The School of Night

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 and Thomas Harriot. There is no firm evidence that all of these men were known to each other, but speculation about their connections features prominently in some writing about the Elizabethan era.

Raleigh was first named as the centre of "The School of Atheism" by the Jesuit priest Robert Persons in 1592, but "The School of Night" is a modern name; the theory that this so-called school was a clandestine intellectual coterie was launched by Arthur Acheson, on textual grounds, in Shakespeare and the Rival Poet (1903). The wording derives from a passage in Act IV, scene III of William Shakespeare's play Love's Labour's Lost, in which the King of Navarre says "Black is the badge of hell / The hue of dungeons and the school of night." There are however at least two other recorded renderings of the line, one reading "suit of night" and the other reading "scowl of night". The context of the lines has nothing to do with cabals: the King is simply mocking the black hair of Rosaline, his friend Berowne's lover. John Kerrigan explains that the line is perfectly straightforward as it stands, a riposte to Berowne's praise of his dark-haired mistress as "fair", and any attempts to load it with topical significance are misleading; the simple meaning of "black is the school where night learns to be black" is all that is required. However, some writers have seen the line as an allusion to Raleigh's 'school of atheism', and have used "The School of Night" as a name for the group.

In 1936 Frances Yates found an unpublished essay on scholarship by the Earl of Northumberland, an associate of Raleigh and supposed member of the movement, and interpreted it as inspiring the key celibacy theme of the play. The supposition is discounted as fanciful by some, but nonetheless received acceptance by some prominent commentators of the time.

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