ABSTRACT
Bottom's famous speech upon waking from his enchantment in A Midsummer Night's Dream (MND) narrates Shakespeare's disengagement from the Elizabethan Lucretius, Christopher Marlowe. Lucretius's De rerum natura (DRN) is one of the most important epics in the Latin tradition. The book DRN in which Lucretius accounts for the senses and their indispensability to humankind. A brief clarification is needed at this point to facilitate the understanding of Lucretius's language and his argumentation. Christopher Marlowe associated with members of the group that gravitated around the Earl of Northumberland and his follower Thomas Harriot. Northumberland was known as the "wizard earl" because of his interest in science, and he and Harriot both were interested in the atomic theory of motion and matter. Marlowe, it seems quite clear, was in reputation if not in fact an atheist. In the early to mid-1590s, many in England would hardly have been willing to be caught talking about atoms and the void and atheism.
