Children of Adoption - People Fas Harvard

CHRISTIAN ETHICS has been a major
concern in the criticism of Measure for Measure, yet Christian monachal
institutions have rarely been considered an essential element in
the play.2 Despite the fact that the friar disguise was rare in Elizabethan
drama and was generally attacked as silly, few critics have
speculated about why Shakespeare should have changed the merchant
disguise used by the incognito kings who may have been his
sources for Vincentio's device.' Likewise, some have seen Isabella's
novitiate as signifying only a desire for chastity, even though the chaste
women who are her counterparts in the sources are not nuns: Shakespeare's
use of the orders in the play has even been considered antimonachal
ati ire.^
Shakespeare's attitude toward the orders cannot have been independent
of his own religious beliefs, but his religion is a vexed question.
His father John may have been a recusant Catholic, and some
have argued that, for at least a portion of his life, Shakespeare himself
was Cath~lic.~ (The birth of his son Hamnet fewer than nine months
after his public marriage to Anne Hathaway, for example, has been
used to argue for an earlier, clandestine marriage, presumably performed
by a Catholic priest.)' Moreover, there were two sixteenthcentury
nuns named Shakespeare in the Benedictine convent at Wroxall,
just north of Stratford: Joan Shakespeare, who was sub-prioress at
the time of the Dissolution and who lived until 1576 (the year William
Shakespeare was twelve); and Isabella Shakespeare, who was prioress
in the early years of the cent~ry.~ (The latter may be among the sources
for the name of Measure for Measure's Isabella, although there are
other possibilities.)
If Shakespeare was raised a Catholic, he would have been especially
sensitive to the confrontation between Catholicism and Protestantism.
In our play, quasi-Brother Vincentio's proposal to quasi-Sister Isabella
echoes that confrontation: the Reformation had ended clerical celibacy,
and Luther himself married a nun. I cannot presume to argue
definitively one way or another the question of Shakespeare's religion,