in Hamlet – but there is little real echo of the heart-racingly urgent and dangerous politics of contemporary religion. That should surprise nobody: Shakespeare was working under the watchful eyes of government censors and in front of a largely Protestant audience. His likely first company, the Queen’s Players, had partly been formed to spread Protestant propaganda. All England was alive with special agents, or ‘searchers’, and the government’s fears were not unjustified – in 1580 Pope Gregory XIII had declared that the assassination of Queen Elizabeth would not be a mortal sin, inciting English Catholics to a coup.
However, just as in the reign of Henry VIII, the religious war did produce some seriously good poetry, this time mainly from the point of view of the harried and desperate Catholic losers. It’s perfectly possible that Shakespeare met the charismatic Jesuit agent and scholar Edmund Campion, who bravely debated with Protestant divines after he’d been tortured and imprisoned. He was confronted by Elizabeth herself, and later died the usual agonising death. Robert Southwell of Norfolk was one of the Jesuits in another mission, shortly after Campion, and came to a similar end, imprisoned, tortured and then hanged, drawn and quartered in 1595. A textual comparison by some scholars suggests that Southwell, connected to Shakespeare’s famous patron the (Campion-befriending) Earl of Southampton, was an author who Shakespeare read closely. In the following extraordinary poem, penned in that year, while Shakespeare was writing A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet, Southwell compares himself to a pounded nutmeg, and defiantly proclaims his martyrdom:
The pounded spise both tast and scent doth please;
In fadinge smoke the force doth incense showe;
The perisht kernell springeth with increase;
The lopped tree doth best and soonest growe.
Gods spice I was, and poundinge was my due;
In fadinge breath my incense favoured best;
Death was my meane my kernell to renewe;
By loppinge shott I upp to heavenly rest.
Some thinges more perfit are in their decaye,
Like sparke that going out geeves clerest light:
Such was my happe, whose dolefull dying daye
Begane my joye and termed fortunes spight.
Alive a Queene, now dead I am a Saint;
Once Mary cald, my name now Martyr is;
From earthly raigne debarred by restrainte,
In liew wherof I raigne in heavenly blis.
My life, my griefe, my death, hath wrought my joye;
My freendes, my foyle, my foes, my weale procurd,
My speedie death hath scorned longe annoye,
And losse of life an endles life assurd.
My scaffolde was the bedd where ease I fownde;
The blocke a pillowe of eternall rest.
My headman cast mee in a blesfull sownde;
His axe cutt of my cares from combred brest.
Rue not my death, rejoyce at my repose;
It was no death to mee but to my woe,
The budd was opened to let owt the rose,
The cheynes unloosed to let the captive goe.
A Prince by birth, a prisoner by mishappe,
From crowne to crosse, from throne to thrall I fell.
Whether or not he was reading Southwell, the up-and-coming playwright and successful London actor William Shakespeare was also leaning with some political skill in the other direction. About this time he wrote the history play King John. It’s not one of his greater efforts, and it follows the ferociously anti-Catholic play of the same name by John Bale. Like Bale, Shakespeare uses the opportunity to get in a bit of patriotic anti-papal baiting:
Thou canst not, Cardinal, devise a name
So slight, unworthy, and ridiculous
To charge me to an answer, as the Pope.
Tell him this tale, and from the mouth of England
And thus much more: that no Italian priest
Shall tithe or toll in our dominions;
But as we, under God, our supreme head,
So, under him, that great supremacy
Where we do reign we will alone uphold
Without th’assistance of a mortal hand.
Queen Elizabeth could hardly have put it better herself. We shouldn’t look to Shakespeare for reportage on the most dangerous politics of his day. However, he does give us something even more useful – the ultimate window into a world in which faith, and in particular the fate of the soul after death, occupied almost everybody. In Measure for Measure, a play which to my ear is unforgiving of the smug certainties of any religious believers, the hero, Claudio, believes that in order to protect his sister Isabella’s virtue he must reconcile himself to execution. A duke, Vincentio, urges him not to be frightened of death – as it were, the official line. Be ‘absolute for death’, he tells Claudio – death or life
Shall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus with life:
If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing
That none but fools would keep: a breath thou art,
Servile to all the skyey influences,
That dost this habitation, where thou keep’st,
Hourly afflict: merely, thou art death’s fool;
So far, so predictable. From pulpits up and down the country, preachers constantly urged their congregations to reconcile themselves to death. On scaffolds, and alongside the pyres prepared for religious martyrs, much the same conversation was going on. We know this from the endless sermons and tracts that have survived from the period; but how did ordinary English men and women feel in response? For that, we have to go to the greatest poet. Claudio, a living, breathing and terrified contemporary, is far from convinced, but to die, he tells himself, and go we know not where,
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison’d in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round
