PORTSMOUTH, R.I. — The archbishop of Canterbury recently broke his church’s long silence on the religious beliefs of England’s foremost playwright — William Shakespeare.
During a presentation at the Hay Festival held in May in Britain, Rowan Williams lobbed his bombshell about the Bard: “I think he probably had a Catholic background and a lot of Catholic friends and associates.”
Archbishop Williams speculated that Shakespeare the man “wasn’t a saint.”
“How much he believed in it, or what he did about it, I don’t quite know,” he said. “He wasn’t a very nice man in many ways — it’s always very shocking, that. The late Shakespeare was hoarding grain and buying up property in Stratford — it was not terribly attractive.”
Shortly after the archbishop delivered his judgment, a well-credentialed group of Shakespeare scholars convened “across the pond” to address the matter in more detail. Jesuits, Benedictines and other American and British scholars gathered June 10-12 at the Portsmouth Institute, a summer conference held at the Benedictine Portsmouth Abbey School in Rhode Island.
Unlike the archbishop of Canterbury, these scholars were not primarily concerned with the Bard’s personal piety. They focused on the way he employed his genius to uphold religious and moral truths — while offering a veiled critique of a ruthless English monarchy that violently uprooted the Catholic faith during the 16th century, destroying monasteries and persecuting Catholics.
Scholars like Jesuit Father Peter Milward, a professor of English Literature at Japan’s Sophia University for most of his priestly life, have labored for decades to penetrate Shakespeare’s cleverly disguised critique of the monarchy’s near-totalitarian effort to identify and suppress Catholic resistance.
Father Milward, who delivered the conference’s keynote address, contended there was enough evidence to establish that Shakespeare was a Catholic. Some scholars, however, merely proposed that his plays provided rich commentary on the religious controversies of his day.
“What Shakespeare sees in all his plays, above all in King Lear, as the major source of his dramatic inspiration, is the agony of Christ in the sufferings of his fellow Catholics in Elizabethan England,” stated Father Milward. “In such terms, we may recognize Lear not just as a ‘morality everyman,’ nor just as [in his own words] ‘every inch a king,’ but as king of England, not unlike Henry VIII in his rejection of Rome and the faith of Catholic Christendom.”
Henry VIII
Shakespeare lived in a land reeling from the consequences of Henry VIII’s break from Rome, the scholars noted during the proceedings at the Portsmouth Institute. The destruction of England’s Catholic monasteries, the disinheritance and exile of many Catholics, and the martyrdom of countless priests reverberated in the nation’s collective conscience and imagination.
In 1534, after Henry assumed his position as the head of the Church of England, he approved a strategy for suppressing the monasteries and extracting their considerable wealth.
Henry died in 1547 and was succeeded first by his son, Edward VI, and followed by his Catholic daughter, Mary Tudor, who gave the Church a brief reprieve. But, in 1558, her successor, Elizabeth I, expanded the anti-papist policies of her father, solidifying the rupture with Catholic tradition.
Abbot Aidan Bellenger of Downside Abbey in England, a Cambridge-educated author of works on English religious orders, reminded the conference participants of the wide-ranging impact of Henry’s suppression of the monasteries, observing that the “blasted heath” evoked in Macbeth as “barren and storm-tossed can be taken as a paradigm for a society without hope.”
The Benedictine scholar noted the deep irony of images and dialogue that convey a nostalgia for better days.
“Melancholy thoughts on a departed greatness may seem inappropriate for an Elizabethan ‘Golden Age,’ but the eventual confusion, the life-and-death debates on religious matters, and the precarious identity of what it meant to be English were as important as swashbuckling nationalism and a newfound ‘national’ religion in the world of Shakespeare,” noted the abbot.
“Around every corner, in every village, scattered across the landscape was the unmistakeable detritus of an abandoned world. The end of the monastic order sounded the death knell of Catholic England,” he added.
The Recusants
For centuries, theatrical producers ignored the tumultuous religious controversies of Shakespeare’s time.
The 1992 historical work by Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580, is credited with prompting a new appreciation for the vitality of English Catholicism before the dissolution of the monasteries, and that is stirring fresh insights into the past.
“The current production of Macbeth in London’s West End is staged in a ruined church, and this seems to be a very suitable setting for the Scottish play, which presents such a broken and disturbed world in which the weird sisters equivocate and ghostly apparitions float in the background,” noted Abbot Bellenger.
The destruction of the monasteries marked an era of anti-Catholic persecution, not only for religious orders, but also for once powerful laymen known as “recusants.”
They refused to renounce their beliefs and incurred heavy fines. In some cases, they were divested of their lands and even forced into a kind of internal exile.
Several scholars at the Portsmouth conference used the plight of the English recusants as a prism through which to interpret the subtext of Shakespeare’s plays.
Lady Clare Asquith, author of the 2005 work Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare, which argues that he was a recusant, suggested that As You Like It — one of his most popular romantic comedies — was inspired by the actual experience of recusant Sir Rowland Stanley of Hooton. Stanley was a nobleman with land near modern Liverpool. Another member of the extended Stanley family, said Asquith, was probably Shakespeare’s first patron.
She noted that several of Sir Rowland’s sons “were Jesuits, and his heir, Sir William Stanley, was the most notorious and dangerous traitor of the day. He had been a celebrated general in Queen Elizabeth’s army in the Low Countries who had defected to the Spanish and throughout the 1590s had been expected to lead an Irish or Spanish invasion force against his own country.”
As You Like It is dated about 1599, around the time of Sir Rowland’s third marriage, and the play explores the theological importance of matrimony. Asquith suggested that “old Sir Rowland’s family concerns, including his son’s sensational defection, were central to Shakespeare’s adaptation of Thomas Lodge’s well-known pastoral novel.”
As You Like It features virtuous noble men and women forced into exile by evil but powerful men who violate the rights of those under their care. Fleeing to the Forest of Arden, Rosalind — the play’s chief heroine — experiences the kind of internal exile that transformed the family life of actual recusants. Initially, Rosalind’s experience is painful and confusing. But, in time, her shared suffering becomes an opportunity for deepened moral reflection and the exercise of virtue.
“Summing up the many religious conversions and awakenings that have happened in the forest,” Asquith concluded, one character in the play “paraphrases Christ’s words about converted sinners: ‘Then is there mirth in heaven/When earthly things made even/Atone together.’”
Indeed, for all the desolation that pervades the tragedies, and the disturbing reversals of fortune that distinguish many of the comedies, the conference participants remarked on the themes of Christian hope and reconciliation embedded in the Bard’s plays.
The archbishop of Canterbury may be correct in his judgment that the Bard was no saint. But the sense of hope conveyed in his plays would seem to offer further evidence of his secret commitment to dangerous beliefs. During an epoch of persecution, the Catholic faith in England endured, protected, in part, through the inexplicable miracle of Shakespeare’s literary genius.
Register senior editor Joan Frawley Desmond writes from Chevy Chase, Maryand.
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Lost from contemporary history books in modern “progressive” high schools and colleges is any mention of the fact that the loss of the monasteries also meant the loss of England’s first and best “Social Safety Net”. The indigent, the worthy poor, those hurt on the job and their families could and did fall back on the charity of the monasteries for not only spiritual help but also food, lodging, clothing and medical help. With the loss of the monasteries a brand new set of problems blossomed all over the ravaged country namely the homeless and great numbers of beggars. It is interesting to note that the very first “poor laws” in Great Britain trace their origins and genealogy to the dissolution of the monasteries. Thus the inefficient and grotesque and inept structure of the modern “Social Safety Net”, sans any spiritual support, also traces its direct lineage to this first great theft of the accumulated patrimony of the Middle Ages by greedy corrupt and just as today, nominally anyway, “Catholic” leaders and politicians.
It is always folly to try to learn history from literature. Playwrights are interested in entertaining people and making money, not in historical accuracy. Note Bene Robert Bolt’s play on Thomas More which neglects to show that More had at least four people burned at the stake for heresy.
Joan, you did not mention that Mary Tudor got her title “Bloody Mary” because she burned 300 plus Reformers for heresy. That episode did more to damage the Catholic Faith in England than anything else. She did not restore the lands or wealth to the monasteries, and she banned the Bible in English. Edmund Campion wrote that he did not care about the Marian Martyrs because they were just “heretics and cobblers” showing his social and economic snobbery.
Elizabeth I was left with a mess. She read the New Testament in Greek every day for her personal devotions. Having been declared illegitimate by Pius V in Regnans Excelsis, she became the target of 19 Catholic assassination plots.
When it was announced in the English College at Rome that the Papal sanctioned Spanish Armada had been defeated by a hurricane mostly, the seminarians cheered. Although these seminarians devoutly wanted to return England to the True Faith, they did not want Philip II of Spain to preside over that return. Yes, there were Anglican spies in the English College at Rome. Without their diaries we would not know what went on there. There are always at least two sides to any story. Objective historians know that and present as balanced a picture of past times as possible.
Whatever Shakespeare’s religious views, he did not always attend church. He today lies buried in the sanctuary of his Anglican parish.
Just to show how inaccurate Shakespeare’s history was made for the sake of entertainment, and, I would say, falsification of the historical record, a young King Duncan was killed in battle by Macbeth in 1040 after Duncan had arrived with his army in Moray.
Excellent post, Veritas. This is all too often overlooked.
When I was in college majoring in history, one of my professors remarked that more students signed up for literature and film courses on historical topics such as the Holocaust than for actual history courses. Those were the students who liked to enjoy fictional stories and imagine history they wanted to believe in. Abbot Aidan Bellenger reminds me of this type of student. First of all the “blasted heath” is in Scotland almost a century before Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries. It is a perfect setting for witches who were greatly feared all over Europe by both Catholics and Protestants. King James I considered himself a ninth generation descendant of Banquo who may have been a fictional character. At the time Macbeth was written King James was afraid of both witches and assassination attempts. Abbot Bellenger would spend his time better looking for the less veiled references to the Gunpowder Plot.
I see that the Whig interpretation of history is very much alive and well in much of what “Verity” writes. It’s understandable, since this is the interpretation that has been thrust down our throats for two hundred years. But as he says, there are two sides to every story. And since the writer seems to find this period of English history interesting (as I do) I will refer him to two excellent books which cut through some of the sentimental mush that is found in Verity’s otherwise interesting replies.
The first book I would recommend to him would be “Charles V” by D.B. Wyndham-Lewis, and the second would be “The Monstrous Regiment” by Christopher Hollis. These two English historians provide what is needed to counteract much of the rubbish that passes for history these days.
I hesitate to recommend Belloc to Whig-ites because that is akin to waving a crucifix before Dracula, but I will take my chances and do so anyway. When after Verity has read these sources then perhaps he would comment again.
Dan, since I have never read Butterfield or Macaulay, I am unfamiliar with the concept of Whig History, but certainly it is dated, and I rely on twentieth century historians for a more objective view. I have read Alison Plowden, Diarmid MacCulough, and right now I am reading Jasper Ridley’s STATESMAN AND SAINT: Cardinal Wolsey, Sir Thomas More and the Politics of Henry VIII. I do not see any reason to think of these authors as “whigs.” I certainly do not see anything sentimental about the Tudor monarchs: Henry VII was weird (he himself wanted to marry Katharine or Aragon) and Henry VIII and Bloody Mary I were tyrants. Only Elizabeth I ruled with any affection from the English people.
What has Wyndham-Lewis’ book Charles V (of France 1338-1380) have to do with the topic of Shakespeare’s plays and closet Catholicism or Tudor/Stuart England? I will send for the Christopher Hollis book by interlibrary loan. I look for historical facts, not fictional illusions about history. I understood Joan Desmond to be saying that Abbot Bellenger thought that Shakespeare’s scene of a “blasted heath” in 11th century Scotland is a description of early 17th century Stuart England as a “society without hope” due to the long lasting results of the dissolution of the monasteries in England which took place under Henry VIII from 1532-1540. Please correct me if I have misunderstood Mrs. Desmond’s writing. Shakespeare’s setting is written so that fictional witches can have an eerie place to cast spells and make prophecies. This is horror show entertainment and is NOT a description of reality. The real historic MacBeth was a good King who killed a warlike Duncan in battle when Duncan invaded Moray. I have often wondered how members of Clan MacBeth feel about Shakespeare’s lies about their ancestor, and BTW, I have no dog in this controversy as I have no Scottish ancestry that I can find. If Abbott Bellenger truly believes that Shakespeare is trying to describe England in 1605, then he should come up with some kind of evidence to support his opinions. If there is no evidence then he is just imagining history.
Now Veritas has stated that the dissolution of the monasteries resulted in a long term lack of charitable resources for the poor. This opinion sounds reasonable and I will keep it in mind as I study the Elizabethan/Stuart period.
It is a fact that the monks, nuns, friars, abbots received government pensions when they were turned out of the monasteries and that Cardinal Pole tried without success to restore monastic life in England during his short tenure as Archbishop of Canterbury, and that some of the former religious married and later took positions as parish priests in the Anglican organization. It appears to me that if they practiced Christian charity in the monasteries, then they would continue to practice such charity in their new situations, especially if they had a guaranteed government income for life.
Finally, Dan, I do not at all understand your reference to waving a crucifix in front of some fictional character. If you are suggesting that my recitation of facts and the opinions that I draw from those facts make me into some kind of fictional fiend; then, shame on you. I would never talk to you that way.
Verity writes, “Mary Tudor got her title ‘Bloody Mary’ because she burned 300 plus Reformers for heresy.” The title was likely bestowed by Protestant historians. As we know, winners write the history. That may explain why Henry VIII, after executing approximately 12,000 of his enemies, was never given the title Bloody Harry.
Raymond, Please give me the source for the number 12,000 of Henry VIII’s enemies. I cannot find such a number even when adding those executed for the Evil May Day, 15, with those executed for the Pilgrimage of Grace, 216, according to the Wikipedia. Compared to European monarchs, Henry VIII is not considered bloodthirsty. Were those 12,000 executed for crimes other than heresy? If so, one must factor in such executions for murder and theft under his daughter and make allowances for her rule of only five years with his rule of thirty-eight.
It is a fact that Henry VIII went to Mass several times a day and engaged in hunting and jousting the rest of the time. He left the administration of England to his Lord Chancellors and councilmen. According to historian, Jasper Ridley, whose book, STATESMAN AND SAINT, published in 1983, no heretics were burned in the last eight years that Cardinal Wolsey was Chancellor. However, in the two years seven months of the chancellorship of Thomas More, six heretics were burned (page 252). During the entire Reformation no heretics were burned in Wolsey’s dioceses of York and Durham. It is interesting to note that neither Martin Luther nor William Tyndale, who was burned at the stake in Antwerp, supported Henry’s cause for divorce or annulment from Queen Katherine.
Give me a little more time to check the Encyclopedia Britannica for numbers.
Veritas: In STATESMAN AND SAINT on page 250, it is stated that in April of 1530, two years before the dissolution of the monasteries, Thomas More introduced the Act of 1530 to control beggars. Beggars had to apply for a license to beg. If a person ” ‘having no land, master, nor using any lawful merchandise, craft mystery whereby he might get his living,’ was found outside his parish in which he was born, or in which he had resided for the last three years and was unable to produce his license to beg or to give an account of how he earned his living, he was to be stripped naked, tied to a cart-tail, and whipped through the market town ‘till his body be bloody by reason of such whipping.’” This is how the author of UTOPIA dealt with beggars.
Raymond, please check the website, Selected Death Tolls for Wars, Massacres and Atrocities before the Twentieth Century, which is listed under Twentieth Century Atlas-Historical Body Count on Google. Scroll down to number 19, the Tudors in England. Tudor Historian Lacey Baldwin Smith claims that 308 traitors were executed under Henry VIII between 1532 and 1540. Holinshed maintains that 72,000 (yes, an extremely high number) of thieves and rogues were executed by hanging at this time and that number does not include traitors or enemies of the state. These executions would have been ordered by magistrates, not the King. Under Mary I, Lacey Baldwin Smith says 132 traitors executed. Morgan’s Oxford History of Britain says she executed 287 Protestants and “others died in prison.” That gives her a total of 419, which is in line with what was on the program Jeopardy a couple of years ago. The number for Queen Elizabeth is 183 traitors and the Catholic Encyclopedia says 221 Catholics. (And, I think these figures for Elizabeth overlap.) That gives Queen Mary the most, and IMO the title “Bloody.”
Please also read the website eyewitnesstohistory.com and the entry An audience with Queen Mary 1557. This is a report from the Venetian Ambassador, Giovanni Michele to his superiors. He mentions “the evil disposition of the people toward her” and that she is “a prey to the hatred she bears my Lady Elizabeth…” This shows how very unpopular Mary I is with the English people. If you google the phrase Giovanni Michele Venetian Ambassador, you can read two other reports on Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. They are very interesting eye witness accounts by a man who is Italian and probably Catholic.
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