"Who wrote Shakespeare’s plays?" has a much more controversial answer than "Who is buried in Grant’s tomb?"
In fact, numerous facts about the Bard continue to be hotly disputed, almost three hundred years after his death.
One of the controversies is whether Shakespeare himself may have been a Catholic.
In his day English Protestants were putting tremendous pressure on Catholics to accept the newly imposed faith, and laws were passed against those who would refuse to attend Protestant services (known as "recusants").
The result was that many people hid their Catholicism but continued to consider themselves Catholic and, when possible, to practice Catholicism in secret (e.g., by aiding and hiding priests who would covertly say Mass and hear confessions).
Others were more bold and openly declared their Catholicism.
Among those were Shakespeare’s father and his daughter, both of whom recused themselves from Protestant services.
In fact, Shakespeare was in the middle of a hotbed of secret and not-so-secret Catholics.
HERE’S AN INTERESTING INTERVIEW BY AN AUTHOR ARGUING THAT SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS CONTAIN COVERT CATHOLIC MESSAGES.
HERE’S WHERE YOU CAN BUY HER BOOK.
HERE’S SOME ADDITIONAL PERSPECTIVE ON THE QUESTION FROM WIKIPEDIA.
Shadowplay is great. My only quibble (which was brought to my attention by a Shakespeare specialist and with whom I agree on this point) is that Asquith can sometime overstates her case, occasionally making it seem that the plays were more an exercise in propaganda than in art. But aside from that, Asquith has some great information and argues her thesis effectively.
This is a great book, if even for just the historical picture it paints of the world’s first modern police state.
One of the thematic elements of Hamlet is that when you say one thing “Now I’ll do it” but do another, you betray a weakness in your own soul. And it was an understanding of this that helped me reject my Protestant understanding of Once Saved Always Saved and eventually become Catholic.
Along the way, I just sort of assumed Shakespeare also was Catholic. But then I heard “no way”. And in this book we see “Yes huh!”
Although put in far more grown-up terms. I highly recommend it as an exciting and Shakespeare-filled depiction of a dark age in our past.
It had always seemed to me that Shakespeare’s plays had a kind of ambiguity or incoherence about them that allowed a director or reader to shape the play in multiple ways.
It’s clear to me anyway that the missing intepretive key to Shakespeare is his crypto-Catholicism and the historical backdrop of the English Reformation – which we now understand more clearly as the brutal and unprincipled supression of the faith of Catholic England by the proto-totalitarian Tudor and Stuart monarchies.
Charles, isn’t it interesting that this period is referred to as the “Golden Age” of English history when it in fact exactly mirrors the totalitarian thought-police state we find in modern communist nations like China?
And historians are only now coming to the realization that the “Dark Ages” were actually an age of high culture, universities, and science.
Both myths seemed to have been largely spread by Protestants in an effort to discredit the Church and show how the Reformation “saved” civilization from her evil clutches.
What do we have to thank for this influx of truth into the American consciousness of our past? Could it be that the secularization of Protestant nations has weakened their overall stake in demonizing the Church? Might it also have something to do with this “new” brand of non-denominational Protestantism which tries as much to distance itself from traditionalist Evangelicalism as it does from Catholicism?
Maybe both. Maybe neither. Just a thought.
I’ve always figured that even if Shakespeare didn’t write his own plays, he could have been the Walt Disney or Stephen Spielberg of his day. They didn’t write everything they produced, but they both had a knack for finding great works to produce.
Of course, that’s not to say he didn’t write them.
Joseph Pearce has a book coming out soon on Shakespeare’s Catholicism. AFAIK, it’s in the publisher’s hands right now with a hoped for publication in the Spring.
The Rochester NY Chesterton Society is having a day long conference on this in April with Pearce speaking (as well as Dale Alquist and others).
It’s a most interesting topic and it seems to be getting a lot more traction as the veil is lifted off English history.
In the meanwhile,
Some say that ever ‘gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long:
And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad;
The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallowed and so gracious is the time.
StubbleSpark,
The English “patriots” who drove their lawful king from the country lest he restore religious liberty and civil rights to English Catholics got to write the history books. This act of treason they styled the “Glorious Revolution”. The same people were responsible for the widespread myths about the Spanish Inquisition.
As the British anti-Catholics have become increasingly irrelevant, the truth is beginning to emerge.
It is interesting that the majority of the greatest American film directors are also Catholic (or fallen-away Catholics).
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