Shakespeare and Dante: Demonic Agency as Literary Theory | Auriga, A Literary Web Diary

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Auriga, A Literary Web Diary

Margherita Maleti Viggiano

January 26, 2012

Shakespeare and Dante: Demonic Agency asLiterary Theory

By margheritamaletiviggiano

Shakespeare and Dante

Demonic Agency as Literary Theory

Chapter One

Double-Meaning Prophesier: Catholicism in Shakespeare

The Word of God is living and effective, sharper than any two-edged sword,

penetrating even between soul and spirit, joints and marrow,

and able to discern reflections and thoughts of the heart.

No creature is concealed from Him, but everything is naked and exposed to the eyes

of Him to whom we must render an account.

(Hebrews 4:12-13, TJB)

The sword of the Spirit is the Word of God.



(Eph. 6:17, TJB)

Father I have manifested thy name unto the men which thou gavest me out of the world:

thine they were, and thou gavest them me; and they have kept thy word

I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for them which thou hast given me

Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe in me through their word; Thatthey may all be one; as thou, Father, art in me and I in thee, that they also me be one in us.

(John 17:1-21, KJV)

I knew a man in Christ How that he was caught up into paradise,

and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter

And lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations,

there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me,

lest I should be exalted above measure.

(2 Corinthians 12:2-7, KJV)

As man is the best of animals when perfected,

so is he the worst of all when sundered from law and justice

when devoid of virtue, man is the most unscrupulous and savage of animals.

(Aristotle, Politics, I.i.12)

Mans life is a day. What is he?/ What is he not? A shadow in a dream

Is man: but when God sheds a brightness,/ Shining life is on earth/ And life is sweet as honey.

(Pindar, Pythian 8.93-97, trans. Bowra)

If America does not yet have great writers, we need not look for the reasons elsewhere:

literary genius does not exist without freedom of mind, and there is not freedom of mind in America.

(Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. I, 267)

What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith



The spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the mind of other men and women.

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own, without bias.

The spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded.

The spirit of liberty is the Spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind

that lesson it has never learned, but never quite forgotten.

(Learned Hand, American Jurist, 1944 Address in Central Park, New York)

1. Criticism, and

In his essay Ideological Criticism and Pluralism, presented at the Special Session of the ModernLanguage Association on The Role of Ideology in the Criticism and Metacriticism of Shakespeare(Washington, 1989), Richard Levin took position against neo-Marxists literary critics who reject theidea that one can attain objective knowledge of a literary text alleging that interpretations arealways determined by the interpreters ideology and so are never objective.[i] To counter a criticalstance that would make any form of criticism impossible and undermine the very notion of criticism,Levin discussed his idea of perspectivism or pluralism, which does not deny the possibility ofobjective knowledge of the text. Such pluralistic perspectivism affirms that the various approachescan attain such knowledge in their own terms, since they are not intervening to produce differentobjects, but are only different ways of viewing the object. Only a pluralism grounded in reciprocalrespect and intellectual honesty allows for scholarly dialogue: it enables us to live together and talkto each other, because we can understand and respect our different approaches.[ii] In this way,criticism retains its fundamental ability to assess the validity and truth of statements andinterpretations.[iii] This is especially relevant in dealing with certain types of criticism that arepopular today, which criticize all theological approaches to literature claiming that they aredogmatic. Such critics belong to the most disparate schools of thought from feminism to neo-Marxism, from New Historicism to skepticism. Nevertheless, they share and agree on a basic anti-religious agenda that informs their interpretation, and which they tend to impose not only on otherindependent critics, but also on their students and department colleagues, thus creating a climate oftyranny and forced consent in the academic environment, which is in fact intended for the freedevelopment of the individual. This is what De Tocqueville calls the tyranny or despotism of the



majority[iv] (Democracy in America, Vol. I, 257 ff.), and what he says about the overt and covertthreats to free-thought and intellectual honesty in the 19th century also rings very true for the currentpolitics of academic publishing and hiring.

In his epoch-making political treatise, De Tocqueville addresses the notion of dogma and thenecessity of dogma for the proper functioning of human reason: we can therefore appropriatelyconsider his reflections propos those critics who are used to indicting the theological approaches toliterature for being dogmatic. In The Principal Source of Beliefs among Democratic Peoples,[v] DeTocqueville very reasonably states that one cannot make it so that there are no dogmatic beliefs, thatis to say opinions which men accept on trust without debate. Indeed, [t]here is no philosopher inthe world so great that he does not believe a million things on the word of others, and who does notassume many more truths that he has proven, including the very dogma of the sovereignty ofpeople on which democracy is based.[vi] The reason why man cannot dispense with dogma is givenby his limited condition limited in terms of intellect, as well as time and opportunity: man cannotdemonstrate all the truths that he makes use of each day, but must accept previous truths based onthe authority and demonstrations of others, assume them as the foundation for his own and progressin this way, by building upon tradition.[vii]

On the other hand, it is deplorable that such critiques directed against theology come from positions Marxism, feminism, New Criticism and other formalisms, deconstruction, New Historicism,skepticism, etc. which are heavily ideological per se.

In this light, feminism dogmatically assumes that abortion is a womans civil right, when in factothers might consider that the freedom of one individual stops where the life and freedom of theother begins. In the same anti-critical way, Marxism and neo-Marxism are dogmatically grounded onthe idea that the spirit of man is the product of material culture, even in spite of the fact that thedevelopment of monotheism in the West shows how the actual direction is from thought to matter adirection proved, inter alia, by the history of Marxism itself.

Again, New Criticism and other formalisms would dogmatically consider the work of art as anindependent artifact, wholly insulated from the historical moment in which it was composed, as wellas from the personal history and intentionality of the author without considering that the reasonwhy Orwells 1984 and Animal Farm, for instance, could not have been written by Plato or Aristotlehas to do with precise historical factors, with the personal history and character of the author, as wellas his intentions in writing his opus. In the same way, deconstruction dogmatically asserts that thehistory of truth has always been the debasement of writing, and its repression outside fullspeech,[viii] and proposes an agenda whereby any text but especially the Bible must beperverted and forcibly made to say the opposite of what it explicitly maintains. Indeed, if it is truethat deconstruction imploded in a meta-critical moment of truth, if the age of deconstruction has



ended for good, and if the ideological roots of deconstruction were exposed by those who did notgain from the distribution of its literary spoils, it is also unfortunately true that the damages done tothe humanities will require many years to repair and overcome. [ix]

New Historicism, closely allied to neo-Marxism and equally claiming a pseudo-scientific validity foritself, has recently been exposed and shown to partake in those very ideologies it purported todebunk. Speaking about our need to become aware of effective history or Wirkungsgeschichte, Hans-Georg Gadamer describes the new historical approach in terms of navet and a generalized failureof self-analysis: historical objectivism shows its navet Real historical thinking must take accountof its own historicity; and: historical objectivism conceals the fact that historical consciousness isitself situated in the web of historical effects it preserves its good conscience by failing to recognizethe presuppositions that govern its own understanding, and hence falls short of reaching that truthwhich, despite the finite nature of our understanding, could be reached.[x]

Gadamers epistemologically sound approach is also realistically constructivist, and in itself itconstitutes an authoritative critique of another common trend in contemporary criticism: skepticism,which in the field of Shakespearean studies finds its believers and devotees in personalities such asStanley Cavell, Graham Bradshaw, John Cox and Millicent Bell.

Apparently, few people manage to appreciate the logical impossibility of skepticism, which makes it aliving paradox and a contradiction in terms: the professed certainty, in other words, that there are nocertainties. Whenever one reads declarations on the alleged, oxymoronic skeptical faith ofShakespeare, one truly wonders how they were arrived at. [S]kepticism has come to beShakespeares assumed position, announces Cox.[xi] In the same way, Cavell describes hisconviction itself as constituting evidence my conviction, or evidence for he has received anintuition of the occurrence of skepticism in Shakespeare. Apparently, Descartes-like, he had a clearand distinct perception of the reality of skepticism in Shakespeare: but how did he reach it andwhence did he obtain it, since we cannot achieve certainty in our knowledge of existence on thebasis of senses alone, hence on no human basis?[xii] According to Cavell, his conviction constitutesevidence, but at the same time, his conviction is also an intuition, and an intuition does notrequire evidence. And it is upon such super-human intuition that he grounds all his subsequentspeculation about Shakespeares alleged skepticism a logically flawed procedure in itself, whichbecomes all the more paradoxical when he admits that he does not command the learning to argueseriously on historical evidence that skepticism finds its way into Shakespeares words.[xiii] Inthis way, he builds a deeply flawed argument and denounces it all on the same page.

If this is what is being marketed as scholarship and if this is what is being taught to students as aninstance of sound logic and argumentation it is not surprising that the humanities, and literarystudies in particular, have recently been under attack and increasingly find themselves in the positionof having to justify their very existence.[xiv]



Indeed, Cavell and other skeptics never mention the fact that, from the point of view of logic,sentences like: It is impossible to know the truth, or: There is no objective truth are always false,in that they present themselves as categorical assertions which are predicated on their own negation,hence the logical impossibility of skepticism.[xv] In truth, the skeptical position is not technically adogma anymore, but already an ideology, which is to say, an instance of Marxian false consciencein which the speaker is aware of the untruth he is putting forward, but does it nonetheless.[xvi] Andin this light, it is also possible to recognize the disingenuous misreading of tradition to serve onesideology, as when Cavell cites Descartes as an instance of skeptical philosopher, trying to erase thefact that Descartes places God, and the innate idea of God and self, at the foundation of his entirephilosophy:

nam unitas, simplicitas, sive inseparabilitas eorum omnium quae in Deo sunt, una est ex praecipuisperfectionibus quas in eo esse intelligo []Superest tantum ut examinem qua ratione ideam istam aDeo accepi nec etiam a me efficta est, nam nihil ab illa detrahere, nihil illi superaddere planepossum, ac proinde superest ut mihi sit innata, quemadmodum etiam mihi est innata idea mei ipsius.[]Et sane non mirum est Deum, me creando ideam illam mihi indidisse, ut esset tanquam notaartificis operi suo impressa.[xvii]

Descartes states that he is aware of God as a supreme being who possesses all those loftyperfections, of which the mind may have some slight perception without fully understanding them:and from the awareness of such perfection derives the logic certainty that God cannot be a deceiver(satis patet illum [Deum] fallacem esse non posse) inasmuch as deception (fraudem) cannot bepart of the perfect Being, who is free from all defect. In this way, Descartes grounds his system ofthought on the logic certainty of God, the perfect Being who is not a deceiver: human perceptions andintuitions can be reliable if and because they are supported by God and by the idea of God in man.[xviii]

For this reason, Cavell cannot claim that the skepticism he has in mind how to live at all in agroundless world is the same as the philosophy of Descartes, who was very far removed from suchmaterialistic conceptions. Cavells counterfactual statement is that Descartes raises questions aboutGods existence and the immortality of the soul, when in fact that is the precisely the foundation ofDescartess philosophy. Descartes does not raise questions about the existence of God: he observesthat His existence is a fact, and builds the edifice of his speculation upon it.

Even Cavell is obliged to contradict himself, as he must admit that [i]n Descartess thinking, theground, one gathers, still exists, in the assurance of God. But, he adds, Descartess very clarityabout the necessity of Gods assurance in establishing a rough adequation or collaboration between



our everyday judgments and the world means that if assurance in God will be shaken, the groundof the everyday is thereby shaken. This is precisely the point: for Descartes, the ground is not shakenbut solidly established in God regardless of Cavells opinion about it. It is therefore a deeply flawedand ideological procedure to read the text of Descartes against the grain so as to make it say theopposite of what is intended; it is a flawed procedure to put the legitimate author under erasure inorder to foreground a critic who has no respect for and therefore is completely unrelated to him. Byprojecting his own ideology on the text, this sort of critic virtually devours it for his own gain andconsumption.

It is necessary to consider the issue of skepticism in contemporary literary criticism. The fact that thatis the most popular stance in current debates, virtually in any field, also explains why so muchscholarship has lost, or rather, relinquished its own raison dtre. Skepticism is the underlyingideology of many critics today, who combine it with one or more of the many factions anddenominations now available on the academic market: deconstruction, New Historicism, CulturalMaterialism, feminism, and so on whose only common denominator is an a priori anti-religiousattitude.

Such academic schizophrenia is aptly epitomized in Habermass definition of a fragmentedconsciousness as a condition of the will that blocks enlightenment by the mechanism ofreification.[xix] And indeed, like the autonomous subsystems that colonize the lifeworld, thesenewly devised and utterly foreign strands of thought predate on the literature of the past as colonialmasters, forcing a process of assimilation upon it in the name of rationality and scientificity.[xx]As the autonomous subsystems growing on the lifeworld, they too need to be stripped of theirideological veils. What makes their position indefensible and untenable is the logical impossibility ofskepticism itself, which clearly appears when the skeptic critic has to support his own thesis: indeed,he is skeptical of everybody elses position, but he passionately believes in his own.

To consider a philosophy more sound and more worthy of reflection, let us see how Habermassthought on the interrelatedness of faith and rationality can help us overcome the impasse in which thehumanities currently find themselves. In The Dialectics of Secularization, Jrgen Habermas conducts adialogue with Joseph Ratzinger on the essential complementarity of faith and reason.[xxi] Hisstarting point is an awareness of the limits and the derivative origin of what is commonlyunderstood as reason: when reason reflects on its deepest foundations, it discovers that it owes itsorigin to something else. And it must acknowledge the fateful power of its origin the reason thatbecomes aware of its limitations thus transcends itself in the direction of something else. [] Butmore is involved here than respect: philosophy has good reasons to be willing to learn from religioustraditions.[xxii]



Habermas is here referring to the metaphysical origin of philosophical thought in Greece, as well asto the mutual compenetration of Christianity and Greek metaphysics[xxiii] that informs andcharacterizes Western speculation. He observes that the idea of ethical and moral values isindissolubly linked to that of the transcendental,[xxiv] and that religiosity and religious fellowshipsmake a functional contribution to the reproduction of motivations and attitudes that are societallydesirable.[xxv] This is all the more necessary because the markets and the power of bureaucracyare expelling social solidarity from more and more spheres in life.[xxvi] Indeed, democraticgovernments have come to realize that the deep forces that guide citizens in their political choicesand orientation belong to realm of religion and morality: they are, in certain respects, both pre-political and post-political: [t]hus, it is in the interest of the constitutional state to deal carefully withall the cultural sources that nourish its citizens; consciousness of norms and their solidarity.[xxvii] Itis this social awareness that Habermas defines as characteristic of a post-secular society. He remarksthat religion is holding its own in an increasingly secular environment,[xxviii] and society woulddo well to recognize its importance as well as its own dependence upon the constructive informingprinciples of all legitimate religions.[xxix]

In order to coexist and prosper, faith and reason must acknowledge their relatedness and mutualdependence, and must develop themselves within an atmosphere of tolerance. In this context ofrelatedness, Habermas discusses at length the necessity of tolerance for civil society in his BetweenNaturalism and Religion: Tolerance protects a pluralistic society from being torn apart as a politicalcommunity by conflicts over worldviews. [] Refraining from discrimination, and hence showingequal respect for everybody, is what is called for in the first instance toward those who are different,rather than the tolerance called for by those who think differently.[xxx] Tolerance and mutualrespect are the preconditions for an intellectually honest and fruitful scholarly debate among critics,but even before that, critics must respect their authors and tolerate the fact that they too may believein and operate according to ideas that are altogether different than their own.

Northrop Frye asserts so much when he discusses the need for criticism to employ the same schemesof reference as the literature they consider, which often belongs to a remote and distant past, withoutprojecting on it some idiosyncratic, contemporary thought-systems that are completely alien to itsown presuppositions and aims: criticism deals with literature in terms of a specific conceptualframework. The framework is not something outside literature This latter gives us, in criticism,the fallacy of what in history is called determinism [] It would be easy to compile a long list of suchdeterminisms in criticism, all of them, whether Marxist, Thomistic, liberal-humanist, neo-Classical,Freudian, Jungian, or existentialist, substituting a critical attitude for criticism, all proposing, not to



find a conceptual framework for criticism within literature, but to attach criticism to one of amiscellany of framework outside it. The axioms and postulates of criticism, however, have to growout of the art it deals with.[xxxi]

Early in his career, Frye came to the realization that the great code of Western literature is the Bible:an infinite source of inspiration for the greatest artists in our tradition. Therefore, all his subsequentwork de facto revolved around the Bible: I soon realized that a student of English literature who doesnot know the Bible does not understand a good deal of what is going on in what he reads: the mostconscientious student will be continually misconstruing the implications, even the meaning. So Ioffered a course in the English Bible as a guide to the study of English literature, and as the mostefficient way of learning about it myself.[xxxii]

The Bible, says Frye, has influenced Anglo-American literature from the Anglo-Saxons tocontemporary writers; it has exerted such influence on Western imagination as a unity, with aunifying pattern of symbols, metaphors and extended metaphors in form of allegories, as well as apolysemous sense that generally requires deep hermeneutical work. In his study, Frye considers theBible not only as a work of literature, as is commonly done today, but as inspired writing of aparticular kind: because the Bible is just so obviously more than a work of literature.[xxxiii]

As hermeneutical approaches, he chose the ones he saw as relevant and meaningful for poets:medieval typology on the one hand, and certain forms of Reformation commentary[xxxiv] on theother. In this way, he tried to explain why and how poets drew inspiration from Sacred Scripture. Forhis analysis, he did not consider the Jewish or Islamic Bible, but the Christian one even discountingthe differences between the Catholic and Protestant translations since it is the Christain Bible whichexerted the greatest influence on Western literature.[xxxv] Frye is adamant that there is no excusetoday for scholars who, in discussing cultural issues originally raised by the Bible and still largelyinformed by it, proceed as though the Bible did not exist,[xxxvi] and he finds it necessary that a non-specialist in Biblical studies call attention to the relevance of the Bible for literary criticism.

Fryes suggestion that literature be discussed in terms of its inner frames of reference and that theBible be recognized as one of the major sources of inspiration for Western literature seem so basicand commonsensical that one may be tempted to take it for granted. But in fact, Fryes position washeavily criticized in his day, and it is has almost been silenced in ours, buried beneath the same heapof irrational, nonsensical theory that is suffocating the humanities as Joyce would say: themudmound or moundings mass of the litter is smothering the letter.

One of the best instances of institutionalized senselessness was Jonathan Cullers attack against theEurocentric pieties and the complicity of literary study with religion, which was immortalized inhis polemic pieces A Critic Against the Christians[xxxvii] and Comparative Literature and the



Pieties.[xxxviii] His intemperate outbursts have been reasonably countered by RoyBattenhouse[xxxix] and James M. Kee[xl], and to these critics I will refer in the following discussion.

Cullers attack right from the beginning establishes a rather puzzling superimposition betweennationality and religion, as if one were the product of the other or vice versa. Hence, in his mind,comparative literature should deflate the partisan pretensions of nationalistic critics and theassociation of literature with national character, as well as the institution of religion in general andthe pieties of nationalisms in particular. Culler claims that the supra-national perspective ofcomparative literature should adopt an a priori anti-religious stance to guarantee political correctness,and ensure not that no-one is left out, but that no-one is let in. And in fact, he deplores the recentstriking revival of interest in the sacred, whereby comparative literature is seen as contributing tothe legitimization of religious discourse. As specimens of dangerously religiously-bent scholars, hecites Northrop Frye, of course but also, very tongue-in-cheek, Geoffrey Hartman and Harold Bloom.Indeed, he laments, our comp. lit. departments nowadays have Marxists, Lacanians,deconstructionists, and feminists in overplus, but seldom anyone who actively attacks religion.Culler is dismayed at the sacrilegious violation of his discipline, since the critique of religion, hesubmits, is the proudest heritage of comparative literature studies. It is (perhaps) by virtue of itscritical demystificatory force that the discipline has even been able to exert a constructive influenceon the thought and discourse of Western culture. And this is precisely the core of the article: Cullerintends to legitimize a combined attack on religion not because literature, in his view, is alien toreligion; but because he sees religion as providing an ideological legitimation for many reactionaryor repressive forces in America today. In other words, comparative literature should debunkChristian mythology not for intrinsic reasons, because Western literature has nothing to do withChristianity; but for political reasons that are completely extrinsic to literature and literaturedepartments, and are instead connected to what he calls the politics of criticism. Literary criticismhas a political function: and for this reason it should receive attention and funding from the academyas well as other political-economic institutions.

At the same time, Culler is the first to recognize the impracticability of his agenda when dealing withcanonic authors like Milton, for instance, who are evidently influenced by Christianity. MiltonsParadise Lost he suggests should be framed in light of the creational myth it presupposes:Perhaps when teaching Paradise Lost we ought not to draw back from suggesting that this account ofcreation is a myth, and initiating discussion of its implications. We wonder at the remarkablemystical insight of Culler, who has been granted infallible knowledge that the Biblical account ofcreation is indeed nothing but a mythical fantasy. And at the same time, we wonder at the reaction ofMiltons spirit, who since then must have been walking the corridors of the MLA at night, shaken outof his grave by the thought that he is indirectly financing an outrageous number of ungrateful,disrespectful and insolent people who could not care less for what he (Milton) really believed in life,but rather teach their students to regard his source of inspiration, Christianity and the Christian Bible,as a personal idiosyncrasy, a Puritanical delusion, a curious, irrelevant survival even in our society.



To offset such critical folly, Roy Battenhouse and James M. Kee, among others, have expounded manyreasonable arguments which, to judge by the current condition of comparative literature studies, havegone unheeded. In his article on postmodern thinking and religion, for instance, Kee callsdeconstructionists to be truly faithful to their own Heideggerian premises, which include a critique ofmetaphysics as well as of the modern subject existing within language: Since Derrida has alwaysinsisted that the critical subject of the modern epoch is situated in the differential web of language,deconstructions critique of metaphysics applies to this subjects pretensions to autonomy.[xli] It isdifficult to imagine how the subject that exists in the postmodern hermeneutical situation[xlii]could be able to appropriate the religious traditions of humankind to disown and deny them, sincethat in itself would be a modern metaphysical gesture.[xliii] The subject that experiences anexistential aporia, says Klee, cannot claim a negational metaphysical mastery[xliv] of this sort, butmust accept that the mode of being of Being comprises concealment as well as unconcealment, absenceand presencing, theophanic emergence and withdrawal.[xlv] Heideggers Gelassenheit, an openingto the mystery of Being, is an invitation to articulate the dialogue involved in the relationshipbetween humanity and divinity, in which poetry predisposes the mind to an encounter betweenthinking and its other within a dialogical situation.[xlvi] It is only in the dialogue between beingand Being that a negotiation is possible between lth and altheia, between euporia and aporia,between blindness and insight.[xlvii]

Roy Battenhouse, on the other hand, points out that Shakespeare has a more mystery-laden sense ofhistory and a more complex understanding of human nature than todays many neo-Marxist criticswho anachronistically back-project their ideology on an Author who was completely alien to it, thusobtaining puzzling results especially in terms of teaching efficaciousness: A fair question to ask ofany critical method is how valuable its results are, and their worth for education. Withoutreferring to the Christian ethos of transcendence and self-sacrifice, he reminds us, it is impossible toexplain to a class of undergraduates how benevolent love can overcome a will to power thatallegedly determines every human activity: how is it possible to explain the surprise of [Cordelias]choosing to return good for evil; or the surprising act, by a nameless servant, of resisting at the costof his life the blinding of Gloucester; and also the surprise of a deathbed repentance by an Edmundwho had formerly espoused only a will to power?[xlviii]

The only way to give an account of the numerous surprises in Shakespeares writings, which areutterly unexplainable in human terms, is to see and understand them within their proper scheme ofreference, which is to say, Christian theology. For the reasons we will discuss in the second section ofthis chapter, devoted to the historical and personal evidence of Shakespeares time and life,Christianity was the strongest force present and active in Renaissance Europe, both at the social andat a deeply personal level in peoples life. It is not possible to arrive at a sound understanding ofShakespeares art without reference to Christian theology and the Christian Bible, which represent the



greatest sources of inspiration for the artist. The question to consider now is how to establish afruitful relationship between theology and literature, and how to convey this relatedness to studentsand readers. To answer the first theoretic question, we will discuss the work of Terence R. Wright,especially his Theology and Literature;[xlix] while for the second pragmatic question, we will rememberNorthrop Fryes experience with his classes, as described in his Anatomy of Criticism.[l]

While his emphasis is mainly on Anglo-American literature, Terence Wright acknowledges theessential role of religion and theology[li] in Western Art. He articulates his theoretical and practicalgoal as an exploration of some of the literary forms adopted by faith,[lii] a critical reading of textsin which theology and literature meet and act upon each other.[liii] In this light, Wright analyzesthe literary texts in the form in which they stand and evaluates their theological significance[liv]utilizing the specialized hermeneutical tools of the two-thousand-year old critical tradition thatrevolves around the Sacred Scriptures, including the writings of scholars and theologians such as theChurch Fathers, St. Augustine, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Dominic, St. Bonaventure, and St. ThomasAquinas among the most prominent.

It is by virtue of this insight that Wright is able to claim a more serious theological role for[Shakespeares] plays, insisting on their potential to explore and to supplement Reformationdiscussion on the nature of evil.[lv] This is indeed one of the main and most sublime aspects ofShakespeares art, which is also a sublime study in the portraiture of evil, not dissimilar fromMachiavellis The Prince: a universal debunking of the evil ways of power, for the benefit of thevirtuous ones who desire to avoid it and live according to Gods Law as Desdemona affirms: Godme such uses send/ Not to pick bad from bad, but by bad mend! (Othello, V.i.103-104)

Only through an appropriate use of Christian theology is it possible to recognize and discuss thisessential feature of Shakespeares art, which would be altogether unintelligible in a relativisticuniverse, without the presence of God to establish an ultimate difference between good and evil asmoral and ontological forces.[lvi] Wright thus defines his perceptive theological approach to literaturenot as theological poetry but rather as poetics of faith.[lvii] At the end of our discussion in thischapter, we will see how it is possible to rephrase his definition as a faithful poetics a poetics, thatis, which will be faithful to the layered textual meaning and to the authorial intentions.[lviii]

As for the second, pragmatic part of the discourse on theology and literature, i.e. its application to thereal life situation of teaching undergraduates and graduates alike given that teaching is still andalways will be the justification for and raison dtre of literary studies let us remember NorthropFryes experience with his university courses on Western literature and the Bible: The academic aimis to see what the subject means, not to accept or reject it. The greater majority of my students



understood this principle at once: those who had difficulty with it showed an invariable pattern ofresistance. And he explained such resistance as a character trait of our epoch, highlighting the factthat there are fewer mental blocks in studying religious traditions outside our own.[lix] In otherwords, a volume on Buddhist Shakespeare such as James Howes 1994 original publication[lx] islikely to meet more interest and open-minded reception than a study on Catholic Shakespeare evenif there is no historical or biographical reason to suspect that Shakespeare may have been a crypto-Buddhist himself.

And it is, in this light, quite telling that Howes discussion of Buddhist themes in Shakespeare shouldbring to the readers attention precisely those articles of Buddhist theology that are common toChristianity: an ethos of egolessness, self-denial and even self-hatred as renunciation of desire (p.129); the key role of empathy and compassion (p. 96 ff.); brotherly forgiveness and peace (p. 27 ff.);and the fundamental importance of religious Art, i.e. images, for human understanding (p. 200 ff.)[lxi]

Following the example of Northrop Frye and Terry Wright, my duty in the following sections of thisfirst chapter will be to illustrate how a reading of Shakespeare according to the principles of Christiantheology is able to shed light on some of the fundamental themes of his sublime art, such as demonicagency and the theological doctrine and existential reality of victim souls. A careful study of theSacred Scriptures and an application of Biblical hermeneutics are essential for such literary-theological approach, and essential it is that such study be conducted according to the basic principleof respect both for the spirit and the letter of the Bible. As Frye reminds us, the Bible is just soobviously more than a work of literature. The Bible is and has been considered for more than two-thousand years a work inspired by God: the poets who in their turn were inspired by it understood itin this way,[lxii] and the critics whose duty is to enlighten their Art must also consider it as divinelyinspired, if they want to develop an understanding of their authors inspiration and Art. It is vital toremind ourselves of the necessary attitude of respect in studying and interpreting the Bible: in thesame way as we respect Shakespeare as a valuable, universal artist, we must also respect his source ofinspiration, the Christian Bible, as a valuable, universal book that needs to be considered according toits internal frame of reference. The first principle of such referential scheme is that the Bible is a workof divine inspiration: there is no point in applying skepticism or deconstructionist reversal to it, for inthat case we would be discussing an idea without referential meaning in reality, a book that does notexist in the actual world but only in our mind: a figment of our own imagination.

I am here referring to recent examples of Biblical commentary from self-appointed specialists suchas Harold Bloom, whose 2005 Jesus and Yahweh: the Names Divine is not a work of rigorous scholarshipbut a manifesto of scholarly fraud: an example of how it is possible, in todays decayed and diseasedacademy, to publish a collection of mystifications and counterfactual statements and get away with itbecause of the greed of the people involved. Greed or covetousness is a desire for worldly riches



above and beyond ones merit, which has infected humanity since time immemorial: and greed is theonly rationale for the astonishing lack of competent peer-review in the case of publications such asBlooms reversal of the Sacred Scriptures. Greedy are the owners and boards of directors of vanitypresses such as Riverhead; and greedy are the university administrations that capitalize on thenotorious renown of a scholar in order to attract more paying students, who are offered the Americandream in the form of a sugar-coated Satan sandwich: it does not matter in the least if the book isbut an ideological mystification if it comes from a rich scholar, it must be good.

Indeed, neither the presses nor the university administrations give a second thought to the accuracyand truthfulness of the information in print: this is not their aim. Their aim is to appeal to a relativelylarge section of the public composed by rebellious youth or young adults with intellectualaspirations. This sort of public is the product of our decayed televised and massified society, raisedand colonized by the media with a systematic anti-religious indoctrination that leads them astraywith examples of institutionalized vice, only to leave them hopeless and unable to resolve theirinevitable sense of guilt for indulging in such vice. Books like Blooms have the important function toappease that sense of guilt: systematically cheated by the media and the academia, these youngpseudo-intellectuals are given, with the seal of the institution, a false sense of legitimation forrejecting God and religion in favor of massified pleasure. And in fact, the drift of The Names Divine isto instill in the readers a generalized, bitter resentment against God: Blooms blasphemous suggestionis that God Himself has betrayed the covenant with humanity, because He is a tyrant and a sadistwith a flair for ironic narratives, ambiguity and misreadings. Rather than a faithful representation ofYahweh, conducted according to scholarly methods, this is obviously a disingenuous self-projectionof Bloom himself.

In so doing, Bloom betrays not only his origins by offending the sensibility of the whole Jewishpeople with blasphemous fabrications about the nature of Yahweh. But he also insults the majority ofthe world population, composed of Christians, Muslims and Jews, who share their faith in the sameGod. All this could happen because of the corrupt practices of publishing houses and universityadministrations exploiting the good faith of readers and students: for indeed, who among Bloomscolleagues and employers has ever protested for his systematic lack of scholarly rigor and competentpeer-review?[lxiii]

It is necessary to consider this question carefully in light of the much debated death of thehumanities afflicting our departments today, and before dealing with the influence of Christianity inShakespeares plays. Christianity, and Catholicism in particular, is a vital force in Shakespeares art.There are historical as well as biographical reasons why this is so, and we are going to analyze themalso in relation to the textual evidence of the plays. But our discussion will unlike recent fashions ofBiblical misappropriations be faithful to the spirit in which the Scriptures were composed and readby inspired artists like Shakespeare.

2. The State of the Religious in Reformation England: Historical Evidence



In his Lectures on Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), Thomas Carlyle discusses theHero as Poet with reference to Shakespeare. His words were prophetic of the current developmentsin Shakespeare studies:

In some sense it may be said that this glorious Elizabethan Era with its Shakespeare, as the outcomeand flowering of all which had preceded it, is itself attributable to the Catholicism of the MiddleAges. The Christian Faith, which was the theme of Dantes Song, had produced this practical lifewhich Shakespeare was to sing. For Religion then, as it now and always is, was the soul of Practice;the primary vital fact in mens life. And remark here, as rather curious, that Middle-Age Catholicismwas abolished, so far as Acts of Parliament could abolish it, before Shakespeare, the noblest productof it, made his appearance. He did make his appearance nevertheless. Nature at her own time, withCatholicism or what else might be necessary, sent him forth; taking small thoughts of Acts ofParliament. King-Henrys, Queen-Elizabeths go their way; and Nature too goes hers.

Carlyle recognizes that the genius of Shakespeare was the product of the Catholic culture of theMiddle Ages, with its public and private education revolving around the Sacred Scriptures; itsreligious theater of mystery- and miracle-plays; its conception of the divine rights of kings and oftemporal power as originating from the Majesty of God; its highly symbolic and allegorical Art; itsreligious architecture; its divinely inspired literature. As Kim F. Hall writes in her much-admiredcritical edition of Othello, religion was the dominant means by which early moderns understood andordered their world.[lxiv]

Religion was not only a matter of private worship, but had an essential social role in providing thefoundation and justification of temporal political power, ordering the relationships amongindividuals and social groups. It is for this reason that King James VI & I could advocate the principleof the divine right of kings in his The True Law of Free Monarchies (1598) and Basilikon Doron (1599),where monarchical power is conceived of as an extension of the apostolic succession initiated byJesus Christ, as He established the foundation of His Universal Church with Peter.[lxv]

In the Basilikon, especially, whose 1603 London edition enjoyed great success and sold thousands ofcopies, James devotes the first book to the description ostensibly for the edification of his son, heirto the throne; but primarily to promote an image of himself as a responsible, God-fearing monarch atthe beginning of his mandate the description of the Christian kings duties toward God: it was thekings duty to love and fear the Omnipotent God, to study the Sacred Scripture attentively, and tospend time in prayer to give thanks to God for His bountiful gifts. As the monarch represented theHead of the State, his example was meant to serve as a model of behavior for all respectable citizens,his subjects.



Jamess other publications also give witness to the key role that religion and theology performed bothsocially and politically: in The Lepanto (1591), for instance, James extols the surprising Christianvictory over the Ottoman Turks in one of the most famous and crucial battles in history: at Lepanto,in 1571.[lxvi] As noted in Holinsheds Chronicles (1577), one of the main sources for Shakespeares useof recorded history, the Christian victory at Lepanto was greeted with enormous enthusiasm inLondon: there were bonfires made through the City, with banqueting and great rejoicing, as goodcause there was, for a victory of so great importance, to the whole state of the Christian commonwealth, (4.262).[lxvii]

Christian theology and religion were of capital importance to the English monarch, whocommissioned a more exact Translation of the holy Scriptures in the English Tongue so that theChurch of England shall reap good fruit thereby. James was praised by the translators for being theprincipal Mover and Author of the work, as well as the wonder of the world for his zealtoward the house of God which doth not slack or go backward, but is more and more kindled,manifesting itself abroad in the farthest parts of Christendom, by writing in defense of the Truthand every day at home, by religious and learned discourse, by frequenting the house of God, byhearing the Word preached, by cherishing the Teachers thereof, by caring for the Church, as a mosttender and loving nursing Father.[lxviii]

Among the writings that King James produced in defense of the Truth, perhaps the most prominentis his Daemonologie, in forme of a Dialogue, divided into three Bookes (1597), where he elucidates the mainprinciples of Christian demonology from an Anglican perspective which distances itself fromorthodox Catholicism only in the refutation of exorcism as an efficacious means to combat demonicagency in human life. For the most part, James is faithful to the theology of his famed predecessors,the prominent Catholic intellectual Jean Bodin, whose De la Dmonomanie des Sorciers (Paris, 1580)became an instant classic; and of course the Dominicans Krmer and Sprenger with their MalleusMaleficarum (1486), which would become the most influential text for the trial and punishment ofmany real witches and maguses, and the persecutions of many more victims in the 16th and 17th

centuries.[lxix] As noted by Giovanna Silvani in her 1997 commented edition,[lxx] JamessDaemonologie had a remarkable influence on contemporary English culture, especially the theater and in fact, Shakespeare drew inspiration for Hamlet from the passage, in Book III, Ch. I, where theking rightly identifies the ghosts and spirits walking at night as demons, since the souls of thedeceased cannot come back from the kingdoms of the afterlife:

PHILOMATHES And what meanes then these kindes of spirites, when they appeare in theshaddow of a person newlie dead, or to die, to his friendes?



EPISTEMON When they appeare upon that occasion, they are called Wraithes in our language.Amongst the Gentiles the Deuill used that much, to make them beleeue that it was some good spiritethat appeared to them then, either to forewarne them of the death of their friend; or else to discouerunto them, the will of the defunct And this way hee easily deceiued the Gentiles, because theyknew not God: And to the same effect it is, that he now appears in that maner to some ignorantChristians. For he dare not so illude anie that knoweth that, neither can the spirite of the defunctreturne to his friend, or yet an Angell use such forms.

Given the immense popularity of the kings writings, it is conceivable that Hamlet represented muchless of a mystery for contemporary audiences that it does for us. Indeed, from the words of James, welearn that Prince Hamlet upon which character generations of critics have projected their ownambitions to immortal genius is likely to have appeared to Renaissance audiences as an ignorantChristian, who does not know that such apparitions always have a demonic origin.

If Christianity was such a powerful force in the public and private life of Renaissance England, theprocess of Reformation was the most powerful primal scene and the greatest trauma both inEngland and in Europe. In the 1530s, King Henry VIII (1509-1547) decided to reject the authority ofRome concerning his divorce from Catherine of Aragon: he therefore instituted a new Church ofEngland with himself as its Head. More than six hundred Catholic monasteries were dissolved underhis reign, both to enrich himself and to buy the support of the aristocracy for his own policies. At hisdeath in 1547, Edward Seymour, duke of Somerset, and after him John Dudley, duke ofNorthumberland, reigned for his then ten-year-old son Edward VI (1547-1553). Important changestook place during their regencies: Acts of Parliament were passed in 1549 and 1551 imposingProtestant religious uniformity; the clergy were allowed to marry; two Acts of Uniformity, in 1549and 1552, prescribed Thomas Cranmers Book of Common Prayer as the only legitimate form ofworship; while the Catholic Mass was replaced with Protestant sermons as the focus of Sundayservice. The politics of persecution against Catholics started in this period. It was briefly reversedduring the short reign of Mary I (1553-1558), and finally reestablished against Catholics by the lastTudor monarch, Elizabeth I (1558 1603), and the first of the Stuarts, James VI & I (1603-1625). It wasduring Elizabeths reign that the foundations of the Church of England were secured, protestant inall places of authority, but Catholic in sympathy among large sections of the lesser clergy and thepeople.[lxxi] At the same time, many English subjects who remained faithful to Catholicism, so-called recusant Catholics, suffered dispossession, imprisonment, torture and brutal death byexecution in order to give testimony to their faith.

As Christopher Devlin remarks, in his Hamlets Divinity, the Protestant Reformation was from itsinception accompanied by a propagandist version of history in writers such as Pierre Bayle (1550),John Foxe (1570) and John Speed (1611), who accused Shakespeare of being a Papist: byShakespeares time there was already a Protestant version of Englands past which was rapidly



gaining ground.[lxxii] This version of history is now coming to be seen as basically flawed, andcontemporary historiography in the field of English Reformation proposes a more realistic view of theReformation as a slow process, mainly imposed from above, and generally very painful for the vastmajority of the population.[lxxiii] It is therefore

not surprising that English audiences were still Catholic or well disposed towardCatholicism.[lxxiv]

David Beauregard, who discerns positive evidence of Catholic theology in Shakespeares plays,reminds us that together with the exclusion of direct allusions to the Name of God andcontemporary religious controversies ethics became a mandated theme in theater as a means torepresse vyce and extol vertwe, so that the formal purpose and the moral images of drama stillcarried considerable theological force.[lxxv] Necessarily, ethics implied theological notions of sin,repentance, providential order, natural law, an afterlife as well as ideas of Purgatory, penitentialsatisfaction, pilgrimage, and religious life. All these theological themes and images, and many more,are well represented in Shakespeares plays in a way that contemporary theater and contemporaryart in general, with its materialistic bias would never allow or tolerate: [b]ut such was not the casein Elizabethan and Jacobean England.[lxxvi] Fortunately for Catholic Shakespeare, there wasconsiderable overlapping in terms of theological doctrines held in common by Catholics andProtestants: this, in addition to the fact that some latitude and tolerance could reasonably beexpected from London officials and supervisors of the theater, allowed Shakespeare to circumventcensorship and express his faith in a mediated way, which is the poetic way par excellence, namely:metaphor, rich polysemy and linguistic ambiguity.

The image of the playwright as a lay priest a priest of eternal imagination, as Joyce would onlyhalf-jokingly say has recently been discussed by Jeffrey Knapp,[lxxvii] who argues for a self-fashioning of theater people, Shakespeares Tribe, into a kind of ministry acting mainly under-cover, inasmuch as [f]ear of church and state repression generated caution.[lxxviii] According toKnapp, English theology and ecclesiology shaped the drama at a fundamental level, aiding theinstitutionalization of theater and the professionalization of players and playwrights as acommunity of practitioners[lxxix] who could use their art to conceptualize and mediate a contentthat was relevant to the most pressing reality of contemporary history in the case of Shakespeare,how to maintain ones faith in times of terror.

3. Catholic Shakespeare: Biographical Evidence



One of the most nave scholarly clichs is the one concerning the paucity of information aboutShakespeares life: it is in fact true that we know quite a lot. As Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor pointout in their 1988 edition of the Complete Works for Oxford UP, [o]ne of the ungrounded myths aboutShakespeare is that all we know about his life could be written on the back of a postagestamp.[lxxx] On the contrary, there remains a wealth of information about Warwickshires andLancashires society; about Shakespeares mother and father; his extended family and relatives; hisfamilys and his own financial management, purchases, mortgages and debts; as well as officialdocuments marking salient moments in his own life and the life of his family, such as the record ofsacraments taken or missed at the local parish and, most importantly, his fathers spiritual testament,which Shakespeare devoutly quoted in what he knew would become his most celebrated play,Hamlet.

From all these records, a cohesive picture emerges of the human and political network to which hebelonged, and most scholars now agree that all the evidence we possess points to a continuity ofCatholicism in the Shakespeare family. As Stephen Greenblatt briefly summarizes, Shakespeare wasprobably brought up in a Roman Catholic household in a time of official suspicion and persecution ofrecusancy and he was haunted by the spirit of his Catholic father.[lxxxi] Indeed, the scholars whodiscuss or have discussed Catholicism in Shakespeare are numerous, and here we can only referencea few of them: George Wilkes, Roy Battenhouse, Christopher Devlin, Peter Milward, DavidBeauregard, Frank Brownlow, Gary Taylor, E. A. J. Honigmann, Eric Sams, Ian Wilson, MargaritaStocker, Dympna Callaghan, Richard Wilson and Ruben Espinosa, among others, all contend thatShakespeare was a Catholic and that his faith had a significant influence on his Art.[lxxxii]

On the other hand, there is still great resistance, both psychological and political, to the idea ofCatholic Shakespeare, and the reasons for this state of affairs are not always transparent. In hisexceptionally well researched and much acclaimed Secret Shakespeare, Richard Wilson denounces oneof the most nave myths of literary biography, which is that of the dramatist as a hero of ProtestantEngland and favorite of the Queen. Wilson argues that the idea of the playwright as an Anglicanspokesman is an academic delusion: [t]he construction of a Shakespeare in love with Protestantempire serves the ideological function of annexing the plays to the dominant Anglo-Saxondiscourses.[lxxxiii] Wilson also cites the work of Alison Shell, to the effect that opposition to therecovery of Elizabethan recusant culture arises in the contemporary academy from some very impuremotives: Responses to current Catholicism seem to determine whether one welcomes or shuns it as asubject for historical enquiry When non-Catholics consider early modern Catholicism, theirattitude is inevitably colored by their views on Catholicism now.[lxxxiv] To fully understandShakespeares art it is therefore necessary to respect the author, and allow him to be himself asKastan suggests, inherently other than, and different from, our contemporary selves. This attitude ofrespect for Shakespeare as Other will be kept in mind in all the following discussion about thebiographical evidence speaking for his Catholic faith.



All historians and critics agree that the place of Shakespeares birth, Stratford in Warwickshire, was arenowned center of Catholic recusancy.[lxxxv] Patrick Collinson describes it as essentially a Catholicstronghold down to the middle of the sixteenth century;[lxxxvi] Antonia Fraser speaks of it as thetown at the center of the recusant map of England;[lxxxvii] and according to John E. Neale,Shakespeares Stratford was a A bastion of middle-class church papists, encircled by Calvinistlandowners such as the Lucys and Grevilles.[lxxxviii]

During the 1570s and the 1580s, in particular, Warwickshire was the center of fervent Catholicismwith the arrival of seminary priests from Douai funded and supported, among others, by theHoghton family. Edmund Spenser, who was himself resident in Lancashire and near Hoghton in1576-77, commented that the priests had to face a long and dangerous travel knowing peril ofdeath awaited them, and no reward or riches were to be found.[lxxxix] The 1580 Jesuit mission wasparticularly important, as it included Fr. Edmund Campion, who later became a martyr of the faith;and Jesuit priest and pamphleteer Robert Persons,[xc] who provided Shakespeares father, JohnShakespeare, with the copy of the Catholic Spiritual Testament drawn by Saint Carlo Borromeo.

The religious atmosphere of the region explains why Shakespeares schoolmasters at the Stratfordgrammar school were Catholic: Simon Hunt went on to become a Jesuit; John Cottom was thebrother of Thomas Cottom, a Catholic priest who was arraigned and executed in 1582 with the Jesuitmartyr Edmund Campion; and the third schoolmaster, Thomas Jerkins, had likely been tutored inrhetoric by Campion at St. Johns College, whose founder had strong Catholic sympathies. Afterbeing awarded a fellowship at St. Johns, Jerkins left without taking orders, an action which suggestsRoman Catholic sympathies.[xci]

In discussing the religious background of William Shakespeares parents and extended family, themajority of critics and historians focus on his father, John which generates a lot of controversy,because the abundant evidence of his Catholic faith is usually dismissed with lofty scorn by thosewho have a vested interest in presenting Shakespeare as the Queens poet and a champion ofProtestantism.[xcii] What we should consider, instead and this is where biographical researchshould start what we should consider is the fact that for the generation of Shakespearesgrandparents Marys own parents, born between the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th



century it would have been absolutely unconceivable to marry their daughter to a Protestant, alsoconsidering that Marys family, the Ardens of Park Hall, were one of the most respected, aristocraticCatholic families in the region.

The ancestors of the Ardens had received lands from William the Conqueror, and their origins couldbe traced back before the Norman Conquest. Mary was the favorite daughter of her father RobertArden and, upon her marriage with John, she was bequeathed his most valuable possession, theWilmcote estate: which tells us that Robert Arden must have been pleased with John Shakespeare ashis son-in-law, in spite of the fact that he was of yeoman stock, while Mary belonged to the gentry.This would not have been possible if John, besides coming from a lower social class, had also been aProtestant. The reverse was the case: Robert Arden was pleased with John as a Roman Catholic ingood standing, and he must have felt secure entrusting him with the care of his most cherisheddaughter.

As Christopher Devlin points out, the Arden household became a headquarters of the Counter-Reformation during Shakespeares teenage years.[xciii] In 1583 Edward Arden, the head of theArden family, was implicated in one of the most disgustingly bogus plots of the period ashameless attempt by Leicester to extirpate his family. Lucy sat on the Commission which indictedhim for high treason. The trial was shifted to London, probably on account of his popularity. He wasexecuted a Tyburn, a martyr in everything but the title.[xciv] The son-in-law of Edward Arden John Somerville, hence the bogus name Somerville Plot was also accused and arrested: he wastortured on the rack and died while he was at the Tower of London. The persecution of the Ardenfamily continued during the 1580s and 1590s,[xcv] also by the local Puritan magistrate Sir ThomasLucy.[xcvi]

Perhaps the most prominent among Shakespeares relatives was poet and martyr Robert Southwell(1561-1595), author of the renowned An Humble Supplication to Queen Elizabeth. His volume ofpoems, titled Saint Peters Complaint (published out of the country in 1616), was addressed to hiscousin William Shakespeare in the salutation To my worthy good cousin, Master W. S.[xcvii] Theinjustice suffered by Southwell, his martyrdom under Queen Elizabeth, and the scandalous hypocrisythat surrounded the persecution of Catholics must have exerted a powerful influence onShakespeares mind as a young man.[xcviii] Learned in the Scriptures, he must have perceived astrong similarity between the tragedy of Southwell and the Passion of Jesus Christ at the hands of thePharisees, the Temple priests of Jerusalem called to recognize and hail Him as the Messiah. In aRenaissance culture saturated with references to Biblical typology, Catholic Shakespeare must havedetected a common element in the odyssey of the Jewish people, coming out of Egypt and persecutedby the Egyptian Pharaoh, and the tragic fate of Catholics in England, living in a regime ofpropaganda and terror: forcibly converted or else dispossessed, incarcerated, brutally tortured,



raped, and savagely killed. It is a great blind spot of Reformation historiography that this immenseburden of human suffering is systematically belittled, if not outright erased and denied in so manypublications on the topic.[xcix]

In his book on John Donne, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art, John Carey tries to remedy this state ofaffairs with a detailed description of the dire conditions in which English Catholics had to live, tornbetween a political loyalty to their country, which for the vast majority of them was never questioned;and the painful realization that their faith made them aliens in their our nation. Careys realisticdescriptions have sometimes been received, once again, with affected revulsion[c] by critics andhistorians interested in presenting a Protestant view of English history, in which Shakespeare figuresas the mouthpiece of Protestantism. Nothing farther from the truth: that early experience of injusticeand oppression, the persecution of Catholics, was the most traumatic as well as the most definingevent in Shakespeares life, against which he had to fight with all the arms provided him by hisgenerous heart, sharp intellect and courage as Joyce would suggest, silence, exile and cunning.

As Richard Wilson writes, John Careys study of Donne describes the tragedy of an entiregeneration of Elizabethan writers born into families which had prospered until 1558 under theCatholic Mary This book is therefore about how Shakespeares muteness on the persecution of hisfamily and friends relates to the conditions in which he wrote.[ci] In their analysis, both Carey andWilson rightly focus on the fact that for all the poets born in the Reformation period names of thecaliber of Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and John Donne religious persecutionwas the defining life-event, whose terror shaped their minds as well as their Art.

With persecution came a vast array of criminal activities such as spying, false accusations anddefamation, of course, which the government justified as legitimate for reasons of state security. Thesystem of spying inspired by Burghley and led by Topcliffe[cii] implied a climate of mistrustamong citizens, now unsure which neighbor to trust, and which to avoid for fear of harassment:Spies, some of them renegade priests and Catholics, gave the authorities advance warning aboutwhere masses were to be celebrated. Catholic households were commonly raided In their privatelife, Catholics were inevitable a prey to blackmail and intimidation. They could not claim redress forpersonal injuries, or retrieve money owed to them.[ciii] These data, so carefully collected andrealistically portrayed in Carey, should constantly be kept in mind when reading Shakespeare, whosemind was shaped in and by terror: Some readers may ask what all this has to do with Donnespoetry, but I imagine they will be few. It would be as reasonable to demand what the Nazipersecution of the Jews has to do with a young Jewish writer in Germany in the 1930s. Donne [andShakespeare before him] was born into a terror, and formed by it.[civ] Which is why, as Wilsoninsightfully remarks, Shakespeares faith is like his own Blackfriars property, with its secretpassageways and priest-holes built to defy the grandest inquisitions.[cv]



On his fathers side, Shakespeare was also firmly established in Catholicism. The evidence speakingfor his fathers Catholic faith is vast, and yet we hope to contribute to it in this chapter by adding anobservation about his Spiritual Testament which has not yet been adequately discussed by the critics.

John Shakespeare was a wealthy businessman at least until the 1570s, when he started experiencingsome financial troubles after the passing of edicts instigating the persecution of Catholics. After 1576,he suddenly ceased to attend Stratford Corporation meetings, until he was finally relieved from thecorporation itself.[cvi] Later, in 1592, he was reported for obstinately refusing to resort to thechurch, pleading fear of process of debt.[cvii] The report itself, as noted by F. W. Brownlow (1989),was nothing but a list of recusant Catholics, drawn by a Protestant commission headed by ThomasLucy, who received by the government the order to ascertain the religious conformity ofWarwickshire with a special eye to Jesuits, priests and recusants, for not coming monthlie to thechurche, according to hir Majesties lawes.[cviii]

Apart from Johns marriage to Catholic Mary Arden, which in and of itself proves his Catholic faith,Johns Spiritual Testament was recovered at the end of the 18th century in the house of hisdescendants, the Harts the same house of Henley St were William was born and raised with hisfamily. As Devlin remarks, Malone, the great eighteenth-century Shakespearean, pronounced itgenuine But no one else supported him and the document was neglected for a hundred years. Thetruth was that Victorian Protestant England simply could not swallow it.[cix] The controversycontinues now, mainly due to the fact that it is a nuisance to the Protestant academic establishment.

The Testament was a prayer as well as a testimony of faith which had been formulated by theArchbishop of Milan, Carlo Borromeo, and was very popular at the end of the 16th century. It wasbrought to England by the numerous Jesuit missions of the 1570s and 1580s, and John Shakespearelikely received it by Persons[cx] and his missionary brothers Campion and Sherwin. As a prayer, itwas intended for frequent recitation in the family, hence we can infer that young William often heardhis father read it before his family members: The devout person who will make use of this spiritualwriting, for the good of his soul let him read or hear it often And when he shall fall sick, let himrenew by reading, or hearing read, this Testament in presence of others.[cxi]

The Testament is certainly genuine, and the fact that Shakespeare quotes it in what would become hismost famous play, Hamlet, is definite proof of it. The first to notice the relation between JohnShakespeares last will and his son Williams masterpiece was George Wilkes, referring to the



haunting presence of the father in the life of the son. At the same time, Wilkes did not indicate aprecise linguistic reference in Hamlet which we will try to do now. In the opening section of thetestament, we read:

Section I. In the name of God, the Father, Sonne, and Holy Ghost, the most holy and blessed VirginMary, Mother of God, the holy hosts of archangels, angels, patriarchs, prophets, evangelists, apostles,saints, martyrs, and all the celestial court and company of heaven; I, John Shakespeare, an unworthymember of the Catholic religion, being at this, my present writing, in perfect health of body, andsound mind, memory, and understanding, but calling to mind the uncertainty of life and certainty ofdeath, and that I may be possibly cut off in the blossom of my sins, and called to render an account ofall my transgressions, externally and internally, and that I may be unprepared for the dreadful trialeither by sacrament, penance, fasting, or prayer, or any other purgation whatever, do, in the holypresence above specified, of my own free and voluntary accord, make and ordain this, my lastspiritual will, testament, confession, protestation, and confession of faith, hoping hereby to receivepardon for all my sins and offences[cxii]

The expressions cut off in the blossom of my sins and called to render an account of mytransgressions are quoted in Shakespeares Hamlet in Act I, scene V, vv. 74-79, in the Ghosts firstspeech to the Prince: Thus was I, sleeping, by a brothers hand/ Of life, of crown, of queen at oncedispatched,/ Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,/ Unhouseled, dis-appointed, unaneled,/ Noreckning made, but sent to my account/ With all my imperfections on my head. Remarkably, theprecise quote cut off in the blossom of my sins is inserted in the same context of accountabilityand Catholic remedies to sin before death. Hence, John Shakespeare enumerates sacrament,penance, fasting, or prayer, or any other purgation whatever; while the Ghost counts the aids he didnot receive at the moment of death: Unhouseled, dis-appointed, unaneled,/ No reckning made.The reference here is of course to the practice of examination of conscience, and to the Catholicsacraments of confession and extreme unction. As Wilkes first suggested, the memory of his fathersoften-repeated words remained inscribed in Williams heart, even as he worked at the London Globe:Remember thee?/ Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat/ in this distracted globe.Remember thee?/ Yea, from the table of my memory/ Ill wipe away all trivial fond records Andthy commandment alone shall live/ Within the book and volume of my brain/ Unmixed with basermatter. Yes, yes, by heaven. (Hamlet, I.v.95-104)

It is also significant that when John Shakespeare died in 1601, he was buried on September 8: the dayon which the Catholic Church celebrates the birthday of the Blessed Virgin not Elizabeth, but thereal one.



Having been raised by devout Catholics, in a town and region which was one the centers of Catholicresistance, William Shakespeare maintained his faith bound to the affection he felt for his noblefamily and origins: in an epoch in which faith was essential, respecting the Catholicism of hisancestors also meant respecting his identity as a human being with strong ties to his house.Shakespeare loved his family: which is why, for instance, he petitioned for a coat of arms. It wascertainly not out of ambition in fact, as with another universal genius of the Renaissance, Leonardoda Vinci, many have pointed out Shakespeares humility, without which he could not have writtenone line.[cxiii] It was rather his concern for the future of his family, his daughters and successors,which prompted him to do all that was in his power to secure their wellbeing.

Among the biographical information evidencing his Catholic faith, few sources mention the fact thathe did not receive communion within the Church of England: Examination of the communion rollsof the parish of St. Saviour in Southwark, carefully kept during the period Shakespeare lived there,revealed that the poet did not take communion in the Church of England, a fact suggesting that likehis father and daughter he did not conform.[cxiv]

Also relevant is the much-maligned fact that he and his wife Anne Hathaway received their marriagelicense only six months prior to the birth of their first daughter, Susanna, in May 1583. As ChristopherDevlin and M. D. H. Parker have suggested, there is no reason to assume that they had broken theirvows and consummated their marriage before the ceremony.[cxv] Parker maintains that there was aMarian priest at Temple Grafton, John First, who may have celebrated the Catholic rite, since he hadescaped deprivation owning to age, harmlessness and the well-known shortage of new men, andlike Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet, [he was] interested in the art of healing, being able to curesick birds.[cxvi]

Recent scholarship has focused on the so-called lost years of Shakespeares biography, discussingthe possibility that William may have been employed as a schoolmaster at the Catholic household ofthe Hoghtons in Lancashire, with whom John Cottam, schoolmaster at Stratford from 1579 to 1581,had family and economic ties. The theory was first advocated by Oliver Baker (1937), supportedamong many others by E.K. Chambers (1944) and Peter Milward (1973), and later expanded by ErnstHonigmann (1985) and Richard Wilson (2004).[cxvii] At Hoghton Tower, William went by the nameof Shakeshafte, a variant previously used by his grandfather Richard, and which served him as anom de guerre as it was the custom with recusant Catholics at the time.[cxviii] To confirm thisobservation, Shakeshafte disappeared immediately after Alexander Hoghton, the head of theHoghton family, bequeathed his property in 1581. Cottam and Shakeshafte were named his legatees,and his neighbor Sir Thomas Hesketh was invited to be friendly unto Fulke Gillam and WilliamShakeshafte now dwelling with me, and either take them into his service or help them to some good



master.[cxix] According to Honigmann, Sir Hesketh employed Gillam, but he probablyrecommended Shakeshafte to the Stanleys, and it was through them that Shakespeare began hiscareer in London around the year 1590.

When Shakespeare appeared in London, it was with pro-Catholic patrons: Lord Strange first, andthen the young Earl of Southampton. And after coming back to Stratford toward the end of his life,for the considerable price of 140 he bought Blackfriars Gatehouse, frequently visited by Jesuits atleast three times: in 1561, 1598 and 1605. With its secret passageways, it was also a renowned safehaven for Catholics, located as it was near the palace of the French Ambassador. Beauregard remarksthat, given the high price paid for such an ancient structure, it is very unlikely that Shakespearebought it as an investment: rather, this strategic purchase was his own way to help the cause offreedom of conscience, offering refuge and protection to Catholics in London. Shakespeare placedBlackfriars in Catholic hands with John Robison and his wife, and his own daughter Susanna carriedon the tenancy until 1639.

After Shakespeares death in 1616, Richard Davies, Vicar of Sapperton and later Archdeacon ofCoventry, recorded the testimony of surviving witnesses attesting that Shakespeare dyed a Papist(MS. Oxf. 31577). Devlin remarks that this authoritative evidence has been indignantly rejected. Butit is good evidence; and we have the cautious but firm and fair conclusion of Sir E. K. Chambers thatthere is no valid reason for rejecting it.[cxx]

The last piece of biographical evidence in support of Shakespeares Catholicism has to do with thecontroversy surrounding the theatrical representation of John Oldcastle as Falstaff in the Henry plays.This problem has been insightfully dealt with by Christopher Devlin in Hamlets Divinity. Devlinstarts his reflection focusing on the fact that very few scholars ever mention how Shakespeare wasseriously accused in his lifetime of being a pro-Catholic propagandist.[cxxi] John Speed, Protestanthistorian of the 1611 Histoire of Great Britaine, accused Shakespeare of being the Papist poet of JesuitFather and pamphleteer Robert Persons: this Papist and his poet, of like conscience for lies, the oneever feigning and the other ever falsifying the truth.[cxxii]

What is usually, and conveniently, erased in this context is the fact that Shakespeares derisive andscathing representation of Falstaff as an overweight white-bearded Satan a hypocrite and acriminal misquoting the Bible to support his deviousness was too destructive for the Protestantestablishment, who were even trying to anoint him as the first martyr for the Protestant cause. Butafter Shakespeares mimesis, it became a mission impossible: the common people coming from thetheater simply would not believe such historical forgery anymore, and Speed found his picture ofOldcastle blown to pieces by rude laughter.[cxxiii] He did his best to rescue the version of historyfabricated by Bayle and Fox in his Book of Martyrs, in which Oldcastle was hailed as a morning star of



the Reformation; and he vented his resentment against Robert Persons accusing him of displayingOldcastle as a Ruffian, a Robber, and a Rebel. Very meaningfully, Speed also acknowledgedShakespeares artistic authority in complete accordance with that of Jesuit Persons, who was speakingfrom a theological perspective:

And his [Personss] authority, taken from the stage-players, is more befitting the pen of his slanderousreport than the credit of the judicious, being only grounded from this Papist and his poet, of likeconscience for lies, the one ever feigning and the other ever falsifying the truth.[cxxiv]

With such an effective self-portrait, we conclude this section on the analysis of the biographicalevidence, and start evaluating the textual marks of Catholic faith in Shakespeare.

4. Catholicism in Shakespeares Plays: an Introduction to the Textual Evidence

In his Catholicism of Shakespeares Plays, Peter Milward observes that Shakespeare expressed hisopinions through his Art as if in disguise, at a remove from his real meaning, exactly like DukeVincentio, a powerful figura of the Artist, is said to act in Measure for Measure: His giving out were ofan infinite distance/ From his true-meant design, (I.iv.53-44) and like the clown Lance, perhaps aplay on his own surname Shake-spear, announces: Thou shalt never get such a secret from me but byparable (Two Gentlemen of Verona, II.v.34-35).[cxxv]

The pervasive influence on Shakespeare of Christian theology and religion and of Catholicism inparticular has been extensively discussed in literature. To develop an idea of the currentscholarship, a good place to start is Battenhouses anthology of commentary on Shakespeares ChristianDimension (1994).[cxxvi] Our goal in this section is not so much to summarize what has been said sofar, but rather to focus on some the most significant themes that unite Shakespeare with Catholicism:the mediaeval tradition of mystery plays; the influence of the Biblical sublime; the pervasiveness ofBiblical typology and Christian symbolism in the political and religious discourse as well as in thearts; the veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary as Mother of God and Muse of Christian inspiration;the centrality of the dogmas of Purgatory, indulgence and prayer for the dead; and, lastly, the key roleof Catholic sacraments like confession, and sacramentals like the Scapular of Mount Carmel, inShakespeares plays.



Perhaps the most prominent academic who commented on the enduring legacy of medieval religiousplays on Renaissance Theater is Erich Auerbach. In the Adam and Eve chapter of Mimesis, Auerbachelaborates Dantes learned explanation of typology found in his Letter XIII, To Cangrande della Scala, inwhich the poet explicates the four levels of Biblical exegesis taking as an example a passage in Psalm113: In exitu Israel de Egipto, domus Iacob de populo barbaro, facta est Iudea sanctification eius, Israel potestas eius.[cxxvii]

The reason why Auerbach discusses religious plays in connection with typology is clear: Medievalreligious plays revolved around a markedly typological reading of human history, which dominatedthroughout the Middle Ages and was still prominent in the 16th and 17th centuries. Auerbach sees afundamental similarity between liturgy and theater, or between liturgical and theatrical drama: thetragedy of Gods Incarnation, Passion and Resurrection is daily reenacted in the Mass in a way that isreminiscent of the modalities of secular dramatic art itself.

Auerbach most importantly defines the Biblical sublime as a particular stylistic trait of the Scriptures,which was fundamentally new and revolutionary if compared to the tradition of the classics: theBible, according to Auerbach, united sermo gravis and sermo remissus in a perfect harmony of from andcontent.[cxxviii] The Biblical sublime is thus characterized by an unfathomable simplicity, which isthe mirror image of Gods Unfathomable Simplicity, since God is One (Simple), Infinite and infinitelycomplex.[cxxix] Gods sublime is, in human terms, a paradox: a coincidentia oppositorum where theinfinitely great can be found in the infinitely small, and vice versa exactly as in the mystery of theEucharist, where the boundless Creator of the Cosmos is present in bounded particles of bread anddrops of wine. This dialectic of unity of opposites characterizes, according to Auerbach, both theBiblical sublime and the medieval religious plays that derive inspiration from it:

The medieval Christian drama falls perfectly within this tradition [of the Bibles sublime simplicity].Being a living representation of Biblical episodes as contained, with their innately dramatic elements,in the liturgy, it opens its arms invitingly to receive the simple and untutored and to lead them fromthe concrete, the everyday, to the hidden and the true precisely as did the great plastic art of themedieval churches which, according to E. Mles well-known theory, is supposed to have receiveddecisive stimuli from the mysteries, that is, from religious drama. [] The scenes which rendereveryday contemporary life are then fitted into a Biblical and world-historical frame by whosespirit they are pervaded the spirit

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