the late 1570s: “There’s nothing sillier than these philosophers,/Fellows who brag they all things understand/In heaven and earth and in the depth beneath.”15
The line from Hamlet captures the essence of the Ignatian principle of God above man, Christ above monarch, heavenly justice above the letter of the law. Campion in his passage is sympathizing with his young Catholic scholars over the difficulty of reading Aristotle, while teaching them the importance over rational philosophy of recognizing the absolute love of an omniscient God. The lines written by Campion and Shakespeare both involve learning and students and reflect the views of the Jesuit founder. “Ignatius measured the knowledge gained in the course of laborious theological study against the sweet simplicity of what he had learned from deep contemplation in faith,” writes Hugo Rahner SJ in Ignatius the Theologian. The phrase “in heaven and earth” reflects the essence of Ignatian spirituality—a tension of opposites between the spiritual love of God and the Holy Trinity in the “above,” on the one hand, and natural man and the letter of the Church in the “below,” on the other hand, with Christ in the middle as mediator. Hamlet seeks to make Horatio aware of the choice, presented to the individual, between vowing loyalty to God through the mediator Christ as preferable to swearing loyalty to the policies of men.
Shakespeare and the Jesuit John Floyd
A distinct reality remains hidden behind the canon of Shakespeare. The theories of an English Jesuit theologian named John Floyd underpin various thoughts beneath the artifice of the canon’s secular surface, particularly in Hamlet. Floyd was a controversialist whose writings against Calvinism and Puritanism first appeared in 1612, the year after Shakespeare retired from the stage; he wrote under the names Fludd, Daniel à Jesu (an anagram of “Ioannes Fluides,” according to the priest John Southcote), Hermannus Loemelius, George White, Fidelis Annosus, Verementanus Druinus, and the initials J.R., standing for his alias John Rivers. Several of his controversial tracts were co-authored with the Jesuit John Percy, alias Fisher.1
Floyd was born on October 14, 1574, in Badlingham, a tiny hamlet within Cambridgeshire’s parish of Chippenham. He studied at the schools for English Catholics at Eu in Normandy, Rheims, and Rome; entered the Society of Jesus in 1592; was appointed sometime around 1597 as prefect of studies at the Jesuit College in Valladolid, Spain, where he also served as prefect of students; and was ordained in Spain in 1599. He held the positions of admonitor and consultor, positions of influence in which he served as a check and evaluator of the Jesuit superior, as well as advised on important matters. These positions indicate Floyd as a person of not only intelligence but integrity. Indeed, Floyd was given high marks by his superiors in the areas of skill and imagination and was seen as distinguished in all genres of “letters,” or writing. He was recommended by his superiors for teaching, preaching, and writing and subsequently taught theology and philosophy with acclaim and became well known as a preacher before laboring on the English mission. He seems to have crossed over to England sometime after his ordination and surfaces in the records upon capture in 1606 while visiting the Jesuit missionary Edward Oldcorne in a Worcester jail. He was detained and imprisoned for one year in England and sent into exile with 46 other priests in 1607. At Douai, four days after Ignatius Loyola was beatified by Pope Paul V in 1609, Floyd professed his four vows to the Society of Jesus on a date of great importance to the Jesuits, July 31—the date of the death of Ignatius of Loyola in 1556. (In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet’s birth date is July 31.) He served again on the mission in England for several years, beginning in 1609, and eventually settled at Louvain and Saint-Omer as a professor of theology and philosophy. Floyd died suddenly of apoplexy (stroke) on September 16 or 17, 1649, in the town of Saint-Omer, then in Spanish Flanders but now in northern France. He presumably lies buried in this tranquil Flemish town on the grounds of the old English College founded there in 1593 by the Jesuits, although burial records are scanty. Today, the site of the old College is occupied by a school for French youths.
The relationship of John Floyd to Shakespeare can be traced through Floyd’s elder brother. Henry Floyd was also a Jesuit missionary priest in England and was highly instrumental in recruiting young Catholic men to the mission.2Henry was born in Cambridgeshire in 1563 but in the diocese of Norfolk, the provincial home of the Jesuit Robert Southwell. After completing his studies at the English College at Rheims, he was sent in 1589 as a promising youth to assist in establishing the new Jesuit College in Valladolid founded by Robert Persons. He drew the commendation of Persons after defending, with distinction, universal theology in Seville in 1593. It is likely that Henry Floyd’s rhetorical skills earned him a place on the English mission. Persons was known to favor those with strong speaking and writing abilities, as the English mission was a mission of the written word aimed at spiritual instruction and persuading lay Catholics against lapsing into conformity to Anglicanism. Henry Floyd subsequently crossed over to England around 1597, shortly after the execution of Robert Southwell, who had been personally selected by Persons for his expertise as a writer. His brother John Floyd, a highly talented and passionate writer with a predilection for metaphor, seems to have followed several years later. Once on the mission, Henry Floyd was assigned, most likely by the mission superior Henry Garnet, to serve as chaplain to Sir John Southcote (1552-1637), a position Floyd held for 19 years until 1616, the year Shakespeare died.
The Southcote household served as a base for the Jesuit mission in Essex, Suffolk, and as far north as Norfolk.3Although Henry Floyd lived with Southcote, he was funded by the Catholic Petre family of Essex, whose staunchly pro-Jesuit enclave included not only the Southcotes but the Waldegrave family and the noted composer William Byrd. Sir John Southcote, a contemporary of Sir John Petre, was married to Magdalen Waldegrave, the younger sister of Petre’s wife Mary.
The so-called Waldegrave manuscript is one of only a few manuscripts still in existence today that contains the sequence of devotional lyrics comprising the greater part of Southwell’s English verse. The manuscript is named as such, because during Shakespeare’s day, its owner was the Waldegrave family of Essex. Sir Edward Waldegrave was married to Frances Neville, a Catholic matron presented with various Southwell poems, including the long Saint Peter’s Complaint; Neville was the daughter of Sir Edward Neville (1471-1538) of Bergavenny, executed for his support of the Pope in opposition to Henry VIII’s quest for a divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Margaret Neville (died 1575), the daughter of Sir Thomas Neville (1484-1542), was married to Sir Robert Southwell, the great uncle of the Jesuit Robert Southwell. Sir Edward Neville and Sir Thomas Neville were brothers, making Frances and Margaret Neville first cousins. These relationships shed light on the path through which the Southwell poems made their way to the Waldegrave family.
According to genealogical records, the sister of Edward Arden (1542-1583), Barbara Arden (born 1528), was married to Richard Neville of Park Hall (1523-1590), son of William Neville and Elizabeth Greville, tying Shakespeare to the Neville family.
The poetry of Southwell, as well as that of Philip Howard, the Earl of Arundel, was circulated among Catholic families in East Anglia largely by the recusant Catholic copyist Peter Mowle of Attleborough, Norfolk; many of these families had been devastated by execution. Frances Neville later became Lady Paulet through a subsequent marriage, and it was as Lady Paulet that she received the poems. Magdalen Waldegrave was the daughter of Sir Edward Waldegrave and Frances Neville, while their son Nicholas Waldegrave inherited the family home at Borley and the collection of Southwell manuscripts along with it.4The signature of the young daughter of Nicholas, Jeronima, appears on a blank page of the Waldegrave manuscript.
Other prominent families of East Anglia would have known the Southwells, who were among the leading gentry in Norfolk, and would likely have been part of the Howard retinue. Many of these Catholic families also owned homes in the area of London now known as Spitalfields, where Southwell compiled some of his work, including An Epistle of Comfort, and close to where the mission superior Henry Garnet took up residence after Southwell’s arrest.5Close in proximity to the Spitalfields enclave were the townhomes of Lord William Vaux and Sir Thomas
