Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 13.djvu/819

 SHAKESPEARE

749

SHAKESPEARE

and though it pretended to rest ujjon the testimony of Judge Christopher Milton, his brother, who did be- come a CathoHc) the statement is certainly untrue (see The Month, Jan., 1909, pp. 1-13 and 92-93). This emphasizes the need of caution — the more so that Shakespeare at least had been dead more than sev- enty years when Archdeacon R. Davies (d. 1708) wrote in his supplementary notes to the biographical collections of the Rev. W. Fulman that the dramatist had a monument at Stratford, adding the words: "He dyed a Papyst". Davies, an Anglican clergyman, could have had no conceivable motive for misrepre- senting the matter in these private notes and as he hved in the neighbouring county of Gloucestershire he may be echoing a local tradition. To this must be added the fact that independent evidence establishes a strong presumption that John Shakespeare, the poet's father, was or had been a Catholic. His wife Mary Arden, the poet's mother, undoubtedly belonged to a family that remained conspicuously Catholic through- out the reign of Elizabeth. John Shakespeare had held municipal office in Stratford-on-Avon during Mary's reign at a time when it seems agreed that Protestants were rigorously excluded from such posts. It is also certain that in 1.592 John Shakespeare was presented as a recusant, though classified among those "recusants heretofore presented who were thought to forbear cioining to church for fear of pro(!ess of debt". Though indications are not lacking that John Shakes- peare was in very reduced circumstances, it is also quite po.ssibIe that his alleged poverty was only as- sumed to cloak his conscientious scruples.

A document, supposed to have been found about 17.50 under the tiles of a house in Stratford which had once been John Shakespeare's, professes to be the spiritual testament of the said John Shakespeare, and assuming it to be authentic it would clearlj' prove him to have been a Catholic. The document, which was at first unhesitatingly accepted as genuine by Ma- lone, is considered by most modern Shakespeare scholars to be a fabrication of J. Jordan who sent it to Malone (Lee, "Life of William Shakespeare", Lon- don, 1908, p. 302). It is certainly not entirely a for- gery (see The Month, Nov., 1911), and it produces in part a form of spiritual testament attributed to St. Charles Borromeo. Moreover, there is good evidence that a paper of this kind was really found. Such tes- taments were undoubtedly common among Catholics in the sixteenth century. Jordan had no particular motive for forging a very long, dreary, and tedious pro- fession of Catholicism, only remotely connected with the poet; and although it has been said that John Shakespeare could not wTitc (Lee, J. W. CJray, and C. C. Stopes maintain the contrary), it is quite conceiv- able that a priest or some other Catholic friend drafted the document for him, a copy of which was meant to be laid with him in his grave. All this goes to show that the dramatist in his youth must have been brought up in a very Catholic atmosphere, and indeed the history of the Gunpowder Plot conspira- tors (the Catesbys lived at Bushwood Park in Strat- ford parish) shows that the neighbourhood was re- garded as quite a hotbed of recusancy.

On the other hand many serious difficulties stand in the way of believing that William Shakespeare could have been in any sense a staunch adherent of the old religion. To begin with, his own daughters were not only baptized in the parish church as their father had been, but were undoubtedly brought upas Protestants, the elder, Mrs. Hall, being aj)i);ir('iitly rather Puritan in her sympathies. Again Sliakcijeare was buried in the chancel of the parish church, though it is admitted that no argument can be deduced from this as to the creed he professed (Lee, op. cit., p. 220). More sig- nificant are such facts as that in 1608 he stood god- father to a child of Henry Walker, as shown by the parish register, that in 1614 he entertained a preacher

at his house "the New Place", the expense being ap- parently borne by the municipality, that he was very familiar with the Bible in a Protestant version, that the various legatees and executors of his will cannot in any way be identified as Cathohcs, and also that he seems to have remained on terms of undiminished intimacy with Ben Jonson, despite the latter's exceptionally di.sgraceful apostasy from theCathohc Faith, which he had for a time embraced. To these considerations must now be added the fact recently brought to light by the researches of Dr. Wallace of Nebraska, that Shakespeare during his residence in London lived for at least six years (1598-1604) at the house of Chris- topher Mountjoy, a refugee French Huguenot, who maintained close relations with the French Protestant Church in London (Harper's Magazine, March, 1910, pp. 489-510). Taking these facts in connexion with the loose morality of the Sonnets, of Venus and Adonis, etc. and of passages in the play, not to speak of sundry vague hints preserved by tradition of the poet's rather dissolute morals, the conclusion seems certain that, even if Shakespeare's sympathies were with the Catholics, he made little or no attempt to live up to his convictions. For such a man it is intrinsi- cally possible and even likely that, fin(lin^^ himself face to face with death, he may have profited by the happy incident of the jjrcsence of some priest in Stratford to be reconciled with the Church before the end came. Thus Archdeacon Davies's statement that "he dyed a Papyst" is by no means incredible, but it would obvi- ously be foolish to build too much upon an unverifi- able tradition of this kind. The point must remain forever uncertain.

As regards the interrial evidence of the plays and poems, no fair appreciation of the arguments advanced by Simpson, Bowden, and others can ignore the strong leaven of Catholic feeling conspicuous in the works as a whole. Detailed discussion would be impossi- ble here. The question is complicated by the doubt whether certain more Protestant passages have any right to be regarded as the authentic work of Shake- speare. For example, there is a general consensus of opinion that the greater part of the fifth act of "Henry VIII" is not his. Similarly in "King John" any hasty references drawn from the anti-papal tone of certain speeches must be discounted by a compari- son between the impression left by the finished play as it came from the hands of the dramatist and the virulent prejudice manifest in the older drama of "The Troublesome Reign of King John", which Shake- speare transformed. On the other hand the type of such characters as Friar Lawrence or of the friar in "Much Ado About Nothing", of Henry V, of Katherine of Aragon, and of others, as well as the whole ethos of "Measure for Measure", with num- berless casual allusions, all speak eloquently for the Catholic tone of the poet's mind (see, for example, the references to purgatory and the last sacraments in "Hamlet", Act I, sc. 5).

Neither can any serious arguments to show that Shakespeare knew nothing of Catholicism be drawn from the fact that in " Romeo and Juliet " he speaks of "evening Mass". Simpson and others have quoted examples of the practice of occasionally saying Mass in the afternoon, one of the places where this was wont to happen being curiously enough Verona itself, the scene of the play. The real difficulty against Simp- son's thesis comes rather from the doubt whether Shakespeare was not infected with the atheism, which, as we know from the testimony of writers as opposite in spirit as Thomas Nashe and Father Persons, was rampant in the more cultured society of the Eliza- bethan age. Such a doubting or sceptical attitude of mind, as multitudes of examples prove in our own day, is by no means inconsistent with a true appreciation of the beauty of Catholicism, and even apart from this it would surely not be surprising that such a man aa