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Religion Around Shakespeare. Peter Iver Kaufman
Читать онлайн.Название Religion Around Shakespeare
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isbn 9780271069586
Автор произведения Peter Iver Kaufman
Серия Religion Around
Издательство Ingram
Interpreters who take the plays as confessionally freighted sometimes (and somewhat carelessly) depict the religion around Shakespeare as clandestinely Catholic, as “an Escher-like world of secret chapels, priest holes, false walls, and trap doors,” which explains how his drama acquired “an exciting marginality.”3 Other interpreters who begin with the plays’ indifference to religion, their fascination with a purportedly Protestant “psychology” of inordinate despair, their disenchantment with older Catholic technologies of salvation, or their apparent acceptance of an attenuated form of reformed religion depict the religion around Shakespeare—if they bother with it at all—as relatively unremarkable.4 The ways the plays are read (as laments for a religion that was lost or as intrigued, bemused, or cleverly critical reactions to the religion Shakespeare found around him) often determines the ways in which the contexts are patched together.
The first two “acts” of what follows are different. They stay far from Shakespeare’s plays and try to repossess the religion around the realm as a glover’s apprentice with a lively curiosity—then as an eclectic playwright—might have taken it in. Admittedly, such repossession requires guesswork. We can only imagine how our subject filtered the news that reached him in Stratford-upon-Avon and London, but it seems a safe bet that the seriousness and success of the queen’s courtships, on which the realm’s religious settlement was thought to depend and which seemed to many at the time to be staggeringly significant, also struck Shakespeare as significant. Anxieties about the succession as well as those about possible invasions and insurrections were expressed in sermons that were all but inescapable, as were opinions that there was either too much preaching or too little.
We cannot tell what Shakespeare thought about his queen’s matrimonial prospects or about either the content or quantity of sermons. Yet we can recapture, to some extent and with some conjecture, what was heard in Stratford, at the collegiate church of the Holy Trinity. We have auditors’ notes from some sermons and printed scripts for others preached from “the Cross” in St. Paul’s churchyard, where Shakespeare almost certainly went to leaf through recent arrivals in the yard’s bookstalls, if not also to listen to what was said by or about the preachers. Some of the sermons delivered at St. Saviour’s, within earshot of the Globe Theater, were transcribed, and the transcriptions have survived. And we can infer what Shakespeare heard in the company of so-called church papists, Catholics who attended the realm’s reformed churches, and recusants, Catholics who refused to attend and were fined. He would have come across both types in Stratford, elsewhere in Warwickshire, and in Lancashire, had he repaired to the last, as locals there still claim.5
But Warwickshire was also home to some of the Midlands’ most respected religiously reformed preachers. Stratford was twice visited by leading Calvinist Thomas Cartwright, whose patron, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, owned a castle at Kenilworth, twelve miles away. And Cartwright once arrived with Job Throckmorton, whom conformists considered a “sanctified puritane.”6 Elected to Parliament from Warwick in the 1580s, Throckmorton befriended the region’s antipapal polemicists and members of London’s reformist network. At that decade’s end, he was suspected of collaborating with the subversives who pseudonymously published their opposition to conformist bishops and to the prevailing policies and polity of the realm’s reformed church.7 Of course, the presence of ardent Catholics and Calvinists in Shakespeare’s shire could mean little. Judging from the late plays he helped compose, which, as James Holstun notices, “sidestep the theological issues that ripped the country apart,” one might say that, as a Stratford student, apprentice, and aspiring player, Shakespeare recoiled from religious polemics.8 Be that as it may—and even if he self-consciously or subliminally believed the theater was an alternative to the church, a faction-free zone, more peaceful than the clerical estate—his plays are still a source from which we learn much about religious circumstance.9 In the final three, topical chapters, therefore, Religion Around Shakespeare docks evidence drawn from some plays alongside evidence left by preachers, churchwardens, vestrymen, polemicists, theologians, and diarists—but not to seek cover for a new interpretation of those plays. The aim of Religion Around—of all five chapters—is simply to repossess what its title promises.
Hence, the last three chapters, on religious authority, religious personality, and religious community, respectively, set a few of Shakespeare’s soliloquies, characters, and caricatures next to relevant contemporary religious developments to illustrate ambivalences. Possibly, they were the playwright’s ambivalences, but I am not prepared to conclude as much. Religion Around argues, instead, that they were atmospheric, which is to claim that many doubts about religious hierarchy and solidarity as well as doubts about election or regeneration were very much in the air in the religion around the realm and, closer, the religion around Shakespeare. The misgivings and doubts spilled across party lines. Mistrust of the Jesuits and of the papacy circulated among both Catholics and Calvinists. Desires for greater discipline were not unique to the precisianists now identified as the most “forward” Protestants (or puritans). Moreover, the aggressiveness of reformists, who were disappointed in the trajectory and pace of government-sanctioned reforms, changed over time and from one region to another, as did the remedial measures they favored and conformists’ responses during Queen Elizabeth’s last decade and King James’s first.10
Where did Shakespeare fit? Literary historians looking to out him as a Calvinist or a Catholic or a devotee of some “hybrid faith” should find something of interest here, although what follows will fall short of a definitive answer to their questions. I am not mining for that metal.11 Unquestionably, the playwright borrowed from the religion around him, and what he deposited in his drama “infused” performances, as Leah Marcus says, “with a vitality born of circumstance.” The plays profit from Shakespeare’s “sublimation into high drama of what is casually there at hand.”12 Nonetheless, to proceed from what was “at hand” and what is now staged so often to a singular scribe’s secrets—to his religious convictions—requires a razzle-dazzle that I am inadequately equipped to attempt.
Circumstance—the religion around the playwright, not his faith or the plays’ proper interpretations—is my subject. I leave Shakespeare’s outlook to others. My challenge is to see how well we can see what he saw when he looked out.
“IT APPERTEINETH TO THE EMPERIALL OFFICE”
Historian Patrick Collinson suggests that “the succession was the question of questions” in late Tudor England, and I think he is quite right. For Shakespeare, who seems uninterested in the worship of—or administration of—churches around him, religion likely became newsworthy only when the whether and how of its survival in the realm happened to relate to that “question of questions.”1 Other English subjects lavished attention on the fate of their churches, the content of their sermons, and the controversies about their liturgies. They formed factions and registered protests, enlivening the religion around the realm and around Shakespeare. So we should begin by attending to those other subjects.
Their story starts for us six years before Shakespeare’s birth when, in 1558, Elizabeth succeeded her half-sister, Mary Tudor, as England’s queen. Elizabeth I’s mother, Anne Boleyn, was said to have steered her sovereign, then husband, King Henry VIII, toward Protestantism.2 Mary, daughter of Henry’s first wife, Katherine of Aragon, looked to return the realm to Rome but had only five years to undo the work of twenty, and the five were not enough. The religiously reformed, of course, welcomed Queen Mary’s end and Elizabeth’s beginning. Some of them left England during Mary’s short reign, presumably guessing that they would be gone longer. Her death and her half-sister’s succession