and prayers to choose a life directed by Christ. Specifically, he aimed to guide the reader through the First Week of the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius that seeks to arouse sorrow and contrition in the individual exercitant. In this First Week, the exercitant meditates on three aspects of sin: (1) the history of sin, including both the original sin of the angels, who in Catholic theology deliberately rejected the notion of the coming of Christ, and the original sin of Adam and Eve, with a focus by the exercitant on the consequences—the loss of grace and a life full of toil and penance—of disobedience toward God; (2) the psychology of sin, including an examination of conscience through the contemplation of one’s own personal sins in the realization of the sinful nature of rebellion, with the special aim of gaining an intimate knowledge of the disorder that lies at the bottom of all sin; and (3) the eschatology of sin, or the contemplation on the mystery of Hell as the state of having been forsaken by God, with the special realization that Judgment on the last day of man will be based on one’s belief in Christ as the incarnation of God. The exercitant severs his attachment to the temporal world and engages in a colloquy with himself, as he imagines Christ on the cross; the goal of the First Week is to make the exercitant aware of the possibility of eternal salvation or eternal loss.
At the same time, Persons’ books of controversy and political tracts were designed to counter the vitriol of the monarchy against the Jesuits. He wanted to politically reinforce the Jesuit stance against conformity to Anglicanism through a moral uplifting of society, while providing English Catholics with direction and purpose. All of this was to be achieved by stressing the crucial point of the Spiritual Exercises at which the individual must turn away from the “vanities” of the world and resolve to follow Christ and serve God.
The critical juncture of the First Week of the Spiritual Exercises is found at the heart of the Shakespearean canon, this study will show. The specific contemplations of the First Week, before the exercitant makes an Election especially in the Second Week to conform his life to Christ, are depicted in Jonson’s three-part “Poems of Devotion” as well. Through the allusions in this sequence to the numerical emblems of Shakespeare, it becomes abundantly clear that Ben Jonson possessed intimate knowledge of one of the deepest inspirations of the canon, as well as knowledge of the intricate devices through which Shakespeare expressed his innermost beliefs. The aim of this particular study is to reveal the Ignatian spirituality subtly infused throughout the canon of Shakespeare and to explore the avenues by which Shakespeare gained entry into this area of specialized knowledge.
To this end, it may be noted that Robert Persons was advocating the dissemination of written Catholic materials in England, whether of political controversy or spiritual devotion, to further the Jesuit cause of restoration of the Catholic faith. He openly recommended in a letter of 1582 the secret printing and dissemination of written propaganda and the employment of individuals “for the writing and secret printing of some books which we may write for the occasion to render the English people compliant” in connection with political schemes to overtake England by force.11Upon his arrival in England, Persons had immediately recognized the need to bolster the work of the missionary priests through their own written and subsequently distributed works. Robert Southwell’s biographer, Nancy Pollard Brown, also says that Southwell was specifically selected for the mission based on his abundant literary talent, as both a skilled rhetorician and gifted poet, confirming the policy of Persons to enhance the mission through the written word.12The monarchy had frequently handed down proclamations condemning the importation and possession of books of religious controversy published on the continent. Books were seized at the ports and confiscated in Catholic homes, Brown notes. To counter these moves, the Jesuits established their own secret presses and gave volumes false imprints, but these presses were costly and dangerous, and discovery had led to the arrest and execution of priests. As a result of these difficulties, Brown says Persons turned to laymen for the dissemination of Catholic writing in both manuscript and printed form. His deliberate plan to employ writers for the express task of producing propaganda also indicates the willingness of Persons to delegate the task of writing influential works beyond his own substantial efforts in this area.
The employment of lay writers for propaganda purposes in the area of religion was apparently accepted practice. As one example, the episcopacy of the Church of England employed gifted contemporary poets, including John Lyly, Thomas Nashe, and Robert Greene, to counter the so-called Marprelate Tracts upholding the new doctrines of Puritanism. These tracts were written by one or more Puritans using the pseudonym Martin Marprelate and as part of a pamphlet war between Puritans and the Anglican Church.
In considering how Shakespeare may have come to infuse his plays and poems with Ignatian spirituality in precisely the manner advocated by Robert Persons, we may note the words of Persons in his memoir, attesting that both he and Edmund Campion had been “most hospitably received” in the house of Arden during their secret pastoral missions before Campion’s capture and execution in 1581. The house of Arden refers to the estate belonging to Edward Arden, a second cousin of Shakespeare’s mother, Mary Arden. Shakespeare could have met both Persons and Campion through this venue, experienced the Spiritual Exercises, and morally aligned himself with a mission that had come into England to rescue Catholics. Two years later in 1583, Edward Arden was executed on suspect grounds after the so-called Somerville Plot to assassinate the Queen. Arden’s Warwickshire son-in-law John Somerville had joined the ranks of those during the mid-1580s who plotted in a number of schemes, many of which were flighty and ill-planned, to violently dethrone the Queen; these alleged plots led to increasingly harsh measures aimed at Catholics. The execution of both Campion and Arden could have easily provided Shakespeare with the motivation to “take up arms against a sea of troubles,” as later said by Hamlet (3.1.59), through dramatic and poetic writing with a politically subversive undercurrent. Campion’s execution had stunned Catholic England and galvanized a fresh wave of resistance against the Crown, including military efforts encouraged by Robert Persons to dethrone the Queen that culminated in the Spanish Armada of 1588, sparked by the execution of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots a year earlier.
We may also consider the comment of the Protestant historian John Speed, who famously, and scornfully, referred to Persons and Shakespeare as “this papist and his poet” in The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain of 1611. Speed in his extended remarks was denouncing Persons’ characterization of Sir John Oldcastle, the founder of the reform-minded Lollards, as a “ruffian knight, as all England knoweth, and commonly brought in by comedians on their stages.”13What makes his comments relevant to Shakespeare is that Oldcastle was the name initially given by Shakespeare to his legendary character Falstaff. “Speed’s scorn was no doubt partly prompted also by the Jesuit’s use of the stage to bolster his historical argumentation,” writes the Shakespeare critic Jean-Christophe Mayer.14
Drama was a staple on the curricula at the early Jesuit schools established throughout Europe. Ignatian spirituality was infused within Jesuit dramas, while the staging of plays was aimed at religious and moral instruction designed to provide a formative influence on the student as a whole. The aim of the Jesuits looked to the salvation and perfection of not only the souls of its members but also those of its fellow men. Indeed, Jesuit dramas typically staged sacred tragedies in the mold of Seneca, such as the Seneca revenge-like Hamlet, and comic-tragedies, such as Romeo and Juliet. Special features of Jesuit drama included ghost apparitions, such as that found in Hamlet, cloud apparatus, such as that found in Romeo and Juliet and possibly Macbeth, and interludes, such as those found in Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
That Shakespeare enjoyed access to the most obscure writings of the Jesuits is remarkable. A well-known line from Hamlet draws from the unpublished dramatic writings of Edmund Campion. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (1.5.166-67) (boldface type added), the wise teacher-like Hamlet instructs his rationalist friend from the Protestant University of Wittenberg, where the Reformation technically began. This line is derived directly from a playful but didactically serious dramatic poem written by Campion
