Liturgy and Literature in Early Modern England

Mr Pearce discusses Shakespeare's play "Sir Thomas More" and St Robert Southwell's poetry. More Renaissance than "Early Modern".

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Joseph Pearce

Can we fail to see the significance of Hamlet’s last words, “the rest is silence,” uttered immediately before Horatio’s prayer from the Requiem Mass? Since “requiem” means “rest” in Latin, can we avoid the suspicion that Shakespeare is alluding to the “something rotten” in the state of England which has silenced the Requiem Mass and banished prayers for the dead?

Having surveyed the Middle Ages in the broadest sense in the previous essay (“Liturgy and Literature in the Middle Ages“), beginning with Beowulf in the late seventh or early eighth century and concluding with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight seven hundred years later in the late fourteenth century, we will continue by focusing on liturgy and literature in Early Modern England during the age of Shakespeare. We will begin, however, not with Shakespeare himself but with the great Jesuit martyr and poet, St. Robert Southwell. Prior to his arrest in 1592 and the three years of torture which followed prior to his execution and martyrdom, Southwell had published a bestselling volume of poetry. These poems were evidently admired by Shakespeare, who engages intertextually with Southwell’s “Upon the Image of Death” in the famous graveyard scene in Hamlet and with Southwell’s eulogy and elegy to Mary, Queen of Scots, “Decease Release”, in King Lear.

Southwell was fond of writing Christmas poetry, of which the most famous and most anthologized is “The Burning Babe”, but his greatest contribution to liturgically inspired literature is indubitably “Of the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar”. Any of this glorious poem’s fifteen stanzas could serve to illustrate its brilliance but we’ll let this solitary example speak for the poem as a whole:

The God of hosts in slender host doth dwell,
Yea, God and man with all to either due,
That God that rules the heavens and rifled hell,
That man whose death did us to life renew:
That God and man that is the angels’ bliss,
In form of bread and wine our nurture is.

St. Robert Southwell was the confessor to the Earl of Southampton, who was Shakespeare’s patron, and it seems very likely that Southwell and Shakespeare would have known each other. It’s possible indeed that Southwell might have been Shakespeare’s own confessor and that the great playwright might have been at one of the clandestine sacrifices of the Mass that Southwell offered for England’s underground church prior to his arrest. Attendance at these celebrations of the Mass was perilous due to the likely presence of the network of spies that were employed to hunt down the missionary priests. This is evident perhaps in one of Shakespeare’s sonnets (Sonnet 23) which contains a line which serves as a truly sublime definition of the Mass as “the perfect ceremony of love’s right”. What else, one wonders, could Shakespeare possibly have had in mind when confecting these lines, especially when the pun on “right” and “rite” is acknowledged and the words are taken within the context of the lines which precede it:

As an unperfect actor on the stage,
Who with his fear is put besides his part,
Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,
Whose strength’s abundance weakens his own heart;
So I, for fear of trust, forget to say
The perfect ceremony of love’s right…

Intriguingly, this is also the sonnet in which Shakespeare appears to allude punningly to St. Thomas More (“More than that tongue that more hath more expressed”). More’s life and martyrdom would be celebrated by Shakespeare in his contribution to the writing of the play, Sir Thomas More, which was banned and never published or performed until long after Shakespeare’s death.

One other example of Shakespeare’s engagement with the liturgy should be offered. This is the prayer that Horatio says over the body of Hamlet: “Good night, sweet prince,/ And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.” This is clearly an allusion and deferential nod to the hymn In Paradisum that is sung in procession after the final blessing of the corpse at the Traditional Requiem Mass as the body is taken from the church to the graveside where the burial will take place: In paradisum deducant te angeli; in tuo adventu suscipiant te martyres, et perducant te in civitatem sanctam Jerusalem. Chorus angelorum te suscipiat, et cum Lazaro quondam paupere æternam habeas requiem. These lines might be translated thus: “May the angels lead you into paradise; may the martyrs receive you at your arrival and lead you to the holy city Jerusalem. May choirs of angels receive you and with Lazarus, once a poor man, may you have eternal rest.”

The irony is that Horatio says a prayer over the body of Hamlet from a liturgical rite, the Requiem Mass, which had been banned in England. The punishment was death for any priest celebrating such a Mass and for praying the words that Horatio uses in a liturgical context. Seen in this light, can we fail to see the significance of Hamlet’s last words, “the rest is silence”, uttered immediately before Horatio’s prayer from the Requiem Mass? Since requiem means “rest” in Latin, can we avoid the suspicion that Shakespeare is alluding to the “something rotten” in the state of England which has silenced the Requiem Mass and banished prayers for the dead? Is Shakespeare saying as much as he dares in defence of the perfect ceremony of love’s rite? Is he saying as much as he dares in the sonnet we’ve already quoted? Is he an “unperfect actor who with his fear is put beside his part”? Is he frightened of “some fierce thing replete with too much rage, whose strength’s abundance weakens his own heart”? We will let him answer these questions himself with the final lines of the same sonnet:

O, let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast;
Who plead for love, and look for recompense,
More than that tongue that more hath more express’d.
O, learn to read what silent love hath writ:
To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.

Shakespeare is asking us to read what can’t be written. He is asking us to use “love’s fine wit” to learn to see what can’t be spoken. The rest is silence because it is silenced. But such silence, expressed with Shakespeare’s silent love, is deafening.

The next essay will focus on “Liturgy and Literature in the Modern Age.”

The featured image is “In the library” (before 1943), by Ludwig Valenta, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.