, that they wrote merely as a means of livelihood, and without any thought of Posterity. That the Drama was a fortuitous and mercenary outburst, is however, a view quite manifestly wrong. On every hand are indications that the dramatists were pursuing a definite and very serious design-that of purging the World of folly, ignorance, and sin. In the introduction to Lanthorn and Candle Light (1608) Dekker avows his intention of levying 1 Shakespeare Studies pp. 20, 209. war upon "certain wild and barbarous rebels that were up in open arms against the tranquillity of the weal public, and styling himself "The Bellman of London he appeals to his readers to aid him in his unequal contest. "Howsoever it be struck, or whosoever gives the first blow, the victory depends upon the valour of you that are the wings to the Bellmans army; for which conquest he is in hope you will valiantly fight, sithence the quarrel is against the head of monstrous abuses, and the blows which you must give are in defence of Law, Justice, Order, Ceremony, Religion, Peace, and that honourable title of Goodness. Saint George! I see the two armies move forward; and behold The Bellman himself first chargeth upon the face of the enemy. 1 In their struggle against the abuses of the age the dramatists turned to the stage as the readiest and most effective weapon for their purpose. This is definitely stated in The Muses Looking Glass by Thomas Randolph-another rising genius who "indulged himself too much, and was "too early cut off; dying in 1634 in the 29th year of his age. "Apollo," says Randolph," finding every place :Fruitful in nothing but fantastic follies And most ridiculous humours, as he is 1 It was a fixed idea in the mind of Bacon that he likewise was a Bellman, see Letter to Salisbury, (1605-6) “I shall content myself to awake better spirits, like a Bellringer; which is first up to call others to Church," and Letter to Dr Playfer (1606-7) "Since I have taken upon me to ring a bell to call other wits together, which is the meanest office, it cannot but be consonant with my desire to have that bell heard as far as may be. |