The Early Life Story
of William Shakespeare
Stratford, England, 1564-1569
(Page 10: Shakespeare's Catholicism)
An excerpt from "William Shakespeare: The Man Behind the Genius"
by Anthony Holden
John Shakespeare's eldest son had been born in dangerous times. It was less than half a century since the Queen's father, King Henry VIII, had broken with Rome, despoiled and looted church landholdings and shrines, executed notables from Sir Thomas More to two of his own wives, including Elizabeth's mother.
The Elizabethan era was fast approaching its apogee — a sustained period of military, political, scientific and cultural achievement without parallel in British history. But it was also an age of ferocious religious persecution. Herself a deeply devout and civilised woman, Elizabeth presided with apparent reluctance over the pursuit, torture and execution of papists, in sporadic purges of varying intensity. But it was a time for followers of the 'old' faith to tread carefully, to worship in corners — for some, if necessary, to deny their faith or at the least 'equivocate'.
In 1757, a century and a half after John Shakespeare's death, a document of great significance was found hidden in the rafters of the family house in Henley Street — by then occupied by Thomas Hart, a direct lineal descendant of William's sister Joan. Retiling Hart's roof was a team of workmen led by Joseph Moseley, a master-builder described as 'very honest, sober, industrious', who on 29 April came upon a small 'paper-book', or pamphlet, tucked between the old tiling and the rafters. Its six stitched leaves turned out to contain fourteen articles amounting to a profession of Roman Catholic faith.
The document, which has become known as John Shakespeare's Spiritual Last Will and Testament, passed from Hart and Moseley to a local alderman, on to the eighteenth-century Shakespeare reliquary John Jordan and eventually (via the vicar of Stratford, James Davenport) to Shakespeare's eighteenth-century biographer, Edmund Malone. Having satisfied himself that it was genuine, though by now lacking its first page, Malone duly published it as an appendix to his 1790 edition of the Works.
The document has since vanished — 'a pity', in the understatement of one of the outstanding twentieth-century Shakespeare biographers, Samuel Schoenbaum, for the advanced techniques of modern scholarship might have answered 'several intriguing questions' regarding the script, the paper, the watermark, the handwriting and, of course, John Shakespeare's signature. Was it a cross or his characteristic mark of the glover's compass? Malone subsequently recanted his conviction that the document was genuine, and the hapless Jordan was accused of forgery; it took until 1923 for a diligent Jesuit scholar, burrowing around the British Museum, to come up with an uncannily similar Italian document, also dating from the sixteenth century.
This was the 'last testament' of Saint Carlo Borromeo, the Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, who died in 1584 and was canonized in 1610. Borromeo's 'Last Will of the Soul, made in health for the Christian to secure himself from the temptations of the devil at the hour of death' was composed during a virulent bout of the plague in Milan in the 1570s, said to have claimed 17,000 Catholic lives. His Testament, which became a mantra of the Counter-Reformation, was clearly the original of the English translation found hidden in what had once been John Shakespeare's roof.
How did it get there? In 1580 Borromeo was visited in Milan by a group of Jesuit missionaries, led by Father Edmund Campion, an English recusant who two years later would be tried and gruesomely executed for treason. Campion and his colleagues brought back with them to England numerous copies of Borromeo's testament, which was now circulating around Catholic Europe in huge quantities. 'Three or four thousand or more of the Testaments' were ordered from Rome by Campion and his colleagues, 'for many persons desire to have them.' Once back in England, Campion passed through the Midlands — specifically Lapworth, just twelve miles from Stratford — en route to Lancashire, where he was again to play a significant role in the life of young William Shakespeare.
Campion's host at Lapworth was Sir William Catesby, a relative by marriage of the Ardens, who was arrested and imprisoned in the Fleet for his pains. In Elizabethan England, Catholics literally risked their lives by admitting popish priests into their houses, whether to take their confession and celebrate Mass or merely to indulge in theological discussion. Policed by the Privy Council, who conducted periodic raids on secret strongholds of recusancy all over the country, adherence to the 'old' faith was a crime amounting to treason, and punishable by death. Elizabeth's reign saw almost 200 Catholics meet excruciating ends on the public scaffold. Just two years after her own death, Catholic apostasy reached its celebrated climax in the 1605 'Powder Treason', now better known as the 'Gunpowder Plot' — whose leader was not Guy Fawkes, as legend would have it, but Robert Catesby, son of that same Sir William who invited Edmund Campion to visit Warwickshire in 1581.
An English translation of Borromeo's Testament, which finally came to light as recently as 1966, proved that the document faithfully attested by John Shakespeare was thus formulaic, but genuine beyond all doubt. A lifelong recusant — as witnessed by his subsequent fines for non-attendance of church, even while still a prominent member of the Stratford community — Shakespeare's father might well have been one of the furtive souls invited by Catesby, his Catholic wife's Catholic kinsman, to meet Campion at Lapworth, and to carry away one of the secretly made English translations imported by the thousand from Rome. If not, it was probably passed to him by John Cottom, then the Stratford schoolmaster, whose recusant brother Thomas was one of Campion's travelling companions.
Three years later, a new round of raids and persecution dogged Warwickshire Catholics after a rash attempt by a local fundamentalist, John Somerville, to assassinate the Queen. As the authorities descended in search of vengeance, the clerk of the council, Thomas Wilkes, bore witness to the urgent efforts of local recusants to 'clear their houses of all show of suspicion'. Somerville, who was captured and hanged en route to London, was married to Margaret Arden, a Catholic cousin of Shakespeare's mother. Perhaps this was the moment her husband felt it prudent to hide his copy of the Spiritual Testament up in the roof?
Aged seventeen when the Testament came into the family home, and twenty by the time his father felt obliged to hide it, the precocious William certainly seems to have absorbed its contents, whatever his personal reaction to them. The Testament's Item I acknowledged the possibility of being 'cut off in the blossom of my sins', a terrifying prospect catered for in Item IV: 'I, John Shakespeare, do protest that I will also pass out of this life, armed with the last sacrament of extreme unction: the which if through any let or hindrance I shall not be able to have, I do now also for that time demand and crave the same.' The words of the English translation find a direct echo in those of the Ghost of Hamlet's Father, written within a year of the death of the poet's:
Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,
Unhous'led, disappointed, unanel'd,
No reck'ning made, but sent to my account
With all my imperfections on my head.
O, horrible, O, horrible, most horrible!
So appalled was John Shakespeare's son, in life as in art, by the fate of those who met their maker 'unaneled' that Hamlet even spares his father's murderer, his hated stepfather Claudius, when presented with the chance to kill him while at prayer. 'No!' he cries,
Up sword, and know thou a more horrid hent:
When he is . . .
. . . about some act
That has no relish of salvation in't . . .
. . . that his soul may be as damn'd and black
As hell, whereto it goes.
No shriving time allowed, the Ghost of Hamlet's Father occupies an authentically Catholic version of Purgatory:
My hour is almost come
When I to sulph'rous and tormenting flames
Must render up myself . . .
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away.
So soon after his own father's death, Shakespeare clearly shares Hamlet's sense of horror that his father's 'canonised bones, hearséd in death / Have burst their cerements'. The fate of unburied bones haunts his work to the terminal point of his own stark epitaph, still there today to chill the heart of the visitor to Stratford's Holy Trinity church, with its curse on him that 'moves my bones'.
Shakespeare's Catholic indoctrination in childhood ran deep, whatever the subsequent falling-off in his beliefs. For both father and son, throughout the poet's youth, the 'equivocation' so dear to the heart of the Porter in Macbeth was a necessary evil to survive amid the religious McCarthyism then dogging Warwickshire dissenters.
By the time he felt obliged to hide his Catholic Testament in the roof at Henley Street, Shakespeare's father was retired from active local politics, and celebrating the birth of his first grandchild by his son William. How it must have pained him, twenty years earlier, to fulfil his duties as Stratford's chamberlain by authorising the payment of two shillings to workmen charged with the task of 'defacing images in the chapel' — Stratford's Guild Chapel, embellished with papist murals of the murder of Thomas à Becket, St Helena's Dream and the Day of Judgement — and hitherto protected by the most powerful man in town, William Clopton, and his son, both Catholics.
But Clopton senior had died in 1560, and now his son had taken himself abroad. Given the political climate, the local council seized the moment to mutilate the heretical frescoes, in danger of bringing into disrepute a town so recently granted its royal charter. Two years later the council spent a further two shillings on the cost of dismantling the chapel's rood loft. And in 1571, John Shakespeare was present when his friend and successor as bailiff, Adrian Quiney, ordered the replacement of the chapel's stained-glass windows with clear panes, and the disposal of the popish capes and vestments still preserved in the chapel, if long since disused.
John Shakespeare may have disguised his religion well enough during his rise to civic eminence, like many fellow Catholics at that time of persecution. But this was an age of informers, well paid for their pains, who helped the authorities keep a close eye on countless pockets of papist defiance throughout the land. John's semi-concealed religious sympathies may well have been responsible for the College of Arms's otherwise mysterious refusal to grant him a coat of arms in 1569. They may also have played a role in the sudden, unwelcome development — eventually to cut short the education of his five-year-old schoolboy son William — that over the next few years, after two decades of sustained success, the former Mayor of Stratford's fortunes went into an abrupt and quite unexpected decline.
Copyright © 1999 by Anthony Holden. All rights reserved. Posted with permission of http://www.twbookmark.com. Click here for ordering information for "William Shakespeare: The Man Behind the Genius" at Amazon.com.
