Features
Shakespeare’s uncertain voyage
Christopher Jackson
He's the most celebrated playwright in the English language, but
what were William Shakespeare's spiritual beliefs? In the 400th
anniversary of the Bard's death, Christopher Jackson takes a closer
look.
These things we know for sure. William Shakespeare was born in
1564 in Stratford- Upon-Avon. Elizabeth I had been on the throne
for six years; her regime would be outwardly Protestant.
Shakespeare's father - John - was a glover and 'whittawer'
(leather-worker) and soon a figure in Stratford society. He became
an alderman (in Romeo and Juliet, his observant son would refer to
the 'agate stone on the forefinger of an alderman'), and then chief
bailiff. But the family fell on hard times.
William attended the local grammar school. He married Anne
Hathaway in 1582; she was 26, he was 18. We don't know how William
spent the late 1580s. But by 1592, Shakespeare was mentioned by
Robert Greene, in bitter terms, as an 'upstart crow' of the London
theatre. Against the odds, he had made his mark.
We all know what happened next - it can be summed up by Ben
Jonson: 'The applause, delight, the wonder of the stage'1. But by
1614, the applause was over.
Shakespeare died on 23rd April 1616. We do not know how he died
- calls to exhume the body always meet the stern rebuke of his
ghost in the epitaph he presumably wrote for himself: 'Curst be he
who move these bones.'
A CERTAIN DUALITY
Any consideration of Shakespeare's religious beliefs runs up
against the difficulty of a certain duality. We have the dusty
record with its scraps of legal documentation - house purchases, a
court case, his will. But then we have the plays.
It is possible, for instance, to state certain cold facts:
Shakespeare was never once fined for not attending church, and was
outwardly Protestant. Or: William Shakespeare was buried on April
23rd in a church which boasts beautiful medieval misericords2, and
was friends with many Catholic recusants. Both are true.
But then it is possible to pick up the plays and find another
kind of life rush in - the impressions one finds there are true,
but in a different way. For instance, we also know that it was
William Shakespeare who gave Isabella the great description of
Christianity in Measure for Measure:
All souls were forfeit once
And He that might the vantage best have took
Found out the remedy'3.
That shows a nuance of understanding of the Christian claim far
deeper than, for instance, the rote Protestant wording of his will.
On the one hand we have the outward form of a life. On the other,
inner inspiration.
Very occasionally, we perhaps glimpse the interplay between the
two.
TRAITS AND AFFINITIES
Perhaps. Maybe. Possibly. Shakespearean biography is dogged with
these words.
But let me also hazard the following. William Shakespeare was,
of course, extraordinarily intelligent, but in the way that
Leonardo da Vinci was intelligent: he was not easily satisfied. He
looked at life from every side: he could chortle like Falstaff and
delineate the schemes of Iago. He could prevaricate like Hamlet but
be alongside Henry V as he rushed into the breach.
Like Leonardo he was intensely curious; the Renaissance had torn
down barriers and Shakespeare delightedly roamed an open
intellectual terrain. He was exceptionally interested in poetry,
acting, nature, law, politics, the classical world, shipping, food,
drink, and travel - to name only a few things. His life took place
within a changed space, one that the Catholic Church had
vacated.
His life also suggests a certain modesty. He conquered London
from without, but did so differently to his great contemporaries
Marlowe and Jonson, both of whom made such noise in the world.
Shakespeare never showed Marlowe's appetite for louche controversy,
or Jonson's tendency towards bombastic self-promotion. On the other
hand, he always got along with such types. Contemporaries called
him 'sweet', 'gentle' and 'honey-tongued'4: he was skilled at
handling egos. He could turn a blind eye to the faults of others,
very possibly because poetic introspection had rendered him acutely
aware of his own.
He was also trustworthy - his career with the Globe Theatre
suggests this - and immensely hard-working. Predominantly, his was
a life of poetic discovery: what could words really be made to
do?
THE PLAY'S THE THING
Yet none of this helps one arbitrate the matter of Shakespeare's
faith. He might have been all these things and a Protestant (or
secret Catholic). But then he might have been all these
things and an atheist. Do the plays tell us more?
But here one runs up against further difficulty: namely,
the magisterially non-committal nature of the work itself. As Keats
pointed out, Shakespeare is an extreme example of 'negative
capability'5 - the ability to hold two contradictory opinions in
his mind at the same time. His mind refused the repose of
straightforward answers. Yet the mystique of the plays has also
been exaggerated. Shakespeare's works are also outpourings of
anxiety, attempts to resolve and reconcile doubt, sincere
encounters with reality. The biographer labours under a surfeit of
information about Shakespeare's feelings, not a dearth.
The very fact of the plays' existence is, in fact, our
first clue. The collapse of medieval structures of belief had
created a vacuum into which Shakespeare and others rushed. The
Reformation brought Shakespeare many things he cared deeply about:
Ovid, the Roman world, sexual freedom, and an adventurous
understanding of politics. But it also created anxiety about what
to think about the fundamentals - about death, and love, and
God.
The Elizabethans were face to face with life again.
Shakespeare was not just able to ask once more questions which no
one had asked since Roman times: he was forced to do so. The plays
are permeated with old questions given new urgency: What is man?
What is love? Should I fear death?
PREOCCUPIED WITH LOVE
Samuel Johnson was the first to notice that comedy comes
easier to Shakespeare than tragedy: 'His tragedy seems to be skill,
his comedy to be instinct'6. The Chandos portrait, if it is
authentic, rather contributes to this view: it is a look of
confidence, and we can easily imagine the full lips breaking into a
smile.
The best plays in the 1590s - Love's Labour's Lost
(1594-5), Romeo and Juliet (1595), and Midsummer Night's Dream
(1595) - all breathe ease, and delight at being alive. Romeo and
Juliet is a play so sweet that tragedy hardly seems to be tragedy
at all, but instead a melancholic sweetness: if it were music it
would be in a major key.
These early works, fresh as morning dew, are deeply
preoccupied with love. One has a strong sense of Shakespeare
enjoying himself, and out from under the wing of any church. He is
a man of the theatre, a celebrity. The dedications to Venus and
Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece show him to have consorted with the
nobility. Contemporary testimony, the sonnets, and a strong vein of
tradition suggest that he wasn't faithful to his wife.
CHANGE OVER TIME
As chaotic as his love-life may have been, it was still
anchored in Stratford. Anne bore him a daughter Susanna in 1583 and
then twins, Hamnet and Judith in 1585.
Hamnet died in 1596. It is a sign of Shakespeare's
copiousness that in the aftermath of this loss, he appears to have
written comedies - the knockabout Merry Wives of Windsor (1597) and
the sassy Much Ado About Nothing (1598) date, almost incredibly, to
the period after the death. This is not to say the death meant
nothing to him; I believe it was this which forced him into the
minor key. The lines spoken in King John (1596) by Constance are
often quoted:
Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form.
[King John, Act 3 Scene 4]
It is a tantalising glimpse, one feels, of Anne
Shakespeare. It is often said that the Elizabethans lived close to
death, with the implication that they were somehow not susceptible
to grief. But what is most striking about these lines is their
modern sensibility. Constance in her grief is completely untethered
from the church. There is no prescription for the loss of her
child. She has been thrust back on herself.
HAMLET'S GHOST
If that's true of this passage in King John, then Hamlet
(1599-1601) is a gigantic working through of the same problem but
from Shakespeare's own perspective.
How does Hamlet work? In writing it, Shakespeare took
important information out. In the story Shakespeare drew from, the
murder of Hamlet's father is publicly known and occurs when Hamlet
is a child. The prince plays a long waiting game, and is clearly
shown to be feigning idiocy. Shakespeare compresses the action to a
few days and has the murder communicated to Hamlet through the
ghost. Each decision isolates Hamlet, starving both him and the
audience of clear explanations. We hear so much from Hamlet partly
because he is trying to create space to think through an unclear
predicament.
But Hamlet doesn't need the ghost to render him
introspective. The famous 'O that this too too solid flesh would
melt' soliloquy is spoken before the arrival of the apparition -
and it is this which gives the impression that in creating Prince
Hamlet, Shakespeare was composing some sort of
self-portrait.
Well then, what do we see? Hamlet is like a pressure
cooker dialled up on someone who couldn't bear the initial
temperature: a fragile mind is faced with a uniquely difficult
situation. It is a rudderless man, deeply preoccupied by death.
Hamlet is in constant flux, lacking significant definition. Laertes
blusters onto the stage at the end of the play exactly as he would
have hit the scene in Paris at the start. Hamlet shifts. Hamlet is
a radical questioning of human identity - of Shakespeare'e own
identity.
And if this is the case, is Prince Hamlet a Christian?
Does he believe in God?
GOD & THE TRAGEDIES
Hamlet's predicament is triggered by a ghost granted brief
leave from purgatory:
My hour is almost come,
When I to sulph'rous and tormenting flames
Must render up myself.
[Hamlet Act 1, Scene 5]
Accordingly, some have tried to make something of the
Catholic paraphernalia of the play. But the main feature of Hamlet
is that the Prince doesn't accept this purgatorial vision at face
value. If he did, he would act immediately, and revenge his father.
If this is Christianity it is Christianity pushed to the outer
limit. This suspicion is given a kind of verbal pattern in
Ophelia's song after she hears of Polonius' death:
He is gone, he is gone,
And we cast away moan,
God ha' mercy on his soul.-
And of all Christian souls, I pray God.
[Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 5]
And of all Christian souls - there is a flavour of
afterthought about that.
Hamlet happens in a world where the universe is being so
severely questioned that not just God's nature, but His very
existence is manifestly at issue. This pattern is repeated in the
great tragedies that follow. King Lear (1605-6) takes place in a
pagan world where Lear himself petitions the gods in the plural:
'As flies to wanton boys are we/to the gods: they kill us for their
sport'7. Its ending, with bodies strewn on the stage, invites
suspicions of ultimate meaninglessness.
SUFFUSED WITH AWE
In Othello (1603-4), Iago says the following of Othello
himself:
And then for her
To win the Moor-were't to renounce his baptism,
All seals and symbols of redeemed sin,
His soul is so enfetter'd to her love,
That she may make, unmake, do what she list,
Even as her appetite shall play the god
With his weak function.
[Othello, Act 2, Scene 3]
Given the malevolence of their speaker, these sentiments
must be taken with a pinch of salt. But they remind us that in
Iago's eyes, Othello is not a straightforward Christian. Othello,
like Shylock in The Merchant of Venice (1596-8), is highly
individuated - Shakespeare understands that not all religious
experience is Christian experience. He lived in a time of expanding
frontiers. Shakespeare heard of distant shipwrecks; he lived among
Huguenot exiles and would have known their struggles. These great
tragedies are suffused with awe at a world far more complex and
uncertain than the medieval structures which his father had grown
up in, had prepared him for.
This awe can flare up at any time. It is there in Macduff
announcing that he has 'no words' when he hears of the death of his
family. It is there also in Lear's bleak: 'No, no, no, no!' at the
death of Cordelia. Hamlet doesn't disappear in a blaze of words,
but in a mute clash of swords.
REDEMPTIVE SHIFT
But by 1609, there is a marked shift. The move to the
Blackfriars theatre, with its superior staging possibilities,
contributed to an appetite for pageant and spectacle which repeats
in Cymbeline (1610), The Winter's Tale and The Tempest (1610-11).
It might be that Shakespeare had seen some of his friend Ben
Jonson's pageants, and wished to show that he could do better. But
the chief change is the figure of the daughter - Mariana in
Pericles (1607-8), Imogen in Cymbeline, Perdita in The Winter's
Tale and Miranda in The Tempest. Shakespeare had become a
grandfather in 1608 - there is a softening, as if a tension has
snapped.
In these plays - which scholars group together under the
heading of Romances - redemption is suddenly possible. At the
beginning of The Winter's Tale we witness the onset of Leontes'
sudden jealousy - for no apparent reason - towards his wife
Hermione and his childhood friend Polixenes. Hermione is thrown in
prison and dies. Without the outsized nature of the initial
jealousy we might not be able to stomach the vast surprise of the
ending when 16 years later a statue of Hermione is brought onstage
and then comes to life.
Leontes: O, she's warm!
If this be magic, let it be an art
Lawful as eating.
[The Winter's Tale, Act 5, Scene 3]
Even if he had had access to the Blackfriars theatre
earlier in his career, it is hard to imagine the Shakespeare of the
early 1600s writing that. A fundamental vexation has been removed.
Shakespeare has regained his trust in the world. We will never know
how he had felt betrayed by life, or what he was forgiving, but
this is the pattern on view.
PEACEFUL RETIREMENT?
Shakespeare plainly embarked on The Tempest (1610- 11)
intending it as his swansong. Like many a busy professional, he
found retirement less congenial than he had supposed. After it, he
would go on to produce several collaborations with John Fletcher:
The History of Cardenio (now lost), Henry VIII (1612-13), and The
Two Noble Kinsmen (1613-4).
There are many wonderful things about The Tempest. It was
superb to give Caliban the speech 'The isle is full of noises' - a
lesser writer would have given it to Miranda. Everybody knows the
magnificent reflections that Prospero is given near its end: 'We
are such stuff as dreams are made on/ and our little lives are
rounded with a sleep'8. But there is also an even better speech at
the end of The Two Noble Kinsmen that is unmistakably
Shakespeare's. For anyone who wishes happiness on the man who gave
the world such pleasure, it is pleasant to hear its cheerful and
wise ring:
Oh you heavenly charmers,
What things you make of us! For what we lack
We laugh, for what we have are sorry, still
Are children in some kind. Let us be thankful
For that which is, and with you leave disputes
That are above our question. Let's go off
And bear us like the time.
[The Two Noble Kinsmen, Act 5, Scene 4].
It is as if he has faced down the uncertainties of the
Reformation, and found his own peace. They are likely the last
words he ever wrote.
SEEKING REFUGE
If this is reconciliation what has been reconciled? I
suspect Shakespeare was little interested in doctrinal matters
throughout his life. But I also have a sense of the world acting on
a light-hearted man, changing him - forcing his hand. Too
questioning to accept the church meekly, Shakespeare nevertheless
came up against the harshness of the world, and required refuge. We
can be sure he sought it in his art.
And yet art is itself a form of interacting with the
world, and the difference with the last plays is the nature of this
interaction. The tragedies are a wrestling-match; the romances, a
thanksgiving. My suspicion is that Shakespeare became profoundly
grateful for life. Did he thank God for it? Given the religious
nature of the times, it seems likely.
We don't know what scene greeted him upon his return to
Stratford. There is an attractive tradition of Shakespeare the
gardener, tending to his mulberry tree. Burgess has him playing
music with his daughters.
I prefer to think of him at peace - as he put it in that
last speech in Two Noble Kinsmen: 'thankful for that which
is'.
NOTES
1 From B. Jonson, 'To the Memory of My Beloved the Author,
Mr. William Shakespeare'.
2 A misericord, sometimes named a mercy seat, is a small
wooden shelf on the underside of a folding seat in a church,
installed to provide a degree of comfort for a person who has to
stand during long periods of prayer.
3 Measure for Measure, Act 2, Scene 2.
4 The phrase honeytongued was used both by Francis Meres
in the Palladis Tamia, and by John Weever In certain verses
addressed to Shakespeare. Meres also calls Shakespeare 'sweet'. Ben
Jonson calls him 'gentle' in his eulogy to Shakespeare which
accompanied the First Folio.
5 Keats sketched out this notion in a letter to his
brothers George and Thomas Keats on 21st December 1817.
6 From Jonson's Preface to the Plays of William
Shakespeare (1765).
7 King Lear, Act 4, Scene 1.
8 The Tempest, Act 4, Scene 1.