Shakespeare and the Jesuits
‘To Fight the Fight’
Andrea Campana
Copyright © 2012 Andrea Campana
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2012-08-28
Dedication
This book is dedicated to the loves of my life, Ed and Giulia, my husband and daughter. I thank them from my heart for their patience and perseverance—the two sustaining qualities of the Jesuit mission—and for allowing me the indulgence of this project. Fortunately, the large doses of frustration handed to them were often met with large doses of humor.
Acknowledgments
This work began conceptually nine years ago at Lehman College under the tutelage of David Bady, who encouraged his students to explore Catholic themes in Shakespeare. A journey which began as a curiosity quickly segued into a passionate and intellectually enriching search for truth. Those of us who have been mentored along the way by Peter Milward SJ will surely agree he is the finest of Shakespeare scholars and an individual of the highest integrity. I am deeply grateful to him for his steady stream of assistance, support, and reality checks: “To me fair friend, you can never be old.” I am also grateful to Dennis Taylor for his willingness to read my work over the years, as well as for our conversations on “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” and to Stratford Caldecott for providing an electronic forum through which our group could explore Catholic readings of Shakespeare. In particular, I thank Patrice Thompson for bringing our attention to the Black Madonna. I thank Fred Tollini SJ, who along with Fr. Milward had enough patience to read through the manuscript. I am deeply indebted to John D’Angelo of Fordham University for allowing me to access the invaluable recusant literature collections at the William D. Walsh Library. Tom McCoog SJ patiently answered my unending questions on the English mission and generously provided documents from the Jesuit archives in Rome on the elaborate ciphers used by Jesuit leaders. Through the assistance of Maurice Whitehead, I was glad to find Philippe Moulis of l’Universite d’Artois, and I thank him for his help in searching for the gravesite of the English Jesuit John Floyd in Saint-Omer. Fr. Peter Harris graciously facilitated my research on John Floyd and passed along two paintings from the Jesuit College in Valladolid, Spain. I would also like to acknowledge the ground-breaking research of John Klause, Clare Asquith, Gerard Kilroy, Pat Martin, and John Finnis, upon which I have relied many times in the often maddening attempts to fit the pieces of the Shakespearean puzzle together.
Lastly, I would like to say that, despite my 20 years as a journalist with impartiality as a second nature, and despite the current trend to veer from hagiographical studies of the Catholic martyrs, I have found it virtually impossible to conduct this research without “floods of tears,” as John Floyd, punning on his own name, though not humorously, says of his grief for “the slain of my country.” And as Joan la Pucelle (Joan of Arc) says in Henry VI, Part I, “One drop of blood drawn from thy country’s bosom/Should grieve thee more than streams of foreign gore./Return thee therefore with a flood of tears,/And wash away thy country’s stained spots.”
Note: This book uses The Signet Classic Shakespeare versions of the plays and the 1609 Quarto sonnets reprinted in The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets by Helen Vendler.
Foreword
By Peter Milward S.J.
“East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” Generous is the applicability of these memorable words of Rudyard Kipling. He himself was born and brought up, though an Englishman, in India, but later on in life he settled in England. So we might also say of him, “India is India, and England is England, and never the twain shall meet.” Yet he himself did his best as an author to bring about a meeting of the two countries, only whether he succeeded in this aim may be doubted. Yet such an aim is not unworthy of such an author, and, as the Roman Quintilian remarks, “Not infrequently it turns out that one who is ever searching for the impossible discovers something worth the discovery.”
So let it be with Shakespeare on the one hand, and the Jesuits on the other. Here, on the one hand, is William Shakespeare, born in 1564 in the rural town of Stratford on the river Avon and died in 1616 back in his country home. It is hardly necessary to describe him and his impressive dramatic output, achieved more or less within the two decades from 1590 to 1610, in the reigns partly of Elizabeth Tudor, partly of James Stuart. Nor is it necessary to add that his name is commonly included among the four great poets of the Western world, together with Homer in Greece, Virgil in Rome, and Dante in Italy, while more recently he has been chosen by his fellow Englishmen as their Man of the Millennium. “Why, man,” as his Cassius declares of Julius Caesar, “he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus!” Well may he then be compared to Kipling’s England. Or rather, may we not say he is England?
There, on the other hand, are the Jesuits, a religious order founded by Ignatius Loyola in 1540, who from the very moment of their foundation expanded so impressively throughout the world. Within what remained of the sixteenth century they had become at home “the educators of Europe”, with so many colleges in so many of the major cities, and abroad “the missionaries of the new world” in America no less than in Asia, or what were then known as “the Indies”. And they have continued to expand from those days till today, apart from a brief period of suppression from 1773 to 1814. In particular, coming close to the life and times of Shakespeare, in all their colleges beyond the narrow seas (or the so-called English Channel) there was a flourishing Jesuit drama, as the Jesuit schoolmasters saw the drama as an important part of a humanistic formation. Also within England, where the “old faith” was increasingly proscribed since the accession of Elizabeth Tudor to the throne in 1558, two Jesuits had made their way in secret in the summer of 1580.
Now let me return to my original question, “If Shakespeare is England, and the Jesuits are India, or the Indian Empire, if not the British Empire, what about a meeting between the twain?” It is strangely akin to the earlier question raised by Hamlet, “To be, or not to be, that is the question.” In other words, is the meeting between the twain to be recognized or not? Did such a meeting ever take place, or not? Do we have any evidence that it took place or not? And again, in face of such a question, we have to consider two hands, on the one hand, and on the other.
On the one hand, there is the situation of the Jesuits in Shakespeare’s England, as well under Elizabeth Tudor as under James Stuart – a situation of severe persecution, directed first against those Catholics who wished to remain loyal to “the old faith”, who refused to attend the new Anglican services (which is all that was required of them by the queen), and who were therefore banned as “recusants”, secondly against those priests who had returned from a seminary formation overseas in order to provide spiritual assistance to the poor afflicted Catholics at home, and above all against the Jesuits who were regarded as the spiritual leaders of those Catholics including the seminary priests. Such a situation called for strict secrecy, and the Jesuits in particular had to exercise the utmost caution in going about their ministry – as we find already in the case of the first two Jesuits to “invade” their country, Robert Persons and
