The suggestion that Shakespeare is “William Shakeshaft,” described as a “player” or perhaps working as a tutor and attached to the recusant (Catholic) Lancastrian Hoghton household during the 1580s, is a third line of argument, although it has to be admitted that no version of Shakespeare's name ever looks remotely like Shakeshaft, which was not an uncommon northern surname. Stephen Greenblatt imagines him meeting the Jesuit missionary Edmund Campion: “Shakespeare would have found Campion fascinating … if the adolescent knelt down before him, he would have been looking at a distorted image of himself”: it's an unlikely if attractive scenario, since we are by no means sure that Shakespeare was ever in Lancashire, still less that he met Campion at this date.4 But that a connection with northern recusancy might have been promoted by John Cottom, Shakespeare's schoolmaster with strong associations with the region and its recusant traditions, and that in turn the local Catholic gentry might have introduced Shakespeare to his first acting job with Strange's Men, who were also connected with the Hoghtons, is tantalizing, but it rests on chains of unverifiable “ifs.”5 That this whole theory has been recently revitalized by scholars keen to insert Lancashire into the lucrative academic and tourist itineraries does not necessarily add to its claims.
Because Catholicism was dangerous in the late sixteenth century—after the excommunication of Queen Elizabeth by Pope Pius V in 1570, Catholics were the dangerous enemy within and subject to violent repression—the idea that its ideas and imagery are covert in Shakespeare's plays has been an attractive one. Clare Asquith's Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare had its genesis in its author's Cold War observation of “the artful double language and hidden identities used in Russian dissident writing.” Asquith describes her glossary of “coded terms” as “an entry point to a long forgotten, almost foreign language” of encrypted Catholicism in Shakespeare's works: Hercules is a “favourite Counter-Reformation image of resistance,” the red rose “an all-purpose image, but used specifically by Catholics for the old, ‘beautiful’ religion,” and “tempest” an image of the Reformation: the placing of The Tempest at the beginning of the First Folio “provides a subtitle to the book as politically loaded as ‘The Blitz’ or ‘The Troubles’ might be to a modern reader.”6 As with all codes, it's entirely possible to be skeptical: red roses in Shakespeare's history plays are already coded with political, rather than religious, allegiance, as the Temple Garden scene between the supporters of York and Lancaster in 1 Henry VI, and, as we know, “that which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet” (Romeo and Juliet 2.1.85–6). While Asquith's theories do not go so far as Baconian cryptology (see Myth 30), their author shares with anti-Stratfordians a kind of over-ingenuity and a sense that the literary text is a cipher to be broken rather than a poem susceptible to multiple readings. Richard Wilson's argument, in Secret Shakespeare, is allied but different: he claims that by not explicitly engaging with contemporary religious controversy Shakespeare creates “a drama out of silence”: Wilson speculates that “Shakespeare's limitless talent for entering the consciousness of others was an ultimate function … of Catholic England's greatest act of ventriloquizing self-forgetfulness.”7 As Gary Taylor notes of Shakespeare's personal invisibility in his plays, there “may be many motives for such self-erasure; any act so bizarre and so sustained must have been overdetermined. But the desire to protect yourself from those ‘who would pluck out the heart of [your] mystery’ is perhaps understandable in adherents of a religion which was defined by law as treason.”8
Shakespeare's apparent reticence on religious topics in his writing is also notable. He does not write religious verse (unless you argue that his opaque poem The Phoenix and the Turtle is a coded Catholic requiem: it is certainly one of the most obscure things Shakespeare ever wrote). Where he does treat religious topics and figures, his purposes seem to be most obviously dramatic rather than doctrinal: it is hard to make the inept Friar in Romeo and Juliet, his more commanding counterpart in Much Ado About Nothing, the potential Marian echoes of Hermione's breathing “statue” at the end of The Winter's Tale, or the attitude to the Pope's “usurped authority” and “juggling witchcraft” (3.1.86, 95) in King John into a coherent expression of their author's own religious beliefs. These references to Catholicism do theatrical not religious work, as a largely secular theater took on some of the social functions of collective display and ritual associated with the traditional religion along with its vestments (often bought by theater companies as props), but transformed its spiritual import.9
As with other biographical readings of the plays discussed in our myths (10, 12, and 18), attempts to deduce Shakespeare's religion from his writing tend towards selectively shaping the range of material to fit their particular agenda. Hamlet is a case in point: Shakespeare seems here to draw on a range of religious associations rather than endorsing any one position. Hamlet is a student of Wittenberg, strongly associated with the reformer Martin Luther (and with Hamlet's strongly anti-Catholic stage predecessor, Marlowe's Dr Faustus). In orthodox Protestant terms, he describes death as the “undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveller returns” (3.1.81–2), but he has himself encountered the distinctly Catholic ghost of his father, returned from the distinctly Catholic location of Purgatory, “doomed for a certain term to walk the night, / And for the day confined to fast in fires / Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purged away” (1.5.10–13). Drawing on the language of John Shakespeare's spiritual testament, Greenblatt describes Hamlet, like the playwright himself, as a Protestant haunted by the spirit of his Catholic father, while noting that in the play Shakespeare “seems at once Catholic, Protestant and deeply skeptical of both.”10
In fact the most compelling evidence that Shakespeare might have been a Catholic is not really about Shakespeare at all, but about revisionist histories of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Instead of swallowing top-down assertions of religious conformity, historians have looked again and found extensive evidence that in families and parishes the shift to reformed practice was much more gradual and less complete than previously thought. David Cressy, for instance, has gathered numerous examples of parishes continuing to ring church bells in defiance of official reformed policy, or defying dictats about moving fonts (it was thought a Catholic “superstition” to place them near the church door for ease of exit for the devils banished at baptism).11 Some of this was clearly principled and informed resistance to the new religion, but more of it was probably a general preference for things to stay as they were, and some operational uncertainty about what practices were and were not permitted. Most priests, after all, remained in their posts across the turbulent religious changes of the mid-sixteenth century. And we have stopped looking back on the religious history of early modern England from the point of view of Protestant dominance. As one of Shakespeare's contemporaries acknowledged, the outcome of the century's pendulum swings was far from certain:
In one man's memory … we have had to our prince, a man, who abolished the pope's authority by his laws and yet in other points kept the faith of his fathers; we have had a child, who by his like laws abolished together with the papacy the whole ancient religion; we have had a woman who restored both again and sharply punished protestants; and lastly her majesty that now is, who by the like laws hath long since abolished both again and now severely punisheth catholics as the other did protestants; and all these strange differences within the compass of about thirty years.12
For many of Shakespeare's recent biographers, this religious palimpsest has its image in the Guild Chapel on Church Street in Stratford-upon-Avon. Just before Shakespeare was born, the chapel's painted interior was whitewashed over; seven years later, the civic authorities paid to have the stained-glass windows knocked out and replaced with clear panes. This local iconoclasm registers the overlap of established and reformed religious identities over the period of Shakespeare's life. As James Shapiro puts it, “to arg
ue that the Shakespeares were secretly Catholic or, alternatively, mainstream Protestants misses the point that except for a small minority at one doctrinal extreme or other, those labels failed to capture the layered nature of what Elizabethans, from the queen on down, actually believed”: the traces of the old paintings beneath the coats of whitewash symbolize this superimposition of beliefs.13 Put this way, Hamlet and Shakespeare shared with their transitional Elizabethan generation the experience of having Catholic fathers who had been born before the Reformation, of living through the fervent anti-Catholicism of the second half of Elizabeth's reign, and of leaving their successors with the new religious politics of James. Shakespeare's religious beliefs become less a matter of individual biography and more a snapshot of contemporary doctrinal shifts, uncertainties, and overlaps; the “bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang” (Sonnet 73:4) epitomize a general rather than a personal, cultural nostalgia amid the debris of English monastic architecture.
The so-called “turn to religion” has become a critical commonplace in early modern studies over the last couple of decades, and this shifting intellectual climate has enabled the old question of Shakespeare's Catholicism to be reconsidered anew. But this movement is not without its own ideological agendas, and in popular culture the religious politics of the sixteenth century—in the detective novels of C.J. Sansom, the TV series The Tudors, or in the film Elizabeth (dir. Shekhar Kapur, 1998), for example, the Elizabethan period has become a historical metaphor for fears about religious fundamentalism in our own time. Perhaps it is worthwhile concluding with something about Shakespeare the skeptic, the secularist: a Shakespeare who is reticent on matters of religious belief not because he is a hidden partisan but because his world view is something different. The philosopher George Santayana, finding only a handful of direct references to Christianity in Shakespeare's works, concluded that “for Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing; he chose to leave his heroes and himself in the presence of life and of death with no other philosophy than that which the profane world can suggest and understand”.14 This powerfully positivist reinterpretation of Shakespeare for the existentialist twentieth century finds itself in Macbeth's bleak assessment:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time, …
It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
(5.5.18–27)
In Santayana, as in the recent debates about Shakespeare's Catholicism, the interpretative pattern is familiar: we look to Shakespeare for what we ourselves believe, or don't believe. The balance of critical and biographical interest has shifted towards Shakespeare's Catholicism at least in part because that represents for us now not simply a religious position but a political one, and a consciously personal one at that. It offers a glimpse of a Shakespeare who is not simply accumulating wealth and property but who apparently suffers inner conflict, a struggle with his conscience, and whose writing is shaped by the mechanisms he has developed for his own psychological and physical self-protection. In this model, Catholicism registers as much as an act of individual assertion and defiance—the poet at an angle to establishment values—as it does as a specific doctrinal allegiance. While the question of whether Shakespeare was a Catholic is unlikely to be definitively answered, we can certainly affirm that we want him to have been.
Notes
1 G. Wilson Knight, “Measure for Measure and the Gospels,” in The Wheel of Fire: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare's Sombre Tragedies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930), pp. 83–4, 90.
2 Dympna Callaghan, “Shakespeare and Religion,” Textual Practice, 15 (2001), pp. 1–4 (p. 2).
3 Robert Bearman, “John Shakespeare's ‘Spiritual Testament’: A Reappraisal,” Shakespeare Survey, 56 (2003), pp. 184–202; Colin Burrow “Who Wouldn't Buy It?”, review of Greenblatt's Will in the World, London Review of Books, 20 January 2005.
4 Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), pp. 108–9.
5 The best summary of all this material is John D. Cox's admirably careful “Was Shakespeare a Christian, and if so, What Kind of Christian Was He?”, Christianity and Literature, 55 (2006), pp. 539–66.
6 Clare Asquith, Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare (New York: Public Affairs, 2005), pp. xiv, 289, 293, 297, 299.
7 Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 295, 19.
8 Gary Taylor, “Forms of Opposition: Shakespeare and Middleton,” English Literary Renaissance, 24 (1994), pp. 283–314 (p. 314).
9 See Stephen Greenblatt, “Resonance and Wonder,” in Learning to Curse (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 161–83.
10 Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 248–9; id., Will in the World, p. 103.
11 David Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
12 William Allen (1581), quoted in Peter Lake, ‘Religious Identities in Shakespeare's England’, in David Scott Kastan (ed.), A Companion to Shakespeare (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 57–84 (p. 57).
13 James Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (London: Faber & Faber, 2005), p. 167.
14 George Santayana, “The Absence of Religion in Shakespeare,” in Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (New York: Scribner's, 1916), p. 152.
Myth 8
Shakespeare's plays had no scenery
Scenery as we know it—painted flats that fly in from above or slide in from the wings to change the scene—is a product of the proscenium stage. Shakespeare's actors performed on a thrust stage. As the name implies, it thrust forward into the auditorium; with the audience on three sides, it had no place for wings. The proscenium was a seventeenth-century import from France: the exiled Cavaliers had enjoyed the theater styles of the French court during the Interregnum, and when they returned to England in the Restoration they brought with them French theater practices. All ties with Elizabethan theater practice were decisively severed. Whereas Shakespeare's theater was demographically diverse (see Myth 13), Restoration theater was bourgeois. Whereas Elizabethan female roles were played by boys, the Restoration theater introduced actresses. And whereas Shakespearean drama was played outdoors in an amphitheater (except from 1608 onwards when the King's Men alternated seasons between the indoor Blackfriars and the outdoor Globe), Restoration drama was played indoors on a proscenium. Consequently, Shakespeare's plays were adapted to suit the new Restoration aesthetic and staging styles.
If scenery is a product of the seventeenth century, stage directions that indicate where a scene takes place are a product of the eighteenth century. In 1709 Nicholas Rowe produced the first scholarly edition of Shakespeare's works, complete with an introductory essay about Shakespeare's life and career. This prompted a flurry of editions: by Alexander Pope in 1725, Lewis Theobald in 1726 and 1734, Thomas Hanmer in 1743–4, and William Warburton in 1747. These editors introduced many of the stage directions that remain in Shakespeare editions today. But their stages were large, as were their theater companies, and do not reflect Elizabethan practice. In Rowe's Measure for Measure Act 1, scene 1 takes place in “A palace”; scene 2 in “The street”; scene 3 in “A monastery”; and scene 4 in “A nunnery.” By the nineteenth century we can find editions of As You Like It that specify Scene: The forest; Scene: Another part of the forest. But Shakespeare's plays do not take place in a palace or a forest; they take place on a bare stage. The introduction of scenery necessitated the introduction of stage directions that specified changes of scene.
30 Great Myths about Shakespeare Page 7