The School of Night 1592

The School of Night is a modern name for a group of men centred on Sir Walter Raleigh
that was once referred to in 1592 as the "School of Atheism". The group supposedly
included poets and scientists Christopher Marlowe, George Chapman, Matthew Roydon and
Thomas Harriot.

Raleigh was first named as the centre of "The School of Atheism" by the Jesuit priest
Robert Persons in 1592,[2] but "The School of Night" is a modern name: the theory that this
so-called school was a clandestine intellectual group was launched by Arthur Acheson, on
textual grounds, in Shakespeare and the Rival Poet (1903). The new wording derives from
a passage in Act IV, scene 3 of Shakespeare's Love's Labours Lost, in which the King of
Navarre says "Black is the badge of hell / The hue of dungeons and the school of night."
Acheson's proposal was endorsed by notable editors John Dover Wilson and Arthur Quiller
Couch in their 1923 edition of Love's Labours Lost. There are, however, at least two other
recorded renderings of the line, one reading "suit of night" and the other as "scowl of
night".

Assumption of Atheism
It is alleged that each of these men studied science, philosophy, and religion, and all were
suspected of atheism. Atheism at that time was a charge nearly the equivalent of treason,
since the English monarch after Henry VIII's reforms was the head of the Church of
England, and to be against the church was, ipso facto, to be against the monarch. However,
it was also a name for anarchy, and was a charge frequently brought against the politically
troublesome. Richard Baines, an anti-Catholic spy for her Majesty's Privy Council, whose
"task was presumably to provide his masters with what they required", charged in an
unsworn deposition that he had heard from another that Marlowe had "read the Atheist
lecture to Sr. Walter Raleigh [and] others". This tale of hearsay, from a paid informer, failed
to substantiate the charges of atheism against the group, but it did include a promise of more
evidence to be revealed at a later date.
Sir Walter Raleigh’s Atheist Verses
Say to the court, it glows
And shines like rotten wood;
Say to the church, it shows
What's good, and doth no good:
If church and court reply,
Then give them both the lie ( from ― The Lie ― )

George Chapman (1559 – 1634 ) Atheist Verses

Her chamber her cathedral-church should be,
And her Leander her chief deity;
For in her love these did the gods forego;
And though her knowledge did not teach her so,
Yet did it teach her this, that what her heart
Did greatest hold in her self-greatest part,
That she did make her god; and 'twas less naught
To leave gods in profession and in thought,
Than in her love and life; for therein lies
Most of her duties and their dignities;
And, rail the brain-bald world at what it will,
That's the grand atheism that reigns in it still. ( from ― Hero and Leander ― )

Christopher Marlowe ( 1564 – 1593 )

The town of Sestos called it Venus' glass.

There might you see the gods in sundry shapes
Committing heady riots, incest, rapes.
For know, that underneath this radiant floor
Was Danae's statue in a brazen tower,
Jove slyly stealing from his sister's bed, ( from ― Hero and Leander ― )

Hero and Leander is the Greek myth relating the story of Hero, a priestess of Aphrodite
(Venus in Roman mythology) who dwelt in a tower in Sestos on the European side of the
Hellespont (today's Dardanelles), and Leander (Ancient Greek: Λέανδρος, Léandros), a
young man from Abydos on the opposite side of the strait. Leander fell in love with Hero
and would swim every night across the Hellespont to spend time with her. Hero would light
a lamp at the top of her tower to guide his way.

Succumbing to Leander's soft words and to his argument that Aphrodite, as the goddess of
love and sex, would scorn the worship of a virgin, Hero "allowed" him to make love to
her—that is, she did not refuse any longer. Their trysts lasted through a warm summer. But
one stormy winter night, the waves tossed Leander in the sea and the breezes blew out
Hero's light; Leander lost his way and drowned. When Hero saw his dead body, she threw
herself over the edge of the tower to her death to be with him.