30 Great Myths about Shakespeare (10 page)

In fact the most compelling evidence that Shakespeare might have been a Catholic is not really about Shakespeare at all, but about revisionist histories of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Instead of swallowing top-down assertions of religious conformity, historians have looked again and found extensive evidence that in families and parishes the shift to reformed practice was much more gradual and less complete than previously thought. David Cressy, for instance, has gathered numerous examples of parishes continuing to ring church bells in defiance of official reformed policy, or defying dictats about moving fonts (it was thought a Catholic “superstition” to place them near the church door for ease of exit for the devils banished at baptism).
¹¹
Some of this was clearly principled and informed resistance to the new religion, but more of it was probably a general preference for things to stay as they were, and some operational uncertainty about what practices were and were not permitted. Most priests, after all, remained in their posts across the turbulent religious changes of the mid-sixteenth century. And we have stopped looking back on the religious history of early modern England from the point of view of Protestant dominance. As one of Shakespeare's contemporaries acknowledged, the outcome of the century's pendulum swings was far from certain:

In one man's memory … we have had to our prince, a man, who abolished the pope's authority by his laws and yet in other points kept the faith of his fathers; we have had a child, who by his like laws abolished together with the papacy the whole ancient religion; we have had a woman who restored both again and sharply punished protestants; and lastly her majesty that now is, who by the like laws hath long since abolished both again and now severely punisheth catholics as the other did protestants; and all these strange differences within the compass of about thirty years.
¹²

For many of Shakespeare's recent biographers, this religious palimpsest has its image in the Guild Chapel on Church Street in Stratford-upon-Avon. Just before Shakespeare was born, the chapel's painted interior was whitewashed over; seven years later, the civic authorities paid to have the stained-glass windows knocked out and replaced with clear panes. This local iconoclasm registers the overlap of established and reformed religious identities over the period of Shakespeare's life. As James Shapiro puts it, “to argue that the Shakespeares were secretly Catholic or, alternatively, mainstream Protestants misses the point that except for a small minority at one doctrinal extreme or other, those labels failed to capture the layered nature of what Elizabethans, from the queen on down, actually believed”: the traces of the old paintings beneath the coats of whitewash symbolize this superimposition of beliefs.
¹³
Put this way, Hamlet and Shakespeare shared with their transitional Elizabethan generation the experience of having Catholic fathers who had been born before the Reformation, of living through the fervent anti-Catholicism of the second half of Elizabeth's reign, and of leaving their successors with the new religious politics of James. Shakespeare's religious beliefs become less a matter of individual biography and more a snapshot of contemporary doctrinal shifts, uncertainties, and overlaps; the “bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang” (Sonnet 73:4) epitomize a general rather than a personal, cultural nostalgia amid the debris of English monastic architecture.

The so-called “turn to religion” has become a critical commonplace in early modern studies over the last couple of decades, and this shifting intellectual climate has enabled the old question of Shakespeare's Catholicism to be reconsidered anew. But this movement is not without its own ideological agendas, and in popular culture the religious politics of the sixteenth century—in the detective novels of C.J. Sansom, the TV series
The Tudors
, or in the film
Elizabeth
(dir. Shekhar Kapur, 1998), for example, the Elizabethan period has become a historical metaphor for fears about religious fundamentalism in our own time. Perhaps it is worthwhile concluding with something about Shakespeare the skeptic, the secularist: a Shakespeare who is reticent on matters of religious belief not because he is a hidden partisan but because his world view is something different. The philosopher George Santayana, finding only a handful of direct references to Christianity in Shakespeare's works, concluded that “for Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing; he chose to leave his heroes and himself in the presence of life and of death with no other philosophy than that which the profane world can suggest and understand”.
¹⁴
This powerfully positivist reinterpretation of Shakespeare for the existentialist twentieth century finds itself in Macbeth's bleak assessment:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time, …

It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

(5.5.18–27)

In Santayana, as in the recent debates about Shakespeare's Catholicism, the interpretative pattern is familiar: we look to Shakespeare for what we ourselves believe, or don't believe. The balance of critical and biographical interest has shifted towards Shakespeare's Catholicism at least in part because that represents for us now not simply a religious position but a political one, and a consciously personal one at that. It offers a glimpse of a Shakespeare who is not simply accumulating wealth and property but who apparently suffers inner conflict, a struggle with his conscience, and whose writing is shaped by the mechanisms he has developed for his own psychological and physical self-protection. In this model, Catholicism registers as much as an act of individual assertion and defiance—the poet at an angle to establishment values—as it does as a specific doctrinal allegiance. While the question of whether Shakespeare was a Catholic is unlikely to be definitively answered, we can certainly affirm that we want him to have been.

Notes

¹
 G. Wilson Knight, “
Measure for Measure
and the Gospels,” in
The Wheel of Fire: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare's Sombre Tragedies
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930), pp. 83–4, 90.

²
 Dympna Callaghan, “Shakespeare and Religion,”
Textual Practice
, 15 (2001), pp. 1–4 (p. 2).

³
 Robert Bearman, “John Shakespeare's ‘Spiritual Testament’: A Reappraisal,”
Shakespeare Survey
, 56 (2003), pp. 184–202; Colin Burrow “Who Wouldn't Buy It?”, review of Greenblatt's
Will in the World
,
London Review of Books
, 20 January 2005.

⁴
 Stephen Greenblatt,
Will in the World
(London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), pp. 108–9.

⁵
 The best summary of all this material is John D. Cox's admirably careful “Was Shakespeare a Christian, and if so, What Kind of Christian Was He?”,
Christianity and Literature
, 55 (2006), pp. 539–66.

⁶
 Clare Asquith,
Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare
(New York: Public Affairs, 2005), pp. xiv, 289, 293, 297, 299.

⁷
 Richard Wilson,
Secret Shakespeare
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 295, 19.

⁸
 Gary Taylor, “Forms of Opposition: Shakespeare and Middleton,”
English Literary Renaissance
, 24 (1994), pp. 283–314 (p. 314).

⁹
 See Stephen Greenblatt, “Resonance and Wonder,” in
Learning to Curse
(New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 161–83.

¹⁰
 Stephen Greenblatt,
Hamlet in Purgatory
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 248–9; id.,
Will in the World
, p. 103.

¹¹
 David Cressy,
Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

¹²
 William Allen (1581), quoted in Peter Lake, ‘Religious Identities in Shakespeare's England’, in David Scott Kastan (ed.),
A Companion to Shakespeare
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 57–84 (p. 57).

¹³
 James Shapiro,
1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare
(London: Faber & Faber, 2005), p. 167.

¹⁴
 George Santayana, “The Absence of Religion in Shakespeare,” in
Interpretations of Poetry and Religion
(New York: Scribner's, 1916), p. 152.

Scenery as we know it—painted flats that fly in from above or slide in from the wings to change the scene—is a product of the proscenium stage. Shakespeare's actors performed on a thrust stage. As the name implies, it thrust forward into the auditorium; with the audience on three sides, it had no place for wings. The proscenium was a seventeenth-century import from France: the exiled Cavaliers had enjoyed the theater styles of the French court during the Interregnum, and when they returned to England in the Restoration they brought with them French theater practices. All ties with Elizabethan theater practice were decisively severed. Whereas Shakespeare's theater was demographically diverse (see Myth 13), Restoration theater was bourgeois. Whereas Elizabethan female roles were played by boys, the Restoration theater introduced actresses. And whereas Shakespearean drama was played outdoors in an amphitheater (except from 1608 onwards when the King's Men alternated seasons between the indoor Blackfriars and the outdoor Globe), Restoration drama was played indoors on a proscenium. Consequently, Shakespeare's plays were adapted to suit the new Restoration aesthetic and staging styles.

If scenery is a product of the seventeenth century, stage directions that indicate where a scene takes place are a product of the eighteenth century. In 1709 Nicholas Rowe produced the first scholarly edition of Shakespeare's works, complete with an introductory essay about Shakespeare's life and career. This prompted a flurry of editions: by Alexander Pope in 1725, Lewis Theobald in 1726 and 1734, Thomas Hanmer in 1743–4, and William Warburton in 1747. These editors introduced many of the stage directions that remain in Shakespeare editions today. But their stages were large, as were their theater companies, and do not reflect Elizabethan practice. In Rowe's
Measure for Measure
Act 1, scene 1 takes place in “A palace”; scene 2 in “The street”; scene 3 in “A monastery”; and scene 4 in “A nunnery.” By the nineteenth century we can find editions of
As You Like It
that specify
Scene: The forest
;
Scene: Another part of the forest
. But Shakespeare's plays do not take place in a palace or a forest; they take place on a bare stage. The introduction of scenery necessitated the introduction of stage directions that specified changes of scene.

Although the Elizabethan theater did not have scenery as we understand it, it had many ways of setting the scene. The theater manager Philip Henslowe includes in his 1598 inventory of properties “the city of Rome” (presumably for Mephistopheles' and Faustus's visit in Marlowe's
Dr Faustus
); another equally ambitious prop—“the cloth of the Sun and Moon”—indicates how these background scenes were presented: on painted backcloths. But backcloths like these are infrequent in Henslowe's inventory, which is more typically populated with large props: Tantalus's tree, a rainbow for Iris, several tombs (distinguished by owner: the tomb of Guido, the tomb of Dido), a great horse (possibly the Trojan horse for a play about Troy), a cauldron (for Marlowe's
The Jew of Malta
), a dragon (for
Dr Faustus
) and a hellmouth (presumably also for
Faustus
).

The Elizabethan stage had an overhead “heavens” (so called because it was painted with the signs of the zodiac) which housed winching machinery from which props and people could descend. Large props such as beds could be pushed in and out from a door or doors at the center back of the stage;
a bed thrust forth
is a common stage direction (Philip Henslowe's 1598 inventory of the props belonging to the Admiral's Men contains “1 bedstead”). A key prop tells us where we are just as much as realistic background scenery.

Small hand-held props and costumes also indicate location. A mirror and a hairbrush indicate a lady's (and sometimes a man's) chamber; a napkin from which one brushes imaginary crumbs indicates that the character has just finished dinner; spurred boots indicate a travel scene. Stage directions that require characters to enter “as from bed,” “as from hunting,” “as in prison,” “as in his study” use costumes and small props to set the scene: a nightgown implies a bed, a hawk on a wrist implies an open field; gyves imply a cell; books on a table imply a backdrop of bookcases.
¹
But as these examples show, one of the most important instruments of scene-setting was the actor's body. It is the actor's actions rather than the props that do the work:
As it were brushing the crumbs from his clothes with a napkin, as newly risen from supper
(Thomas Heywood,
A Woman Killed with Kindness
, 2.1.181). It is not clear in this example whether the napkin actually exists or is governed grammatically by the hypothesis “as it were.”

Shakespeare's plays are sparse in stage directions. The usual explanation is that because he was a sharer in his company he was on hand to instruct; thus, detailed stage directions were not necessary. This may well be true. It is notable that his early plays (before he was a sharer) and his late plays (when he was in semi-retirement—did he sell his shares to buy the Gatehouse in 1610?) contain more detailed instructions, such as
The Tempest
's
Solemne and strange Musicke
:
and Prosper on the top (invisible:) Enter severall strange shapes
,
bringing in a Banket
[banquet];
and dance about it with gentle actions of salutations
,
and inviting the King
,
&c
.
to eate, they depart
(Act 3, scene 3; we quote from the Folio, TLN 1535–8). But masques of the period are also characterized by detailed stage directions; the masque-like qualities of his late plays are perhaps indebted to this. And Elizabethan writers were generally fluid in their staging requirements. At the end of Robert Greene's
Alphonsus of Aragon
we find the direction:
Exit Venus; or, if you can conveniently, let a chair come down from the top of the stage and draw her up
(ll. 2109–10). Probably something equally imaginative lies behind the many stage directions in Elizabethan drama that state simply “
Exit X
.”