Shakespeare's religion

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article requires authentication or verification by an expert. Please assist in recruiting an expert or improve this article yourself. See the talk page for details. (May 2009)

Knowledge of Shakespeare's religion is important in understanding the man and his works because of the wealth of biblical and liturgical allusions, both Protestant and Catholic, in his writings and the hidden references to contemporary religious tensions that are claimed to be found in the plays.^[1] The topic is the subject of intense scholarly debate. There is no direct evidence of William Shakespeare's religious affiliation. However, over the years, there have been many speculations about the personal religious beliefs that he may have held. These speculations are based on circumstantial evidence from historical records and on analysis of his published work. Some evidence suggests that Shakespeare's family had Catholic sympathies and that he himself was a secret Catholic, though there is disagreement over whether he in fact was, many scholars maintaining the former consensus position that he was a member of the established Anglican Church.^[2][3][4]

Due to the paucity of direct evidence, general agreement on the matter has not yet been reached. As one analysis of the subject put it, "One cannot quite speak of a consensus among Shakespeare scholars on this point, though the reluctance of some to admit the possibility of Catholicism in Shakespeare's family is becoming harder to maintain."^[5]

Contents 1 Shakespeare's family 2 Shakespeare's schooling 3 Lost years 4 Possible Catholic wedding 5 Catholic sympathies 5.1 Textual evidence 5.2 Revision of older plays 6 Atheism 7 See also 8 External links 9 Notes and references

[edit] Shakespeare's family

In 1559, five years before Shakespeare's birth, the Elizabethan Religious Settlement finally severed the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church. In the ensuing years, extreme pressure was placed on England's Catholics to convert to the Protestant Church of England, and recusancy laws made Catholicism illegal. In Shakespeare's lifetime there was a substantial and widespread quiet resistance to the newly imposed faith.^[6] Some scholars, using both historical and literary evidence, have argued that Shakespeare was one of these recusants.^[7]

Some scholars claim that there is evidence that members of Shakespeare's family were recusant Catholics. The strongest evidence is a tract professing secret Catholicism signed by John Shakespeare, father of the poet. The tract was found in the 18th century in the rafters of a house which had once been John Shakespeare's, and was seen and described by the reputable scholar Edmond Malone. Malone later changed his mind and declared that he thought the tract was a forgery.^[8] Although the tract document itself has been lost, 20th century evidence has linked Malone's reported wording of the tract definitively to a testament written by Charles Borromeo and circulated in England by Edmund Campion, copies of which still exist in Italian and English.^[9] John Shakespeare was also listed as one who did not attend church services, but this was "for feare of processe for Debtte", according to the commissioners, not because he was a recusant.^[10] Then again, avoiding creditors may have merely been a convenient pretext for a recusant's avoidance of the established church's services.

Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden, was a member of a conspicuous and determinedly Catholic family in Warwickshire.^[11] In 1606, William's daughter Susannah was listed as one of the residents of Stratford refusing to take Holy Communion in a Protestant service, which may suggest Catholic sympathies.^[12] It may, however, also be a sign of Puritan sympathies; Susannah's sister Judith was, according to some statements, of a Puritanical bent.^[13]

[edit] Shakespeare's schooling

Four of the six schoolmasters at the grammar school during Shakespeare's youth, King’s New School in Stratford, were Catholic sympathisers,^[14] and Simon Hunt, who was likely to have been one of Shakespeare’s teachers, later became a Jesuit.^[15] Thomas Jenkins, who succeeded Hunt as teacher in the grammar school, was a student of Edmund Campion at St. John's College, Oxford. Jenkins's successor at the grammar school in 1579, John Cottam, was the brother of Jesuit priest Thomas Cottam. A fellow grammar school pupil with Shakespeare, Robert Debdale, joined the Jesuits at Douai and was later executed in England for Catholic proselytising along with Thomas Cottam.^[16]

[edit] Lost years

John Aubrey reported that Shakespeare had been a country schoolmaster,^[17] a tale augmented in the 20th century with the theory that his employer might have been Alexander Hoghton of Lancashire,^[18] a prominent Catholic landowner who left money in his will to a certain "William Shakeshafte", referencing theatrical costumes and paraphernalia.^[19] Shakespeare's grandfather Richard had also once used the name Shakeshafte. Ackroyd adds that study of the marginal notes in the Hoghton family copy of Edward Hall's Chronicles, an important source for Shakespeare's early histories, shows that they were in "probability" in Shakespeare's writing.^[20]

[edit] Possible Catholic wedding

The writer's marriage to Anne Hathaway in 1582 may have been officiated, amongst other candidates, by John Frith ^[21] in the town of Temple Grafton a few miles from Stratford. In 1586 the crown named Frith, who maintained the appearance of Protestantism, as a Roman Catholic priest.^[22] Some surmise Shakespeare wed in Temple Grafton rather than the Protestant Church in Stratford in order for his wedding to be performed as a Catholic sacrament. He was thought to have rushed his marriage ceremony, as Anne was three months pregnant. ^[22]

[edit] Catholic sympathies

Archdeacon Richard Davies, a 17th century Anglican cleric wrote of Shakespeare: "He dyed a Papyst". The "Catholic Encyclopedia" (1912) states that 'Davies, an Anglican clergyman, could have had no conceivable motive for misrepresenting the matter in these private notes and as he lived in the neighbouring county of Gloucestershire he may be echoing a local tradition' but concludes that whilst Davies comment 'is by no means incredible but it would obviously be foolish to build too much upon an unverifiable tradition of this kind'^[23] In addition to Davies, the historian John Speed, in 1611 while Shakespeare was still alive, asserted or alleged the Bard's Catholicism, lambasting him and lumping him together with Jesuit Robert Persons ("the Papist and his poet") for their attacks on the proto-Protestant John Oldcastle.^{[24] [25] [26]} Joseph Pearce, however, in The Quest for Shakespeare, distinguishes Speed's "astonishing attack" on Shakespeare as a manifestation of the general suspicion in which the Puritans, of whom Speed was one, held playmakers. He explains that Speed is attacking Persons for his "revisionist history" in demolishing the notion in Foxe's Martyrs that Oldcastle is a Protestant hero, and he condemns Shakespeare for "falsifying...the history of England" in Henry IV, Part 1.^[27]

Pearce maintains that one of the most compelling pieces of evidence is Shakespeare's purchase of Blackfriars Gatehouse, a place that had remained in Catholic hands since the time of the Reformation, was notorious for Jesuit conspiracy, passageways and priest holes to hide priests, and for covert Catholic activity in London.^[28][29][30] Shakespeare ensured that the tenant, John Robinson, remained in the house and its use continued. The same year that Robinson was named as Shakespeare's tenant, Robinson's brother entered the seminary at the English College in Rome.^[31][29]

[edit] Textual evidence

The literary scholar and Catholic priest Peter Milward and the writer Clare Asquith^[32][33] are among those who have claimed that such sympathies are detectable in his writing. Asquith claims that Shakespeare uses terms such as "high" when referring to Catholic characters and "low" when referring to Protestants (the terms refer to their altars) and "light" or "fair" to refer to Catholic and "dark" to refer to Protestant, a reference to certain clerical garbs. Asquith also detects in Shakespeare's work the use of a simple code used by the Jesuit underground in England which took the form of a mercantile terminology wherein priests were 'merchants' and souls were 'jewels', those pursuing them were 'creditors', and the Tyburn gallows where the members of the underground died was called 'the place of much trading'.^[34] The Jesuit underground used this code so their correspondences looked like innocuous commercial letters, and Asquith claims that Shakespeare also used this code.^[34] However, these particular claims have met with some criticism.^[35]

An increasing number of scholars do look to matters biographical and evidence from Shakespeare’s work such as the placement of young Hamlet as a student at Wittenberg while old Hamlet’s ghost is in purgatory,^[36] the sympathetic view of religious life ("thrice blessed"), scholastic theology in The Phoenix and the Turtle, sympathetic allusions to English Jesuit St. Edmund Campion that are claimed to exist in Twelfth Night^[37] and many other matters as suggestive of a Catholic worldview. More recently it has been suggested that Shakespeare was simply playing upon an English Catholic tradition, rather than being actually being Catholic, and was utilizing the symbolic nature of Catholic ceremony to embellish his own theatre.^[38] Stephen Greenblatt suspects Catholic sympathies of some kind or another in Shakespeare and his family, but considers the writer himself to be a less than pious person with essentially worldly motives.^[39]

Greenblatt acknowledges the convention that the "equivocator" arriving at the gate of hell in the Porter's speech in Macbeth is probably a reference to the Jesuit Father Henry Garnet who had been executed in 1606.^[40] He argues, however, that Shakespeare probably included the allusion for the sake of topicality, trusting that his audience would have heard of Garnet's pamphlet on equivocation rather than any hidden sympathy for the man or his cause — indeed the portrait is not a sympathetic one. Shakespeare may have also been aware of the "equivocation" concept which appeared as the subject of a 1583 tract by Queen Elizabeth's chief councillor Lord Burghley as well as the 1584 Doctrine of Equivocation by the Spanish prelate Martin Azpilcueta that was disseminated across Europe and into England in the 1590s.^[41]

The Shakespeare editor and historian A. L. Rowse is firm in his assertion that Shakespeare was not a Catholic: "He was an orthodox, confirming member of the Church into which he had been baptised, was brought up and married, in which his children were reared and in whose arms he at length was buried".^[42] He identifies anti-Catholic sentiment in Sonnet 124, taking "the fools of time" in the last lines of this sonnet "To this I witness call the fools of time, which die for goodness who have lived for crime." to refer to the many Jesuits who were executed for treason in the years 1594-5.^[43] Other writers, also identifying "the fools of time" as the executed Jesuits, contend however that the poet sympathises with them.^[44] John Klause maintains that the Sonnet (as well as Titus Andronicus) was influenced by later executed Jesuit Robert Southwell's Supplication to Her Majestie and Epistle of Comfort.^[45]

[edit] Revision of older plays

Although Shakespeare commonly adapted existing tales, typically myths or works in another language, Joseph Pearce notes that King John, King Lear and Hamlet were all works that had been done recently and in English with an anti-Catholic bias, and that Shakespeare's version appear to be a refutation of the source plays.^[46][47] Pearce believes otherwise he would not have "reinvented the wheel", revisiting recent English plays.^[47][48] Peter Milward is among those who hold the view that Shakespeare engaged in rebuttal of recent English "anti-Papist" works.^[47] On the other hand, Jonathan Bate describes the process of Leir's transformation into Lear as replacing the "external trappings of Christianity" with a pagan setting.^[49] He adds that the devils plaguing "Poor Tom" in Shakespeare's version have the same names as the evil spirits in a book by Samuel Harsnett, later Archbishop of York, that denounces the "fake" Catholic practice of exorcism.^[50]

[edit] Atheism

The fact of Shakespeare’s Christianity is in itself not universally accepted. William Birch of Oxford University was, in 1848, probably the first to air the notion of atheism, based solely on his interpretation of sentiments expressed in the works, but the theory was dismissed as a "rare tissue of perverted ingenuity" by a contemporary, the textual editor H. H. Furness.^[51][52] The 1914 edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia questioned not only Shakespeare's Catholicism, but whether "[he] was not infected with the atheism, which...was rampant in the more cultured society of the Elizabethan age."^[23] Some evidence in support of Shakespeare's supposed atheism, and then only in the form of "evidence of absence", exists in the discovery by John Payne Collier, a notorious forger of historical documents, who examined the records of St Saviour's, Southwark, and found that Shakespeare, alone among his fellow Globe actors, was not shown as a churchgoer. The obvious conclusion here is that of recusancy, but instead it is often cited as evidence of atheism.^[53]

[edit] See also

• The Quest for Shakespeare television series about the evidence of Shakespeare's Catholicism

[edit] External links

• The Quest for Shakespeare EWTN's page for the thirteen episode TV series on the evidence for Shakespeare's Catholicism

[edit] Notes and references

v • d • e William Shakespeare and his works General information Biography · Style · Influence · Portraits · Reputation · Religion · Sexuality · Shakespeare authorship question Tragedies Antony and Cleopatra · Coriolanus · Cymbeline · Hamlet · Julius Caesar · King Lear · Macbeth · Othello · Romeo and Juliet · Timon of Athens · Titus Andronicus · Troilus and Cressida Comedies All's Well That Ends Well · As You Like It · The Comedy of Errors · Love's Labour's Lost · Measure for Measure · The Merchant of Venice · The Merry Wives of Windsor · A Midsummer Night's Dream · Much Ado About Nothing · Pericles, Prince of Tyre · The Taming of the Shrew · The Tempest · Twelfth Night · The Two Gentlemen of Verona · The Two Noble Kinsmen · The Winter's Tale Histories King John · Richard II · Henry IV, Part 1 · Henry IV, Part 2 · Henry V · Henry VI, Part 1 · Henry VI, Part 2 · Henry VI, Part 3 · Richard III · Henry VIII Poems Sonnets · Venus and Adonis · The Rape of Lucrece · The Phoenix and the Turtle Apocrypha and lost plays Edward III · Sir Thomas More · Cardenio (lost) · Love's Labour's Won (lost) · The Birth of Merlin · Locrine · The London Prodigal · The Puritan · The Second Maiden's Tragedy · Thomas of Woodstock · Sir John Oldcastle · Thomas Lord Cromwell · A Yorkshire Tragedy · Fair Em · Mucedorus · The Merry Devil of Edmonton · Arden of Faversham · Edmund Ironside · Vortigern and Rowena · Poetry: The Passionate Pilgrim · A Lover's Complaint · To the Queen Other play information Shakespeare's plays · Shakespeare in performance · Chronology of Shakespeare's plays · Oxfordian chronology · Shakespeare in film · BBC Television Shakespeare · Titles based on Shakespeare · Lists of characters A–K, L–Z · Problem plays · List of historical characters · Ghost characters