The Heart of His Mystery

From the author's Preface: A brief one, just to give the reader an idea what to expect. As a Catholic myself, I be lieve that Shakespeare's work can only be fully understood in the knowledge of his Catholic faith. As is well known, Shakespeare is myriad-minded and so, like St. Paul (1 Corinthians 9,22), is capable of being 'all things to all men'. As a result we have the humanist Shakespeare, the atheist Shakespeare, the existentialist Shakespeare, the Marxist and feminist Shakespeares – and so on. No doubt a case can be made for arguing that he anticipates these future philosophical positions. But it ignores the question of where he was coming from. Surely the first and most immediate approach to understanding an author is to ask where he stands in relation to the circumstances and issues of his own time? The historical evidence for Shakespeare's Catholicism has been mounting, as witnessed by an increasing number of studies in recent years, and can now practically be regarded as conclusive. While examining this evidence in passing, on which I certainly cannot claim to be an expert, I am more concerned here to show how the dramatist's mind and above all his heart were imbued, through and through, with his Christian and specifically Catholic faith – in fact, that the humanity and imaginative sympathy for which he is rightly regarded as preeminent are coextensive with his Catholicism. I wanted to write a book that could be read with pleasure by a person who is not familiar with Shakespeare's plays. I have therefore quoted liberally. Those who are familiar with such passages will certainly not mind seeing them again! Those who are not will be spared having to reach for the Collected Works to track down a reference. ****** If Shakespeare says little, in explicit terms, about the political and religious questions of his own time, there was good reason for it. The Elizabethan state was the first systematically organised police state in Europe, and it exercised a severe censorship over written productions. Writers could easily come under suspicion. Marlowe may have been murdered on the instructions of the government. Thomas Kyd, the author of The Spanish Tragedy, was tortured when under investigation for the possession of what was considered heretical literature, and supposedly died of his injuries. ****** Biographical writers on Shakespeare in recent years have increasingly emphasised his Catholic background. Rural Warwickshire was predominantly loyal to the old church and the old ways. Many of the later Gunpowder Plotters came from here, and would have been personally known to Shakespeare. Both Shakespeare's father John and his daughter Susanna appear on the lists of recusants – people who stayed away from the mandatory Anglican church services for reasons of conscience. John Shakespeare made a Catholic will. And we also have a tradition, reported by the 17th century Anglican divine Richard Davies, that the poet 'died a Papist'. It is practically unthinkable, then, that he would have had no opinions about the religious controversies of his time; it was just that it was dangerous to speak about them too openly... ***** From the Foreword, by Peter Milward SJ, Professor Emeritus, Sophia University, Tokyo 'Why, look you now,' says Hamlet to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who have been sent by the king to spy on him, 'how unworthy a thing you make of me. You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery.' (Hamlet III.2) That is also what Shakespeare says to the multitude of scholars and critics, not to mention producers, who are ever in search for the heart of his mystery. After all, there is no doubt that Shakespeare is not only the greatest but also the most mysterious, enigmatic, quizzical, Mona-Lisaesque of all, I won't just say English authors, but of all authors who have appeared on the stage of this little world from the days of Homer onwards. A fellow-poet William Wordsworth once dared to say of his sonnets, 'Scorn not the sonnet,' adding the reason, 'With this key / Shakespeare unlocked his heart.' To this piece of poetic daring one is tempted to respond, 'Not only did Shakespeare lock his heart as well in his sonnets as in his plays, but he threw the key away!' Yet there is a key, as John Waterfield wisely insists in this new interpretation of the plays and poems of Shakespeare. Only it is to be found not by those who, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, go everywhere in painstaking search, up hill and down dale, outside and inside the life and times of the Bard, with exacting exploration of Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxist economics, Saussurian linguistics and Derridean deconstructionism – or, as George Bernard Shaw aptly calls them, the 'many thousands of academic, punctilious, most archaeologically correct men of letters and art' who are nowadays to be encountered crawling about the halls of postmodern learning. No, it is only to be found by whose who, like John Waterfield, approach the great dramatist with the key of love, or what Richard II in his lonely prison calls 'a strange brooch in this all-hating world' (Richard II V.5) This well accords with what John Henry Newman wisely observes in his Idea of a University, that the end of university learning is not mere knowledge, as of the life and times of Shakespeare, but such wisdom as enters into and savours knowledge with the added flavour of love. Where, then, it may be asked, are we to seek and find this all-important key of love? Simply, John Waterfield answers, in the subtitle to this volume, in the Catholic faith as it was professed, if in secret, by the poor English recusants of Shakespeare's time under the successive and repressive reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. It is out of his deep sympathy with them and their ever aggravated endurance of persecution that from first to last – from Titus Andronicus to The Tempest – the dramatist composes his plays. That is the conclusion we must come to if only we look beneath their surface of plot and characterisation, which is open to all the Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns of our time, to the layers of hidden meaning at whose presence the dramatist hints (among innumerable other passages) in the way he characterises Duke Vincentio in Measure for Measure, whose 'givings out were of an infinite distance/ From his true-meant design.' (I.4) What? Can it then be maintained, it may be asked, not without the heat and dust of controversy, that the great Shakespeare was a member of, or at least a sympathiser with, that despised, downtrodden class of English recusants, once the great majority but since the days of Bloody Mary a lowly minority of the Elizabethans? Well, why not? And were they actually a minority? At least, may it not be upheld as a reasonable hypothesis to be successively demonstrated with attention to play after play in chronological order? Then the more indications come to the surface that this may well be the case, if not certainly so, more and more light comes to be thrown as well on the surface as on the hidden recesses of meaning in the plays, till one may even end up with the proverbial exclamation of Archimedes, 'Eureka!' Only, what is required, in order to arrive at such a delighted exclamation, is not a narrowly carping, critical mind, examining each statement one by one, as it were in accordance with the old Roman ideal of 'Divide et impera' – Divide and conquer! – but an open mind, ready to compare one statement with another and to assemble them all together in an intuitive, synthetic glance, till, as Hippolyta says of 'the story of the night' as told by the four lovers in A Midsummer Night's Dream, it 'more witnesseth than fancy's images, / And grows to something of great constancy' (V.1). Such is the constancy, I make bold to say, to be found in the following pages.