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three years to reenergize the ministry as the archbishop of Canterbury, was “not worthy to carry Cartwright’s books.”³¹

      Conformists were quick to come to Whitgift’s defense and also drew Throckmorton’s fire. He blamed their “envenomed mouthes” for the “kitchen rhetorike” and for “speeches so opprobrious” that they forced his friends, well-meaning reformists, to defend their reputations and petition their way out of prison.³² Matthew Sutcliffe, dean of Exeter Cathedral, concluded confidently that the Midlands’ commoners were too astute to be gulled by Throckmorton’s attacks on conformists and by his puritanical insistence that the realm’s bishops be “unspotted.”³³ But we cannot calculate from this distance whether the scalding criticisms of Throckmorton, Gilby, and Cartwright were influential, or of only passing interest, in Stratford. Maybe much the same should be said about the Earl of Leicester’s patronage of puritans. Of course, all of this was part of the religion around Shakespeare, although when Leicester dropped into conversations around Henley Street, talk may simply have turned to the renovations to his castle at nearby Kenilworth. His reformist sympathies may have been of no interest to the local workmen who gossiped about the project. William Shakespeare, in any event, may not have been at hand to hear them. A few literary historians believe he left for Lancashire soon after leaving school in Stratford. And if he did go north, the religion around him was more recusant—resistant to reform—than reformed.

      Parts of Lancashire were doggedly Catholic from 1536, when participants in what was called the Pilgrimage of Grace demanded that King Henry VIII recatholicize the region as well as others, to the last decade of the century, when, rumor had it, the northwest would welcome an invasion from Spain or Scotland to initiate “the alteration of [reformed] religion.”³⁴ High sheriff Richard Holland, reporting to the queen’s Council at the time Shakespeare may have been north, confirmed that “either none at all or verie small reformation [was] had” there.³⁵ Conspiracies to rescue Mary Stuart almost invariably featured that region of the realm. Lancashire was thought to be the best place to take the Queen of Scots for safekeeping.³⁶

      Stratford schoolmaster John Cottom hailed from there. His neighbor Alexander Hoghton hired a man named William Shakeshafte, who appears to have had some interest in theater. To this day, the locals say that Hoghton’s Shakeshafte was William Shakespeare of Stratford. Some historians agree, conjecturing that Cottom introduced Hoghton to Shakespeare and that the latter’s presence, years later, among the playmakers associated with Lancashire’s Lord Ferdinando Stanley can be explained by the soon-to-be playwright’s residence in the north and connections with Catholics there.³⁷

      Evidence for Shakespeare’s lodging in Lancashire for a time is very suggestive but far from conclusive. Yet what seems all but incontestable is that Hoghton and his neighbors were fond of the old faith and were beneficiaries of the local magistrates’ “gentle dealinge” with the region’s Catholics. Reformist Edward Fleetwood of Wigan despaired that the statutes against the likes of Hoghton were unenforced, explaining—by complaining—that there were too few “sounde gentlemen” around to staff the commissions, which were instructed to supply the queen’s Council with “sufficient intelligence” about “inconvenient persons” in the region.³⁸

      From articles of inquiry that survive, we know that both politics and religion were in play, although results, as Fleetwood noted, were hardly impressive. Commissioners required that persons suspected of being “inconvenient[ly] Catholic” relay what they knew about—and confide their reactions to—the papal excommunication of Elizabeth in 1570. Had they heard that she had been “denounced” in Rome as “no rightull governour of England”? Were they appalled that Pope Pius V had absolved “subjects of this realm from all obedience to hyr”? Did Lancashire gentry think that Jesuits and other expatriate priests were “lawfully executed” for having tried to rally resident Catholics and to stir rebellion? Were Lancashire Catholics genuinely opposed to Rome’s overreaching?³⁹ Perhaps, as Fleetwood groused, the interrogations were “gentle” in the north, but they did produce at least one notable defection: Lord Stanley apologized for the “backwardnes” of his father’s faith, promising the bishop of Chester that Lancashire Protestants would soon see that no one would “shewe himself more forward” in their cause than he, when he succeeded his “backward” father as earl of Derby.⁴⁰

      Many interpreters who think Shakespeare lived (as Shakeshafte) among Lancastrian Catholics appreciate, as does John Cox, that “even absolutely certain documentary evidence concerning [the playwright’s] formation in the traditional faith would not amount to evidence that [he] retained that faith” as an adult.⁴¹ Hence, proponents of a steadfastly, if slyly, Catholic Shakespeare hunt for late Tudor confessional “backwardnes” in his plays. When Prospero bids farewell in The Tempest, Richard Wilson hears “the most positive affirmation ever made on an English Renaissance stage of the Catholic belief in the power of intercessory prayer to the Saints and Virgin.” Wilson places great emphasis on the old magician’s final request that the playgoers’ “indulgence set [him] free,” explaining that both playwright, scripting his protagonist’s farewell, and playgoers, hearing it, had in mind the indulgences that circulated among English Catholics who assisted expatriate priests and Jesuits with the reconversion of the realm.⁴²

      But Wilson almost certainly overbids his hand. Of course, whether in Warwickshire or Lancashire, Shakespeare could have heard about—and have been impressed by—those expatriate priests, whom we met in the first chapter and will meet again in the third. Returning to England at great personal risk, they were intent on flaying the “faults and follyes” of reformed churches.⁴³ But Shakespeare could also have been impressed by reformers’ indictments of those very same priests. Prospero’s talk of indulgences tells us neither that Shakespeare admired recusants who harbored seminarians and Jesuits from abroad nor that he thought less favorably of the church papists, who feared that the old faith was ill-served by overzealous advocates and who turned them away. Elizabethan Catholics had a range of reactions to the missionaries and to friends’ and adversaries’ advice that they accommodate the realm’s religiously reformed authorities. Some Catholics prayed for the “Roman” reconquest of England; others were unsettled by a premonition of the violence that unquestionably would have attended a reversal of that magnitude. Elizabethan Calvinist sentiments were pluriform as well; reformists, whom conformists believed to be too “forward,” accused accusers of too often looking backward, looking, specifically, to Rome.⁴⁴ And the Calvinists’ controversies and quarrels gave William Shakespeare much to tell us about the religion around him, as we shall learn, although neither reformed nor unreformed religion appears to have tempted him devoutly to develop any readily identifiable and steadfastly held confessional opinions. We are not wrong to ask about his view of “unlawfull mynisters” in the Midlands—that question generates a few intriguing readings of his plays—but we would be unwise to expect a definitive answer.⁴⁵

      Shakespeare was in Stratford to marry in 1582 and stayed for the birth of his daughter soon thereafter. Chances are that he remained (or returned) for the birth of twins two years later. We may assume that he knew something of the conformists—John Whitgift, after all, was bishop of Worcester from 1577 to 1583—and of reformists, although there is nothing directly connecting him to Throckmorton, Gilby, and Cartwright. As for local recusants and church papists, John’s as well as William’s familiarity with some—and perhaps with many—seems reasonable. Both father and son possibly met expatriate missionaries and Jesuits passing through. Conceivably, William Shakespeare was welcomed into Catholic circles yet was confessionally unaligned when he left Stratford for London, presuming that a resourceful player might do better by a growing family than a glover encumbered with his father’s debts.

      LONDON

      The Court was close to the city, as was the royal residence at Whitehall in Westminster. The government, that is, was a stroll down the Strand from London’s commercial district, the shops, taverns, and tenements that constituted the highest-density spot in England. Intellectual exchange around St. Paul’s Cathedral was brisk. Outdoor preaching at Paul’s Cross attracted crowds, and the churchyard was fringed with bookstalls, from which readers bought what had just been published in their realm as well as pamphlets, books,

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