Romeo and Jesuits

Mr Pearce looks at yet another way that William Shakespeare's Catholic Faith may have influenced his plays and his poetry. See his William Shakespeare: Poet, Playwright—Catholic?

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Joseph Pearce

The Jesuit poet and martyr Saint Robert Southwell was executed in London on February 20, 1595, shortly before Shakespeare is thought to have written Romeo and Juliet. Since there is abundant evidence to suggest that Shakespeare knew Southwell and that he admired Southwell’s poetry, it is worth examining the evidence for Southwell’s influence on Shakespeare’s tragedy of the “star-cross’d lovers”. First, however, let’s summarize the biographical and textual evidence for Shakespeare’s acquaintance with Southwell.

Although Shakespeare and Southwell were distant cousins it is likely that they first met through their mutual relationship with the young Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, who was Shakespeare’s patron. Since the evidence shows that Southwell was probably Southampton’s confessor and spiritual adviser at the time that Shakespeare and Southampton first met, it brings Shakespeare into the orbit of the famous Jesuit outlaw.

Apart from their mutual acquaintance with the Earl of Southampton, and the strong circumstantial evidence that they must have known each other within the confines of London’s close-knit Catholic recusant community, the strongest evidence for Southwell’s and Shakespeare’s friendship is to be found in their respective works. Southwell’s writing, in poetry and prose, was very widely read, even by his sworn enemies, such as Lord Burghley, Francis Bacon, Richard Topcliffe and even the Queen herself. As for his friends in the persecuted Catholic community, his works were devoured avidly. He was not only a priest who had somehow eluded capture since his arrival in England in 1586, a real-life Scarlet Pimpernel, but was a true poet whose place in the literary canon, centuries later, is assured. Is it any wonder, therefore, that Shakespeare, as a Catholic and as a poet, should be drawn to this particular Jesuit?

Shortly before his capture in July 1592, Southwell had been working on a manuscript of his poems and had penned a Preface addressed to the author’s “Loving Cousin”. Since Southwell and Shakespeare were distant cousins it has been conjectured that the Preface was addressed to Shakespeare, though others have suggested that the “Cousin” in question was perhaps Southampton, since Southwell’s brother and sister had each married Southampton’s first cousins. Either way, the Preface itself is an appeal to poets in general, or perhaps to Shakespeare in particular, to use their God-given talents in the service of the Giver of them: “Poets, by abusing their talents, and making the follies and feignings of love the customary subject of their base endeavours, have so discredited this faculty, that a poet, a lover, and a liar, are by many reckoned but three words of one signification….”

Such an exhortation to poets to wed their verse to virtue is reflected in the dedicatory letter that Shakespeare wrote to Southampton for his poem Venus and Adonis in which he promised his patron that he would produce “some graver labor”.

In the first instance, it is apparent that the very theme of Romeo and Juliet dovetails with a recurring theme in Southwell’s work that “lewd love is loss” and that true freedom is to be found in the purification of love through sanctity. Southwell might have had Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis in mind when he complained that the “finest wits” write of Venus and her erotic wiles, thereby allowing their true Christian orientation to be clouded by the “misty loves” of Eros. It is possible that Shakespeare’s writing of The Rape of Lucrece might have been inspired by the desire to respond positively to Southwell’s complaint, especially as there are clear parallels between Shakespeare’s Lucrece and Southwell’s St Peter’s Complaint. Yet surely Romeo and Juliet, of all Shakespeare’s plays, is the one that condemns most forthrightly the lewd love of Eros and its destructive consequences.

At the beginning of the famous balcony scene, Romeo explicitly spurns virginity as the “vestal livery” that “none but fools do where”. He desires that Juliet should cease to be a maid who wears the virginal livery of Diana, the goddess of chastity, and should instead sacrifice her virginity on the altar of the voluptuous Venus, his own weapon being the sacrificial knife.

Such is Southwell’s preoccupation with the deadly lure of Venus, or venery, that it serves as the recurring motif of much of his verse, in much the way that it serves as the dominant motif in the relationship of Shakespeare’s lovers. Southwell’s poem, “Love’s Servile Lot”, is so palpably pertinent to the moral thread with which Shakespeare weaves his tragedy that it almost serves as a commentary on the moral fabric of the play itself. Servile love separates will from wit, and the senses from reason; she is delightful on the surface but corrupt in the core:

She shroudeth vice in virtue’s veil,
Pretending good in ill:
She offreth joy, affordeth grief,
A kiss where she doth kill.

She binds the lovers “in tender twist”, like fleas in a spider’s web, and inflicts wounds like a tyrant while offering, like a surgeon, to heal the pain she causes. Yet the pain and the comfort “have equal force, / For death is both their ends.” She induces those in her thrall to throw themselves into the tempest of passion in defiance of reason:

Moods, passions, fancy’s jealous fits,
Attend upon her train;
She yieldeth rest without repose,
A heav’n in hellish pain.

As we read these lines we see visions of Shakespeare’s lovers throwing themselves to the ground in inconsolable grief-stricken tantrums, threatening suicide. And when we read the following verse we are haunted by the lovers’ desperate and suicidal end:

Her sleep in sin, doth end in wrath,
Remorse rings her awake,
Death calls her up, shame drives her out,
Despairs her upshot make.

The same theme is taken up by Southwell in “Lewd Love is Loss”, a poem to which Shakespeare seems to allude in The Merchant of Venice. In this verse, as in so many others, the Jesuit poet cautions his readers not to fall into “fancy’s trap” or allow themselves to be lured by “gracious features” which “Lull reason’s force asleep in error’s lap, / Or draw thy wit to bent of wanton’s will”:

So long the fly doth dally with the flame,
Until the singed wings do force his fall:
So long the eye doth follow fancy’s game,
Till love hath left the heart in heavy thrall.
Soon may the mind be cast in Cupid’s jail,
But hard it is imprisoned thoughts to bail.
O loathe that love whose final aim is lust,
Moth of the mind, eclipse of reason’s light:
The grave of grace, the mole of nature’s rust,
The wracke of wit, the wrong of every right.
In sum and evil whose harms not tongue can tell,
In which to live is death, to die is hell.

There is further suggestive evidence of Southwell’s influence on Romeo and Juliet in the punning connection between Romeo’s exclamation after his fateful slaying of Tybalt that he is “fortune’s fool” and the title of Southwell’s poem, “Fortune’s Falsehood”. Yet again, Southwell’s poem elucidates Shakespeare’s theme. It commences with a description of the ways in which “sly fortune’s subtleties” ensnare fortune’s fools with “shrewd hooks” and “baits of happiness”, wherein “misery” lurks amidst “worldly merriments”. As the theme is developed, clear and applicable parallels with Romeo and Juliet become apparent. Fortune soothes appetites “with pleasing vanities”, reminding us of the Petrarchan vanities and conceits with which Romeo initially wooed Juliet, but she uses such pleasing platitudes to conquer the victim “with cloaked tyranny”. She opens “death’s door” with “fawning flattery”, alluring her fools “to bloody destiny”, their subsequent ruin “registering her false felicity”. Like the hapless Romeo and Juliet, fortune’s false “hopes are fastened in bliss that vanisheth”.

A further and more direct connection between Shakespeare’s play and Southwell’s poem is to be found in the penultimate stanza of Southwell’s verse in which fortune’s “fools” take their “common pilgrimage to cursed deities”. The link between fortune’s falsehood in Southwell’s poem and “fortune’s fool” (Romeo) is evident in the way in which Romeo describes his lips as “two blushing pilgrims” in his very first words to Juliet. The profanity of the inappropriate religious imagery that he employs throughout the first exchange with Juliet testifies to the “cursed deities” which his words’ “pleasing vanities” and “fawning flattery” serve. Through such flattery, “death’s door” is opened, alluring Juliet “to bloody destiny”.

Yet another connection, this time by way of contrast, is that between the “light love” to which Juliet yields and the love that “loveth light” to which Southwell refers in his poem “From Fortune’s Reach”.  Whereas “light love” is the unchaste or frivolous love of Venus, the love that “loveth light” is the chaste love, the caritas, or agape, that enables one to love truly:

Let fickle fortune run her blindest race:
I settled have an unremoved mind:
I scorn to be the game of fancy’s chase,
Or vane to show the change of every wind.
Light giddy humors stinted to no rest,
Still change their choice, yet never choose the best.

Against this light giddy love that offers nothing but restlessness, the poet chooses an altogether different love. He is no slave to “beauty’s fading bliss” but seeks and finds “a light that ever shines” whose “glorious beams” will yield his soul “the sum of all delights”:

My light to love, my love to life doth guide
To life that lives by love, and loveth light …

Shakespeare may have had this poem in mind, with its dizzying and dazzling play of words on “light”, “love” and “life”, when he himself plays on the words of “light” and “love” during the balcony scene. Romeo tells Juliet that he had flown over the orchard walls “with love’s light wings”, whereas Juliet, worrying that Romeo might find her behaviour “light”, i.e. immodest or unchaste, begs him to pardon her “yielding to light love”. A few lines later, she worries that their brazen forwardness is “too rash, too unadvised, too sudden”; it is “too like the lightning, which doth cease to be / Ere one can say ‘It lightens’.” Their love is so light that she fears that it will be as blinding and as instantaneously spent as lightning itself.  Her words are indeed prophetic of the moral blindness that their “light love” causes and the dazzling suddenness with which it is spent. Their being struck with “light love” would prove as sudden and as deadly as lightning itself. Compare this with the “light that ever shines” which is the reward for the “life that lives by love, and loveth light” to which the Jesuit refers. Such a comparison becomes even more apparent when we note the ubiquitous imagery of darkness throughout Shakespeare’s play.

Much more could be said of Saint Robert Southwell’s influence on Shakespeare, especially in Hamlet and King Lear, but it is clear that the play that was written in the months following the Jesuit’s martyrdom highlights the abyss that separates the “light love” of Romeo with the Jesuit’s love that “loveth light”.