I lift up my eyes to the mountains:
from where shall come my help?
My help shall come from the Lord
who made heaven and earth.
Psalm 121: 1-2
The myth that we are all equal before the
law has long been debunked. We kid ourselves that our legislative and judicial
systems have blind eyes when it comes to citizenship, gender, sexual
preference, social status, education, upbringing and wealth. They don’t.
Privilege given to any person or group is inequitable unless it addresses an
imbalance or provides for support that will raise and enhance a person’s or
group’s opportunities, protect the weak and vulnerable. There is a raft of
anti-discrimination acts promulgated by commonwealth, state and territory
legislatures that attempt to do so.
In 2013 the sentence for Gunn’s John
Gay for insider trading was $50,000. He sold $3.1 million of shares. The
maximum sentence was a fine of $220,000 or 10 years imprisonment. A week before
Gay was sentenced an Education Department employee in Hobart, Sandra Johnson,
was jailed for four years for stealing $400,000 over a period of several years.
Is justice blind?
Luke (18:1 – 8) tells the story of the
widow who pesters an unjust judge until he relents in case she worries him to
death. This is the story of a disempowered woman, of lowly status and of little
income, who persists in seeking justice. It is her persistence that brings
success. Jesus tells this parable to highlight ‘the need to pray continually
and never lose heart’. This is ‘the cry of the poor (Proverbs 21:13)’. Before
God we are indeed equal, though we are constantly assured that the poor,
children, the disadvantaged, the dispossessed have a special place. It is quite
imaginable to envisage this widow praying Psalm 121: who will help me? It will
be the Lord. It is so much easier to give up, to accept less than what is right
and just. Our persistence must be in both in prayer and action. The widow
doesn’t just leave her prayer for justice before God, she is strengthened by
and nourished by her prayer that propels her into action.
The psalmist’s beautiful trust in God is a
constant reminder that in God’s eyes, we are all loved, no more and no less
than one another. He is our guard and our protector when all around us desert
us, or when human justice and compassion fail.
May he never allow you to stumble!
Let him sleep not, your guard.
No, he sleeps not nor slumbers,
Israel’s guard.
The Lord is your guard and your shade;
at your right side he stands.
By day the sun shall not smite you
nor the moon in the night.
Writer
Joseph Pearce on the case for Shakespeare’s Catholicism
A
specialist expert on the religious faith of Christian literary figures, Mr.
Pearce’s bestselling books include “The
Quest for Shakespeare,” “Tolkien: Man and Myth,” “The Unmasking
of Oscar Wilde,” “C.S. Lewis and The Catholic Church,” “Literary Converts,
Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G.K. Chesterton,” “Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in
Exile” and “Old Thunder: A Life of Hilaire Belloc.” He has hosted two 13-part
television specials about Shakespeare on EWTN and lectured at a wide variety of
international literary events at colleges and universities in the U.S., Canada,
Britain, Europe, Africa and South America.
On
May 24, I interviewed Mr. Pearce by telephone about the latest developments in
research on Shakespeare’s faith life. The following transcript of our
conversation has been edited for style and length.
Although
films like “Shakespeare in Love” have presented the Bard as a religious or a
dutiful Anglican, more recent productions like TNT’s “Will” have depicted him
as a friend of Catholics, like the Jesuit St. Robert Southwell, and even as a
Catholic recusant himself. What has changed in recent decades regarding popular
perception of Shakespeare’s faith?
Principally, there’s just
been a very large increase in the amount of solid scholarship being done,
bringing to light facts about Shakespeare’s life which had either not been
known before or had been forgotten and neglected. So right now, the evidence
for the Catholic Shakespeare has become mainstream.
Even
though the Bard knew so many Catholics that it’s hard to see him as anything
but a Catholic himself, Shakespeare’s faith came up as an enigma in last year’s
Kenneth Branagh biopic “All is Well,” about the playwright’s last years. In
your opinion, why do some people still have trouble seeing Shakespeare as a
papist?
I think one of the problems
is that we tend to read in a postmodern sense, meaning through our own pride
and prejudice. In other words, we want to see Shakespeare reflecting back to us
our own understanding of the world. So those people opposed to Catholicism
haven’t grappled with or fathomed that dimension.
I can see where people might
respond by saying I’m the pot calling the kettle black because I’m a Catholic
myself, but I insist in my scholarship on reading the work objectively through
the eyes of the author, which means we have to learn as much as possible about
the author. So although you can prove Shakespeare’s Catholicism by reading the
plays, I think you have to begin by proving it biographically and historically
through his life, and I think there’s enough evidence now beyond any reasonable
doubt that Shakespeare was certainly a Catholic in sympathy and to one degree
or another a practicing, recusant Catholic.
Your
writings provide an avalanche of this evidence about the Bard’s Catholic
connections. If someone asked you in passing to briefly state the strongest
argument for Shakespeare’s Catholicism, what would you say?
If I had to give just one
example, I’d point to his purchasing of the Blackfriars Gatehouse in London in
1612, just before he retires and goes back to Stratford-Upon-Avon. This was a
notorious center for recusant Catholic activity in London. [The gatehouse] had
remained in Catholic hands from the dissolution of the monasteries to
Shakespeare’s purchase of it 80 years later, and Shakespeare insisted that John
Robinson—whose brother had left that same year to study for the priesthood at
the English College in Rome—should remain as the tenant, indicating that the
house would continue to be used as a center of Catholic recusant activity.
There can be no real denying that Shakespeare purchased the house to remain in
Catholic hands and indeed his own hands, which were Catholic.
Does
the religious affiliation of Shakespeare even matter?
Whether it’s conscious or
subconscious, intentional or unintentional, a work of art always embodies and
incarnates in some sense the deepest-held beliefs of an author. Therefore, an
author’s theology and philosophy, in the context of the times in which the
author lives, are clearly going to inform the work. If Shakespeare is a
believing papist, that’s got to inform how we understand the work, and more to
the point, how we understand the objective meaning.
What’s
our understanding of how Shakespeare’s faith may have shifted or changed over
the course of his life?
I don’t think there’s any
real controversy any longer that he was clearly raised in a very Catholic
household. His father was fined for his Catholic recusancy, his family was one
of the most notorious recusant families in the country and some of his
relatives were actually executed for their involvement in so-called Catholic
plots. So he was certainly raised militantly Catholic. It’s been presumed in
some circles that he lost his faith when he came to London and started writing
the plays, but as I show in my book The Quest for Shakespeare and
as other authors have shown, all the evidence shows that Shakespeare retains
his Catholic faith during the 25 years or so that he’s writing the plays and
sonnets.
Because
of the gatehouse?
Well, the gatehouse, yes,
but for instance he’s taken to court for threatening the lives of two people.
And the people he’s alleged to have threatened in that court case were notorious
Catholic persecutors who boast of raiding Catholic homes, of burning Catholic
crucifixes and of burning Catholic books. So Shakespeare’s enemies were enemies
of the faith and also his codefendants in that court case include some known
Catholic recusants. That’s just one other example; I could go on. Obviously,
the point is that now there’s an abundance of evidence to show that he retained
his Catholic sympathies. To the extent to which he was really practicing his
faith is more difficult to prove, of course, because you don’t leave a paper
trail when you’re embarking on illegal activity.
While
recent scholarly works have continued to speculate about Shakespeare’s faith,
the late G.K. Chesterton wrote even before his conversion to Catholicism that
he saw Shakespeare representing merry old Catholic England in complement to the
Protestant England captured by John Milton. To what extent do you find
Chesterton’s image helpful?
Very helpful. In fact,
Chesterton is reflecting something very similar that Blessed John Henry Newman
said 50 to 60 years earlier: that it’s impossible to read Shakespeare without
seeing him as a Catholic. And Milton, of course, is the antithesis writing a
half-century later.
What
do you make of the apparent anti-Catholic themes in Shakespeare’s plays?
If you look at the entirety
of the plays, his villains are usually Machiavels; in other words,
practitioners of secular politics, and the heroes and heroines are normally
authentic orthodox Christian believers. We could talk about “Macbeth,”
“Hamlet,” “King Lear,” “The Merchant of Venice,” etc. Where there are instances
of anti-Catholicism, I would say that’s Shakespeare covering his bases with the
audience. But if you look at the whole of his plays, what comes across is a
Catholic worldview, a Catholic philosophy and as far as possible a public
expression of Catholicism at a time when it was illegal. It was illegal to talk
about contemporary religion and politics on the stage; so Shakespeare gets
around that by setting his plays in the past, which was Catholic, and by
setting his plays in places like Italy where he can have Franciscan friars
walking about—for the most part, positively portrayed—and get around the law by
not talking about English politics.
In “Henry VI,” I suppose you
could see Shakespeare’s negative treatment of Joan of Arc as an instance of
anti-Catholicism. But Joan of Arc was not canonized until the 20th century and
it was the view of Catholic England, prior to the Reformation, that Joan of Arc
was some sort of weirdo and not a saint. All Shakespeare’s doing in that
instance is expressing the English Catholic view of Joan of Arc; it’s not
anti-Catholic, he’s just speaking for his time.
Based
on your research, how would you describe the flavor of Shakespeare’s faith, the
type of Catholicism he represents?
What we see in the
Elizabethan Shakespeare, the plays he wrote during the reign of Queen
Elizabeth, are lots of questions about authentic monarchs and usurped
authority. It was the view of many Catholics, including St. Pius V, that
Elizabeth was not the bona fide queen of
England and that Mary, Queen of Scots was the true queen and her heirs entitled
to succession. Shakespeare toying with these themes would be a Catholic way of
seeing things.
Then, after James comes to
the throne, a lot of Jacobean Shakespeare is about betrayal. That’s why, for
instance, “Macbeth,” about the Scottish king, is really about how promises were
broken by a Machiavellian monarch. The Catholics had great hopes that James
would actually bring back tolerance and liberty, but he failed to perform that.
In 1606, when Catholics were most despondent and almost despairing as the
persecution came back in force, with no hope of letting up, we have
Shakespeare’s darkest plays: “Macbeth,” “Othello” and “King Lear.” In “King
Lear,” we have references to the poems of St. Robert Southwell as in some of
Shakespeare’s other plays.
What
do you hope readers will take away from your writings on Shakespeare?
The most important thing is
that Shakespeare has been treated unjustly by history—firstly, through
ignorance of the facts, and then through deconstruction of who he is and what
he says in his plays. If we’re going to place him where he belongs, at the apex
of all that’s best in English literature, we need to understand who he is.
Therefore, knowing his deepest beliefs is essential for understanding the
plays.
If
you could say one thing to Pope Francis about Shakespeare, what would it be?
That Shakespeare shows us,
in a perennial sense, the necessity of being true—not to ourselves, to quote
Polonius, but to objective reality, to authentic orthodoxy. Where there’s a
conflict between worldly and eternal, we have to be prepared to lay down our
lives for the eternal. That’s what his great heroes and heroines do—there’s a constant
replaying of that perennial theme in Antiphone, to go back to Sophocles, of
religious liberty. I think Shakespeare speaks to the tensions between secular
power and religious freedom. In that sense, he’s perennially relevant to what
Francis comments on.
My favorite line, just
plucking one, would be the line from King Lear’s speech that begins: “Come,
let’s away to prison…” He says, “as if we were God’s spies,” an allusion to
both the Jesuits and to a line from St. Robert Southwell’s poem, “Decease
Release,” where he talks about Mary, Queen of Scots being “God’s spice” and in
being crushed her fragrance rising to heaven like incense. Shakespeare making
that connection between “God’s spies” and “God’s spice” delights me.
What
are your hopes for the future of Shakespearean research?
I sometimes say wistfully
and whimsically that if I had the freedom, I’d like to write a separate book on
each of Shakespeare’s plays, because I think the evidence for Shakespeare’s
Catholicism really emerges when you go scene-by-scene, not plucking lines out
of context. What we really need are dozens of new books looking at the plays
from the perspective of Shakespeare as a Catholic. That’s far too big a job for
one person, but I do think we need a whole new field of young scholars taking
up the challenge to actually go through the plays. Every time I visit a play,
new aspects of Shakespeare’s Catholicism leap up at me, so it’s very exciting
and much remains to be done.
In
his book “Shakespeare,” the late Catholic professor Mark Van Doren of Columbia
University did look into each play, enjoying the themes for their own sakes
rather than analyzing them. What value remains in reading the Bard for pleasure
rather than through the lens of scholarship?
That’s absolutely legitimate
as long as we know what we’re doing and don’t pontificate, based on a
recreational reading, about objective matters.
Any
final thoughts?
The key thing I try to
encapsulate is that there are two ways of engaging Shakespeare’s Catholicism:
one is through history and biography—the biographical evidence—and the other is
through engagement with the textual evidence of the works themselves. I see
these two types of evidence converging like a gothic arch, where one supports
the other, and the more research we do in either half of the arch, the more
clearly defined and delineated Shakespeare’s Catholicism becomes.
This article appeared in America Magazine
on 7 October 2019.
