AS FASCINATION with Shakespeare’s dramas and poems endures, the desire to know more about the inner life of the greatest literary figure in the English language intensifies–though scholars have always failed to satisfy it, because “there is no evidence, you know.” That was the pithy response of Simon Schama when he warned British historian-turned-documentary filmmaker Michael Wood about the pitfalls in trying to make the first-ever film that would make Shakespeare come alive.
But Wood persisted. The result is both an impressive film and a companion book entitled “In Search of Shakespeare.” The four-hour BBC film will air nationally on various PBS channels in segments throughout February. Many who watch this film may not be aware that Wood’s exposé of Shakespeare’s family’s abiding attachment to Roman Catholicism, and perhaps his own, is quite controversial. Since the mid-1980s, scholars have had sharp differences concerning the “Catholic question.” For his part, Wood seems perplexed that others fail to appreciate that his exploration of how this religious heritage colored the bard’s life and writings helps greatly to overcome the paucity of other evidence illuminating the man’s inner life.
Indeed, the dreary bottom line is that between his birth in 1564 and his purchase of an expensive home in Stratford town in 1597, this particular William Shakespeare (there were several with this name at the time) only left records pertaining to his shotgun marriage to Anne Hathaway and the birth of his children. While biographers can pad their narratives with “could have” or “might have” speculation, as every Shakespearean biographer has done since the eighteenth-century, a documentary filmmaker cannot get away with it so easily. To fill up the videotape and to give us a more compelling picture, Wood astutely decided to ride the new wave in Shakespeare scholarship: the growing evidence that young William emerged from a family deeply imbedded in a network of hard-core Catholics from South Warwickshire.
Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt, due to publish yet another Shakespeare biography within the next year, once encouraged Hollywood producers to make a film exploring this Catholic connection. He had no success, as filmmakers concluded, with “Shakespeare in Love,” that sex was easier for moviegoers to grasp than the conflicts between Protestants and Catholics four hundred years ago.
Hollywood isn’t alone. The idea of a Catholic Shakespeare troubles some scholars as well. He was for two decades on the royal payroll as the senior dramatist of the acting company directly tied to Queen Elizabeth’s court. And after the queen’s harsh new edicts in the early 1580s, anyone who failed to appear regularly at Anglican services, or who sustained Catholic faith in secrecy, risked ruinous fines, imprisonment, and even execution.
Wood notes that this was the fate of several close friends and relatives of Shakespeare’s parents. And he provides a map in his book showing the location of an execution scaffold next to the Curtain Theater in the first theatrical district in London, just north of the city walls in Shoreditch. Wood doesn’t mention that the queen in August 1588 had several English Catholics executed to reinforce and celebrate the defeat of the Spanish Armada, including one Jesuit on this particular scaffold.
SUCH HISTORICAL FACTS are a jarring reminder of how awkward a Catholic bard on the royal payroll would have been in that era and later for a nation whose cultural identity cannot be divorced from the Reformation and the Protestant heritage. Nonetheless, the evidence for the staunch Catholicism of Shakespeare’s parents and his own dossier as a crypto-Catholic remains impressive. His favorite daughter, Susanna, failed to attend and initially defied inquisitive officials about her nonattendance at Anglican services in 1606. This was only four months after the Jesuit Gunpowder Plot failed to blow up Parliament with King James in the building. In early 1613, while his dramas were being featured for the first and very Protestant royal wedding in seventy years (the king’s daughter marrying the leader of the German Protestants), Shakespeare had the amazing audacity to go out and purchase the Blackfriar’s Gatehouse. This property was notorious for being a haven or safehouse where Catholics and priests gathered in secret for the Mass and other religious observances.
Mainstream scholars have long insisted–and correctly–that the literary works taken as a whole could not have come from the pen of a person with a sectarian worldview or the “siege mentality” natural for English Catholics in the face of brutal persecution. The traces of the old faith that can be found in the dramas and poems are few in number and orthodox scholars chalk them up to Shakespeare’s professionalism as a dramatist when he tried to be faithful to the pre-Reformation historical context of his dramas. Beyond that, they observe that some Shakespearean dramas convey a hostility to the papacy and Catholic views, to the point that he sometimes seems a propagandist for the Tudor regime. From this perspective, they will allow that perhaps the Bard might have been a homosexual, but never a secret Roman Catholic.
Wood, who focuses in the film and book far more on social history than literary texts, never provides a convincing rebuttal to this analysis. And he rings an odd note when he suggests the Sonnets are modeled on the Rosary. And does again when he suggests the Ghost in “Hamlet” (whose young protagonist is on recess from Luther’s Wittenburg University, no less) is infused with the spirit of Catholicism. For these reasons, it was no surprise that Stanley Wells, arguably the preeminent Shakespeare scholar these days, ridiculed Wood’s pursuit of the Catholic connection in a lecture last fall at the Smithsonian, just two days before Wood’s book-signing presentation in the same auditorium.
Wells’s categorical rejection was endorsed by Frank Kermode, who contrasted Wells’s recent Shakespeare biography with that of Wood’s in the New York Times–much to Wood’s detriment. Wood won endorsement from the venerable Robert Giroux, who reviewed the book in the Los Angeles Times. But Clive James tried to ignore the Catholic Question entirely in his review in the Times Literary Supplement, while Germaine Greer decided to go on the offensive against Wood’s catholicization.
SUCH TACTICS are not likely to discourage the Catholic Bard movement. Fordham University Press and Manchester University in Britain have just released substantial anthologies of scholarly essays ferreting out every imaginable hint of a Catholic sensibility in the staggering canon of nearly forty dramas. Still, no attentive observer can deny that all this amounts to a major schism among Shakespeare scholars.
But Wood and the BBC seem untroubled–indeed, even reassured that a Shakespeare who was a crypto-Catholic will make a more inclusive cultural icon for the Global Village. At the Smithsonian, Wood lamented that Wells and others are in a state of denial about the Catholic-flavored biographical evidence at a time when they should be grateful that he has made Shakespeare seem more real.
Presumably, Wood meant that his portrait of a living Shakespeare would be the answer to those who deny that the “Stratford man” wrote the works. But a Catholic Shakespeare is harder to accept as the author, not easier. Still, Wood has put together a beautifully filmed and fascinating documentary that’s worth everyone’s time to see.
Peter W. Dickson is a former CIA political-military analyst and biographer of Henry Kissinger.
