There is no contemporary evidence for that claim, and (IIRC) it is usually regarded now as an invention of a later writer.
Well, I believe that the poaching idea has been discredited in another post. But I repeat. All I am saying is that truly poor people in 16th-century England rarely got a chance to learn to read and write at all. The vast majority of Englishmen would have been illiterate at that time.
I agree 100% that Shakespeare is the author of Shakespeare’s plays. All I am saying is that the ability to read and write elegant prose and poetry would seem to indicate that WS got educational opportunities that most English boys of his century would not have had.
Now, it is not absolutely impossible that a poor boy from a poor family could have worked extra hard and learned how to read and write beautifully, maybe with the help of a kind teacher who recognized genius in the lad and spent hour upon hour giving him free tutoring.
But the fact is that Shakespeare shows a knowledge of Latin and French (as in The Tempest) a knowledge of history, a knowledge of geography, etc. He makes allusions to classical subjects, to Greek and Roman gods. He knew enough about ancient Rome to write Julius Caesar. He knew enough about English history to write his historical plays. He alludes to the discovery of the New World in Twelfth Night (“the Map of the World with the augmentation of the Indies”).
I realize that he got his plot lines from existing books, but the ability to read these books and craft beautiful plays in beautiful language based on these stories simply cannot be done without a fair amount of education.
The simplest explanation is that he came from a class that could afford to give him that education and the leisure to study. NOT the nobility, but not a poor family either.
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I never understood the claims, either. Shakespeare is downright mundane compared to, say, Mozart. He was a talented guy working around other talented guys, but he more famous than them because somebody got the bright idea of publishing his plays (after his death) in book format, to be distributed and performed throughout the realm and, after eventual translation, the world. Had the First Folio been a collection of Marlowe’s work, he’d be a leading light of Western civilization, while Shakespeare’s fame would have been limited to his London fan base.
Nothing I said had anything to do with Shakespeare being better or worse as an author. Please read more carefully.
Shakespeare was exceptionally understanding of minority groups. Nothing I said disputes that. Please read more carefully.
Or it could be that he was just understanding of minority groups. He had many Catholic connections, including his Mother’s family, so it is not shocking that he declines to attack them. The lack of such attacks is not evidence that he himself was Catholic. (It may suggest that he was not especially committed to Protestantism.)
Which is a fine, since I never said nor implied you did. Please read more carefully.
To repeat:
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.
Ben Jonson had published his collected works seven years before Shakespeare did, and it’s highly unlikely that Heminge and Condell would have been inspired to put out Shakespeare’s First Folio if Jonson hadn’t done it first. Undoubtedly, it helped that Shakespeare’s colleagues were concerned with his posthumous reputation – a third of Shakespeare’s plays would have been lost to posterity if they hadn’t been – but if the publication of one’s collected works were the only operative factor, Jonson would be more famous than Shakespeare.
It’s possible that Marlowe would have achieved fame on par with Shakespeare’s if he had lived longer and written more, but seven plays, Hero and Leander, and translations of Ovid and Lucan aren’t much to build a Shakespeare-level reputation on.
I’m perplexed at the repetition of this statement. What are you trying to say? “The simplest explanation for Shakespeare is that he was just a normal guy, and therefore it’s not at all possible, no matter how much evidence you present, for him to be anything but that. So stop.”
Because that’s how you’re coming across, and it doesn’t seem conducive to any kind of interesting debate.
Various comments …
John Shakespeare’s Spiritual Testament is undoubtedly the angle that has given the Shakespeare as Catholic hypothesis its legs. Though, as with most such matters, there are complications.
Malone’s significance here is that it was him who published the text and hence ensured that that survived, even when the documents (sic) themselves were lost. He himself was initially convinced by them, but over the years changed his mind and wound up dismissing them as forgeries. While he never fully explained his change of mind, it probably had to do with the fact that the testament came in two separate pieces via John Jordan.
Twentieth century scholarship established that the second half of the testament (from midway through III onwards) matches a standard Catholic profession of faith from the period. The start doesn’t - and the split follows the division in the pieces supplied by Jordan. Since the second half of the text was otherwise unknown until 1926, the modern conclusion is that what Malone saw of it was almost certainly derived from a genuine 16th century document. The first half was likely someone, probably Jordan, improving upon this by faking the missing section.
So was the second half really John Shakespeare’s? It has been suggested - by Schoenbaum, for instance - that, since the text is a standard template, that Jordan could have found a genuine document with blank spaces for the name, added the father’s name and then organised the apparent provenance. Nevertheless, my impression is that nobody these days dismisses the possibility that John was a recusant out of hand and most take it seriously.
Certainly possible, but why single out Catholics amongst the minorities you perceive him as being empathetic with when creating characters? If he could so convincingly give voice to Moors and Jews without being one, why not Catholics as well?
(Inevitably, the argument used here for Catholicism has been applied to claim entirely other identities for him. A Jewish Shakespeare anyone?)
As far as I know, nobody has ever argued against Shakespeare being Catholic on either the grounds that they were far too rare in the Elizabethan England for him to be one or, likewise, that he was too lower class to be one. Thus these two particular arguments seem completely beside the point.
There are other bits and pieces of evidence that are more typically marshalled in support of the thesis that he was Catholic.
Thus there’s the isolated report of Richard Davies in the late 17th century that “He died a papist”, though this is the sort of stray gossip that’s unlikely to persuade the unconvinced.
A bigger argument in recent years has been the old suggestion that Shakespeare spent the “lost years” with the Hoghtons of Alston Hall in Lancashire, who definitely were Catholics. But the concensus on that issue remains that there are more plausible local candidates for the “William Shakeshafte” there than the young man from Stratford.
If anything, the Catholic angle seems to have been the fashionable take in the more popularist wing of Shakespeare biography of late - e.g Anthony Holden and Michael Wood. I suspect that it’s one of those unprovable suggestions that will just continue to pass into and out of fashion.
I don’t see his statement that way. It reads more like “Shakespeare was a talented guy, period, so why try to add unnecessary layers to him by making up loopy secrets and conspiracies with no supporting evidence?”
He’s not really any more extraordinary as a playwright than, say, smushing Neil Simon and Arthur Miller together. Talented, sure. Tormented? Prove it.
I am saying that the simplest explanation is the most likely, and the burden of proof lies on those who want to argue otherwise. It is* possible * that he was Catholic, neopagan, or any number of other things. It’s possible that he was a space alien from the planet Remulak.
The primary evidence given in this thread for WS being a neopagan was that he certainly knew a lot about myths. I trust the weakness of that argument is obvious. The only meaningful evidence given in this thread for him being a Catholic is the Spiritual Testament, a single, non-extant document of questionable provenance, along with the evidence that he wasn’t as anti-Catholic as other people. This is only marginally stronger.
It’s a very common exercise: people like to imagine a famous figure as gay, transgendered, black, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Atheist, a psuedonym, a Nazi, or what have you, and so they look for evidence to support that … or failing that, they argue that “well, it’s possible,” as if it means something.
Or, as I should have said, Bryan is entirely correct.
“Maybe he was Catholic,” does not strike me as particularly loopy, nor as much of a conspiracy. There were, at that time, a significant number of “closet” Catholics. There were quite a lot of them in the area where Shakespeare grew up. It’s possible, therefore, that he might be Catholic. It’s not proof, by any means, and nobody is presenting it as proof. That doesn’t mean it’s not an idea worth pursuing, and if there is proof out there one way or the other, it’s not likely to come to light if people refuse to discuss the issue because he was statistically more likely to be Protestant than anything else.
He was, for my money, the single greatest creative agent in the history of Western letters. You can mush Simon and Miller together, and then pile everyone from Sam Beckett to Oscar Wilde on top, and your end result would still be a pale imitation. Insofar as it makes any sense to compare a playwright with a composer, your earlier comparison with Mozart was a little fairer, but still too charitable to Wolfgang.
None of which, his purported Catholicism included, has anything to do with him being “tortured.”
I must confess, I am bemused by some of this stuff.
My recollection of UK history (being British I got taught it, and tend to brush up on it occasionally) has no recollection of James I being an avid persecuter of Catholics.
Sure, he was not that keen on being blown up, but that was more a political problem.
Now, early on Henry VIII had ‘saints’ like More and Fisher persecuting people who wanted to interpret the Bible themselves, Mary was a lunatic - and Elizabeth did not much bother.
I’ve vague memories of, I think Pepys being touched by the King to cure scrofula (curious superstition - very unhygienic), and I was told that the breaking of staff and drowning of books was a message from Shakespeare that he was packing up and retiring - from witchcraft.
Othello may have been a moor, but at that time he would have had a light sun tan, and came from a rather more advanced society than Elizabethan England. Sure he was in a minority, like Bill Gates would be in the UK.
Education was not entirely unusual, Edward VI had established Grammar Schools (someone had to provide ‘clerks’ after the church got asset stripped), and I’ve strong recollections that WS spent some time at Oxford.
The big problems were gently brewing at the ‘Low Church’ end of things.
My take is that WS was a cross between a court jester and a brown noser - a very talented satirist who did propoganda as a side line.
I also suspect, that then as now, few people really gave a toss about religion.
How sharper than a serpent’s tooth is Gaudere’s unkindness. 
And it’s “wilt thou” into the bargain.
Both of you are wrong. Early-modern notions of social rank were very precise and ignoring those nuances are bound to lead you to the wrong conclusions.
What would have counted for contemporaries was that John Shakespeare was a tradesman and a member of the Stratford corporation. That placed him within a very specific stratum of late-Tudor society. When it came to social rank, townsmen were always something of a special case. Membership of a town corporation certainly mattered, in the sense that it raised someone above the lesser, unskilled inhabitants of that town, but it otherwise simply confirmed them as a townsman and certainly did not make them a gentleman. As he went on to hold higher civic offices, John Shakespeare would have counted as one of the more important inhabitants in a not-very-important provincial town. In other words, a classic example of one of the ‘middling sort’.
The local gentry would have emphatically not have regarded him as ‘one of us’. Only when granted arms in 1596 would John Shakespeare have been considered a gentleman and it is revealing that his earlier application (if indeed it had been submitted) had been dropped. It was not unusual for successful tradesmen from towns to make the transition to gentry status, but the point was that this was all about acquiring a status they did not already have and from which their involvement in commerce was thought to disqualify them. Tradesmen sought to become gentlemen precisely because they were thought not to be so. In John Shakespeare’s case, his elevation to the rank of armigerous gentleman depended on his son’s newfound wealth; on his own, as a failed, bankrupted glover without extensive non-urban property, he would never have become a gentleman, which is part of the reason why the grant of arms was thought rather suspect at the time.
Nor is it true that Anne Hathaway came from a gentry family. Her father, Richard Hathaway, was no more than a yeoman farmer. Unlike with their age difference, there was nothing particularly unusual about two people of such backgrounds marrying. Indeed, if anything, John Shakespeare, who had been chief alderman of Stratford and a surety for his debts, may well have thought of himself as a bit superior to Richard Hathaway.
All of which is, in any case, irrelevant to the issue of William’s education. Stratford had a good grammar school, which provided free education to the sons of members of the corporation. Although John Shakespeare may have been illiterate (which is one of the major problems with the ‘Spiritual Testament’), literacy and a classical education were the norms in Stratford in the 1570s for boys such as Shakespeare. Indeed, as Jonathan Bate has pointed out, there was a whole wave of grammar school boys from Warwickshire, many without university educations, who made it in the literary world of late Elizabethan London.
Getting Shakespeare’s social background correct also makes no difference to the issue of his religion. The point about the survival of Catholicism in the period of Shakespeare’s childhood is that there was an older generation, including John Shakespeare, who had experienced Catholicism when it had still been the official religion. One did not need to be rich, educated or have access to a priest to look back nostalgically to the time before the Reformation. The crunch came when that generation began dying out. Then the survival of Catholicism came to depend on the missions from the Continent and, as those missions tended to be centred on noble and gentry households, only then did it become a religion with a distinctly upper-class profile. What that means is that John Shakespeare’s social status tells us nothing about the likelihood of him being a Catholic (although it is rather more relevant that he was from Warwickshire). But what this also reveals is the extent of the problem of assuming his son’s beliefs can be equated with those of the father. In general, that older generation of nostalgic Catholics failed to pass on that residual faith to their children. Which means that the issue of Shakespeare’s possible Catholicism has to be proved separately from that of his father.
And, as bonzer correctly points out, no serious Shakespeare scholar dismisses either possibility out of hand. However, it would be fair to say that the most recent trend in the technical literature has been to see the standard evidence for their possible Catholicism as even more problematic than previously supposed. Robert Bearman has strongly reasserted the argument that the ‘Spiritual Testament’ is an eighteenth-century fake and, although the whole debate has now degenerated into an incredibly complicated argument over the tontine provisions in Alexander Hoghton’s will, it now looks as it is not just that ‘William Shakeshafte’ is not necessarily Shakespeare but that it cannot be him. Which is why Michael Wood, having given the Shakespeare-as-Catholic theory maximum publicity in his BBC series, rather backtracked on the subject when he came to write the book-of-the-series.
The recent Peter Ackroyd popular biography also leans in the Catholic direction–definitely the fashion.
John Henry Newman (Catholic convert from CofE) in his The Idea of a University gives what may be a traditional Catholic view of WS: it is too bad he wasn’t Catholic, but there is nothing in WS that is overtly counter to sound Catholic theology and he is therefore appropriate reading for Catholic students.(!)