30 Great Myths about Shakespeare (9 page)

To any German province, Spain or Portugal,

Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England:

Why you must needs be strangers. Would you be pleased

To find a nation of such barbarous temper

That, breaking out in hideous violence,

Would not afford you an abode on earth,

Whet their detested knives against your throats,

Spurn you like dogs? …

What would you think

To be thus used? This is the strangers' case,

And this your mountainish inhumanity.

(Add. II. 6. 141–56)

In effect he says: get in touch with your inner Fleming; imagine things from the point of view of the outsider. That unusual adjective “mountainish” enacts this flip perfectly: the word suggests the ignorant or uncivilized people of a mountainous region, in order to turn this evocation of otherness onto the self. It's a technique we see again and again in Shakespeare: an imaginative empathy with the minority or persecuted person's point of view.

And yet it is also true that minorities can be presented critically: the fickle crowds in
Julius Caesar
and
Coriolanus
, for instance, or the enslaved Caliban in
The Tempest
who sees freedom as simply having a new master:

No more dams I'll make for fish,

Nor fetch in firing

At requiring.

Nor scrape trenchering, nor wash dish.

'Ban, 'ban, Cacaliban

Has a new master.—Get a new man.

Freedom, high-day!

(2.2.179–85)

One of the reasons it is hard to decide whether Shakespeare is politically correct or incorrect is that he has it both ways. Modern productions of
Coriolanus
or
Julius Caesar
have attempted to stabilize the plays' political sympathies through topical costuming—the conspirators as freedom fighters against a dictatorship, or the patricians as the self-interested fat cats of an undemocratic state—but in Shakespeare's hands the balance of sympathies is more delicate. Does Caesar have absolutist aspirations to disband the republic and accept the crown? We don't know, because the scene is only reported, not shown.

It is also possible to recontextualize some of these most sensitive plays and remove them from historically specific problems. A recent production of
Merchant of Venice
by Edward Hall's all-male theater company Propeller set the play in a modern prison. The inmates were staging a production of
Merchant of Venice
without the knowledge or approval of the prison warders. Floors were scrubbed when the warders patrolled; as soon as they were out of sight, scenes from the
Merchant of Venice
began to be acted. But this amateur dramatic group of prisoners was not a cohesive entity. The performers were divided into two uneven groups—as often happens with institutional politics—one of power-wielders, one of victims. The victims played the Jews, the power-wielders the Christians. Shakespeare's play was thus seen to be about minority versus majority groups and the behaviors that accompany them. It mattered little whether the groups were rival football supporters or different races or religions: the play exposed the emotional workings of political hierarchies not religious or racial politics.

Does this indicate that Shakespeare's plays are above political incorrectness? or that it is we who are able to make them so? It is impossible to say decisively. But as Myth 22 argues, part of their enduring appeal on stage and to readers is their ability to speak to different periods and mean different things at different times. Shakespeare is both the Elizabethans' contemporary and ours.

Notes

¹
 Matt Cartmill,
A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature through History
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 76–8.

²
 Coppélia Kahn,
Man's Estate
:
Masculine Identity in Shakespeare
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981), p. 108.

³
 John Fletcher,
The Woman's Prize; or The Tamer Tamed
, ed. Celia Daileader and Gary Taylor, Revels (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).

⁴
 Jean Howard, “
Othello
as an Adventure Play,” in Peter Erickson and Maurice Hunt (eds.),
Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's “Othello”
(New York: MLA, 2005), pp. 90–9.

The seventeenth-century censor at St Alban's, the Jesuit English College in Valladolid, Spain, clearly set to work to make their library copy of Shakespeare's collected works acceptable to seminarians. This largely took the form of excising unsuitable passages from the corpus of plays, and in particular, lines of bawdy humor and those which seemed to treat Catholic doctrine lightly, such as Rosalind's view that Orlando's “kissing is as full of sanctity as the touch of holy bread” (
As You Like It
3.4.12–13), or, more substantially, the disrespect shown to the papal legate Pandulph in
King John
. Coming to
Measure for Measure
, Shakespeare's seedy story of sex and coercion and starring a novice nun and an ethically ambiguous disguised friar, however, no such piecemeal amelioration was possible. The twelve leaves have been summarily torn from the volume. Presumably this Catholic reader would have been surprised to read the critic G. Wilson Knight's interpretation of the “atmosphere of Christianity pervading” this religiously problematic play: for Knight, the Duke's “enlightened human insight and Christian ethic” is “exactly correspondent with Jesus',” and the play should be read as a religious allegory or parable.
¹
Far from being ripped from the Folio, Wilson Knight's play should surely have been required reading for the St Alban's seminarians.

These apparently polar views of
Measure for Measure
give some indication of the range of religious interpretations that can be generated from Shakespeare's plays, and, perhaps, suggest that the religion of Shakespeare's plays is largely in the eye of the beholder. Indeed, much of the discussion of religion in Shakespeare's life and work has been doctrinally partisan and ideologically motivated, telling us as much about its adherents—religious and secular—as its object. But questions about Shakespeare's own religious affiliations have entered mainstream biography and criticism over the past two decades, with the result that now, as Dympna Callaghan (not a religious partisan critic) admits, “the long-held assumption about Shakespeare as the Protestant national poet is probably wide of the mark.”
²

Suggestions that Shakespeare himself retained his allegiance to the old Catholic religion after the Reformation have been circulating for centuries. Three main lines of argument are frequently cited. The first is the spiritual testament of Shakespeare's father—found by workmen in the mid-eighteenth century in the rafters of the house in Henley Street in Stratford, seen by the Shakespearean scholar Edmund Malone, copied and then later lost. Malone later suspected it was fraudulent: the most judicious recent assessments of the evidence by the Shakespeare Centre archivist Robert Bearman suggests he was probably right to be suspicious. Colin Burrow puts it in characteristically dry terms: “Shakespeare may or may not have been Catholic, but generally if a document that sounds too good to be true is found exactly where you'd hope to find it and then goes missing in mysterious circumstances it is indeed too good to be true.”
³
In this lost testament John Shakespeare calls on “the glorious and ever Virgin Mary, mother of god, refuge and advocate of sinners” to be his “Executresse” and swears his undying allegiance to the traditional faith. If the testament is a fake, it was a prescient one: at the time of its discovery, no parallel was known, but in the twentieth century other versions of similar documents were found, suggesting that this one—if it indeed existed—was based on a template, perhaps brought to England in Edmund Campion's Jesuit Mission of 1580. This declaration of Catholic belief seemed to confirm that John Shakespeare's fines for not attending church in 1592 were a sign of doctrinal resistance to reformed religion. The alternative explanation is that Shakespeare senior's business affairs were in a dire state, and that he was avoiding his creditors; adherents of the Catholicism theory argue both that debt was a common excuse for non-attendance at church by Catholics, and furthermore that, like other recusants, John Shakespeare was attempting to hide his wealth to secure it from sequestration by the authorities, and that his apparent financial difficulties were in fact a stratagem. The fact that Susanna, Shakespeare's favored daughter, was likewise fined in 1606 only seems to confirm the family's loyalties. Interestingly, Shakespeare himself was never fined for recusancy.

The suggestion that Shakespeare is “William Shakeshaft,” described as a “player” or perhaps working as a tutor and attached to the recusant (Catholic) Lancastrian Hoghton household during the 1580s, is a third line of argument, although it has to be admitted that no version of Shakespeare's name ever looks remotely like Shakeshaft, which was not an uncommon northern surname. Stephen Greenblatt imagines him meeting the Jesuit missionary Edmund Campion: “Shakespeare would have found Campion fascinating … if the adolescent knelt down before him, he would have been looking at a distorted image of himself”: it's an unlikely if attractive scenario, since we are by no means sure that Shakespeare was ever in Lancashire, still less that he met Campion at this date.
⁴
But that a connection with northern recusancy might have been promoted by John Cottom, Shakespeare's schoolmaster with strong associations with the region and its recusant traditions, and that in turn the local Catholic gentry might have introduced Shakespeare to his first acting job with Strange's Men, who were also connected with the Hoghtons, is tantalizing, but it rests on chains of unverifiable “ifs.”
⁵
That this whole theory has been recently revitalized by scholars keen to insert Lancashire into the lucrative academic and tourist itineraries does not necessarily add to its claims.

Because Catholicism was dangerous in the late sixteenth century—after the excommunication of Queen Elizabeth by Pope Pius V in 1570, Catholics were the dangerous enemy within and subject to violent repression—the idea that its ideas and imagery are covert in Shakespeare's plays has been an attractive one. Clare Asquith's
Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare
had its genesis in its author's Cold War observation of “the artful double language and hidden identities used in Russian dissident writing.” Asquith describes her glossary of “coded terms” as “an entry point to a long forgotten, almost foreign language” of encrypted Catholicism in Shakespeare's works: Hercules is a “favourite Counter-Reformation image of resistance,” the red rose “an all-purpose image, but used specifically by Catholics for the old, ‘beautiful’ religion,” and “tempest” an image of the Reformation: the placing of
The Tempest
at the beginning of the First Folio “provides a subtitle to the book as politically loaded as ‘The Blitz’ or ‘The Troubles’ might be to a modern reader.”
⁶
As with all codes, it's entirely possible to be skeptical: red roses in Shakespeare's history plays are already coded with political, rather than religious, allegiance, as the Temple Garden scene between the supporters of York and Lancaster in
1 Henry VI
, and, as we know, “that which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet” (
Romeo and Juliet
2.1.85–6). While Asquith's theories do not go so far as Baconian cryptology (see Myth 30), their author shares with anti-Stratfordians a kind of over-ingenuity and a sense that the literary text is a cipher to be broken rather than a poem susceptible to multiple readings. Richard Wilson's argument, in
Secret Shakespeare
, is allied but different: he claims that by
not
explicitly engaging with contemporary religious controversy Shakespeare creates “a drama out of silence”: Wilson speculates that “Shakespeare's limitless talent for entering the consciousness of others was an ultimate function … of Catholic England's greatest act of ventriloquizing self-forgetfulness.”
⁷
As Gary Taylor notes of Shakespeare's personal invisibility in his plays, there “may be many motives for such self-erasure; any act so bizarre and so sustained must have been overdetermined. But the desire to protect yourself from those ‘who would pluck out the heart of [your] mystery’ is perhaps understandable in adherents of a religion which was defined by law as treason.”
⁸

Shakespeare's apparent reticence on religious topics in his writing is also notable. He does not write religious verse (unless you argue that his opaque poem
The Phoenix and the Turtle
is a coded Catholic requiem: it is certainly one of the most obscure things Shakespeare ever wrote). Where he does treat religious topics and figures, his purposes seem to be most obviously dramatic rather than doctrinal: it is hard to make the inept Friar in
Romeo and Juliet
, his more commanding counterpart in
Much Ado About Nothing
, the potential Marian echoes of Hermione's breathing “statue” at the end of
The Winter's Tale
, or the attitude to the Pope's “usurped authority” and “juggling witchcraft” (3.1.86, 95) in
King John
into a coherent expression of their author's own religious beliefs. These references to Catholicism do theatrical not religious work, as a largely secular theater took on some of the social functions of collective display and ritual associated with the traditional religion along with its vestments (often bought by theater companies as props), but transformed its spiritual import.
⁹

As with other biographical readings of the plays discussed in our myths (10, 12, and 18), attempts to deduce Shakespeare's religion from his writing tend towards selectively shaping the range of material to fit their particular agenda.
Hamlet
is a case in point: Shakespeare seems here to draw on a range of religious associations rather than endorsing any one position. Hamlet is a student of Wittenberg, strongly associated with the reformer Martin Luther (and with Hamlet's strongly anti-Catholic stage predecessor, Marlowe's Dr Faustus). In orthodox Protestant terms, he describes death as the “undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveller returns” (3.1.81–2), but he has himself encountered the distinctly Catholic ghost of his father, returned from the distinctly Catholic location of Purgatory, “doomed for a certain term to walk the night, / And for the day confined to fast in fires / Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purged away” (1.5.10–13). Drawing on the language of John Shakespeare's spiritual testament, Greenblatt describes Hamlet, like the playwright himself, as a Protestant haunted by the spirit of his Catholic father, while noting that in the play Shakespeare “seems at once Catholic, Protestant and deeply skeptical of both.”
¹⁰