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William Shakespeare, Sanders portrait
Was Shakespeare a Catholic?
Ever since the 1990s it has been trendy to say that Shakespeare was a practising Catholic. Which, at the time of the Gunpowder Plot, would seem to have been a pretty risky thing to be.
The Shakespearian expert Richard Wilson sees allusions to Catholicism everywhere in Shakespeare’s plays. He then claims that Shakespeare became disillusioned with it around 1606, in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot. We examine how much truth there is in this claim.
And then we ask, is this the right question? Shouldn’t we be asking about the religious affiliations of his audience? For decades now, historians following on from Christopher Haigh and Eamon Duffy have been showing that the transition to Protestantism in England was very slow and very patchy.
More recently, Alexandra Walsham has shown that, by the 1590s, Catholicism was, if anything, growing again. And yet research also shows that ordinary people were probably a great deal less interested in denominational differences than theologians and historians are.
Historian Michael Gandy finds that in Jacobean London ‘Catholics were not in a ghetto. Catholics of all levels were fully integrated into every aspect of ordinary life’. It was especially true among the poor, who were sometimes convicted in church courts of being Catholics but apparently never made to pay the fines.
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Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus is said to have received knowledge of the physical world from God while Moses received moral
Hidden forces outside the body
Some historians have tried to shoe-horn Shakespeare into a third kind of religion – either an alternative philosophy known as Hermetism (which is very roughly like a kind of Christian Buddhism, although there is no link at all between them). Or, like historian Frances Yates, they link Shakespeare to Hermetism’s much more magical cousin, known as Hermeticism.
This embraced astrology and alchemy, as well as the Jewish semi-magical world of Kabbala, and spoke of hidden forces outside the body.
So, for example, in The Merchant of Venice, Shylock cannot explain his obsession with getting revenge over Antonio. It is some kind of compulsion coming from outside, forcing him to act. Everyone suffers from these compulsions, complains Shylock. Why do some people love cats, and some hate them? Why do some people love the sound of bagpipes ‘and others, when the bagpipe sings’ are so offended they ‘cannot contain their urine’?
Literary scholar Mary Floyd-Wilson writes that Shakespeare depicts love as a kind of invisible but irresistible magnetism. In All’s Well that Ends Well, feisty Helena falls inexplicably for the useless and arrogant Bertram. What else can it be, but some kind of hidden, supernatural force?
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Human behaviour was thought to be governed by four so-called ‘humours’ – blood (associated broadly with optimism), phlegm (a lack of emotion), yellow bile (anger) and black bile (melancholy)
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