Master Shakespeare a foul Papist? Possible!

Great Debates
1

In another thread in cafe society, here someone brings up an interesting idea that Shakespeare may have been of the Old Religion (i.e. Roman Catholic).

While we may never settle the question, here is some interesting evidence.

  1. The number of Roman Catholic English continued to be surpisingly large in England for about a century or two after the Reformation. Historians such as Christopher Hibbert record that the number of RCs in England declined only slowly. Many of the “recusants” were upper-class and upper-middle-class rural conservatives (i.e. country squires) who scornfully regarded Protestantism and even Anglicanism as lower-class aberrations. There were numerous country gentry who complied with the laws requiring them to be Anglican by having the head of the family, the father, attend Anglican services while his wife and children (and he) continued to celebrate mass in their homes with English RC priests trained in Douay, France, at a special seminary that snuck priests into England much like the Taliban sneaking into Afghanistan.

  2. Contrary to all myths, Shakespeare was not from the lower classes. He was clearly a product of the conservative, upper-middle class rural gentry around Startford on Avon.

  3. Obviously, the up-and-coming young playwright, upon arriving in London, would not have dared reveal Papist leanings.

  4. While Elizabeth I was not too bad in her persecution of RCs, the English public generally detested them and considered them traitors. Her successor, James the First of England, however, persecuted Catholics with ferocity. Priests caught saying mass were hanged, cut down while still alive, and had their hearts cut out while the crowds cheered. And while we think of Shakespeare as an Eliabethan, his King would have been James the First from 1603 until the Bard’s death in 1616.

  5. Given the climate of the day in England, what is truly amazing about Shakespeare’s plays is the rarity or total absence of anti-Catholic sentiment in his plays. In our own age, we are used to sympathetic portrayals of nuns and priests in the media (e.g. Sound of Music). But consider how gently and favourably Shakespeare treated Roman Catholic characters and even RC clergy in his plays.

For example, Romeo and Juliet and Friar Laurence, who, if somewhat incomptent and indirectly responsible for the death of the lovers, is definitely seen as sympathetic.

Consider Othello, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night or Love’s Labour’s Lost, set in Roman Catholic countries, in which most or all of the the characters are presumably Roman Catholics.

  1. The Wikipedia article on Shakespeare contains this tantalizing tidbit: “There is evidence that members of Shakespeare’s family were recusant Catholics. The strongest evidence is a tract professing secret Catholicism signed by John Shakespeare, father of the poet. The tract was found in the rafters of Shakespeare’s birthplace in the 18th century, and was seen and described by the reputable scholar Edmond Malone. However, the tract has since been lost, and its authenticity cannot therefore be proven.”

So what thinkest thou? Was Master Shakespeare a foul and God-cursed Papist?

2

By “the Old Religion”, the poster you referenced was referring to paganism, not Catholicism. Sorry to completely sweep your legs out from under you on that meticulous OP…

3

Oh, and quite a few of Shakespeare’s plays are set in Catholic nations because the source material he used was set in Catholic nations. Shakespeare’s plays may be original, but the stories those plays depict rarely (if ever) sprung from our man William’s own mind.

4

Um, I think you read that wrong.

I think Bosda’s saying his prof insinuated that Shakespeare may have been pagan. Y’know, witchcraft and fairy lore. Usually it’s the Wiccan church (which did NOT exist in Shakespeare’s day) that’s called “The Old Religion”.

Google hits for The Old Religion.

5

What do you mean, “myths”? :rolleyes:

We havehis family’s tax & baptismal records! And we know his father was a glover (a tradesman who made gloves) and an elected Alderman, a post traditionally held by a commoner. His mother was the daughter of local gentry, which implies a Knight or local Squire, neither of which are noblemen.

And I was refering to Paganism, thou tedious fellow. :dubious:

6

First of all, you are quite right in saying that I missed the meaning of Old Religion in the original post. :smack:

I guess the OP meant paganism, not Roman Catholicism.

But I was only using that as a segué into my own discussion, which was a consideration of whether or not Shakespeare might have been a Roman Catholic.

My misreading of that OP does NOT invalidate the argument that follows, because I was not using the OP about the witches in Macbeth as evidence.

If I had read it correctly, I would have said: “Another posting speculates as to whether Shakespeare was secretly a member of the Pagan Old Religion. I think it is possible he may have been a member of the other “Old Religion” Roman Catholicism.”

The rest of my posting remains perfectly valid.

7

'Struth, I fear! I had actually thought of that after I posted my last post but never got back here in time to note it before you did. Sorry! :slight_smile:

8

However, several other plays suggest that Shakespeare had a Pagan connection, including A Midsummer Night’s Dream & others.

If true, he was not a Catholic, but rather a secret Pagan. Further, his troupe of actors became the Queen’s Players, official entertainers to Her Majesty. Given that Elizabeth had a short way with Catholics (read: “OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!!!”), it is more than likely that Pagan Shakespeare toed the official line on Sunday Morning, & avoided the Friday Fish Plate Special.

What he did or didn’t do under the full moon was something altogether different.

9

Nah, I didn’t miss it, but I don’t know much 'bout it, neither. Except, as **Bosda **already points out, there’s not much real debate over who Master William was, outside of Freshman English classes. Think of how people will view, say, Bill Gates in 500 years. Without written records, it’s likely that people would find it hard to believe that he achieved what he has in such a technical field without a college degree. Yet the fact is that he attended some college, but never graduated.

Could Shakespeare have been a closet Catholic? Probably not, given that we have his baptismal records. Could he have converted secretly? Possibly, but I think it much more likely that the lack of Catholic bashing in his plays was because he was simply aware of the last 100 years of his own country’s history, and thought it prudent not to piss anyone off on either side, as there was really no knowing who’d be in power next week! Exaggeration, I know. Elizabeth’s reign was remarkably stable, given what had preceeded it. Still, as long as it wasn’t integral to the story, why would a playwrite-for-hire anger and alienate potential patrons?

I think the pagan idea has more merit, and even that’s statistically quite unlikely. Neopagan revisionist “histories” aside, very few of those persecuted as witches were pagan herbalist midwives, and there’s no evidence for unbroken hereditary witchcraft in England. Most “witches” were Protestants when the Catholics were in power or vice-versa.

10

You are destroying a straw man of your own creation. If you will carefully read my OP, I nowhere state that Shakespeare was of the nobility. I stated he was part of the upper-middle class gentry, many of whose members clung to Catholicism in secret.

Your point about Shakespeare’s father being an Alderman simply confirms my point. “Commoner” did not have to mean dirt poor. It meant simply not of the nobility. Some commoners had enough money to buy and sell certain nobles several times over. Consider that John Shakespeare 1) had a trade making a luxury item (gloves), 2) that he was socialy prominent enough to be elected Alderman by his community, and 3) that he married the daughter of local gentry. While it is not impossible that he married up, it is more likely that he was considered suitable to marry the daughter of gentry because he was what we would today call “upper-middle-class”. They likely would not have used that expression at that time, I realize.

Finally, add to this that his son William appears to have received a good education that was only available to the well-off, and my point stands. Truly poor, lower-class people in England rarely learned to read, let alone write beautiful sonnets and plays.

Shakespeare was of the rural upper-middle-class in 16th-century England, a class that contained many “recusant” Catholics.

11

Do you not think it possible that a family of closet Catholics who want to hold on to their position in a small town in England would have had him baptised by the Anglican Church to cover their butts?

After all, wht did you expect them to say to the local Anglican clergy?" No thank you, we already had our little Willy baptized by a Roman Catholic Priest who was illegally saying mass in the area and whom we hid in our home for a few days?"

Just as recusant Catholic fathers played along with the law by attending Anglican services, a well documented fact.

12

Of course I think it’s possible, that’s why I said “probably”, not “definitely”.

Look, I don’t know exactly what else you’re looking for. The answer is we’ll never know if he was secretly a Catholic or a pagan or an atheist, because it was, well, secret.

But you don’t seem to have a lot of evidence to support your rather extraordinary claim other than, “well, some of the people in what may have been his socio-economic sphere were secretly Catholic.” Ok, sure. Lots of the people (the majority, in fact) in my socio-economic sphere are Christian, but I’m not. Yet if I were a playwright, I wouldn’t write Christian bashing in a populist piece unless it were integral to the plot.

13

I’m an agnostic on the issue of Shakespeare’s possible Catholicism, but I will say that the idea is not far-fetched, and there are quite a few people in the academy who take it seriously.

Actually, Shakespeare’s portrayal of Catholic clergy, especially in Romeo and Juliet and Measure for Measure, really is unusual for the early modern English stage. With the possible exception of John Ford’s 'Tis Pity She’s a Whore (which is all about those crazy incestuous murderous Italians, but does have a relatively decent friar in it), I can’t think of any other plays from the era that treat the Catholic establishment so sympathetically. John Webster’s Cardinal in The Duchess of Malfi – who bribes his way into ecclesiastical office, keeps a mistress, and conspires to murder his sister – is a great deal more typical of the period. Most playwrights weren’t all that fussed about offending Catholics; they were writing for an audience that loved to hate corrupt friars and cardinals.

Shakespeare probably also had a hand in Sir Thomas More, which really WAS hot-button stuff, and was probably never staged because the authors couldn’t come to an agreement with the censor. While the play glosses over the details of More’s falling-out with Henry VIII, Elizabethan audiences would obviously have known perfectly well what it was all about – and the play is, basically, a hagiography in all but name. There’s no question that we’re meant to see More as a man who follows his conscience and dies a martyr’s death.

14

Many people wanted to question Shakespeare’s authorship because they couldn’t imagine an average guy from an average family in an average town could produce such brilliance.

The authorship established beyond question, some want to grasp at straws such as a secretly held religion because they still can’t imagine it…

15

I fail to see anywhere where the OP questions the authorship or intelligence of Shakespeare…? Or at least I don’t see how WS being a closet Roman Catholic would somehow make him more or less able to write well.

16

You’re missing the point, and I didn’t say any of what you suggest I said.

People have always wanted to find out some grand secret about Shakespeare (he was gay, he was a cover for Francis Bacon, etc.) because the simplest, most likely explanation was too prosaic for them. Imagining him either as a closet Catholic or a secret neopagan is just another example of that.

17

If I may, I would like to deal with the two above sentences in reverse order.

The second sentence is a complete non-sequitur to my argument. If Shakespeare and members of his family did indeed secretly cling to Roman Catholicism (and historians now agree that surprisingly large numbers of Englishmen did) it has absolutely nothing to do with the first part of your argument. Being a closet Catholic would not make him better or worse as an author.

It might, however, have made him a little more understanding of other persecuted minority groups. Consider his sympathetic, if tragic, charater Othello, a Moor.

Or consider his treatment of Shylock in the Merchant of Venice. Now, I realize that the MOV is seen as an anti-semitic play according to modern standards, and there is great controversy about it being taught in schools.

But every historical figure must be judged in the context of their own time. Look at Shylock’s famous speech about a Jew having ears, eyes, warmed and cooled, etc. It is an eloquent plea for tolerance. Also, Shylock’s daughter is protrayed sympathetically.

Compare MOV to something like Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, in which the Jew Barabas is so monstrously evil that some of his lines actually cause laughter in modern audiences, such as when he says he likes to kick homeless, sick people lying on the street.

Given the hatred of Jews among Elizabethans, MOV and the protrayal of Shylock are relatively mild.

Consider also Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. In one scene, Roman Catholic clergy enter in a gross mockery of Papism, and the whole thing turns into a farce in which, if memory serves me correctly, RC priests have fire or fireworks shoved into their clothing and run around à la three stooges to the obvious mirth and delight of the Catholic-hating audience.

Now it is possible as one poster has said, that the complete lack of ANYTHING anti-Catholic in any of Shakespeare’s plays may have been simply the result of his desire not to get in trouble in case another Bloody Mary came to the throne.

But obviously, Marlowe had no fear of a return of Catholic power to England in the late 1500s, judging by his plays. Nor apparently did the people who put on his plays. Was Shakespeare the only one who was this fearful of a return of Catholic hegemony?

Now then, getting around to your first statement, FURT, I actually share your opinion. I also am sick and tired of the old “Shakespeare was really Bacon” or “Shakespeare never existed” nonsense. It is about as credible as Bigfoot.

I also find the argument that a brilliant writer must have been a noble both elitist and ridiculous.

BUT I AM NOT MAKING THAT ARGUMENT! I have not for one second questioned Shakespeare’s authorship.

All I am saying is that there is a differnce between saying that Shakespeare was a commoner (i.e. not part of the nobility) and interpreting “commoner” to mean that he sprang from an impoverished background.

Everything points to Shakespeare coming from a comfortable, local gentry in a small town. John Shakespeare’s election as an Alderman, his trade as a glove-maker (which may have meant that he owned a glove-making business that employed a number of people) his marriage to a daughter of a knight or squire, and the fact that someone, somewhere, somehow gave his son William an excellent education and an ability to read and write eloquently all point to an upper-middle-class background.

And I am adding that recusant Catholics were common among this conservative class.

18

:confused: The difference being . . . ?

19

If Shakespeare came from a comfortable class, how did he come to be convicted of poaching?

20

I’m kind of missing the logic here. Paganism has clearly left strong imprints in Western European culture, but I don’t see how Shakespeare’s use of pre-Christian trope made him a “secret Pagan”. His ‘Pagan connection’ could have been “Holla, this shit dost be cool”.