Information about Shakespeare's Religion

Over the years, there have been a number of speculations about the religious beliefs of William Shakespeare. While little direct evidence exists, circumstantial evidence suggests that Shakespeare's family had Catholic sympathies and that he himself was Catholic, though there is disagreement over whether he in fact was.

Shakespeare's family

In 1559, five years before Shakespeare's birth, the Elizabethan Religious Settlement finally severed the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church. In the ensuing years, extreme pressure was placed on England's Catholics to convert to the Protestant Church of England, and recusancy laws made Catholicism illegal. Some historians maintain that in Shakespeare's lifetime there was a substantial and widespread quiet resistance to the newly imposed faith.^[1] Some scholars, using both historical and literary evidence, have argued that Shakespeare was one of these recusants.^[2]

Some scholars claim that there is evidence that members of Shakespeare's family were recusant Catholics. The strongest evidence is a tract professing secret Catholicism signed by John Shakespeare, father of the poet. The tract was found in the 18th century in the rafters of a house which had once been John Shakespeare's, and was seen and described by the reputable scholar Edmond Malone. Malone later changed his mind and declared that he thought the tract was a forgery. Although the tract document itself has been lost, 20th century evidence has linked Malone's reported wording of the tract definitively to a testament written by Charles Borromeo and circulated by Edmund Campion, copies of which still exist in Italian and English.^[3] John Shakespeare was also listed as one who did not attend church services, but this was "for feare of processe for Debtte", according to the commissioners, not because he was a recusant.^[4] Then again, avoiding creditors may have merely been a convenient pretext for a recusant's avoidance of the established church's services.

Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden, was a member of a conspicuous and determinedly Catholic family in Warwickshire.^[5] In 1606, William's daughter Susannah was listed as one of the residents of Stratford refusing to take Holy Communion, which may suggest Catholic sympathies.^[6] It may, however, also be a sign of Puritan sympathies; Susannah's sister Judith was, according to some statements, of a Puritanical bent.^[7] Archdeacon Richard Davies, an 18th century Anglican cleric, allegedly wrote of Shakespeare: "He dyed a Papyst".^[8]

Shakespeare's schooling

Four of the six schoolmasters at the grammar school during Shakespeare's youth, King’s New School in Stratford, were Catholic sympathisers,^[9] and Simon Hunt, likely one of Shakespeare’s teachers, later became a Jesuit.^[10] Thomas Jenkins, who succeeded Hunt as teacher in the grammar school, was a student of Edmund Campion at St. John's College, Oxford. Jenkins's successor at the grammar school in 1579, John Cottam, was the brother of Jesuit priest Thomas Cottam. A fellow grammar school pupil with Shakespeare, Robert Debdale, joined the Jesuits at Douai and was later executed in England for Catholic proselytising along with Thomas Cottam.^[11]

Lost years

John Aubrey reported that Shakespeare had been a country schoolmaster,^[12] a tale augmented in the 20th century with the theory that his employer might have been Alexander Hoghton of Lancashire,^[13] a prominent Catholic landowner who left money in his will to a certain "William Shakeshafte", referencing theatrical costumes and paraphernalia.^[14] Shakespeare's grandfather Richard had also once used the name Shakeshafte. Ackroyd adds that study of the marginal notes in the Hoghton family copy of Edward Hall's Chronicles, an important source for Shakespeare's early histories, shows that they were in "probability" in Shakespeare's writing.^[15]

Possible Catholic wedding

The writer's marriage to Anne Hathaway in 1582 may have been officiated, amongst other candidates, by John Frith ^[16] in the town of Temple Grafton a few miles from Stratford. In 1586 the crown named Frith, who maintained the appearance of Protestantism, as a Roman Catholic priest^[17]. Some surmise Shakespeare wed in Temple Grafton rather than the Protestant Church in Stratford in order for his wedding to be performed as a Catholic sacrament. ^[18]

Catholic sympathies

While none of this evidence proves Shakespeare's own Catholic sympathies, one historian, Clare Asquith, has claimed that those sympathies are detectable in his writing. Asquith claims that Shakespeare uses terms such as "high" when referring to Catholic characters and "low" when referring to Protestants (the terms refer to their altars) and "light" or "fair" to refer to Catholic and "dark" to refer to Protestant, a reference to certain clerical garbs. Asquith also detects in Shakespeare's work the use of a simple code used by the Jesuit underground in England which took the form of a mercantile terminology wherein priests were 'merchants' and souls were 'jewels', the people pursuing them were 'creditors', and the Tyburn gallows where the members of the underground died was called 'the place of much trading'.^[19] The Jesuit underground used this code so their correspondences looked like innocuous commercial letters, and Asquith claims that Shakespeare also used this code.^[19]

Needless to say, Shakespeare’s Catholicism is by no means universally accepted. The 1914 edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia questioned not only his Catholicism, but whether "Shakespeare was not infected with the atheism, which... was rampant in the more cultured society of the Elizabethan age."^[20] Stephen Greenblatt suspects Catholic sympathies of some kind or another in Shakespeare and his family but considers the writer to be a less than pious person with essentially worldly motives.^[21] An increasing number of scholars do look to matters biographical and evidence from Shakespeare’s work such as the placement of young Hamlet as a student at Wittenberg while old Hamlet’s ghost is in purgatory,^[22] the sympathetic view of religious life ("thrice blessed"), scholastic theology in The Phoenix and the Turtle, and sympathetic allusions to martyred English Jesuit St. Edmund Campion in Twelfth Night^[23] and many other matters as suggestive of a Catholic worldview.

Greenblatt makes the case that the "equivocator" arriving at the gate of hell in the Porter's speech in Macbeth refers to the Jesuit Father Henry Garnet after his execution in 1606.^[24] He allows, however, that Shakespeare probably included the allusion for the sake of topicality, trusting that his audience would have heard of Garnet's pamphlet on equivocation rather than any hidden sympathy for the man or his cause—indeed the portrait is not a sympathetic one. Shakespeare may have also been aware of the "equivocation" concept which appeared as the subject of a 1583 tract by Queen Elizabeth's chief councillor Lord Burghley as well as the 1584 Doctrine of Equivocation by the Spanish prelate Martin Azpilcueta that was disseminated across Europe and into England in the 1590s.^[25]

Notes and references

	Part of a series on William Shakespeare and his works
General information	Biography| Style | influence| Reputation | Religion| Sexuality | Shakespearean Authorship Question
Tragedies	Antony and Cleopatra | Coriolanus | Hamlet | Julius Caesar| King Lear| Macbeth | Othello | Romeo and Juliet| Timon of Athens| Titus Andronicus| Troilus and Cressida
Comedies	All's Well That Ends Well | As You Like It| The Comedy of Errors| Cymbeline | Love's Labour's Lost| Measure for Measure| The Merchant of Venice| The Merry Wives of Windsor| A Midsummer Night's Dream| Much Ado About Nothing| Pericles, Prince of Tyre| The Taming of the Shrew| The Tempest| Twelfth Night, or What You Will| The Two Gentlemen of Verona| The Two Noble Kinsmen| The Winter's Tale
Histories	King John | Richard II| Henry IV, Part 1| Henry IV, Part 2| Henry V| Henry VI, part 1| Henry VI, part 2| Henry VI, part 3| Richard III| Henry VIII
Poems	Sonnets | Venus and Adonis| The Rape of Lucrece| The Passionate Pilgrim| The Phoenix and the Turtle| A Lover's Complaint
Apocrypha and Lost Plays	Edward III | Sir Thomas More| Cardenio (lost)| Love's Labour's Won (lost)| The Birth of Merlin| Locrine | The London Prodigal| The Puritan| The Second Maiden's Tragedy| Richard II, Part I: Thomas of Woodstock| Sir John Oldcastle| Thomas Lord Cromwell| A Yorkshire Tragedy| Fair Em| Mucedorus | The Merry Devil of Edmonton| Arden of Faversham| Edmund Ironside| Vortigern and Rowena
Other play information	Shakespeare's plays | Shakespeare in performance| Chronology of Shakespeare plays| Oxfordian chronology| Shakespeare on screen| BBC Television Shakespeare| Titles based on Shakespeare| List of characters | Problem Plays| List of historical characters| Ghost characters