The Shakespeare Enigma

Was Shakespeare a Catholic? Mr Pearce believes he was and makes a good case for his argument. The Bard's father, John, definitely was, as is proven by his will.

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Joseph Pearce

In the decades and centuries following his death, the pieces of the puzzle connecting Shakespeare to the Catholic faith were lost, or were forgotten or set aside. But there is little doubt that Shakespeare’s contemporaries heard the words spoken from the stage with the eyes that saw what he was saying.

If we look back in time, to the very dawn of Western civilization, we find the figure of Homer. Or actually we don’t find him. We know nothing about him except that someone known by that name wrote the two foundational epics of Western literature. And we don’t even know that for sure because some scholars seem to believe that The Iliad and The Odyssey were written by two different authors to whom the same name has been ascribed by posterity.

Prior to Homer, history disappears into the mystical mists of time. Homer writes about ancient civilizations that existed centuries before his time about which he knew little and about which we know almost nothing. This should remind us to be ever mindful that there are two definitions of history. The first is that history is the past, pure and simple; the second is that it is the surviving record of the past, those parts of the past which are documented in words, or in stone, or in bone. To put the matter metaphorically, history (in the first sense) is like a jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing.

This understanding of history explains why Homer is an enigma but it doesn’t appear to explain why the figure of William Shakespeare seems to be shrouded in mystery. In terms of time, he is over two thousand years closer to us than Homer. It was only a little over 400 years ago that he was writing his poetry and plays. Why is this relatively recent figure in history such an enigma? The painting of him which seems to have the greatest claim to authenticity, the famous Chandos portrait, looks at us with the enigmatic suggestiveness of the Mona Lisa. As with Leonardo’s famous portrait, the Chandos Shakespeare seduces us with its aura of mystery, its unanswered questions. Who is this man who looks at us knowingly from the canvas? What secrets does he conceal? His eyes meet ours, teasing us with evasive promptings of we know not what. “We ask and ask,” wrote Matthew Arnold in his sonnet to Shakespeare: “Thou smilest and art still,/Out-topping knowledge.”

Returning to the metaphor of the jigsaw puzzle, we might be surprised to discover that more of the pieces of his life are known than many people realize. These pieces reveal, beyond reasonable doubt, that Shakespeare was raised in a recusant Catholic family and that he probably remained a Catholic throughout his life. The present author has compiled the biographical evidence in his book The Quest for Shakespeare: The Bard of Avon and the Church of Rome (Ignatius Press) and has surveyed the textual evidence to be gleaned from the plays in Through Shakespeare’s Eyes: Seeing the Catholic Presence of the Plays (also Ignatius Press). In both cases, he was building on the work done by previous generations of scholars, providing a compendium of other men’s labours.

Considering that the practice of the Catholic faith was illegal in Shakespeare’s time, we don’t know the extent to which he was a practicing Catholic, which would have made him a secret outlaw, or whether he reluctantly conformed to the tyranny of his times by abstaining from religious practice. There is a clue, perhaps, in one of his sonnets in the reference to “[t]he perfect ceremony of love’s rite”, which would appear to be a perfect definition of a Catholic understanding of the holy sacrifice of the Mass, along with the fear associated with it during the persecutions and executions of the Elizabethan age and rage:

As an unperfect actor on the stage,
Who with his fear is put beside 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 rite,
And in mine own love’s strength seem to decay,
O’ercharged with burthen of mine own love’s might….

Such was the power and reach of Queen Elizabeth’s spy network, against which Shakespeare vented his spleen in Hamlet, that Catholics did not know whom to trust. There were many feigned and fake “conversions” to the Faith, making it impossible to know if the “Catholic” in one’s midst was genuine or otherwise. Such spies would report on those attending the underground Masses; hence the “fear of trust” which leads to the “forgetfulness” to say the “perfect ceremony of love’s rite”, a fear born of the tyranny of the anti-papist culture of the times, the “fierce thing replete with too much rage”. The strength of the love for Christ seems to decay under the weight of the burden that the power of such love demands. The cross is too heavy and the one called to carry it stumbles. It is this struggle and this tension that animate Shakespeare’s plays, a fact that Shakespeare, in the second half of the sonnet, hopes we will see and understand:

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 expressed.
O learn to read what silent love hath writ,
To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.

As his heart cannot speak openly for fear of the consequences, he hopes that his eloquence will be expressed in his works. In his plays, he pleads for charity in very uncharitable times and calls for justice and mercy (recompense) for those suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous persecution. Beguilingly and enigmatically, there is even a seeming punning reference to St. Thomas More, who was the subject of a banned play which Shakespeare at least partially wrote: “More than that tongue that more hath More expressed.” Although Shakespeare does not wish or does not have the courage to suffer martyrdom for his faith, he hopes his dissident voice will be heard in “love’s fine wit” which his “silent love hath writ”.

There is little doubt that Shakespeare’s contemporaries heard the words spoken from the stage with the eyes that saw what he was saying. This is evident by the vociferous and vituperative attacks upon him by the leading Puritans of his time, who connected him with the hated Jesuits. It is likely in fact that the nature of these attacks contributed to Shakespeare’s decision to cease writing and to return to the relative safety of his family home in Stratford-upon-Avon.

In the decades and centuries following his death, the pieces of the puzzle connecting Shakespeare to the Catholic faith were lost, or were forgotten or set aside. Seventy or so years after Shakespeare’s death, when the Anglican clergyman, Richard Davies, recorded that Shakespeare had “dyed a papist”, there were few others who remembered. Indeed by the end of the seventeenth century, Shakespeare himself had been largely forgotten. His plays were performed during the revival of the theatre following the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 but it wasn’t until the following century that his works really experienced a revival. The three-day Shakespeare “Jubilee”, organized in 1769 by the celebrated actor and produced David Garrick, marked the “canonization” of the Bard of Avon as a veritable secular icon of the English nation. By this time, England’s national mythos was dogmatically “anti-papist”. It was unthinkable, therefore, that the new iconographic symbol of the nation, William Shakespeare, should be tainted by association with the Old Faith. This being so, any pieces of the puzzle which had not been buried by the sands of time, were diligently ignored. A century later still, in the Victorian era, when Matthew Arnold wrote his sonnet to Shakespeare, there was nothing left of the real Shakespeare in the public’s perception. All that was left was the enigma of which Arnold writes.

Thankfully, as Cordelia reminds us in King Lear, “Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides.” It was Matthew Arnold’s contemporary, the historian and literary scholar, Richard Simpson, who began to rediscover the lost or neglected pieces of the puzzle of Shakespeare’s life. His work has been carried on by generations of scholars who have been able to piece together enough of the facts to show that Shakespeare’s Catholic faith and sympathies are beyond reasonable doubt. The only reason that the enigma remains is the desire by many people to continue to believe in false or fake Shakespeares. Their plighted cunning notwithstanding, the real William Shakespeare stands before them in inescapable splendour. Love’s finest wit can no longer be silenced. His love’s labours are not lost, and all’s well that ends well!

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The featured image is an 18th-century painting of William Shakespeare by an anonymous artist, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.