The Age of Shakespeare

Joseph Pearce looks at the situation in the time of the Bard when the battle for religious liberty was a matter of life and death, as it is becoming today.

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Joseph Pearce

Shakespeare’s age was one in which sin was put at the service of secular tyranny and in which those who sought to practice the fullness of the Faith were held in scorn and punished by the enforcement of draconian laws. It was an age in which the battle for religious liberty was a matter of life and death. It was an age, in some respects, that is not all that different from our own.

Ben Jonson famously said of his friend William Shakespeare that he was not of an age but for all time. This is indubitably so. The works of Shakespeare speak to all ages because they hold up a mirror to humanity. They show us who we are. They reflect those deepest aspects of what it is to be a human person living within a human community. They show us man’s relationship with man, man’s relationship with God and, which is the mark of great art, they also throw penetrative light on God’s relationship with man.

And yet it is imperative to know something about the age of Shakespeare if we are to dive and delve deeper into the profundity of what he has to say to us. He lived in turbulent times in which Caesar was besieging the things that were God’s and in which men were being martyred for clinging to the faith of their fathers. This turbulence, tyranny and martyrdom shape Shakespeare’s work as they shaped his life. It is well, therefore, to know something of the age in which he lived.

Shakespeare was born on St. George’s Day, 1564, into a devout and defiant Catholic family. At the time of his birth, the cold queen of England, Elizabeth I, had only reigned a few short years. She would preside over a period of relentless persecution of England’s Catholics, casting a shadow over Shakespeare’s childhood and manhood. His father was fined for his recusancy, his refusal to conform to the new state-imposed religion, and was forced to retire from local politics because of his faith. Some of Shakespeare’s cousins were executed for their alleged involvement in “papist plots”. It seems that Shakespeare himself, as a young man, had to flee from his hometown to escape the wrath of the local priest-hunting lord of the manor, Sir Thomas Lucy.

In 1568, when Shakespeare was only four years old, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, fled to England, seeking sanctuary from her enemies north of the border. She was immediately imprisoned on Elizabeth’s orders. In the following year, an uprising, known as the Northern Rebellion, was put down ruthlessly with hundreds of people, mostly Catholics, being hanged in their local villages, without trial. Such tyranny prompted the pope, St. Pius V, to excommunicate Elizabeth, an act which infuriated the cold queen, raising her ire and therefore raising the political heat still further. New penal laws were passed in 1571 making it punishable by death to even attend a private Mass, held in secret, and severe punishments were enacted for the mere possession of articles associated with Catholic worship and practice. For the remainder of Elizabeth’s reign, her kingdom was destined to become a land of martyrs.

In 1571, the same year in which Bloody Bess was making it punishable by death to practice “popery”, St. Pius V saved Europe from the Islamic Turkish Empire when the fleet of the Holy League which he had sponsored, under the leadership of Don John of Austria, defeated the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto, the largest naval battle since before the time of Christ. If the papal forces had not prevailed, Rome and western Europe might have gone the way of Constantinople, falling under the sway of the forces of Islam.

In 1580, the Jesuit mission to England began. There is evidence that the teenage Shakespeare could have met the first of these Jesuit missionaries, St. Edmund Campion, during the Jesuit’s journey north in 1580 or possibly at a recusant house in Lancashire a few months later. There is much stronger evidence that Shakespeare would have known another Jesuit martyr, St. Robert Southwell, to whose poetry Shakespeare alludes repeatedly in his own plays and whom he probably knew personally. Campion was martyred in 1581 and Southwell in 1595. Apart from these two heroic Jesuits, Shakespeare probably knew others who were martyred for their faith, including St. Anne Line, who was hanged in 1601 for the “crime” of sheltering priests.

The death of Bloody Bess in 1603 raised hopes that the decades of relentless persecution were at an end. Such hopes were dashed when her successor, James I, continued with the anti-papist pogroms. The doom-laden sense of desolation and anger that the Catholics of England felt at this continuation of tyranny was evident in the darkness of Shakespeare’s plays written at this time, such as Othello, Macbeth and King Lear.

The age of Shakespeare also saw the rise of the Puritans who were securing control of Parliament and were threatening to rival the power of the king himself. Eventually, the Puritans would succeed in overthrowing the monarchy and would execute King James’s son, Charles I, establishing a short-lived Puritan dictatorship. These seeds of regicide, revolution and war were all being laid in the fifty-two years that Shakespeare walked the earth. His age was one in which sin was put at the service of secular tyranny and in which those who sought to practice the fullness of the Faith were held in scorn and punished by the enforcement of draconian laws. It was an age in which the battle for religious liberty was a matter of life and death. It was an age, in some respects, that is not all that different from our own.

Republished with gracious permission from the Saint Austin Review.

The featured image of William Shakespeare is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.