traitor’s death, dragged along the road to the gallows, hanged, drawn and quartered on the gallows, and so made a spectacle to all who might feel tempted to support them.
On the other hand, there is the situation of Shakespeare himself during his dramatic career, which he had to spend for most of the time in London. Did he meet any of the Jesuits who came to England from the year 1580 onwards? Who would they have been anyhow? During his brief return to England, a year before he was arrested, Campion had made quite a name for himself with his two publications, one popularly known as “Campion’s Brag”, or “A Letter to the Lords of the Council”, and another in Latin on “Ten Reasons” on the side of the Catholics against the Protestants. Persons had already published his “Reasons of Refusal”, explaining why Catholics were forbidden to attend the new Anglican services, but then, on his friend’s arrest, he had to return to the continent, where he soon published his spiritual bestseller, popularly known as “The Book of Resolution” but subsequently re-titled The Christian Directory. On the Catholic side he became the most prolific controversialist till his death in 1610. Their two places were soon taken by Jasper Heywood, who was not only related to Sir Thomas More through his father the dramatist John Heywood, but had also been one of the translators of the influential Seneca’s Ten Tragedies early on in Elizabeth’s reign. He was followed, on his banishment in 1585, by William Weston, who achieved notoriety in connection with a series of exorcisms at recusant houses to the North of London, in collaboration with a seminary priest Robert Debdale, who had been a classmate of Shakespeare’s at Stratford. The exorcisms are alluded to in Shakespeare’s early Comedy of Errors and in his later tragedy of King Lear. The following year there arrived two more Jesuits, who may both claim some connection with the dramatist and his plays, Henry Garnet and Robert Southwell. Garnet soon found himself superior of the few Jesuits in England, after the arrest and imprisonment of Weston, and he later reappears as the drunken Porter’s “equivocator” in Macbeth. As for Southwell, he achieved considerable fame as an Elizabethan poet before he was arrested in 1592, imprisoned and severely tortured, before being put to death in 1595, and his poetic and prose writings achieved publication both during his lifetime and in the immediate aftermath of his death. Yet another Jesuit, John Gerard, was active in and around London during all these years, till he was obliged to leave the country after the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 (in which he is said to have been implicated). In short, there weren’t so many of them to have made Shakespeare’s acquaintance, but at least they were very active in their spiritual ministry and very vocal in their publications, besides being behind much of the Catholic enterprise both in England and abroad and for that reason the particular object of the Elizabethan persecution.
Then what, it may be asked, about the possibility, the probability, or the moral certainty, of a meeting between the twain? The great dramatist, on the one hand, and the far-flung Society of Jesus, on the other? So long as we speak in terms of what may be possible or probable, there is no problem. John Henry Newman, who knew his Shakespeare, though he was no Shakespeare scholar, remarks of him in his Idea of a University, that he had “so little of a Protestant about him that Catholics have been able without extravagance to claim him as their own”. In this remark he was no doubt relying on the evidence provided him by the Shakespeare scholar Richard Simpson, who had followed him into the Catholic Church, and who left behind him notes on “The Religion of Shakespeare” which were subsequently worked up in book form by a priest of the London Oratory, Henry Sebastian Bowden. The other great Catholic thinker of the following century also gave it as his opinion in his book on Chaucer, “That Shakespeare was a Catholic is a thing that every Catholic feels by every sort of convergent common sense to be true.” He in turn was supported by another Catholic scholar, Clara Longworth, the Comtesse de Chambrun, who devoted several books in those years to the Catholicism of Shakespeare. Even so, granted that Shakespeare was a Catholic, at least in sympathy, does that necessarily put him in touch with the Jesuits? Possibly so, and probably so, especially if we follow (as Chesterton was evidently following) Newman’s principle of what he calls in his Grammar of Assent the “convergence of independent probabilities”, which is restated by Shakespeare himself in his Midsummer Night’s Dream, in the words of Hippolyta, as “more witnessing than fancy’s images, and growing to something of great constancy”.
On the other hand, it may be queried, and today it is increasingly being queried, what hard evidence we have, whether of Shakespeare’s Catholic allegiance or (let alone) his Jesuit acquaintance? Nowadays there are not a few Catholic scholars, and even a few Jesuits, who call both theses in question, or who, while sympathetic with the reasoning behind the theses, find themselves unable to come to any reasonable conclusion but the agnostic “Not proven”. Faced with a determined consensus of what may be called “the Shakespeare establishment” whether at Stratford in England or at Washington in America, that the dramatist was, if anything, a conforming Anglican to all outward appearances and probably a religious agnostic at heart, such Catholic scholars may feel reluctant to take up what is commonly represented as a “sectarian” position in desiring (as Newman puts it) to claim Shakespeare as their own, especially in these post-Vatican, ecumenical times, when we prefer to emphasize what Catholics and non-Catholics have in common over what has divided us since the Elizabethan Reformation.
At the same time, it has to be recognized that “truth” has its claims on us no less than “charity”, according to the Pauline principle of Veritatem facientes in caritate, which is variously translated as “following truth in love”, or “speaking truth in love”, or “doing truth in charity”. It has also to be recognized that confessional allegiance is one thing, and it is very difficult to prove concerning Shakespeare one way or the other in the murky times of Elizabethan England, whereas the impact of religious faith on works of literary or dramatic genius is another. In the world of modern Shakespeare scholarship, one may well waive the former question by neither affirming nor denying but adding a third option, which is simply “Transeat”, or in the words of the Virgin to the Angel (and in the song of the Beatles), “Let it be”, considering that it is rather the latter question which should engage our scholarly attention. That is to say, to what extent, it may be asked, does the religious faith of the dramatist, whether old or new, whether traditional or reformed, enter into the deep meaning of his plays? Also, to what extent do his possible, probable, or even morally certain connections with the English Jesuits of his time affect our interpretation of his plays?
For this purpose, I would say, what is most needed in such an exploration is – what is not necessarily to be found in today’s academic world – an open mind. I mean that, while scholars may profess to seek the truth in every investigation, they may consider certain cases, such as the religious faith of Shakespeare, or the general relation of religion and drama, to be closed, when they are really wide open for that very reason. Thus what has been regarded as “taboo” up till quite recently may suddenly be revealed as no longer subject to such a prohibition.
Take the individual Jesuits mentioned above. Both Persons and Campion are known to have visited the house of Edward Arden, the head of the Arden family, to which Shakespeare’s mother presumably belonged, and that house named Park Hall was situated in the neighborhood of present-day Birmingham not far from Stratford. There both father and son, John and the young William, could have made their way and met either one or both the Jesuits and received the Spiritual Testament which was discovered among the rafters of the house in Henley Street in the eighteenth century. There is also evidence, recently disputed but still valid, that the young William subsequently became tutor to a Catholic family named Houghton in Lancashire, under the related name of “Shakeshafte”, and it was under Houghton auspices that Campion later stayed in Lancashire, working on his “Ten Reasons”. As for Persons, the influence of his writings, especially his “Book of Resolution”, is to be found scattered here and there in the plays of Shakespeare, not least in his great tragedies. The two names are even associated, with reference to the comic figure of Falstaff, by the Protestant historian John Speed, as “the papist and his poet”. The same, or much more, may be said of the impact of Southwell’s poems and prose writings on the early plays and poems of Shakespeare, at least leading up to Hamlet at the end of the Elizabethan age – concerning which an outstanding
