Rachel Miller
Culture & Thought Editor
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, the master of the English language, is the subject of this fall’s Catholic Culture Series. The series, which began last Tuesday and which will run weekly until the middle of October, is sponsored by Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture and hopes to address the question of Shakespeare’s Catholic ethos through presentations by four eminent Shakespeare scholars.
Tuesday’s lecture by Prof. Joseph Pearce of Ave Maria University, “Will the Real Shakespeare Please Stand Up? Evidence for the Bard’s Catholicism,” examined the historical clues which point to Shakespeare’s possible Catholic identity. Pearce acknowledged that this is not a subject to be taken lightly. He said, “We need to realize that we are involved in a very heated controversy here, what I call the Shakespeare Wars.”
Against the grain of most modern Shakespeare scholarship, Pearce asserted that “Shakespeare’s words are only understandable if we know the man. If we misread the man, we misread the work.”
To understand the man Shakespeare, Pearce claimed, we must understand how his creative gift worked in him. “The grace of God does not write on the person as tabula rasa; their work is an incarnation of their words, always a reflection of the personhood of the author. Never forget the importance of personhood in the art of the author, because the giver of the creative gift—God—never forgets.”
England’s religious affiliation, Pearce explained, radically shifted from Anglican to Catholic and then back again in a period of twenty-five years during William Shakespeare’s lifetime, and that during the period when Anglican royalty reigned, English law mandated the attendance of Anglican services and made practice of the Catholic faith illegal. Staunch Catholics who refused to attend Anglican services were called ‘recusant,’ and were usually fined.
Knowledge about Shake-speare’s true religious faith is hazy because of the volatile religious atmosphere in Elizabethan England, but there is evidence that Shakespeare’s father, John Shakespeare, was a recusant Catholic, according to Pearce. He cited the discovery of ‘Spiritual Will and Testament of John Shakespeare,’ which attests to the elder Shakespeare’s staunch Catholic faith, as part of the “overwhelming” evidence which shows that “Shakespeare was raised in a militantly Catholic household.”
The issue that causes the greatest controversy is the claim that Shakespeare himself was a lifelong Catholic, Pearce said. “Most have accepted that Shakespeare was brought up Catholic, and that he might have died a Catholic, but in the mean time, [critics claim] he became a good proto-secularist. And lucky for them, he wrote most of his plays during this period.”
Pearce believes the opposite, claiming that Shakespeare remained a recusant, practicing Catholicism throughout his lifetime and rejecting Anglicanism. “My thesis is that his Catholicism wasn’t secret, but known to Queen Elizabeth, and [though recusant] was deemed not to be a threat…[it] was deemed to be a ‘safe’ Catholicism, underlying his work but not threatening the state.”
Pearce said his interpretation of these historical circumstances is very different from those of secular literary theorists. “They hear that Shakespeare never went to an Anglican Church, and think ‘This means he’s just like us!’. [Instead] it is reasonable to assume that he didn’t go to Anglican services for the same reason his father and daughter did not—because he was a recusant.”
For further corroboration, Pearce engaged in literary analysis. He noted that “Shakespeare writes nothing by way of a eulogy for Queen Elizabeth I; instead, Measure for Measure and All’s Well that Ends Well [the plays written right after her death] have a liberated feel to them.”
Pearce attributed this feeling of liberation to the end of the vigorous repression of Catholics in England during Elizabeth’s reign, and observed another change in mood reflecting the actions of her successor, King James I. “There was a great sense of liberation [among Catholics] for eighteen months or so, then another crack down…Something of the desolation and despair [felt by Catholics] is seen after this clamp-down, especially in his greatest tragedies: King Lear, Othello and Macbeth.”
Pearce asserted that his thesis was one which would be enriching to all Shakespeare scholarship, and joked that he had pondered writing an article entitled “Why Protestants Shouldn’t Be Scared of a Catholic Shakespeare.” He claimed that “Shakespeare was interested in the dialectic between Catholic Christianity, virtue, and Machiavellian realpolitik, not between Catholicism and Luther.” Pearce said that Shakespeare’s heroes represent Christian virtue while his villains are Machiavellians, and as a result, “Shakespeare can be read as a dialogue between Christianity and secularism.”
The Catholic Culture Series will continue with presentations by Professors Peter Holland, John Finnis, and Ms. Clare Asquith, on Tuesday evenings at 8 p.m. in Room 155 of DeBartolo Hall.
Rachel Miller is a junior political science and theology major who spends her time contemplating religion and politics, but who really just wants to be a mom (a mom who, of course, will read Shakespeare to her children). Contact Rachel at rmille10@nd.edu.
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