Shakespeare among the Jesuits

In the end, there is no reliable documentary evidence of Shakespeare’s personal religious beliefs, let alone any reliable evidence of his involvement with the Jesuits. Even the so-called “Spiritual Testament,” an unequivocal statement of Roman Catholic faith, supposedly first brought to England by Edmund Campion and apparently signed by Shakespeare’s father, if it is genuine, attests to the faith of John Shakespeare, not his son William.^[1] And the other biographical elements of what John D. Cox calls a “documentary tripod” (543), never more than possibilities, are even less likely to be genuine.^[2] Nevertheless, in recent years, a virtual cottage industry has developed among Shakespeareans trying to ascertain Shakespeare’s spiritual stance. In surveying various efforts to link Shakespeare’s life and work to the Society of Jesus, I will focus on three areas of investigation: first, what evidence there may be in his works for his involvement with the Jesuits, in terms of actual references to them; second, what evidence there may be of Jesuit influence on Shakespeare’s writing; third, what evidence there may be of possible personal connections between Jesuits and Shakespeare. I will begin with some preliminary considerations to provide a context for my survey.

What evidence there is comes largely from efforts to “read the man” from his work, and such efforts are notoriously uncertain and subjective in their conclusions. They are particularly vulnerable to the human tendency to find in Shakespeare one’s own beliefs. Some of those who have written about Shakespeare and religion seek to advance their own creed by finding it in the Bard. But many others who have written on the topic maintain scholarly objectivity whatever their personal beliefs may be.^[3]

Shakespeare’s work suggests to me that he was a Christian raised in an environment of Catholic faith who was taught by men involved with the Jesuits, that as a teenager he probably met and admired Edmund Campion, that Campion’s fate turned him away from any thought of following the Jesuit martyr’s path in his own life. Shakespeare probably went to church every Sunday as required by law but remained sympathetic to the Catholic position. There has been ample documentation of the influence on his work of the Book of Common Prayer, Protestant translations of the Bible, and the Elizabethan collection of homilies appointed to be read in churches, while there is also clear evidence of his familiarity with Catholic belief and practice—a glance at Hamlet’s references to purgatory and the circumstances surrounding Ophelia’s burial attests to his knowledge.

While he would have shared with most English people, of whatever religious faith, condemnation of the Gunpowder Plotters and the Jesuits who apparently supported them, he would also have shared with most people condemnation of the harsh treatment suffered by Catholics (and Puritans) who tried to practice and teach their faith while remaining loyal subjects of the Queen. At the time, the universal custom across Europe was to equate heresy with treason. In my view, Shakespeare was probably a Church Papist, that is, a Catholic who outwardly conformed to the established Protestant Church and yet inwardly remained Roman Catholic. My conclusion springs from a lifetime of close reading and engagement of Shakespeare’s works in order to teach them.

In his excellent analysis of the question published in this collection, “Was Shakespeare a ‘Church Papist’ or a Prayer Book Anglican?,” Charles R. Forker offers an impressive and persuasive argument in favor of the latter conclusion, yet other scholars, Gary Taylor among them, working with similar evidence, have concluded that Shakespeare may well have been a “church papist” (Taylor 298). Still others have surveyed the evidence and decided that Shakespeare “was a man whose precise faith commitment is impossible to determine, though it is likely to be somewhere in the English Church” (Cox 556). This conclusion appears as an option in Cox’s brilliant 2006 review essay for Christianity and Literature, with a provocatively agnostic title: “Was Shakespeare a Christian, and If So, What Kind of Christian Was He?”

The risks and rewards of finding the author in his work can be illustrated by drawing an analogy from the case of James Joyce. The title of this essay, “Shakespeare among the Jesuits,” pays quiet tribute to a seminal study of Joyce’s intellectual and spiritual formation, Kevin Sullivan’s 1958 analysis of Joyce among the Jesuits. Sullivan offered extensive documentation to support his thesis that Joyce correctly declared, “You allude to me as a Catholic; you ought to allude to me as a Jesuit” (Sullivan 2). Sullivan wrote that Joyce “received the whole of his formal education from the Jesuits” (7). Some years later, Richard Ellmann revealed that Joyce spent several months as a student of the Christian Brothers, a fact that Joyce himself suppressed. According to Ellmann, these months constituted “Joyce’s one break with Jesuit education, and he shared his father’s view that the Jesuits were the gentlemen of Catholic education, and the Christian Brothers (‘Paddy Stink and Mick[e]y Mud,’ as his father denominated them) its drones” (35).

Some years later still, it was pointed out that Ellmann attributes to Joyce’s father John the words of a fictional character in a novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “Ellmann is quoting not Joyce’s father but Stephen’s [Dedalus] father [Simon Dedalus] in Portrait. . . . Although James Joyce and his father John may have agreed with Simon Dedalus’s characterization of the Christian Brothers, the names [used by Simon Dedalus] have stuck ever since as a handy description of Joyce’s [own] view of the Christian Brothers” (Mahon, Joyce 350). Even if Simon Dedalus’s words accurately reported John Joyce’s view of the Brothers, they did not necessarily reflect his son’s view. Indeed, Joyce’s references to the Christian Brothers, which appear in all four of his works of fiction, are positive or neutral in tone, with the one exception of the “Paddy Stink” remark in Portrait. And it is later in Portrait that Joyce offers his most positive view of the Brothers, when Stephen encounters a group of Brothers jogging together and reflects:

Such a passage “reveals . . . his [Stephen Dedalus’] grudging awareness of a Christian charity beyond his reach. . . . Joyce’s ironic method incorporates into one novel both the most negative and the most positive comments on the Christian Brothers to be found in his work” (Mahon, Joyce 358-59).

The point of this Joycean diversion is to suggest that there is a place in our critical discourse for drawing at least some tentative biographical conclusions from what are regarded as fictional modes of expression. On this basis, it would be reasonable to conclude, in agreement with the 2004 analysis of his fiction, that Joyce’s attitude toward the Christian Brothers was much more nuanced than previously thought. While it is true that Joyce’s novel has long been recognized as a fictional treatment of his own story and that nothing like this conclusion about Joyce and the Brothers could ever be posited about Shakespeare and his religious opinions on the basis of his works (although many commentators try to find such revelation in the plays and the Sonnets), it is also true that constructing an impenetrable wall between Shakespeare’s personal beliefs and beliefs expressed by his characters takes the New Critical strictures against the “biographical fallacy” to an unreasonable extreme.

When Cox asks, “Was Shakespeare a Christian, and If So, What Kind of Christian Was He?,” I think it is reasonable to respond, after reading and analyzing such plays as Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Macbeth, and The Winter’s Tale, that he was indeed a Christian. And I think a reasonably good case can be made to support Robert Miola’s assertion that “we will read his plays differently if we attend to their Catholic subtext” (quoted in Wilson 31). The evidence of Shakespeare’s involvement with Jesuits is not nearly as persuasive.

In fact, Shakespeare makes only one clear reference to the Jesuits in his works, “clear” in the sense that virtually all commentators agree about it. The reference comes in Macbeth, as part of the Porter’s comic rant solus at the start of 2.3. The Porter at Macbeth’s castle in Inverness has been awakened by loud knocking on the gate, already heard by the audience during the conversation between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in the preceding scene. Imagining himself “porter of hell gate” (medieval miracle plays placed demon-porters at the entrance to hell), the speaker lists kinds of people who might be knocking on hell gate, specifically a farmer, an equivocator, and a tailor. When he hears a second knock, the Porter cries: “Knock, knock! Who’s there, in th’ other devil’s name? Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven. O, come in, equivocator” (2.3.7-11).^[4] G. Blakemore Evans’ note on equivocator is typical: “Alluding to Jesuits, and particularly to Father Garnet, who claimed the right to make ambiguous answers when under examination so as not to incriminate himself. The word was current during the investigation that followed the Gunpowder Plot of 1605” (1368). Extending the reference to equivocation, the Porter says to Macduff a moment later that “much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery: it makes him, and it mars him . . . makes him stand to, and not stand to; in conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep, and giving him the lie, leaves him” (2.3.31-36).

The play is very much focused on equivocation, “double-talk,” and its consequences, independently of the Porter’s apparent reference to the Gunpowder Plot. Indeed, the word equivocate (in various forms as verb, noun, adjective) appears only nine times in Shakespeare, six of them in Macbeth.^[5] It seems reasonable to infer that Shakespeare himself had little use for equivocation, especially when he has Macbeth, near the end of the play, doubt “th’ equivocation of the fiend” (5.5.42), the double-talk of the weird sisters. The link between the weird sisters and the Porter may have been reinforced by “Robert Armin’s acting of the Porter’s role and the First Witch” (Wills 98).

Some commentators suggest that all three of the Porter’s imagined arrivals at hell-gate could be Father Garnet in different guises. Many have noted that the Porter may speak of a farmer knocking on hell-gate because Garnet took the name “Farmer” as part of his disguise. Garry Wills reinforces the possibility that the farmer is also Garnet by noting that the farmer is carrying napkins, handkerchiefs, which could come from the scene of the Jesuit’s execution, where the faithful would use such napkins to sop up the blood of the martyr as relics to be honored in the future (99-100).^[6] Wills’ further contention that the tailor is somehow connected to Father Garnet (102-3) is inspired by H. L. Rogers’ essay in Review of English Studies, in which Rogers makes an effort to make a connection between a tailor’s testimony to Gunpowder Plot investigators and Shakespeare’s play, a connection that seems far-fetched to me, too far-fetched even to summarize here.

Yet the tailor reference is no more far-fetched than many of the other links that have been claimed between Shakespeare’s work and the Jesuits, especially by writers who regard Catholicism and the Jesuits as the hidden subject of many of Shakespeare’s plays and poems, writers who posit an elaborate code-system in which the playwright communicates to his fellow Catholics an allegorical, apologetic meaning in his characters and plots hidden from the uninitiated. For example, Clare Asquith offers definitions of Shakespeare’s most frequently coded (might we say “equivocal”?!) terms in a special Glossary. When Shakespeare uses the word love, for example, Asquith glosses that “true love” is “an analogy for courageous allegiance to spiritual truth” (294). A name like Rosalind is “given by Shakespeare and his contemporaries to figures representing the country’s spirituality, lost in the Reformation” (298). Documents of the time clearly indicate that coded language was used by Jesuits and their supporters as part of their effort to escape arrest (crow, for example, meant Jesuit, a reference to their black soutanes [Noonan 59]^[7]), but it is not at all clear to many observers that Shakespeare used such words as part of coded messages hidden in his plays.

For those who treat a literary text as “a cipher to be broken rather than a poem susceptible to multiple readings” (Maguire and Smith 49), King Lear offers a commentary on the English Reformation: Lear (Henry VIII) disowns and banishes Cordelia (the Catholic Church), provoking a period of strife and conflict. Cordelia could also represent Henry VIII’s daughter Mary, at first disinherited but eventually, as Queen Mary, responsible for the reunion of England and Rome (Milward 173-74).

Those who see a coded subtext would find references to Jesuits elsewhere in Shakespeare’s work, references more neutral or positive in tone than that in Macbeth. One of the more interesting and ingenious examples involves Feste in Twelfth Night. According to John Noonan, at one point Feste makes a gratuitous allusion to Edmund Campion: “Bonos dies, Sir Toby: for as the old hermit of Prague, that never saw pen and ink, very wittily said to a niece of King Gorboduc, ‘That that is is’; so I, being Master Parson, am Master Parson; for what is ‘that’ but ‘that,’ and ‘is’ but ‘is’?” (4.2.12-16). Noonan suggests that the old hermit of Prague is Campion because the Jesuit’s last assignment before the English mission had been as a teacher in Prague. To reinforce the reference to Campion, Noonan sees in the words about pen and ink an allusion to a poem in honor of Campion composed by Henry Walpole shortly after the Jesuit’s execution. The poem was entitled with its first line, “Why do I use my paper, ink, and pen?” Getting really far-fetched, perhaps, Noonan argues further that the reference to Gorboduc could remind audiences that one of Campion’s torturers in the Tower was Thomas Norton, co-author of the famous tragedy Gorboduc (1561) (54).

Some readings of The Winter’s Tale connect Paulina’s tragic husband to the Antigonus who was a mythical ferryman in Antwerp, a major port of entry for young Englishmen pursuing a vocation to the Catholic, sometimes Jesuit, priesthood. Antigonus places his precious cargo Perdita on the seacoast of Bohemia, from which he exits, famously “pursued by a bear” (3.3.58). In the allegorical or coded reading, the bear is the Earl of Leicester, whose emblem was the bear. Leicester was fiercely anti-Catholic. Before he is torn apart by the bear, Antigonus of Antwerp brings young Englishmen safely to Europe, where they might take up an invitation Campion issued while he was still teaching in Prague, that young Catholics should sail for “the pleasant and blessed shore of Bohemia” (Wilson 27).^[8]

Noonan’s focus, however, is on Shakespeare’s Sonnets, the happy hunting-ground of readers who continue to follow William Wordsworth’s dictum that “with this key [his Sonnets] / Shakespeare unlock’d his heart” (“Scorn Not the Sonnet,” ll. 2-3, 1827).^[9]

Many commentators agree that “bare ruin’d choirs” in Sonnet 73 (l. 4, 1856) laments Henry VIII’s suppression of the monasteries. Others have suggested that the phrase “fools of Time” in Sonnet 124 refers to Jesuits and others martyred “for goodness, who have liv’d [in the eyes of the state] for crime” (ll. 13-14, 1866). Noonan points out that Robert Southwell refers to English Catholics as “god Almightyes fooles (as some scornfully call us)” in his Humble Supplication (written in 1591). Writing to the Jesuit Superior General Claudio Acquaviva in 1597, Father Garnet says that “Catholics here are called God’s fools, since, to their credit, they make themselves simpletons that they may become wise” (Noonan 197), alluding to the language of St. Paul’s letters. The example from Sonnet 124 points to a frequent problem with coded interpretations: the link between real life and the poem or play is rarely an exact fit. In this case, the Jesuits quoted in support of the “fools of Time” reference speak of “God’s fools” and “god Almightyes fooles,” not fools of Time.

Noonan argues that Sonnets 69, 70, and 94 are addressed not to the young man normally regarded as the addressee but to Jesuits on mission in England at the time. The argument is complicated, but essentially Noonan sees Shakespeare praising the Jesuits while at the same time warning them that they have aroused opposition not only from their obvious enemies, the government spies looking for the reward promised to successful priest-hunters, but from some of their fellow Catholics, particularly those secular priests (men ordained for service in a diocese rather than for a specific religious order) who regarded the Jesuits as outsiders threatening the efforts of the seculars to find an accommodation with the Established Church.

From the beginning, with Campion’s barnstorming campaign across the country, the Jesuits had urged Catholics to be recusants, openly to profess their faith, refusing to follow the example of the discreet Church Papists. In these sonnets Shakespeare, Noonan argues, expresses concern that their energetic promotion of their faith could put the Jesuits, and their co-religionists, in danger. Shakespeare urges the Jesuits to make absolutely clear that their mission is to minister to their fellow-Catholics and that they do not represent a threat to the government or to non-Catholic Englishmen. Noonan summarizes his interpretation:

Noonan’s reading of Sonnet 94—one of the more obscure sonnets, in the judgment of most scholars—seems reasonable enough, especially when he shows how so perceptive a commentator as Stephen Booth puzzles over passages that make sense to someone like Noonan, familiar with Catholic culture. I don’t think his readings of Sonnets 69 and 70 are nearly so persuasive, especially since they have been reasonably interpreted by earlier commentators as part of the “Young Man” sequence.

My second area of investigation is the possible influence of Jesuit writing on Shakespeare’s writing. Peter Milward offers a broad survey of possible influences, including Campion, Robert Persons, and Southwell (43-67). We know that Shakespeare was a voracious reader, and a particularly retentive one,^[10] so it is no surprise to learn that he seems to have been familiar with some of the writing of these Jesuits. And his reading often contributes to his plays.

In particular, scholarly study has yielded abundant evidence of Southwell’s influence on Shakespeare. John Klause offers persuasive arguments to justify his conclusion that “Shakespeare ‘knew’ Robert Southwell: possessed his works, almost all of them; had them so densely yet broadly folded into his memory that they could become . . . instantly and bountifully available at the slightest hint of their relevance to his task at any moment of composition.” Furthermore, Klause argues that “Shakespeare must have had access to Southwell’s work through secret and privileged channels, since [Shakespeare] made use of a prohibited book (An Epistle of Comfort) and manuscripts available only in close circulation in the Catholic underground” (256).

In order to bolster his case for Southwell’s influence, Klause sets side-by-side passages from Samuel Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, universally regarded as an important influence on King Lear, with passages from the play. When he does the same thing with Portia’s “quality of mercy” speech and Southwell’s Epistle of Comfort, it is obvious that, judging by the Harsnett precedent, there is an apparent link between the language of The Merchant of Venice and Southwell’s Epistle. The first comparison between Harsnett and Lear juxtaposes Harsnett’s “he will . . . blow downe steeples” with Lear in the storm, “Blow . . . Till you have drench’d our steeples” (3.2.1-3) (Klause 23). Shakespeare’s “The quality of mercy is not strain’d” (4.1.184) links to the words “qualitye . . . mercye . . . constrayned” in Southwell’s Epistle (Klause 32). The same Southwell passage that Shakespeare echoes in Merchant also influences his writing in Julius Caesar and Measure for Measure. Antony’s “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war” (3.1.273) could recall Southwell’s “cryed . . . warr . . . havocke” and “slipperye dogges” (Klause 34).

As in the link between Harsnett and Shakespeare, the verbal echoes of Southwell in Shakespeare are simply too dense to be considered accidental or coincidental, although Klause weakens his case by claiming as echoes phrases that could have come to Shakespeare from other sources, including his own invention. But connections between Southwell and Shakespeare have been proposed for years, and Klause’s careful research validates some of the earlier analyses. Klause has a larger case to make, however: that Shakespeare, Southwell, and the Earl of Southampton were related, albeit rather distantly, and that all three knew and interacted with each other. There is very little solid evidence of such links beyond the verbal echoes.

But this kind of argumentation leads to my third area of investigation, the possible personal connections between Jesuits and Shakespeare. Some enthusiasts claim that Shakespeare had a great deal of interaction with Jesuits, supposing direct personal contact that would link him not only to Southwell and Campion, but to Persons, Garnet, Walpole, and other members of the Jesuit mission. None of these proposed connections is based on firm evidence. The most persuasive hypothesis regarding personal contact would link Shakespeare to Campion, as I have already suggested in outlining my own conclusions about Shakespeare as a Church Papist.^[11]

Enough supposition has been offered regarding Campion to tempt some scholars to move this putative relationship from “possible” to “probable.” Unfortunately, studies like that by Thomas M. McCoog and Peter Davidson have blown big holes in the “documentary tripod” identified by Cox, and two of the components of the tripod (Shakespeare’s possible time in Lancashire and John Shakespeare’s signature on the “Spiritual Testament”) were important contributors to the thesis of a “probable” connection between Shakespeare and Campion.^[12]

But it remains a strong possibility that two men who taught at the Grammar School in Stratford when Shakespeare could have been a pupil there (no documentary proof exists, of course, that Shakespeare ever attended the school) were themselves connected to the Jesuits. Between 1571 and 1575, Simon Hunt was master of the school. Unfortunately, we can’t be sure that the Simon Hunt who later matriculated at Douai, became a Jesuit in 1578, and died in Rome in 1583 was Shakespeare’s master because there was another Hunt, who died in Stratford in 1598, leaving behind an estate valued at £100.

The next master, whom S. Schoenbaum calls “Shakespeare’s principal instructor” (53), Thomas Jenkins, earned degrees at St. John’s College, Oxford, and was a fellow of the college from 1566 to 1572. He later became a priest of the Established Church, married, and had at least two children. He was master of the school in Stratford between 1575 and 1579. Of particular interest is the fact that Jenkins must have known Campion, who became a fellow of St. John’s College in 1564 and was still a fellow when he left Oxford in 1570. Jenkins would have known of Campion’s charismatic personality, so marked that there were students at Oxford known as “Campionists,” who imitated his walk and his every gesture and strove to emulate his learning. To add speculation upon speculation: might Jenkins have talked about Campion to the Stratford pupils? Between 1579 and 1581, the master of the Stratford school was John Cottam, who had been recruited by Jenkins before his departure from the position. Cottam’s younger brother Thomas was by that time a Jesuit companion of Campion. He was arrested, tried, and executed along with Campion. John Cottam left his position in Stratford in 1581 and retired to his native Lancashire (Schoenbaum 53).

This succession of masters in Stratford remains a useful arrow in the quiver of those who think Shakespeare may have met Campion. Indeed, the “schoolmasters” evidence might transform the “documentary tripod” into a four-legged stool. Curiously, McCoog and Davidson make no mention of the masters in their essay that reaches the conclusion that possible connections between Shakespeare and Campion are much ado about nothing. When Father McCoog offered a lecture based on his article at Fordham University in Manhattan several years ago, I asked him about the schoolmasters, and he responded that the evidence did not change his conclusion that Shakespeare and Campion probably had no personal contact.

In 2010, The Shakespeare Newsletter reported that America, a weekly magazine published by members of the Society of Jesus, conferred its annual Campion Award for Achievement in Christian Letters for 2009 on Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury and leader of the worldwide Anglican communion. The award is named for Edmund Campion, the Jesuit priest who was executed as a traitor in 1581. Campion’s name is appropriately applied to an award for excellence in Christian Letters because of his own considerable gifts as a writer, displayed in both Latin and English, most famously in the “Brag,” a short, stirring statement of his evangelical intentions in going to England despite the threat of execution. The peroration includes these words:

In accepting the Campion Award, Williams referred to the various hypotheses about a possible relationship between Shakespeare and Campion. He continued:

Even if he’d never met Campion, Shakespeare, like all England, knew about the Jesuit missionary and his reckless bravery, traveling across the country under constant threat of arrest, issuing challenges and planting learned propositions under the very noses of his opponents. He may well have reflected on the meaning of Campion’s mission for his life and his attitude toward life. But Williams can do no more than speculate, like so many others, about a possible encounter between Campion and young Shakespeare.^[13]

Williams’ thoughts also point to yet another possible avenue of contact between Shakespeare and the Jesuits, related to the possibility of personal encounters. In such contacts, is it possible that Shakespeare learned something of Jesuit spirituality, centered on Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises? Some years ago, Louis Martz suggested the impact of Jesuit thinking on what he called The Poetry of Meditation. Shakespeare may have learned about Jesuit spirituality, especially about Ignatius’ method of composition of place, from men only a generation removed from Loyola himself. Shakespeare may have learned too about the Jesuit love of drama as a teaching device. Might he have heard of Campion’s play Ambrosia, written for his students in Prague to perform but also performed before the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolph II? And could he have seen and admired Campion’s Rationes Decem, written in a Latin style that Sir Philip Sidney (who visited Campion when the Jesuit was still in Prague) would have approved?^[14]

I have tried in this essay to survey and evaluate the various theories about connections between Shakespeare and the Society of Jesus. Some would like to conclude that such a mass of theories is the smoke produced by the fire of a relationship between the English dramatist and English Jesuits. But, taken in the aggregate, all the theories still lead to the conclusion that such a relationship is a possibility, not a probability. Near the end of his life, as he languished in the Tower and waited for trial and execution, Thomas More liked to repeat words meant to comfort both himself and his loved ones. In a letter to his daughter Margaret, he wrote that “I shall full heartily pray for us all, that we may meet together once in heaven, where we shall make merry forever, and never have trouble after” (More lxv). When we meet Shakespeare in heaven, we may at last learn just what he believed and whom he knew and admired. Such certainty is not allowed us in this passing world.

Works Cited

Asquith, Clare. Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare. New York: Public Affairs, 2005.

Auden, W. H. “Introduction” to Shakespeare, The Sonnets, newly revised ed. Signet Classic. New York: New American Library, 1999.

Bearman, Robert. “John Shakespeare’s ‘Spiritual Testament’: A Reappraisal.” Shakespeare Survey 56 (2003): 184-202.

Cox, John D. “Was Shakespeare a Christian, and If So, What Kind of Christian Was He?” Christianity and Literature 55 (2006): 539-66.

Dutton, Richard, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson, eds. Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003.

Evans, G. Blakemore with the assistance of J. J. M. Tobin, ed. The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004.

Jenkins, Harold, ed. Hamlet. By William Shakespeare. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Methuen, 1982.

Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [1916]. Ed. R. B. Kershner. Boston: Bedford-St. Martin’s, 1993.

Kershner, R. B., ed. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. By James Joyce. Boston: Bedford-St. Martin’s, 1993.

Klause, John. Shakespeare, the Earl, and the Jesuit. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008.

Maguire, Laurie and Emma Smith. 30 Great Myths about Shakespeare. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.

Mahon, John W. “Joyce Among the Brothers.” Christianity and Literature 53 (2004): 349-59.

———. “Rowan Williams on Shakespeare and Campion.” The Shakespeare Newsletter 59.3 (2009/2010): 103, 117-18.

Martz, Louis. The Poetry of Meditation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976.

McCoog, Thomas M., S.J., and Peter Davidson. “Edmund Campion and William Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing?” In The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits. Ed. Thomas M. McCoog. 2nd ed. Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 2007.

Milward, Peter, S.J. Shakespeare’s Religious Background. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973.

More, Thomas. Selected Writings. Ed. John F. Thornton and Susan Varenne. New York: Vintage, 2003.

Noonan, John T., Jr. Shakespeare’s Spiritual Sonnets. North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2011.

Rogers, H. L. “An English Tailor and Father Garnet’s Straw.” Review of English Studies 16.61 (1965): 44-49.

Schoenbaum, S. Shakespeare: A Documentary Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans with the assistance of J. J. M. Tobin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

Sullivan, Kevin. Joyce among the Jesuits. New York: Columbia University Press, 1958.

Taylor, Gary. “Forms of Opposition: Shakespeare and Middleton.” English Literary Renaissance 24.2 (1994): 283-314.

Thornton, John F. and Susan Varenne, eds. Selected Writings. By Thomas More. New York: Vintage, 2003.

Waugh, Evelyn. Edmund Campion, Jesuit and Martyr [1935]. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image, 1956.

Wills, Garry. Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.” New York: The New York Public Library and Oxford University Press, 1995.

Wilson, Richard. “Introduction: A Torturing Hour—Shakespeare and the Martyrs.” In Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare. Ed. Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003. 1-39.

Wordsworth, William. The Complete Poetical Works. London: Macmillan, 1888; Bartleby.com, 1999. www.bartleby.com/145/ 2 September 2013.

Notes

No less an authority than Schoenbaum was inclined to accept the genuineness of the document, but Bearman, the Stratford archivist, offers arguments that undermine its authenticity. Even Schoenbaum will accept only the authenticity of the document, not the claim that John Shakespeare signed it (46).

Besides the Spiritual Testament, the legs of the tripod are the possibility that John Shakespeare absented himself from church because he was a recusant, and the suggestion that Shakespeare spent his so-called “lost years” as a tutor/player in an aristocratic household in Lancashire, becoming a follower of Campion when Campion came to stay in the house (Cox 541-43). Of course, only the last of these three involves William Shakespeare directly. McCoog and Davidson offer persuasive arguments that seriously undermine two of the three claims, the Spiritual Testament and the lost years as “Shakeshafte,” in Lancashire.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I am a practicing Catholic, baptized and raised in that faith, educated in high school and college by Jesuits, whose earliest members (including Campion and Southwell, both regarded as saints by Catholics) have long been personal heroes. No doubt my personal history helps to explain my interest in efforts to determine Shakespeare’s religious beliefs. Given my personal belief, I make a special effort to maintain scholarly objectivity, at the same time that I find the belief helpful for seeing elements of Catholic belief and Jesuit spirituality in Shakespeare.

Quotations from Shakespeare follow The Riverside Shakespeare.

One of the other references appears in Hamlet: during his conversation with the Gravedigger, Hamlet comments to Horatio that “we must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us” (5.1.137-38). In his commentary on Hamlet’s use of the word, Harold Jenkins notes that the Jesuit connection was “already familiar enough” years before the Gunpowder Plot made it notorious (384)—clearly, familiar enough to Shakespeare.

Some may recall the vivid scene in Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, where Jesus’ mother and Pilate’s wife together use towels to sop up Jesus’ blood at the site of his savage scourging, clearly because they instinctively regarded the Lord’s blood as in some way sacred. Wills notes that Calpurnia’s dream in Julius Caesar of Caesar’s statue running “pure blood” (2.2.78) in which Romans bathed their hands is interpreted by the conspirator Decius Brutus as a positive sign “that from you great Rome shall suck / Reviving blood, and that great men shall press / For tinctures, stains, relics, and cognizance” (2.2.87-89). Calpurnia dreams in Plutarch, and Decius proposes a harmless interpretation in Plutarch, but the dream of a bleeding statue is Shakespeare’s invention, clearly meant to prepare for the conspirators’ bathing their hands in the blood flowing from Caesar’s many wounds after his assassination.

Noonan argues that Robert Greene’s attack on Shakespeare as an “upstart crow” could have been meant to identify Shakespeare as a Catholic.

McCoog and Davidson use careful analysis of existing records to demolish the suppositions behind the “documentary tripod,” demonstrating that in some instances scholars have doctored quotations to help their arguments. When Wilson quotes Campion inviting someone to join him on “the pleasant and blessed shore of Bohemia,” Wilson is adding “of Bohemia” to what Campion actually wrote about his exile from England having “cast” him “on a pleasant and blessed shore,” where shore is metaphorical, not a reference to the putative seacoast of Bohemia (172).

For more than forty years, I have prefaced my teaching of Shakespeare’s Sonnets with the first paragraph of W. H. Auden’s Introduction to the Signet Classic edition, where he writes that the sonnets “have become the best touchstone I know of for distinguishing the sheep from the goats, those, that is, who love poetry for its own sake and understand its nature, from those who only value poems either as historical documents or because they express feelings or beliefs of which the reader happens to approve” (xxxvii). Consequently, in teaching the Sonnets, I avoid the kind of speculation that figures in this essay.

10.

In a letter to the editor of the Times Literary Supplement in 1925 concerning a book on Shakespeare’s debt to Montaigne, T. S. Eliot wrote that “Shakespeare read with the most prodigious memory for words that has ever existed” (quoted in Klause 45).

11.

No survey like this would be complete without reference to the ridiculous end of the spectrum of speculation. According to Joanne Ambrose, “there was only one Englishman from Elizabethan times who could have written the works of Shakespeare. . . . It is my strong belief that the English scholar and Catholic saint, Edmund Campion, was the true author of the works attributed to William Shakspere.”

12.

It should be noted, however, that, while McCoog and Davidson’s research undermines the theory that Shakespeare could have grown close to Campion in Lancashire, their research confirms that Campion probably visited Stratford and its neighborhood early in his mission: “On his first missionary circuit, we know that Campion traveled through the Thames Valley and the Midlands” (178), which could easily include Stratford. Also, McCoog and Davidson note Campion’s visit(s?) to the Ardens, who lived near Stratford, and we know he was in Oxford (about fifty miles south of Stratford) and at Stonor Park, on the Thames between Oxford and London (179). Shakespeare could have encountered Campion on any of these visits.

13.

Greenblatt accepts the “Shakeshafte in Lancashire” hypothesis and imagines a meeting between Campion and the future playwright, suggesting that they might have seen aspects of themselves in each other: “Witty, imaginative, and brilliantly adept at improvisation, [Campion] managed to combine meditative seriousness with a strong theatrical streak. If the adolescent knelt down before Campion, he would have been looking at a distorted image of himself” (109).

14.

In a “little volume . . . barely 20,000 words in length” (Waugh 134), Campion offers ten reasons “proposed to his adversaries for disputation in the name of the faith and presented to the illustrious members of our universities” (Campion, title-page). Published on a secret press at Stonor, the slim volume was placed in the pews of the university church at Oxford, St. Mary’s, on the morning in June 1581 of the traditional summer exercises in rhetorical disputation. Both the Rationes and Sidney’s Apology for Poetry propose a defense of what many regarded as indefensible, and both make certain to incorporate humor and a kind of high-flying combativeness into the highly rhetorical structure. Several of Campion’s passages of peroration share their tone with similar passages in Sidney’s Apology. Concluding the presentation of his seventh reason, on history, Campion writes:

Therefore, this much is clear, that the articles of our belief are what History, manifold and various, History the messenger of antiquity, and life of memory, utters and repeats in abundance; while no narrative penned in human times records that the doctrines foisted in by our opponents ever had any footing in the Church. It is clear, I say, that the historians are mine, and that the adversary’s raids upon history are utterly without point. (121)