The Unsung Shakespeare
Why, one wonders, should one of the most famous people in history be featured as one of the unsung heroes of Christendom? This would seem to be a good question until we realize that most people do not perceive Shakespeare as a hero of Christendom. He is sung, to be sure. He is sung more widely and more loudly than almost anyone. But he is not sung in tune.
On the contrary, he is sung out of tune. His songs are sung discordantly and disgracefully by a whole motley of meddlesome modernists and postmodernists. He is the victim of radical feminists, Marxist theorists, queer theorists, Nietzschean nihilists, post-colonialists, anti-racists, and woke dogmatists, none of whom know who Shakespeare was, how he sung, or what he was singing about.
In order to sing as Shakespeare sung, we need to understand that his Muse, the source of inspiration for all his music, was profoundly Catholic.
Let’s look at the facts of Shakespeare’s life as a means to understanding the songs that he sings in his poetry and plays.
Shakespeare was born in 1564, in the early years of the reign of Elizabeth I (Bloody Bess), a tyrant whose reign was characterized by her merciless quest to destroy the Catholic Church in England. It was illegal in Shakespeare’s time to practice the Catholic Faith and punishable by death to be a Catholic priest or to hide a priest from the priest-hunters. In the midst of such tyranny, Shakespeare was raised by staunchly Catholic parents.
Members of his mother’s family, the Ardens, were known for their defiant Catholic recusancy (“refusers of Protestant communion”), defying the tyrannical laws which required that everyone attend the services of the heretical state religion. They suffered death, imprisonment, and exile. Shakespeare’s father appears to have resigned from his involvement in local politics when it became required by law for local government officials to take the Oath of Supremacy, thereby swearing allegiance to the queen as head of the Church. He was fined for his Catholic recusancy in 1592 and hid an incriminating Catholic confession of faith in the rafters of his house for fear of its being discovered. Shakespeare’s daughter, Susanna, would also be fined for her Catholic recusancy in 1606.
As for Shakespeare himself, it seems that he remained a resolute Catholic. Although there is no record of his being fined for his recusancy, there is also no evidence that he ever attended the state religion’s services. He was fined in 1596 for allegedly threatening violence against two disreputable characters who had boasted of their role in raids on Catholic homes. Whereas Shakespeare’s co-defendants in this court case included known Catholic recusants, one of his two accusers was “one of the extreme Puritans” who had boasted in a report in 1585 of a raid on a Catholic home in which “papist” books, pictures, and a crucifix were discovered and confiscated.
Many of Shakespeare’s closest friends were known recusants. His patron, the Earl of Southampton, was a recusant who seems to have had the future Jesuit saint and martyr Robert Southwell as his personal confessor. The biographical and textual evidence also suggests strongly that Shakespeare knew Southwell, and it is clear from Shakespeare’s poetry and plays that he was influenced by Southwell’s own writings and poetry.
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