Rachel Miller
Culture & Thought Editor
WITH A SEPTEMBER 25th presentation by Notre Dame’s own resident Shakespeare expert, Professor Peter Holland, the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture continued its series of lectures on the Bard’s Catholicism. Holland presented a historical assessment of the evidence against Shakespeare’s Catholicism, and included a scathing criticism of those who assert that he was Catholic.
Holland began by shedding light on his title, “Cracking the Shakespeare Code,” recalling an episode of the British television show Dr. Who, in which aliens used the Globe Theatre—and Shakespeare’s plays performed therein—as a portal to communicate with earth. He continued by noting that the question of “What might these words have meant to Shakespeare?” is one with which not only ‘Dr. Who,’ but actors and scholars alike grapple.
According to Holland, “Many have a strong belief that [Shakespeare’s] plays contain hidden messages which reveal the true identity of the author,” and these hidden codes have led to many different beliefs about who Shakespeare truly was. “All writers try to appropriate Shakespeare,” he argued, “and one part of the reason for uncovering particular codings lies in the decoder…Codes, in other words, are dangerous things for those who claim them.”
For Holland, the flexibility of interpretation within Shakespeare’s works allows for this sort of continuing debate. “Most supporters of Shakespeare’s Catholicism are Catholic,” Holland noted, but “this is something that the texts cannot confidently or eloquently show.”
After dismissing the texts as adequate grounds for proving Shakespeare’s Catholicism, Holland proceeded to formulate an argument from biographical evidence. He articulated three main questions: “First, whether his father, John Shakespeare, was a recusant; second, whether John Shakespeare left behind a Catholic testament; and third, whether William Shakespeare was William Shakeshaft.” Holland concluded that only “if the answers to all of these point to Catholicism can we read Shakespeare as Catholic.”
Although many cite John Shakespeare’s inclusion on the rolls of Catholics in Stratford-upon-Avon as proof of his recusancy, Holland argued that the elder Shakespeare avoided church because of his own money problems. Rather than for religious reasons, “John Shakespeare was named explicitly in the group of those who did not attend Anglican services because they feared process of debt.” And, according to Holland, “there is no evidence whatsoever…that the list misrepresents his reasons for non-attendance. Ample evidence exists that [proves] he was in deep financial trouble from the early 1570s onward.”
Next, Holland addressed the often-cited ‘Spiritual Will and Testament’ of Shakespeare’s father. Holland believes the document to be a fake. Though he does not doubt that the document was based on an authentic text, “its errors show that it was transcribed by someone fundamentally ignorant of the form of Catholic prayers, which recusants would have understood.”
To conclude the historical debate, Holland argued that the William Shakeshaft, a schoolteacher connected to the household of the recusant Catholic Hoghton family, could not have been William Shakespeare. Even if Shakeshaft was Shakespeare, according to Holland, he would only have been 17 years old, “and it was unlikely he would have gotten paid that much.”
Having reached this historical conclusion, Holland again turned to the Bard’s work itself. “Those who now read the plays as Catholic are reading code which decades of scholarship have not detected,” he said. If Shakespeare were truly Catholic, Holland argued, “the Catholic allusion [of his works] would be widespread knowledge.”
In a scathing review of the work of future Catholic Culture Series speaker Ms. Claire Asquith, Holland said that the Catholic thesis “depends on a misreading of the plays,” particularly citing her review of Measure for Measure. “Here, when Shakespeare introduced a most socially visible, devout, Christian community of sisters, he did so skeptically…The text shows a rejection of the devout separation from the world which the convent represents.”
The problem, Holland suggested, lies in searching for only one way of reading Shakespeare. “Such encoded meanings,” he said, “turn Shakespeare from a questioner to a commentator with a message, and we find this univocal quality quite dull.” Shakespeare’s drama is simply too complex to be pushing a singular agenda, according to Holland. “The problem with treating extraordinary and complex dramas in code is that the depth of dramatic quality leeches away as we analyze the code…The Shakespeare found in the code is much less brilliant, much less exciting, much less interesting than is actually present in the writing—and this is not exactly what we want to find.”
Rachel Miller is a junior political science and theology major. Contact Rachel at rmille10@nd.edu.
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