Shakespeare Magazine 13

The faith of Shakespeare
Shakespeare scholar
Graham Holderness
is a sub-deacon
at St Michael and
All Angels Church
in Bedford Park,
London.
bequeathed the Gatehouse to his daughter Susanna,
and ensured that John Robinson, who lived in the
house, could continue his tenancy. In the same
year Robinson’s brother entered the seminary at
the English College in Rome. Despite the weight
of this evidence, it all remains circumstantial, and
neither proves nor disproves William Shakespeare’s
Catholicism. There is no doubt that Shakespeare
was closely hemmed in by Catholicism, but that
does not in itself make him a Catholic. At the very
centre of this whirlwind of conspiracy, recusancy,
resistance and rebellion, Shakespeare keeps his
silence.”
My own background is Catholic, and I grew
up in the north-west of England, not far
from the loci of some ‘Catholic Shakespeare’
myths. But they don't convince me. Is there
a sense that elements of Catholicism would
inevitably occur in Shakespeare's works?
He was living amid the debris of Catholic
England, so naturally this would provide his
building blocks?
“This is particularly evident in plays which
explicitly feature aspects of both Catholic and
Protestant culture, such as Measure for Measure or
Hamlet. In the former, the Duke’s influence over
the dramatic narrative is such as to make him a
kind of providential deity, arranging people and
events into concord with poetic justice. Some of
this is performed through his disguise as a Roman
Catholic friar – in fact he claims to be not only
a friar but a papal legate – which enables him to
move anonymously and with a kind of diplomatic
privilege through the scenes of the play’s action.
“He takes advantage of the ‘secret harbour’
offered by a monastery, and to some limited degree
takes a genuine brother, Friar Thomas, into his
confidence. He hears confessions, speaks often
of the confessional, and uses information gained
from confession to further his plans. He persuades
people to act in certain ways by exploiting the trust
people repose in his assumed sacerdotal identity.
When Angelo is unmasked, he recognises the Duke
as a kind of quasi-divine authority:
Then, good prince,
No longer session hold upon my shame,
But let my trial be mine own confession.
Immediate sentence then, and sequent death,
Is all the grace I beg. (5.1.358-366)
“There are two distinct methods of dealing with
sin and penitence at play here, the Catholic and
the Protestant. The former relies on auricular
confession, private absolution and personal
penance – the latter on public ‘general confession’,
collective absolution and the public exhibition
of shame. Angelo begs to be released from the
Protestant requirement for public confession,
the holding of a ‘session’ on his shame, and to
be permitted the privacy of trial and execution
shakespeare magazine 59