Was Shakespeare a Catholic? There is a dreadful whiff of sectarian scalp-hunting in fixing a denominational label to the greatest creative imagination England has ever produced. Indeed, Shakespeare was not straightforwardly even a Christian writer, in the obvious sense in which Dante or Milton was. His last romances, among which The Tempest belongs, are saturated with Christian imagery of healing, reconciliation and forgiveness, but is Lear a Christian play?
So what is known for certain about Shakespeare's religion? We begin with the community in which he was born. Like many other towns, Elizabethan Stratford dragged its feet about embracing the new religion. One vicar, William Butcher, was certainly a Catholic, sacked along with the town schoolmaster in 1569, for sympathy with the Catholic Rebellion of the northern earls.
Simon Hunt, Shakespeare's first schoolmaster, left his post in 1575 to become a Catholic priest, subsequently a Jesuit: he died as a Penitentiary of St Peter's in Rome in 1585. With him went one of Shakespeare's schoolfellows, a neighbour of Anne Hathaway's at Shottery, Robert Debdale, himself executed as a priest in 1586. While studying for the priesthood, Debdale shared classes with Thomas Cottom, executed as a priest in 1582. Cottom's brother, John, was schoolmaster at Stratford and taught Shakespeare until, under mounting official pressure against Catholics, he fled home to Lancashire. Much of Shakespeare's education, therefore, was dominated by men sympathetic or actively committed to Catholicism.
His home was equally suspect. Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden, was a member of one of the most prominent Warwickshire Catholic families. Shakespeare's father, John, a prominent Stratford tradesman, held a string of important offices in the town in Elizabeth's early years, reaching the top of the tree as High Bailiff (mayor) in 1568. In the course of his official duties he co-operated in the slow dismantling of Catholicism, but from 1576 he dropped out of office, and was clearly in financial difficulties. In 1592 he appears in the recusant rolls for failing to come to church, but is one of nine people said to be avoiding church for fear of being arrested as a debtor. We can in fact be certain that debt was not John Shakespeare's only reason for staying away from his parish church.
On 27th April 1757 a bricklayer working on Shakespeare's birthplace found hidden under the roof tiles a small six-paged manuscript in a late-16th-century hand. It was John Shakespeare's "Spiritual Testament", and in paragraph after paragraph it affirmed his Catholic beliefs - craving the prayers of the "glorious and ever Virgin Mary, refuge and advocate of sinners", and asking for prayers and Masses to speed him through purgatory. This manuscript was subsequently lost, and its authenticity debated until this century, when a series of discoveries by the Jesuit Herbert Thurston established beyond any doubt that the lost manuscript was genuine.
John Shakespeare had copied a document produced by St Carlo Borromeo during the plague in Milan in the late 1570s. It was designed as a solemn "Soul Testament" or declaration of faith for people likely to die without a priest. In 1580 the Jesuits Robert Parsons and Edmund Campion launched a mission to England. Before setting off, they spent a week with Borromeo in Milan, and brought thousands of translations of his Testament to England, for it was ideally adapted to a country where the faith was persecuted and priests a rarity: Parsons reported that "many people desire to have them".
Among them was Shakespeare's father. Before Campion's arrest in June 1581, the Jesuits were preaching and reconciling the lapsed in the midlands, and came within 12 miles of Stratford. Their impact on Catholics and fellow-travellers in the region was electric, and it must have been then that John Shakespeare got hold of the Testament. In the fraught religious atmosphere of the 1580s, copying it out with his own name incriminatingly at the beginning of each paragraph can only have been a deliberate act of rededication to Catholicism.
By 1583, however, persecution of local Catholics came to a head. Shakespeare's cousins the Ardens were arrested, and the head of the family was hanged, drawn and quartered. Arrests and searches reached Stratford, and it was reported to Sir Francis Walsingham that the Warwickshire papists were frantically "clearing their houses of all show of suspicion". It must have been during this scare that John Shakespeare hid, but significantly did not destroy, his incriminating profession of faith.
We can only speculate about the domestic impact of John Shakespeare's dangerous conversion in the early 1580s, but the circumstances of the young poet's marriage to Anne Hathaway in 1582 are suggestive. The record in the Stratford registers implies, oddly, that the wedding took place in the village of Temple Grafton, five miles from Stratford, maybe because the vicar, John Frith, was an old Catholic priest, suspect to the authorities as "unsound in religion".
There are other intriguing loose ends at this period of Shakespeare's life. He is said to have left Stratford after a quarrel with a local magistrate, Sir Thomas Lucy. Tradition has it that the row was over deer poaching, but Lucy was one of the most active Protestants in the region, instrumental in the arrest of the Ardens in 1583. Interestingly, the 17th-century Anglican clergyman who is our source for this Lucy connection also claimed that Shakespeare "died a papist".
There is also a tradition, which P.E.A.J. Honigman and Richard Wilson have strongly advocated, that the 16-year-old Shakespeare functioned as a tutor and actor at Hoghton Tower, as part of the household of the Lancashire Catholic grandee, Alexander Hoghton. Shakespeare's schoolmaster, John Cottam, was a tenant of the Hoghton family, and Hoghton's will in 1581 made special arrangements for a servant named William Shakeshafte to pass into the employment of Sir Thomas Hesketh, who kept a company of players at his house at Rufford. Shakeshafte is a common Lancashire name, but also a documented form of Shakespeare's family name. The Cottam connection, and Shakespeare's later connections with the Lancashireman Thomas Savage, trustee of the Globe and a native of Rufford, make the story more than plausible.
And Shakespeare's connections with Catholicism may extend to the next generation. Before her marriage to a leading Protestant, Dr William Hall, Shakespeare's daughter Susannah was cited for recusancy in 1606, along with her godparents, Judith and Hamnet Sadler.
The plays support, even if they do not prove, the idea that Shakespeare had Catholic sympathies. Several of them, especially Hamlet, show an extensive familiarity with Catholic teachings, such as that on purgatory. The sensibility which evoked in sonnet 73 "Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang" was certainly receptive to the beauty of the old faith, alert to the tragedy and loss involved in reformation. When he chose the story of King John for a play, using a rabidly anti-Catholic source, Shakespeare consistently softened the anti-Catholicism, forfeiting the easy approval of a patriotically Protestant audience. There is nothing in the whole body of Shakespeare's work remotely comparable to the cheap anti-Catholicism of the Vatican banquet scene in Marlow's Dr Faustus. So whether or not Shakespeare can be claimed as a Catholic writer, he was certainly not a Protestant one.
Dr Eamon Duffy was in Dublin to speak at a seminar organised by the Abbey Theatre on the possibility that Shakespeare was a Catholic. He is Reader in Church History in the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Magdalene College. His study of the English Reformation, The Stripping of the Altars, is published by Yale University Press
Shakespeare's The Tempest, directed by Conall Morrison, opens tonight at the Abbey Theatre
