1. Compare Imre Lakatos, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes , ed. John Worrall and Gregory Currie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), and Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), on the pattern of scientific revolutions. Checking these notes at a makeshift outdoor table less than two days after the largest earthquake in modern Los Angeles history, and less than two miles from its epicenter, I cannot resist offering the analogy to the steady movement of tectonic plates that manifests itself in sporadic violent shifts.

2. James L. Calderwood's characteristically fresh and insightful Shakespeare and the Denial of Death (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987) builds directly on Becker, as does Kirby Farrell's thoughtful Play, Death, and Heroism in Shakespeare (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).

3. Andrew Marvell, "A Dialogue between Thyrsis and Dorinda," lines 1-4, in The Complete Poems , ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 21.

4. Thomas Heywood, A True Discourse of the Two infamous upstart Prophets (London, 1636), p. 7; cf. Richard Hooker, Works , ed. Jan Keble (New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), II, 21: "With our contentions their irreligious humour also is much strengthened." The case of Mary Gunter, which will be described in my Epilogue, grimly verifies that prediction and its applicability beyond the sphere of skeptical intellectuals.

5. Foucault himself acknowledges that the fifteenth-century "substitution of the theme of madness for that of death does not mark a break, but rather a torsion within the same anxiety," and I would suggest that the anxiety may have focused primarily on personal disintegration rather than (as Foucault suggests) a cynical nihilism; see Madness and Civilization , trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage, 1973), p. 16.

Perhaps cultural critics have underestimated the continuity of human anxieties about death partly because they underestimate the continuity of selfhood assumed in earlier cultures. The fact that the invention of individuality always seems to occur during the period in which the investigator specializes should give some pause. Along with the familiar emphasis on heightened individualism in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe (in the works of Burckhardt and his followers), the scholarly world has been treated to extensive claims (in the works of Colin Morris, Philippe Ariès, Joel Fineman, Catherine Belsey, and Francis Barker) for nascent individuality in each century from the eleventh through the seventeenth—none of which explain such powerful and various documents of continuous and interior selfhood, haunted by mortal frailty, as Oedipus Rex , the Book of Job, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and the Confessions of Saint Augustine. Indeed, the doctrine of resurrection, as articulated by the church fathers and the scholastics, would have made little sense if individual identity had been as attenuated as is now sometimes claimed, On the patristic insistante that the same person is resurrected who lived, see Caroline Walker Bynum, "Material Continuity," History of Religions , 30 (1990), p. 70; on the investment in the continuity of bodily selfhood during the thirteenth century, see Bynum, p. 77.

For further instances of critics inclined to disallow modern notions of selfhood in Renaissance culture, see Reconstructing Individualism , ed. Thomas C. Heller et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986). An article by David Aers, "Reflections on Current Histories of the Subject," Literature & History (1991), pp. 20-34, has strongly refuted these claims, as has Richard Levin's characteristically sharp-edged "Unthinkable Thoughts in the New Historicizing of English Renaissance Drama," New Literary History , 21 (1990), especially pp. 436-37 and 442-44, and David Quint's admirably measured introduction to Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), especially pp. 1-5. This is not to deny that there are important fluctuations in the degree and configuration of psychological individualism, as domestic arrangements and religious practices change. But the fluctuations are subtle, and it is unlikely that they have ever completely erased the fear of personal extinction in Western culture from the Medieval period to the present. As Walter Ralegh ruefully reported, while the roles and the stages of our lives may change, "we die in earnest, that's no jest"—and we each die as ourselves. Nor would anyone have had it otherwise, even back then: "tho we may wish the prosperous Appurtenances of others, or to be an other in his happy Accidents; yet so intrinsical is every Man unto himself, that some doubt may be made, whether any would exchange his Being, or substantially become another Man" (Browne, "Letter to a Friend,'' p. 404).

6. Sigmund Freud, "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death," Complete Psychological Works , Standard ed., trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), XIV, 296 and 294, which further speculates that this primal mourner "devised a compromise; he conceded the fact of his own death as well, but denied it the significance of annihilation." My theory is that this compromise is perpetually renegotiated, in a variety of cultural languages, throughout modern Western cultures. Throughout his works, D. W. Winnicott insists that basic human psychological crises remain similar in virtually any historical setting.

7. See, for example, Browne, Religio Medici , p. 116: "I say, every man hath a double Horoscope, one of his humanity, his birth; another of his Christianity, his baptisme, and from this doe I compute or calculate my Nativitie, not reckoning . . . my selfe any thing, before I was my Saviours, and inrolled in the Register of Christ."

8. Clare Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (London: Croom Helm, 1984), p. 83.

9. Michael MacDonald and Terence R. Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), pp. 15-16. The current fetishizing of the boundary between life and death is evident in arguments and trials about doctor-assisted suicide.

10. Phillipe Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present , trans. Patricia Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 138, discusses the emergence of autobiographical elements from the twelfth century onward. Gittings, p. 33, argues that "From the early fourteenth century . . . the name of the person commemorated was now displayed on the monument," and speculates that this change was "symptomatic of a growing emphasis on the individual." On p. 144 she cites evidence that, in seventeenthcentury Kent, "ordinary people as well as their social superiors'' increasingly sought tombstones; and on p. 148 she argues that "the type of remembrance of the deceased fostered by epitaphs underwent a striking change during the early modern period," placing less emphasis on genealogy and social role, and more on personal qualities. Peter Burke, "Death in the Renaissance, 1347-1656," in Dies Illa: Death in the Middle Ages , ed. Jane H. M. Taylor, Vinaver Studies in French (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1984), p. 60, sees in Burckhardt's Renaissance an emphasis on "the modern sense of fame," exemplified by the increasing emphasis on tombs. In the elegies collected by Anthony Stafford, Honour and Vertue, Triumphing over the Grave (London, 1640), a "Jo. Goad." writes, "For though here lyes the Corps of Stafford dead, / His Name and Epitaph can't be Buried" (sig. S4r); contrast Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Meditations , trans. Meric Casaubon (London, 1634), VI, 42: "Nay they that have not so much as a Name remaining, what are they the worse for it?"

11. When John Donne finds himself suffering a sickness unto death, he wonders why God would forbid "those, that serve thee in holy services , to doe any office about the dead "; he then decides to "satisfie my selfe with this; that in those times  . . . a great part of the Idolatry of the Nations , flowed from . . . an over-zealous celebrating , and over-studious preserving of the memories , and the Pictures of some dead persons ." From this he manages to derive a needed assurance resisted by his own strict Protestant reading of the Bible: that God "dost certainly allow that we should doe offices of piety to the dead " (Devotions, pp. 93-94). Theo Brown, The Fate of the Dead: A Study in Folk-Eschatology in the West Country after the Reformation (Ipswich: D.S. Brewer, 1979), p. 15ff., cites the Reformation rejection of "Popish superstitions" about the dead as the cause of various anxious folk-practices of this period. What Brown perceives leaking out into folk-culture, I believe is visible in canonical high-culture as well. On the impact a strict Reformation theology would have on our consoling rituals surrounding death, see Glen W. Davidson, "In Search of Paradigms: Death and Destiny in Seventeenth-Century North America," in Religious Encounters with Death , ed. Frank Reynolds and Earle Waugh (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1977), p. 229, describing the stark prayerless burials practiced by New World Puritans. Browne, p. 67, lists among his heresies one ''which I did never positively maintaine or practice, but have often wished it had been consonant to Truth, and not offensive to my Religion, and that is the prayer for the dead."

12. Robert Pricke, A Verie Godlie and Learned Sermon (London, 1608), sig. Flr.

13. Pricke, sig. D1v.

14. Norman T. Burns, Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 39-89. Richard Greenham, Workes , ed. H. Holland, 3d ed. (London, 1601), p. 3, tells of a man taught by the Familists "that there was no God"; and several sects taught that this life held the only true heaven.

15. Burns, p. 59.

16. Giles Firmin, Real Christian ; quoted in John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 58.

17. See, for example, Donne's Holy Sonnet "If Poysonous Mineralls"; Herbert's lyrics "Nature" and "Good Friday"; and Jacob Boehme's 1622 prayer: "Receive Thou me into Thy Death! Strike down my self-assumed I-ness so that no longer do I live, since sin is the only active [thing] within me!"; The Way to Christ (1622), trans. John J. Stoudt (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), pp. 11-12 ( De Poenitentia Vera , I, 19). The doubter in Richard Sault's A Conference Betwixt a Modern Atheist and his Friend (London, 1693) complains that the soul will lack individuality after death.

18. Theodore Spencer, Death and Elizabethan Tragedy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), p. 138.

19. Browne, p. 111. In a 1627 wedding sermon Donne describes marriage as "a second and a suppletory eternity , in the continuation and propagation of Children," but only for the purpose of contrasting it with the condition of resurrected angels, who need no such supplement (VIII, 99). Stafford's eulogy remarks that humankind "is onely immortall here below by succession" (p. 84), and Jo. Castillian's elegy lamenting Stafford's dying without progeny expresses the failure of a similar hope: "Thy soule might still have liv'd, in others breath, / Whose single life, is now a numerous death" (sig. Q2v).

20. Browne, p. 61. Locke used travel literature to dispute Edward Herbert's argument that God was a universal and therefore innate and therefore true idea; see David Berman, "The repressive denials of atheism in Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries," in Royal Irish Academy Proceedings , vol. 82, sec. C, no. 9 (Dublin, 1982), p. 241.

21. William Leigh, The Christians Watch (London, 1605), sig. E4r, claims that "The beastely Epicures"—familiar villains in Jacobean anti-atheistical tracts—were "doubly damned in their thoughts for that they deem'd soules mortall, and worldes immortal."

22. Mary Beth Rose, The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 175; see also Robert N. Watson, "Tragedy," in The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama , ed. A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 301-51. Spencer, pp. 15-16, links Renaissance tragedy to Renaissance realism.

23. Christopher Walter, "Death in Byzantine Iconography," Eastern Churches Review , 8 (1976), p. 144, argues that "The chief consolation which Antiquity could offer, faced with the fact of death, was that heroes also had to undergo this awful experience."

24. C. John Somerville, The Secularization of Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 179.

25. Roy W. Battenhouse, Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Christian Premises (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), p. 133. For a recent example particularly relevant to my argument, see Arthur Kirsch's review of Calderwood's Shakespeare and the Denial of Death in Shakespeare Quarterly , 40 (1989), pp. 348-49.

26. T. Stocker, trans., An excellent treatise of the Immortalytie of the Soule by John Calvin (London, 1581), sig. A2r.

27. John Proctor, The Fal of the late Arrian (1549), sig. A8v.

28. John Calvin, Institutes , II.viii.9; quoted by Richard Strier, Love Known (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 177.

29. Pricke, sig. Aa1v.

30. Thomas Jackson, A Treatise (London, 1625), p. 31; Jeremy Corderoy, A Warning for Worldlings (London, 1608), sig. A4v.

31. The contrast with several Asian cultures which devalue individuality and make annihilation the desideratum of their theology is instructive.

32. Freud, "Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious," VIII, passim.

33. Pricke, sig. C1v.

34. This general idea of culture bears some resemblance to M. M. Bakhtin's "chronotope," a way of formulating space and time; see The Dialogic Imagination , trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). It may be objected that the theocentric Renaissance world-view safely proscribed such dizzying infinities, but in fact Donne's sermons are rich in examples. See also Jean Pierre Camus, A Draught of Eternitie , trans. Miles Car (Douay, 1632), which suggests, in a morally conventional section-heading, "That all the evill in the world, comes from want of thinking of Eternity" (p. 8). Camus's closer analysis, however, suggests that this is a draught in which we might easily drown: "Now Eternitie being of this nature, who sees not, that no definition can comprehend or compasse that, which in it selfe hath no bound'' (p. 47).

35. John Dove, A Confutation of Atheism (London, 1605), sig. B2r. The pun on matrix is suggestive: the mother is the primal source of order and harmony for most infant psyches.

36. This version of the social contract remains in force beyond the grave—perhaps especially there. According to Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 323, in return for the prayers intended to help the dying person navigate the beyond, that person "was expected to affirm the common framework of value and belief by manifesting orthodox faith and the approved signs of piety." Ariès, p. 604, approaches my viewpoint in asserting that "The ritualization of death is a special aspect of the total strategy of man against nature," but he understands nature primarily as the jungle that sometimes surrounds the individual and the sporadic unruly emotions within, overlooking the perpetual struggle to conquer the wilderness of a mental landscape overrun by unsorted data from the entire external world.

37. The Works of Francis Bacon (London: C. & J. Rivington, 1826), VIII, 7-78.

38. Ronald Levao, Renaissance Minds and Their Fictions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. xvii.

39. Lynn White, "Death and the Devil," in The Darker Vision of the Renaissance , ed. Robert S. Kinsman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), p. 26, argues that the Renaissance "was the most psychically disturbed era in European history," its only rival being "the late Hellenistic and Roman period, with its . . . rapid spread of the concept of an afterlife of either bliss or eternal torture."

40. Abraham Darcie, "The World's Contempt," in Frances Duchesse Dowager of Richmond & Lenox her Funerall Teares (London, 1624), sig. Bb4v.

41. Heinz Kohut, How Does Analysis Cure? , ed. Arnold Goldberg and Paul Stepansky (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 3; his Restoration of the Self (New York: International Press, 1981), pp. 102-14; and D. W. Winnicott, "Disintegration Anxiety," in his Psycho-Analytic Explorations , ed. Clare Winnicott et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).

42. Quoted by Berman, p. 226.

43. Quoted by Berman, p. 238. A century later Edmund Burke recognized that his warning against rebellion on behalf of some abstract principle of absolute liberty applied to the psychological as well as the political system: after "throwing off that Christian religion . . . we are apprehensive (being well aware that the mind will not endure a void) that some uncouth, pernicious, and degrading superstition might take the place of it"; quoted by Berman, p. 242.

44. Heywood, pp. 7-8.

45. Richard Bentley, The Folly of Atheism (London, 1691-92), pp. 34-35; and A Confutation of Atheism from the Origin of Humane Bodies (London, 1692), pp. 11-14.

46. King Utopus has "made the whole matter of religion an open question and left each one free to choose what he should believe. By way of exception, he conscientiously and strictly gave injunction that no one should fall so far below the dignity of human nature as to believe that souls likewise perish with the body." Thomas More, Utopia , ed. Edward Surtz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), p. 134; on the acceptance of communism, see pp. 53-55. This aversion to annihilationism may reflect More's own psychological fears. According to Richard Marius, Thomas More: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1984), p. 516, "The Catholic Church was his only assurance against hell, or worse—non-being."

47. On the argument that men became "Atheisticall naturalists" primarily to rationalize their sensual desires, see Richard Carpenter, The Soules Sentinel (London, 1616), p. 76; also Jean Paget, Meditations of Death (London, 1628), pp. 179, 416. Richard Sault, in The Second Spira , part II (London, 1693), sig. B3r, discusses "those two great Evils of Atheism and Debauchery (which usually produce one another)." Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy is an interesting variant which seems to conclude that annihilationism would lead, not to hedonism, but to mass suicide—though perhaps suicide is the hedonistic choice in the miserable world Hamlet perceives. J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (London: Edward Arnold, 1924), p. 179, suggests that ''What the Church dreaded above all in the idea of the annihilation of the personality was the consequence, accepted by the extremist mystics of all religions, that the soul absorbed in God, and therefore having no will, can no longer sin, even in following its carnal appetites. How many poor ignorant people had been dragged by such doctrines into the most abominable license."

48. Farrell, p. 133, speculates that "the patriarch appropriated the role of death himself, subjecting it to human rules. By being perfectly obedient one could hope to placate if not control death." On Winnicott's view that monarchs still help to sustain the psychic health of the British, see Peter Rudnytsky, The Psychoanalytic Vocation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 107. Becker, pp. 133 and 149, associates the wild lamentations that generally follow the assassination of political leaders with their role as immortality-surrogates; if the leader can die, then the people realize that they can too. There is also, however, an aspect of celebration in the ritualized hysteria of these mournings. Death has been made into a remarkable, even an aberrant event—and one that inspires universal worship of the victim, who lives on in the name of government buildings, a palpable body-politic replacing the natural body.

49. John Dunton (?), A Mourning-Ring in Memory of your Departed Friend (London, 1692), p. 107. Compare the Monty Python skit which uses a rather one-sided interview of several distinguished corpses to conclude that there probably isn't life after death.

50. Clearly the divided legacy of old historicism and New Criticism presents contemporary critics with a dilemma that may help to explain the division of advanced literary study into the polar camps of Marxists, to whom literature is a window into the work-house, and post-structuralists, to whom it is yet another playing-field. This is not to deny that the extremes might temporarily cooperate in exposing the constructions of social or verbal reality as arbitrary and hence open to radical revision. But the progressive vision of dialectical materialism seems incompatible with deconstructionist disavowals of authentic dialogue and ultimate points of reference. Jacques Derrida's suggestion, in "Racism's Last Word," Critical Inquiry , 12 (1985), pp. 290-99, that his semiotic system somehow attacks "apartheid" more than it does other words reveals how anxious deconstructionists can be to disguise this problem, and to claim some palpable verification for their abstract philosophical system by aligning it with an established ethical consensus.

51. Michel de Montaigne, Essays , ed. Donald Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), p. 64. Browne, Hydriotaphia , p. 314, translates this skeptical idea into his own ecstatic rhetoric: "Pious spirits . . . made little more of this world, then the world that was before it, while they lay obscure in the Chaos of pre-ordination"; Browne, p. 303, suggests that "A Dialogue between two Infants in the womb concerning the state of this world, might handsomely illustrate our ignorance of the next." For evidence that Montaigne's comments represent a twist on a standard consolatory metaphor, see Zacharie Boyd, The Last Battle of the Soul in Death (1629), ed. Gabriel Noel (Glasgow, 1831), who asserts that at death "My paines do not dismay mee, because I travaile to bring foorth eternall life," and that "The buried bodies of the Sainctes are in their grave like Babes lapped in swaddling cloathes in their cradles''; see also Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, IX, 3, comparing birth and death.

52. Compare Freud's argument that a stabilizing narcissism "would not be a perversion, but the libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of selfpreservation, a measure of which may justifiably be attributed to every living creature" (XIV, 73-74).

53. This loss is potentially quite destructive to the benevolent cross-cultural political agenda generally associated with New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. Comparably, post-structuralist exaggeration of the role of verbal forms in constructing our reality has reinforced the patronizing alienation from other species that has led to so much careless cruelty; from an animal-rights perspective, the enlightened new boss in literary theory is even more tyrannical than the old boss. The complaint is germane to the argument of this book, because that disdainful neglect of other species (either on the ground that they lack verbal language, or on the ground that they lack souls) seems to me an extension of the narcissistic compulsion to invent reasons why we are somehow exempt from the plain biological death we see visited on so many of our fellow creatures.

54. Jean E. Howard, "The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies," English Literary Renaissance , 16 (1986), pp. 21-23.

55. Los Angeles Times , June 17, 1993, p. A6.

56. Stephen Greenblatt, "Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion," in Shakespeare's "Rough Magic," ed. Peter Erickson and Coppélia Kahn (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), p. 279. Greenblatt's assertion is closely echoed in Stachniewski, p. 329: "Atheism may have been almost unthinkable."

57. Greenblatt, p. 277.

58. William Towers, Atheismus Vapulans (London, 1654), pp. 13-14. See also Robert Welcome, The State of the Godly, both in this life, and in the life to come (London, 1606), pp. 60-61—"What plainer for to stop the mouths of Atheists ye contradict ye immortality of the soul then ye saying of Christ our Lord in ye Gospel"—though he may mean Christian annihilationists rather than atheists, which would make a more logical argument. In any case, it is also clear that some defenders of faith recognized the problem with this approach: Corderoy's atheistic traveller warns his pious interlocutor that "in vaine you shall heape testimonies out of the Scripture: for if I did beleeve there were a God, I would beleeve the Scripture" (p. 38). So stupidity should not be mistaken for an epistemic limit.

59. Deposition from the Cerne Abbas commission records, in Hadrian Dorrell (?), Willobie His Avisa (1594), ed. G. B. Harrison (Edinburgh: University Press, 1966), p. 269.

60. William Sclater, A Funerall Sermon (London, 1629), p. 14.

61. Thomas Morton, A Treatise of the Nature of God (London, 1599), p. 30.

62. Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century , trans. Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), passim.

63. Martin Fotherby, Atheomastix (London, 1622), pp. 131-32. A 1685 defense of belief displays a similarly revealing circular quality, when the anonymous "Person of Honour" who presented The Atheist Unmasked claims to disprove atheism by proving that those who were not really atheists were not really atheists: "But this fear terrifies the Atheist most when he comes to dye not so much the fear of Death, as what shall become of him after Death"—by which this author means the fear of hellfire, not annihilation.

64. Samuel Ward, The Life of Faith in Death (London, 1622), p. 88.

65. Sermons , VI, 325, compares nature's abhorrence of a vacuum to the way "the devill will get into Gods roome, rather then the heart of man shall be without the opinion of God; There is no Atheist; They that oppose the true, do yet worship a false god; and hee that sayes there is no God, doth for all that, set up some God to himselfe."

66. Corderoy, p. 323, defends himself against posited readers "who thinke it not convenient, that any question should be made, whether there be any God or no, because . . . the very calling of it in question, breedeth scruples in the mindes of those, who made no question of it before." Don Cameron Allen, Doubt's Boundless Sea (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964), p. 20, cites several other instances of this pattern. David R. Riggs, in a paper delivered to the 1991 Shakespeare Association of America Convention, suggests that Christopher Marlowe may have fallen victim to a similar transaction. Somerville, p. 163 argues that the common efforts to explain away atheists by naturalistic causes such as sensual comfort or mental illness inadvertently opened religious tendencies to skeptical scientific analysis.

67. Hooker, II, 19.

68. Henrie Smith, Gods Arrowe against Atheists (London, 1593), sig. Blr-v. Similarly moralistic readings of the atheistical psyche appear in Corderoy, p. 326, and Paget, pp. 179 and 416.

69. Pricke, sig. D4r-v.

70. William Hammon, Answer to Priestly , quoted by Berman, p. 244.

71. Michael Hunter, "The Problem of 'Atheism' in Early Modern England," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , 5th Series (1985), p. 137, tries to dismiss the various assertions of atheism he finds in the period as "isolated cases of anti-religious talk," but the number and directness of the assertions make that claim difficult to sustain; and to say they are scattered is as much as to say they are widespread.

72. The historian David Wooten has theorized that Puritanism, since it identified its community only by a shared faith in God, necessarily defined anyone outside the group as atheist (David R. Riggs, personal communication). Radford Mavericke, Three treatises religiously handled (London, 1603), sig. H3v, typifies this culture's anxiety about disbelief: "worst of all, are the Nullifidians, or Atheists of our time [who] care not what religion they be, but weigh not whether there bee any religion at all, far worse than the Turkes, that acknowledge there is a God, but allow none but Mahomet to bee his prophet." Hunter notes the severity of the resistance, citing Fuller, p. 383, who insists that " Atheisme in England is more to be feared then Popery "; Donne, Sermons , IX, 145, argues that "Idolatry is better then Atheisme"; Greenham, p. 3, describes a countryman who "feared rather Atheisme than Papisme in the Realme"; and Adam Hill, The Crie of England (London, 1595), p. 32, identifies atheism as ''the sinne of all sinnes." Even the tolerant Hooker, II, 20-21, suggests that England has been "too patient" with its atheistical scoffers, and recommends "that decree of Nabuchodonosor" that made such blasphemies capital crimes.

73. Dove, sig. A3r.

74. William Perkins, Treatise of Mans Imaginations (Cambridge, 1607), pp. 50, 31, 34.

75. Fotherby, sig. B2r.

76. Thomas Adams, Sermons , ed. John Brown (Cambridge, 1909), pp. 35 and 146; Adams, The White Devil (London, 1613), p. 25.

77. Welcome, pp. 72-73.

78. Towers, pp. 3-4.

79. Sault, A Conference , sig. A2v.

80. William Birnie, The Blame of Kirk-Buriall (Edinburgh, 1606), sig. Blr. The Christian speaker in Sault's Conference , p. 30, suggests that "there are but few amongst such as are call'd Atheists, tha[t] can (if they dare think) doubt of his Existence," but that a much greater number doubt the immortality of the soul.

81. D.P. Walker, The Decline of Hell (London: Routledge, 1964), pp. 8-9, 80-81.

82. Leigh, sig. B3r.

83. Walker, pp. 40-41, discusses Bayle's futile efforts to disprove "the effectiveness of savage deterrants" such as the threat of hellfire.

84. Adams, Workes (London, 1629), p. 756. A few pages earlier Adams warns that "The day of judgement, when it comes, shall finde no Atheist. What those degenerate creatures would not believe, they shall see . . ." (p. 753; see similarly p. 412).

85. Smith, sig. B8r.

86. Hunter, XXXV, 140; see similarly, Sir George More, A Demonstration of God in His Workes (London, 1597), p. 20.

87. Samuel Gardiner, The Scourge of Sacrilege (London, 1611), sig. C3v; cf. Corderoy, sig. A4r. Sclater, p. 16, strives to exempt the man he is eulogizing from the evil of their society "wherein the doctrine of judgement is holden a fable, and nothing but a meere policy to keepe fooles in awe." Even during the Elizabethan period, this may have been a familiar perspective in some cynical academic circles (it appears in Lyly's Euphues ), and a century later Hobbes brought it fully into the open, but even then it more often took the form of a skeptical voice the author mimics for the purpose of attacking it: " Heaven, Hell, Futurity , and the Immortality of the Soul , all which are but politick Inventions of Priests and cunning Magistrates, to enrich themselves and keep the Vulgar in Awe, who are naturally Superstitious and Fearful" (Sault, Second Spira , part I, p. 5).

88. Thomas Taylor, "A Profitable Memoriall," appended to The Pilgrims Profession (1622); rpt. in his Three Treatises (London, 1633), p. 168.

89. Heinz Kohut, The Restoration of the Self (New York: International Press, 1981), p. 177, suggests that "during early psychic development a process takes place in which some archaic mental contents that had been experienced as belonging to the self become obliterated or are assigned to the area of the nonself while others are retained within the self or added to it. As a result of this process a core self . . . is established."

90. William Worship, The Christians Mourning Garment , 3d ed. (London, 1603), sig. C6r.

91. Smith, sig. Blr. Morton, p. 30, condemns true atheists as "not men but beasts in the likenesse of men."

92. Daniel Donne, A Sub-Poena from the Star-Chamber of Heaven (London, 1623), p. 54.

93. Alexander Grosse, Deaths Deliverance (London, 1632), p. 8.

94. Edward Coffin, A True Relation of the Last Sicknes and Death of Cardinall Bellarmine (1622), Epistle, pp. 3-4. A similar structure emerges in the assertion of Thomas Tuke, A Discourse of Death (London, 1613), p. 67, that "when a beast dies, his soul doth vanish, and is dissolved: but when a man dies, his soule still continues." See also Welcome, p. 56: "the soule (or life) of beasts proceeded from the same substance and matter whereof their bodies were made: but the soule of man is a spirituall and divine thing, which because it proceeded from god, must needes remaine for ever."

95. Hunter, p. 151, quotes this accusation of John Derpier in 1607.

96. Sault, A Conference , p. 2.

97. William Crompton, A Lasting Jewell for Religious Woemen (London, 1630), sig. C3r; see also Spencer, pp. 197-99, on the necrophiliac aspects of Renaissance tragedy.

98. It is interesting, in this regard, that in the later Middle Ages female saints were especially obliged to remain "incorrupt after burial"; see Bynum, p. 77.

99. Non-Entity , pp. 2-3. Donne, Sermons , IX, 405, strives to answer that "heavy charge" against Protestant theology.

100. Non-Entity , p. 154. Strikingly similar charges are levelled by Benjamin Carier, Copy of a Letter (1615), p. 41, against those who abused Catholics; they are reported to have stunk like half-rotted corpses from the moment of their death.

101. Carier, p. 3.

102. Towers, p. 108.

103. See, for example, Hunter, p. 144.

104. More, Demonstration , p. 20.

105. Quoted by Burns, p. 119, n. 42.

106. Tuke, pp. 2 and 13. Edward Grimeston's History of Polybius (London, 1633), on the other hand, mistranslates the classical original to conceal its Machiavellian reading of religion; I am indebted to Debora Shuger for this reference.

107. Casaubon, in his edition of Marcus Aurelius, pp. 8-9.

108. David Humphreys, in his edition of The Apologetics of the Learned Athenian Philosopher Athenagoras (London, 1714), p. 92. William Morray, A Short Treatise of Death in Sixe Chapters (Edinburgh, 1631 ), p. 24, similarly asserts that Solomon is "speaking in the person of the Atheist" in parts of Ecclesiastes.

109. Welcome, p. 54.

110. Samuel Gardiner, Doomes-day Booke: Or, an Alarum for Atheistes (London, 1606), p. 47.

111. Tuke, sig. A2v and p. 8.

112. Welcome, p. 56.

113. Abraham Holland, Hollandi Post-Huma (Cambridge, 1626), sig. L3r.

114. N. Campbell, A Treatise upon Death (Glasgow, 1630), sig. G6r; see also sigs. E7v and Flr.

115. Alexander Grosse, Eliahs Fiery Charet (London, 1632), p. 35.

116. Donne, Sermons , V, 210. Cf. VII, 298: "who can feare the darknesse of death, that hath had the light of this world, and of the next too?"; and X, 245: "To us that speake dayly of the death of Christ  . . . can the memory or the mention of our owne death bee yrkesome or bitter?" See also the Devotions , pp. 30 and 78.

117. Francis Dillingham, A Sermon Preached [for] Lady Elizabeth Luke (1609), p. 21.

118. Nicholas Guy, Pieties Pillar (London, 1626), pp. 35-36. See also the Chorus to act 3 of the Countess of Pembroke's translation of Robert Garnier's Marc Antonie ; Holland, sig. 12r; and John Milton, Paradise Lost , II, 92-98, in Complete Poems and Major Prose , ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), where it compromises Moloch's bravado about annihilation.

119. I Corinthians, 15:54, Geneva Bible; even Paul's rhetorical question earlier in verse 12—"Now if it be preached, that Christ is risen from the dead, how say some among you, that there is no resurrection of the dead?"—shows more willingness to acknowledge the possibility of real disbelief than the Jacobeans apparently could tolerate.

120. Grosse, p. 38. In an interesting variant, preachers could also demand of a father, "Would [David] have so bitterly lamented [Absalom's] death, if the soule and body dyed together?"; see Welcome, p. 62.

121. John Gaule, A Defiance to Death (London, 1629), p. 21, may declare that "death is a nothing, and are we afraid of we know not what?"; but when Montaigne, p. 64, asks his version of the same question—"why should we fear to lose a thing which once lost cannot be regretted?"—the rhetoric comports as much real perplexity as strategic dismissal.

122. Sclater, p. 7.

123. Camus, p. 149. According to Camus, pp. 21-22, whoever fails to consider eternity risks "loosing the eternall light of glorie," whoever "walkes in so palpable darknesse" will be "buried in the shadowes of so black an oblivion!''

124. Timothy Oldmayne, Lifes Brevitie and Deaths Debility (London, 1636), p. 51. According to E. B., A Buckler against the fear of Death (London, 1640), sig. B8r, only a Christian can say to Death, while walking in its shadow, "Though with thee in the dark I dwell a space, / Yet canst thou not eternally benight me," since a Christian can hope for "an everlasting day, / And an uneclipsed light." See similarly Stephen Denison, Another Tombestone (London, 1627), p. 39: "there will come a day, wherein [the Saints departed] shall lift up their heads out of the grave in shining brightnesse." See also Browne's plea, ''Let not my sinnes, blacke as the night, / Eclipse the lustre of thy light" (p. 156); and the promise of Marvell's Thyrsis that "There always is a rising sun" in Elysium (35).

125. Adams, Workes , p. 14.

126. Boyd, I, 13; II, 400, 8, 424.

127. Stafford, pp. 88, 79. This imagery evidently proved so effective that it was still in use at the end of the seventeenth century: atheists are "blinded with so thick a mist of Night, / That they shall never more behold the light"; William Dawes, An Anatomy of Atheism , (London, 1694), p. 8.

128. Paget, pp. 66-69, 431-2.

129. A Mourning-Ring , "House of Weeping," p. 204; "Death-Bed Thoughts," p. 143. Dawes's Anatomy of Atheism falls back on the Cartesian "good bet" argument for belief in an afterlife, hoping that God exists, because "If not the worst event that we can have / Is to lye senslesse in the silent Grave."

130. Thomas Fuller, The Holy State and the Profane State (Cambridge, 1642), p. 382.

131. Arthur Gorges, The Olympian Catastrophe , lines 1027-32; quoted by Dennis Kay, Melodious Tears: The English Funeral Elegy from Spenser to Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 147.

132. Thomas Newton, Atropoion Delion (London, 1603), sigs. A3v, B2r, B4v. The acronymic dedicatory verse begins by reporting that "E.Yes that before her death, did then behold her, / L.Amentes in flood of teares to loose their gazing." Though the Queen had once been a miraculous generator of vision, Newton reports that "At length to Church I brought my Delia 's Hearse, / Blindfolded (for my eyes were blinde with crying)," and in fact "all her Mourners eyes were vailde and blinde" (sig. B2r).

133. Darcie, sigs. A6r, Aalr, Bblr.

134. Coffin, pp. 3-4.

135. See Gillian Murray Kendall's insightful "Overkill in Shakespeare," Shakespeare Quarterly , 43 (1992), pp. 33-50.

136. Spencer, pp. 199-200, discusses the permutations of this motif.

137. Holland, "The Description of the last great Plague" (1625), in Hollandi , sig. E4r-v. Cf. Huizinga, p. 129: "Towards 1400 the conception of death in art and literature took a spectral and fantastic shape. The macabre vision arose from deep psychological strata of fear; religious thought at once reduced it to a means of moral exhortation. As such it was a great cultural idea, till in its turn it went out of fashion, lingering on in epitaphs and symbols in village cemeteries."

138. Holland, "The Plague a dreary Punishment," in Hollandi , sig. GIr. The fact that Holland died soon after writing this account of the plague, and even sooner after vowing to undertake a religious life if spared, somehow makes his vivid narrative very poignant—perhaps because we are used to identifying with narrators who are the survivors. Norbert Elias, The Loneliness of the Dying , trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), p. 11, argues that "It would certainly be possible to make dying easier for some people if repressed guilt-fantasies . . . could be alleviated or dispelled." My suspicion, on the contrary, is that we generate such fantasies precisely because a death meant as punishment is more tolerable than the alternative: a death without meaning.

139. Spencer, p. 71.

140. Huizinga, p. 134, observes that "The desire to invent a visible image of all that appertained to death entailed the neglecting of all those aspects of it which were not suited to direct representation." I suspect that was often precisely why such illustrations were performed, to conceal the impossibility of comprehending oblivion.

141. Duffy, p. 339.

142. Holland, "To His Friends," in Hollandi , sig. I2r.

143. Lewes Bayly, The Practise of Pietie (London, 1613), pp. 909, 101, 96.

144. Bayly, p. 125.

145. Camus, p. 101; he goes on to describe their sense of smell powerfully affronted by the stench of corpses and sulphurous brimstone, their bodily thirst and hunger not ended but intensified (pp. 108-10).

146. Camus, pp. 162-65. Humphrey Sydenham, Natures Overthrow and Deaths Triumph (London, 1626), p. 8, describes death as "a privation onely, having name (saith Augustine ) but no essence."

147. Camus, pp. 90, 136.

148. Adams, Workes , p. 758. Adams himself warned elsewhere that atheists were worse than the devil (pp. 184-85).

149. Quoted by Walker, p. 81.

150. Tuke, p. 81.

151. On the exemption of funerary monuments in 1550 and again in 1643, see Joshua Scodel, The English Poetic Epitaph (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 208; on the exemption of Last Judgment scenes, see Huston Diehl, "To Put Us in Remembrance," in Homo, Memento Finis , Early Drama, Art, and Music Monograph Series 6, ed. David Bevington (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1985), pp. 179-80. This helps to explain the paradox noted by Farrell, p. 91, that "Calvin and Luther both insisted that what lies beyond death is ineffable," yet "they used traditional imagery to make the point.''

152. Gardiner, Doomes-day , pp. 102-3.

153. Paradise Lost , II, 666-70; in Hughes.

154. For examples of scholarship that—though valuable—largely accepts these boundaries, see Arnold Stein, The House of Death (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Harry Morris, Last Things in Shakespeare (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1985); Michael C. Andrews, This Action of Our Death (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989); Nancy Lee Beaty, The Craft of Dying (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970); and Robert F. Willson, Jr., Shakespeare's Reflexive Endings (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990).

155. Freud, "On Hysteria," II, 305.

156. John Milton, "The Christian Doctrine," in Hughes, pp. 900-901.

157. Humphreys, trans., Apologetics , p. 89.

158. Jonathan Culler, Framing the Sign (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), pp. 69-82. For a revealing parallel, see Gary Wills, Under God: Religion and American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), who speculates that ordinarily glib journalists, sensing the low "number of churchgoers in the national press, as opposed to the general population . . . are oddly tongue-tied when the Bible is brought up. And editors seem to prefer inarticulacy on the subject" (p. 18).

159. See, for example, the superb scholarship of Debora Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 218-49, who argues that Christianity remained a haven of valuable subversions throughout the Renaissance; that models of justified rebellion, of economic redistribution, even of a nurturant patriarchy, were recuperated largely from Christian traditions. Wills, p. 384, points out similar progressive functions in modern American Christianity.

160. In that sense, multiculturalism is a contradiction in terms, and its advocates should not be too surprised (or too patronizing) when they meet deep-seated resistance. My point is not to endorse the hegemony (and accompanying privileges) of white male Eurocentric culture in American universities, but to warn against complacency in the well-intended efforts to alter that hegemony. Universities—and literary studies in particular—may be one of the few settings in which such changes can be successfully negotiated, if only because nothing material is obviously and immediately at stake. But a premature, insincere truce in the struggle between different beliefs at universities almost ensures an eventual war between differing believers in society at large. Instead, universities must strive toward providing diverse people and opinions with channels for meaningful mutual critiques as well as for consensus.

But how open and diverse can such discussions actually be, without collapsing into chaos? The sophisticated left wing as well as the fundamentalist right have begun to argue that the standard of rational debate reflects a (male and/or European) cultural bias and thus unfairly prejudices the key issues. I believe that the rational standard is deeply valid, and a necessary premise for any community of higher learning—but that may only prove that, as a rationalist, I am as devoted to my belief-system as anyone else to theirs, and similarly unable to conceive my universe without it.

161. For a prominent exception, see Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 99; and Shuger, passim.

162. Wills, p. 16, cites recent statistics confirming that 80 percent of Americans "believe they will be called before God on Judgment Day," and that Americans give God more importance in their lives than any other nation surveyed except Malta.

163. Times Literary Supplement , June 7, 1974, p. 597. In fact, this phase of Empson's great career has been treated dismissively by most of the literary establishment.

164. Robert M. Adams, "Lucy and Lucifer," New York Review of Books , March 1, 1990, pp. 38-40.

165. C. S. Lewis, "What Christians Believe," in Broadcast Talks (London: G. Bles, 1943), pp. 41-43.

166. For the history of this obligation, see Susanne Klingenstein, Jews in the American Academy, 1900-1940 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), particularly concerning the careers of Lewisohn, Zeitlin, and Trilling.

167. Denis Donoghue, New York Review of Books , November 5, 1992, p. 50.

168. Shuger, pp. 17-90 and passim.

169. Nicholas Bownde, The Unbelief of St Thomas the Apostle (1608 ), (London, 1817), pp. 52-53, 33; see also p. 132, and Bownde's reminder on p. 113 that, in the matter of fearful doubts about death, "it is thus with the best, one time or other."

170. Perkins, p. 35.

171. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy , ed. Holbrook Jackson (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1932), III, 417.

172. Compare the struggle of the great Victorian Catholic humanist John Henry Newman, who can bring himself to concede that England's cultural heritage is primarily "a Protestant literature" only by noting that it is therefore not "atheistical." Newman finds special cause for "thankfulness that the most illustrious amongst English writers has so little of a Protestant about him," and is further thankful that "there is in Shakespeare neither contempt of religion nor skepticism. . . . There is no mistaking in his works on which side lies the right; Satan is not made a hero, nor Cain a victim"; The Idea of a University (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), p. 262. My chapters on Shakespeare will contest this pious portrait.

173. Worship, sig. C4v.

174. Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, IV, 39.

175. Montaigne, p. 60, recommends reversing the usual practice of denying death and instead conquering its terrors by diligent confrontation. No doubt Thomas Browne became the guiding Virgil of this Introduction because I reread him feverishly during a recent expedition (to another damned conference), after the plane lost an engine and careened around thunderstorms for an hour before landing in the hellish glare of arrayed fire-trucks—my version of Greenblatt's famous airplane anecdote at the end of Renaissance Self-Fashioning , and another clear example of the way criticism becomes suffused with autobiography.

176. Thomas Taylor, p. 143.