No period in English history has been more tumultuous and tyrannical than the last ten years in the reign of Elizabeth I and the first ten years of James I’s succession. Those two decades were also the golden age of English drama. It was the era of Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare – four playwrights who navigated the tempestuous waters of purge and persecution with different degrees of success. Kyd and Marlowe were accused of ‘holding monstrous opinions’ – the definition of which differed from accuser to accuser and included out-and-out atheism, libels against Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary and the blasphemous suggestion that the English sovereign was not head of the English Church. Jonson was certainly a Catholic from time to time – usually at moments of great stress or danger. Three of the playwrights clearly reflect their religious beliefs in their work. But Shakespeare’s faith is not so transparently revealed. After discovering how Kyd, Marlowe and Jonson chose (or chose not) to worship, the intriguing question remains: was William Shakespeare a Catholic?
Marlowe – author of Dr Faustus, Tamburlaine and The Jew of Malta – was a rumbustious atheist whose religious views were a combination of progressive thinking about the literal truth of the Old Testament and a desire to outrage conventional society. After his death in 1593, Richard Baines – like Marlowe, an associate of Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s spy-master – published what he claimed to be the playwright’s views on the Bible. Baines was hardly a reliable witness. He had, among his other accomplishments, spent some time ‘under cover’ as a seminarian in Rheims and, after his ordination, had planned to murder the whole community by poisoning the seminary’s well. The plan came to nothing and, in consequence, Baines’ infamy was never discovered. He was sent to England in the belief that he would say secret Masses for fugitive Catholics. Once he was free of his disguise, he resumed his old trade. He was an informer by instinct.
Baines reported – almost certainly correctly – that Marlowe rejected the Old Testament’s timeframe. His ‘damnable lies’ included doubts about the very existence of Adam, ‘proved to have lived within six thousand years’ while ‘the Indians have assuredly written of above sixteen thousand years ago’.1 Moses he regarded as a charlatan who ‘made the Jews travel forty years in the wilderness – which journey might have been done in one year’. His views on the New Testament were even more inflammatory. ‘Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest … All the New Testament is filthily written … The sacrament would have been much better administered in a tobacco pipe.’2 Most offensive of all, Marlowe insisted that there was an erotic implication in the description of St John as ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’.
The allegations against Marlowe were substantiated by Thomas Kyd, author of the Spanish Tragedy. The two men had shared the same lodgings and worked in the same room. So when Kyd was accused of publishing a ‘lewd and malicious libel’, it was easy for him to claim that incriminating documents, found in his possession, had been left behind by Marlowe. The ‘libel’ was included in material which he was said to have produced as a contribution to a campaign designed to encourage riots in protests against immigration. One of the leaflets produced in evidence was a doggerel verse, signed ‘Tamburlaine’. The quality of the work – ‘We’ll cut your throats in your temple praying / Not Paris Massacre so much blood did spill’3 – confirmed that Marlowe was not the author. But Kyd, under torture, repeated the charge and added that Marlowe was the proposed leader of an atheist uprising. Marlowe was arrested but, probably because of his association with Walsingham, was treated far better than Kyd had been. He was actually released to await trial. Shortly after his parole he was killed in a tavern brawl. There is still no certainty about the true author of the undoubtedly combustible attack on immigration – a feature of Tudor life that was welcomed by the Protestant leadership because most of the newcomers were, or were said to be, refugees from Catholic tyranny – material which Kyd disowned. But Kyd shared Marlowe’s atheism and shared the joke when he made a ‘jest of the Scriptures with these horrible vile, heretical words, denying the eternal deity of Christ’ – less out of an intellectual conviction than in a spirit of reckless bravado.
Ben Jonson equivocated. But at least he took religion seriously and his Catholicism was reflected in his plays. He was converted to Catholicism in 1598 – a dangerous year to acknowledge the authority of the Pope – while he was in prison awaiting trial for causing the death of one Gabriel Spencer, a fellow actor. Jonson’s claim that Spencer was killed in a duel was dismissed, but he pleaded ‘benefit of clergy’ – the reduction of punishment in cases where the criminal is in Holy Orders – and the sentence of execution was reduced to branding. During the weeks when his plea was being considered, it seemed that Jonson was destined for the gallows. The old adage proved correct. His mind, wonderfully concentrated, turned to the idea of writing a religious play. The result was Sejanus, written and first performed in 1603, the year of Queen Elizabeth’s death, and printed in 1605, the year of the Gunpowder Plot.
Sejanus is a Roman courtier who ingratiates himself with the Emperor Tiberius, exploits the imperial patronage by obtaining positions of power and influence for his supporters and aspires to lead the empire. The parallel with the rise of Cecil and Bacon is less than exact. But both men – like Sejanus – strengthened their position by exaggerating the threat to the established order posed by the followers of a different faith. The enemy, according to Sejanus, were the Catiline family. Catholics were represented in the same way to Elizabeth by Bacon and Cecil.
It is easy to overstate the extent to which Sejanus was meant to be a covert attack on the corruption, cruelty and conspiracies (real and imaginary) in Elizabethan England. Some Jonson scholars have identified representations of every prominent figure of the period – including Mary, Queen of Scots – among the dramatis personae.4 But, although the parallels have been exaggerated, they were close enough for the Earl of Northampton to cite the play as evidence to support his claim that the Privy Council should indict Jonson for ‘Popery’.5 Whether or not Elizabethan audiences appreciated the political nuances of the play must remain in doubt. So must the attitude of the King’s Players who performed it. But we do know that one of them was William Shakespeare.
Much of Shakespeare’s life is a mystery, and virtually nothing is known of his religious inclination. There is no record of him attending Mass or associating with recusants. Nor did he ostentatiously proclaim his Protestantism, although – as a member of, and playwright to, a company of Elizabethan Court players – he lived among men and women who would expect him to exhibit loyalty to the Queen and the Church of which she was head. There are, however, two areas in which evidence of his faith can be found. One is family background, friends and neighbours. The other is the texts of his plays.
The notion that Shakespeare was an unrepentant Catholic first gained serious credence with a discovery that was made, in 1757, by workmen who were retiling the roof of a house in Stratford-upon-Avon. Concealed in the rafters, they found what came to be called John Shakespeare’s Spiritual Testament. John was the given name of William Shakespeare’s father. Before 1757 there had been some casual and unverified suggestions that Shakespeare was inclined towards Catholicism. Fifty years after his death, Richard Davies, chaplain of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, wrote in the margin of notes on the tragedies, ‘He dyed a Papist’6 – leaving whoever read his observation to decide whether he meant that Shakespeare had remained true to Rome to the end or that he had a deathbed conversion.
During Shakespeare’s lifetime, the cartographer John Speed denounced Shakespeare in a polemic entitled The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine. Without providing much evidence to support his claim, he alleged that ‘This Papist and his Poet, of like conscience, the one ever feigning, the other ever falsifying the truth’,7 were guilty of treason. The attack was thought, at the time, to be the result of jealousy combined with prejudice. But after the discovery of the Testament, it was not so lightly dismissed. John Shakespeare could sign his name, but he could not read. So the claim that the document was connected to him was only plausible if it is assumed that he was handed it, ready-made, and then added his signature.
The document included an oath of allegiance to the ‘Romaine and Apostolic Church’, described the Virgin Mary as ‘my Angell guardian’ and venerated ‘the holy sacrifice of the Mass’.8 Those expressions – like much else in the Testament – are word-for-word translations of the call to live and die for the old faith, from a spiritual that was composed by Carlo Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan. Four thousand copies were brought to England by Edmund Campion, who certainly visited villages five miles outside Stratford. The Testament ends with the invocation of St Winifred, which was not in the Borromeo document and can be explained – say subscribers to the Campion-connection theory – by John Shakespeare’s anxiety to make the Testament appear his own work. St Winifred was the patron saint of Holywell, a favourite place of pilgrimage for Warwickshire. So far, so plausible. But one passage that was added to the Borromeo text is too good to be true.
John Shakespeare allegedly stated that the Testament was written as a precaution: ‘I may be cut off in the blossome of my sins.’9 Those words – or words much like them – are spoken by the ghost of Hamlet’s father, who lamented that he had been ‘Cut off euen in blossom of my sinne’ (1:5:76). There are two possible explanations for the similarity. William Shakespeare could have remembered his father’s agonies for thirty years and incorporated them in his most celebrated play. Or the Testament could have been written sometime later than 1599 (and long after John Shakespeare’s death) and the line from Hamlet included to give it bogus authenticity. The second explanation seems by far the more likely.
It is, however, certain that John Shakespeare – a glover by trade – was, at one time, a recusant. His name appears on a list of Stratford citizens who were ‘presented [before the magistrates] for not coming monthlie to the Church according to Her Majesty’s laws’.10 However, when refusal to conform would have disqualified him from holding local office, he turned apostate. John’s appointment, in 1558, as a town constable required him to take the Oath of Allegiance. He agreed, but the evidence suggests that he was reluctant to accept the obligations of Protestantism and that when they could not be avoided, he forswore his true faith as little as possible. His attitude was illustrated by the way in which he interpreted the injunction to ‘utterly extinct and destroy’ the symbols of Catholicism in Stratford’s parish church. The edict had been in force for five years before he obeyed it. Then he limewashed the church wall – making restoration possible – and removed the rood screen in one piece, thus allowing it to be re-erected when the true faith was restored to England. Despite his clear reluctance to conform, by 1568 John’s Protestant orthodoxy was sufficiently established for him to be elected bailiff (mayor) of Stratford. In 1576 he retired from all municipal office, for no apparent reason. That was the year in which the Privy Council set up a commission more generally to enforce the obligation of public servants to take the Oath of Supremacy. John Shakespeare may have wanted to avoid close scrutiny of his record. Or perhaps there was only so much heresy that he could stomach.
William Shakespeare was four at the time when his father was made mayor of Stratford. We have no way of knowing what he was taught, at his mother’s knee, though it is certain that the Ardens – his maternal grandparents – were strong and consistent recusants. In 1583 the head of the family was executed for involvement in the Summerville Plot, and Mary Arden’s father, a gentleman landowner, had been notable for the expression of public pleasure at the succession of Mary Tudor and the deposition of Lady Jane Grey. But whatever family prayers were said each evening, by the time William Shakespeare was old enough to notice such things, his father represented the Catholic compromise with Protestantism that was common among men who wanted to get on in this world and were too busy to worry about the next.
Despite his father’s acceptance of the outward signs of the Protestant faith, William Shakespeare grew up surrounded by Catholics. Hugh Latimer – the Bishop of Worcester who, during the Counter-Reformation, was burned at the stake for his Protestant zeal – located Stratford ‘at the blind end’ of his diocese. His Archdeacon reported that in Warwickshire ‘great Parishes and Market towns [were] utterly destitute of the word of God’. And John Whitgift (one of Latimer’s successors in Worcester) complained that Stratford was a closely knit community that shielded Papists and refused to provide the names and numbers of either recusant or yet-to-be converted and redeemed Catholics in the town. The Worcester clergy estimated that there were one hundred Papists, of one sort or another, in Stratford. A dozen or more were the Shakespeares’ neighbours.
Known Catholics who – like the Shakespeares – lived in Henley Street included George Whateley, a woollen draper, who was rich enough to endow a small school outside the town. Two of his brothers were fugitive priests. John Cawdrey, the landlord of the Angel Inn, was the father of a Jesuit. George Badger, another woollen draper, was forced to resign from the aldermanic bench when it was discovered that he too was a recusant. And the Shakespeares had Catholic connections in other parts of Stratford. Thomas Nash, who bought the Bear Inn from Thomas Barber, was a distant Shakespeare relation. Both landlords were Catholics. William’s parents were close enough to the practising Papists of Stratford to convince young William that Papists were not the treacherous heretics depicted in Protestant propaganda. And he was to learn more about the Roman faith at school.
Stratford Grammar School employed a succession of Catholic masters. Some of them forswore their faith – as John Shakespeare had forsworn his – in order to secure their appointment, but their continued (if secret) adherence to the old religion was not in doubt. Simon Hunt left the school for the seminary at Douai and became a Jesuit priest. Thomas Jenkins’ long association with Edmund Campion had begun at St John’s College, Oxford. John Cottom was certainly a Catholic and was believed to be the brother of Thomas Cottam, a Jesuit who was tried alongside Campion and subsequently executed. It may be that it was because of connections made at school, and the influence of his masters, that William Shakespeare left Stratford at the beginning of the ten ‘lost years’.
There are many theories about how the decade was spent, and the suggestion that he passed most of the time in Lancashire is no more capable of verification than any of the others. But the proposition that Shakespeare was the Shakeshaft who was employed by the Houghtons of Lancashire is as plausible as the rest of the theories, and it provides a suitable bridge between schooldays in Stratford and life as an actor and playwright-actor in London. The transmutation from Shakespeare into Shakeshaft can be explained by the variations in name and spelling that were common in Tudor England. William’s paternal grandfather signed himself ‘Shakestaff’.11 Or it may have been the result of the need to hide his true identity.
The Houghtons knew the Cottoms of Preston whose kinsman, John Cottom, had taught young William Shakespeare in Stratford. He was named in John Houghton’s will as a one-time ‘servant’ – an omnibus description that could easily encompass resident schoolmaster. It does not require a great leap of imagination to assume that, having moved on to Stratford Grammar School, he recommended his brightest pupil to fill the post he had once held. Lancashire, the most Catholic county in the realm, was notorious for ignoring the edicts of its Protestant sovereign. Nine of the twenty-one Popish schoolteachers who were executed in the reign of Queen Elizabeth taught in Lancashire. William Shakespeare, or Shakeshaft, may have been one of those who escaped. His survival may have been the result of his employer’s friendship with the Stanley family. The Stanleys had played an ignoble part in the suppression of the Pilgrimage of Grace, but Lord Strange – the eldest son of the family, and future Earl of Derby – was a Catholic sympathiser who, in the years before he succeeded to the title and the estate, was patron of a group of travelling players. Was it in Lancashire that Shakespeare joined Lord Strange’s Men and became first an actor and then a playwright? It may have been gratitude that made him, in later life, go out of his way to please and flatter the Stanleys.
In The Tragedy of Richard III (5:4:17) it is Stanley who seizes the crown from the dead tyrant’s head, presents it to the Earl of Richmond and symbolically crowns him Henry VII, King of England:
Lo! Here, this long-usurped royalty
From the dead temples of this bloody wretch
Have I plucked off to grace thy brows withal:
Wear it, enjoy it and make much of it.
Richmond – gracious in victory – enquires, ‘is young George Stanley living?’ and is gratified to discover that he is ‘safe in Leicester town’. The story establishes the Stanleys as crucial to the emergence of the whole Tudor dynasty and is, of course, pure invention.
The works of William Shakespeare are so complete and comprehensive that it is possible to use the evidence of his plays and poetry to prove that he was whatever the reader wants him to be. In The Heart of His Mystery, John Waterfield devotes six hundred pages of careful textual analysis to the Catholic references, images and coded messages in the plays and poetry. He dedicates the book to Clare Asquith, the author of Shadowplay, and endorses her belief that the plays have a hidden message, which had to be deciphered by the recognition of a ‘breathtakingly simple’ code: ‘High and fair stand for Catholic, Low and dark stand for Protestant.’12 That is not the only reason why Waterfield’s work should be treated with caution. The evidence for his confidence that the collected works are Catholic tracts includes the assertions that ‘when Capulet threatens to drag Juliet “on a hurdle” to her wedding with Paris, it reminds us that this was the way in which priests were conveyed to the place of execution’, and ‘the mutilated figure of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus, with hands cut off and tongue torn out, acquires additional poignancy when we see her as standing for the powerless, persecuted and gagged Catholic Community’.13 That may or may not be true. The connection is in the eye of the beholder. But neither quotation tells us anything about Shakespeare’s religion.
Only once – in all his works – did Shakespeare quote directly from the Bible. Measure for Measure takes its title from Chapter 7 of Matthew’s Gospel, ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgement ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured unto you again.’ The play begins with the imprisonment of Claudio for the crime of fathering a child with Julietta, to whom he is betrothed. Any claims it has to being a stern rejection of sexual licence are undermined by what follows – the offer of repeal in return for sexual favours (provided by a surrogate), and the final speech of the play in which the Duke of Vienna proposes marriage to a nun. Measure for Measure teaches us very little about Shakespeare’s attitude towards religion and nothing about his attitude towards Rome.
We do know that Shakespeare never wrote a word that openly commended Catholicism. He did, however, heartily support, from time to time, the idea that temporal monarchs enjoyed an authority which the Pope could not subvert. The supremacy of kings is most trenchantly expressed in King John (3:1:147–54) – a play set in England three hundred years before the Reformation:
What earthly name to interrogatories
Can task the free breath of a sacred king?
Thou canst not, Cardinal, devise a name
So slight, unworthy and ridiculous,
To charge me to an answer, as the Pope.
Tell him this tale; and from the mouth of England
Add thus much more: that no Italian priest
Shall tithe or toll in our dominions.
But Shakespeare’s religious inclinations should not be judged by the great set speeches, which he must have thought – as a Court player – needed to meet the mood of the time. It is more rewarding to look for indications of belief in less bravura passages.
In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet asks Friar Lawrence, ‘Are you at leisure, holy father now / Or shall I come to you at evening mass?’ Evening Mass had been prohibited by the Council of Trent in 1566. But it would be wrong to assume that the question was put in Juliet’s mouth to indicate that Rome’s writ did not run in the Globe Theatre. It may have been an obeisance to historical accuracy. The action of the play is set before 1556 and Verona was slow to implement the Tridentine obligations. Shakespeare’s genius included a general and proper willingness to require fact and truth to take second place behind the needs of rhythm and rhyme. The likelihood is that he wrote of evening Mass without a thought about its religious implications.
There is no doubt that Shakespeare was a patriot. And it is easy to believe that he was a Protestant patriot. Professor A D Nuttall wrote in Shakespeare the Thinker of commentators who regard the absence from his plays of ‘Protestant ferocity’ as an indication of his ‘not so crypto Catholicism’14 and dismiss his rare excursions into verbal violence against Rome as a ‘young dramatist … temporarily toeing the party line’. The example he cites comes from Henry VI Part 1. It is 1429 and the English army is besieging Orleans. Talbot announces, ‘our English troops retire, I cannot stay them’, (2:1:17) and then confronts the cause of all the panic, St Joan:
Devil or devil’s dam, I’ll conjure thee
Blood will I draw on thee, thou art a witch.
Subsequently, Bedford describes the French king as ‘Coward of France’, who, ‘wrongs his fame, despairing of his own arm’s fortitude, to join with witches and the help of hell’ (2:5:5).
It is perfectly true that the authorised Protestant version of Henry VI’s defeat was that English arms were beaten by witchcraft and that St Joan was the chief witch. But the story was not invented in Tudor England. It was the excuse for defeat offered by Henry VI’s army. Shakespeare recorded it because the English soldiers said it. He also wrote (1:6:4–7) – given a little poetic licence – what the French said about her:
Divinest creature, Astraea’s daughter.
How shall I honour thee for this success?
Thy promises are like Adonis’ gardens,
That one day bloom’d and fruitful were the next.
In the play, Joan does not make constant references to the Virgin Mary in order to make plain that she is no ordinary witch, but a Catholic witch. She does it onstage because that is what she did in life.
Interpreting Shakespeare’s words as vehicles for ideas beyond the narrow scope of the play is an amusing pastime which, over the years, has got out of hand. Macbeth – first performed at the Globe in 1606 – is said to be a response to the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, the year before. The idea was said to be made credible by Macbeth’s decision ‘to doubt the equivocation of the fiend’ that promised him immunity until Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane (5:5:43). That is said, by those who have a vivid imagination, to echo the indictment against Father Henry Garnett, an executed Jesuit, who was accused of equivocation during his trial.15 Pericles – the same authorities explain – is, in form and content, like a mystery play of the sort performed in Coventry which, during his boyhood, Shakespeare may or may not have seen. The sudden appearance of Diana was thought to be so evocative of visitations by the Virgin Mary that the play was performed in recusant households and became required reading at the English Jesuit College at Saint-Omer.16
There is only one of Shakespeare’s plays which we can be sure provoked a violent religious-cum-political reaction from its first-night audience. In June 1613 the Globe Theatre was set on fire during the performance of Henry VIII. It is by no means certain what made the audience so angry. Wolsey – whose fall and death the play portrays – is a tragic character: ‘I charge thee Cromwell, put away ambition.’ Cranmer triumphs over his enemies, and Anne Boleyn – after a sumptuous coronation, which is re-enacted on stage – gives triumphant birth to Princess Elizabeth. A spectator at the coronation procession actually speaks of the King’s ‘scruples’ about the validity of his divorce from Catherine being extinguished by ‘learned and reverend fathers’ who confirmed that the ‘late marriage [was] made of non effect’. But the impeccably Protestant nature of the play is undermined by the character of Queen Catherine herself. Her speeches make clear that her courage and regal dignity survived her humiliation. She tells Wolsey (2:4:74):
I do believe,
Induc’d by potent circumstance, that
You are mine enemy; and make my challenge
You shall not be my judge; for it is you
Have blown this coal betwixt my lord and me
Which God’s dews quench. Therefore I say again
I utterly abhor, yea, from my soul
Refuse you for my judge.
Whatever message Shakespeare intended to convey, he certainly expected trouble. The epilogue begins, ‘Tis ten to one this play can never please.’
All this amounts to is the glorious truth that William Shakespeare, as well as being ‘not for an age but for all time’ was also not for one denomination, but for many. Only by a prodigious leap of the imagination can we conclude that Sonnet 73 – ‘bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang’17 – is a criticism of the Dissolution of the monasteries or that the constant occurrence of shipwrecks and storms is ‘meant to suggest the dire upheaval and destruction of traditional values that had been the Catholic experience of the Reformation’.18 Yet there is evidence to suggest that William Shakespeare was of a Catholic inclination. It is revealed by lines in his plays which contain ideas that came naturally into his mind.
Shakespeare created a number of notable ghosts – unquiet souls who wander through the purgatory that Protestants dismissed as a Catholic invention. They appear most notably in Hamlet, Julius Caesar and Macbeth, but they are also, at least, mentioned in plays that do not need them to move the action along. The ghost of Hamlet’s father deserves particular attention. Even though he is in the half world between heaven and hell while he is waiting for the sins against him to be purged, he is allowed to return to the land of the living.
During his (or its) early manifestations, the ghost is visible to Horatio. ‘Look, my lord, it comes’ (1:4:39). When, after his real or feigned madness, it appears to him again, no one else sees it. Gertrude says to him, ‘you do bend your eye on vacancy’ (3:4:116). It is clear that the ghost which (or who) materialises on the platform before the castle at Elsinore is meant to be taken seriously. That does not necessarily mean that Shakespeare himself believed in ghosts and, in consequence, purgatory. But there is no doubt that he expected his audiences to do so.
There is, among Shakespeare’s minor characters, an undoubted bias in favour of the Catholic clergy. Friar Lawrence, who is – as a result of his foolish advice – criminally responsible for the tragic deaths of Romeo and Juliet, is portrayed as a fireside philosopher who takes refuge from the wickedness of the world in ‘the powerful grace that lies in plants, herbs, stones and their true qualities’ (2:3:15). The priests in Two Gentlemen of Verona, Twelfth Night and Much Ado About Nothing are similarly benign. Friar Patrick, in Two Gentlemen of Verona, hears Silva’s confession – an act of grace which must have been denied to the (presumably Protestant) actor who played the part. The plays are set in the years before the Reformation, and the appearance of a Protestant clergyman would have been as much of an anachronism as Caesar’s clock. But although a true enemy of the Pope and Papists would have made the agents of Rome wicked, sinister or ridiculous, it is the incumbents of Queen Elizabeth’s Church who are treated with little respect. Sir Nathaniel, a ‘curate’ in Love’s Labour’s Lost, is a sycophant. Sir Oliver Martext, a ‘vicar’ in As You Like It, has doubts about the legality of the marriage between Audrey and Touchstone, but lives by the adage, ‘’Tis no matter; ne’er a fantastical knave of them all shall flout me out of my calling’ (3:3:114).
By portraying Martext as more interested in his living than his principles, Shakespeare was reflecting the common criticism – sometimes justified, sometimes not – levelled by unreconciled Catholics against the Protestant clergy. But Shakespeare was not of an extreme Catholic disposition. He was not an extreme anything. His upbringing and instinct inclined him towards Rome. But the inclination was not so strong that he was prepared to risk his life and livelihood to observe its rites and respect its rituals. And that made the most extraordinary of men typical of the age in which he lived.