was a kingdom ripe for spiritual awakening in the religiously austere years of the Tudor monarchs. A now-recognized meaningful percentage of England’s population, Catholics had been deprived under the Queen’s religious “settlement” of access to the sacraments and spiritual guidance; this settlement, enacted in 1559, abolished the jurisdiction of the Pope, restored royal supremacy, and re-imposed a Protestant prayer book as the official worship of the Church of England. The Queen had been excommunicated by the Pope in 1570, complicating matters for English Catholics, particularly the Jesuits, who were aligned with Catholic Spain. Under various English laws, including penal statutes specifically targeted against the Jesuits, their essentially pastoral mission was treasonable. Any denial of the state’s supremacy in religion resulted in the penalty of execution by hanging, drawing, and quartering; oftentimes, the condemned was cut down after being hanged but while still alive, at which time the butchering took place.
In June of 1555, the first Englishman, Thomas Lith, was admitted to the Society of Jesus.2Fewer than 20 years later, Thomas Wodehouse would become the first English Jesuit executed. By the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign in 1603, a total of 11 English Jesuits had been executed.3 While that may seem a small number in comparison to the 124 seminary priests put to death during her reign,4 meaning those trained at the English Catholic seminaries abroad, it was the Jesuits with their bold, fresh new spirituality and dogged attempts to re-establish Catholicism that had the greatest impact in England. Of the “Forty Martyrs of England and Wales” canonized by Pope Paul VI in 1970, nine were Jesuits. Of those nine approved for sainthood, four were executed under Queen Elizabeth—Edmund Campion, Alexander Briant, Robert Southwell, and Henry Walpole. Given that a mere seven Jesuits were operating on the ground in England in 1598, a number that had grown to only 52 by 1610, the 15 Jesuit executions under Queen Elizabeth and her successor King James I translate into a staggering proportion of their total population.5
Equally striking, some 59 Catholic laymen were put to death under Elizabeth, while nearly 300 of the 500 seminary priests who returned to England during Elizabeth’s reign were imprisoned after 1574.6
The cultural impact of the Crown’s war against Catholics gave rise to a literature that sought to conceal its deepest meaning through artifice. In an era of outlawed Catholicism, missionary Jesuits in hiding relied heavily on coded language and numerical ciphers to send clandestine messages to one another. Art was monitored and forced underground. Dramatic and other expression became a venue for veiled Catholic dissidence in a persecutory environment in which Catholics were executed by the state, families destroyed, and human behavior altered toward extremism or bitter conformism under policies of Elizabeth that aimed to create a secular state. The oxymoron and pun favored by Elizabethan poets reflected a religiously divided England through the creation of double meanings, leading to literary ambiguity. The discovery of hidden layers of Ignatian theology in the work of Shakespeare, as well as complex number symbolism and acrostic arrangements revealing historical secrets, particularly in his sequence of 154 sonnets, contributes to a growing body of evidence pointing to not only the putative Catholicism of Shakespeare himself; it places his work within a Jesuit strategy to wage a war of words intended to stop persecution, win religious toleration from the monarchy at the very least, and boost the spirits of imprisoned and demoralized Catholics, while stirring others to action.
The English mission, which began in 1580 as the first permanent independent mission of the Society of Jesus, was finally granted the status of Province in 1623 after 43 years of bitter struggle. The Province of England was established and a novitiate opened in London at a time when the English Jesuits numbered 218.7The according of this special status occurred exactly 100 years after Ignatius of Loyola had completed the writing of the Spiritual Exercises in 1523. We may consider that to mark these two milestones, the First Folio was published in 1623.
Ignatius of Loyola was pragmatic, charismatic, mystical, and passionate. Likewise, the four Jesuit players in this Shakespearean drama—Robert Persons, Edmund Campion, Henry Garnet, and Robert Southwell—may be described, on a respective basis, in much the same way. Fate and luck were never the companions of Robert Persons. His pragmatism guided the Jesuit mission from its inception and sustained the Society’s political and spiritual objectives until his death in 1610. The cautious and politically astute nature of Persons was balanced by the charisma of the beloved cult figure of Edmund Campion, a gifted orator who was so revered while at Oxford that his gait was imitated. The mission was expanded in 1586 with the arrival of Henry Garnet and Robert Southwell. A deep friendship developed between the two based on the shared experience of living under the constant threat of detection and execution. An intense zeal for what they perceived was the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth sustained this friendship as well. Garnet was a great mystic who believed in the mysticism of numbers and the power of the Rosary to rescue the English Catholics. A student of a leading scientist and principal architect of the Gregorian calendar, Christopher Clavius, Garnet was both a mathematician and a talented musician. The deeply religious poetry and sturdy prose of his companion, the emotionally voluble Southwell, was the expression of a commitment so unwavering that he welcomed martyrdom in imitation of the Passion of Christ. Southwell was easily the greatest Catholic poet of the Renaissance, and his writings captivated contemporary poets and influenced future generations as well. Recent studies have shown the rather stunning extent to which identical words, phrases, and imagery appear in the work of Southwell and Shakespeare, with the latter drawing from the former. The commonly repeated assertion that Shakespeare coined as many as 2,000 new words quickly becomes myth after one consults the works of Southwell and discovers the Jesuit trailblazer of semantics.
There was no shortage of words issued from the pen of Robert Persons. Catholic Resistance in Elizabethan England: Robert Persons’s Jesuit Polemic, 1580-1610 by Victor Houliston is mandatory reading on the extraordinary impact of Persons’ prolific literary output on the religious discourse of early modern England. The author of some 30 books in Latin and English, the Jesuit leader’s most significant work is undoubtedly The Book of Resolution, later named The Christian Directory. The execution of Campion in 1581 provided the encouragement for Persons to confront the political tempest of Elizabethan England. His initially pastoral mission to England turned political, and he tirelessly dedicated himself for the remainder of his life on the continent to the reconversion of England to the Catholic faith, especially through military means. But in his writing, the pastoral took precedence over the political, and his commitment to education never foundered.8Persons was a top scholar who built up seminaries in France and Spain at Saint-Omer, Valladolid, and Seville for the English Catholics, and he served as rector of the English College in Rome. He was substantially influenced by Claudio Acquaviva, who as General of the Society of Jesus from 1581 until 1615 sought to preserve the spiritual heritage of the Jesuits and the principles of Ignatius. Acquaviva strongly encouraged the “renovation” of the spirit of the individual Jesuit through a periodic return to the interior life of prayer, particularly prayer devoted to the Virgin Mary, as well as apostolic work in the field. While the Society of Jesus was already fundamentally devoted to the Virgin Mary, Acquaviva was responsible for taking this devotion to new heights.
The heart of Robert Persons can be found in a painting on the walls of the English College he founded at Valladolid in Spain. He is depicted before King Philip III of Spain, imploring the King’s permission to transfer the Virgin Vulnerata, a statue of the Virgin Mary that had been desecrated by English troops at Cadiz in 1596, to Valladolid for restoration.9The mind of Persons can be found as perfectly integrated with his heart in The Christian Directory, which encompassed his concept of “resolution.” As part of the desired synthesis of mind and heart in the Ignatian servant, Persons sought through the concept of resolution to promote an entirely new way of thinking that was grounded in faith. To this end, the Directory encouraged the twofold goal for the individual Catholic of making a resolution for Christ and implementing it.10
What is critical to understanding the motivation of Shakespeare is the deliberate promotion of Ignatian spirituality in England by Robert Persons, backed by the efforts and directives of Acquaviva. Persons provided the
