Ten Reasons Why Shakespeare Was Catholic

May 20, 2015 by Fr. Dwight Longenecker

There are probably no greater academic debating topics than the mysterious life of the Bard of Avon–William Shakespeare.

Did he really write those plays? If he didn’t, who did? Was he involved in the Elizabethan spy network?

Was he a secret Catholic? Are there pro-Catholic “codes” is his plays?

I’m off to England in a few weeks’ time with my friend Joseph Pearce to help conduct a pilgrimage that focuses on English Catholic literary figures and Catholic martyrs.

“Shakespeare the Catholic” will be one of the key discussion topics. So here are ten reasons why Shakespeare was very probably a Catholic.

1. There were plenty of secret Catholics in Elizabethan England - Elizabeth I’s England was a virtual Protestant police state. Everyone had to swear loyalty to the Protestant queen. Everyone had to go to the state church. Attendance was taken. If you didn’t attend you were fined, imprisoned and fined again. The Catholic Church went underground and a secret network developed of faithful Catholic families.

2 Shakespeare’s family were secret Catholics - the secret Catholics were called “recusants” which means “refusers” because they refused to conform to the state religion. Shakespeare’s mother was from the Arden family–a well known and influential recusant family in Warwickshire.  One of the Arden relatives was executed for hiding a priest and John Shakespeare–William’s father–was fined for refusing to attend Church of England services. Shakespeare’s daughter Susanna was recorded as being Catholic.

3. A Catholic pamphlet was found hidden in the rafters of Shakespeare’s Birthplace - The pamphlet was a translation of a tract by St Edmund Campion who was executed in 1581 for being a Catholic priest. The young William Shakespeare was living in the house where the pamphlet was found at the time it was hidden.

4. Shakespeare probably had a Catholic wedding - Shakespeare married Anne Hatawat in 1582. They didn’t marry in their local church but scooted off to be married by Fr. John Frith at his little church in the nearby village of Temple Grafton. Four years later, the government accused Frith of secretly being a Roman Catholic priest. Did William and Ann go there in order to be married in a Catholic ceremony?

5. Shakespeare wrote sympathetically about Catholics - Shakespeare  included sympathetic Catholic characters in his plays: Friar Laurence from Romeo and Juliet and Friar Francis in Much Ado About Nothing. Shakespeare’s writing also indicates an intimate knowledge of Catholic ritual and belief.

6. Shakespeare condemns the Tudor regime - Hamlet is a play about social disintegration, incest, madness, infertility and murder. These were all things of which the Catholics accused the Tudor regime of Henry VIII and Elizabeth.

7 Shakespeare links social upheaval and chaos with Protestantism - Hamlet and his friend Horatio are “students at Wittenburg”–which was the center of Protestantism and Denmark is portrayed as a newly Protestant regime. The link is clear that it is the Protestant revolution that has brought the curse of murder, fratricide, incest, madness and chaos on the country.

8. Shakespeare may have visited the English College in Rome - In 2009 archivists at the Venerable English College in Rome uncovered two mysterious entries that could have been William Shakespeare using an alias. Because of the secretive and dangerous times, English Catholics abroad often traveled under assumed names. The dates match the time when Shakespeare’s whereabouts were unknown.
9. After his retirement Shakespeare bought a property in London as a priest’s “safe house” - Shakespeare bought the Blackfriar’s Gatehouse at a huge price. One assumes to keep it as a safe house for Catholic priests and for secret masses.
10. Shakespeare was reported to have died as a Catholic – He left almost everything in his will to his Catholic daughter Susanna. He left nothing to his Protestant family members and in the late 1600s, an Anglican minister wrote that Shakespeare “dyed a Papyst” – or a loyal Catholic

Shakespeare's English Is NOT That Complicated

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Professor David Crystal and his son Ben at Hay Festival 2015  

 

Photo: Jay Williams

By Hannah Furness, Arts Correspondent

7:00AM BST 31 May 2015

2 Comments

 

Studying Shakespeare for exams is made far more confusing than it ought to be for a generation which has unwittingly adopted the Bard's own language devices, one of the world's leading experts on linguistics has suggested. 

Professor David Crystal said only a tiny selection of the million words making up the canon of William Shakespeare were markedly different to the language of 2015, making it much easier to understand than many people think. 

Young people today, he said, had even adopted some of Shakespeare's own linguistic traits without realising, with the Facebook generation creating the word "unfriend" just as the playwright used "unsex, unsound or uncurse".

Prof Crystal, who has written a Shakespeare dictionary with his actor son Ben, added the huge number of notes accompanying plays on the exam syllabus gave the impression that the text was far more complicated than is necessary.

Speaking at Hay Festival, Ben Crystal added even he had disliked Shakespeare at school, pointing out the curriculum requirement to "study" it rather than learn to enjoy it gave children the wrong impression.

"You open one of the typical editions of Shakespeare at Act 1, Scene 1, Page 1, and there are just two lines of text and all of the rest of the page is notes," said Prof Crystal, who has written and edited more than 100 books on language.





 ^{A likeness of William Shakespeare (Alamy)}
 
"If you're looking at that, Shakespeare must be difficult then mustn't he? Otherwise what are all these notes doing?

"And so when you're looking at Shakespeare on the page, certainly you get the impression that Shakespeare is different. Almost a different language from the present day.

"But in actual fact it isn't as different as all that. It's early modern English, not late Middle English.

"When you actually go through all the words in Shakespeare - and there are nearly a million words in Shakespeare - there are only just around 20,000 different words altogether.

"And when you go through all of those and compare them with the modern day, for words in Shakespeare that are different in meaning from the words you and I speak today, the answer is surprisingly small.

"Only five per cent are really, really different."


 

^{Professor David Crystal, speaking at Hay Festival (Jay Williams)}

Of those, he said, around 1,000 are "false friends" such as the word naughty, which appear to be familiar but have a slightly different meaning.

He told an audience Shakespeare was particularly fond of using the prefix "un", such as "unshout", "uncurse" and Lady Macbeth requesting: "Unsex me".

"Leave it like that and it's a different language" said Prof Crystal. "But point out that 'friend' has now become 'unfriend' and the kids go 'oh yeah, that's right'.

He added he had recently heard other examples in modern life, including "unChinese-y", "unpoliceman-life" and "unyoung".

Ben, who has performed 'original pronunciation' versions of Shakespeare to show how the first audiences understood it, said students should be taught to love the plays, then introduced to the linguistic tools to get the most out of them.




^{Ben Crystal (Jay Williams)}
 
"I didn't like Shakespeare when I was in school and it didn't make sense to me until I started acting it," he said.

"I don't like the idea that the curriculum says that our younglings must have studied two Shakespeare plays by the age of 14.

"Shakespeare started not as a man of literature but as a man of the stage: he was a playwright rather than a novelist or author.

"Where in the curriculum or our school studies are we giving them a chance to play with Shakespeare? Or learn to love Shakespeare?"

The Oxford Illustrated Shakespeare Dictionary is out now.

Rich Folks Seats at the Restored Globe in London.

Globe, London

Clarification of Yet More of Shakespeare Risque Humor

Bawdy Bard: Shakespeare Play's Lost Lines Reveal Sexual Mocking

by Owen Jarus, Live Science Contributor   |   May 05, 2015 07:03am ET

In the Shakespeare play Don Armado, a bragging Spanish nobleman who is hopelessly in love, tells his page, a boy named Moth, to "Warble, child; make passionate my sense of hearing."	Moth's reply is one word "Concolinel," which makes no sense. Credit: Bodleian First Folio, CC Attrib 3.0 unported View full size image

A lost section of "Love's Labour's Lost," a comedy written by William Shakespeare, has been rediscovered, revealing a song mocking the sexual inadequacy of one of the play's male characters.

The rediscovery of this section did not come from a long-lost manuscript, but rather through the analysis of a mysterious one-word line in the play that has long mystified scholars.

Lovesick Nobleman
 

Written in the 1590s, the play was performed before Queen Elizabeth I. In the play, a man named Ferdinand, the King of Navarre (in northern Spain), establishes a law banning men in his court from having sex, or even meeting with a woman, for three years while he and his retainers undertake scholarly studies. Ferdinand believes the studies will be more successful if the people around him abstain from sex.

Not long after the law is in place, Costard, one of Ferdinand's subjects, gets caught with a woman named Jaquenetta. Spanish nobleman Don Adriano de Armado — who has a high opinion of himself and his sexual abilities — imprisons Costard. Armado himself falls hopelessly in love with Jaquenetta, freeing Costard on condition that he set Armado up with Jaquenetta. [The 6 Most Tragic Love Stories in History]

At the beginning of Act III, the lovesick Armado asks his servant, a page named Moth, to "Warble, child; make passionate my sense of hearing."

This is where the mystery begins. When Shakespeare's play was published, the only line that follows is Moth saying the word "Concolinel."

What Shakespeare meant by "Concolinel" has been a long-standing mystery. The word "song" is written at the start of the third act suggesting Moth is supposed to sing a song related to "Concolinel."
"Moth's solitary word has generally been taken as representing a song, now lost, for which the lyrics are not given in the play," wrote Ross Duffin, a professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, in an article recently published in the journal Shakespeare Quarterly.

Now, after 400 years, a researcher has found that "Concolinel" is a corrupted version of the French song "Qvand Colinet." Shown, part of the song when it was reprinted in 1887.
Credit: public domain, digitized by Google

View full size image

Duffin found that "Concolinel" is actually a misspelling of a French song called Qvand Colinet, which was popular around the time Shakespeare lived. The song refers to a penis that is "too soft and too small," and would have been sung by Moth to mock Armado's sexual inadequacy. Armado, who doesn'tunderstand the song, doesn't realize that his own servant is making fun of him.

"Don Armado was being mocked by the use of this song. He thinks of himself as being so gallant," Duffin told Live Science in an interview. "Don Armado doesn't realize that he's being pilloried, and so that would have been the joke."

The entire song may not have been sung when the play was performed.

Rediscovery

Duffin, a music professor, has written extensively about the songs from Shakespeare's plays, publishing a book about his research in 2004 called "Shakespeare's Songbook."

In his plays, Shakespeare refers to many popular songs in his time, Duffin told Live Science. Some of these songs were so popular their lyrics didn't have to be published.

Part of the problem with the song in "Love's Labour's Lost" is that Shakespeare gave only its name, and those charged with publishing Shakespeare's plays appear to have mangled its French spelling.
Duffin's research revealed several lines of evidence that indicate that this is Shakespeare's lost song. Aside from the similarities in spelling, the song fits in well with the dialogue. Moth is a young servant who regularly finds ways to make fun of his inept master Armado, and this song plays into this tone.

Also, after Moth sings this song, and Armado asks him to perform a task, Moth asks Armado whether he will win over Jaquenetta with a "French Braule" (braule being a type of song), indicating the song was French.

Additionally, the song lyrics also appear to include the word Jaquenetta. "Without much of a stretch, the repeated line 'Et sa belle iaquette' could be construed as 'And his pretty Jaquenetta,'" wrote Duffin in the article.

Duffin's research indicates this song was popular in Shakespeare's time, and English performers were making their way back and forth from England to the European continent bringing songs back with them.

This song "seems to have been something that was popular probably in the late 16th and in the early 17th century," Duffin said. It was first published as part of an anthology of popular songs in 1602 but would have been known before then.

Duffin found that the song may have been sung to the tune of Sellenger's Round (examplesof this tune can be heard on YouTube), but this is uncertain.

Reaction to the discovery

Chantal Schütz, a professor at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, who has published articles on this play, believes the song is likely correct.

"I find the arguments very convincing as concerns the text of the song, and there is ample evidence that songs traveled back and forth between France and England just like other commodities, material or immaterial," she wrote in an email, adding that it may not have been sung to the tune of Sellenger's Round (music for a dance).

It's possible that the newly rediscovered section of the play could be performed as early as this summer at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, although this has yet to be confirmed.

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