Was Shakespeare a “Church Papist” or a Prayer Book Anglican?

Reopening an inquiry into Shakespeare’s private religious beliefs or confessional affiliation can be expected to elicit a collective yawn from the great majority of literary scholars. Past attempts to address this issue are legion and, as everyone knows, the results have been as multifarious and contradictory as the writers themselves or the propositions advanced. What, that hoary and unanswerable question yet again? But, of course, as we learn from Hamlet, the most inscrutable of problems is often the most absorbing. Bernardo’s question at the opening of the play, “Who’s there?” (1.1.1), can be quickly answered; “To be or not to be . . .” (3.1.55) cannot.^[1] Brian Cummings in a British Academy lecture has referred to religion as “the last great mystery of Shakespeare studies.” Forced to rely on the meager documentary evidence regarding the bard’s faith, biographers can only assert, though with diminished assurance, what Roland Mushat Frye stated half a century ago, namely that Shakespeare “lived and died a conforming member of the Church of England, by which he and his children were baptized, and in which he was buried” (3). And we must also take seriously David Daniell’s equally discouraging assertion: “Shakespeare’s poems and plays provide no evidence about whether he was Protestant or Catholic” (2).^[2] Such purely fact-based nescience, however, has failed to hold in check a flood of fairly recent scholarship attempting to “demolish the Protestant-Whig narrative into which Shakespeare . . . [has] been inserted in literary history” (despite the tendency of cultural materialist and new historicist commentary to dismiss the church as a means of political and economic power control through mystification). The revisionists have sought to address “the centrality of religion in early modern culture” as a significant element in any true understanding of our greatest playwright (Marotti, “Shakespeare and Catholicism” 218). Particularly prominent in this trend has been a revival of belief in Shakespeare’s Catholicism or at least in his strong sympathy with the old religion.^[3] Arthur Marotti in the piece just quoted cites much of the relevant scholarship, and we can take Gary Taylor’s assumption that Shakespeare was raised a Catholic as fairly representative of much recent thinking on the subject.^[4]

A playwright living between 1564 and 1616 (Shakespeare’s dates), would have fallen of necessity into one or more of the three principal religious categories—Catholic, Church of England, or Puritan. But as recent church historians and students of Elizabethan culture have made us increasingly aware, these groupings are deceptively crude and over-simple. Indeed, Peter Lake reminds us that the vocabulary current among analysts of English religious culture includes “Puritan, Papist, Protestant, Catholic, Familist, Separatist, Conformist, [and] Church Papist” (“Religious Identities” 58)—designations that, together with overlapping between groups and the normative “flux in religion” within “the apparently rigid constraints of doctrinal formulation and political loyalism” (Questier 206), make clear distinctions extremely difficult to maintain. Alexandra Walsham speaks of the “confessional limbo” and “bewildering variety of opinions and attitudes” that confront scholars (3).^[5] Nevertheless, it is possible to narrow the possibilities a little.

At the extreme right in the broad spectrum of religious choices were the Counter-Reformation, post-Tridentine Catholics represented by Jesuit seminarians such as Edmund Campion, Robert Southwell, and Henry Garnet—men who were prepared to be savagely martyred rather than endanger their souls by yielding to a schismatic and heretical national church. At the opposite extreme were separatist Puritans, men who hated the Elizabethan settlement as much as, or even more than, Catholics did, and who wished to abolish episcopacy and a prescribed liturgy—abhorrent vestiges of popish tyranny, superstition, and corruption—in order to substitute a presbyterian church of Genevan purity with “godly” preaching of the Word as its primary mission. Also occupying the left fringe were the Family of Love, an equally separatist and anti-liturgical cult with secretive tendencies, suspicious sexual practices, and beliefs that derived in part from continental Anabaptists.

The large amorphous middle group of Church of England conformists, whether reluctant or enthusiastic, embraced a diversity of religious inclinations and beliefs. There were survivalist Catholics who clung emotionally to the old faith of their pre-Reformation heritage but were willing to accept the religion of the present monarch out of convenience, laziness, patriotism, or the hope that since the church had changed so often in the recent past, it might well revert again to its status under Henry VIII before his divorce or under Queen Mary, Elizabeth’s immediate predecessor. It was not inconceivable, after all, that a Catholic prince would supplant or succeed Elizabeth, and several possibilities were mentioned even after the execution of the Queen of Scots in 1587 (see Forker, ed., Richard II 8-9). Numerous non-judgmental Catholic moralists took the view that such “church papists” (a term of contempt used by their more purist coreligionists) could justifiably attend the established church and receive her sacraments, given the perils and penalties of failing to do so (Walsham 50).^[6] Some of these reluctant conformists began over time to revere the Prayer Book liturgy, heard week after week, responding to the somber majesty of Cranmer’s prose and gradually coming to believe that the rite of Holy Communion was not so different in essentials from the Mass for which they had longed. But reluctance, of course, remained, stemming from genuine fear about the validity of a faith that was still too new and untraditional to be accepted without endangerment of souls. According to Christopher Haigh, parishes here and there were slow to enforce the iconoclastic regulations of the reformed church, and “many clergy made the Prayer Book services as much like masses as circumspection allowed” (“Continuity of Catholicism” 40). Not a few papists defected, among whom were the Jesuit Thomas Langdale and the seminary priest Thomas Bell; the latter’s apostasy was a lucky break for the establishment since he wrote pamphlets denouncing “Popish Tyrannie” and “the Romish Foxe” (Walsham 55-60, 122-23). Protestant doctrines were proclaimed in sermon after sermon, promulgated in the Homilies (1547-71) required to be read in church, and glorified in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, which we know Shakespeare drew upon for the Henry VI plays and Henry VIII. Elizabeth had insisted on removing from the Great Litany the old 1552 reference to the Pope as Antichrist with “all his detestable enormities,” and the culture of services in English “entered and possessed” the “minds” of most Elizabethans, including Catholics, thus becoming, in Eamon Duffy’s formulation,“the fabric of their prayer, the utterance of their most solemn and their most vulnerable moments” (Stripping of the Altars 593).

Among the more leftward and thorough-going Puritan clergy within the Church of England were those who resisted the rubrics of the Prayer Book, failing to wear the prescribed surplice and square cap or “popish” cope, and refusing to make the sign of the cross in baptisms. In Peterborough, conservative laymen and diocesan authorities charged clergy with nonconformity—for “discarding the surplice, not following the order of the Book of Common Prayer, not baptizing or burying in accordance with the Injunctions of 1559, and refusing to observe holy days” (Sheils 43).^[7] When Archbishop Whitgift in 1583 began to enforce nationwide articles mandating the Prayer Book liturgies, “about 45 of the parochial clergy [of Peterborough], almost one-sixth of the total, refused to subscribe,” some of whom were suspended from their livings (Sheils 49). In the Diocese of Durham, regulations of the church hierarchy and the Queen’s high commissioners directed local officials to investigate and punish persons who “openly or privatelie defend hold or mainteyne any erronious or hereticall opinions and likewise . . . all sckismatiks puritanes or precisians (as some tearme them)” including “all that have or kepe any sedicious bookes” aimed at Parliament “or any suche other bookes impugninge the Booke of Common Prayer . . .” (Purvis 14). It is clear then that the established church faced resistance from both the Catholic right and Puritan left in its attempts to comprehend within a somewhat latitudinarian policy various shades of reformed theology and opinion and to achieve a decent uniformity in worship rather than the manacling of consciences.

Where in this mix of theological and liturgical conflict would Shakespeare’s own religious preferences have lain? It seems clear enough that they could hardly have fallen on the Puritan side. Sir Oliver Martext, the Puritan hedge-priest who attempts to marry Touchstone and Audrey in As You Like It, and whose name glances at the Martin Marprelate controversy (1588-96), comes off badly: Jaques scornfully adjures the bridegroom, “Get you to church, and have a good priest that can tell you what marriage is” (3.3.84-86, emphasis added). Malvolio, the butt of comic persecution in Twelfth Night, is bullied by Feste in the guise of the curate Sir Topas as being possessed by demons—a spiritual state taken seriously by Catholics but scorned by anti-papist churchmen such as Samuel Harsnett, whose satirical denunciation of exorcisms Shakespeare would later use to characterize Edgar as “poor Tom” in King Lear. Maria in the comedy remarks of the smug, humorless, and social-climbing steward that “sometimes he is a kind of puritan” (Twelfth Night 2.3.140) while Sir Toby jeers, probably backed by vocal audience assent, “Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?” (2.3.114-16). The treatment of Sir John Oldcastle (renamed Falstaff) in 1 and 2 Henry IV mocks a figure who was valorized by Foxe and considered by many (including Lord Chamberlain Cobham, his descendant) to be a proto-Protestant martyr. In contrast to the collaborative authors of the rival play, Sir John Oldcastle (1599), Shakespeare makes his greatest comic figure a shameless liar, hypocrite, coward, and debauchee who nevertheless is forever citing scripture and can be addressed as “Monsieur Remorse” (1 Henry IV 1.2.113) like an ostentatious adherent of the “godly.” Angelo, the hypocritical magistrate who puritanically condemns Claudio for the sexual license he would secretly practice himself, is cast as the villain of Measure for Measure until, having genuinely repented, he becomes the beneficiary of unearned grace.^[8]

The high esteem that ceremony, the sacraments, and the miraculous enjoy in Shakespeare’s plays (especially the histories and romances), as well as the plethora of Prayer Book echoes throughout his work, suggest a love of tradition and the mystical in religious preference. Elements of spiritual transcendence regularly appear in the plays as, for example, in Hamlet, when the sacredness of Christmas is invoked as a force to counter the possibly diabolic influence of ghosts:

It is within this context that so many historically oriented commentators have chosen to see the playwright as either a secret Catholic who for practical and professional reasons conformed outwardly to the Church of England, or else as a convinced Prayer Book Anglican, presumably with leanings toward a High-Church or pre-Laudian orientation (acknowledging of course the anachronism of these latter terms).^[9] Both positions contain elements of plausibility. My argument in this essay, however, is that the second of the two is the more likely. What remains, therefore, is to summarize the evidence in support of both attitudes and then to explore certain themes and details in Shakespeare’s oeuvre that may support my inference (and it can be only that) that he was a practicing Anglican with a strong residual sympathy for the old faith.

The possible Catholicism of Shakespeare’s family background need not detain us long since the little that we know, or think we know, has often been rehearsed. John Shakespeare, the poet’s father, was identified with others in Stratford-upon-Avon as failing to attend his Church of England parish, Holy Trinity, in 1592 “for fear of process for debt” (quoted in Schoenbaum 42). This has often been taken as evidence of Roman Catholic allegiance since Catholics sometimes protested the shunning of debt collectors as a cover for their truancy. But there is no reason to doubt John’s financial problems, for which there is elsewhere corroborative warrant. Robert Bearman, for example, has investigated in detail the numerous legal difficulties regarding debt and insolvency in which Shakespeare’s father became embroiled, making a strong case for John’s “continuing inability to manage his business affairs” as the likeliest explanation for his “nonattendance at church” (“A Papist or Just Penniless?” 431). Late in the eighteenth century, the eminent scholar Edmond Malone transcribed a so-called Catholic spiritual testament of John Shakespeare, reported to have been discovered by a bricklayer in the roof tiles of the Shakespeare family house in Henley Street. This was a formulaic document based on a writing by Cardinal Borromeo, containing blank spaces for the name of the devout testator, “an unworthy member of the holy Catholic religion” (quoted in Schoenbaum 48), to be inserted in various places—in this case, John Shakespeare. Since John signed other documents only with a cross, the name in the testament, if genuine, would have to have been in someone else’s handwriting. The original document is lost (we have only eighteenth-century transcripts), but Bearman has recently shown that at least part, and probably all, of the booklet was forged (Bearman, “Spiritual Testament”). As a chamberlain of Stratford in 1564, John had the duty, perhaps performed reluctantly, of carrying out iconoclastic Protestant reforms such as whitewashing the pre-Reformation representation of the Last Judgment on a wall of the guild chapel; he had held the same office in the corporation a few years earlier when the rood loft of the parish church with its crucifix and images of the Virgin Mary and Saint John was dismantled. By 1571, when higher authorities forced the selling off of Catholic vestments, John had become chief alderman (Duffy, “Bare Ruined Choirs” 46). At a time when most of the nation was alarmed by the outbreak of the Northern Rebellion in 1569, it would have been one of his duties to recruit men to oppose the Catholic insurgents against the Queen (Shaheen 56). Suggestive as these scraps of information may be, they obviously cannot establish the Catholicism of Shakespeare’s father beyond cavil.

On his mother’s side also, the dramatist could have been subject to Catholic influence. Mary Arden’s father Robert, Shakespeare’s maternal grandfather, was Catholic, as is clear from his will; and she was supposedly related to prominent Catholics in Warwickshire. Her putative cousin Edward Arden, head of the eminent Ardens of Castle Bromwich, was a wealthy recusant martyred for his religion in 1583, and Edward’s mentally unstable son-in-law John Somerville, who was probably responsible for his father-in-law’s arrest, undertook a hare-brained scheme to assassinate Queen Elizabeth, committing suicide in prison before his execution could be carried out. As David Ellis points out, however, the Shakespeare family seems to have attempted in 1599 to have their recently obtained coat of arms “combined with that of [the] ancient, if by then discredited, Arden family, but the heralds could find no connection between it and Mary’s ancestry” (30). If Shakespeare was married, as most suppose, in Temple Grafton, five miles west of Stratford, the vicar would have been John Frith, “an old priest and unsound in religion” (i.e., a Catholic) (quoted in Schoenbaum 87); but since the surviving record of 1582 gives the name of the bride as “Anne Whateley” rather than Anne Hathaway, the apparent miscopying gives rise to further uncertainties. The poet named his twins Hamnet and Judith after his good friends and neighbors, Hamnet and Judith Sadler, probably the children’s godparents, who were listed in 1606 as among “persons popishly affected” (quoted in Schoenbaum 286), although the clergyman who christened the children in 1585 was clearly not a papalist. Shakespeare’s older daughter Susanna appeared in the same recusant list as the Sadlers for failing to receive Holy Communion at Easter and is thought to have had Catholic propensities; nevertheless, her husband, Dr. John Hall, whom she married in 1607, was a “staunch” Protestant (Campbell and Quinn 678), and she was buried in the same Anglican church as her father. That the Shakespeare family were Catholic in sympathy, if not in practice, seems likely but cannot be asserted as fact.

The dramatist was almost certainly taught by Catholics at his Stratford grammar school. At least two of his schoolmasters, Simon Hunt and John Cottam, were papists (Schoenbaum 66, 113-14). The first had attended university in Douai and went on to become a Jesuit priest; the second was the brother of Thomas Cottam, the Jesuit martyr convicted with Campion and executed shortly after him in 1582. These men, however, would have had to conform outwardly to the Church of England, besides which instruction in the establishment catechism was obligatory in “petty school,” and Protestant masters also presided. Robert Debdale, a Stratford grammar school boy in the years before Shakespeare would have enrolled, became a Jesuit priest on the continent and, returning to England in 1580, was arrested, tortured, and executed as a Catholic spy in 1586; from Rome, he kept in close touch with his family near Stratford, to whom he sent a religious medal, rosaries, and a crucifix. Shakespeare probably knew the Debdale family, and it has even been suggested that Robert and the future playwright “shared a great-grandfather” (Wilson 17-18, 36n92). The contention of E. A. J. Honigmann and others that Shakespeare spent his “lost years” as a dependent in the Catholic household of the Hoghton family in Lancashire rests on the unlikely identification of the poet with a “William Shakeshafte” in Hoghton’s will (the name was common in the region) together with the tantalizing information that Sir Thomas Hesketh, a friend of Hoghton mentioned in the same document to whom Shakeshafte was recommended, was on friendly terms with the Stanley family (the Catholic earls of Derby) who patronized actors. Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, heir to the earldom, lent his name to the London company in which Shakespeare may have performed and that probably staged early plays such as The Comedy of Errors, Titus Andronicus, and 1 Henry VI.^[10] Shakespeare’s relationship with Strange’s Men, of course, need not depend on any connection to an unproved residence in Lancashire. The historian John Speed assumed in 1611 that the playwright who had refashioned the tragic martyr Oldcastle, hero of Protestants, into so disreputable a stage comic as Falstaff, would by implication have had to be a Catholic. The Anglican Archdeacon Richard Davies, writing c.1660, is famous for having declared (without evidence) that Shakespeare “dyed a papist” (see Speed; Davies; quoted in Chambers, William Shakespeare 2:217-18, 2:257).

Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton and Shakespeare’s patron, was influenced strongly by his fiercely Catholic father, the second earl, and on coming into his title became the head of one of the most important Catholic families in England. As a royal ward, however, he came under the care of Elizabeth’s most powerful Protestant minister, Lord Burghley, and was exposed to Reformation ideas at Cecil House in London and later at St. John’s College, Cambridge. By the reign of King James, he had already converted to the Church of England, partly on account of having married a Protestant (Elizabeth Vernon) and partly owing to the influence of Sir Edwin Sandys and Lord Essex (whose uprising against the Queen he impetuously joined) (Honan). Although revisionist scholars interested in arguing for the dramatist’s secret Catholicism have made much of these circumstantial bits and pieces, clearly they offer us no surety. As Robert Miola, himself an expert on Elizabethan Catholicism, has wisely remarked, “Catholics have always believed in baptism by blood and baptism by desire but never, so far as I know, in baptism by association” (“Shakespeare’s Religion” 27). It is worth noting that the poet’s own name never appears in the lists of recusants that were kept for purposes of surveiling potentially dangerous Romanists. Given the mixed and scattered evidence, it is tempting to agree with Jeffrey Mirus, who thinks that “Shakespeare at least possessed significant Catholic sensibilities, in the depth of his heart, where they could not get him into too much trouble.”^[11]

Apart from baptismal, marriage, and burial records in the established church, Shakespeare’s (and Fletcher’s) laudatory characterization of Archbishop Cranmer in Henry VIII furnishes important evidence of the poet’s religious conformity. Contrasted with Cranmer’s great Catholic-minded enemy, Bishop Gardiner of Winchester, whose malevolence and ambitious arrogance are based on Foxe, the primate of the English Church is portrayed as a figure of “truth,” “integrity,” “honesty,” “innocence,” and “meekness” (5.1.114, 122, 141, 5.2.97). Gardiner attempts to have Cranmer tried and condemned for teaching “new opinions, / Divers and dangerous,” “heresies” that “may prove pernicious” (5.2.52-54)—for being “a sectary” (5.2.105) whose radical Protestant ideas will provoke “Commotions, uproars, with a general taint / Of the whole state” such as those in “upper Germany” (5.2.63-65). The Reformation emphasis here could scarcely be more explicit. London audiences, of course, would be aware of the archbishop’s heroic martyrdom in the reign of Queen Mary. They would know also that Elizabeth’s predecessor on the throne had persecuted other reformist bishops such as Latimer and Ridley and, perhaps, that Gardiner had presided at her coronation. Some might also have recognized that it was Cranmer, freshly consecrated as primate of the English Church, who had officially pronounced the legality of Henry VIII’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon after Convocation, over which he presided, had affirmed that her union with Prince Arthur had indeed been consummated (MacCulloch 89, 93-94). In the play, vindicated as the loyal servant of the king and honored as the godfather of his new daughter, the archbishop christens the future Queen Elizabeth, prophesying that among the many blessings to be conferred by her reign will be the “Truth” that “shall nurse her” and the “Holy and heavenly thoughts” with which she shall be “counsel[ed].” “God shall be truly known” (5.4.28-36), he continues, with the religious benefits outliving her to be superintended by her theologically committed successor, King James. Indeed, it could be argued that Cranmer’s voice is to be identified in some measure with the play’s subtitle, All is True.

The same drama, however, also caters to Catholic sensibilities, especially in the character of the hard-used Queen Katherine, whose sufferings, like those of the saintly Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, are presented as embodying virtue, tragic dignity, and spiritual authenticity. Her trial scene supplies a fitting counterpart to that of Cranmer, while her noble fortitude and Catholic patience contrast effectively with the shallower, more sexual charms of her rival, Queen Anne, whom Wolsey characterizes as a “spleeny Lutheran” (3.2.99). Katherine’s masque-like “Vision,” accompanied by “Sad and solemn music” in which “Spirits of peace” successively crown her with “garlands of bays ” (some spectators, I suspect, would code these as crowns of beatification), affirms onstage a liturgically elevated enactment of her rapturous reception into eternity as a saint (4.2.80.1, 82.1-83).^[12] Clearly, Henry VIII sends mixed religious signals. If Shakespeare had been a secret Catholic at the time of its composition, even allowing that he was drawing upon Foxe’s stridently Protestant Book of Martyrs, he probably would have avoided the dramatization of Cranmer’s quarrel with Gardiner as an unnecessary ingredient in the story of a colorful reign, or at least the doctrinal and ecclesiastical nature of their differences. He might also have excluded from Cranmer’s christening speech the nearly explicit references to Elizabeth’s church settlement, “God shall be truly known,” as conceding too much to the opposition. On the other hand, it is plausible that a convinced but non-puritan adherent of the reformed church could be comfortable with these dramatic decisions while nevertheless presenting with admiration and respect the moving plight of Queen Katherine as representing the old faith for which he and certain sectors of his audience might feel a sincere nostalgia.

III

Another powerful sign of Shakespeare’s conformity to the Church of England is his constant echoing of the 1559 Prayer Book, revised only minimally in 1604. Attendance at church, of course, was mandatory on pain of paying a fine, but someone who went unwillingly to services would be unlikely to absorb their language and content so pervasively—to some extent even unconsciously—as our dramatist does, frequently embedding their phrases and concepts in secular and sometimes unrelated contexts. Naseeb Shaheen’s marvelously helpful and extensively researched work on biblical references in Shakespeare also includes the poet’s borrowings, verbal and conceptual, from the Prayer Book and the Homilies that were appointed to be read in church when a licensed preacher was unavailable (see esp. 827-32). What is striking here is the range and frequency of Shakespeare’s use of the prescribed liturgies, covering nearly all of the major services and parts of services including the offices of Morning and Evening Prayer, the General Confession and Absolution, the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, the Litany, the service of Holy Communion with its own General Confession and Absolution, the special Collects, Epistles, and Gospels appointed for specific Sundays and Holy Days, the rite for Baptism, the Catechism, the services of Confirmation, Matrimony, and Visitation of the Sick, the Burial Service, the Commination against Sinners, the Table of Kindred and Affinity, and the Prayer Book Calendar. Shaheen’s list of references extends to five and a half closely printed pages. The Shakespeare works that betray evidence of familiarity with this material cover the entire list from early plays such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Titus Andronicus to late plays like The Tempest, Henry VIII, and The Two Noble Kinsmen as well as all the genres—comedies, tragedies, histories, tragicomedies (or “problem plays”), and romances. Shakespeare’s innumerable echoes of, or allusions to, the Psalms, which were read or sung in their entirety every month according to the appointed calendar, are usually closer to the Coverdale translation (the version used in church and printed in the Prayer Book and Psalter)^[13] than to other biblical translations such as the Bishops’ and Geneva Bibles, which we know Shakespeare also used.^[14]

One of the more obvious examples of Shakespeare’s familiarity with liturgical practice in the English Church comes from Richard II when the self-dramatizing monarch during the so-called deposition scene refers to services in which the officiating priest reads out the prayers from one side of the chancel and is answered by his clerical assistant on the other side by chiming in with “Amen”:

A variant of this use occurs in liturgical contexts when the priest reads prayers to which the congregation, led by the clerk, repeats the “Amen.” A comical version of this commonplace utterance and response occurs in Much Ado About Nothing during a colloquy between Margaret and Borachio when the latter flirts with Margaret and she wittily holds him off by affecting to be leading prayers in church:

We get another brief allusion to the same liturgical antiphony in Troilus and Cressida as the conclusion to one of Thersites’ atrabiliar diatribes against Trojans and Greeks: “I have said my prayers, and the devil Envy say amen” (2.3.20-21). A rubric in the Prayer Book service of A Commination against Sinners directs, “And the people shall answer and say ‘Amen’” after each “Cursed is he . . .” read sequentially by the priest at the beginning of the liturgy (Book of Common Prayer, 1559, ed. Booty 316);^[15] but the same congregational response appears frequently also in other services.

Shakespeare’s extensive dependence on the Prayer Book and the Homilies may be illustrated by his practice in Richard II. Debora Shuger has pointed out two important allusions, the first occurring during the quarrel between Mowbray and Bolingbroke at the beginning of the play and the second in the queen’s greeting to York after Richard has exposed his realm to danger by departing for Ireland and she is eager for consoling news of her husband (“In a Christian Climate” 43, 45). Mowbray admits that in the past he had planned to assassinate Gaunt, “A trespass that doth vex my grieved soul; / But ere I last receiv’d the sacrament / I did confess it, and exactly begg’d / Your Grace’s pardon, and I hope I had it” (1.1.138-41). As Shuger observes, Mowbray alludes here to a precondition of receiving the consecrated bread and wine, namely that a communicant must not “presume to the Lord’s Table” until he has “truly repented and amended his former naughty life” and “recompensed the parties whom he hath done wrong unto . . . ” (Book of Common Prayer, ed. Booty 247). The Prayer Book preface to the rite specifically so orders. The celebrant’s invitation to communion during the liturgy (immediately before the congregation’s recitation of the General Confession, said kneeling) reinforces the prescription, beginning with the words “You that do truly and earnestly repent you of your sins, and be in love and charity with your neighbors. . . . ” Later in the play, when York enters to the disconsolate queen who has been commiserating with Bushy and Green, she greets him with “Uncle, for God’s sake speak comfortable words” (2.2.76). Any regular Elizabethan churchgoer would instantly recognize that the speaker has just used a familiar phrase from the communion liturgy at the point where the celebrant introduces four supportive quotations from scripture (Matthew 11:28; John 3:16; 1 Timothy 1:15; and 1 John 2:1-2): “Hear what comfortable words our Savior Christ saith, to all that truly turn to him” (Book of Common Prayer, ed. Booty 247, 259, 260). We should note that the adjective “comfortable” carries theological weight, meaning not merely “consolatory” but relating to the third person of the Trinity as the source of Christian fortitude and hope—to “Holy Ghost, the comforter” as invoked in the Te Deum, a traditional canticle for Matins (Morning Prayer) (Book of Common Prayer, ed. Booty 54). As Shaheen points out, the phrase became common and was widely used, occasionally even before the Prayer Book came into existence (371). But its wide currency undoubtedly derives from its having been regularly heard in church, which is why we should not be surprised to find it recurring in a speech by Flamineo in Webster’s White Devil (3.3.12).

Other probable instances of indebtedness to the Prayer Book also appear in Richard II. Echoes of at least two of the Psalms in Coverdale’s version come up in the dialogue. When Gaunt mentions God as “the widow’s champion and defense” (1.2.43), he seems to draw upon either Psalm 68:5 (“He is a father of the fatherlesse, and defendeth the cause of the widowes”) or Psalm 146:9 (“The Lord . . . defendeth the fatherless and widow”). Aumerle, kneeling for mercy to Henry IV near the end of the play, begs, “For ever may . . . My tongue cleave to my roof within my mouth, / Unless a pardon ere I rise to speak” (5.3.30-32). Although the image appears elsewhere in scripture, the most likely source is Psalm 137:6 (“Let my tongue cleave to the roofe of my mouth”). Three references to the Baptismal service also are heard. When Carlisle announces that Mowbray has died in Venice, giving “his pure soul unto his captain Christ, / Under whose colors he had fought so long” (4.1.99-100), he alludes to the point in the rite where the priest makes the sign of the “cross upon the child’s forehead, saying” that he does so “in token that hereafter he shall not be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified, and manfully to fight under his banner . . . and to continue Christ’s faithful soldier . . . unto his life’s end.” After Aumerle has been pardoned, his mother, Duchess of York, seals her petition on his behalf with “Come, my old son, I pray God make thee new” (5.3.146)—echoing the prayer in Baptism (based on Ephesians 4:22-24) “that the old Adam . . . may be so buried, that the new man may be raised up in” the child. Richard’s long prison soliloquy contains still another allusion to the Baptismal ceremony when the deposed king makes reference to a sentence in the Gospel appointed for this sacrament, “Suffer little children to come unto me” (Mark 10:14), in “Come, little ones” (5.5.15) (Book of Common Prayer, ed. Booty 275, 274, 271). Shakespeare also echoes the Good Friday liturgy. Carlisle’s line, “Peace shall go sleep with Turks and infidels” (4.1.139), levies upon one of the collects for that day, “Have mercy upon all Jews, Turks, infidels, and heretics . . .”;^[16] a few lines later, the bishop again alludes to the same service in his reference to the “field of Golgotha and dead men’s skulls” (4.1.144)—a quotation from the Gospel of John to be read at the same service, “the place of dead men’s skulls, but in Hebrew, Golgotha” (19:17) (Book of Common Prayer, ed. Booty 144, 149).

Richard II also draws regularly upon the Homilies. Not surprisingly in a play about the deposition of a monarch by divine right, the homily “Against disobedience and willful rebellion” figures prominently. Gaunt’s argument that he cannot act against Richard, “God’s substitute, / His deputy anointed in His sight . . . for I may never lift / An angry arm against His minister” (1.2.37-41), derives ultimately from 1 Samuel (24:7, 11; 26:9, 11) but would have reminded hearers of the homily in which “the Lord’s anointed” is very often invoked. Part II of the sermon on disobedience, for example, instances David as praying, “The Lord keepe me . . . from laying hands upon . . . Gods anoynted. For who can lay his hand upon the Lords anoynted, and be guiltlesse?” (Rickey and Stroup 286). Similar allusions to this sermon crop up in Shakespeare’s other plays about monarchy, as, for instance, in 1 Henry IV (4.3.40) and Macbeth (2.3.68). When Richard inveighs against rebels, prophesying that “Armies of pestilence . . . shall strike / Your children yet unborn and unbegot” (3.3.87-88), he seems to refer to Part IV of the homily on disobedience, which declares “the childe yet unborne may rue” the consequences of revolt (Rickey and Stroup 303). Carlisle’s protest against deposing Richard is generally indebted to the same homily, which speaks of “rebels” who “robbe, spoyle, destroy and burne in England,” who “kill and murther their owne neighbours and kinsefolke” (Rickey and Stroup 282), a passage that corresponds to the bishop’s words about the “blood of English . . . manur[ing] the ground” and “tumultuous wars” that “Shall kin with kin and kind with kind confound” (4.1.137-41). Carlisle also repeats the allusion to “the childe yet unborne” from the same homiletic passage that Richard had referred to when he warns, “the children yet unborn / Shall feel this day as sharp to them as thorn” (4.1.322-23).

Richard’s own protest against deposition, reminding his hearers of the “heinous article” against “cracking the strong warrant of an oath” (4.1.233-35), glances at another sentence in the disobedience homily that mentions “the dishonour done by rebels . . . by their breaking of their oath made to their Prince” (Rickey and Stroup 292).^[17] Richard’s imperious demand, “show us the hand of God / That hath dismiss’d us from our stewardship” (3.3.77-78), can be paralleled by various passages in the homily “concerning good Order, and obedience to Rulers and Magistrates” (69) with stress on the authority of princes as deriving from God. And Bolingbroke’s pious wish for the salvation of his old enemy Mowbray, “Sweet peace conduct his sweet soul to the bosom / Of good old Abraham!” (4.1.103-4), based on “Abraham’s bosom” (Luke 16:22, the Gospel lesson appointed to be read at the Eucharist on the first Sunday after Trinity), may also reflect the homily “Against the Fear of Death,” which thrice refers to “Abrahams bosome” as “a place of rest, pleasure, and consolation,” “of all comfort,” and of “refresh[ment]” (Rickey and Stroup 60, 65, 66). To be sure, “Abraham’s bosom” was a common phrase in wide circulation, but the playwright was probably used to hearing it in church in connection with the raising of Lazarus. Shakespeare may have remembered these homiletic-biblical references again in Henry V when he made Mistress Quickly ignorantly substitute “Arthur’s bosom” (2.3.9-10) for “Abraham’s bosom” in her description of Falstaff’s death.

Lest it should be thought that Richard II with its Christological emphasis on the “divinity [that] doth hedge a king” (Hamlet 4.5.124) is unusual in respect of its closeness to the Prayer Book (and the discussion above presents only a sampling), we may cite three echoes of the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds, recited continually in the Church of England liturgy, that appear in Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Winter’s Tale. The Danish prince, joking with one of the gravediggers, says that the hole in the ground being prepared to receive Ophelia is “for the dead, not for the quick” (5.1.126), a clear echo of “the quick and the dead” spoken by communicants at every celebration of Holy Communion and also at Matins and Evening Prayer. The Nicene Creed ends with a profession of belief in “the life of the world to come,” a phrase repeated nearly verbatim in Macbeth’s “We’ld jump the life to come” (1.7.7) and in Autolycus’s “For the life to come, I sleep out the thought of it” (Winter’s Tale 4.3.30) (Book of Common Prayer, ed. Booty 58, 64, 251). The General Confession, spoken daily in both Morning and Evening Prayer, contains a sonorous sentence that seems to have etched itself unforgettably upon Shakespeare’s memory: “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us” (Book of Common Prayer, ed. Booty 50). The most obvious echoes occur in Julius Caesar and Macbeth: Brutus speaks of a “cause to wish / Things done undone” (4.2.8-9) while Lady Macbeth in her tortured sleep laments, “What’s done cannot be undone” (5.1.68). But further probable reminiscences crop up in Titus Andronicus, Othello, and Antony and Cleopatra.^[18] The wording of the General Confession parallels in part Matthew 23:23—“these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone” (Bishops’ Bible)—and may derive ultimately from the proverb “Things done cannot be undone” (Tilley T200), but the constant oral repetition of the Prayer Book General Confession is the likeliest means of accounting for all the Shakespearean passages.

One could go through every play in the canon with the help of Shaheen’s masterful compendium to demonstrate Shakespeare’s constant resort to ideas and phraseology from both the Prayer Book and the Homilies.^[19] Both sources could, of course, be purchased in printed form, but it is far likelier that the dramatist absorbed his knowledge of them aurally, saturated as he must have been by words and rhythms ceaselessly repeated in the liturgies and moral instruction of the established church.

A certain amount of nostalgia for elements of the old faith would doubtless have been felt by conservative but accepting conformists as well as resentful or disappointed churchgoing Catholics. In Sonnet 73, Shakespeare evokes the time before the monasteries were despoiled by alluding to gothic ruins that once contained the soaring voices of choristers—“Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang” (l.4). The sumptuous polyphony of William Byrd, a Catholic whom the Queen continued in her personal service, could still be heard in the chapels royal, in Westminster Abbey, and in some cathedrals, although most parish churches had to content themselves with the less inspiring metrical psalms of the sort made famous by Sternhold and Hopkins.^[20] Falstaff, in a spasm of mock Puritan virtue, refers to Protestant Dutch immigrants who were notorious for psalm-singing: “God help the while! a bad world, I say. I would I were a weaver, I could sing psalms, or any thing” (1 Henry IV 2.4.132-34).^[21] Decaying monuments or desecrated shrines of the past, churches that had been stripped of their “superstitious” altars and statuary, and medieval stained glass that often had to remain to keep weather out were reminders of what could sometimes be perceived as a more socially generous, hospitable, and charitable pre-Reformation era not unlike that which old Adam represents in As You Like It:

The old religion had important ties to the ethos of everyday life as well as to the theater. Social events and traditions keyed to the old liturgical calendar of saints’ and holy days—All Hallows Eve (the day before All Saints Day), Christmas, Twelfth Night (the eve of the Epiphany), Candlemas (the Purification of Our Lady), Shrovetide (the three days preceding Ash Wednesday), Eastertide, Whitsunday (Pentecost), Corpus Christi, and the like—persisted in some places, and performances of masques and plays at court were frequently associated with religious holidays. The twelve days of Christmas and the pre-Lenten period seem to have been the most popular during Shakespeare’s lifetime.

Although the Church of England took over many of the major feasts of the Roman Catholic calendar, a new, harsher, Puritan-influenced moralism threw a wet blanket over traditional festivities in some quarters. Deliberately anti-mystical Protestant understandings of the Eucharist had banished Corpus Christi from the official table of religious observances. Correlations between the liturgical calendar and theatrical activity were most noticeable at court, partly because greater ritualism and formality in worship suited the iconographical status and ceremonialism of royalty. Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night with its themes of social inclusiveness and comedic discovery, of the need for humility and the cure of self-love, takes its title from Epiphany, which celebrates the visitation of the Magi, symbolizing the spread of incarnational Christianity from the Holy Land to the entire known world and officially subtitled the “Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles.” Leslie Hotson, who argues that the play may have had its first performance at Whitehall on this feast, points out that Elizabeth “would have delivered the traditional offering of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the altar” in the chapel adjacent to “the great hall” where the play would be acted (reported in Hassel 77).^[22] It is unlikely, of course, that Shakespeare would have designed his comedy with so limiting or explicit an occasion in mind, and, indeed, the first recorded performance occurred at Candlemas (2 February 1602) at the Middle Temple; court performances took place later at Easter 1618 and at Candlemas 1623—both of them obvious celebrations of Christian joy. Candlemas, moreover, celebrates the purification of Christ’s mother after childbirth, is related liturgically to Christmas, and, as its name suggests, focuses, like Epiphany, on the theme of light and enlightenment.^[23] Epiphany had also come to be associated with the Feast of Fools and had long since been an occasion for pranks, revelry, and secular frivolity, themes suggested by Shakespeare’s subtitle, What You Will.

Connections between theatrical entertainment and major liturgical holidays had developed from the miracle and mystery plays of the later Middle Ages to which Shakespeare could have been exposed as a boy. As Emrys Jones points out, the last performances of the mystery cycles at Coventry in 1579 took place not far from Stratford; and students of the playwright’s two historical tetralogies, plays that traverse a chain of events from Richard II to Richard III, have observed that they may be seen as “a secular equivalent to the sacred cycle of the Middle Ages” (Jones 34, quoting Hardison 290).^[24] It therefore would have been natural for him to embrace such traditions in the light of their continuity with England’s Catholic heritage rather than abjuring them as pagan or irreverent disruptions of Christian sobriety as some of his anti-theatrical contemporaries were inclined to do.

Another of the customs officially disallowed as popish superstition by the Elizabethan settlement was bell-ringing for the dead that had long been part of Catholic practice and connected especially to the feasts of All Saints and All Souls. As Jones reminds us, All Souls’ Day (2 November) had been “a festival of the dead” devoted to praying for relatives and friends in Purgatory and was additionally associated with ghosts and a folk belief in the reappearance of deceased persons to those “who had wronged them during their life” (228-29).^[25] Shakespeare made use of these traditions, as Jones explains, in the fifth act of Richard III in which Buckingham before his execution rehearses the long list of his master’s victims, precursors of his own imminent destruction, noting the irony of his death’s occurring on “All-Souls’ day” (5.1.10). Shakespeare’s importation of this significant date from Holinshed’s Chronicles, historically separated from that of the Battle of Bosworth by nearly two years, prepares us for the reappearance of the same victims to King Richard as a succession of ghosts in a dream the night before his bloody defeat. The ghosts of Old Hamlet (who describes his torments in Purgatory) and of Julius Caesar seem to draw upon these same Catholic traditions that continued to linger in Elizabethan consciousness. As for ringing church bells in memory of the dead, Shakespeare alludes to this Catholic custom when Northumberland anticipates news of his son’s demise, comparing it to “a sullen bell, / Rememb’red tolling a departing friend” (2 Henry IV 1.1.102-3). A reference to the same “sullen bell” appears again in Sonnet 71, “No longer mourn for me when I am dead” (l. 2), and Donne of course, like Shakespeare, speaks of the same venerable custom in one of his best-known meditations: “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee” (Donne, in Simpson 101).

The beautiful dirge in Cymbeline, “Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun . . . ” (4.2.258 ff), sung or said antiphonally by Arviragus and Guiderius over the corpse of Fidele (actually Imogen disguised as a boy and still alive), raises again the complex issue of Elizabethan beliefs about prayers for the dead since the final stanza consists of petitions that he be spared the potential harm of exorcisers, witchcraft, and “unlaid” ghosts and be comforted by the assurance of “Quiet consummation” and a “renowned . . . grave” (4.2.276-81).^[26] Arviragus suggests that he and his brother “sing him to th’ ground” (4.2.236), using a ritual once employed for their mother, while he cradles the body (as Lear holds the dead Cordelia), in a way that produces a Pietà-like image on stage. The action here recalls the pre-Reformation Office of the Dead, the first antiphon of which began with the Latin dirige from which the word dirge derives, and which provided mourners with an emotionally intense but controlled formalization of their grief, heightened by Gregorian chant or more elaborate musical settings. In the medieval church the term dirge was sometimes understood as the entire office including prayers of lamentation that preceded the usual Mass of requiem. After the break with Rome, Church of England liturgies for burial of the dead simplified these obsequies in the belief that since Purgatory no longer existed (according to the Thirty-nine Articles of 1563),^[27] it would be unchristian to mourn too immoderately those whom God had already raised to a state of eternal bliss or to intercede for those whose damnation He had already decreed. As Ralph Houlbrooke reports, the Prayer Book of 1559, based chiefly on the second Edwardian Prayer Book of 1552, abolished “the rites of commendation of the soul and the dirge” (264). Just how comprehensively not praying for the dead was institutionalized and enforced throughout Elizabethan England is difficult to estimate, but that such prayers continued subversively and unofficially in the culture as a whole is suggested by the presence of dirges in stage plays where historical or foreign settings might perhaps excuse their presence. Calvinists seem to have been more fierce opponents than conservative Church of England clergy.

Keverne Smith discusses the issue in a valuable article on the example from Cymbeline, citing various other instances of dirges in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Munday’s Death of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon, Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge, and Webster’s White Devil among others (63-66). As she points out, the title character of the Munday play, a dramatization of a Robin Hood legend, dies with an approving reference to “holy dirges” (l. 814) followed by “a sung dirge of weeping and wailing” with prominent mention of Catholic symbols such as the dead man’s “beades and Primer” (i.e., shortened breviary; l.808), and “holy crosse” (i.e., crucifix; l.854) interred with the deceased (Smith 65).^[28] If accused of presenting such pre-Reformation pieties in a sympathetic light, the dramatist could plead that he was dramatizing the life of an English folk hero from the medieval past; but there would doubtless be members of both Munday’s and Shakespeare’s audiences who would react to such details with reverence for the ways of the old faith despite Protestant objections. Citing Donna Hamilton’s work on Munday, Smith writes that the dramatist of the Huntingdon plays “tried to give the appearance of conformity to Protestant practice whilst actually introducing features into his plays from the old religion. Who else would have been so unwise as to start a play sympathetic to Sir Thomas More?” (65). We might make the same claim for Shakespeare, who was also attracted to Catholic features for stage use and who, after all, was a collaborator with Munday on Sir Thomas More. It should be noted too that Henry V, “the mirror of all Christian kings” (Henry V 2.Chorus 6) in Shakespeare’s portrayal, reinters the body of Richard II, assassinated by his father Bolingbroke, bestowing on the grave “more contrite tears, / Than from [the body] issued forced drops of blood,” paying hundreds of the poor to pray for his soul as well as building “Two chauntries” where “sad and solemn priests” continually sing Masses for the martyred king (4.1.295-302).

Shakespeare’s awareness of Catholic burial customs as well as mixed responses to them is obvious in Hamlet. Everyone remembers the scene in which Ophelia’s corpse is laid to rest and then shockingly disturbed by a brawl (part of it in the grave itself!) between her ex-lover and her sibling. Ophelia’s brother, obviously reared in the old religion, is outraged that his sister should be denied the full ritual of a requiem Mass before burial in an Elsinore church or chapel, an attitude made patent by his twice-repeated question, “What ceremony else?” and “Must there no more be done?” (5.1.223, 235). The officiating priest must carefully explain that the curtailed rites are owing to her supposed suicide, the mortal sin of “self-slaughter” against which, as Hamlet had earlier pointed out, “the Everlasting” has “fix’d / His canon” (1.2.131-32). “Her death was doubtful,” the cleric observes,

Laertes then responds in a manner that, curiously, makes him more sympathetic to audiences at this particular moment than either Hamlet, shortly to come forward as his indecorous challenger, or the theologically legalistic priest:

The emotions evoked in this dramatically intense exchange are strong but complex. And what, we may ask, can audiences be expected to infer from it regarding approval or disapproval of Catholic funerary tradition?

Laertes’ desire for the solemnity of a requiem testifies to the genuineness of his grief and to his profound fraternal love of Ophelia. It also ratifies our sense that her death, as described by the Queen in one of the most exquisitely lyrical speeches of the play (“There is a willow grows askaunt the brook, / That shows his hoary leaves in the glassy stream . . .” [4.7.166 ff.]), cannot be fairly judged as willful self-violence or indeed as anything other than the result of slippage into irreversible dementia. We come away from this episode with the wish to believe that Ophelia’s innocence and tragic death, brought about by Hamlet’s rejection of her, by the murder of her father, and by Machiavellian plots and political antagonisms beyond her ken, should indeed be ushered into eternity with the full ritual support of the faith in which she has been nurtured, her “obsequies . . . enlarg’d” (5.1.226) well beyond the narrow judgmentalism of ecclesiastical hierarchs who have paid more attention to the letter of canon law than to its spirit. Moreover, the prince who disrupts the solemnity of the burial by coming forward to accuse Laertes of exaggerated, and therefore insincere, grief comes off in this action as a self-obsessed egomaniac, too offended by anything legitimated by his corrupt uncle to empathize with the pain of others. Nor can we forget that Hamlet is presumably a prince of Protestant leanings, having studied in Luther’s university where the more elaborate rituals of Catholic worship were decried as idolatrous. Of course, Shakespeare’s reversal of sympathy for Hamlet in favor of Laertes is temporary. The long final scene—in which the latter’s treachery works its fatal mischief and in which Claudius’s poison brings down his queen and himself—quickly realigns our feelings. Hamlet apologizes for his rudeness at Ophelia’s grave. Finally, he exchanges forgiveness with the man he had assaulted and who has now become his deathsman, so that, despite his flaws, he can emerge in our estimation as a mysterious compound of courage, philosophical penetration, and nobility. The dramatist would have us join empathically in Horatio’s moving prayer, “Good night, sweet prince, / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!” (5.2.359-60), lines, incidentally, that echo the Catholic burial rite: “In paradisum deducant te angeli . . . Chorus angelorum te suscipiat . . . aeternam habeas requiem” (Jenkins 416).

Hamlet nevertheless leaves much unresolved, remaining a fundamentally ambivalent play in respect of its embedded attitudes toward religion. The Denmark of this tragedy comprises a world in which northern and southern, Protestant and Catholic, cultural values intermingle. Characters with Germanic names (Hamlet, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Gertrude, Osric) interact with those with Latin ones (Polonius, Claudius, Horatio, Bernardo, Marcellus, Francisco). A prince educated at Wittenberg avenges a father who suffers in Purgatory and who, having been denied the final sacraments of the viaticum and extreme unction, “Unhous’led, disappointed, unanel’ed” (1.5.77), was unable to prepare for the Catholic death for which he had hoped. Hamlet’s speculative mind and emotional isolation, his fits of arrogance tempered by self-condemnation, and his extreme individualism and misogyny belong to a mind-set that questions the truths of received religion and suggests the questing, if often intolerant, attitudes of the more advanced, radical Reformers. But the tragedy also reaffirms the wisdom of accepting a providential view of humanity (“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends . . .” [5.2.10]; “There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow . . .” [5.2.219 ff.]), which, though essentially stoical, fails wholly to exclude the ancient Catholic view of universal order. Tragic doubt may call Christian eschatology into question without annihilating it, nor should we forget that doubt, an integral component of reason, has traditionally been regarded as a feature of Roman and Anglican theology, especially as excogitated in the writings of divines such as Richard Hooker and Lancelot Andrewes. As Anthony Dawson reminds us, although “religious ways of thinking and feeling saturated the whole period,” Shakespeare’s dramatic appropriation of these modes was “typically indirect and diffuse” (238, 240).^[29] And Maurice Hunt goes so far as to insist that the dramatist’s “syncretistic method [of] incorporating Protestant and Catholic elements into his plays is virtually singular among early modern English playwrights . . .” (ix).

J. S. Purvis’s collection of Tudor parish documents from the Diocese of York during the reign of Elizabeth is enlightening on the extent to which Protestant iconoclasm and rules of worship were constantly being undercut and resisted by attempts to maintain prohibited “old customs” from the pre-Reformation past (vii). Crucifixes on rood screens, holy water stoups, and pieces of old altars and shrines had been left standing in some locales; Eucharistic vestments had to be confiscated; the keeping of rosaries and the ringing of bells for the dead had to be suppressed; the use of wafers at communion (as in the old Mass) was unsuccessfully discouraged in certain places, as well as the laying up of consecrated hosts in a pyx (i.e., reserving the sacrament for adoration or taking communion to the sick); vested perambulations around fields on rogation days persisted here and there. These survivals of Catholic practice, especially in rural areas, agree with Haigh’s contention, quoted above, that some clergy tried to keep the appearance of the old Mass within the prescribed English liturgy.

The veneration of relics was another “superstitious” practice that the new order tried to extirpate. One of the more bizarre evidences of Catholic piety surviving into an officially Protestant reign was the action of one William Tesimond, who confessed to an ecclesiastical commission in York (13 November 1572) that “he had in his chest certein heires taken of the bearde of the late executed [Thomas Percy,] earle of Northumberland, which he got after the execution by cutting it of[f] him self when the head was in the Tolboothe on Owsebridge to be set upon the stake” for public warning to would-be traitors (Purvis 166). Northumberland, a leading insurgent of the Northern Rising (a failed attempt to restore Catholicism as the state religion), could be seen as a holy martyr and potential saint by followers for whom the present monarch was nothing less than a dangerous heretic deservedly excommunicated by the Pope. The condemned man himself had worn on the scaffold a treasured relic given him by Mary Queen of Scots—a thorn supposedly preserved from Christ’s crown at the Crucifixion set into a golden cross (Lee 24:435). Northumberland’s decapitation occurred when Shakespeare was a small boy, but he would have been acutely aware of later scenes when dedicated Jesuits such as Campion, Walpole, and Southwell were publicly butchered as threats to the regime and devout spectators attempted to dip handkerchiefs in their blood or retrieve some rag of blood-stained clothing to be treasured as sacred emblems of their sacrifice for the true faith. Edward Oldcorne, another Jesuit (martyred in 1606 in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot), provided yet another grisly relic for devoted followers when his eye, separated from its socket by the violence of his decapitator (he was beheaded after being disemboweled), was somehow retrieved by an onlooker and preserved as an object of veneration—a reminder of the gruesome scene in King Lear in which Gloucester’s eyes are gouged out on stage: “Out, vild jelly! / Where is thy lustre now? (3.7.83-84).^[30] Even non-Catholics could admire the courage of these men “and, in some cases, be moved to emulate” their example (Marotti, “Southwell’s Remains” 44, 51).^[31]

Such practices, secularized by virtue of a pre-Christian context, get reflected in Antony’s speech over the body of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in which the manipulative orator works up his audience to frenzy by referring to the generous bequests of the sacrificial victim. Had the people known the contents of his will, Antony tells them, “they would go and kiss dead Caesar’s wounds, / And dip their napkins in his sacred blood; / Yea, beg a hair of him for memory . . .” (Julius Caesar 3.2.132-34). Another reference to the same custom occurs in Calphurnia’s prophetic dream in which Caesar’s statue spouts blood to which “great men shall press / For tinctures, stains, relics, and cognizance” (2.2.88-89). Of course, the episodes in which these allusions occur do not necessarily commend such pieties to audience emulation or approval, and indeed Hooker, whom Shakespeare may have read, inveighs against those who blindly accept papal authority: “lett [them] submitt theire neckes to the yoke of Christe and ceasse to dye theire garments . . . in blood” (A Learned Discourse of Justification, in Hooker 5:148).^[32] Whether Shakespeare agreed with Hooker or not, bloody napkins or handkerchiefs in other plays testify to the dramatist’s awareness of extreme Catholic suffering. In 3 Henry VI, for example, the tiger-like Queen Margaret “stain[s a] napkin with the blood” taken “from the bosom of the boy” Rutland (1.4.79-81)—brother to the future Edward IV and Richard III—tortured and killed by Clifford after the lad has begged for a chance to “pray before I take my death” (1.3.35) and after a priest, his tutor, has interceded futilely to save the “innocent child” (1.3.8). Margaret then presides over the sanguinary execution of York, the boy’s father, and, after having forced him in mockery to wear a paper crown (in a parody of Christ’s crown of thorns), “bid[s] the father wipe his eyes” (1.4.139) with the “cloth . . . dipp’d . . . in [the] blood of [his] sweet boy” (1.4.157). Even in comedy where bloody tokens serve as mistaken evidence of violent deaths or mortal injuries, as, for example, Thisbe’s “mantle” stained by a lion’s “bloody mouth” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1.142-43) or the “bloody napkin” “Dy’d in [Orlando’s] blood” (As You Like It 4.3.138, 155), or the “bloody cloth” in Cymbeline (5.1.1) that convinces Posthumus that Imogen is dead, audiences may pick up some faint resonance of Catholic martyrdoms.

In a broader sense, the widespread shedding of blood onstage in Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies can be seen as related, at least subliminally, to the theology of Eucharistic sacrifice that had been suppressed (together with the Catholic Mass) but had persisted, albeit controversially, in the doctrine of Real Presence as defended by conservative anti-Calvinist Church of England divines such as Hooker and Andrewes. These and others laid stress, in the words of the Prayer Book, on Christ’s “full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world” as reenacted liturgically in the “holy mysteries” of the altar (Book of Common Prayer, ed. Booty 259, 263). C. L. Barber speaks of the “famished, insatiable spiritual hunger” of Elizabethans for pre-Reformation ritual, of “the search for alternative incarnation,” as leading to stage presentations that might offer their own compensatory mystique (Barber and Wheeler 29). For Barber and other commentators, the death of figures such as Talbot in 1 Henry VI, which Thomas Nashe thought gave spectators the opportunity to “behold” a national hero “fresh bleeding” in performance after performance, “recalled and redefined the central element of the Corpus Christi plays: the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood” (Pierce Peniless His Supplication to the Devill, Nashe 1:212; Knapp 218). But, as Jeffrey Knapp argues in the essay just quoted, the view that stage bloodshed in Shakespeare’s histories amounts to nothing more than a secular analogue to the Catholic mystery of the medieval plays, stripped of religious significance, is a damaging oversimplification.^[33]

Knapp reminds us that thirty-nine of Shakespeare’s forty-four references to Christ occur in the two historical tetralogies, as do two-thirds of his “direct references to the Mass, as well as eight of his nine” uses of the word sacrament (227). Of course much of the bloodshed, as in the retributive execution of York mentioned above or in the violent demise of Richard III at Bosworth, is designed to dramatize the fruits of overweening ambition and pride and to evoke either horror at human savagery or the satisfaction of long-delayed justice. But the murders of Henry VI, associated with “church-like humors” (2 Henry VI 1.1.247) and a fondness for “brazen images of canonized saints” (2 Henry VI 1.3.60), and of Richard II, described as “the figure of God’s majesty, / His captain, steward, deputy elect” (Richard II 4.1.125-26), more readily comport with the notion of royal sacrifice, reinforced by the Tudor emphasis on sacral kingship. The histories convey a more encompassing idea of national sacrifice in phrases such as the “purple testament of bleeding war” (Richard II 3.3.94) and in the tragic reference to the aftermath of Agincourt, the hero of which glorious victory bequeathed his achievement to a child monarch whose managers “lost France, and made his England bleed” (Henry V, Epilogue 12). The final play of the second tetralogy ends by referring audiences back to the long sequence of bloodshed that had comprised the earlier group of dramas on the Wars of the Roses, inviting them to share in memory the bloody travails of a long national nightmare out of which had ultimately emerged the Tudors and the reign of Gloriana. The protracted record of violent deaths and sacrificial bloodletting might invoke not only the persecution of Catholics but equally perhaps the national myth of freedom from Romish tyranny through the memory of Protestant martyrdoms as enshrined in Foxe’s nationalistic Acts and Monuments.

Concepts of blood sacrifice with their symbolic relevance to the Eucharist extend into Shakespearean tragedy. The most prominent example is undoubtedly Macbeth, in which the murder of Duncan, “a most sainted king” (4.3.109), is described as “sacrilegious”—a violation of the “Lord’s anointed temple” involving theft of the “life o’ th’ building” (2.3.67-69) with its overtones of stealing the reserved sacrament from a tabernacle. The slain body with its “gash’d stabs” evokes the medieval iconography of martyrdom, the king’s “silver skin lac’d with his golden blood” (2.3.112-13), as in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “gash gold-vermilion” (“The Windhover,” l.14; see Hopkins 144). Also, the dramatist fortifies his moral contrast between a sacred king and a “bloody-sceptred” usurper (4.3.104), whose “deep damnation” (1.7.20) is assured, by introducing an emphatically protracted allusion to “the most pious” King Edward the Confessor (3.6.27), Macbeth’s contemporary in England, with his divine gifts of healing and prophecy. As most spectators would have known, Saint Edward was a prototype of present and future English monarchs (he had been the patron saint of England until Edward III displaced him in favor of Saint George) whose remains in Westminster Abbey continued to be venerated by Catholics and some Protestants. Relics of Edward’s coronation regalia continued to be used in English coronations up through the reign of Charles I until they were finally destroyed or sold by Oliver Cromwell (Barlow 277; Coit 59).^[34]

Macbeth alludes twice to Holy Communion, the forbidden receiving of which his crime will make blasphemous. Before the murder, he foresees an “even-handed justice” that “Commends th’ ingredience of our poison’d chalice / To our own lips” (1.7.10-12). After his treason he refers to having “Put rancors in the vessel of [his] peace” (3.1.66). Shakespeare may well have recalled the Prayer Book “exhortation” to prospective communicants, which reminds them that “as the benefit is great” to those who receive “with a truly penitent heart,” “so is the danger great” to the unrepentant: “For then we be guilty of the body and blood of Christ,” “eat[ing] and drink[ing] our own damnation” (Book of Common Prayer, ed. Booty 257-58).^[35] For an unconfessed regicide, receiving the Blessed Sacrament would be equivalent to quaffing “baboon’s blood” (4.1.37), an ingredient of the witches’ hellish brew.^[36] Early in the tragedy, a bloody sergeant reports Macbeth’s valor in vanquishing another traitor, Macdonwald, “unseam[ing] him from the nave to th’ chops” (1.2.22), and creating by the wholesale slaughter of foreign invaders “another Golgotha” as if he and Banquo had “meant to bathe in reeking wounds” (1.2.39-40). As many have noted, this description of bravery in defense of King Duncan’s realm serves also as an ironic adumbration of Macbeth’s tyrannical bloodshed and eventual punishment. Nor should we forget that at least some in Shakespeare’s audience would have witnessed the “unseaming” of bodies at Tyburn, where traitors, whether Catholic or Protestant, were publicly drawn and quartered. Macduff’s woeful cry in reaction to the slaughter that has engulfed Scotland, “Bleed, bleed, poor country!” (4.3.31), universalizes the wounding, extending it from individuals to the nation as a whole and tying it into the theme of tragic sacrifice—not only of the speaker’s innocent family but of Scotland itself until the “grace of Grace” (5.9.38) can be restored under Malcolm.

The idea of blood sacrifice as an aspect of politics comes across powerfully in the assassination of Caesar in Shakespeare’s popular Roman tragedy. Brutus urges the conspirators to think of their revolutionary coup as quasi-religious:

And the implied analogy between killing a would-be king, “thrice presented” with “a kingly crown” (3.2.96), and attempts upon Elizabeth’s life would be reinforced for educated members of a Globe audience who knew of Caesar’s “personal divinity” as “pontifex maximus,” High Priest of the College of Pontifs (Cerasano xiii). As S. P. Cerasano observes, Shakespeare’s invented action of having Brutus and his accomplices “wash their hands in Caesar’s blood . . . turns the moment into a horrifying parody of hands clasped in friendship and devotion” (xix). Additionally, and to even greater horrific effect, it may remind spectators, however remotely, of the Prayer of Humble Access, recited in the established church before partaking of the Eucharist, in which participants pray “that our sinful bodies may be made clean by [Christ’s] body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood” (Book of Common Prayer, ed. Booty 263). Similar sacramental ironies may attend the vengeful bloodletting in Titus Andronicus in which the “irreligious piety” (1.1.130) of Alarbus’s sacrifice is staged (“Let’s hew his limbs till they be clean consum’d” [1.1.129]) and in which the mutilated Lavinia holds a basin to receive blood from the cut throats of Chiron and Demetrius, whose heads are then baked into a pie for consumption by their mother—a hideous pagan analogue of the “Lord’s Supper” in which Anglicans (as well as Catholics) “spiritually eat the flesh of Christ, and drink his blood” (Book of Common Prayer, ed. Booty 254, 258).^[37]

Even Othello tries to regard his violence upon Desdemona in religious terms although it involves no visible blood—concerned that she confess her sins as she would be required to do before receiving communion: “I would not kill thy unprepared spirit, / No, heaven forfend! I would not kill thy soul” (5.2.31-32). Then, when she denies unfaithfulness, he accuses her of “perjury”: “thou dost stone my heart, / And mak’st me call what I intend to do / A murther, which I thought a sacrifice” (5.2.63-65). Othello, a Christian convert, reverts to paganism, ultimately executing justice upon himself as an apostate. It was Shakespeare’s way to mingle pagan and Christian ideas of sacrifice and to introduce religious and sacramental ideas into secular or historically pre-Christian settings and situations. But such dramatic transformations and realignments of religious thinking could never have succeeded so powerfully except to audiences for whom Christianity in all its varied expressions, Catholic, Church of England, or Puritan among them, was a present and abiding concern.

The Catholic sacrament of Penance or auricular confession was not heavily emphasized in the reformed Church of England, principally because it considered Baptism and the Eucharist the only two biblical sacraments. A General Confession was always recited congregationally, the people “meekly kneeling,” at Matins and Holy Communion, followed by the priest’s prescribed absolution, which was considered sufficient for most persons. Nevertheless provision for private confession to a priest was made, not only in an “exhortation” preceding the communion service but also in the rite for the Visitation of the Sick. Prospective communicants who could not quiet their consciences without counsel were adjured to confer individually with a priest to “receive comfort and the benefit of absolution.” Those who were too ill to attend church and “troubled with any weighty matter” were urged to “make a special confession” after which they would receive priestly absolution in words provided by the Prayer Book (Book of Common Prayer, ed. Booty 50-51, 257, 259-60, 303). Hooker, the Thomas Aquinas of the Anglican settlement, defended auricular confession and was himself privately confessed on his deathbed; Andrewes was also a strong believer in the practice (see Walton 224; Gibbs).^[38]

Shakespeare refers often to the sacrament of Penance, especially in the histories and Romeo and Juliet, usually in the vocabulary of shrift and shriving.^[39] In Richard III, he puts auricular confession to effective dramatic use as a means of underscoring the unpredictable de casibus fall of Lord Hastings. On the last day of his life, Hastings confers briefly and complacently with his confessor, a priest called “Sir John,” making an appointment for their next “exercise” the following “Sabbath” (3.2.110-11). At this point, he is joined by Buckingham, who will accompany him to the Tower to confer about the coronation of the child king Edward V: “What, talking with a priest, Lord Chamberlain? . . .Your honor hath no shriving work in hand” (3.2.113-15). Only hours later, Gloucester suddenly engineers Hastings’ condemnation, and Richard’s henchman Ratcliff callously orders the doomed man to “Make a short shrift” (3.4.95) so that the Duke can see his severed head before he dines. A wiser Hastings is compelled to acknowledge, “O now I need the priest that spake to me!” (3.4.87).

Although mentions of churchly penance appear regularly in the first historical tetralogy, their absence from Henry IV and indeed from the second sequence as a group hints at a new secular trend in the dramatization of history, or at least at a shift away from the traditionally Catholic and Church of England importance of reconciliation between Christians and between them and God as a feature of one’s ordinary religious obligation.^[40] Falstaff, however, is forever vowing to reform his life in a way for which Puritans were notorious. Unsurprisingly two references to “amendment of life,” a standard Prayer Book phrase associated with repentance, appear twice in the dialogue. Prince Hal refers sarcastically to Falstaff’s “good amendment of life” (1 Henry IV 1.2.102) and Falstaff himself chides Bardolph, “Do thou amend thy face, and I’ll amend my life” (1 Henry IV 3.3.24-25). Although the Geneva Bible uses such language in Matthew 3:8 and 3:11; Luke 15:7; and Acts 3:19 and 26:20, the Church of England liturgy is most likely Shakespeare’s immediate source. The services of Morning and Evening Prayer urge worshippers to “Amend your lives, for the kingdom of God is at hand.” The Litany prays “to amend our lives according to thy holy Word.” The command to “confess yourselves . . . with full purpose of amendment of life” appears in one of the exhortations before Holy Communion, and we find “Amend your lives, and be in perfect charity with all men” in the same rite (Book of Common Prayer, ed. Booty 49, 71, 257, 258). Of course, those who could remember the reign of Mary Tudor would be entirely familiar with auricular confession since the Church under her guidance had placed “strong emphasis on the value of the sacrament of penance” (Duffy, Stripping of the Altars 539).

Reformist iconoclasm, dedicated to the abolition of “idolatry,” had succeeded in removing most statues of saints from English churches in Shakespeare’s time, and the granting of indulgences must have seemed even more remote to most playgoers. Smith draws our attention, however, to two evidences of Catholic sensibility with reference of statues and indulgences in The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest in ways that make them “inoffensive to a Protestant ear” (66). When Perdita kneels to what she assumes to be a statue of her mother, she performs an act that would remind many in the audience of devotion to Our Lady:

Prospero’s final address to the theater audience, asking to be “reliev’d by prayer” (Tempest, Epilogue 16) invokes the much decried practice of remitting time in Purgatory for Catholics who paid money or performed some supererogatory act such as bringing fuel for the burning of heretics at the stake (a macabre practice of the late fifteenth century mentioned by Foxe) (Duffy, Stripping of the Altars 289): “As you from crimes would pardon’d be, / Let your indulgence set me free” (19-20). The technical Catholic sense of “indulgence” does not, of course, exclude the more general meaning of compassionate release effected by being prayed for (note the echoed terms of the Lord’s Prayer) with the obvious implication that all Christians have a duty to pray for their fellows according to “the mutuall charitie that wee beare one toward another” (in the words of the Homily on Prayer) (Rickey and Stroup 116). In both instances, the secular context and the translation of religious practice into symbol or metaphor renders them entirely benign to mixed audiences who might represent a range of confessional attitudes and affiliations.

Reformation theologians, in their anxiety about Catholic superstition, tended to be skeptical toward claims of the miraculous in modern times. Shakespeare seems to endorse this view in the episode of 2 Henry VI in which the wise and good Duke Humphrey, the lone figure of unselfishness in a corrupt court, unmasks the fake “miracle” of the charlatan Simpcox, who claims, and is believed by the gullible, to have been cured of genetic blindness by Saint Alban at his “holy shrine” (2.1.59, 86). On the other hand, the playwright also represents genuine miracles such as Helena’s cure of the French king’s fistula with implied commendation. As she herself points out to her incredulous patient:

In the same comedy, nevertheless, rationalism receives its due in a comment by Lafew: “They say miracles are past, and we have our philosophical persons, to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless” (2.3.1-3). The Archbishop of Canterbury in Henry V expresses a similar sentiment, responding to Ely’s view that Prince Hal’s reformation from playboy to “a true lover of the holy Church” took place not suddenly but gradually “Under the veil of wildness”: “It must be so; for miracles are ceas’d . . .” (1.1.23, 64-67).

We are obviously meant to take seriously the “miraculous work” of Edward the Confessor (Macbeth 4.3.147), whose “touching” for the “king’s evil” was practiced by both Tudor and Stuart monarchs before, during, and after Shakespeare’s lifetime.^[42] The practice was clearly a survival of royal Catholic tradition but was apparently acceptable even to anti-superstitious Protestants as a reflection of monarchical divine right. (Anti-Catholic prejudices, especially in light of the recent Gunpowder Plot [1605], are catered for in the same play by the satirical reference to equivocation in the Porter’s speech [2.3.31-35], which alludes to the trial of the Jesuit conspirator, Father Garnet.) Edgar attempts to cure his father’s despair by appealing to the reality of miracles in King Lear (4.6.55), convincing the blind Gloucester that divine intervention has preserved his life in a fall from the dizzying heights of Dover Cliff. However illusory the physics of Gloucester’s “fall” may be in the subject’s damaged perception, his consequent shift from nihilism to stoic forbearance comes across as a valid miracle, psychologically received. Shakespeare also arouses our sense of religious wonder amounting to miracle at many points where the seemingly impossible magically occurs on stage. When Henry V at Agincourt learns that, except for a few of high birth, “But five and twenty” of his other men have perished as compared with a great number of the French, he can only attribute the astonishing result to otherworldly causes: “O God, thy arm was here . . .” (Henry V 4.8.106). Audiences are intended to experience a similar sense of theophany by Jupiter’s descent in Cymbeline, by the resurrections of Thaisa and Hermione in Pericles and The Winter’s Tale, by the unfathomable preservations from shipwreck in The Tempest that Gonzalo calls a “miracle” (2.1.6), and by the miraculous unions^[43] and lordly forgiveness, with their suggestion of supernatural intervention, that conclude the same play.

If such examples of heavenly influence in human affairs seem to reflect a Catholic understanding of divine grace, they are no less applicable to a Church of England mentality. But it must be admitted that the magical elements of institutional Christianity are more generally amenable to Catholic than to radical Protestant sensibilities.^[44] As Marotti suggests, “Shakespeare (like many conservative Protestants) might have been trying to salvage for a post-Catholic English culture some of those emotionally powerful features of medieval Catholicism that broadened the range of religious experience and perception, preserving a sense of the mysteriousness and wondrousness of both the natural and supernatural worlds” (“Shakespeare and Catholicism” 230).

What, if anything, may be inferred concerning Shakespeare’s religious preferences or attitudes from his characterization of clerics on the stage? Not surprisingly, the evidence is mixed. With a few exceptions, the bishops and cardinals, essentially, because, for the most part they are involved in power politics or represent hostile governments abroad, fail to evoke much sympathy. Naturally, most of these are Catholics since they appear in the history plays which, except for Henry VIII, are set in pre-Reformation periods. Episcopacy, as Taylor reminds us, was indissolubly tied to monarchy. When the more radical Puritans were urging presbyterianism as a better system of church government, James I objected, “No bishop, no king” (309).^[45] It is, therefore, not surprising to find the lords spiritual in Shakespeare’s dramas taking political and even military roles alongside the lords temporal. But it is the kings and the secular nobility in whom the dramatist is almost invariably more interested as subjects for psychological and emotional conflict than the divines.

Henry Beauford, Bishop of Winchester and afterwards Cardinal in 1 and 2 Henry VI, is the most wicked of the prelates—a dedicated enemy of the good Duke Humphrey, a hollow-hearted, arrogant, and treacherous killer who “regards nor God nor king” (1 Henry VI 1.3.60), and a churchman whose “red sparkling eyes blab his heart’s malice” (2 Henry VI 3.1.154); he dies blaspheming, guilt-ridden, and terrified. As a group, the bishops in Richard III are presented as either toadies to secular politicians or weak and pliable figures whom Gloucester can control like chessmen. The Archbishop of York, “[w]ind-changing Warwick[’s]” brother who had carelessly allowed his prisoner Edward IV to escape in 3 Henry VI (4.5.12-13, 5.1.57), and whose sole function in the next drama is to appear as the guardian of Edward V’s younger sibling, is easily outflanked by Cardinal Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury. The primate of all England begins by defending the right of sanctuary for the boy and his mother but then quickly backs down when Buckingham puts pressure on him as “too senseless-obstinate . . . Too ceremonious and traditional” (Richard III 3.1.44-45). Morton, Bishop of Ely, an undoubted opponent of Gloucester’s decision to frame and dispose of Hastings, is briefly dispatched from the council chamber to send for strawberries from his garden so that Gloucester and Catesby can privately confer. Their shocking decision is to agree hastily to have the Lord Chancellor condemned without trial. The two wordless bishops, “props of virtue for a Christian prince” (3.7.96), who appear on either side of Gloucester when he is pretending to shun the crown in a seriocomic display of hypocrisy, are mere bits of ecclesiastical furniture to assist a power grab. Richard Scroop, the rebel Archbishop of York who allies himself with the Percys in the Henry IV plays, is a disappointed power-seeker, soldier, and traitor whom Prince John scolds as a man who has deserted his spiritual “flock,” at the same time abandoning “exposition[s] on the holy text,” to become “an iron man . . . Turning the word to sword and life to death” (2 Henry IV 4.2.5-10). The playwright complicates our generally negative response to Scroop by making him the naïve victim of Prince John’s cynical trickery. Having promised to redress the prelate’s grievances if he will dismiss his rebel army, John straightaway breaks faith and, taking him prisoner, sends him instantly to execution. Canterbury and Ely, the bishops in Henry V, also function in a political context, authorizing the king to invade France and donating an unprecedented sum in aid thereof to avoid having lands, revenues, and historical privileges stripped from the Church. When Henry warns them to take heed “How you awake our sleeping sword of war,” Canterbury is ready to take “The sin upon my head” (1.2.22, 97). Such venal motives on the part of the high clergy tend to contaminate the otherwise heroic tone of Henry’s enterprise.

Another unsavory Catholic politician, presented as a surrogate for the Pope’s presumptuous interference in the affairs of sovereign nations, is Cardinal Pandulf, the casuistical legate in King John. This “meddling priest” (3.1.163) both enkindles and bans war under pain of ecclesiastical interdict, opportunistically manipulating both English and French royalty. And we can imagine the enmity toward Rome that even English Catholics, loyal to Elizabeth, might feel in the scene that shows her medieval predecessor yielding up his crown in symbolic vassalage to an “Italian priest,” i.e., the Pope, who would presume to “tithe or toll in [John’s] dominions” (3.1.153-54, 5.1.1-2). Pandulph does arrange the peace between England and France with which the play ends, but his overall role represents him as a worldly foreign power-broker in scarlet robes, a costume that would have prompted hostility in almost knee-jerk fashion from most Elizabethans. Shakespeare also characterizes both Cardinal Wolsey and Catholic-leaning Bishop Gardiner, Henry VIII’s secretary, as more concerned with power, influence, and (in the case of Wolsey) wealth than in Christian virtue or humility. To be sure, the latter’s fall is accompanied by a moving soliloquy on the vanity of “pomp” and worldly “glory” (Henry VIII 3.2.365) plus a report by Griffith that he ultimately “found the blessedness of being little” (4.2.66).

As observed earlier, Gardiner serves as a foil to Archbishop Cranmer, who endures humiliation with dignity and emerges as the soul of “integrity” (5.1.114), while his enemy, his “cruel nature” having been exposed, tries to regain his standing with the king through “flattery” and “play[ing] the spaniel” (5.2.159-64). Compeius, legate from the Vatican, presides with his fellow cardinal over the commission to hear the king’s divorce case, and is introduced as a “just and learned priest” (2.2.96); but, as a supporter of Wolsey against Queen Katherine, for whom great sympathy is evoked, he functions solely as an arm of papal authority—detached, unfeeling, and “political” rather than holy. The king himself remarks, “These Cardinals trifle with me; I abhor / This dilatory sloth and tricks of Rome” (2.4.237-38). The only other bishop in Shakespeare with Cranmer’s “integrity” is Carlisle in Richard II, who is brave enough to protest Bolingbroke’s usurpation in the man’s presence, to assert that he is a “foul traitor” to the anointed king, and to predict a result that theater audiences already knew to be true: “The blood of English shall manure the ground / And future ages groan for this foul act” (Richard II 4.1. 135-38). Unsurprisingly, the price of Carlisle’s courage is instant arrest for treason. Even Henry IV, however, finally spares his life, acknowledging in him “High sparks of honor” (5.6.29). Carlisle’s friend and supporter, the Abbot of Westminster, hardly has a character, although he tries unsuccessfully to organize a conspiracy to restore Richard, “tak[ing] the sacrament” (4.1.328) to guarantee his secrecy. In this tragedy of fallen kingship, the Abbot operates merely as a second churchly foe of usurpation, thus establishing (to judge from voices heard onstage) that religious gravitas weighs heavily on Richard’s side.

Only a few of Shakespeare’s lower Catholic clergy produce negative reactions. The most obvious villains in this category are Hume and Southwell, the conjuring priests of 2 Henry VI who, with the witch Marjory Jordan and her confederate Bolingbroke, are in contact with diabolic powers and serve the misguided ambitions of Duke Humphrey’s duchess. But as the most recent Arden editor observes, part of the intended effect here is burlesque and demonic grotesquerie (Knowles 79-80). Hume, nevertheless, is portrayed as being in league with the arch-villains of the play, Cardinal Beauford and the Duke of Suffolk. Another criminal cleric is the fanatic monk (an offstage figure only) who poisons King John. Shakespeare, as often noted, significantly alters the tone of his source play, The Troublesome Reign of King John, by greatly reducing Peele’s strident anti-Catholicism—largely omitting, for example, the farcical satire on monks and monasteries and relegating the plot to poison John, together with the murder itself, to a brief narrative reference (5.6.23-30).^[46] By and large, the lesser clerics in Shakespeare’s histories are figures of peace such as Hastings’ confessor and Rutland’s tutor, whose presence onstage only serves to highlight the violence and brutality over which they can exert no control. We can exclude the putatively Shakespearean or part-Shakespearean Edward III from this survey since no clerics at all appear in the play. The same is true for the collaborative and censored play, Sir Thomas More.

The Catholic clergy in Shakespeare’s comedies are almost invariably benign figures such as the kindly Abbess who resolves the baffling confusions in The Comedy of Errors. That she is discovered ultimately to be the wife of Egeon says less about her theoretical chastity than about her function as a figure to assist in rectifying an intricate Plautine tangle in which the reunion of families becomes the dominant consideration. Friar Francis plays a vital and charitable role in rehabilitating the reputation of Hero, the falsely accused ingénue of Much Ado About Nothing, being one of the few persons who believes in her innocence. Protecting her under the fiction that she is dead, he officiates ultimately in the “holy rites” (5.4.68) of her interrupted union with Claudio as well as those of Beatrice and Benedick, the witty enemies of romance who finally succumb to their formerly unacknowledged attraction to each other. The character who presides over the quadruple marriage at the end of As You Like It is “a person representing Hymen” rather than a Christian priest. Catholic ethos is nevertheless supplied by an offstage “old religious man” (5.4.160)^[47] who converts Duke Frederick from usurper and would-be fratricide to a pious Christian; he renounces the world, presumably by entering a monastery. Orlando has already converted his malicious brother Oliver to virtue by preserving him from a dangerous snake and hungry lioness while the cynical Jaques joins the suddenly reformed duke, apparently to profit morally and spiritually from his volte face: “Out of these convertites / There is much matter to be heard and learn’d” (5.4.184-85).

Isabella, the excessively severe nun of Measure for Measure, who rates her chastity more highly than her brother’s life (2.4.185), but who also intercedes for her betrayer Angelo even when she believes he has had him executed, functions as the moral center of this problematic play. As a novice of the austere “poor Clares,” she voices to the seemingly wiser Sister Francesca a desire for even “a more strict restraint” (1.4.4) upon the cloister. One might suppose then that the dramatist has solidly grounded the play in Catholic values. It is set in Vienna, an incontestable venue of the old religion. But the role of Duke Vincentio—who with the help of Friar Thomas disguises himself as a fellow celibate monastic called Lodowick, who falsely claims to be on “special business from his Holiness” (3.2.220), who eavesdrops on a private interview between Isabella and her brother, who arranges for Angelo to bed his rejected fiancée Mariana in the belief that she is Isabella, who hears confessions without priestly warrant (5.1.527), who manipulates all the principals with the collusion of Friar Peter, and who finally offers the icily righteous nun his hand in marriage while still attired in a cowl—calls the play’s Catholic assumptions into urgent question. Catholic orders in this case serve as a ruse for spying upon the Duke’s subjects and of redirecting their lives as a puppeteer might handle marionettes. To all this trickery, the legitimate wearers of habits lend their ready and secret cooperation.

Clerics in the other comedies are all Protestants and targets of satirical deflation. The curate Nathaniel of Love’s Labour’s Lost is paired with the schoolmaster Holofernes, both of them pedants who “have been at a great feast of languages, and stol’n the scraps” (5.1.36-37). Martext, the inadequate hedge-priest of As You Like It, has already been mentioned as a Puritan ignoramus. Sir Hugh Evans, the dialectally idiosyncratic Welsh parson of The Merry Wives of Windsor who speaks “flannel” (5.5.163) and “makes fritters of English” (5.5.143), ridiculously promotes the verbally limited Slender, “bashful almost to the point of nonexistence” (Riverside Shakespeare 322) and the most vacuous of Anne Page’s suitors. All three are studies in comic stupidity and reflections, perhaps, of the Church of England’s scarcity of properly educated priests, especially in the rural and more remote parts of the country. The curate Sir Topas of Twelfth Night, the Church of England parson whom Feste cleverly impersonates in supposing to cure Malvolio of possession by the devil, comes off as yet another vignette of churchly absurdity. Mock-serious, spouting false Latin, pretentiously learned (he refers to Pythagoras, King Gorboduc, and “the old hermit of Prague” [4.2.12-13, 50]), falsely bearded, and apparently clad in a Calvinist’s black gown (perhaps with a surplice over it), he epitomizes the hypocritical Puritan who conforms outwardly to established Church requirements while harboring near-separatist views. When Maria provides him with his costume, Feste comments mordantly, “Well . . . I will dissemble myself in’t, and I would I were the first that ever dissembled in such a gown” (4.2.4-6).^[48]

The tragedies are notably deficient in church characters (with the notable exception of Friar Lawrence and Friar John, the holy Franciscans of Romeo and Juliet who try their best to support the doomed lovers, and the previously mentioned court priest at Ophelia’s burial). None appears in Othello, King Lear, or Macbeth. Timon of Athens and the four Roman plays, being set in pre-Christian societies, have no occasion to introduce Christian clerics or even pagan priests. Cressida’s father, Calchas, is a Trojan priest but has no religious function in Troilus and Cressida.

As Robert Lublin points out, the costuming of clerical characters on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage tended to be ideologically coded (chapter 4). Ordinarily, spectators at the theater could quickly distinguish Catholic, Church of England, and Puritan clergymen by their distinctive dress. Cardinals in their red cassocks and skull caps or broad-brimmed hats signaled worldliness, luxury, avarice, corruption, and religious hypocrisy if not diabolic evil, as in Shakespeare’s Beauford, Pandulf, and Wolsey. Webster’s depraved cardinals in The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, Ford’s in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, and Shirley’s in The Cardinal obviously constitute variations on an Italianate stereotype.^[49] As Vittoria in The White Devil remarks of Monticelso, later to become Pope, “O poor charity! / Thou art seldom found in scarlet” (3.2.70-71). Bishops or archbishops in purple cassocks or copes and mitres tended also to suggest pre-Reformation establishment power, wealth, and privilege, representing, as they usually do, the Church as an arm of social and governmental control. Church of England bishops such as Cranmer would ordinarily be depicted onstage in rochet (with full lawn sleeves), chimere, and Canterbury cap as distinct from the Eucharistic chasuble or cope of their earlier counterparts.^[50] Puritan clergy, who regarded even the Anglican surplice as intolerably “popish,” were probably staged in simple black gowns, perhaps of Genevan cut of the kind Feste (as Sir Topas) seems to wear.

Friars and monks were costumed more or less alike in simple habits of brown or gray with cowls and rope girdles. In the morality plays and in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, monastics had come to be identified with lasciviousness and hellish conjuring. Faustus, summoning up Mephistopheles, charges him to appear in the guise of “an old Franciscan friar” since that “holy shape becomes a devil best” (1.3.26-27, A-text, Bevington and Rasmussen 127). But obedient, patriotic, and learned friars such as Bacon in Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay could project an honorable image onstage, their simplicity of attire, devotional sincerity, and loyalty to king and country representing Christian values of which both Catholic and Church of England theatergoers could approve. It is clearly this category to which Friars Lawrence and Francis of Romeo and Juliet and Much Ado belong. Friar Lawrence, like the reformed Bacon, combines learning (expertise in herbalism) with Christian devotion. And also like Greene’s protagonist (after he has repented his meddling with “nigroromantic charms” and renounced “Conjuring . . . devils and fiends”) (Greene, Friar Bacon xiii.89-90), Lawrence evinces no tendency to misuse scholarship for concourse with the powers of darkness. Paradoxically, of course, Friar Lawrence’s legitimate use of arcane knowledge (the use of a sleeping potion in tune with nature) cannot avert the death of the lovers he tries to save despite his best intentions. Contrastingly, Friar Bacon’s necromancy (at odds with nature) threatens and delays the union of Margaret and Lacy and must ultimately give place to the triumphant magic of romantic love as solemnized by marriage. Bacon’s powers of prognostication are transformed from the dangerous to the beneficent, from the potentially hellish to the “mystical” (xvi.63), portending “bliss unto this matchless realm” of England (xvi.39). Such are the trajectories that divide tragedy from comedy. The point is that Shakespeare, like Greene, could portray friars as admirable figures, collapsing their identity as Catholics into generalized images of simple churchly beneficence in a way that occluded Reformation or pre-Reformation ideology.

The diminished concern with churchly characters, already noticed in the tragedies, applies even more radically to the romances, which contain no ecclesiastics whatever. Are we to infer, then, that Shakespeare, as he grew to the full height of his powers as a dramatist, lost interest in institutional Christianity, or perhaps even that intellectual maturity or personal experience had caused him to forsake its creedal tenets? This seems unlikely since Henry VIII, composed late in his career, allows the Christian church and its higher clergy a prominent and accepted place among the subjects treated. Besides which, tragicomedy, to which Shakespeare increasingly turned, “specializes in bringing happiness out of near-disaster, which is why Guarini considered it the only kind of drama that truly reflected Christian belief” (Potter, ed., The Two Noble Kinsmen 5). Absence of priests in the final plays undoubtedly derives from their fantasy worlds and pseudo-Hellenistic, semi-mythical content. Defamiliarization, journeys to remote places, and anti-realism become strategies of the genre. The romances’ strong element of supernaturalism involving strangeness, wonder, and miracle, their focus on painful losses followed by amazing reunions of long-lost loved ones, their symbolic resurrections from the dead with intimations of immortality, their preservation of innocence in contexts of depravity, their presentation of harmony emerging from discord (to the frequent accompaniment of music), and their dramatic exploitation of the purposely improbable—these elements establish contexts in which settled and familiar religious institutions would be otiose and out of place. Shakespeare transports us through fanciful plots and characters and by means of spiritually charged language to imaginary regions and states of mind where theophany seems somehow proximate or potentially apprehensible. Like Gloucester, we are invited in the romances to consider “that the clearest gods . . . make them honors / Of men’s impossibilities” (King Lear 4.6.73-74).

Here classical divinities replace or stand in for the Trinity. In Pericles, Thaisa becomes a priestess of Diana, sheltering herself in the goddess’s temple at Ephesus, a city that (as in The Comedy of Errors) would have reminded theatergoers of Saint Paul. At one point she is called a “nun” (5.3.15). “Celestial” Diana actually appears onstage in a vision to order Pericles to “perform [her] bidding” (5.1.247-50), and we hear of a banquet to celebrate the feast of Neptune (5.Chorus 16-19). The classical deities of chastity and the sea obviously suggest that both Thaisa and Pericles pursue their destinies under divine protection. Cymbeline, set like Lear in pre-Christian Britain, portrays a society whose gods are also Roman but which ultimately makes peace with Caesar Augustus, the emperor in whose reign Christ was born. Posthumus experiences a dream vision in which the ghosts of his parents pray to Jupiter, the “Thunder-master” (5.4.30), who then descends on an eagle, throws a thunderbolt, and announces that their son’s trials and sufferings will eventuate in married happiness. The message, allegorically received, is Christian rather than pagan and the theology in tune with martyrdom; tribulation paves the road to self-fulfillment, even glory: “Whom best I love, I cross; to make my gift, / The more delay’d, delighted. Be content, / Your low-laid son our godhead will uplift” (5.4.101-3).

In The Winter’s Tale, objective truths are lodged in the oracle of Delphos, “hand deliver’d / Of great Apollo’s priest” (3.2.127-28), whereas The Tempest presents a masque-like vision, magically produced by Prospero, in which spirits representing Iris, Ceres, Juno, nymphs, and reapers bless the nuptials of Ferdinand and Miranda. This court entertainment expresses the ideals of Christian marriage as divinely sponsored, chaste, and productive of offspring—values familiarly embodied in the Prayer Book “Solemnization of Matrimony,” which mentions “the mystical union . . . betwixt Christ and his Church,” the “avoid[ance of] fornication,” and “the procreation of children” (Book of Common Prayer, ed. Booty 290). Prospero, the godlike magus or “theurgist” who can control the forces of nature and command the four elements as emblematized by the spirit Ariel and the subhuman Caliban, finally renounces his supernatural powers, drowns his magic book, and forgives his enemies, humbly rejoining fallible humanity in a way that suggests the mystery of the Incarnation.^[51] Symbolically, we behold Omnipotence deigning to transform itself to Charity. Deity stoops to the condition of humanness. The great artist relinquishes his unique craft the better to promote social harmony and solidarity with his fellows. In the epilogue, the actor who had commanded the stage abandons his godlike role to speak to his audience as one of them—a man among men.

The closest thing to a priestly figure in The Winter’s Tale is Paulina (again associations with Saint Paul may be intended)—the court lady who sequesters the supposedly deceased Hermione and presides in a “chapel” (5.3.86) over her miraculous transformation from statue to living queen:

Pericles had already offered a curious precedent to this mystical resurrection in the scene in which Cerimon, also in quasi priest-like fashion, revives the putatively dead Thaisa coffined in a sea chest:

These numinously charged moments, although redolent of a mystical and Catholic sensibility, are by no means alien to conservative Protestantism, especially as embodied in the more traditionalist liturgical practice and theology of the Church of England as promoted in the works of Hooker, Donne, Andrewes, and George Herbert.

In the interests of completeness, brief mention may be made of Shakespeare’s non-dramatic works. By and large, these are devoid of clerics and religious content and can, therefore, be mostly ignored in the search for clues to the dramatist’s ecclesiastical affiliations or sympathies. Neither of the two narrative poems—the Ovidian-erotic Venus and Adonis (taken from Roman mythology) and the more solemn Rape of Lucrece (based on pre-Christian Roman history)—contains any tantalizing confessional hints, both being more concerned with the exercise of wit, rhetorical invention, and evocative description in the service of sexual experience than with devotional or churchly matters. The sonnets, although they occasionally invoke Christian imagery (e.g., “sings hymns at heaven’s gate” [29.12], “holy and obsequious tear,” “dear religious love” [31.5-6], “like prayers divine” [108.5]), focus on human, not sacred, love. Shakespeare’s apparent nostalgia for the old religion comes out, as mentioned earlier, in the allusion to the “Bare ruin’d choirs” [73.4] of destroyed monasteries, besides which we have the anomalous religious sonnet 146 (“Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth”), which dwells on the immortality of the speaker’s soul as contrasted with the decaying body that temporarily houses it; this entirely conventional idea is equally amenable to both Church of England and Roman Catholic belief. For our purposes, the one potentially fruitful non-dramatic work is The Phoenix and the Turtle, Shakespeare’s cryptically allegorical and enigmatically mystical poem contributed to Robert Chester’s Love’s Martyr (1601).

Chester’s long, rambling, and pedestrian verses announce themselves as Allegorically Shadowing the Truth of Love, in the Constant Fate of the Phoenix and Turtle, while a group of shorter poems appended under the separate designation of “diverse poetical essays on the former subject” includes Shakespeare’s untitled contribution along with others by “Ignoto” (author unknown), John Marston, George Chapman, and Ben Jonson. The collection is dedicated to the prominent Welshman Sir John Salusbury of Lleweni, Denbighshire—a cousin of Queen Elizabeth, a man related by marriage to the earls of Derby (the Stanley family), an Esquire of the Queen’s Body, a literary patron, a Middle Templar, and a person knighted the same year Love’s Martyr was published for his “active part” in helping to suppress the Essex rebellion (Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen, eds. 107). Sir John’s cousin Owen Salusbury was shot dead during the uprising as a supporter of the earl, and his elder brother Thomas, a dedicated Catholic, had been executed in 1586 for complicity in the Babington Plot. The volume’s dedicatee (who could be suspected as a potential claimant to the throne because his mother, Katheryn Tudor of Berain, was a direct descendant of Henry VII, and who might be thought dangerous because of his Catholic connections) was especially keen to establish his bona fides as a loyal subject of Her Majesty and a faithful conformist in the Church of England.

G. Wilson Knight (in 1955) and John Finnis and Patrick Martin (in 2003) have contended that Shakespeare’s beautiful but puzzlingly abstruse poem meets “a widely felt desire” for Shakespeare “to have written at least one mystical, religious or devotional work, whether Catholic or otherwise” (Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen, eds. 93). Knight interprets the poem without significant reference to organized Christianity in the context of Shakespeare’s sonnets, its theme of transcendence rising out of the poet’s constant love for the beautiful youth with the sexual ambiguity of the relationship figured in the female aspect of the Phoenix (the boy) and in the maleness of the Turtle-dove (his unwavering adorer); the “central purpose” is to celebrate “a mystical love-union beyond sex,” the “very death of truth and beauty creat[ing] a third unknown immortality” in which, like the Christian Trinity, difference is caught up in and fused with unity (199-200): “Number there in love was slain” (The Phoenix and the Turtle l.28). Finnis and Martin add their voices to the increasingly popular trend of regarding Shakespeare as a secret Catholic by coding the Phoenix as Anne Lyne (a Catholic martyr executed in 1601 for harboring a subversive priest) and the Turtle as her faithful husband Roger (who was imprisoned and exiled in 1591 and died in Flanders three or four years later). Somewhat more convincingly (in respect of their detailed historical contextualization with reference to Salusbury’s political difficulties and his gratitude to his sovereign for helping him solve them), the Arden editors read Shakespeare’s poem as a panegyric of the Queen as Phoenix (the emblem was increasingly applied to her as she aged),^[52] casting Salusbury, her loving and loyal subject, in the role of the Turtle. In November 1601, Elizabeth made a farewell speech to Parliament (the so-called Golden Speech) in which she proclaimed the special love between herself and her subjects, exalting the relationship as a mystical union in the body politic, using rhetoric that resembles that of Shakespeare’s poem. Sir John, frustrated because he could not be present at this Parliament owing to violence in Denbighshire between his supporters and a rival candidate that prevented his election as MP, apparently suffered emotionally on account of his enforced absence. Accordingly, Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen hypothesize that the Queen, with only a short time to live, is figured in the Phoenix, whose splendor will be mysteriously renewed from its own ashes, while the Turtle represents both her devoted people as a body and Sir John Salusbury as “love’s martyr: a man who suffered much for his unshakeable determination to serve his close kinswoman Elizabeth” (108). The problem, of course, as Helen Hackett writes, is that the Queen and Salusbury were still alive in 1601, whereas the loving birds of the poem “are decidedly dead”; moreover, “the phoenix motif was generally used in Elizabethan poetry and art to express the Queen’s miraculous triumph over time and death, either expressing a loyal wish for her to go on forever or mythologizing the fact that the succession must proceed by some nonbiological means” (136-37). But however we grapple with the baffling paradoxes of The Phoenix and the Turtle, and whether or not we choose to read its allegory topically, we can at least agree that it contains a Christian priest.

Appearing among the mourning birds is “the death-divining swan”—characterized as a “priest in surplice white” appointed to lead the funeral liturgy “Lest the requiem lack his right” (ll. 13-16). In addition, the white swan is associated with another mourner, the “sable” crow (ll. 17-20). As Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen observe, this imagery “strongly evokes the funeral rites of the Elizabethan Church, in which a surplice-clad minister leads a funeral procession flanked by a black-gowned parish clerk” (117). Nevertheless, the word “requiem” (used by Shakespeare only here and in the burial scene of Hamlet [5.1.237]) suggests Catholic obsequies, and Finnis and Martin insist that in Shakespeare’s time “underground priests were licensed to conduct much of the [Catholic] Liturgy of the Dead in a surplice” (12). Even if Shakespeare in this passage had a Church of England service in mind, his respect for the officially disused Mass of requiem, longed for by both Church Papists and at least some sacrament-oriented Anglicans, comes through unmistakably. Also notable in the poem is its resort to a scholastic vocabulary and mind-set (perhaps with some admixture of Neoplatonism): “Two distincts, division none,” “Single nature’s double name / Neither two nor one was called,” “Reason, in itself confounded, / Saw division grow together” (ll. 27, 39-40, 41-42). Although the religious context may be conformist, a tinge of medieval Catholic coloring remains.

To the extent that Shakespeare’s plays may be thought anticlerical, such a view would apply chiefly to bishops and priests so corrupted by politics or worldly ambition as to betray their true calling as servants of Christ and pastors to ordinary folk, especially the lost, the powerless, and the unloved. Indeed, nothing in Shakespeare’s theatrical canon suggests hostility to the established church as the body of Christ in the fallen world or to its holiest representatives on earth. Historians of the English Reformation, leaning over-heavily on its boisterous Calvinist spokesmen, have sometimes insisted too categorically on the radical difference, particularly in regard to the Eucharist, between the Roman Catholic promotion of “magic” and “superstition” and the Anglican reliance on reason and scriptural purity. Granted, Puritan clergymen within the established church such as William Perkins could rail against the “sinne [of] Magicke, sorcerie, or witchcraft, in the [Roman Catholic] consecration of the host in which they make their Breadengod: . . . if any thing be done by them, it is from the secret operation of the devil himself” (Perkins 744). As Cummings reminds us, one seventeenth-century clergyman “believed the words ‘hocus pocus’ to be a juggling corruption of the phrase hoc est corpus” (Cummings, ed., Prayer Book xxvii). But Hooker, although he denies the doctrine of transubstantiation, acknowledges the Real Presence in the “holy mysteries” and brings to the rite of Holy Communion not merely reason but a sense of majestic exaltation and awe:

Hooker had strongly urged, in contravention of his puritan opponents, that true religion required the use of outward symbolism and ceremony in worship not only because it suited the majesty and mysteriousness of God but also because it was more effectively and instinctually formative of Christian devotion than the mere unvarnished word on its own. As Lake puts it, Hooker’s views came “little short of the reclamation of the whole realm of symbolic action and ritual practice from the status of popish superstition to that of a necessary, indeed essential, means of communication and edification” (Anglicans and Puritans 65). Hooker also pointed out that alienating secret Catholics or Church Papists “by utter evacuation of all Romish ceremonies” from the reformed church was pragmatically counterproductive:

The effect of spiritual elevation so characteristic of the more ritualistic elements of Shakespeare’s romances aligns strikingly with both Catholic and Church of England liturgical practice, at least in its proto-Arminian wing.

The Reverend Robert Hart, a thoughtful scholar of Hooker’s writings, refers in an online article to the great Elizabethan apologist for the Church of England as “a perfect example of the Catholic Protestant (or Protestant Catholic) . . . during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.”^[54] Nor must we forget that a royal proclamation of 1559 specified that priests and laity “shall pray for Christ’s holy Catholic church . . . and specially for the Church of England” (Hughes and Larkin 2:131). Her Majesty seems here only to have reminded her subjects of the explicit and mandatory phrases of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, which profess belief in the “holy catholic Church” (Matins and Evensong) and “one catholic and apostolic Church” (Holy Communion). She might also have had in mind the Quicunque vult (“Whosoever will be saved . . . it is necessary that he hold the catholic faith”) recited at Evensong at Christmas and Easter, on Trinity Sunday, and at other high feasts (Book of Common Prayer, ed. Booty 58, 64, 251, 65). Eamon Duffy, a distinguished student of the Reformation in England, may overstate the case when he observes that “Shakespeare might just as well be placed among the fellow travelers as among the [Roman] Catholics, [although even] if we cannot quite be sure that Shakespeare was a Catholic, it becomes clearer and clearer that he must have struck alert contemporaries as a most unsatisfactory Protestant” (“Bare Ruined Choirs” 56). We may suspect that devout men like Hooker and Bishop Andrewes would dispute that Shakespeare’s Protestantism was in any way “unsatisfactory,” as Duffy alleges.

Hart’s perception of the overlap, or even identity, between Catholicism and Protestantism in Hooker’s Eucharistic theology and Duffy’s comment about the possibility of Shakespeare’s Catholic-leaning and therefore “unsatisfactory” Protestantism may both be traceable, ultimately, to the fruitful but purposeful ambiguities of Cranmer’s 1549 Prayer Book. The Latin Mass, of which the new English liturgy was (in part only) a translation, had been more than a mere memorial of the Last Supper; it was also a miraculous re-enactment, repeated at every celebration, of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross “for the sins of the whole world” (Book of Common Prayer, ed. Booty 263). The title of the service in the first Prayer Book is “The Supper of the Lorde, and the holy Communion, commonly called the Masse.” As a distinguished scholar of the Prayer Book points out, Cranmer (who had increasingly been influenced by the Eucharistic theology of the German and Swiss reformers but who was nevertheless “scrupulous” in his desire to placate churchmen of diverse opinions) “allowed room in 1549 for more than one literal interpretation” of his version of the canon. Although the celebrant is instructed to make the sign of the cross twice over the elements of bread and wine on the words, “blesse and sanctifie,” the 1549 liturgy omits from the Sarum rite the specific Latin comparison between Christ’s offering of himself on the cross and the Eucharistic offering of the altar (Cummings, ed., Prayer Book xxx). Therefore, the new Communion rite, although it carefully avoided an explicit statement about the sacrificial nature of the Eucharistic consecration, also refrained from denying it. Denials of Real Presence and Calvinist-oriented explanations of what did and did not actually happen when bread and wine were consecrated could be left to sermons, of which there was a plethora. In addition there were the Thirty-nine Articles, slanted toward Calvinism but ambiguous and perhaps contradictory enough to allow a certain latitude in practice and belief. Not surprisingly, conservatives who might have hoped for a Mass in English with most of the old religious verities preserved were bitterly disappointed, while Calvinist zealots tended to regard the Prayer Book as little better than popery in disguise.

It is notable also that the rubrics of the 1549 book backed up the spoken word with physical and visually oriented symbolism—the white cloth of the communion table, the signing of foreheads in baptism, the blessing of holy water, the oil of unction, and the like. Eucharistic vestments were permissible:

Cummings, in his informative edition of the early versions of the Prayer Book, makes an important point about the “performativ[ity]” of Cranmer’s liturgy, the written words being “more like a play-text than like a novel in the way that we must approach it as readers” (Cummings, ed., Prayer Book xxxiv). Bishop Jewel had referred to “the scenic apparatus” of priestly celebrations (quoted in Lake, Anglicans and Puritans 164). The rubrics brought Tudor worship and belief “into social reality, a little like the stage-directions in a Shakespeare play: with the difference that here the rubrics are authorized by the original writer” (Cummings, ed., Prayer Book xxxiv). The rubrics as much as the spoken language have caused endless debate and controversy for centuries in the Church. The famous “black rubric” of the much more Protestant but briefly used Prayer Book of 1552, with its tortuous specifications about kneeling at the Eucharist (it was deleted in the 1559 book when Elizabeth succeeded to the throne), goes to elaborate lengths to make clear that the humble posture prescribed must in no way be taken to endorse “adoracion” of the Blessed Sacrament (Cummings, ed., Prayer Book 667). To quote Cummings again, “Religion is not only a matter of the right words, but the right words said in the right way using the right objects [and movements] in the right order” (Cummings, ed., Prayer Book xxxiv).

It was the first Edwardian Prayer Book of 1549 that Queen Elizabeth favored when she attempted in 1559 to settle England finally as a Protestant nation, acting as the supreme governor of a reformed but ceremonially traditional church. She had hoped to restore communion tables to their medieval altar-wise position except when moved forward for actual celebrations of the Eucharist and to return to the old use of wafer bread rather than the ordinary leavened kind used in Edward VI’s time. It is thought that she also approved of the rood images (crucifixes flanked by the Virgin Mary and Saint John) that were common in English churches during her father’s and half sister’s reigns but were replaced now by royal coats of arms, an obvious symbol of monarchical as well as national authority. In her chapel royal at Whitehall, she had installed candles and a silver crucifix on an altar-like communion table against the wall. The Queen’s personal preference for worship in “the beauty of holiness” (Psalm 96.9) was, however, frustrated by pressure from evangelical bishops, some of them Marian exiles, hostile to anything that might be thought “popish.” As a result, the new version of the Prayer Book (1559) was based not on the 1549 liturgy but on its more radical but short-lived successor of 1552.

A few differences in the new version nevertheless made the Elizabethan liturgy somewhat less anti-Catholic than might have been anticipated: as mentioned already, the specific ban on adoration was now gone, as well as denunciation of the Pope in the Litany; a new ornaments rubric once more legalized the alb, the cope, and other such vestments as had been worn in the second year of Edward’s reign in lieu of the surplice (although the more ornate vesture was understood to apply mainly to cathedrals, Westminster Abbey, and the Queen’s own places of worship where the music was commensurately more elaborate). Moreover, the prayer of consecration in Holy Communion combined words from both the 1549 and 1552 rites. The zealous Protestant John Jewel, writing to Peter Martyr early in 1559 when the terms of the new liturgy were being debated, worried about Her Majesty’s willingness to press for liturgical reform with sufficient vigor:

Count Feria, an emissary to London from Philip II, reported to his master that Elizabeth had told him “she differed very little from [Roman Catholics], as she believed that God was in the sacrament of the Eucharist, and only dissented from two or three things in the Mass” (Haugaard 109, quoting Calendar of State Papers relating to English Affairs, preserved . . . in the Archives of Simancas).

As so often occurs with attempts at compromise, the 1559 Prayer Book seems to have pleased very few, at least when it was introduced. The subtitle announced the content as including the “administration of the Sacramentes and other rites and Ceremonies of the Churche,” using a word (ceremonies) that would stick in the craw of many root-and-branch reformers. Factionalism over the physical movements and material objects used in worship (vestments, kneeling, making the sign of the cross, the nature of communion vessels, the ring used in marriage, etc.) could produce more rancor than the actual words set out to be used by priests and laity. Liturgical worship is a communal affair—an action done in concert by a whole congregation as the body of Christ and not as a collection of separately minded individuals. As Cummings reminds us, “Many Elizabethans were still Catholic at heart, and conformed only reluctantly to a church now bereft of spiritual comfort and external signs. Puritans, on the other hand, mocked even the use of the surplice . . . [and] thought they might as well be ‘papists’ by using [the Prayer Book] at all” (Cummings, ed., Prayer Book xxxvii). The incipient polarization in religious attitudes would grow increasingly intense until it finally ended in revolution with the execution of the devoutly High-Church Charles I and abolition of the Prayer Book during the Interregnum. But even at the Restoration, when the present English Prayer Book of 1662 came into use, strong divergence on questions of doctrine and liturgical practice continued to disturb the unity of the Church of England—a divergence that persists today. Two Anglican parishes in present-day London—All Souls, Langham Place, and All Saints, Margaret Street, both of them under authority of the same bishop and only five minutes apart on foot—represent the Protestant and Catholic extremes. All Souls, architecturally neoclassical and noted for preaching, exhibits very plain physical adornments, is liberally rationalist in tone, and takes a minimalist approach to the sacraments; in contrast, All Saints, Victorian gothic and elaborately furnished with representations of the saints, celebrates High Mass with incense, bells, and lights to the accompaniment of Mass settings in Latin by Tallis, Byrd, Palestrina, Vittoria, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Gounod, Rheinberger, and even Rachmaninoff, and encourages devotion to Our Lady. When styles of worship are at stake, the via media, which Anglicanism is theoretically supposed to embody, has never been easy to define.

Although Calvinism dominated the Church of England during the early part of Elizabeth’s reign, a movement that Fincham and Tyacke call “avant-garde conformity” (74-125), began to develop around 1590, about the time Shakespeare started his theatrical career, and continued through the reign of James I. Anti-Calvinist sentiments found expression in sermons here and there, especially those preached at court, and the “sacrament-centred style of piety” favored by Hooker (Lake, Anglicans and Puritans 173-82) and protected by the Queen, who preferred ceremonial worship and was sympathetic to those who stressed free will rather than strict predestination, began to receive support in high places. George Carew, Elizabeth’s dean of the chapel royal, had celebrated her coronation Mass,^[55] having already held ecclesiastical appointments under Mary, so that his status as a true Protestant was suspect. Although he died in 1583 before Shakespeare became active as a playwright, his influence on the Queen and her court seems to have been formative. Several of her bishops (Edmund Guest of Rochester, Richard Cheyney of Gloucester, and Edmund Freke of Norwich) gained favor for opposing unconditional predestination and were friendlier than most to images and the element of mystery in the Eucharist. Royal chapels at Whitehall, Windsor, and Hampton Court acquired costly adornments. The Queen’s altar crucifix came, went, and returned according to the virulence of Puritan complaints, but additional criticisms were leveled at representations of the Virgin Mary, Christ’s apostles, and other saints in royal chapels (apparently hangings or tapestries), and her personal clergy continued to celebrate in “golden copes” (Fincham and Tyacke 81).

Dean Gabriel Goodman of Westminster Abbey, who presided there until 1601, continued the traditions of a more ornate worship in a cathedral-like church that J. F. Meritt has aptly described as “the cradle of Laudianism” (623). The Abbey, under direct control of the Queen rather than of a local bishop and reflecting her style of worship on a large scale, provided a public focus for the Elizabethan church as observed by courtiers and foreign dignitaries. Anciently associated with coronations and other monarchic rituals, it was the site of royal tombs and the shrine of Edward the Confessor, a continuing locus of the claimed nexus between sacredness and the throne besides being a relic of the old religion. James I erected tombs there, not only for Elizabeth, his predecessor, but also for his mother, Mary Queen of Scots (a Catholic martyr), reinterring her elaborately in the Henry VII chapel, the sepulcher established by the first Tudor. The Abbey set a style of ceremonialism that gradually extended to cathedrals. Goodman enjoyed the support of Burghley, Elizabeth’s most powerful minister, and, protected as he was (like her personal chaplains), was largely free of the protestantizing, Calvinist pressures of her reform-minded bishops. Music at Abbey liturgies was famously magnificent, sung as it was by a state-of-the-art choir of men and boys from the adjoining school (an organist was appointed in 1569) and becoming a model for lesser churches within its immediate jurisdiction. Andrewes, the most obvious of the proto-Laudians (he restored altars and railed them off, heard private confessions, and occasionally used incense) succeeded Goodman as dean in 1601. And it was Andrewes who especially appealed to literati such as Thomas Nashe and the courtier-dramatist John Lyly, mainly for his “incomparable” preaching style but also perhaps for his exalted churchmanship (McCullough, Oxford DNB). Nashe called him “the absolutest Oracle of all sound Deuinitie here amongst vs . . . mixing the two seuerall properties of an Orator and a Poet both in one” (Have with You to Saffron-Walden, Nashe 3:105, 107). Still another admirer of Andrewes was the courtier, poet, and inventor of the flush toilet, Sir John Harington, who, although suspected of being a papist, was loyal to the established church while holding strong anti-Calvinist convictions and a marked nostalgia for the “rituals and fellowship of Catholicism” that he thought should “persist in reformed England” (Clark 561).^[56] Harington’s application to become chancellor of Ireland and Archbishop of Dublin in the Church of Ireland (1605) embodies in considerable detail his views concerning the essential Catholicity of the Elizabethan and Jacobean church, including his disapproval of married bishops plus his respect for crosses and crucifixes, for copes and Eucharistic vestments, for auricular confession, for the doctrine of Real Presence in Holy Communion, for its closeness in essentials to the Catholic Mass, and for the tradition of apostolic succession (without papal supremacy), all of which were officially allowed, if not insisted upon, under James I (Harington, State of Ireland 16-19).

As a regular performer at court, Shakespeare must certainly have been aware of the Queen’s religious preferences and attitudes. Nor is it unlikely that the dramatist, like most sophisticated Londoners, would have known about, and perhaps have sometimes attended, services at the Abbey—a church that managed to retain its medieval Catholic ambience and associations more prominently than parishes in the city, which had mostly been whitewashed and stripped of their altars, monuments, and statuary. If we should dare attempt to re create Shakespeare’s aesthetic processes, we might imagine the “High-Church” ritualism of the abdication scene in Richard II with its stately movement and sonorous language owing something to the liturgical solemnities to which the playwright may have been exposed in Westminster. The area dominated by the Abbey, as Merritt points out, had its own political, ecclesiastical, and intellectual culture distinct from London proper, being strongly associated with the court and not far upriver from the Inns of Court. Saint Mary Overie (later to become Southwark Cathedral), located on the south side of the Thames near London Bridge and not far from the Globe, would be another likely place of worship for Shakespeare. The dramatist buried his brother Edmund there in 1607, and the renowned prelate Andrewes, Bishop of Winchester, was honored in 1626 by being laid to rest in a chapel of the apse behind the high altar since Saint Mary’s was then part of the Diocese of Winchester. This parish had close associations with the theater. The renowned actor Edward Alleyn was a benefactor of charities connected with it, and the bones of Shakespeare’s collaborator John Fletcher as well as those of Philip Massinger lie in the same church.

Walter Pater, searching unsuccessfully for a liturgical source for a “rite of ‘degradation’” of kings, turned to “the Roman Pontifical” for something analogous to “that by which an offending priest or bishop may be deprived” (198). Taking up Pater’s hint, Margaret Ranald investigated sixteenth-century ceremonies of degradation used in chivalric, military, and ecclesiastical contexts that might serve as analogues to Richard’s invented ritual of self-divestiture in Shakespeare’s play. Not surprisingly, Ranald turns to Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1583) for instances of officially degraded clerics—cases of “canonical penal expulsion from the clerical state” that nearly always led to execution, most often burning at the stake for heresy (183, 184-96). Bishops Latimer and Ridley are famous examples, but Foxe’s most detailed and notable account is that of Archbishop Cranmer, Primate of All England, degraded, condemned, and burnt alive at Oxford in 1556. It hardly needs saying that Cranmer, in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, becomes the archetypal martyr of the English Church, identified with its birth pangs in breaking free of Rome as well as with its unique liturgy. That Shakespeare might have read Foxe on Cranmer for his presentation of Richard II’s discrowning is far from unlikely, since we know that he used the same source for elements in 2 and 3 Henry VI and perhaps King John as well as Henry VIII at a later point.

The important similarity between Cranmer’s degradation and the royal parallel in Shakespeare’s play is the sequential stripping off of clothing and appurtenances of office—for the archbishop, pall, mitre, Gospel book, episcopal ring, and crozier; for the king, crown, scepter, and the forswearing “All pomp and majesty” (4.1.211).^[57] Cranmer’s canonical fingers were scraped with glass to remove any remaining holy oils, as Richard washes away with his “own tears” his “balm” (4.1.207), the chrism with which he was anointed at his coronation. Cranmer objects to being degraded unlawfully by officials of lower rank than himself (bishops rather than archbishops), as Richard charges his deposers with violating their fealty, “cracking the strong warrant of an oath” (4.1.235). One of the reasons he preempts the ceremony of discoronation is to prevent mere subjects such as Bolingbroke from humiliating him. Perhaps the most significant parallel is the obliteration of identity involved in formal rites of “un-personing.” According to Foxe, “After this pageant of degradation . . . was finished,” Bonner, the officiating prelate, said to Cranmer, “Now are you no lord any more,” thereafter using only the generic term “gentleman” (Foxe, Acts and Monuments 8:79-80). Richard claims that the experience of being “unking’d” (4.1.220) has reduced him to “nothing” (4.1.201): “I have no name, no title, / No, not that name was given me at the font” (4.1.255-56). And it is interesting to note that at the end of the deposition scene, Shakespeare gives the Abbot of Westminster Foxe’s word pageant: “A woeful pageant have we here beheld” (4.1.321).

We can only guess that Shakespeare may have had Foxe’s account of Cranmer in mind when he conceived the climactic scene of Richard II. But if he did, an interesting complexity of motive presents itself. Episcopal degradations and inverted coronations have an obvious dramatic appeal, combining as they do pathos (or even tragedy) with public and visually arresting solemnity. Like executions, they present an opportunity for spectacle that nevertheless invites empathy and psychological engagement. And both ceremonies presuppose the elaborate and essentially Catholic liturgies of installation that the degradations undo—rituals anciently devised by the Church in which sumptuously vested clerics participate. Archbishops are enthroned as kings are crowned; bishops are consecrated as kings are anointed. But in Foxe, of course, the martyr is Protestant while his persecutors are Catholic, so that a dramatist’s attraction to the Catholic ceremonial would commingle in his mind with the moral opprobrium of its purpose. This is exactly the kind of tension that could have been felt by a Church of England playwright, loyal to a Protestant queen whom he served, but attached also to the ceremonial dignity and ritualism of traditions from the past.

The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613-14), probably Shakespeare’s final play (written with Fletcher), seems also to raise the issue of Catholic-oriented ceremonial in a drama that appeals to what Lois Potter calls “Militant Protestantism” (Potter 37-40). At the beginning of Act 5, Theseus, Hippolyta, and the court enter processionally to preside over the ritual preparations of Palamon and Arcite for their mortal combat. Three altars to Venus, Mars, and Diana are shown, to which the principals in the cast (Palamon, Arcite, and Emilia) respectively do obeisance. Bowing, full prostration, and kneeling plus the use of incense and music become part of the ritual in a way that would almost certainly be coded as Catholic by at least some members of the audience. Since the setting is classical Greece, the religious elements are technically pagan, and Shakespeare in this scene was, of course, prompted by details already in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale. But phrases such as “holy prayers,” “hallowed clouds [which receive] swelling incense,” “holy altars,” “Our intercession,” “canst make / A cripple flourish with his crutch,” “large confessors,” “O sacred, shadowy, cold, and constant queen,” and “I here, thy priest, / Am humbled ’fore thine altar” (5.1.2, 4, 12, 45, 81-82, 105, 137, 142-43) evoke an unmistakably Catholic overtone. On the other hand, the play seems also to allude to the sorry plight of Protestants in the Netherlands in the symbolism of the three mourning queens who interrupt the royal wedding in the opening episode—a reminder of the allegorical daughters of Belgia depicted in sixteenth-century art and literature as pleading fervently to the cruel Duke of Alva, the Catholic oppressor. As Potter points out, the recent death of the much idealized Protestant Prince Henry of Wales and the marriage of his sister to Frederick, Prince Palatine, had raised popular consciousness about possible threats to the reformed religion, and at a time when the new anti-Calvinist writings of the Dutch theologian Arminius were provoking fresh defenses of predestinarian theology in England.

The presence of both Protestant and Catholic ideas in the same play (most scholars attribute both scenes to Shakespeare) (Wells and Taylor 625) may well testify to a phenomenon that Jean-Christophe Mayer has called the dramatist’s “hybrid faith”—“not so much a matter of systematic allegiance as one of constant debating and questioning” (5). Also it is worth remembering Shuger’s assertion that “Religion [in Shakespeare’s time] supplies the primary language of analysis,” providing in drama and all other forms of discourse “the cultural matrix for explorations of virtually every topic. . . .” (Habits of Thought 6).

VII

What the foregoing discussion has, I hope, made clear is the futility of supposing that we can ever establish as fact the truth of Shakespeare’s confessional allegiance or allegiances. We cannot assume that if the poet were Catholic or Protestant in his youth, he would necessarily remain so throughout his life. Religious faith is not like a birthmark but rather an aspect of human development that almost invariably changes, is shaken, deepens, is lost, is regained, or simply evaporates according to the vicissitudes of life and the cultural pressures and intellectual influences to which one is exposed. Honigmann imagines a Shakespeare who was raised a Catholic, changed to Protestantism in the 1580s, remained so throughout his professional life, phrased his will according to Protestant conventions, and then “returne[d] to the [Catholic] fold on [his] death-bed” like Lord Marchmain in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (114, 125). This scenario has its cinematic charms but, as Honigmann himself knew, could never be accepted as more than an educated guess. Since the dramatist bequeathed us no account of his personal beliefs, all we are left with is collections of hints and perceived tendencies garnered from his plays and poems susceptible of varying interpretations. And, of course, selection itself involves a strong element of subjectivity. However rigorous in their methods scholars may try to be, none can entirely avoid viewing Shakespeare through the lens and filters of his own confessional (or non-confessional) bias or of re-creating the preeminent dramatist in our culture in a way that ratifies his own prejudices.

There is also the important consideration raised by an aphorism, quoted by Miola in a devastating review of a book that confidently claims secret Catholicism for the playwright: “Dante was a Catholic; Milton was a Protestant; Shakespeare was a dramatist” (Review 51). The danger of trying to read Shakespearean plays as biography has often been stressed. Keats famously loved the poet for his “negative capability”—his acceptance of “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts” and freedom from specific intellectual contexts, categories, or systems of thought. Hazlitt praised him for having “no one peculiar bias”: “He was the least of an egotist that it was possible to be. He was nothing in himself; but he was all that others were, or that they could become.” Matthew Arnold expresses a related insight in a well-known sonnet: “Others abide our question. Thou art free. / We ask and ask—Thou smilest and art still, / Out-topping knowledge.” Among more recent commentators, Greenblatt speaks of Shakespeare as possessing “a limitless talent for entering into the consciousness of another,” while Taylor, who argues that the playwright was probably a Catholic, describes the Shakespeare of the critical stance he is opposing as “an artist beyond ideology, a synthesizer of all opposites,” employing the term “self-erasure” (Keats 1:193, Hazlitt 5:47, Arnold 39, Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning 252, Taylor 313-14).

Non-Christians have latterly claimed Shakespeare for their camp. Miola instances James Howe’s A Buddhist’s Shakespeare and Eric Mallin’s Godless Shakespeare as evidence that the dramatist can now be read through almost any religious or anti-religious spectacles. Even critics more closely conditioned by history have recognized that Christian assumptions are up for serious interrogation in a tragedy such as King Lear. Dr. Johnson, who had been brought up on Tate’s happy ending as performed in the theaters of his day, was “shocked” by the gratuitous cruelty and injustice of Shakespeare’s original text, so totally at odds, as he would have thought, with any Christian concept of a moral universe—a text amounting to denial of divine providence in dramatic form (Vickers 138-40). Since Johnson’s time what R. A. Foakes refers to as the “colossus at the centre of Shakespeare’s achievement,” “the grandest effort of his imagination” (1), has been interpreted as both a “Christian transvaluation of the values of Lear’s pagan world” (Heilman 221) and as a dramatization of apocalypse, of the “universal disruption of Nature . . . which for millennia had been a standing dread of mankind” (Holloway 79). For William Elton, the whole tradition of redemptionist interpretations of Lear, based partly upon Christian allusions in the dialogue (such as Cordelia’s “O dear father, / It is thy business that I go about” [4.4.24]),^[58] was a wrongheaded attempt to deny that the play “is intentionally . . . a syncretically pagan tragedy” challenging audiences in 1605 and still today (at least for those spectators who cannot “turn aside and stop their beating minds”) to glimpse the “horror” of an “all-dissolving chaos” (338). A. D. Nuttall thinks that Shakespeare deliberately builds up a structure of Christian commedia in King Lear with its fulfillment in the moving reunion of the broken old monarch with his saintly daughter (“Pray you now forget, and forgive; I am old and foolish” [4.7.83]), only “to smash it” and thus convert the work into “an anti-Christian play” (306-7).

Donne’s famous lines on the decay of the world, probably written when he was especially disheartened about his exclusion from a life of public affairs, convey a sense of earthly negativism in tune with the five stressed iterations of “never” (5.3.309) that, for many, sum up the overwhelming pessimism of King Lear:

But it is worth remembering that Donne (arguably like Shakespeare) had strong Catholic sympathies, having been raised in the old faith, and that he converted to the Church of England (for a combination of professional and intellectual reasons), eventually becoming—apparently with some reluctance—one of its devout and most luminous priests. We know also that he was plagued by doubts and wrestled with personal demons as perhaps Shakespeare did when he was conceiving what many consider his greatest tragedy.

The parallel with Donne may gather some strength when we consider that the final plays express a spirit of acceptance, serenity, even hope, after encounters with mortality, as does a familiar passage of one of the Devotions on Emergent Occasions, written in the tradition of ars moriendi when the Dean of Saint Paul’s was emerging from an illness that had brought him close to death:

Gary Taylor might be correct in assessing the “apparent invisibility” (314) of Shakespeare’s religious opinions and convictions as a persona deliberately adopted by the dramatist—a canny mode of self-protection from Walsingham’s network of spies who might subject him to official inquisition or even deliver him to Topcliffe’s rack. But if Shakespeare disguised himself so consistently in this way over a long and varied career in the theater, he would have had to do so at the expense of spontaneity and emotional intercourse with others in a way that seems wholly inconsistent with his power to re-create such relationships convincingly on the stage. Hazlitt’s belief in a dramatist without bias of any kind is also probably a romantic illusion—a product of bardolatry—for no man, least of all a literary and theatrical genius, can exist without opinions about the things that matter in life (physical health, sex, family relationships, friends, art, politics, religion). It seems likelier to me that Shakespeare was a practicing member of the English Church with no need to disguise the fact, who nevertheless felt powerful connections to the “Catholic” faith in both its Roman and proto-Laudian expressions. If he had lived a generation later and been so inclined, he might have written about his religious commitment in the manner of Sir Thomas Browne:

Browne believed in witches as Shakespeare appears to have done and, while loyal to the Church of England, bore little hostility to the communion from which it had evolved: “It is an unjust scandall of our adversaries, and a grosse error in our selves, to compute the Nativity of our Religion from Henry the eight, who though he rejected the Pope, refus’d not the faith of Rome, and effected no more then what his owne Predecessors desired and assayed in ages past . . .” (Patrides, ed. 64-65). Like Shakespeare, Browne was attracted to the mysterious aspect of belief:

It is also difficult to think that Shakespeare would have disagreed with Browne’s reflections on the externals of religion: “Holy Water and Crucifix . . . deceive not my judgement, nor abuse my devotion at all. I am, I confesse, naturally inclined to that, which misguided zeale termes superstition. . . . I love to use the civility of my knee, my hat, and hand, with all those outward and sensible motions, which may expresse, or promote my invisible devotion. . . . I could never heare the Ave Marie Bell without an elevation, or thinke it a sufficient warrant, because [Roman Catholics] erred in one circumstance, for me to erre in all, that is in silence and dumbe contempt . . .” (Patrides, ed. 63). If we are inclined to believe that Shakespeare was a man of faith, and further that his faith, while “Catholic” in tone, tradition, and expression, was also broadly tolerant and encompassing of difference, Browne’s more explicit account of religion may serve us as a useful referent. Shakespeare’s religious sentiments, if they were at all like Browne’s, would make him reasonably comfortable with Prayer Book Anglicanism and probably more so, we are entitled to imagine, than with the stifled hostilities and unfulfilled longings associated with “church papistry.”

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Notes

See Levin. Quotations from Shakespeare unless otherwise noted follow The Riverside Shakespeare.

Hunt echoes Daniell: “the textual evidence of the plays will never allow us certainly to infer Shakespeare’s religious views, whether they were mainly Catholic or Protestant, or whether he wrote as an agnostic or atheist” (xi). It may be marginally relevant to note that Daniell’s and Hunt’s statements had already been contradicted by Tyrone, the closed-minded actor-father-figure in Eugene O’Neill’s autobiographical tragedy, Long Day’s Journey into Night, who insists that “Shakespeare was an Irish Catholic. . . . The proof is in his plays” (127).

Richard Simpson, a Victorian Anglican priest who converted to the Church of Rome, devoted much of his later life to contextualizing Elizabethan attitudes toward his adopted religion and to arguing that Shakespeare was probably a Catholic (see Richard Simpson).

The Jesuit scholar Milward, writing at the beginning of the twenty-first century, reports that “a scholarly consensus has been building up over the past century in favour of [Shakespeare’s family’s] Catholicism, or loyalty to ‘the old faith’” (116). An importantly influential factor for Milward was the republication of Honigmann with a new preface, which assembles a variety of circumstantial evidence to argue that Shakespeare became a dependent of the prominent recusant family of Alexander Hoghton in Lancashire after leaving grammar school in Stratford. Taylor, admitting that he “cannot prove that Shakespeare was a Catholic” (298) and rejecting Honigmann’s Lancashire hypothesis, has mounted one of the more telling arguments for Shakespeare’s Catholicism by showing how “church papists” could attend services of the established church and be loyal subjects, patriots, and severe critics of elements of their own tradition in ways that might look like Protestantism without betraying the core of their Catholic belief.

Marotti reminds us of Ben Jonson’s confessional mutability: he “converted to Catholicism in prison in 1597, [then] moved away from his new religious affiliation [during the period of the Gunpowder Plot], histrionically rejoining the official church in 1610 by enthusiastically draining the Communion cup” (“Shakespeare and Catholicism” 220).

Walsham cites Nicholas Sander (1567), who reports a widespread belief among oppressed Catholics that “this going to schismatical Service is, or may be wincked at, or dispensed . . .” (sig. A4v). She also mentions a Jesuit who complained as late as 1593 of the “many schismaticall old preestes” who contended that “it was not onlye lawfull in these extremityes to goe to churche without protestation but alsoe to receave the supper of the lorde” (50).

A complaint against a parish priest of Easington in the Diocese of York specified in 1566 that “he hayth ministryd often and sundrye tymes withowt ayther surplus or cooppe [i.e., cope]”; another priest in the parish of Weverham was cited in the Visitation Book for not being “painfull in studie,” for not conducting “service accordinge to the order set downe,” and because he “weares no surples in service tyme” (Purvis 155, 159).

Ben Jonson carried mockery of holier-than-thou moralism, hypocrisy, and kill-joy attitudes to greater extremes than anything in Shakespeare in such caricatures of Puritanism as Tribulation Wholesome (The Alchemist), Zeal-of-the-land Busy, and Dame Purecraft (Bartholomew Fair).

The term Anglican seems to have been used for the first time by James VI of Scotland in 1598 in a reference to “Papisticall or Anglican bishopping” (OED) but was not much employed in England until after Shakespeare’s death in the seventeenth century. High-Church concepts did not make an official appearance in the Church of England until the 1630s, when they were promulgated by Archbishop Laud in the reign of Charles I. The seeds of Laudian Arminianism and the reintroduction of greater ceremonialism, however, had already been planted by Hooker in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (Books I-IV, 1594) and by Andrewes, who by 1597 had emerged “as the leading figure among a younger generation of ‘avant-garde’ conformists,” anti-Calvinist and sacramentalist in outlook (see Fincham and Tyacke 84). By the mid-1580s, Andrewes was already deploring non-altar-like communion tables set away from church walls where the “the dreadful mysteries of God are celebrated”: such tables “look . . . more like an oyster board . . . than a table fit for God’s sanctuary” (Fincham and Tyacke 85).

10.

Klause refers to Lord Strange as “a suspect Protestant whose ambience was Catholic” (235).

11.

Mirus was responding to the review by Miola. Mahon (in a private communication) speculates that Shakespeare, while still a schoolboy in Stratford, may have been inspired by Edmund Campion, an eloquent and influential convert to Catholicism long before his Tyburn martyrdom, through association with the “friends or cousins or brothers” of teachers “who became Jesuits in the 1570s.” The “teen-aged Shakespeare” may not only have been “aware of Campion but even have met him. Given his own gift for language,” the future dramatist “may well have thrilled to the words of Campion’s ‘Brag’ and also read the Decem Rationes that Campion planted in the pews at St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford just before his arrest. I envision a young man admiring the pluck and the talent of Campion, drawn to the charismatic priest and tempted to consider following [him] into the Jesuits. But any such temptation vanished when he saw what [terrible consequences befell his hero]. . . . Lacking the kind of faith that would support such a dangerous vocation. . . , Shakespeare chose to pursue instead a career in the theatre.”

12.

Even when Katherine proudly walks out of her elaborately staged divorce hearing, having temporarily lost her patience, King Henry praises her “sweet gentleness” and “saint-like” meekness (2.4.138-39). E. E. Duncan-Jones calls attention to an interesting parallel to Katherine’s death-bed vision in the life of Marguerite of Angoulême, who is reported to have had a similar dream, based in part on the traditions of saints’ lives, in which a beautiful woman shows the French duchess a coronet with which she will be crowned in heaven. McMullan in his Arden 3 edition of Henry VIII comments at length on the contrast between the two queens of the play, one Catholic and the other Protestant, arguing that the collaborating dramatists have subtly and ironically problematized it (120-36).

13.

The version of the Psalms by Myles Coverdale used in Anglican services derives from the Great Bible (1539), the first Bible authorized for use in the Church of England. It took over much of William Tyndale’s incomplete Bible with objectionable elements revised. Coverdale was mainly responsible for the parts unfinished by Tyndale.

14.

Shakespeare’s knowledge and love of the Psalter, which he “quoted more . . . than from any other book of the Bible” (Noble 76), has become a commonplace. Even when he does not borrow the language or allude directly to particular verses of Psalms, he seems to have assimilated their content profoundly. One wonders, for example, whether Coriolanus’s description of himself standing steadfast “As if a man were author of himself, / And knew no other kin” (Coriolanus 5.3.36-37) could have been suggested by Psalm 100:3 (“he that hath made us, and not we ourselves”), part of the Jubilate Deo, used in Morning Prayer.

15.

Unless otherwise noted, all further references to the Prayer Book are to this edition.

16.

A reference to the same collect appears also in Richard III: “think you we are Turks or infidels?” (3.5.41).

17.

Shaheen (382) also cites the anonymous play Thomas of Woodstock (5.3.59) as a probable source for the oath breaking (see Corbin and Sedge, eds. 177).

18.

Cf. Iago’s comment on the loose morals of Venetian women: “they do let God see the pranks / They dare not show their husbands; their best conscience / Is not to leave’t undone, but keep’t unkown” (Othello 3.3.202-4); also Ventidius’s excuse for stopping short of his full potential as a conqueror: “Better to leave undone, than by our deed / Acquire too high a fame when him we serve’s away” (Antony and Cleopatra 3.1.14-15); also the elaborate wordplay on “done,” “undo,” and “undone” by Demetrius, Aaron, and Chiron in Titus Andronicus with reference to the Moor’s copulation with Tamora (4.2.73-77).

19.

Cf. the example from Twelfth Night explained in note 48 below.

20.

Sternhold and Hopkins’s Psalms in English Meter came out in more than one hundred editions between 1583 and 1608 (see Groves 14). Byrd’s teacher, Thomas Tallis (also a Catholic), produced one of the most elaborately polyphonic sacred compositions of the Elizabethan period in his forty-part Spem in alium (c.1570), derived from the forbidden Sarum Rite. It seems to have been commissioned by Thomas Howard, fourth Duke of Norfolk, a cousin of Queen Elizabeth, brought up as a Protestant, but executed for treason in 1572 for attempting to marry Mary Queen of Scots and restore Catholicism as the state religion.

21.

The Clown in The Winter’s Tale also alludes satirically to the practice: among the singing sheep shearers there is “one Puritan amongst them, and he sings psalms to hornpipes” (4.3.43-45). Falstaff’s reference to “the whore of Babylon,” a popular Protestant epithet for the Catholic Church, as reported by Mistress Quickly in Henry V (2.3.38-39), is another evidence of Falstaff’s Puritanism as Shakespeare conceived the character.

22.

Hotson’s argument for the specific occasion and date of such a performance on 6 January 1601 has been generally rejected by most scholars.

23.

It would be absurd to argue that all, or even most, plays performed during festive seasons in the liturgical calendar are related by theme or content to the holy days on which they were acted. King Lear, for example, perhaps Shakespeare’s bleakest tragedy, was presented at court on Saint Stephen’s Day (26 December 1606) and also on Candlemas (2 February 1610) at Gowthwaite Hall, Yorkshire (see Chambers, Elizabethan Stage 4:121, and Muir, ed. xliii). The Yorkshire staging, incidentally, seems to have been by recusants. The feast of Christendom’s first martyr might conceivably be thought appropriate for the multiple cruelties of a drama set in pre-Christian Britain even though it be played during the joyousness of Christmastide; but it would be difficult to make a case for a like suitability at Candlemas. On the other hand, Holy Innocents’ Day (28 December) was the occasion of performances of The Comedy of Errors in 1594 at Gray’s Inn, and in 1604 at court, as part of the annual Christmas festivities. Hassel discusses thematic connections between the proper Prayer Book lessons of the day and the themes of naïveté, the reunion of dispersed family members, and foolery in the comedy (37-42).

24.

Jones devotes many pages to showing how 2 Henry VI along with other Shakespearean plays, conforms to patterns already evinced by the Passion sequence of the medieval cycle plays.

25.

In the United States, these associations have devolved into the imagery of death’s heads and skeletons at Halloween; in England the commemoration of Guy Fawkes’ Day (5 November) with its custom of lighting bonfires finally displaced the older folk traditions of All Hallows Eve and All Souls’ Day (31 October-2 November).

26.

“Quiet consummation” implies not only peace of soul but also unmolested remains. In an age when graves were dug up and bones thrown into charnel houses (compare the fate of Yorick’s skull in Hamlet), it was conventional to pray that the body of the deceased should remain secure and undisturbed. Cf. the inscription, supposedly penned by Shakespeare himself, on the gravestone in Holy Trinity Church: “Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare, / To digg the dust encloased heare: / Bleste be ye man yt spares these stones, / And curst be he yt moves my bones.”

27.

Article 22 specified that “The Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory . . . is a fond thing, vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the word of God” (see Cummings, ed., Book of Common Prayer, 679).

28.

Quotations from Munday follow the edition by Meagher.

29.

Invoking ideas of “dissociation” and “orchestration” in Bakhtin, Dawson speaks of Shakespeare’s habit of “intermingling . . . diverse and contradictory voices” in, for example, Measure for Measure, in which “Calvinist, anti-Calvinist, [and] Catholic” attitudes are voiced (241-42, 245).

30.

Oldcorne’s eye was encased in a decorative container made to resemble the original socket with even the eyelashes represented. It is one of the religious treasures of Stonyhurst College in Lancashire and was recently displayed at the British Museum in London in an exhibition entitled Shakespeare’s Restless World to illustrate how the theater of cruelty in plays such as Titus Andronicus and King Lear had a basis in the reality of the playwright’s own culture.

31.

Marotti quotes William Allen, referring to the martyrs of 1581-82, on the value placed on holy mementoes: “more then the weight in golde . . . is offered for any peece of their reliques, either of their bodies, haire, bones or garments, yea of any thing that hath any spot or staine of their innocent and sacred bloud.” Marotti also cites Henry More’s account of how, at Campion’s execution, one onlooker “cut off [the priest’s] finger and ma[d]e off with it” (42-43). After Mary Stuart, clad in the crimson petticoat of a martyr, was beheaded at Fotheringay in 1587, the authorities quickly burned all appurtenances of her presence lest these be collected by fellow Catholics and sympathizers as sacred relics (see Roderick Graham 428). The Jesuit Henry Walpole, still a later martyr, was hanged, drawn, and quartered in 1595. Present at Campion’s execution in 1581, he had been splattered with the victim’s blood, an experience he took as a sacred call to follow the same dangerous path of Catholic missionary work in England (see Oxford DNB). Chidiock Tichborne, executed in 1586 for participation in the Babington plot, had already been arrested in 1583 with his father over official concern with “popish relics” obtained abroad without permission to travel (see the article on Anthony Babington in the Oxford DNB).

32.

For Shakespeare’s knowledge of Hooker, see Whitacre, 100-101, 198-209.

33.

Such skeptical critics as Barber and Greenblatt, who argue for the total secularization of religious images and concepts in Shakespeare’s theatrical appropriation of “rituals and beliefs that are no longer efficacious” and have been “emptied out,” tend to overlook the element of mystery that at least some Elizabethans regarded as still present in the liturgies of the Church of England (Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations 119). In this section, I am indebted to Knapp’s provocative essay.

34.

Saint Edward, to whom Richard II was especially dedicated, is the principal saint depicted in the Wilton Diptych.

35.

See also Mahon, “Conviviality and Conflict in Shakespeare’s Meals”: “The [banquet] Macbeth cannot share becomes a meal in which the blood of murder . . . supplants the wine of celebration and communion. . . . Lady Macbeth . . . and her usurper husband . . . are excommunicated” (247).

36.

Roman Polanski in his 1971 film adaptation of Macbeth actually showed the title character drinking the witches’ brew from a chalice-like goblet on his second visit to their cavern (see Forker, “Symbolic and Thematic Impoverishment” 198, 211).

37.

Klause argues that both Sonnet 124 and Titus Andronicus reflect indebtedness to Robert Southwell’s An Epistle of Comfort (1587) and An Humble Supplication to Her Majestie (1591) and further that the extraordinary bloodshed in the play shows Shakespeare’s sympathetic awareness of recent Catholic martyrdoms in England. He points out, for example, that the word martyr and its cognates “appear in Titus more than in any other work of Shakespeare” (226). Additionally, he calls attention to a consciousness of Catholic sensibility in such anachronistic references and phrases as blessings by “Saint Steven” (4.4.42), “by [our] Lady” (4.4.48), “priest and holy water” for celebrating a wedding (1.1.323), “hermits in their holy prayers” (3.2.41), a “ruinous [i.e., ruined] monastery,” (5.1.21) and “popish tricks and ceremonies” (5.1.76)—the last spoken by the atheist Aaron (226, 235). For the Eucharistic overtones of the Thyestean banquet, a Roman “proleptic mockery” of the sacrifice of the Mass, see Klause, 236.

38.

The sacerdotal authority for priestly absolution is derived from John 20:21-23 in which Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit into his disciples, endowing them with the power to remit sins in his name.

39.

Leontes in The Winter’s Tale also alludes to auricular confession when he praises Camillo for having “priest-like . . . cleans’d my bosom” (1.2.237-38).

40.

For a fuller discussion of reconciliation and forgiveness in 1 and 2 Henry IV, see Forker, “The State of the Soul.”

41.

The feast of the Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin, popularly known as Candlemas, was a Church of England holy day celebrated on 2 February and related thematically to Christmas. Another feast in the Prayer Book calendar was the Annunciation (25 March), sometimes referred to as Lady Day. The Magnificat (or Song of Mary) was one of the two canticles appointed for Evensong. Intercessions to Mary were, of course, omitted from the Prayer Book but may have persisted illegally in some places where clergy and people clung to Catholic customs.

42.

Queen Elizabeth often touched for the healing of scrofula, using a ritual that consisted of prayers, responses, Gospel readings, and crossing the sores of the afflicted with a gold coin called an angel. James I, brought up as a Presbyterian and wary of superstition, was more reluctant to practice touching but was persuaded to do so by his English councilors, who knew that his subjects expected it of him. His practice was to hang an angel about the neck of the sufferer as described in Shakespeare’s play (4.3.153). For a full discussion of the rite of royal touching, see Paul, 367-87.

43.

The joining of Ferdinand and Miranda is described as “A most high miracle” (The Tempest 5.1.177).

44.

Taylor notices that George Wilkins, with whom Shakespeare probably collaborated in Pericles, “was certainly a Catholic” and also that the play “was included in a Continental Jesuit book-list of 1619” and hence “perceived, by at least some readers and viewers, as a pro-Catholic play” (293). Taylor summarizes the scholarship on the part-attribution to Wilkins.

45.

King James at the Hampton Court conference of 1604 sided with the bishops against the more extreme Protestants on the ground that the apostolic succession, belief in the continuous succession of bishops since Saint Peter through the laying on of hands at episcopal consecrations, supported the doctrine of divine right from which his authority as king derived.

46.

I have discussed the relationship between Peele’s and Shakespeare’s two plays in my edition of The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England, 79-87. Peele’s ridicule of monks and monasteries is reduced in Shakespeare to an order that the Bastard “shake the bags / Of hoarding abbots” (King John 3.3.7-8).

47.

Milward identifies this figure provisionally with John Frith, an “old Marian priest” (117), who may have married Shakespeare at Temple Grafton, in the vicinity of the forest of Arden.

48.

When Sir Topas approaches the “prison” where Malvolio has been locked up in darkness to be cured of madness, he echoes the Prayer Book rubric for the service of Visitation of the Sick: “The priest entering into the sick man’s presence, shall say, ‘Peace be in this house . . .’” (Booty, ed. 300). Feste, counterfeiting the curate, says, “Peace in this prison!” (4.2.18).

49.

The virtuous and religiously outspoken cardinal in Middleton’s Women Beware Women, the moralistic spokesman of that revenge tragedy, is an obvious exception to the anti-Catholic coding of most such prelates on the Jacobean stage. Inasmuch as Middleton’s dramas, unlike Shakespeare’s, have sometimes been associated with Calvinism, this particular cardinal exemplifies an interesting deviation from the stereotype.

50.

Lublin discusses the change in Church of England vestments that flowed from a revision of the 1549 Prayer Book in 1552 and Archbishop Parker’s 1566 “Advertisements.” Eucharistic vestments were no longer required, only a surplice, cassock, and tippet supplanting them. Extreme Puritans objected to this reform as insufficiently thorough. 1566 marked “the height of the vestments controversy” (132-34).

51.

Critics are divided on the question of whether Prospero’s magic is benign or ultimately damnable (see the Arden 3 edition of The Tempest 62n2). James I in his Daemonologie warned that “secret studies” of the occult could lead to the diabolic: “divers men having attained to a great perfection in learning . . . they assaie to vendicate unto [their followers] a greater name, by not onlie knowing the course of things heavenlie, but likewise to clim to the knowledge of things to come thereby. Which, at the first face appearing lawfull unto them, in respect the ground thereof seemeth to proceed of naturall causes onelie; they are so allured thereby, that finding their practize to proove true in sundry things, they studie to know the cause thereof: and so mounting from degree to degree, upon the slipperie and uncertaine scale of curiositie; they are at last entised, that where lawfull artes or sciences failes, to satisfie their restles mindes, even to seeke to that black and unlawfull science of Magic” (10). In a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury (1604), Dr. John Dee, on whom some think the character of Prospero may have been partly based, defended white magic (as opposed to black), echoing a phrase from the Nicene Creed (“all things visible and invisible”): Dee speaks of “ascending . . . from things visible, to consider of thinges invisible; from things bodily, to conceive of thinges spirituall; from things transitorie, and momentanie, to meditate of things permanent; by thinges mortall (visible and invisible) to have some perceiverance of immortality . . .” (72). From Dee’s point of view, the spiritual danger lay only in the pride of the practitioner rather than in the practice itself.

52.

Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen reproduce Nicholas Hilliard’s well-known “Phoenix” portrait of Queen Elizabeth (c.1575) wearing the “phoenix” jewel on her breast (110) as well as a Phoenix emblem with verses applying it to the “matchless Queene” from H. G.’s The Mirror of Majesty, 1618 (113).

53.

The Commentary on the first part of this quotation in the Folger Works of Richard Hooker cites Herbert’s poem, “The Holy Communion”: “ . . . whether bread stay / Or whether Bread doe fly away / Concerneth bread, not mee. / But that both thou and all thy traine / Bee there, to thy truth, and my gaine, / Concerneth mee and Thee.” Also noted is the poem attributed to Elizabeth I: “Christ was the Word that spake it; / He took the Bread and break it: / And what the Word did make it, / That I believe, and take it” (see Hooker 6, Part 2, 765).

54.

Sir John Harington used a similar designation in referring to Stephen Gardiner (c.1493-1555), twice Bishop of Winchester under Henry VIII and Queen Mary, as “a Catholique Protestant, or a protesting Catholicke” in 1608 (A Supplie or Addicion to the Catalogue of Bishops 65). See also note 56 below. This, of course, is the same Bishop Gardiner, as noted earlier, whose character Shakespeare dramatizes in Henry VIII.

55.

Carew was willing to follow Elizabeth’s order forbidding the elevation of the bread and wine during the prayer of consecration at the service, whereas the recently Marian English bishops, who would normally have officiated, refused.

56.

Clark is commenting on an important article on Harington by Shuger as representative of a group of influential pre-Laudian churchmen during Shakespeare’s lifetime; also see Shuger, “A Protesting Catholic Puritan.”

57.

Cranmer was first “dressed in the robes and attributes of his priestly and ecclesiastical office and powers.” Then all these were “ceremonially stripped from him, starting with the highest and ending with the innermost garments” (Ranald 185). The dressing (before the undressing) resembles a coronation ceremony in which the monarch is anointed with holy oil and clothed with specific symbolic garments one by one, ending with the crown, as well as presented with the attributes of kingship (knightly spurs, orb, scepter, etc.). In Richard II (4.1), the title character symbolically inverts the coronation ritual.

58.

Compare the echo of Christ’s words in the Temple, “Wist you not that I must go about my Father’s business?” (Luke 2:49), part of the Gospel appointed for the first Sunday after Epiphany in the 1559 Prayer Book (ed. Booty 96).

59.

Another curious link between Donne and Shakespeare appears in the final lines of Sonnet 146 (“Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth”) and the Holy Sonnet “Death! Be not proud”: cf. “And Death once dead, there’s no more dying then” (146.14) with “And death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die” (Donne, Complete Poems, ed. Robbins 548).