For generations, Shakespeare remained the Bard of a blessed land, ruled by a beloved Queen worshipped by her subjects. Such was the Tudor legend passed on through the centuries. Unfortunately, the reality uncovered by historians is less attractive.
Shakespeare’s England was in fact an age of terror and persecution, surveillance and brutal executions for those who did not accept the new faith imposed by Queen Elizabeth I and her trusted advisor, William Cecil, when she came to the throne in 1558. Succeeding her Catholic sister Mary Tudor, she opted for her father’s religious policy, becoming the Supreme Head of the Church of England. The practice of the Roman Catholic religion was prohibited. Catholics were asked to change or deny their beliefs, or else they would be penalized, fined, barred from holding office.
When Elizabeth was excommunicated by the pope in 1570, he wrote the bull Regnans in Excelsis absolving his flock from their duty to their Queen, after which they all became traitors. On sudden denunciation, their properties could be seized, they could be exiled or executed. The mere possession of images of saints could turn one into an enemy of the Crown. There was no room for dissidence. People lived in fear of informers. Sir Francis Walsingham, the Queen’s spymaster, created a most effective intelligence network with ramifications all over Europe. There was little that escaped his eye.
William Shakespeare was born and bred a Catholic in Stratford upon Avon where his father held several distinguished offices between 1558 and 1577, until his situation abruptly deteriorated. As Professor Greenblatt puts it: “John Shakespeare’s debts, mortgages, fines, and losses and his sudden and precipitous disappearance from public life suggest something more than the consequences of a cyclical downturn in the glove trade” (Will in the World, 63). A denunciation by an informer for holding the wrong religious beliefs remains a most likely cause. He was listed several times among recusants (i.e. people who refused to attend Church of England services), and his name was later found attached to a copy of Cardinal Carlo Boromeo’s Spiritual Testament, hidden in the rafters of his house. (Upon his return to England in 1580, Edmund Campion had handed out many such copies to Catholics deprived of sacraments.)
Shakespeare’s mother, Mary Arden, was loosely related to the Gentry family of Park Hall, near Birmingham, whose head Edward Arden was falsely accused of plotting against the Queen and executed in 1583. The Ardens were at the center of a very Catholic connection, which would be later linked with the Gunpowder Plot. This was a rather dangerous environment for young Shakespeare, who, fresh from school, departed North to Lancashire, allegedly employed as a tutor by wealthy Catholic Alexander Hoghton, at the very time when the famous Jesuit father, Edmund Campion, spent some weeks there at Richard Hoghton’s Park Hall.
Evidence is still lacking, but what we know for sure is that Shakespeare’s sudden growth as a poet, his mannerist style as a dramatist, his recurring themes, such as legitimacy, betrayal, rape, and exile, and, with growing insistence, intercession, patience, and pardon, delineate the trauma and healing process of a man deeply wounded. If he met Edmund Campion, he must have been in awe of his mastery of language, his talents as a pedagogue and rhetorician who may even, as a practiced Jesuit, have told him about the usefulness of drama as a “soft power” towards faith.
In Catholic Lancashire, William Shakespeare would not only have been able to exert his many talents—Lord Strange’s Men, Fernandino Stanley’s household company, provided for his first experience in drama and lasting friends[1] in the theater—he would also have been made aware of the usefulness and necessity of doublespeak and of disguise; he would have discovered the intricate threads linking private and public life and the high risks of faith. Like most Catholics at the time, he would have been shattered by the martyrdom of Edmund Campion on December 1st, 1581.
Shakespeare’s mystery partly comes from the necessity to be untraceable. The theater certainly was the best place to throw words into the wind and hide behind the masks of his many characters. If he wanted to succeed and yet remain true to himself, he surely had to follow Polonius’s advice and “by indirections find directions out” (Hamlet, II i 65). Obliquity and spy games were of the essence. Shakespeare would therefore need to shape his own tools, invent his own dramatic practice to seem what he was not and preserve his freedom of speech. According to Clare Asquith (Shadowplay), he hid his comments and beliefs using all kinds of indirections and codes covertly used by dissident writers in the sixteenth century. Furthermore, he used indirections in his plots and in the structures of his plays, creating mirror effects, unexpected torsions, and revelations. He had minor characters say essential things, while others asserted the reverse. He was a master at doublespeak, puns, and wordplay, leading the heedless spectator on elusive tracks. These were the characteristics of Mannerism, a style better known in Italy among Counter-Reformation artists.
In an England now deprived of its religious monuments, of the beauty of its Church frescoes and painted statues of the Saints, which had for centuries provided a wonderful setting for the enlightenment and progress of Christians but had been systematically destroyed or whitewashed by the Tudor administration, the dramatist could imagine and recreate those lost paintings through metaphors and metamorphoses. They sometime opened up surprising vistas of animated heaven, such as Macbeth’s very Baroque vision of his own damnation trumpeted about Heaven:
Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued against
The deep damnation of his taking off,
And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin, horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye
That tears shall drown the wind.(I vii 16–25)
What altar piece had he in mind? Has anyone ever wondered at this Baroque visualization of the consequences of his own deed by Scottish Macbeth? Was not Shakespeare trying to arouse his audience’s pity for his hero’s deluded soul and pointing to another, now forbidden, world?
The dramatist also seems to have used the method of intense visualization of Saint Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises to produce powerful images, opening imaginary scenes in the minds and hearts of his audience. Saint Ignatius’ Exercises appear to be a manner of staging a series of mysteries, of creating within oneself a kind of solitary theatre where the plays of one’s soul and mind will be performed. Ignatius’ representations are by no means mere pictures, they have depth and all the measurements of architecture. They are not restricted to sight alone, they use all the senses, so that in a meditation on hell, you have “to hear, the wailing, the screaming, cries and blasphemies,” you have “to smell the smoke, the brimstone, the corruption, and rottenness.” You have “to taste bitter things, as tears, sadness” and “with the sense of touch to feel how the flames surround and burn souls” (see The Spiritual Exercises, Fifth Exercise).
Both Juliet and Richard II seem to be very good students of Ignatius. Juliet tries to strengthen her resolution “to live an unstained wife to my sweet love,” (IV i 88) by painting in her mind the frightful scene of her waking among dead bodies in the Capulet’s tomb:
— What with loathsome smells,
And shrieks like mandrake torn out of the earth,
That living mortals, hearing them, run mad —
O, if I wake, shall I not be distraught,
Environèd with all these hideous fears,
And madly play with my forefathers’ joints,
And pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud,
And, in this rage, with some great kinsman’s bone
As with a club dash out my desp’rate brains?
(IV iii 45–53)
Preceding this, the dramatist, through Friar Lawrence, had already conjured up for his audience a mental image of death. Similarly, Richard II visualizes his own demise with the lucidity of one following Saint Ignatius’ Exercises. He not only seems to visualize in his mind’s eye the hidden kingship of death, he actually follows in his demise the three degrees of humility advised by Ignatius: first lowering and humiliating himself, then, divesting himself of his kingly attributes and not caring any more for the things of this world, and last striving to imitate Christ. (The Three Modes of Humility, 81–82)
Thus, by sudden intrusions of powerful images, reversals of genres—The Comedy of Errors is written within the tragic frame of a man condemned to death for landing on forbidden land and later taken to the place of execution which was Holywell gallows, next door to Shakespeare’s theater—or the introduction of unlikely characters disrupting the rules of genre and decorum, the dramatist managed to unsettle his audience, opening their minds and hearts with more and more talent to a questioning of England’s spiritual and historical reality, something that was fundamentally prohibited, while maintaining the official appearance of a protean genius who shared the freedom of speech of the Fool.
Over the years, Shakespeare improved his manner, but his message remained the same. What if the message had conditioned the manner? What if the very prohibitive nature of its content had made the detours and sophisticated designs of mannerism a necessity? I believe that his very personal manner was conditioned by the constant faith underlying all his plays, in which, despite censorship, he displayed many devoted, helpful monks, prayers for the dead, references to Purgatory, and ladies full of grace, not to speak of a very attractive portrait of Joan of Arc.
Editor’s Note: The author’s book Shakespeare, The Magician and The Healer is available from Angelico Press.
[1] Edward Alleyn, George Brian, Augustine Phillipes, Thomas Pope, John Heminges and William Kempe, all belonged to Lord Strange’s Men and alongside Shakespeare later formed the core of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men at the Globe theatre in London.
Photo by Matt Riches on Unsplash
