 Hello fellow followers of Christ and welcome to the show that introduces you to the men and women behind history's greatest works of literature. Come along every week as we explore these renowned authors, the times and genre in which they wrote, why scholars praise their writing and how we as Catholics should read and understand their works. I'm Joseph Pierce and this is The Authority. Hello and welcome to episode 10 of The Authority, where we are going to be discussing arguably the greatest writer who ever lived. If we would look at the history of Western civilization, there really are only three writers I would suggest who can claim the crown as the greatest. And we could argue forever perhaps about which of these three deserve the laurel. But the three would be the triumvirate, if you like, the straddled the centuries above all others, head and shoulders above the rest, so to speak, are Homer, the great writer from the classical Greek period, who was actually the subject of our first episode in The Authority. Dante, the great medieval poet with his masterpiece arguably the greatest work of literature ever written, The Divine Comedy. Finally, the subject of today's episode, the great William Shakespeare. So William Shakespeare is almost exact contemporary with the subject of the last episode, Robert Southerl. They both were born within a year or two older. Shakespeare was born in 1564, so six years into the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and died in 1616 during the reign of the monarch who succeeded Elizabeth I, James VI of Scotland, who became James I of England. So we cannot understand William Shakespeare's work unless we understand who William Shakespeare is. To remind ourselves, the modus operandi of this podcast series and the philosophy which informs it is that the most authoritative voice in understanding a work of literature is the authorial authority. That's why this is called the authority because we respect the authority of the author. So obviously the more we know about Shakespeare, the more we will be able to understand his work. So let's look at Shakespeare and what we will see, he was almost certainly a believing and probably a practicing Catholic, albeit of course secretly because the Catholic faith was illegal during the whole of the time that Shakespeare was alive, with one brief period of liberty, the accession to the throne of James I in 1603 and 1604 will come to that in due course. So there are two ways of understanding Shakespeare's Catholicism. One is to look at the facts of his life and times, so what the biographical and historical evidence for his Catholicism and the other is the textual evidence, the evidence to be found in his poetry and plays. So what I would like to do is to spend the first part of this episode looking at the historical and biographical evidence for Shakespeare's Catholicism and then the second part are looking at some of the textual evidence. We'll only scratch the surface in the latter part because I mean books and books couldn't should be written on that topic. So as I said Shakespeare was born in 1564 early in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and this was a time when it was illegal to be a Catholic in England and certainly from 1580 onwards would be punished by death to be a Catholic priest in England and punished by death to shelter and harbour a Catholic priest in England. We should say that unlike the other thing we have to take a step back so the historical context is that the Reformation in England is very different from the Reformation on the continent. In fact the 16th century is basically informed by, animated by three separate reformations and all of which is very different. So we have the Protestant Reformation on the continent where Martin Luther and John Calvin and others had very real theological differences with the teaching of the Catholic Church and so that Reformation was was rooted in theological and philosophical differences even though many many worldly princes used that division in Europe for their own worldly secular ambitions with the outbreak of war being the consequence etc but nonetheless there was a real theological philosophical difference between the Protestants and the Catholics. In England however Henry VIII broke with Rome not because he was against the Catholic Church on the contrary he had authored possibly with the help of two men who would later have killed St. Robert, St. Thomas More and St. John Fisher. He wrote a refutation of the teaching of Luther which was entitled in defense of the seven sacraments where he defended the seven sacraments of the Church which were under attack and under fire by Martin Luther's teaching. For this ironically considering his later actions he was awarded the title Fidei Defensor Defender of the Faith by the Pope. This was rescinded when Henry VIII broke with Rome but why did Henry VIII break with Rome? Because he wanted a divorce from his wife the very very good Catherine of Aragon who I'm always tempted to canonize not not to have any right to do so certainly she's buried in Peterborough Cathedral and I've often when I've been going through Peterborough in England and I have played above her tomb she's buried under the under the the nave so because she she appealed to Rome because she didn't want a divorce there were no grounds for a divorce Henry basically just breaks with Rome declared himself head of the Church he effectively establishes a state religion of which he is himself the dictator and all the bishops are become under his tyrannical authority. So what we have is the establishment of a state religion against the will of the people this is absolutely important very different you know Luther had a following in Germany and in Switzerland and in France and Calvin had a following in Switzerland and France. Henry had very little following amongst the people of England who were very much Catholic in belief and in practice the only reason he got away with his attempt to make himself head of the church was by buying off the aristocracy by offering them the church land so he confiscated and closed down all the monasteries and conference around around England that were themselves the schools the hospitals the places where the poor could could seek relief the places where people could stay during their travels these were closed down and the monasteries were dissolved in the land given to whichever members of the nobility of the aristocracy that would would would join Henry in his pillage of the church and is by this the enrichment of the few that the state religion was imposed upon the people of England so as a majority of the people in England were were Catholic by sensibility they fed into three camps the church conformists who outwardly paid lip service to the state religion because you were fined if you did not attend Anglican services a certain number of times a year so outwardly they conformed but moaned under their breath and hoped for the return of the good old days there were then where the second group were a group that were called the church papists by their enemies and these were were people who lived a double life outwardly they conformed to the state religion but secretly they continued to practice their Catholic faith whenever there was a Catholic priest available of course the priests were now underground because the church was illegal and then the third group were the recusants to those who refused to attend the state services and paid the fines or were forced into exile or were sent to prison or were executed for their refusal to conform to the state religion Shakespeare's family were recusants his mother's family the ardents were from one of the most defiant recusant families one of the most devout Catholic families some of Shakespeare's cousins were executed for their part in in illegal Catholic activities Shakespeare's father was fined for his recusancy in 1592 by which time Shakespeare's writing his plays earlier than that he resigned from his role in politics in Stratford upon Avon when it becomes necessary for politicians local government officials to take an oath of supremacy whereby they would accept the king as the supreme head of the church John Shakespeare evidently in conscience did not feel able to do that so he resigned from any active role in politics rather than to compromise his conscience Shakespeare himself had to leave Stratford upon Avon in a hurry due to his offending the local Lord of the Manor we don't know exactly what he did to offend him some say he wrote a sonnet attacking him others say he was he poached and the land on the Lord of the Manor's lands the fact is we don't know what we do know is Lord of the Manor was very very anti-Catholic who took a great joy and satisfaction in overseeing the raids on Catholic homes in Stratford upon Avon amongst the recusant families possibly Shakespeare's own family certainly we know of raids on houses of Shakespeare's friends so he leaves in a hurry eventually he arrives in London and the evidence such it is in London of his life also suggests he remained a defiant Catholic the Earl of Southampton his patron was a recusant Catholic who had the Jesuit martyrs of Robert Soutel as his personal confessor Shakespeare clearly moved in recusant circles his poem The Finish and the Turtle seems to allude to another recusant couple Roger and Anne Lyne Anne Lyne would be martyred for harboring Catholic priests in 1600 around the time Shakespeare was his very angry play Hamlet but perhaps the best evidence for Shakespeare's recusancy in the early times during the reign of Queen Elizabeth is when he is actually he ends up being charged with threatening the lives of two people and he's bound over to keep the peace what's interesting is the people who Shakespeare clearly had as enemies were known priest hunters who gloated about their raids on on Catholic homes about bringing out crucifixes and Catholic books and Catholic pictures and burning them outside the houses in a bonfire so these are Shakespeare's enemies his co-defendants because there were people also charged with him were no included known recusant Catholics so Shakespeare's friends are recusant Catholics his enemies are those who persecute the Catholics but the best evidence biographically for Shakespeare's Catholicism comes from the last thing that he did before leaving London to retire and return to his family in Stratford upon Avon this was the purchasing of the Blackfriars gatehouse in about 1611 or 1612 so what's the Blackfriars gatehouse well as its name would suggest it was the gatehouse to Blackfriars Blackfriars were the Dominicans so it was the entrance house to the Blackfriars religious community in London and if you go to London the area where that Dominican religious house was it's still called Blackfriars there's a Blackfriars bridge there's a Blackfriars tube station there's a Blackfriars area of London so Shakespeare buys a Blackfriars gatehouse now this is 80 years after the dissolution almost 75 years after the dissolution of the monasteries so it certainly doesn't hasn't belonged to the Dominicans for decades but we know from the property deeds that this house remained in resolute Catholic hands from the time of the dissolution of the monasteries 75 years earlier to the time that Shakespeare buys it we also know that the home is used as a base for secret Catholic activities the house is raided on several occasions and there are secret passageways leading down to the river Thames the house is on the Thames by which priests that are hiding there can escape by the secret passage and down to a boat etc we know of Jesuit priests on the run from the authorities who seek refuge there so this was a centre for Catholic activity this is the house that Shakespeare purchases certainly didn't purchase it to live in because as we've said he purchased it just before leaving London in order to purchase it merely as an investment because he was a well he'd been a wealthy man for a long while he bought the second largest house in Stratford-upon-Avon for his own family 12 or so years earlier so he certainly could afford it by houses earlier but he had lived at this time this time in London for 25 years without ever purchasing a property to live in there might be various reasons for that which we don't have time to discuss but he clearly purchased it so it could continue to be used in the same manner it had been used and this is clear from the fact that he stipulates upon purchasing it that the current tenant should remain and that tenant's name is John Robinson John Robinson is clearly a friend of Shakespeare's he's the only one of Shakespeare's London friends who at who's present during Shakespeare's final illness and signs his will in the very year in which Shakespeare purchased the Blackfriars Gate House John Robinson's brother enters the English College in Rome to study for the priesthood so the final evidence is the fact that perhaps that the executress of Shakespeare's will is his daughter Susanna who had herself been fined for her Catholic recusancy in 1606 and many of the beneficiaries of Shakespeare's will are local Catholics so that's the at least some of the biographical and historical evidence if you want to dig and delve deeper I invite you to read my book The Quest for Shakespeare the Bard of Avon and the Church of Rome which gives the biographical and textual evidence for Shakespeare's Catholicism well now we've on for the second part of this podcast to look at the textual evidence for Shakespeare's Catholicism and I look at this in two other books that I've written through Shakespeare's eyes discovering the the Catholic presence in the plays which looks at the Catholic presence in three of Shakespeare's plays the Merchant of Venice Hamlet and King Lear and then I wrote another book with Shakespeare and Love discovering the Catholic presence in Romeo and Juliet which has the appendix or has an appendix on the Jesuit connection so in a few minutes we have I'm just going to scratch the surface so to speak and look at some of the evidence since from some of the plays let's look at the Merchant of Venice first so the the Merchant of Venice basically is set on two levels there's the worldly level of Venice itself where the people are worldly and secular and sinful and avaricious and prideful and vengeful and then there's Belmont as the name suggests the beautiful mountain where the heavenly Porsche lives this is sort of this mysterious realm that seems to be above and beyond the the wickedness of the world and we're clearly reminded in the structure of the play morally between the high ground of Belmont and the low ground of Venice between Augustine's city of God and his city of man and basically the story tells the difference between the two and there are three tests in the Merchant of Venice the testing of the caskets where in order to gain the hand of the heavenly Porsche and become air to the beauty of Belmont this heavenly sphere of the city of God one must choose the leaden casket above the gold and silver caskets one must choose the wealth of heaven and the health of holiness over worldly wealth and wickedness and this the the Bassania does he chooses to lay down his life for his friends the true Christian definition of love to die to ourselves to choose the death of self for the good of the beloved and in making that choice he wins the hand of the heavenly Porsche in marriage um so there are illusions in that as we discussed in the previous episode to the poems of Saint Robert's Southerl should say another thing about that that that play is although ostensibly the villain of the peace Shylock is is Jewish we have to understand that Shakespeare is is is being forced to use euphemisms it was illegal in Elizabethan England at the time that Shakespeare was writing to talk about contemporary religion and politics on the stage um so he couldn't talk about what was happening uh in terms of religion and politics because it was illegal to do so so he had to talk about contemporary religion and politics euphemistically through the use of euphemism and allegory so he sets his plays in the past um but knowing that the people will see parallels between the past and the present so Queen Elizabeth was actually said that do you not know that I am Richard the second referring to um Shakespeare's play of that title Richard the third is a Machiavellian ruler many people were seeing connections between um Shakespeare's history plays and contemporary England so much so that that there was the so-called bishops ban was passed in the late 1590s making it illegal to write uh plays based upon English history um because it quite clearly these were being used euphemistically uh to talk about contemporary England so Shakespeare then writes plays about other countries he writes Hamlet Prince of Denmark Macbeth about a Scottish king obviously plays said in in ancient Rome such as Antony and Cleopatra so he gets round around it that way but he also gets around it in the merchant of Venice because um the there had been virtually no Jews in England for 300 years because they had been expelled by Edward the first 300 years earlier the only money lenders in England were the Calvinists were the Puritans and this was because the Catholic Church had always condemned usury um money lending uh whereas Calvin had permitted the practice of usury to uh to to his own followers so in England the only money lenders were the Puritans and we have to understand for Shakespeare's audience that the full star that the characters such as as uh characters such as uh Shylock in the Merchant of Venice or full star in Henry the fourth part one Henry the fourth part two and Henry the fifth and in the play Mary lives of Windsor Mary wives of Windsor and the character of Malvolio who's actually called a Puritan in the play 12th night are are Shakespeare's attacks upon Puritanism and you have to understand something about this as well that the Puritans are not just anti-Catholic um very insistent upon the continuing persecution of England's Catholics they were also against the the theater and when the Puritans eventually gained enough power uh following the English Civil War they not only of course brought back uh intensified persecution of Catholicism they also closed down all the theaters and indeed during the period of Puritan rule following the English Civil War they even for a while banned Christmas as being a papist festival is after all means Christ mass so Shakespeare knew the dangers of Puritanism and so with his audience of course you know his audience are people who go to plays who go to the theater are the very thing that that that the Puritans have have um uh dismissed as being uh satanic there are quotes and when we when we do the the episode on Richard Crasher we'll look at Richard Crasher's Puritanical father and what he had to say about the theater so really we have to see uh ironically uh considering that the Shylock is a Jew and what's happened uh our our sense it's quite correct sensibility towards anti-Semitism following the outrageous of Adolf Hitler for instance uh that for Shakespeare's audience he would have been seen not as a Jew because there were very few Jews in England but as a thinly veiled Puritan money changer and uh this is like actually I don't know ironically like the Nazis the the the the Puritans were despised by Shakespeare's audience as those who basically sought to destroy what Shakespeare's audience believed in and and what they wanted so look at some other plays we've looked at uh Hamlet the something rotten in the state of Denmark is something rotten in the state of England the play was written at around the time of the Essex Rebellion it's a very angry play um one of the Earl of Essex's right-hand men in that rebellion was the Earl of Southampton Shakespeare's um uh patron and whereas the Earl of Essex was executed when the when the rebellion was overthrown the Earl of Southampton was spared but thrown into uh the Tower of London and was only released following the death of the Queen um three years later so Shakespeare was clearly involved in this and the anger which led to that rebellion is present in the play um and it's a play which is very much about spies and we have to understand that the people who Shakespeare almost certainly knew such as Ann Lyne uh the the the the martyr and some Robert Suther were betrayed by Elizabeth's and then James's spy network um the spy network people pretended to be conversed to the faith or else Catholics were bribed and blackmailed um the usual the usual dirty sordid work of espionage so Hamlet is very much a play that's uh that's uh vensis anger where Shakespeare vences spleen against spies so Rosencraft and Guildenstern who are uh former school friends of Hamlet who are now in the service of the wicked King Claudius who killed Hamlet's father serving an adulterous relationship with his mother um Polonius the relativist uh in philosophy who believes there's no truth but but your own no objective truth only subjective truth he's the spy master who these dispatch network of spies he would have reminded Shakespeare's audience of the wicked Lord Burley who oversaw Elizabeth's spy network um Hamlet's anger against Ophelia the woman he loves when he realizes that she is spying on him that uh that she's uh to make matters worse pretending to be praying so pretending to be pious when actual fact she's serving her father in spying upon the man she loves her father and King Claudius are hiding uh while she pretends uh to to be um loyal and loving towards Hamlet this is a play that's very angry and then we look at let's look at King's King Lear the play King Lear in that play we see a theme which is a recurrent theme in the poetry of of Saint Robert's Southerl that we have to choose poverty we have to lay down our lives for uh for Christ and his church for God and neighbor um we have to choose death we have to choose to die to ourselves so in King Lear the play begins with King Lear doing exactly what the kings of England have done um to demand absolute allegiance to the state above all else King Lear tells his daughters that if they um swear absolute devotion to him and tell him how much they love him he will reward them with land just as Henry VIII did with the aristocrats who uh who um gave absolute loyalty to him when he dissolved the monasteries he gave them the land um so the two daughters who don't love King Lear pretend that they do and feign their love for him and the daughter who does truly love the king um Cordelia who's very named Cordelia could mean uh Lear's heart or Cordelion Lionheart more to the point with Cordelia she refuses to lie and she says to him she can only offer him the love which is due to him as her father and as her king she cannot offer that love which is due for instance to her bridegroom when she should get married and as in many of Shakespeare's plays references to brides and bridegrooms is also an elusive reference to Christ who described himself as the bridegroom on many occasions of course uh and the church as the bride of Christ that uh that Cordelia cannot give to the king that which belongs to Christ or to her rightful husband the heavenly bridegroom Christ himself or her own bridegroom in marriage so she refuses she becomes a recusant and like many recusants England in England she is exiled and then in the play we see the necessity of holy poverty there are two types of wisdom epitomized by the falls in the play there are two falls there's the worldly fall who tells the king he was foolish to give away his worldly power and then there's the heavenly fall who was introduced to us through the singing of a Franciscan ballad who has embraced lady poverty who lives in rags who lives uh sleeping rough on the heath who uh tells us confesses his sins and reiterates the Ten Commandments um who talks about the sins of pride and the sins of lust and the sins of avarice and king Leah sees the wisdom of this foolishness the strips himself naked on the heath saying off off you lendings that everything given to us in life is lent that our lives and themselves are lent we don't own our lives because we will be forced to relinquish them in God's good time and um so in doing this of course king Leah is emulating the the the the actions of st Francis of Assisi thus the the the reference to this the franciscan ballad the franciscan theme here we have to lay down our very lives and all our belongings embrace lady poverty uh in order to embrace the poverty of christ upon the cross this wisdom is the wisdom of the holy fall and it's this wisdom which exercises the worldly wisdom of the of the earlier fall who disappears without trace as if he's exercised by the coming of this holiness we could of course say much much more about the uh about the the uh the catholic dimension in Shakespeare's plays we don't have time uh to do so here i do invite you to to uh to read um uh my books on the topic to go deeper into the Catholicism with this greatest of writers William Shakespeare thanks as always for joining me and until next time goodbye and god bless this has been an episode of the authority with Joseph Pierce brought to you by tan for updates on new episodes and to support the authority and other great free content visit the authority podcast dot com to subscribe and use coupon code authority 25 to get 25 percent off your next order including books audio books and video courses by joseph pierce on literary giants such as Tolkien cheserton louis shakespeare and bellach as well as tans extensive catalog of content from 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