Introduction

This book will argue that the fear of death as annihilation produced a crisis in English Renaissance culture, a crisis discernible in both Shakespearean drama, which criticizes and parodies traditional promises of immortality, and Metaphysical poetry, which experiments with new versions of those promises. By placing the brutalities and banalities of death within heroic stories and artistic forms, literature helps to disguise the conflict between the psychological necessity known as narcissism and the physical necessity known as mortality. English Renaissance literature fiercely questions the validity of this function, even while dutifully performing it.

To the familiar idea that art gives order to a chaotic universe, I would add that art allows a society to consider which order that should be. Because they make no affirmative claim to mirroring reality, the imaginative arts allow a human group to re-examine its definitions of morality and even of reality, without acknowledging the nature of the task. Otherwise the group would be obliged to acknowledge its morality and reality as arbitrary choices—which would destroy precisely the illusion it strives (at some collective preconscious level) to preserve. Like the evolution of species, the process of change in cultures therefore proceeds by punctuated equilibrium; by periods of rapid change—marked by revolutions in artistic method—and long intervals that are relatively static.^[1] The changes are not essentially progressive, any more

than evolution is. They are mutations and adaptations in changing environments, and they cannot be objectively moralized.

One may therefore posit a causal model for the creation of art without accepting an often mechanistic Marxist model that treats art as a subfunction of economic organization. Whatever its contributions to the concealment or exposure of class conflict, art also creates and reflects the cognitive organization by which we assimilate the infinitely various phenomenal universe. The production of cognitive order requires a perpetual negotiation between the idiosyncracies of individual experience and the need to communicate and cooperate with other members of society. Government censorship, which has proven such a fruitful topic in recent studies of Renaissance literature, is only the most explicit manifestation of that comprehensive negotiation. The need to regulate thought exists independent of any specific thought that a government might wish to regulate, and psychology should not be subordinated to politics in the study of cultures.

Death provokes this need for thought-control in an extreme form, because it opens a window out of the self and into the infinite. The regulation of thoughts about death, particularly as imprinted on English literature during the half century centered around the reign of King James I, is my primary topic. As Ernest Becker has shown so brilliantly in The Denial of Death^[2] —a fundamental inspiration for this book—human beings need culture to numb these thoughts, presumably because mortality has become a fixture of our consciousness, rather than an intermittent and unarticulated incentive to obey our survival instincts. Modern Western cultures, like most others, have found it necessary to decorate, contextualize, and mythologize death, presumably to prevent a devastating loss of orientation and morale. Death is a kind of Medusa we can watch only as a reflection in our defensive shields, only in the secondary distortions it produces in the cultural field around it. Like many other crises, the mortality-crisis of Jacobean England was evidently produced by the familiar laws of supply and demand: assurance about personal salvation was declining while attachment to both the external properties and the internal subjectivities of the human individual were increasing. The resulting demands on the promise of afterlife became so great that the Christian denial of death threatened to become visible as a mere ideology, a manipulative illusion rather than an absolute truth.

Could some aspects of traditional Christian belief be shored up by propping them against the recoveries of classical philosophy and the

discoveries of new science that had helped undermine such beliefs? The appealing commonplace that poets are always a century ahead of philosophers would predict that the flirtations with atheism pervading Enlightenment culture explicate notions already present in Jacobean literature. But to imagine Jacobean annihilationism as a sort of preparatory deism is to read cultural history in the wrong direction. More likely, deism arose from an effort to provide a soft landing for the human individual plunging into the abyss of a universe that now seemed indifferent; to dispel the resentments underlying satiric Renaissance attacks on traditional beliefs by conjuring a new, diffuse, and rationalistic version of providence; and to make the resulting evacuation of individuality, both human and divine, seem a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

Thesis

When death shall part us from these kids,
And shut up our divided lids,
Tell me, Thyrsis, prithee do,
Whither thou and I must go.^[3]

In early seventeenth-century England, that was indeed the question, and not only in the minds of rustic materialists like Marvell's Dorinda. Despite its ferocious displays of Christian conviction, Jacobean culture struggled with the suspicion that death was a complete and permanent annihilation of the self, not merely some latency of the body awaiting Last Judgment. The balanced forms and predictable images of most sixteenth-century funeral writing in England reflect a complacency that gives way to more complex cultural pressures—and therefore richer art—in the senescence of the Tudor period. By a kind of Freudian slip, Jacobean literature often reverts from its surface narrative to repressed anxieties about death as eternal annihilation, especially during moments of silence, eclipses of light, collapses of identity, unspoolings of time, and approaches of closure. These dark constellations generate a sinister gravity which constantly threatens to topple the confident Christian stance.

My claim is not that the Jacobeans were all covert atheists, a vast School of Night conspiring to conceal its real beliefs in code. The religious passions of the period were authentically engaged in doctrinal disputes within Christianity. But shrewd observers (such as Donne, Bacon, and Hooker) could already see that the multiplying cross-

accusations of heresy within Christianity inevitably bred skepticism toward the belief as a whole, that (as Heywood put it) "many from Schisme grow into Atheisme."^[4] The multivocal aspects of literary art could easily have amplified all these conflicts and dubieties, even while striving to endorse Christian orthodoxy.

Though it is certainly risky to project Existentialist anxieties back onto a Renaissance culture that had a very different way of understanding its universe, only a facile and even patronizing reading of human psychology, as well as an incomplete reading of the historical record, can insist that Renaissance minds were incapable of registering the fear of personal annihilation. Neither human individuality nor human responses to common and fundamental events are likely to change as abruptly as Michel Foucault has encouraged contemporary cultural analysts to imagine.^[5] I am more sympathetic to Freud's assertion that "the attitude of our unconscious towards the problem of death [remains] almost exactly the same as that of primaeval man," and that mythological evasions of the notion of annihilation were probably conjoined with the very first human recognition of death.^[6] As the human womb has retained the same fluid salinity as the ocean from which the species evolved, so the human confrontation with mortality retains its primitive profile.

Clearly, not even these primal events are wholly immune to the refractions of local culture. Both birth and death were evidently placed later in the biological cycle during the Renaissance than they are now. The abortion debate leads us to speculate how long before birth human life actually begins, whereas many people in the Renaissance believed that full human existence did not begin before baptism.^[7] The debate about medical technology and euthanasia leads us to speculate how long before complete lifelessness death actually occurs, whereas people in the Renaissance were not exactly dead until burial, since corpses were sometimes arrested for worldly debts on the way to the churchyard. Indeed, for those who believed in soul-sleeping, the book was not closed on a life until Last Judgment, so corpses could be disinterred for posthumous honors or (as in the case of Cromwell) punishments.^[8]

But the primary changes in English Renaissance culture would only have accentuated the primal fear of annihilation. The extraordinarily punitive attitudes toward suicide in sixteenth and early seventeenth century England suggest a terrible anxiety about the surrender of the self.^[9] Social historians such as Phillipe Ariès have plausibly associated heightened anxiety about death in Renaissance Europe with the heightened sense of personal identity generated by new social configurations

(which emphasized domestic privacy) and reflected in the emergence of autobiography as a literary genre as well as in the increasing use of names and personal histories on tombstones.^[10] Interpretations of High Renaissance art and philosophy have (following Jacob Burckhardt) traditionally emphasized the liberation of individual consciousness.

The Protestant Reformation played a major role in this change, shifting the locus of redemption from group ritual to personal conscience. That shift, moreover, is only a small part of the role the Reformation played in heightening the psychological burdens of mortality. Both the inscrutable determinism and the systematic iconoclasm of Calvinist theology created a blank wall between the living and the dead, encouraging the ominous inference that all might be blankness or darkness beyond it. Since (pace Max Weber and R. H. Tawney) worldly conduct was no longer a reliable guide to otherworldly destiny, the illusion of continuity was lost; the resulting uncertainties were aggravated by the erasure of other aids for visualizing the hereafter. By eliminating the doctrine of purgatory, Reformation theology precluded efficacious prayers for parted souls, putting the fate of the dead beyond the control of the living.^[11] Even ordinary funeral rituals came under attack by Calvinists and, more rigorously, by Anabaptists.^[12] And the fate of the living was beyond the control of the dead, since saints were deprived of any intercessory power.

To a significant degree, the Reformation arose directly from a recognition that the fear of death was being manipulated by churchmen for material advantage—specifically, through the selling of indulgences. Other less obvious consolatory devices disappeared alongside that one. For example, by forbidding belief in the miraculously preserved reliquary remains of saints, Protestantism forbade the hope that piety might somehow exempt the body from physical decay. In this sense, the Reformers had a difficult package to sell; what made sense theologically made trouble psychologically. The vacillations of Luther and Calvin on the question of soul-sleeping may reflect a delicate negotiation in which the Reformers sought to posit a form of oblivion prior to the Last Judgment without rousing the annihilationist model latent in anxious Renaissance minds. The vivid blankness of a common Jacobean notion that "the bodie lyeth in the grave senseles, and without motion even as a blocke or stone"^[13] would have roused a considerable need for reassurance about the experience of the soul.

A challenge to traditional ideas of afterlife would have followed logically from other Reformation challenges to the manipulative institutions that had accreted around the original Word of God. The fresh and

close reading of the Bible recommended by Protestantism threatened (as Isaac Casaubon discovered) to destabilize and disunify that principal cultural text, and specifically to undermine its supposed promises concerning personal afterlife. Though modern histories have mostly effaced it, the most explicitly annihilationist theology in this period arises from the radical wing of the Reformation: Familists, Ranters, and Quakers.^[14] In 1545, England received a group of theological refugees who "would teach out of scripture, that there is neither place of rest ne pain after death; that hell is nothing else but a tormenting and desperate conscience."^[15] Even mainstream Protestant theology, by its particular emphasis on individual interiority, on the sinfulness of that interiority, and on the lack of any purgatorial process that could winnow out that sinfulness, must have made it virtually impossible to imagine satisfactorily the survival of a full selfhood in heaven. Indeed, as Giles Firmin noted bitterly in 1670, anyone who "useth diligently all means whereby he may be saved" is admonished by Calvinists that "this is but a way of self-love, and a way to Hell; self must be hated."^[16] No wonder poets such as Donne and Herbert—and radical Protestant mystics such as Boehme—find themselves uneasily begging God for the erasure and the salvation of the self simultaneously.^[17] Calvin's Institutes depict a God who sometimes allows people destined to damnation to feel an inward conviction of salvation; so it became futile to project even the positive aspects of the self into the next world. The annihilationist fear—losing the interior affective self into an infinity that does not care for it—was a Calvinist fact.

Under Catholicism, the choice of lifelong virginity projected an absolute confidence in the afterlife, a certainty that the Christian devotee would be abundantly compensated for abjuring worldly pleasures and failing in the category of genetic survival. In this sense, vows of celibacy were the counterpart of duelling (as Measure for Measure , I will argue, is the counterpart of Hamlet ). The declaration that honor is an allimportant good serves to refute the supposition that death is an allconsuming evil, and "Whole plays were built around the belief that virginity accompanied by death is preferable to the loss of it accompanied by life."^[18] The Protestant effort to valorize fruitful marriage (an effort that arguably culminates in Paradise Lost ) certainly makes sense as an effort to justify the Reformation rejection of monasticism, but a supplementary motive may have been the desire to reconstruct the Catholic promise of immortality in a doctrinally acceptable form. Procreation became, in part, a displacement of sacramentalism and transub-

stantiation: a tangible and communal form of immortality tied to the cycle of human life, a consuming of the body in the hope of rendering life eternal.

Yet the moment of conception only reinscribed both parent and child in the entropic economy of Original Sin; and while procreation might have offered Protestants at least a biological simulacrum of immortality, it could offer little promise of preserving their precious interiority. Sir Thomas Browne remarked that the "conceit and counterfeit subsisting in our progenies seemes to mee a meere fallacy,"^[19] and many Renaissance thinkers seized on the models offered by the survival of classical culture, and advocated living for art (with its peculiar ability to preserve precisely what procreation does not), or for honor (through the Christian stoicism that makes interiority a stay against the mutability of a fallen world). If one's entire being can be channeled into an idea, then that being can outlast the mortal body. But as Browne suggests in Hydriotaphia (pp. 308–9), unearthing the classical past was not an entirely reassuring experience for those hoping to project their identities into an infinite future: "to subsist in bones, and be but Pyramidally extant, is a fallacy in duration. Vain ashes, which in the oblivion of names, persons, times, and sexes, have found unto themselves, a fruitlesse continuation, and only arise unto late posterity, as Emblemes of mortall vanities." The more of the past that was found, the more that was known to be lost, and the scope of human enterprises was belittled by deep time as well as by Christian eschatology.

Nearly all the famous transforming achievements of the Renaissance had side-effects that must have magnified the terrors of mortality. In revealing the size and variety of the world, imperialistic and mercantile exploration aggravated the threat already presented by the rediscovery of classical cultures: the threat to reveal the arbitrariness of local consolatory formulas, leaving commentators such as Browne to save the appearances by positing "a Geography of Religions as well as Lands."^[20] The navigational technology developed for those explorations led to an astronomy that revealed the scope, the heliocentric shape, and the unlimited mutability of the universe. As a result, the soul was becoming disastrously devalued against its material context.^[21] All these discoveries—which Western culture is still struggling to assimilate—put extraordinary pressure on traditional consolations and denials. All these developments heightened the fear that human beings might actually be meaningless little entities lost in the dizzyingly vast, varied, and powerful universe.

In his efforts to prove that fideism renders him immune to the psychic dangers of scientific thinking, Browne boldly anatomizes and historicizes the denial of death: "To be ignorant of evils to come" allows us to "digest the mixture of our few and evil dayes," like the ancients who,

rather then be lost in the uncomfortable night of nothing, were content to recede into the common being, and make one particle of the publick soul of all things, which was no more then to return into their unknown and divine Originall again. Aegyptian ingenuity was more unsatisfied, contriving their bodies in sweet consistences, to attend the return of their souls. But all was vanity, feeding the winde, and folly. The Aegyptian Mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummie is become Merchandise, Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsoms. In vain do individuals hope for Immortality, or any patent from oblivion, in preservations below the Moon: Men have been deceived even in their flatteries above the Sun, and studied conceits to perpetuate their names in heaven. The various Cosmography of that part hath already varied the names of contrived constellations; Nimrod is lost in Orion , and Osyris in the Dogge-starre. While we look for incorruption in the heavens, we finde they are but like the Earth; Durable in their main bodies, alterable in their parts: whereof besides Comets and new Stars, perspectives begin to tell tales. (pp. 311–12)

Condensed into this single continuous passage are skeptical "perspectives" on virtually every quest for immortality except the Christian one. Fame, generational succession, social role, preservation in body or in name—none of these can withstand the corrosive effects of scientific inquiry (or, in the case of the mummies, of capitalist commodification). Moreover, if "conceits to perpetuate their names in heaven" were delusions, and if the superlunary "heavens" prove, on closer inspection, no less corruptible than the earth, then the Christian sphere of salvation is hardly safe either, though Browne would not consciously attack it. To describe the constellations as "contrived" is very nearly to acknowledge that all the systems by which we reduce the phenomenal universe to a human scale and form are arbitrary (Juliet's plea that Romeo should be posthumously cut out "in little stars / And he will make the face of heaven so fine / That all the world will be in love with night" identifies constellation-making as a tactic against the inhumane infinitude of death). To say that such myths are constructed against the fear of becoming "lost in the uncomfortable night of nothing" is surely to raise the threat of annihilationism, and to suggest that all visions of immortality might be projections of psychological expediency.

The pressures of annihilationism intensified under the surface of Jacobean culture, testing (like volcanic magma) any weakness in the

protective barrier. Predictably, they found expression primarily in the mythmaking functions of literature. Prominently in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus , and more subtly throughout later Renaissance tragedy, waves of ambition crested and crashed, as aspiring minds found they could not overcome the limits of their mortal bodies. On the Jacobean stage, a fundamental narcissistic resentment of mortality expressed itself through the introverted courtier's frustration that his individual worth was cruelly ignored by an all-powerful lord; whatever its other sociological bases, the black-clad malcontent was also a doomed Everyman. In the motivating ghosts of revenge-tragedy, the Nietzschean resentment we imagine in the dead storms back into the realm of the living, a community that must be punished for carrying on without them. Dramatic portrayals of rebellion against divine law may sometimes have been tendentious displacements, designed to underscore the inherent evils of rebellion against an earthly sovereign; yet they also contained displaced expressions of rebellion against natural law on behalf of human immortality.

The rise of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy coincides with the emergent scientific view of the universe—a view which necessarily contradicts our narcissism, both as individuals and as a species: "in both ancient Greece and Renaissance Europe, the major developments in tragedy coincide with the rise of science. . . . during this process of change, 'a sense of injustice appears, compounded of ignorance, fear, unfulfilled desire, and suffering, the mark of an "absence" which of necessity escapes organization'—that is, meaninglessness."^[22] The primary story-line of tragedy is the one-way street that leads a human being from the triumphs of life to defeat in death. If there was a growing suspicion that this was also a dead-end street, the tensions invested in tragedy would have become increasingly complex and powerful. If the English Church no longer permitted Christ to play so explicit a physicalsacrificial role in the tragic ritual known as Mass, then some new form of tragic hero would have to become our advance scout into the unknown country of death.^[23] If prayers for the dead were discouraged in churches, then revenge on behalf of a ghost would be performed in theaters; diplomacy with God would give way to war on a demonized fellow-human.

It has become a critical commonplace that, except in a few tragically diseased minds such as John Webster's, Christian afterlife was an unquestioned premise of English Renaissance culture, and atheism would have been "too arduous an intellectual effort to contemplate."^[24]

The ingenious New Historicist reading of the history of mentalities—the claim that, when Renaissance theologians complain about atheists, they are inventing and demonizing an Otherness that did not yet exist—thus echoes the conclusion of old-fashioned campaigns to identify Shakespeare as a Christian propagandist. These campaigns have marked educational uses of Shakespeare for a century, and the accompanying scholarly tradition is evident from S. L. Bethell's Christianizing studies in the 1940s to Roy Battenhouse's revealing complaint that efforts to associate the ideas in the plays with secular Renaissance culture necessarily "imply a Shakespeare whose ultimate values were sub-Christian."^[25] Since then, critics heavily educated in Christian religion have naturally looked for a Christian Shakespeare, and critics lacking that education have deferred to them on religious questions. The resulting distortion has been reinforced, from the other end of the political spectrum, by overzealous efforts to deny authors any autonomy from the self-perpetuating projects of their cultural milieux.

Nostalgia for a posited age of piety is understandable, but the English Renaissance was not such an age. The Introduction to an Elizabethan translation of Calvin's treatise on the immortality of the soul asserts that

at that tyme that Maister Calvin wrote this booke, it should seeme by his preface ensuing, that there were many grevously infected with this monstrous opinion, that the Soules of men dyed together with the bodies. Which foule and hellish error, I feare, hath possessed and poysoned at this day, the hartes and mindes of a great number, here at home, within this lande. . . . Wherefore, seeing this pamflet, was at that tyme necessary to be published, for the confuting of all such Atheists, Epicures, and belly Gods, as then lyved, I think it in my poore opinion, at this present most necessary and needefull. But here, me thinketh I heare some men say, that it is impossible for any, in so great light of the Gospell to be of this minde: whom I feare, I may with griefe of hart justly answere: that there are too too many such.^[26]

Admittedly Calvin was more concerned with mortalism than annihilationism, but Stocker's remarks raise the stakes by invoking atheists and Epicures, who respect no God and fear no reprisal for their earthly indulgences. So the efforts of historicizing modern scholars to describe English Renaissance culture as an epistemically closed system of Christian belief overlook the way contemporary commentators such as Stocker tried and failed to make the same claim. This "great light of the Gospell" did not completely fail, but surely it flickered, whatever people protested to the contrary: "The greatest wondre is, to se such nombre of

heresyes so nygh home, so manye infected with them within this Ile of England: Within Englande I saye, where everye man, every woman pretendeth to be a gospeller. . . ."^[27]

Admittedly, too, spiritual uneasiness and fear of death are not the same as confirmed and radical atheism. As Calvin himself demanded, "If all fear is branded as unbelief, how shall we account for the dread with which we read, He was heavily stricken?"^[28] Renaissance Christianity generally made some allowances for doubt and worldly sorrow. A fear of pain or damnation, however, is far more compatible with Christian faith than a fear of annihilation, which contradicts a fundamental incentive to Christian belief; and the level of annihilationist anxiety manifest in Jacobean culture is incompatible with the Christian hegemony commonly depicted. Browne opens Religio Medici by conceding that atheism is "the generall scandall of my profession" (p. 61). In 1608 a funeral sermon was published "as a remedie against the horrible prophaneness, Atheisme and contempt of GOD, which (as some great floud) doth at this time, overflow the bancks of this whole Land."^[29] One pious firsthand commentator on the fear of death in Jacobean culture felt compelled to offer a chapter on "Why this disease was not so Epidemicall in ancient as in latter times;" another reports that "there are now more then ever there were, (thogh they professe not in words) who think in their hearts there is no God."^[30] Ultimately, then, for all its universalizing impulses, my argument remains markedly historical. Jacobean literature was demonstrably working on problems peculiar to an egoistic culture, which tries to defend the individual against the erosions of form and fame by time and mortality, and to patch the resulting gaps in our selfesteem.^[31] These plays and poems show deformations from the first impact of the disastrous collision between modern Western narcissism and modern Western skepticism.

Death, Politics, and Art

A few years ago, one of my teaching assistants convinced her husband, an evolutionary biologist, to lend her the human skull from his lab collection so that she could confront her discussion section on Hamlet with the shock of the thing itself, unaccommodated death, a little touch of Yorick in the late afternoon. The class passed the skull around with all due reverence, until one amazed student managed to ask

the teaching assistant where she could possibly have acquired it. She, not thinking of course about how it would sound, replied cheerfully, "Oh, it's my husband's."

At that moment the physical fact of the skull surely became less shocking than the social malfunction this reply seemed to represent. The teaching assistant seemed to be displaying what psychologists call "inappropriate affect" (a term implying the need for consensus on our styles of emotional behavior) to a degree that would mark her as a sociopath (a term implying the dangers of falling outside that consensus). She had overachieved her goal of pulling the skull, and the play, free from their safe cultural context.

This is surely too ponderous an analysis for an accidental occasion of laughter, but laughter (in a Freudian model) arises from the release of forbidden thoughts,^[32] and the story therefore makes a fitting epigraph for an argument about the forbiddenness of unaccommodated death. Like those students, like Hamlet himself in the graveyard, my reader will be asked to make the disorienting leap from a blithe analytic distance to an almost unthinkable horror—and to recognize that horror may be a more rational response than detachment.

Contemporary Western societies generally contrive to hide the corpse behind institutional screens such as hospitals and funeral parlors, but out of sight is not quite out of mind. The systematic distortions practiced by our public media show how badly we still need the help of culture to control the terror of mortality and the prospect of oblivion. The people of Jacobean London, so lacking in privacy and reliable medical care, were under far more persistent pressure to reconcile the sight of corpses with the heroic and salvational narratives by which their society sustained its morale. Indeed, a traditional Christian's chief joy and discipline consisted of gazing at a slumped and bloody corpse on a cross, and believing it a god capable of achieving and bestowing immortality. Even if the Scriptures "were silent, yet experience doth speake out the matter so plainly, that the greatest dullard and rude person may understand. For to what ende serve so many Funeralls of all sorts, olde, young, rich, poore, noble, and base? so many drie bones cast out of the Graves? . . . but to set forth visiblie before our eyes, the mortall estate of mankinde."^[33]

That is not merely a rhetorical question, and art is not merely decorative, any more than religion is merely a Sunday pastime: a culture exists because it has necessary work to do, and art is one of the workers, a specialist (according to the Platonic formula) in the construction of

lies capable of reconfiguring our interiority. Those lies may be insidious or soothing or (according to the Cultural Materialist formula) insidious because soothing. Yet, as Sidney's Apology for Poetry argues, poets are not exactly liars: they keep a safe distance from affirmations of fact so that they can approach a higher reality and present it coherently, undamaged by local or temporary confusions. From a less idealistic perspective, poets have superior access to truth precisely because they are backstage at the creation of mass illusions. To the extent that human groups actively construct their reality, artists are more honest about their work than ostensibly more objective observers. To the extent that artists are aware that interpreting death is an urgent but arbitrary cultural task, they can devise more effective consolations—or provide a more corrosive analysis of that artificial consolatory process.

By emphasizing the competition for power, much recent New Historicist and Cultural Materialist criticism has underestimated the importance of these functions. Cultural analysis based in economics, with a superstructure of political science, inevitably overlooks powerful motives based in biology, with a superstructure in psychology. The conspiracy of political authorities to forestall rebellion is no more primary than the organization of consciousness to forestall insanity, and the fact that either form of repression can become excessive does not mean that it is entirely dispensable or inherently sinister.

The pressures toward political realignment and economic redistribution are not the only ones that threaten the stability of a culture. Against the pressure of life's desires—for this man's crown or that man's food—there is also a pressure of mortal terror; and stories must be invented to help regulate both kinds of pressure. Certain genres of imaginative literature are primarily a form of armor that our species has invented to protect the places where our self-consciousness makes us vulnerable to the bewildering variety of the universe and the crushing scale of universal space and time.^[34] A culture deprived of its consensual view of that universe—that is, a culture whose blinders to alternative views have worn through to transparency—faces a cognitive crisis potentially as devastating as any political rebellion. Imagine the psychological condition of a person incapable of what Otto Rank calls "partialization," receiving all the noumenal world's broadcasts simultaneously and indiscriminately, like a radio with a broken tuner; then imagine the condition of a society made up of such multiphrenics. If religion is indeed "the mother of peace" (as a 1605 attack on atheists claimed) it may be on this level of mental organization.^[35]

Pico della Mirandola's fifteenth-century "Oration on the Dignity of Man" interprets our lack of the bodily defenses given other animals as a parable of our obligation to choose and construct our moral selves. As Becker's work suggests (pp. 50–52), a similar burden arises from our lack of the peremptory instinctive programming that allows other animals to function efficiently. The systems of cognitive selectivity are the inward institutions of human existence, and everyone has a psychological interest in stabilizing them by mutual affirmation.^[36] Otherwise the society would suffer some macrocosmic version of the hyperreceptivity of the schizophrenic. It is not surprising that creative artists, perpetually recognizing possible new configurations for reality, and dangerously aware of the artificiality of the old ones, are so often threatened with both social ostracism and mental illness.

Scientists also risked ostracism in the Renaissance, and for similar reasons. In Novum Organum (1620), Francis Bacon exposed the false "idols" that stabilize cognitive patterns for the individual and the society alike.^[37] Though based on the belief that an objective reality awaits human discovery, this exposition both reflected and threatened to amplify an emerging suspicion that the perceived universe is an arbitrary selection and translation from an utterly unstable and indeterminate text, where once had stood a Book of Life immune to deconstruction. As Ronald Levao has eloquently demonstrated, "Renaissance thought and letters . . . brought increased attention to bear on both the power and contingency of constructions—literary and extraliterary—and came ultimately to contribute to a vision of culture, not as structured by eternal categories, but as a distinctly human artifact."^[38] This vision—evident also in Fulke Greville's "Treatie of Humane Learning," which begins, "The mind of man is this world's true dimension"—would have magnified exponentially the fear of death as an erasure of consciousness. If God cannot be relied on to make sense of the universe, then the human mind must remain perpetually, categorically vigilant; but if God cannot be relied on to save that mind from extinction with the body, then the project is hopeless. This helps to explain why cultures such as the Renaissance that face a radical challenge to their assurances about afterlife display psychotic tendencies.^[39]

For the Jacobeans, the Christian God was therefore a necessary anchor in a troublesome sea of mutability: "He onley is stable in his being, it is he onely, that borders and limits the stormes and tempests of the world."^[40] But if God began to lose His unity and stability through

doctrinal schism, then the culture as a whole would become vulnerable again to unbounded thinking, vulnerable in particular to the dizzying idea that the organizing consciousness might utterly and eternally disappear. This cultural crisis parallels the psychological crisis of the schizoid individual: according to contemporary psychological theorists such as Heinz Kohut and D. W. Winnicott, patients experience a terror of death in direct proportion to the threat of character disintegration in their psychic lives.^[41] Indeed, in the aftermath of their Civil War—political violence provoked by a religious schism that divided the national identity—the English became sharply sensitive to the social necessity of stable belief-systems. This sensitivity manifests itself in several ways—for instance, the weird disjunctions and kaleidoscopic perspectives of time and space in Marvell's "Upon Appleton House" seem inseparable from anxieties about the unresolved Civil War—but most forcefully in arguments against atheism. If it is true (as one Enlightenment attack on deism asserted) that "No community ever was or can be begun or maintained, but upon the Basis of Religion,"^[42] it may be because political order depends on a shared cognitive organization. According to another attack, "Atheism offers such violence to all our faculties, that it seems scarce credible it should ever really find any footing in human understanding."^[43]

One legible subtext of these dismissive remarks is an anxiety that social order can find no footing without shared systems of understanding, and that such understanding can find no real footing without positing an organizing deity:

if every man . . . should follow his owne private humour, what manner of Church or Commonwealth should wee have amongst us? Would not all grow into confusion and disorder, and returne into that stupidity of ignorance which swayed in the World before the true Religion was first propagated and . . . at the last it must necessarily come to mutiny, if not massacre.^[44]

Later in the seventeenth century, Richard Bentley would similarly warn atheists that their desire to reject religion as an instrument of social control would quickly "reduce all once again to thy imaginary State of Nature of Original Confusion"; in a subsequent lecture he argues that God has given us limited senses because excessively rich sight "would be very little better than blindness," and excessively rich hearing would forbid us to "retire from perpetual buzzing and humming."^[45] Clearly the Christian story of creation out of chaos has foundations in the

formative stages of each human psyche that must tame the infinite variations of sense-experience into a coherent universe governed by a perpetual benign intelligence.

The control-hungry Utopia that Thomas More envisioned was cozy enough in its communism, but it could not tolerate doubts about afterlife.^[46] Renaissance England shared with this Utopia the assumption that annihilationism necessarily implied libertinism. The standard accusation that atheists are susceptible to every kind of lawlessness and debauchery may be a way of placing anxieties about this loss of boundaries back into a conventional moral framework.^[47] Remember death, and you will never sin, said the preachers; but to remember death too well may be to lose all ethical bearings. It must have required a very precise calibration for Renaissance Christians, especially Protestants, to sustain a recognition of death without entertaining a suspicion of mere oblivion; yet on the distinction they had rested the entire moral order of their society.

As Shakespeare's Richard II ruefully acknowledges, even the most absolute earthly monarch exercises very marginal power; eternity and mutability can make even the vaunted "material base" seem virtually immaterial (Richard's experience came to mind when my dentist recently offered me "a temporary crown" to "hold off decay"). The complaint that historical criticism tends to fetishize power may be true in a specific psychoanalytic sense, to the extent that the exalted successive monarchy and its control over human destiny serves (as does the artificial fetish-object) to eclipse the vulnerability of the mortal body. Contrary to the assumption of some political critics, the cult of monarchy may have served a need of the subjects no less than of the monarch. Queen Elizabeth and King James doubtless used the common people for many kinds of material advantage, but the people also used their sovereigns as immortality-surrogates, investing them with bodies-politic co-eternal and co-extensive with their nations, and granting them the power to impose death partly because that function implies an obverse power to preserve life (as in the curative force of the royal touch).^[48] Furthermore, mourning for celebrities (royal or otherwise) allows people to stage observances that answer to the grandiose needs of their own narcissism, wounded by a recognition of mortality. In any case, there must certainly have been a great many people in England, especially outside London, who did not know or care much about Elizabeth's portraits or James's masques, but had a close and compelling view of the face of death and the drama of the deathbed.

So while this book attempts to practice "cultural poetics"—the reading of literature as part of other ideological constructions—it resists the New Historicist tendency to emphasize political power in a way that excludes personal psychology, and to emphasize anthropological distance in a way that precludes personal sympathy. And where the modal New Historicist analysis might begin with a slide of a specific Renaissance map or a detailed anecdote from a Renaissance diary—something that would have been seen by very few, however neatly it may be generalized into a cultural signature—what I have chosen to poise for interrogation at the top of my document is that anonymous skull, the like of which spoke in eloquent silences to so many Renaissance thinkers. On behalf of mortality and its moral lessons, "The chief Speaker and Orator is he who hath now forgotten to speak ; for the locking up of his Senses , the silence of his Tongue  . . . have more force . . . than the most Eloquent Strains of the best Rhetorician ."^[49]

This critique of New Historicism does not of course apply to all the practitioners of a movement that is nearly impossible to define, except perhaps as a variety of adaptations of cultural anthropology and Marxist ideology designed to refresh literary criticism and restore its social relevancy without oversimplifying historical causation. Supremely admirable as that project is in the abstract, it is often limited in practice by a determination to identify literature as largely an effort to disguise the merely arbitrary and fictional aspects of government authority. My point is that all the mythologies by which we define ourselves and attribute meaning to our lives exist under the same constant threat of exposure. As religious schism and scientific discovery put Medieval beliefs increasingly at risk, literature begins uneasily testing the wound in the culture, trying sometimes to patch it up with new consolations, sometimes to articulate its pain and fear. And, just as (New Historicists have shown) authors find equivocal ways to subvert the very power-structures their fictions legitimize, Jacobean literature sometimes exposes as wishful thinking the very figurations of immortality it helped construct.

Another limiting aspect of common New Historicist practice has proven harder for me to avoid than the reduction of cultural order to political order: the assumption that literature is valuable primarily as the record of successive epidemics of social pathology. In this, the harshest critics of the humanist tradition reinforce its central legacy, namely, a socially utilitarian view of the arts. The project of excavating the secret ironic meaning of literary texts, which has come to seem tired and even dishonest over the last twenty years, has largely given way to another,

more openly adversarial kind of excavation; but making literature a series of sociological symptoms seems finally no more satisfactory than making it a series of aesthetic symmetries. Many conference papers consist largely of reading, to a snickering audience, passages in which some canonical author violates our current consensus on issues of race, class, or gender, as if these passages were wiretap transcripts that might finally bring an arrogant career-criminal to justice, or Freudian slips on behalf of an entire culture that disclose its dysfunctions. Obviously this book reflects a conviction that the repressions of a culture can be productively excavated and abreacted, but not strictly for the sake of accusing the past of lacking the enlightenment of my ideal future.

Of course we should not cover all the faults of the past with a mystifying aura of canonicity; but we overlook a central value of story-telling and art-making if we assume that it profits a critic to gain a sociological document and lose a work of imagination that (perhaps because it bridges alternative systems of coherence) defies paraphrase of any sort. Autopsy has a purpose, but it is not the only real transaction between human beings, and far from the most appealing. Of course we should lament the aspects of past cultures that encouraged cruelty, injustice, and closed-mindedness; but perhaps we should also recognize whatever virtues and beauties those cultural arrangements enabled, however poor a compensation the wonders of any world order must seem for the ignorance and suffering of its creatures.

Every pedagogical and critical stance—aestheticist, humanist, Marxist, deconstructionist—has political implications, but that is not the same as saying they are ultimately nothing but politics. Every meal we eat and every kiss we bestow carries strong political implications as well, and yet surely those experiences cannot be summarized as merely assertions of (say) our vegetarianism or heterosexuality without sacrificing much of the richness of human experience. A literary scholar who (fleeing the instability of language) becomes entirely an analyst and advocate of political positions abandons a site of tradition, sympathy, and uncertainty that serves as a buffer zone between a society's temporary notions of justice and propriety, and the series of totalitarian states those notions would otherwise generate.

Yet if that scholar entirely abandons the role of ethicist, the study of literature tends to become either an evanescent dance of verbal wit or a laborious expedition into linguistic theory.^[50] If literature lacks anything like a soul, legible at least in palimpsest, then it is finally only a collection of ABCs conspiring to simulate meaning, as a soulless human race would

be a collection of DNA conspiring their own preservation and replication. Surely the prestige and affection bestowed on poets across so many centuries and cultures has not all come from the top down, as an endorsement of their role in mystifying and legitimizing the political status quo; nor would the poets evoke that prestige and affection if they were primarily cynical philosophers of language who mocked the meat they fed on. The appetite of New Historicism for both symbolic indeterminacy and political relevancy offers a promising middle ground, but its practitioners have tended to subordinate the three necessary premises of ethics—love, free will, and imagination—to their virtual opposites, by concentrating on the repression of sexual deviation, on illusory subversion that subserves containment, and on subliminally determined conspiracies in defense of the established material order. The implication is that tough-minded historicism forbids ascribing freedom of love, will, or imagination to English Renaissance minds; but I believe that the literature displays a fierce struggle to defend all three categories from the impingements of mortality.

Doubtful Beliefs

My grandmother recently tried to explain to me how exasperatingly attached my late grandfather had been to the pleasures of food, drink, and good fellowship. "Why, if he knew he was dead," she snapped, "it would kill him." Such are the paradoxes of annihilationist terror. As Montaigne argued, if we did not mind our non-being prior to birth, it makes little sense to fear non-being after death.^[51] Shakespeare's Prospero implies the same thing in consoling Ferdinand: "our little life / Is rounded with a sleep," not merely ended with one (The Tempest , 4.1.157-58).

Yet there is something in the human mind—perhaps a survival instinct channeled through a modern Western notion of sacred selfhood^[52] —that is terrified to imagine itself extinguished in the vasts of time and space. Perhaps the comparison of death to birth, so common in Renaissance consolation literature, reflects a deep truth about the fear of annihilation. The primary psychic tasks of infancy—to defend the fragile unity of the self in separation from the world of objects, and to make that infinitely large and various phenomenal world comprehensible and predictable—seem analogous to and connected to the primary anxieties of annihilationism. The same narcissistic illusions deployed

against vulnerability and cognitive chaos at the beginning of human life make it virtually unbearable to accept an utter dissolution at the end of it, when the objective world reabsorbs the passive self into a limitless and meaningless mutability. Moreover, what is needed for healthy psychic development resembles what is needed for Christian complacency toward death: trust in the benevolence and omnipotence of a creator who recognizes and responds to the self so tentatively and laboriously carved out of the world.

Applying this contemporary psychological theory to Jacobean minds presumes a substantial continuity in human sensibilities over nearly four centuries—which seems to me a defensible presumption. Foucault's influential idea that cultures perceive radically different realities from century to century has bred an epidemic of exaggeration in cultural criticism, often at a real cost to what Clifford Geertz calls the precious "power of the scientific imagination to bring us in touch with the lives of strangers."^[53] Surely it is possible to recognize kinship, across space or time, without brutally imposing sameness. (Indeed, many Foucauldian critics could themselves be accused of imposing sameness; replicating the maneuver they so effectively expose in Renaissance culture, they construct the complicated human past as a conveniently absolute Other.) Illusory empathy is a corrupt sentiment, but an illusory estrangement, by implying that the Other does not feel as we feel, induces a tolerance of injustice and cruelty. In her generally excellent summary and advocacy of New Historicism, Jean Howard echoes Tzvetan Todorov's lament that Central American Indians were "denied inclusion within the category of the human" by Renaissance Spaniards, who could therefore torture them remorselessly. Yet she also echoes—and endorses as the first precept of New Historicist criticism—Jonathan Dollimore's claim that political virtue can arise only from a belief "that there is no shared human essence . . . no traits not the product of social forces at a particular historical juncture."^[54] By denying that "humanity" is a legitimate experiential category apart from local cultural configurations, these theories authorize the notorious tendency to identify members of sub-cultures as sub-human, and to treat them as such. This political danger remains virulent today: repressive Asian governments have begun telling the United Nations "that Western definitions of human rights are culture-bound and thus inappropriate," creating "one of the most serious threats ever mounted against the 45-year old Universal Declaration on Human Rights."^[55]

The essentialist overtones of my argument derive not only from this political concern, but also from a personal investment in empathy and in the validity of a psychoanalytic reading of human behavior. By asserting that the Jacobeans shared our modern sense of a personal identity threatened by mortality, this book posits some meaningful continuities: both synchronically in the self, and diachronically in the species. It also assumes some meaningful (if coded) continuity between the interior self of these authors and the personae through whom they speak, and a continuity between my "modern self" and yours as we confront these questions and these texts. Naturally these similarities are not absolute, but neither are the differences. Though the acceptance of imperfect similarities has become disreputable in elite scholarship—dismissed as naively sentimental or politically regressive by scholars interested in hermeneutic gaps or historical fractures and the otherness thereby produced—I hope to revive one side of a dialogue that is as vital for historical scholarship as the dialogue between the recognition of difference and the recognition of similarity is for any cognitive process.

Particularly relevant to my argument is the widespread assumption that the demoralizing materialist reading of death was simply unavailable in the Christian culture of Renaissance England. In the most cited and anthologized essay of this generation in Renaissance studies, "Invisible Bullets," Stephen Greenblatt argues that, while charges of atheism were frequent, "Few if any of these investigations turned up what we would call atheists, even muddled or shallow ones; the stance that seems to come naturally to the greenest college freshman in late 20th-century America seems to have been almost unthinkable to the most daring philosophical minds of late sixteenth-century England."^[56] Much virtue in "almost." The status of the atheistical hypothesis has clearly changed over the centuries, at some level more pervasive than official doctrine, from forbidden to commonplace. But as Greenblatt himself concedes, to say that it is unsafe to write about a particular idea, and imperative to disavow it in official interrogations, is hardly the same as to say that it was unthinkable. And, clearly, it was thinkable to the accusers, whose zealous campaigns were presumably fueled by a projection of unmanageable inward doubts. This book will argue that annihilationist terror affects far more than the occasional "extravagant, zany exception" Greenblatt acknowledges.^[57] Even in the hands of one of its most brilliant and fair-minded practitioners, New Historicism characteristically risks overrating the ability of a centralized cultural consensus to manipulate

not only the consciousness, but also the subconsciousness, of an entire population. In this it oddly mimics the tendency of old historicists to identify certain ideas as universally held in a society—a tendency New Historicists generally revile (in the work of Tillyard, for example) as a naive or compileit misreading of a campaign of ideological repression.

Granted, it was difficult for most Renaissance minds to relinquish the Christian premises of their world-views. This led to some ludicrously circular arguments which cite as proof of God's existence the fact that the Bible—which is after all the God-given truth—asserts that He exists.^[58] A slightly more subtle circularity often marks attacks on annihilationism. Told that "there is a secte that teacheth that there is neither hell nor heaven, nor god, nor devill; and that the soule is mortall and dyeth with the bodye," an Elizabethan minister replies that "if there should not be such a secte the worde of god were faulce which did teach that towardes the latter end there should be such that shoulde fall awaye."^[59] The Jacobean version is more psychological: "Yea aske but the Conscience of the vilest Atheist, it will be a thousand witnesses of this truth; how often are they filled with unspeakable horrours especially in death? wherefore? but because they know there is a judgement that followes it."^[60] Donne argues that "no man dares think upon the last Judgement, but he that can thinke upon it with comfort"—implying that people suppose themselves annihilationists only because they know they are damned—and demands that atheists "answer their own terrors, and horrors alone at midnight, and tell themselves whence that proceeds, if there be no God" (Sermons , VI, 277; III, 257). Yet some Elizabethans recognized such strenuous misreadings of atheism as evasions: when one figure in a dialogue claims that professed atheists would, on close examination, "confesse, that they think there is a God," his interlocutor sympathizes with the effort to "make the best of their Atheisme . . . but I can assure you that there are such, that denie not onely the providence, but even the very nature and existence of God."^[61]

By denying the existence, even the possibility, of meaningful Renaissance atheism, modern commentators such as Lucien Febvre^[62] replicate what was actually the defensive reflex of a truly endangered Christian hegemony. Martin Fotherby's Atheomastix offers the standard Renaissance version of the modern dictum that there are no atheists in foxholes: "No dreame, no vision, no thunder, no lightening, doth so affright the Atheist , as the thought of death doth; and what will follow after death . . . the cogitation of a state of death, doth strike him, with

a feare of an eternall death."^[63] By this Fotherby means, or says he means, the fear of God's punishment; he never mentions the possibility that the fear of eternal death might arise from a fear of eternal death. Atheism stands refuted by the evidence that no one can sustain it on a deathbed, or that "no one can dye in their wits, that die not in the faith of our Lord Christ";^[64] yet this evidence is potentially far less subversive to atheism than to Christianity, which becomes vulnerable to Voltaire's skeptical observation that, if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him. Furthermore, to argue (as Donne does, for example)^[65] that there are no atheists because the human mind could not function without a belief in God not only provokes this skepticism about origins, it is also self-contradictory, since it involves positing and entering an atheistical mentality for the purpose of deeming it unachievable. This is precisely the kind of paradox that Greenblatt's "Invisible Bullets" sets out to explore: the way invaders of alien cultures find themselves hoist with their own petard, exposing the arbitrary character of their own beliefsystems by exploiting (cynically, improvisationally) the beliefs of others. Attacks on annihilationism may have had the same kind of ramifications for orthodox Christianity.

A subliminal recognition of this danger may lie behind the Renaissance tendency to accuse overt attackers of atheism of covertly endorsing atheism, since they disseminate the forbidden ideas in the course of refuting them.^[66] The other fundamental paradox at the heart of nearly all seventeenth-century attacks on atheism and annihilationism is that authors felt obliged to refute rationally what they claimed no rational person could assert, to mount vigorous rescue operations into theological territory they claimed was uninhabited. These tracts describe a fundamental hegemony of religious belief, like that implied by Febvre and Greenblatt, but their description is clearly tendentious. Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica (p. 183) dismisses disbelievers as either too stupid or too clever to see the most obvious truths, yet disputes at length with these phantoms. In a breathtaking display of revisionist appropriation, Browne's Religio Medici analyzes the forces that "have perverted the devotion of many unto Atheisme," yet a few paragraphs later declares that actually

there was never any. Those that held Religion was the difference of man from beasts, have spoken probably, and proceed upon a principle as inductive as the other: That doctrine of Epicurus , that denied the providence of God, was no Atheism, but a magnificent and high-strained conceit of his Majesty, which

hee deemed too sublime to minde the triviall actions of those inferiour creatures: That fatall necessitie of the Stoickes, is nothing but the immutable Law of his will. (pp. 84–86)

Christian anagogy thus inoculates itself against comparative anthropology. Ancient pagan belief in the immortality of souls, which could be used to argue that such belief is a human psychological need rather than a truth of revelation or natural reason, is read as a verifying premonition of Christianity. Browne (pp. 86–87) goes on to claim that even the author of the notorious (and probably apocryphal) De tribus impostoribus , "though divided from all Religions, and was neither Jew, Turk, nor Christian, was not a positive Atheist." All Browne will concede is that "the Rhetorick of Satan . . . may pervext a loose or prejudicate beleefe," particularly in befuddled classicists: "I remember a Doctor in Physick of Italy, who could not perfectly believe the immortality of the soule, because Galen seemed to make a doubt therof." Perhaps, he adds, there was also once a Frenchman similarly misled by Seneca.

When the printed record does acknowledge atheistical views, the acknowledgments always disarm the threat by ad hominem attacks on the disbelievers. Sometimes, as in Browne, the disbelievers are tainted by association with lower animals or the pagan past, if not by sheer mental incapacity. All these guilty associations conjoin into a kind of Circe motif, visible in Hooker's astonishment "that base desires should so extinguish in men the sense of their own excellency, as to make them willing that their souls should be like the souls of beasts, mortal and corruptible with their bodies?"^[67] Disbelief is thus commonly portrayed as a rationalization for hedonism, as the disbeliever himself would miserably confess on his deathbed: by "experience of all ages it hath been proved that Atheists themselves, that is, such as in their health and prosperitie for more libertie of sinning, would strive against the being of a God, when they come to die or fall into any great miserie, they of all other would shew themselves most fearfull of this God."^[68]

These logical, rhetorical, and theological mazes were constructed to entrap Jacobean annihilationism and channel it back into Christian affirmation. In 1608 Robert Pricke observed that

Atheists (whereof we have too many examples) puffe out a little warme breath in scorne and derision, saying, there goeth my soule: he being therein fowlie deceived, and sheweth himselfe utterlie impudent and shamelesse. It were a blessed thing for thee, oh thou Atheist , if thou wert in the estate of a bruit

beast. But alas, thou art indued with an immortal soule, which can never die: whereof thou art even convinced in thy selfe; but that the divell hath blinded thine eyes, and strongly possessed thy heart. For what is the reason that thou doest so tremble at death, and art so loth to die? . . . the cause is the guilt and accusation of an evill conscience: from which thou doest conclude, that immediately after death, thou shalt suffer everlasting torments and confusion in hel fire: which doth plainely prove to thy shamelesse face, that a principall part of thee doth still remaine after death; and that is thy soule.^[69]

The atheistical fear of annihilation supposedly proves valid and universal the Christian belief in afterlife. To deny the Christian model of the universe is to prove that the Biblical devil has made you a liar. This device is clearly at work in the deathbed crises discussed in my Epilogue, and it looks ahead to the tricks of denial by which Enlightenment Christians continued to claim that atheism was impossible even when someone openly asserted it, on the grounds that such a person could not vow his or her atheistic convictions by God, and therefore earned no credence—a sort of theological Catch-22.

These efforts to make the Christian belief-system self-verifying prove that it was not inherently so. If no one was in a position to assault it from outside, why were there such frantic efforts to pull the wagons into a circle? Naturally it was a long time before anyone could actually advocate atheistic beliefs in print, but that hardly proves there were no real atheists. After encountering so many examples, Renaissance and modern, of the tendency to disallow the evidence of atheism, to make conventional intellectual history a barrier against unconventional thought, to claim that no one could think that way because no one had yet thought that way, one can appreciate the exasperated effort of William Hammon to establish a terminus ad quem of unbroken belief: "Be it therefore for the future remembered, that in London in the kingdom of England, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-one, a man publickly declared himself to be an atheist."^[70]

In Jacobean usage "atheist" did not always mean a person who refused to believe in any form of deity. It was often a term of anathema applied to anyone who deviated from the writer's preferred form of Christianity rather than a specific term for those denying the existence of God.^[71] Yet one may still wonder why "atheist" (to the extent that the term was part of a rhetorical strategy) served as the darkest condemnation, and (to the extent that the term expressed a sincere horror) why people felt that the only alternative to their particular doctrine of

personal salvation was the terrifying abyss of unbelief.^[72] Vague and factional uses of the term have sometimes been cited to sustain the claim that atheism in the pure form was not possible in the Renaissance, but in many Jacobean instances "atheism" carries its specific modern sense. John Dore's Confutation of Atheism concedes that "Sometimes under the name of Atheists are comprehended Pagans, Infidels and Idolators," but he attacks the thing itself, which he considers far worse.^[73] William Perkins's Treatise of Mans Imaginations asserts that some men "avouch, hould, & maintain that there is no God at all; this is the highest degree of Atheisme," which he calls "the most notorious, and vile damnable thought that can be in a naturall man." Indeed, Perkins offers a Christian essentialist refutation of theories about insular Renaissance belief: "we must not thinke that this wicked thought is onely in some notorious and hainous sinners; but it is in the corrupt minde and Imagination of every man that commeth of Adam naturally, not one excepted, save Christ alone. . . . by nature his corrupt heart is prone to think there is no God ."^[74] Martin Fotherby's Atheomastix draws fairly sophisticated distinctions among unbelievers, whom he divides into Atheists, Epicures, and Naturalists.^[75] Donne studies various types of atheists, concluding that "we have all, all these . . . in our owne bosomes" (Sermons , IX, 171). Thomas Adams, another very prominent Jacobean preacher, identifies atheism as "the highest theft against God, because it would steal from him not sua, sed se , his goods, but himself." In another sermon, Adams identifies a bad congregation as "semi-atheistical cosmopolites"; in a third, he describes Judas as worse than "absolute atheists."^[76] Robert Welcome's Jacobean funeral sermon contrasts the woman he is eulogizing to "many lukewarm Politicians that either are Atheists , of no religion at al; or els Chameleon -like turne with the time."^[77] At mid-century, the author of Atheismus Vapulans announces as his target those who deny God, and claims there is one such in his own circle;^[78] and toward the end of the century, the "Methodizer of the Second Spira" sets out to refute "those that either own no God; or at least deny the Separate Existence and Immortality of the Soul , I think there are but few of the first. But upon my personal Knowledge there's too many of the last Opinion ."^[79]

As this last quotation indicates, annihilationism does not necessarily connote atheism, even for Christians. Averroes and Pompanazzi led influential Medieval and Renaissance revivals of Origen's notion that human souls might be reabsorbed into a sort of world-soul at death; while nominally Christian, this theology can hardly have satisfied the increasingly common desire to have one's unique interiority preserved

eternally. In the early seventeenth century, William Birnie's Blame of Kirk-Buriall remarks that the "Saducean herisie denied the resurrection" without calling that heresy atheism,^[80] and Socinians were regularly accused of disbelieving in the eternity of hell, without being accused of disbelieving in God.^[81]

Still, atheism and annihilationism were intimately connected in the common discourse (and marked together as capital crimes in the Blasphemy Bill of 1648–50), if only because the chief anxiety expressed about atheism—that without the fear of eternal punishment people would behave immorally—applies to annihilationism as well. There are indications that Jacobean culture felt annihilationism to be the greatest threat of all: "it is Epicurisme, Atheisme, and the greatest Apostacie from faith that may be" to suppose that "we shal bee heareafter as though wee had never been," that "the Spirit vanisheth as the soft ayre."^[82] Browne cannot understand how Epicurus and Seneca managed "to be honest without a thought of Heaven or Hell" to reward or punish at resurrection, and concludes that "without this, all Religion is a Fallacy, and those impieties of Lucian, Euripides , and Julian are no blasphemies, but subtile verities, and Atheists have beene the onely Philosophers" (pp. 119–20). Later in the seventeenth century, Bayle argued that hell was useless as a moral deterrent,^[83] but—as with similar evidence about the death-penalty in our own society—people still felt a psychological need for that absolute stay against the prospect of moral chaos.

In Adams's analysis, "There are some feare to die, others not so much to die as to bee dead. The former are cowardly, the other unbelieving soules . . . But when the last extremitie comes, mori cupiant , they desire to die."^[84] His point is a familiar one, that unbelievers will be surprised by hell, but he acknowledges that they were already frightened of mere oblivion. Doubtless hellfire was a more compelling threat, but it was also far more widely acknowledged and far better contextualized. The fear of non-being was therefore more likely to build up pressure in the psychic economy and to find indirect means of expression: in poetry, for example, rather than in laws or sermons, and therefore in a form more accessible to literary critics than to historians. Even if annihilationism tends to be the discourse of an Other, it may find an outlet in drama, where authors and actors never quite speak as themselves. And even if subversion tends to mirror official doctrine, annihilationist resentment against the universe may manifest itself in the form of parodies of the sacred system.

The shortage of more explicit annihilationist assertions in the written record can hardly be considered conclusive, since it would have been dangerous in Renaissance society to write such things, worse to save them, and virtually suicidal to publish them. Under such circumstances, heterodoxies can be recuperated from the responses of the orthodox authorities, as the dark shape with whom those authorities appear to be shadow-boxing; they reach us by indirect discourse, and through the indirections of art. Perhaps (as Kyd and Marlowe learned the hard way) it was far too risky to propose a Machiavellian explanation for official religion outside of dramatic personae, but if no one had such suspicions in late Elizabethan England, why would Henrie Smith bother writing that "a religious devotion of feare toward God is bred and borne with every man, and therefore there cannot be any pollicie of humane invention."^[85] Roger Ascham's Scholemaster ends up inscribing this suspicion in his curriculum by attempting to attack it.^[86] A Jacobean preacher opens the same Machiavellian perspective in his very effort to extol Christianity: "It is Religion, that holdeth us at a bay, and keepeth the heart of the Subject in awe, that it swelleth not against the Soveraigne."^[87] At least one Jacobean woman proved capable of believing "That the Scriptures are not his Word, but a Pollicie," and holding to that belief for six years; but we would never have known it, if another preacher had not chosen to celebrate her progress from indoctrinated Catholicism through miserable atheism to triumphant Protestantism.^[88] Thus schism not only encouraged atheism, it helped plant it in the explicit historical record.

Lengthy though it is, this introduction has quoted only a fraction of the annihilationist instances I found, which are surely only a fraction of those existing, which are in turn only a fraction of those originally published, which would have represented only a fraction of the cases actively suspected. So the traditional assumption that Jacobeans would automatically have believed in afterlife is at best an exaggeration. To such overreadings of the history of mentalities, one may reply with an updating of Carlyle's dictum: close thy Foucault, open thy Ecclesiastes. There is no new thing under the sun, and the biological-materialist reading of death is probably one of the oldest. Browne suggests that heresies are cyclically recurrent, and his discussion evolves into reincarnationist metaphors and mortalist apologetics that, in their defensiveness, suggest an unresolved struggle with annihilationism:

Heresies perish not with their Authors, but like the River Arethusa , though they lose their currents in one place, they rise up againe in another . . . for as

though there were a Metempsuchosis , and the soule of one man passed into another, opinions doe finde after certaine revolutions, men and mindes like those that first begat them. . . . there was none then, but there hath been some one since that parallels him, and is as it were his revived selfe. Now the first of [Browne's heresies] was that of the Arabians, that the soules of men perished with their bodies, but should yet bee raised againe at the last day; not that I did absolutely conceive a mortality of the soule; but if that were, which faith, not Philosophy hath yet throughly disproved . . . yet I held the same conceit thereof that wee all doe of the body, that it should rise againe. Surely it is but the merits of our unworthy natures, if wee sleepe in darkenesse, untill the last alarum: . . . so I might enjoy my Saviour at the last, I could with patience be nothing almost unto eternity. (pp. 66–67)

This crucial word "almost"—semantically, a limiting function against the absolute—performs a similar service in the dedicatory epistle to Hydriotaphia , which claims that the remains of the ancients "lay, almost in silence among us" (p. 264). The prospect of personal annihilation was always asserting itself—staring up from plaguy corpses, rising in the inscrutable remains of classical antiquity, threatening to become legible even in the Bible itself. Jacobean culture was obliged to find ways to unthink that thought, to talk itself out of fear, to quarantine a potentially catastrophic cultural epidemic.

The Rhetoric of Denial

For all the pious and rational warnings that death is universal, human beings are notoriously ready to disbelieve in their own mortality. This was apparently as characteristic of the Jacobeans as it is of us. Memento mori stands in the foreground of nearly every Jacobean funeral sermon; yet at the same time the preachers appear to offer, as an incentive to orthodoxy, the hope that annihilation can be isolated in an Other. Recently much has been made of the invention and oppression of aliens for the purposes of political advantage, but a comparable transaction necessarily occurs in the formation of the individual psyche,^[89] and in the evasions of mortality a culture offers its constituents. Just as (according to Freud) it is impossible to believe in one's own mortality, so cultures systematically project their annihilationist anxieties onto an Other consciousness.

William Worship's The Christians Mourning Garment (1603) claims that the worst heretics are those who

hold that their soules in death vanish away like a dogges. This Satanicall paradore possest the hart of that great Physitian Galen. A man might have cast

his water and found filthy sediments of Athisme. But he is dead long ago, & I would this sin had died with him. Good Christian, never come thou nere those Carrions that maintaine the soule to be a vapour, unlesse thou have the winde of them.^[90]

This is a quip, but it contains several characteristic signatures of antiannihilationist rhetoric. Worship isolates annihilation as the fate of lower animals, enables himself to talk about annihilationism by locating it in a disastrously misguided classical authority, and associates that authority (and any Renaissance followers) with contagion and bodily decay, as if those who resisted the spiritual disease would somehow be spared such decay. The fact that such heterodox notions—that the corpses of the virtuous might avoid vermiculation, that the souls of the wicked might be simply annihilated—permeate these pious presentations suggests they were powerful hopes and fears that the preachers could hope only to channel, not wholly to suppress.

Jacobean culture bristles with these projections: human beings are encouraged to project their unacceptable mortality onto other animals, men to project theirs onto women, Christians onto pagans, Catholics and Protestants onto each other. The distinction between all other animals, in whom people witnessed the simple and decisive work of mortality, and human beings, who were supposedly made for immortality, was the easiest of these binarisms to assert, because the categories were stable and the theology orthodox. Even the usually generous and inclusive Browne joins in this theological version of kicking the dog: "I beleeve that the whole frame of a beaste doth perish, and is left in the same state after death, as before it was materialled unto life; that the soules of men know neither contrary nor corruption, that they subsist beyond the body, and outlive death by the priviledge of their proper natures" (p. 108). Henrie Smith's Gods Arrowe against Atheists begins with the assertion that "Atheisme and Irreligion was ever odious even amonge the Heathen themselves . . . as being more like rude beastes than reasonable men."^[91] The implication is that those who live like dogs (that is, without religion) will die like dogs (that is, unredeemed from mere physical decay). "Certainly," one Jacobean preacher assured his audience, "though sinful man be like unto the beasts that perish, yet he doth not perish like the beasts, whose bodies are turned into ashes, and their spirits vanish. . . ."^[92] Another preacher pushes the same allusion a step further, suggesting that those who do not recognize the Christian God "shall be like the beast which perisheth," before (inconsistently) reverting to a warning about hellfire.^[93]

Often a syntactical parallelism serves to secure and neaten this arguably tenuous distinction: "To dye is the course of Nature, to dye well, of Christian Art: that is common to men with beasts; this proper unto Gods servants alone."^[94] Clearly these structures serve to restrain a suspicion that becomes momentarily audible in the testimony that one Jacobean gentleman believed "there was hoe god & hoe resurrection, & that men died a death like beasts."^[95] When the annihilationist side acquires its own voice (though, typically, as the straw-man in a pious argument), it attacks precisely this consoling distinction: "you and I are nothing else but Brutes , and if we have any priviledge above Lions and Foxes , 'tis from a more Exquisite Fabric; our clockwork is something finer than theirs; and our Organs are more apposite and proper for abstracted perception."^[96] The current controversy over animal rights, particularly as it affects medical care for human beings, suggests that the struggle on this point is far from over.

A more elusive but perhaps more pervasive version of this pattern allowed men to isolate the condition of annihilation in women. The behavioral traits that Renaissance manuals repeatedly suggest were prized in wives—silence, coldness, containment, and passivity—bear a striking resemblance to the traits of the dead as conceived by annihilationism. Though sexually frustrated, Shakespeare's Bertram adores the maiden who strikes him as

                                                            a monument.
When you are dead, you should be such a one
As you are now; for you are cold and stern. . . .
(All's Well , 4.2.6–8)

This pattern did not, I think, reflect an outbreak of necrophilia—though references to women as "painted Sepulchres,"^[97] a devotion to pallid complexions, and sporadic black humor about corpse-kissing in Jacobean tragedy, might seem to support that hypothesis. An alternative explanation for this correspondenc"[Group EN00131]",5,4,"Note 131"> as subjects in an elaborate experiment on the condition of oblivion. This experiment would have yielded the comforting datum that one can endure a great deal of personal erasure and still retain some form of existence. The choice of women as experimental subjects is hardly surprising, since men have often projected their unwanted inner traits onto the opposite sex, and since an extensive misogynist tradition going back at least as far as the Genesis story clearly blames women—their heat, their appetite, their persuasion—for the onset of mortality in the species.

This theological view likely received reinforcement through the biological, psychological, and sociological functions that encourage men to perceive women as mates provoking decadent sexuality and as mothers issuing the fallible flesh in which our consciousness is so precariously sustained.^[98] So the projective explanation edges toward another explanation, this one vengeful, talionic. The scapegoats for mortality become the guinea-pigs for annihilation. Women must be made to endure in life what they have betrayed men into enduring in death. If this is not a homeopathic cure for the disease of mortality, it is at least a punishment of the guilty party, which—as revenge-tragedy clearly shows—is considered the next best thing.

Inevitably, Catholics and Protestants turned against each other the theological weaponry developed to justify the oppression of other species and of women. Two predominant strains of recusant propaganda make sense only as efforts to associate the Reformation with annihilation, presumably on the assumption that people would avoid any faction tainted by the extinction of consciousness and the decay of the body. The first strain exploits Protestant asceticism and iconoclasm in order to identify the Reformation with pure negation. Thus, the anonymous author of the 1633 tract The Non-Entity of Protestantism wittily informs the Reformers that, since their principal project is undoing the worldly accretions of Roman practice, "your Religion is in it selfe a meere Non-Entity; Its Being consisting in a Not-being , and Essence, in want of Essence ."^[99] The second strain is visible later in the same tract, in the description of Calvin's death: "being in despayre, and calling upon the Divell, he gave up his wicked soule, swearing, cursing, and blaspheming: he died of the disease of lice & wormes, increasing in a most loathsome ulcer, about his privy parts, so as none could endure the stench."^[100] This is of course a rather comprehensive smear, but once again the primary threat is vermiculation rather than hellfire: Calvin is tainted by association with the horror of mere bodily decay, as Judas, Herod, and Arius had been before him, and in implied contrast to reliquary saints, who were distinguished by bodily preservation. Why should a man's susceptibility to posthumous decay be taken as a divine condemnation of his views, unless one were clinging to the idea that a particular orthodoxy forestailed it? By offering a kind of time-lapse image of a Protestant hero's rotting corpse, this propagandist vividly links Calvinist theology to materialist death.

The theological arguments against the Reformation thus blend into emotional ones. Catholics repeatedly implied that Protestantism

untamed death—which may explain why Puritan preachers were so desperate (as my Epilogue shows) to deny that a notable parishioner had died in wild desperation. A 1615 recusant document addressed "to some particular friends in England, " chronicling "the miserable ends of such as have impugned the Catholike Church, " lists first among the "foure sorts of Christians in the world out of the Catholike Church," those who "doe not beleeve either hell or heaven."^[101] By mid-century the tendentious association between extinction of the soul and deterioration of the flesh becomes fairly explicit, and can be used against atheists and schismatics alike. Instead of threatening unbelievers with hellfire, Towers warns that such badly sowed seed of the soul "does not only not multiply, but it perishes, it does not only not laugh and sing, but it weeps, and dyes, and comes to nothing, to nothing but that, which is most like to nothing, to putrefaction."^[102]

Perhaps the greatest threat to the integrity of Renaissance Christian culture was the rediscovery of ancient pagan culture. Elizabethan scholars made a commodity of this potential disease, converting the misguided Other into an outlet for their own forbidden anxieties. Noting a heavy "reliance on examples from classical antiquity" in English Renaissance discussions of atheism, historians have concluded that there must not have been any native atheistic impulse to be confronted;^[103] but perhaps the classical emphasis reflects an evasion rather than an invention of more local disbelief. Speculative atheism may come and go, but the 1597 commentator who isolates it safely back in Diagoras simultaneously tries to isolate in Epicurus a tendency that is surely transhistorical: the hedonistic neglect of high morality.^[104] Even Lyly's warning about rampant atheism at Oxford reflects this displacement: "Be there not many at Athens which think there is no God, no redemption, no resurrection?"^[105]

Jacobean commentaries on classical authors repeatedly employ them in this defensive maneuver. Thomas Tuke's Discourse of Death , for example, locates in the ancients both annihilationism ("Amongst the heathen some there were, that held the death a dissolution of the soule, as Democritus, Epicurus . . .") and the Machiavellian interpretation of religion ("the Emperour Theodosius  . . . thought it better to binde his Subjects to him by Religion, then by terror").^[106] The Roman legacy thus provides both a rationale for exploring taboo topics, and a conveniently distant screen on which to project current doubts about Christian providence and statecraft. Casaubon's preface to Marcus Aurelius's Meditations warns that many scholastics typify the tendency of unaided

reason toward atheism, and therefore "incurre both the just suspicion of being Atheists themselves, and the certaine guilt and crime of having made many others so."^[107] Humphreys's commentary on Athenagoras argues that Ecclesiastes (a favorite text of the annihilationist Sadducees) must be read as a dialogue between Solomon and an atheis.^[108] In distinguishing themselves from the obviously non-Christian material they were editing, Casaubon and Humphreys can perform a kind of curative amputation on the decaying body of Renaissance Christianity.

Occasionally, however, the containment of annihilationism within classical paganism sprang a leak. Robert Welcome's State of the godly, both in this life, and in the life to come (1606) virtually explodes with energy when it discovers this expedient for speaking (by a kind of praeteritio ) what it is usually obliged to silence:

This stops the beastly and blasphemous mouth of the Sadduces , and fully puts them to silence; who affirmed, that there is no resurrection, nor Angell , nor spirit: and of Epicurus the belligod Philosopher, who was a most detestable defender of pleasure, and thought that Man was onely borne to enjoy pleasure, and sayd that the Soule dyeth after the death of the body: and of Plinie , who was not ashamed to write, that it fares with all men after the last day as it did before the first day: and that there is no more sense and feeling, eyther of body, or minde, after we are dead, then there was before we were borne; and of Lucretius a fat swine of Epicurus stie, who impudently opens his uncleane mouth against heaven. . . .^[109]

Many of the ancients believed that death was simply the end of everything, according to Samuel Gardiner's Doomes-day Book , and something about their assumptions seemed uncomfortably familiar: "In these darkenesse lay almost all the rabblement of the Orators, Philosophers, and Poets of the Gentiles. And if we shall ransacke the militant Church, we shall find many monstrous minded men in this matter."^[110] The Jacobeans conjured an enemy out of classical culture, and sometimes discovered that the enemy was themselves.

Another interesting feature of Jacobean attacks on annihilationism is their peculiarly consistent recourse to rhetorical questions. The need to dismiss the fear of death without denying its existence regularly evokes this quirk of style in authors who rarely employ it elsewhere:

For why should he feare death whom death doth helpe , not hurt, and ease rather than end? . . . For where should the soules of men be after Death, but either in Heaven with Christ, or in Hell with the Divell?^[111]

Damnable are all the assertions, that maintaine the mortality of the soule: for if shee did perishe with the body, and had no sense & feeling after death: how can the godly after death bee in Gods presence . . . ?^[112]

 . . . shall wee, certaine that there is a Life hereafter full of unspeakable felicitie, bee affraid of the way which GOD hath ordained as a passage to it?^[113]

Why weep we any more, seeing all teares are wiped from their eyes?^[114]

 . . . for what is death to the people of God? what is it to them to die?^[115]

I have a greater [inheritance] after the death of this body, and shall I be loath to come to that?^[116]

 . . . why then should the living sorow for the ded, as men which have no hope?^[117]

 . . . who in the sea of this tempestuous world, would not give this world to arrive at the haven of eternall happinesse?^[118]

In Drummond's 1623 Cypress Grove this device is not an exception, but so tyrannical a rule that it resembles a neurotic compulsion:

They which forewent us did leave a room for us, and should we grieve to do the same to those which should come after us? Who, being admitted to see the exquisite ratifies of some antiquary's cabinet, is grieved, all viewed, to have the curtain drawn, and give place to new pilgrims? And when the Lord of this universe hath showed us the various wonders of his amazing frame, should we take it to heart, when he thinketh time to dislodge? (pp. 26–27)

Two pages later Drummond intensifies his questioning:

But is this life so great a good that the loss of it should be so dear unto man? If it be, the meanest creatures of nature thus be happy, for they live no less than he. If it be so great a felicity, how is it esteemed of man himself at so small a rate, that for so poor gains, nay, one disgraceful word, he will not stand to lose it? What excellency is there in it, for the which he should desire it perpetual, and repine to be at rest, and return to his old Grandmother Dust? Of what moment are the labours and actions of it, that the interruption and leaving-off of them should be to him so distasteful, and with such grudging lamentations received? Is not the entering into life weakness? the continuing sorrow? (pp. 28–29)

And over the next twenty-five short pages, some forty more such questions are shored against our mortal ruin.

Perhaps there is an echo of "O, Death where is thy sting?" in some of these questions,^[119] but I suspect they also reflect a kind of rhetorical brinkmanship, an expedient generated by a double bind that increasingly skeptical Jacobean audiences imposed on their preachers. On the one hand, to pretend that death was not immensely mysterious and terrifying would be to forfeit all relevance to the fears of skeptics. Straightforward assertions that death is a blessing sound very hollow to modern readers, and in this the Jacobeans were evidently our contemporaries, because such assertions diminish rapidly in the literature of consolation around the beginning of the seventeenth century. On the other hand, to admit that death is mysterious and terrifying would contradict a consolation fundamental to the appeal of Christianity. As Donne notes in the Devotions (p, 30), "I should belie Nature , if I should deny that I feard this, & if I should say that I feared death , I should belye God ." In other words, this rhetorical quirk reflects the same contradiction as the logical quirk whereby strenuous rational refutations of the atheistical position were accompanied by denials that any rational person could hold that position. Both quirks indicate declining confidence in divine providence.

Jacobean mourners faced an agonizing ambivalence, parallel to the double bind imposed on preachers. Faced with the apparent failure of Christianity to cure mortality, they needed to express their bewilderment without quite accusing God of dereliction; so, through rhetorical questions, they half-heartedly accused themselves. When Jonson's epitaph "On My First Son" asks "why / Will man lament the state he should envy?" (5–6) the huge ambivalence of the poem comes into focus. Donne's Holy Sonnet on the death of his wife asks God, "why should I begg more Love, when as thou / Dost woe my soul, for hers" (9–10); yet clearly he cannot quite satisfy himself with the bargain. Preachers could demand of a widow, "Is not God to you in stead often husbands?"^[120] But the implied answer does not erase what provoked the question.

The rhetorical question was a device for entrapping and disguising mortality-anxiety, and shaming it into silence. It resembles a psychoanalyric reaction-formation, coping with an unacceptable idea or impulse by representing it as its opposite. But death remained an unanswered question in many minds, and if we break the rhetorical spell that kept these anxieties suspended, we are left with a real question: why should death (the cessation of life, not death-throes or damnation) have been so terrifying in a culture supposedly saturated with Christian belief?^[121]

Many Renaissance attempts to reconcile the fear of death and mourning for the dead with the Christian idea of heaven have an air of rationalization. The promise of afterlife provided a way of moderating the otherwise uncontainable grief of the bereaved: "Egyptians mourne unmeasureably, as thinking death to be a destruction of all things; Joseph as a Christian, hopefully expecting the promise of Resurrection."^[122] A primary function of religion is to restore measure to the infinite, which threatens to destroy the sanity of the living world; but, again, the necessity of a consolation does not prove the validity of that consolation. The quest for The Meane in Mourning (the title of a Jacobean funeral sermon by Thomas Playfere) seems to constitute an illogical compromise in the choice between an infinitely blessed or an infinitely meaningless universe—as if the preachers were not quite sure they had the votes to push through an absolute affirmation of Christianity, and sought instead a compromise resolution.

The familiar association of Christianity with light becomes, throughout the seventeenth century, a rhetorical resource for extorting orthodox Christian belief from those who fear that death will impose an immeasurable darkness. Citing Augustine's belief that in hell, "flame shall burne them, without affording light at all," Jean Pierre Camus warns that unredeemed death enforces "so deepe a blindnes, and so deadly a numnesse" that no man could stand the thought of it. For those who have eyes but will not see the Christian revelation in life, this kind of death is poetic justice.^[123] Timothy Oldmayne warns that "godlesse persons . . . have no reason at all to looke for the Resurrection day . . . sith to them it will bee a day of Darknesse, and not light."^[124] Thomas Adams uses the same associations to condemn "Atheists such as have voluntarily, violently extinguished to themselves the Sun-light of the Scripture" out of a shortsighted desire to "act the workes of darkenesse."^[125] The "Pastour" in Zacharie Boyd's Last Battle of the Soul in Death (1629) tells a fearful man, "This heere is your griefe, that death will strik you with a blindness"—a grief suiting only a pagan, because "though both his eyes should sinke downe into his head, or droppe out like blobbes or droppes of water," the Christian shall still "see his Redeemer." "Once I sat in darknesse ," Boyd later proclaims; "hee is now my Light . Once I was in death , hee is now my Life ." Again the association is conventional enough, but it is worth noticing what the analogy assumes about death, and about the human fear of death as "a place of silence" and a "dungeon of darknesse."^[126] A decade later the same manipulative metaphors persist: for true Christians, death is

actually an escape from "a darke dungeon . . . to the light"; the fear of death is only "for those who are blinded with the Mist Atheisme and Impiety."^[127] By making light a figuration of Christian morality, then letting the metaphor collapse to a literal level, such commentators can subliminally exploit our instinctive fear of the dark, which annihilationism infinitely intensifies.

As the seventeenth century progresses, the annihilationist notion of sensory deprivation becomes increasingly explicit. Jean Paget describes the decay of sight and hearing in human senescence as a warning of what is to follow, leaving the visionary soul as the only consolation "when the eyes of the body . . . beginne to be darke."^[128]A Mourning-Ring asserts that "The Grave, into which we are all going, is a place of silence," that the fear of death is augmented by "a natural fear of darkness," and that "by shutting their Eyes and Mouth, we do intimate, that the dead are no more to take delight in the Objects of this visible World."^[129] According to Thomas Fuller, "our Atheist hath a dead palsey, is past all sense, and cannot perceive God who is everywhere presented unto him,"^[130] as if the disbeliever's life were infected by the oblivion he must envision beyond it. Clearly these writings evince anxiety in seventeenth-century England about the oblivion of death, whether one chooses to interpret them as efforts to cure that anxiety or to exploit it. Furthermore, this fear is not the product of some bizarre antique episteme ; the same anxieties are still visible in stories of near-death experiences, which commonly feature an intense white light summoning from the beyond, a light generally read as a manifestation—indeed, a verification—of Christian afterlife.

Royal deaths provide a special instance of this pattern; perhaps the notion that the monarch embodied the nation allowed a release of annihilationist anxieties through a suggestion that subjects are rendered senseless by the royal demise. Arthur Gorges's poem on the death of Prince Henry claims that

My Muse did want her selfe, my sence was nume,
My heart grew faint, my quicker power grew slow,
Myne eyes weare dimme, my tongue was taken dumbe,
My inke no longer from my penn would flowe,
           For inke, tongue, eyes, power, hart, sence, muse, apawled,
           Became thick dumbe dymme, slow, faint nume, and stald.^[131]

Thomas Newton's funeral poem for Queen Elizabeth persistently associates death with blindness, which the mourners acquire as a sort of hysterical sympathetic symptom.^[132] An elegy written in the last year of King James's life similarly describes how all five senses are emptied by the

process of mourning, characterizing death as "deafe, and blind," and the grave as "eternall night"; the poet later warns that "our passions must not for ever transport us into obscurity and darknesse" which "will in a moment change our dazling into starke blindnes"; and urges therefore, "let not our eies take any rest" until they have seen "the true path" to heaven.^[133]

Representing Death

Art eyther perfits nature, or doth imitate it. This for imitation
hath nothing, because death is nothing but the corruption of
Nature, the defect and privation of life, the divorce and
dissolution of our essentiall parts. . . . Art therfore must perfit
this deformity more truly in the maske wherewith it come
covered then in the thing it selfe which is without horrour,
unles it be of such as our selves cast upon it.^[134]

If the Jacobeans were "much possessed by death" (as T. S. Eliot suggested in "Whispers of Immortality"), that fascination with mortality does not finally acquit them of denying it. In fact, many of the macabre gestures associated with this culture are ultimately legible as evasions of the full implications of death. The grotesquely redundant practice of Renaissance executions, in which a man might be hanged, disembowelled, beheaded, drawn and quartered, and burnt at the stake, implies that the punitive power of the state is not circumscribed by the boundary between life and death, as it would be if death were absolute oblivion.^[135] A more avowedly dramatic version of this over-kill, in which a single character is murdered more than once (as in The Jew of Malta and The Revenger's Tragedy ), similarly resists the idea that death is a single and absolute event; at the same time, these depictions invite our uneasy laughter at a denial we commonly practice, the unarticulated belief that the corpse cares how gently it is treated. Nor—considering Jonson's epitaph on his first daughter and Laertes' farewell to his sister—can this dissonance be explained away by claiming that Jacobeans were somehow unable to project tenderness toward corpses as we do. Another common stage practice of the period—bringing heroines such as Desdemona and the Duchess of Malfi briefly back from a breathless demise—also encourages spectators to deny the simple finality of death.^[136] Presumably that is why Shakespeare hints at such a moment at the end of King Lear , and why his stubborn refusal to fulfill that hint has

proved so devastating to the morale of audiences. A later chapter will argue that George Herbert attempts to console his readers by systematically differentiating death from closural silence.

Epidemics, especially bubonic plague, pressed death to the forefront of Renaissance consciousness, but largely as a problem of public health and an occasion for conventional moral admonition. If "Th'all-conquering Pox" is a "forraine guest / The Divell-instructed Indies to us sold / To recompense the filching of their Gold," and if the plague is "a dreary Punishment, Heaven's curse,"^[137] then at least death is part of a political and providential narrative. As in public executions and Augustinian theology, construing death as punishment returns it to the realm of human meaning. Contagion without guilt would come too close to demonstrating that death is an ordinary unpleasant fact of our bodies that no retribution can correct: "By one another (strange!) so many di'de / And yet no murder here, no Homocide."^[138]

The macabre imagery that the plague helped to provoke is generally assumed to reflect an unmediated confrontation with death; but illustrating and moralizing the stages of decay is only a conditional surrender of denial, since it allowed people to focus on a gradual process rather than on the absurdly binary shift from a unity to a nullity of consciousness. Along with the danse macabre and the morality play, morbid illustrations helped capture death within the arena of ritual and representation. If it is true that, in sixteenth-century England, "We rarely find the word 'death' used alone; it is qualified by some descriptive phrase which at once brings it sharply before our eyes,"^[139] perhaps that is because Elizabethans needed to contextualize and visualize death, in order to forestall the terrors of an infinite darkness. Making death a voice rather than a silence, a visible agency rather than a Black Hole, removes its nihilistic sting.^[140] Portraying the deceased in the transi mode of tomb statuary, which showed the corpse in putrefaction, placed kinetic decay back in the containment of static art; placing such statuary inside a church was a further act of containment (and bravado). Even the ferocious Renaissance disputes about the proper path to the afterlife could have been consoling, if they distracted people from the idea that there might be no destination.

One could hardly call consoling the terrifying depictions of hellfire in sermons and paintings; but they did powerfully preclude any supposition that the senses would merely expire. Perhaps this is why "it was detailed vividness which seemed the essence" of Medieval visions of purgatory.^[141] People were drawn to such depictions even while profess-

ing themselves horrified, as we are to scenes of violent death in action movies and news reports, and partly for the same reason: because their contingency and vividness helps us repress the suspicion that death consists of a banal extinction. This fear of erasure informs Abraham Holland's complaint, on the brink of his death in 1625, about "The dolefull silence of the standers by / As if they were all speechlesse, and from me / Did draw one generall stupid sympathy."^[142] In 1613, Lewes Bayly's popular The Practise of Pietie similarly warned that "They who come to visit the sicke must have a speciall care not to stand dumbe and staring in the sicke persons face to disquiet him," as if to avoid mirroring back to the sufferer the conditions of silence and blindness that he must fear await him. Earlier in the book, Bayly notes the onset of deafness and blindness as final symptoms of the moribund.^[143] If these are the fears and symptoms, then Bayly's hell is almost a relief and a cure: "There thy lascivious Eyes shall be afflicted with sights of ghastly Spirits: thy curious Eares shall be aftrighted with hydeous noyse of howling divels . . . ."^[144] Whatever the costs, the show must go on.

Ambivalences similarly generate contradictions in Jean Pierre Camus's 1632 A Draught of Eternitie , which warns "that the damned shall be in thicker obscurities than those of Egipt, and that the tempest of darknes shall possesse them for ever. . . . the eyes of the damned, though otherwise capable of sight, see nothing but that which may trouble and torment them."^[145] Indeed, Camus does cite St. Thomas's argument "that the non-esse being considered purely in it selfe, is the evil of evils, and the most miserable condition imaginable," before going on to insist that hell must somehow be worse.^[146] When Camus defines hell as "the accursed denne, where DEATH doth eternally inhabite," it sounds almost indistinguishable from the annihilationist grave. Moreover, when he attempts to conjure up that hell, it looks suspiciously like a displacement offcars about the mere decay of the corpse, as he himself seems uneasily aware: "Thence that immortall worme , which incessantly shall gnaw them, mentioned by ISAY, a worme which S. THOMAS, and all the Doctors hold to be spirituall, not corporall. . . ."^[147]

Evidence of this kind of slippage is crucial to my argument that the pious terror of damnation increasingly served as a disguise for the blasphemous terror of annihilation. Though the conventional wisdom expressed in one of Thomas Adams's sermons—"Yes, rather had they bee dead with out sense, then alive in torment"^[148] —reflects a sincere and widespread belief, it does not reflect all facets of the Renaissance psyche. It was true for Milton's Moloch, but not for his Satan, and perhaps not

for his Adam either. At the 1601 Rakow Colloquy, the Socinian idea that the damned would eventually be utterly annihilated was defended on the grounds that "it should be considered much more absurd if the wicked were given immortality, which is a most special gift and blessing of God."^[149] Thomas Tuke thinks it worth asserting that "forso much as the soule doth survive the bodie, and live, when it is dead, it should comfort men against the dread, that death brings with it. For they shall not be Nothing , nor Nowhere ."^[150] It is suggestive in this regard that, as tomb sculpture was explicitly exempted from Parliamentary attacks on superstitious monuments, so images of the Last Judgment enjoyed a surprising immunity from Protestant iconoclasm in general.^[151] Perhaps the annihilationist fear of perpetual blindness, already exacerbated by Reformation theology, was too disturbing to be left unrelieved by visual treatment of the scene where the dead are restored to their senses.

Protestant theology made it difficult to describe the experience of heaven as anything other than a negation of earthly experience: "The state of the bodie shall bee such as no labours or sorrowes shall seaze any more uppon it . . . the slaverie of sinne shall no more take holde of it, the flesh . . . shal no more overcrowe it, it being then at quiethesse with the spirit."^[152] In Marvell's "Dialogue," the shepherd Thyrsis answers Dorinda's request for a description of life in Elysium with another series of negations and obliviations:

Oh, there's neither hope nor fear,
There's no wolf, no fox, no bear.
No need of dog to fetch our stray,
Our Lightfoot we may give away;
No oat-pipe's needful; there thy ears
May sleep with music of the spheres.
(lines 21–26)

When another notable Puritan poet attempts to depict Death frighteningly in Paradise Lost , he speaks of

                                                    The other shape,
If shape it might be call'd that shape had none
Distinguishable in member, joint or limb,
Or substance might be call'd, that shadow seem'd,
For each seem'd either; black it stood as Night. . . .^[153]

Having foresworn ritual and idolatry, Puritans must have found death a difficult idea to contain.

As "The variety of Monuments hath often obscured true graves" (Browne, p. 290), so a variety of rituals have served to obscure true

death. The familiar Renaissance ars moriendi was part of an elaborate cultural construction designed to block our view of nothingness. Voluminous meditations focused on the moment of dying as artful performance, thus putting the emphasis on technique rather than implications, on the doorway rather than the house of eternity. Most recent studies of death in Renaissance culture accept a basic Renaissance strategy of denial when they accept the rituals surrounding death as if they were death itself, and as if the moment of death could therefore subsume the eternity that follows.^[154] Royal figures from Mary to Charles I, and cultural celebrities from More to Essex to Ralegh, rehearsed stage business and scripted one-liners to impress the crowds at their executions; ordinary people studied how to stage edifying death-bed dramas for their families; all as if the right kind of death could somehow defeat mortality itself. Precisely because of their theatrical and manipulative aspects, these performances must not be taken as simply the outward expressions of an inward Christian assurance. Indeed, they invite us to examine other scripts composed in the same culture, to see whether they were staged as part of, or as critique of, the same urgent task: to sustain a distinction between death and annihilation.

Outline

Having introduced the skull, I now present the skeleton. This book turns first to canonical English Renaissance drama, seeking to transcribe a half-stifled cry of protest by the increasingly valued human individual against personal extinction at death. The plays suggest considerable uncertainty about the prospects of Christian afterlife, if only by searching so earnestly for alternative models of salvation and permanence. The plays then interrogate those alternative models, exposing their contradictions and insufficiencies. In the absence of a salvational theology, there are two usual ways of participating in the ancient human quest for immortality. One is to die for the ancestors' cause, renewing a heroic tribal tradition by refusing to compromise for mere survival; this symbolic defiance of death is proposed and challenged in The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet . The other way is to renew the ancestors' likeness through procreation, in a compromise with death; this solution is proposed by the genre of comedy, with its emphasis on types and procreation, challenged in Measure for Measure , and bitterly abandoned in Macbeth .

Beneath the surface horror of Renaissance revenge-tragedy lies the reassuring implication that death is a contingent event, and that even if death occurs, it can be cured by destroying its immediate agent. Efficient cause masks first cause; mourning becomes effectual. The villain of revenge-tragedy, like the Vice of morality drama, provides a satisfyingly localized and assailable scapegoat for our inward mortal frailties. The Spanish Tragedy plays to these fantasies, but also raises some troubling questions about the validity of the metonymic scheme by which we imagine rescuing the people we love from death, and thereby about the entire scheme by which Christ supposedly rescues us from death by taking our place in its clutches.

In Hamlet , Shakespeare further excavates and examines this submerged premise of blood-revenge. As mortality progressively enforces its sovereignty, the only sanctuary is a stoic notion of honor which manifests itself variously as the father within (the superego), the father without (the ghost), or the father above (the Christian God). These paternal mandates provide the only alternative to despair, yet to obey them is to submit to an "illusion" that finally renews only death. By inviting a skeptical examination of this social function of denial, Hamlet challenges our common willingness to let the ghosts of our fathers tell us to kill and die defending fantasies of immortality.

Measure for Measure , like many Renaissance marriage-comedies, offers the figurative immortality offered by procreation as an alternative to literal Christian immortality. Shakespeare, however, seems intent on exposing procreation as a means of perpetuating, not the individual, but a group and a genotype that exploit the illusion of personal immortality. What are happy demographic solutions for the society as a whole never quite eclipse the psychologically terrible redundancy they imply for the individual caught in the cycles of nature. Macbeth reprises this argument in a more imagistic mode, converting its surface concern with royal succession into a parable about the ways time exposes the futility of our aspirations toward individual importance. In both plays, beneath the seeming benevolence of divine justice, natural order, and political legitimacy looms an uncaring machine allied with mere biological process.

The tendency to seek immortality through the physical legacy of progeny (conventionally construed as a female project) thus receives no more convincing an endorsement in Shakespearean drama than the tendency to seek immortality through the legacies of name and power (conventionally male concerns). Healthy and orderly reproduction, the

ideal so relentlessly pursued in Measure for Measure and Macbeth , proves no less illusory than the motivating ghost in Hamlet , no less dependent on pietistic deception and denial. A radically communal solution to death is no more satisfactory than a radically individualist one.

Unless we stage a quixotic rebellion against material reality, we remain subject to the relentless, mindless logic of biological nature. Believing in ghosts is arguably a destructive pathology, yet accepting our status as material and mortal beings hardly assures happiness and ethical progress. According to Freud, the undoing of neurotic repression through psychotherapy could promise only to turn "hysterical misery into common unhappiness";^[155] similarly, undoing the denial of death may only replace the haunted world of Hamlet with the pain and sorrow of King Lear , at once extraordinary and all too common. A world of cyclical violence gives way to an entropic universe in which nothing will come of something. The final scene of this most final of tragedies systematically undoes the mythologies that represent death as curable, tolerable, or in any legitimate way consolable. All we are left with is the bare necessity of our denial. Nahum Tare—the playwright whose happyending revision of King Lear held the stage exclusively, by popular demand, for over 150 years—was English culture's equivalent of the individual's protective superego, the agency of denial. That superego imposes a lie, as Tate imposes a corrupted text; yet to read the world any other way is to risk losing our moral bearings completely. Though considerations of space and morale have dissuaded me from treating King Lear extensively in this book, it should be acknowledged here as the brooding absent presence of my argument.

The story of King Lear would certainly seem a period to such as love not sorrow. But always to make Shakespeare the end of the story, the moral of the story, and the bridge to modern skepticism is much too facile. Most of the "alternative Shakespeares" critics have recently generated seem designed to prove that, in our modern academic enlightenment, we all understand what only he knew then, a newly decodable message about semiotic indeterminacy, women's disempowerment, or the material base. Shakespeare is handy for revisionist cultural historians, since his multivocal genius can be made to speak against itself and to speak across all the apparent gaps of cultural history. To make my argument proof of anything more than the elusive and illusionist qualities of Shakespeare's art, as they empower the ironizing critic, I thought it important to look also at canonical authors who were more closely associated with the orthodox Christian thought

of the period, and were working in a genre inherently more univocal than drama.

The second half of the book therefore studies another literary form characteristic of Jacobean culture: the Metaphysical lyric, as practiced by John Donne and George Herbert, which provides further evidence of literature's uneasy complicity in a conspiracy to obstruct mortal terror. By combining these studies of drama and poetry into a single book, I hope to demonstrate cultural patterns that extend beyond a single author or genre. The pursuit of immortality through symbolic abstraction links the revenge tragedies to Donne; the acceptance of cyclical renewal and bodily destiny links the plays of progeny to Herbert.

Many of Donne's trademark gestures—his conceited valedictory departures, his pursuit of an abstract mutuality with his beloved, his misogyny when that mutuality falters—can be productively read as displacements of his anxieties about his mortal body. His egoism would have made him especially susceptible to the annihilationist fears of his culture, and his secular lyrics reveal a desperate and elaborate mythmaking in which erotic love compulsively undertakes the salvational work ordinarily performed by Christianity.

Herbert, by contrast, seems ostentatiously unanxious about death, yet that very ostentation suggests an effort to answer an unspeakable terror—if not for himself, then for his troubled compatriots. In The Temple , this country parson repeatedly constructs his lyrics as models of salvation, surrogates of immortality. As linear sequence consumes these fragile, beautiful entities, they fall not into an endless silence but into the saving eternal word of God; the white space is heaven and not oblivion. In this way the formal structures of the poetry abet its explicit Christian argument by insisting on the distinction between physical closure and spiritual termination.

Since the current critical climate encourages reading Renaissance literature in relation to monarchs, it seems worth noting that the works I have identified with radical symbolic solutions to the problem of mortality—The Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet , and most of Donne's erotic lyrics—were written in the second half of Queen Elizabeth's reign; at a time, in other words, when the idea of perpetuity at the center of the society had to be invested in ingenious and sometimes violent assertions of the Virgin Queen's inviolability. Perhaps English culture was preparing the society for a metaphysical succession. The works I have identified with a contrastingly simple idea of filial renewal, and the biological mode of immortality—Measure for Measure, Macbeth , and Herbert's The

Temple —were instead written under Stuart monarchs who had sons ready to sustain the royal identity indefinitely into the future.

Clearly this book could have gone on indefinitely as well, but unredeemed death is hardly a topic to live with. Some obvious examples, such as Webster and Burton, remain untouched; but obvious examples are not the best ones if the goal is to demonstrate the way annihilationism manifests itself through evasive resistances. The fact that the fears become more explicit in Caroline authors helps verify my suspicion that it was nascent in Jacobean ones; but explicit statements, by definition, need no explication, and I will leave them to speak for themselves. The only others I try to speak for are the two women discussed in my Epilogue, whose deathbed crises not only confirm that Christian faith was far from stable in Tudor-Stuart England, but also suggest that it sometimes exacerbated rather than alleviated the pain of mortality.

If the book has any ethical thrust, it arises from the suspicion that the dogs of war are still being loosed, and the knots of repression are still being tied, in order to sustain and conceal the conspiracy of faith. This occurs not only through explicit religious inquisitions, but also through compulsive efforts to verify the fantasy that mortal erasure is the fate of an unworthy Other, a fantasy that societies regularly enforce by attacking competing societies and alternative cultures, that men enforce by silencing women, that humans enforce by casually enslaving other animals—and that we at times enforce against ourselves, by repressing our bodily existence. Popular drama, a public and collaborative form, primarily explores the ethical and political diseases produced by the need to disbelieve in mortality. Lyric poetry, generally a more private and individual expression, primarily explores the psychological diseases produced by the same need. Together they allow an investigation of the causes and costs of the denial of death.

Criticism and Christianity

If I were to say that I had devoted myself to the study of the
Christian religion because nothing else can so effectually
rescue the lives and minds of men from those two detestable
curses, slavery and superstition. . . . If I communicate the
result of my inquiries to the world at large . . . with a friendly
and benignant feeling towards mankind . . . I hope to meet
with a candid reception from all parties, and that none at least

will take unjust offence, even though many things should be
brought to light which will at once be seen to differ from
certain received opinions.^[156]

To fill up the Measure of their Iniquities, as Menasse Ben
Israel informs us, the Hereticks endeavored to draw the
inspired Authors also into a Society and Partnership of their
Atheism and Infidelity.^[157]

Is it possible to suggest that Christianity has controlled academic discourse concerning canonical Renaissance literature, or to question more generally the validity of religiosity in critical practices, without courting sharp animosity and charges of reductionism? The question may seem odd, since the proportion of evangelical Christians among American university professors is doubtless far below the national average, and fundamentalist students have often found their perspective unwelcome in elite classrooms. Yet Christianity, as Jonathan Culler observes, has enjoyed a peculiar exemption from the kinds of critique now commonly visited on other cultural institutions.^[158] Seeing little tact or profit in stirring this hornets' nest, and fearful perhaps of aggravating the anti-intellectualism of the American mainstream, even non-Christian historicists have located the agencies of reaction and repression in adjacent practices, rather than in religion itself. When they enumerate the crimes of a cultural colonialism that travelled under the banner of Christianity, for example, or argue that the Christianized Chain of Being model protected an unjust political status quo, critics still tend to imply that Christianity has been distorted and abused by secular forces; that despite its emphasis on punishment and submission, authority and hierarchy, Christianity should be presumed innocent of the crimes committed in its name; that the problem lies in the materialist exploitation of religion, rather than in the tendencies religion empowers within the human psyche.

Nothing as complex in its history and implications as Christianity could be proven basically destructive—or basically anything else. In fact, in their search for a repressive hegemony to condemn, New Historicists have generally ignored the progressive aspects of the church's influence.^[159] Citing occasions when institutional Christianity has seemingly betrayed its own principles—Crusades, Inquisitions, affiliation with genocidal campaigns of various sorts—is considered acceptable, if a little trite. After all, the Reformation itself implied that institutional Christianity is a paradox if not an oxymoron, that the church tends to betray the

original principles of the Gospel. But publicly questioning the intellectual validity of religiosity itself is commonly viewed as a violation of privacy, perhaps even as an incitement to holy war.

When different beliefs collide, they are bound to compete. Even when they make no explicit attempt to conquer each other, their very juxtaposition does violence to a deep human need to understand one's own belief-system as something more than an arbitrary choice. The controversial campaigns for multicultural sensitivity on campuses often overlook the contrary priorities of universities and cultures: universities exist largely to encourage the testing of ideas against other ideas (by a common standard of rationalism), whereas cultures exist largely for the sake of providing the human mind with stable and coherent explanations.^[160] The benign tone of contemporary mainstream Christianity, and the popular consensus supporting it, often conceal the fundamental aggressiveness it shares with other belief-systems. This produces a double standard whereby audible assertions of atheism strike most observers as a tasteless and even malicious affront to Christian believers, whereas ordinary assertions of Christian belief are considered nothing other than the practice of spiritual freedom. The pietism of most studies of Donne and Herbert is no more dangerous than a crèche in front of City Hall at Christmastime, but perhaps no less dangerous, either. The fact that such gestures are not generally seen as sectarian and exclusionary is precisely what proves they are part of a drift toward spiritual coercion.

The study of religion seems to be emerging from its strange eclipse in Renaissance cultural studies. Some critics have surely been deterred from this topic by the massive reading in classical languages that it has always demanded, as well as by the recognition that scholarly glory is now usually won by trumping the past, not by following its strong suits. New Historicists may have had further cause to avoid the topic of religion, since they seek to expose the conspiracies and mythographic disguises of established power, and Christian religion was explicitly a conspiracy that felt no need to disguise its reliance on pure belief. Furthermore, New Historicism commonly seeks to expose the way hegemonies of power in a society secretly construct the moral interiority of individuals, and again Christianity was unabashedly explicit about that project.

But surely the interrogation of the way official power redefined extreme punishment as a manifestation of its own benevolence would apply corrosively to the very heart of Christianity, which can function as a religion of forgiveness only because it is founded on a religion of

punishment. Like the other controlling agencies, Christianity generates the subversion it calls sin to enable the containment it calls grace; it demands our grateful submission because it forgives the inward crimes it has invented and authorized itself to discipline. What if the formulaic New Historicist essay that begins with a stunningly gruesome narrative of execution were to begin instead with one of the no less horrible descriptions of Crucifixion, or gloating descriptions of damnation, from the period? Why do critics who freely make English Renaissance writers into sophisticated Marxists, deconstructionists, and French feminist Freudians, suppose those same writers utterly incapable of questioning the premises, purposes, and moral validity of these holy terrors, which imprinted themselves on the bodies as well as the minds of so many people? That sort of questioning would have been a logical outgrowth, not only of Protestant accusations against the Roman church, but also of the special miseries the resulting schism imposed on Elizabethans. Yet with few exceptions,^[161] New Historicists have proven reluctant to inquire into the dynamics of that cultural negotiation, where materialist philosophy rather than material competition becomes the engine of potential subversion. Considering the extensive skepticism of the Jacobeans and the extraordinary religiosity of most Americans,^[162] one may wonder whether the argument that our secular culture must not presume to interpret the Renaissance in our own terms is itself partly an act of denial, an effort by intellectuals to project aspects of contemporary America that do not fit our image of a secular state into an Other culture where they can be safely contained.

Moreover, other methodologies arguably better suited to criticize religion have swerved carefully around it. The tacit agreement to do so becomes most evident in the public gauntlet imposed on those who violate it. Jonathan Culler cites the example of William Empson, whose resistance to the pietism of English criticism was dismissed by Denis Donoghue in the T.L.S. as "the most tedious part of [Empson's] mind," and "not the work of a gentleman."^[163] Robert Adams's review of Culler's book in the U.S. equivalent of the powerful T.L.S. , the New York Review of Books , calls the chapter defending Empson "a youthfully harsh assault on religion, primarily Christian religion."^[164] The similarity of Donoghue's response and Adams's is revealing. Both seem to say, there is of course something undeveloped about these non-religious sensibilities; we all know it, and hardly need to say a further word about it.

In a widely anthologized essay, C. S. Lewis dismisses atheism and related skepticisms as "boys' philosophies," a phrase he likes so well he

says it again, contrasting these "boys' philosophies" to the obvious "manliness" of Manichaean and (especially) Anglican belief.^[165] To call such ad puerum arguments logically weak is only half the story; the other half is the presumption of a cultural dominance that will protect the weaknesses from serious challenge. Even these leading intellectuals seem to prefer the intimidating power of popular consensus to free debate; even in the secular academy, the atheistical hypothesis must struggle for a fair hearing. This is probably an unexamined legacy from the first half of this century, when literary criticism (particularly of the earlier periods) was dominated by two groups: devout Christians, and Jews wary of losing their tiny crevices of entry into the traditional academy. Particularly in English departments, secular American critics still often feel obligated to try to pass for erudite Edwardian vicars.^[166] The time has come to re-examine that legacy, and perhaps to repair the historically conditioned imbalance. The tone struck by Denis Donoghue and C.S. Lewis—somewhere between snide and regretful—is reminiscent of the anti-Semitism pervasive in British aristocratic culture, which associates Judaism with vulgarity, or at best with an undeveloped Christianity. The fist is rather more velvet than most of those by which entrenched beliefsystems have historically attacked dissenters, but it is still a fist; and it seems prudent to confront the problem before the next time the gloves come off.

Such a confrontation may seem small-minded and mean-spirited when Christianity is understood as a faith preciously and privately held by one's neighbors; yet, when it is understood as a dominant idea and practice of society, not to question it seems irresponsible. In another prominent review, Donoghue concludes his attack on several recent studies of the Bible as literature by wondering wistfully why such critics would want "to offend people who choose to live their lives in religious terms, in community and prayer. Why not leave them alone?"^[167] The few critics who offer a dissenting view of the most powerful book in our culture suddenly appear as an arrogant and brutish horde battering down the walls of the last monastery and torturing the mild charitable monks.

The intention of this book is certainly not to insult Christian believers by despoiling their relics, nor even to pretend that Christianity is irrelevant in the study of Jacobean literature. I have assumed, however, that religious responses to death can be analyzed as psychological responses, in a particular historical matrix, to hard facts that are largely beyond history. This argument depends on a Freudian model of the

divided psyche to this extent: it supposes that a mind devoted on one level to Christian faith could find itself in frequent subliminal skirmishes against the demurrals of another, more skeptical part of that mind. This hardly strikes me as a radical proposition; in fact, it seems fundamental to Renaissance Christianity, from Calvin to Hooker.^[168] One Jacobean cleric wrote an entire book using the precedent of Doubting Thomas to legitimize the doubts his fellows were evidently reluctant to admit, doubts particularly about resurrection, a doctrine he admitted ran against all reason: "unbelief possesseth men every manner of way, and there is no man in the world altogether free from it, though it be a great deal more in some than other."^[169] Another reminds us, "We must know that these two thoughts, There is a God , and there is no God , may be, and are both in one and the same heart. . . ."^[170] Burton's discussion of atheistic despair in The Anatomy of Melancholy similarly concedes "that no living man is free from such thoughts in part."^[171] Yet several colleagues have already felt compelled to remind me that these authors were, after all, Christians in a Christian land, and so any traces of annihilationism I detect in their writings must result from my anachronistic misreadings.

Implicit endorsements from canonical authors are precious commodities, claimed (through explication or biography) by interpreters working on behalf of many competing belief-systems—including several, such as psychoanalysis, not ordinarily considered religious. Presumably my mistrust of institutional religion partly impels me to retrieve these Renaissance authors from their supposedly uncompromised allegiance to Christian doctrine.^[172] As I believe that literature should be more than a mystified symptom of social illness, an artifact dispensed and manipulated by critics, so I believe that spiritual life should be more than an evasive maneuver provoked by the threat of personal annihilation, a consolation dispensed and manipulated by an institutional church.

Finally, I believe that a scholar's duty toward the cultural consensus is in large part the duty of an opposition party—even if that only means keeping power honest, keeping the social incentives to any consensus from exaggerating the factual basis of that consensus. There is as much enlightenment to be gained in the undoing of denial as in the filling of ignorance; the ideas and truths lost in the daily process of collective cultural repression are probably as many and as precious as in the imperfect process of cultural transmission over centuries. Since the fear of personal annihilation has generated a large part of that repression, I have tried to use my grasp of English Renaissance literature to lift up

(with all the discomfort this metaphor implies) a corner of the vault in which the fact of death still lies hidden.

Envoy

Assure thy selfe, whosoever readeth this booke, that ere many
yeares, or decades of months be past, Death (mounted on his
pale horse) will rap at thy doore, and alight, & carry thee
away (bound head and foote) to a land darke as darknesse it
selfe.^[173]

 . . . how many physitians who once looked so grimme, and so
tetrically shrunk their browes upon their patients, are dead
and gone themselves. How many Astrologers, after that in
great ostentation they had foretold the death of some others;
how many Philosophers after so many elaborate tracts and
volumes concerning either mortalitie, or immortalitie. . . .^[174]

If I were to say I am dying, and in this I am not any different from you, it might sound sensationalistic; yet anyone could justly make that pronouncement. Three important premises of this book follow from that fact. The first is that, particularly in relation to mortality, human beings have a great deal in common. The second is that language can capture some of those connections, meaning that my experience can bear on yours, and those of Jacobean authors can bear on ours. The third is that, in speaking about mortality, submission will always appear to carry a subtext of bravado, and bravado of submission.

To hold a psychoanalytic view of the self and an annihilationist view of the universe is to suspect that most stable forms of human happiness depend on skillful self-deception, and that most stubborn forms of mental illness arise from self-deceptions so awkward that they must be defended fanatically. But is there any heroic middle ground to be claimed by staring into the face of a God who is not there? A New Yorker cartoon by Edward Koren shows a huge toothy monster hovering ominously over a cozy suburban couple, who are telling friends seated on the opposite sofa, "We deal with it by talking about it." Writing this book has been that kind of ludicrously inadequate gesture toward mastery. Perhaps (in the tradition of Everyman as well as Montaigne) I am maintaining an unpleasant vigil on the grounds that death comes when least anticipated, as in childhood I forestalled nightmares by deliberately going to sleep with the most frightening possible images in

my conscious mind, a concession which dissuaded them from attacking in the subconscious realm of dreams.^[175]

In retrospect, my ostensibly objective research has been shaped by personal concerns. The son of a psychologist and a literary critic, I wrote an ambitious book of psychoanalytic criticism claiming that Shakespeare's ambitious young men always submit to their heritage in the effort to transcend it. As a tenure decision approached, I wrote a book of practical criticism about the strategies of professional literary competition; in arguing that Ben Jonson outpositioned rival playwrights by placing their characters belittlingly in his own satiric context, I repeatedly positioned rival Jonson critics belittlingly in the context of my own overarching theory. This is not to imply that nothing is now left for me but death; only that I decided to approach this pattern more honestly this time, or at least more actively, and to see whether Renaissance literature could help me confront fears that have weighed on me since childhood.

Surely I am not alone in this, and I could probably have spared the Jacobeans by seeking a support group in my own social world, but embarrassment forbade me to confess such sophomoric concerns. That same embarrassment, however, helped me recognize the taboos by which my own culture keeps this unspeakable topic unspoken, and to recognize that Renaissance writers might have been circumventing an earlier and fiercer version of that taboo. In the past few years, when asked what I was working on, I have been able to answer with a single conversation-staggering syllable: "death." After an instant of blinking silence, most people react with concern for my health; scholars often follow that with warnings about anachronism. Both those reactions bespeak denial, the belief that we have "no need to trouble [ourselves] with any such thoughts yet" (as Mistress Quickly told the dying Falstaff about God), or that we have no need to trouble ourselves about them any more (as the modern technological approach to the body often seems to suggest).

But I have always loathed the macabre, and now that the book is nearly finished, I am relieved to see that it is less about death itself than about "the feare of death, which presseth us all our life,"^[176] and less about the fear of death than about what that fear allows us to examine: the ways culture helps us place our circumscribed individual experience satisfactorily in a seemingly infinite and indifferent universe. The ways a culture handles, not the material problems of death, but the psychological problems of mortality, is a window into the way human beings construct a world they can travel in, whatever their actual destination.