WAS SHAKESPEARE A CATHOLIC?

'HE subject we propose to reopen in the following pages

THE

has

an interest peculiarly its own. Removed, properly, from the heats of theological controversy, it is nevertheless not a subject of mere literary curiosity. If the inner life of great men, the prevailing and guiding motives of their actions, and all which gives significance to their history, are of more interest than their bare biographies, it cannot but interest us deeply to inquire what was the religious belief of a genius without a rival in any age or in any country. A Catholic critic, at all events, can pursue this investigation without the slightest theological bias. What can it matter to the Church whether or not Shakespeare was a Catholic? She sets as much store by the soul of the poorest and most uninstructed as by that of a Newton, a Bacon, or even a Shakespeare. It would not in the smallest degree impair her supernatural nature, nor her right to claim faith and obedience, if not one man of intellectual greatness had ever bowed his mind to her sweet yoke. But notwithstanding this, who is there of us who can affect unconcern as to the religious convictions of a man in whose company we have spent, and may still spend, so many delightful hours; who fascinates us, now by the playfulness of a satire that never wounds, now by the depth and truth of his intuitions, the sublimity of his imagination, and his vast range of thought; who, by the exhaustless energy of his creative fancy, conjures into our presence a multitude of men and women whom he himself has made, who have a place in our memory, who become the objects of our detestation or of our love, of our scorn or our admiration, in short, of every sympathy, emotion, and passion, as really and completely as if we had taken them by the hand, sat by them, spent hours with them, and heard them speak and converse; who, by the witchery of words which lends its own voice to every nicest shade of human folly or human greatness, of human baseness or of human virtue, keeps our minds rapt in suspense over the histories of the creatures of his genius, the crises of their destinies, and the inevitable catastrophe, be it ludicrous or tragic, engendered by their foibles or their crimes. And, as if this were not enough, by a yet mightier speli he carries us on the wings of fancy beyond the limits of the known creation into imaginary spheres of existence, whose denizens are presented to us in no fantastic attributes of improbability, but in forms so true and real that we feel almost as if we had known them before, and accept them without question. And yet more; in every catastrophe, and here and there throughout every history, there issue great

moral truths, like springs of transparent water in a leafy woodland carpeted with flowers, by which the ways of God are justified and man ennobled. We could be as easily indifferent as to the faith of a beloved friend as to that of Shakespeare.

We of these days of cheap newspapers and shameless interviewing can scarcely understand the utter dearth of materials from which some information may be gleaned of the private life and habits of so eminent a personage as Shakespeare; one, too, who seems to have been so beloved by his acquaintance and friends. Of those trifling incidents, familiar customs, and ordinary habits of daily life which reveal to us the inner self and real character of a man more clearly than more impressive incidents, and than his studied bearing under general observation, we know literally nothing. If we would know him we must find him in his writings. To them, too, we must have recourse, from lack of any positive information on the subject, if we would find out what was his religious belief. There are one or two facts which must be constantly had in view if so interesting an inquiry is to have any practical value.

Obviously, we cannot afford to lose sight, even for a moment, of the state of things, first, in Christendom generally, and then in particular in the country whose privilege it is to have produced our poet.

At his birth an era of faith and religious peace had closed, to be succeeded by an era of revolutions. The cradle of Shakespeare may be said to have been rocked in revolution.

The position of England with reference to Protestantism was unlike that of any other nation or people who embraced the new tenets. It is true that their adoption by whatever state resulted more from some political exigency than from religious belief, although no doubt there was mingled with this not a little of sincere but passionate and unreasoning conviction. The latter would never have prevailed without the assistance of the former. It was not the kind of spirit which could afford to dispense with the arm of the flesh. Sooner or later, however, all the populations of the kingdoms over whom the Evil Spirit prevailed acquiesced in the newfangled views of Christianity, as the multitude ever will in teachings which flatter their lower nature. And so, indeed, they did in England at last, but under circumstances which there is no necessity of recapitulating here. In Shakespeare's time there was no such acquiescence on the part of the English people. The man who tore England from the Holy See was, it is true, in insubordination, self-assertion, and intense personal pride, Protestant to the heart's core. In the dogmas of the Catholic faith, however, he was a firm believer. He had written, and ably, in their defence,

and had impaled the arch-heretic on the point of a not feeble pen. Woe to him who maintained the Protestant heresy to his face! It would have been, "Off with his head!" Even his poor creature, Cranmer, whom he thrust into the chair of St. Thomas, who canted and recanted and canted again, was compelled to conform to every dogma of the Catholic faith except the one which stood in the way of his master's lascivious and despotic will.

It happened, thus, that the separation of England from the Catholic Church was a separation not so much of doctrine or liturgical form as of jurisdiction. The doctrine and liturgical changes effected by the boy king, Edward VI., were immediately obliterated by his successor, the pious and gentle Mary. The profession of Protestantism by her successor, Elizabeth, in whose 'reign Shakespeare flourished, was forced upon her by the peculiarity of her position. What faith she had was undoubtedly Catholic. It can be safely affirmed that the English people, up to the time when their bastard Queen, laden with temporal glory but reft of hope, with a burdened conscience, and trying to assuage her despair by the mummeries of a grovelling sorcery, breathed her last, had not acquiesced in the new versions of Christianity which had beguiled so many of the nations.

There was, thus, in England an absence of the passionate sectarianism, or rather bitter animosity against the Church, which characterized the revolt from her gentle yoke in other countries. Neither can we distinguish any very obvious traces of political animosity. The sovereign power, which had culminated in despotism in the hands of Henry VIII., was too strong to admit of antagonism or of political partisanship. Discontent there was, but no one who wished to keep his head on his shoulders ventured to give expression to it. A passive acquiescence, even, in the criminal excesses of sovereign power was not enough. An avowed consent was often demanded, especially of those whose exalted rank and nobility of character made them objects of suspicion. Not all the virtues that adorn humanity were able to save the head of Sir Thomas More from the block. To remain in the communion of the Church was to pronounce the King an adulterer, and in that way lay martyrdom. In this respect matters were not improved under Elizabeth. In one aspect they were worse. The peculiarity of her position gave more place to the passionate heats of sectarianism. Her father had no competitor for his throne, and was too resolute and too powerful to need the alliance of any faction or party.

Elizabeth was compelled by the stress of events to profess Protestantism and to invoke its aid. Not that the Church would necessarily have deposed her on account of her birth. Illegitimacy of

birth does not necessarily incapacitate a sovereign from reigning. No doubt the Church would never concede her support to the claims of a usurper against those of the rightful heir without flagrant cause. In this case the rightful heir was a pious Catholic, and the usurper an avowed heretic and schismatic. The mortifying position of the latter, who, there is every reason to believe, held in supreme contempt the religionists into whose arms she was thrown, was rendered more intolerable to a vain and imperious woman by the circumstance that her rival excelled her as much in beauty, and in all womanly goodness and graces, as she did in the justice of her claim. And so it came to pass, by the inexorable logic of events, that for an English Catholic to profess the faith by which he hoped to be saved was tantamount to pronouncing his sovereign a usurper, and, after the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, a mean, jealous, and cruel murderess.

It is easy now to see how it happened that, during the first sixty or seventy years of the inauguration of Protestantism in England, we find so few traces of that fanatical sectarianism and bitter hatred of St. Peter's See which marked its rise and progress amongst all other apostatizing peoples, but in which England afterward enjoyed the unenviable distinction of surpassing them all. But that was a subsequent importation. It came in with Scotch James, caused a revolution, a regicide, after a restoration another revolution, and a whole subsequent history of religious discord, broils and persecutions-a dismal heritage, of whose vulgar horrors England is not quite rid even to the day in which we write. And we may without irreverence regard it as a judgment of God upon that nation for robbing Scotland of her faith, and for the infamous means she employed in order to effect her unholy purpose.

In this state of things it is probable that any English Catholic whose rank and influence did not provoke attention was able, throughout the whole reign of Elizabeth, to retain his faith and practice the essentials of his religion so long as he did not impugn the Queen's title nor show himself disaffected to the existing order of things. At the same time, for the reasons already given, it is clear that the very fact of professing the Catholic religion unavoidably placed the believer more or less in an attitude of passive opposition, as it were, to the reigning sovereign, and it was necessary for him to practice his religion with as little ostentation as possible, if not, indeed, to conceal it.

Notwithstanding all this, it is remarkable that there is no contemporary testimony upon the strength of which we can assert that Shakespeare was a Catholic; and we are driven to search his writings for inferential evidence whether he was or was not. Nevertheless, this very silence on the subject, on the part of his contem

poraries, seems to favor the belief that he clung to the faith of his ancestors. If he had been an adherent of the new religious views, we should have been sure to have heard of it, and pretty loudly too.

Our business, however, is with the internal evidence afforded by his writings; and, bearing in mind the condition of affairs just described in England during the time when he wrote, we think we shall be able to satisfy every impartial reader, that from them we may gather very strong evidence indeed that he was not of those who sold their faith for a mess of pottage.

In searching among the dramas of Shakespeare, in order to ascertain the religious convictions of their author, it would argue great shallowness, nay frivolity, of criticism to found any conclusions on opinions, sentiments, or expressions, which fall from the lips of the characters he portrays. Every one of those must speak and act in the truth of the character with which he is invested by the magic pen that called him or her into being. Our opinion must be gathered rather from the characters themselves with which he invests his personages, from the incidents he invents, the truths he inculcates, and whatever obviously expresses himself. Having once created his dramatis persona, they are, so to speak, out of his power. They must be true to themselves; but of what sort they shall be, he is the supreme arbiter.

The political exigencies of Elizabeth had already made an opening for the Puritans. Already they had sufficient influence to afflict the playwrights. The Swan of Avon was a very black swan, indeed, in their eyes, and they forced him to wing his flight across the river and settle with his play-troupe in Southwark. Had Shakespeare belonged to this class of religionists, there would not have been the slightest uncertainty as to his religious views. Every one of his Catholic characters would have been a Caliban, an Iago, a Richard III., a Goneril, or Lady Macbeth; at the best a Falstaff. All his Protestant characters would have been miracles of virtue, and favored vessels of election.

But we may go further than this. If the poet had conscientiously shared the religious profession of the reigning powers, which was a very modified form of Protestantism, it is almost certain that such of his dramatis persona as were of the new English religion would have been invested with characters which would compare on the whole advantageously with the characters of those whom he portrayed in communion with the Holy See. There was everything to induce him to adopt such a course. Proprietor of

a theatre, for which he wrote the dramas to be represented, it would have promoted his moneyed interests, and also indeed his literary fame, which was, at the time, involved with them. Court patronage was wealth and fame to him. Court opposition, ruin. Under