(2008) – the Earl being Shakespeare’s noble patron, the Earl of Southampton, and the Jesuit being Robert Southwell. Then there is the connection between William Weston, with the seminary priest, the dramatist’s classmate, Robert Debdale, and Shakespeare’s two plays which touch on the sensational subject of exorcism. And there is, above all, the further connection between the Jesuit superior Henry Garnet, with his alleged complicity in the Gunpowder Plot, and Shakespeare’s Macbeth, including the whole issue of equivocation on which special emphasis was laid at Garnet’s trial in 1606.
But now I am anticipating, if in general terms, what the lady author has to say in fuller detail on this vexed subject of “Shakespeare and the Jesuits” – to which she is now adding, over and above the few Elizabethan Jesuits I have mentioned, another who is rather to be described as Jacobean, who rarely comes up for consideration in this context, but who for this very reason deserves fuller attention, if only with respect to the four great tragedies, which may be seen in their totality as “Shakespeare’s Passion Play”. With his addition I even feel as if the author has provided her dramatist – not without echoes of “the papist and his poet” – with a triplicity of Jesuit influence of which he might have been proud, from Campion, by way of Southwell, to John Floyd (or Fludd). And so, in conclusion, let me say, “Speak Floyd for me!” or rather “Speak Fludd for Andrea Campana!”
(Sophia University, Tokyo)
Introduction
Every story about William Shakespeare begins with Ben Jonson. His oft-quoted tribute of 1623 rings out and confers upon Shakespeare a quality of immortality that persists to this day: “He was not of an age, but for all time!” So began the worldwide cult of Bard worship a mere seven years after Shakespeare’s death, with the publishing of the First Folio of 36 plays.
The power of Shakespeare to elicit the creative and critical response continues unabated. In today’s literary milieu, Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series of vampire romance novels, inspired in part by Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer’s Night Dream, and The Merchant of Venice, has sold more than 100 million copies in some 37 languages. Shakespeare no doubt has sketched the borders of culture for all nations. He is celebrated for his rhetorical finesse to shape fictional characters into realistic portraits of a broad swath of humanity, offering insight into the most elemental of our behaviors and motivations.
End of story? Not quite. Too many loose ends remain untied. Although the immortality of Shakespeare triumphs, and his work has lost neither its authenticity nor vitality among purists, his characters, themes, and plots, as well as the dramatist’s personal motivations, have been reinvented by playwrights, poets, composers, novelists, moviemakers, and literary critics as a way to retrofit them into the cultural or political bias of the moment.
This is due to a penumbra that surrounds the enigmatic figure of Shakespeare, a shroud of mystery that continues to eclipse the source of his immortality and to cloud the deepest inspiration of his work. The dramatist taunts us with such lines as, “His givings-out were of an infinite distance/From his true-meant design,” spoken by Lucio in Measure for Measure (1.4.55), leaping off the stage and the page as if we are to discern a hint of biographical truth. His “true-meant design” has remained stubbornly out of plain view. At the same time, a dearth of seamless biographical information fuels an authorship debate not unlike the conspiracy theories surrounding the JFK assassination. T.S. Eliot came closest to unraveling the secret of Shakespeare, when the 20thcentury poet sensed the existence of a “pattern in Shakespeare’s carpet.”
With Ben Jonson as our guide, we may emerge from these purgatorial shadows. An able dramatist and poet in his own right, the wit-trading tavern-mate and sometime rival of the great Bard interests today’s crop of literary critics mostly for what he knew about Shakespeare. What has remained unnoticed for 400 years is the significance of five other words issued from the pen of Jonson that are far more relevant to the life of Shakespeare. “Can man forget this storie?” Jonson writes in the last line of “Poems of Devotion,” the product of his dying years. The three-lyric sequence reveals a man prepared to confront his own guilt, as well as the collective guilt of England, over a matter Jonson apparently could not shake from his memory: the staggering brutality leveled against Jesuit missionary priests during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Through both content and form, the “Poems of Devotion” sequence expresses Jonson’s deep desire for harmony with the divine, while pleading forgiveness for the sin of Jesuit execution. Jonson may have been a tough man of letters, but he was a principled one with an eye for recognizing virtue in a superficial age. As with other poets whose work veiled political commentary, Jonson was acutely aware of the social role of poetry, and his writing was marked by a satirical bent aimed at a society widely perceived as corrupt. While in prison in 1598, he was converted by a priest to Catholicism, and a religious vision informs much of his poetry.
In “Poems of Devotion,” Jonson unmistakably models his poems on the early but essential steps of the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. In the process, he reveals his experiential understanding of this mystical process by which one perceives God through meditative prayer. At the same time, he shapes his tripartite series into symbolic numerical patterns using rhyme, meter, and stanzaic structure that mirror the emblems found in the sonnets of Shakespeare. These numerical emblems, in both Jonson and Shakespeare, form specific allusions to the highly controversial English Jesuit missionary figures of Robert Persons, Edmund Campion, Henry Garnet, and Robert Southwell.
Within both his 80-line encomium of 1623 and “Poems of Devotion” of 1640, Jonson discloses a truth that unlocks the mystery of Shakespeare’s heart, a truth that has been assiduously sought by the most erudite of scholars since the 18thcentury. What makes Shakespeare immortal, Jonson says, is not solely the universal humanity of his legendary characters. No, it is something far greater.
At the heart of Shakespeare’s poems and plays is the silent presence of, if not tribute to, the Jesuit missionary priests martyred under the powerful and glorious yet randomly persecutory Queen Elizabeth I, who ruled the newly emerging secular nation-state of England from 1558 until her death in 1603. In the most daring of styles during the great blossoming of the Renaissance in English literature, the genius of Shakespeare gives an eternal voice to these executed Jesuits by appropriating their very own words to inspire his art form. In doing so, he leaves a written record of one of the most rapacious periods of English history, shadowed beneath the surface of works that delight, instruct, and mystify us; stir our emotions; and create in us a sense of the profound and the aesthetic. Shakespeare draws heavily from the writings of the Jesuits to create some of the most memorable lines in all of western literature. In what is surely one of the greatest literary ironies ever, Shakespeare elevates the words of the martyrs to an unparalleled level of artistry that has sustained itself for more than four centuries. He summons to the fore a formidable array of imaginative faculties and uses the power of art to transcend not only the tragic experience of the martyrs but also the earthly bonds of all humanity. Through this bold and aesthetically innovative move, Shakespeare not only ensures the immortality of the missionaries, whose clandestine ministry segued into extreme political controversy and brutal execution, but he appears to have arrived at a deeper faith in the process.
One of the boldest efforts ever by the Society of Jesus was its mission to England as part of the Catholic reform movement, with the express mission to counter the effects of the Protestant Reformation that had begun under King Henry VIII. Officially founded in 1540 by Ignatius of Loyola in Spain as an order of the Catholic Church, the Society of Jesus fanned out across Europe and enjoyed an extraordinary period of growth in the 25 years following his death in 1556. During this time, three generals ruled the Society—Diego Laynez (1558-1565), Francis Borgia (1565-1572), and Everard Mercurian (1573-1580). From the time of Ignatius to the death of Mercurian in 1580, the number of Jesuits worldwide increased fivefold to 5,000, while the number of colleges grew from 31 to 144. Missions were operating in places as far-flung as Florida, Mexico, and Peru.1
England
