Interesting, if true.

Shadowplay

The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare

Clare Asquith

Public Affairs, $26, 349 pp.

According to Northrop Frye, "All commentary is allegorical interpretation, the attaching of ideas to the structure of poetic imagery." Few would quibble with this as a description of Clare Asquith's Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare. Asquith unabashedly plays the role of decoder in order to offer her readers access to a range of meanings that have, according to her argument, been submerged over the course of time. Time and the apotheosis of Shakespeare (which transformed him into a transcendent genius far above the petty intrigues of politics and sectarian religion) have effaced his true identity as an engaged Catholic, whose plays contain a consistently coded commentary on the religious affairs of the day. In discovering a Catholic Shakespeare, Asquith is in good company; a number of scholars, such as E. A. J. Honnigmann, Richard Wilson, Gary Taylor, and Stephen Greenblatt, have recently reanimated an old argument for the bard's Catholicism, but this book is unlike anything recently written by literary academics. Asquith is refreshingly unconstrained by the conventions of academic discourse and pursues her argument with an exuberance and daring rarely found in academic prose. The author's enthusiasm is so contagious that it is hard not to be swept up in the pull of her fast-paced narrative. Yet as the story races along from Shakespeare's early career to his enforced retirement, a number of difficulties concerning the interpretation of both history and literature are glossed over.

Asquith's approach is historicist: she assumes that Shakespeare should be read within the context of his own time as a poet speaking to his contemporaries. Varieties of historicism have dominated Shakespearean criticism for some time now, but, Asquith's historicism is new and different. First, she has done an excellent job of absorbing the work of recent historians who have radically altered our understanding of the English Reformation. The triumphalist narrative of national emancipation that interpreted the English Reformation as the popular repudiation of a corrupt, superstitious, and moribund Catholic Church has been criticized from a number of directions. Eamon Duffy (The Stripping of the Altars) has argued that late medieval Catholicism in England was a vital religion, not the desiccated institution of Protestant myth, and Christopher Haigh (English Reformations) has punctured another piety by insisting that the Reformation when it came was not the fast and popular movement so often celebrated in revolutionary terms, but instead a political imposition from above that met with significant resistance and proceeded slowly.

Influenced by Duffy, Haigh, and a host of like-minded historians, Asquith has depicted a Shakespearean England that was deeply saturated by Catholic belief and practice, a world in which matters of faith were of paramount importance and the victory of Protestantism was not by any means assured. The second aspect of her argument that is new and different is her claim that Shakespeare wrote in code in order to chronicle the events that "led his country into the moral wasteland of the 1590s." In other words, Shakespeare tells the secret history of the unpopular Reformation that has only recently been discovered by revisionist historians. This congruence helps to explain why the secret meanings of Shakespeare's plays have for so long eluded commentators. They have been, for the most part, in the grip of a myth about the speed and extent of the English Reformation that has blinded them to the true significance of Shakespeare's drama.

There is no question that this is true--to a degree. We are, thanks to the work of these historians, in a much better position to detect religious resonances. For example, when, Pistol, in Henry V, announces that Bardolph has stolen "a pax" and must be hanged for it, we are readier now to hear an allusion to the stripping of the altars in this reference to a piece of liturgical furniture no longer in use in Tudor England. Similarly, when Sonnet 73 describes "Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang," it is hard now not to hear a lament for the destruction of the monasteries under Henry VIII. The difficulty is in determining how to make sense of these scattered moments. Asquith's solution is to read these various bits of resonant language together as a coherent narrative; the procedure is wonderfully economical--stray bits of language, which might be construed as the usual flotsam and jetsam of a culture in transformation, are marshaled into the form of a covert history and argument.

Poets and playwrights of the time did occasionally use allegory in order to comment on recent events, but it is hard not to feel something odd about treating a play as a policy paper. For example, Asquith reads Titus Andronicus as an allegory of the recent reformation in England that concludes by assuring its Catholic (and understanding) spectators that help will come from abroad. This is a startlingly upbeat way of reading the grim finale of Shakespeare's bloodiest tragedy. Few in the audience would have been unaware that Goths at the gates of Rome were a sign not of cultural renewal but collapse. Titus Andronicus is above all the tragedy of a culture in decline--haunted by the violent texts of their ancestors, the Romans are driven to acts of violence that make them, finally, indistinguishable from their barbarian enemies. It may also be an attempt to persuade Catholics who have suffered grievously under the Elizabethan regime to remain patient and await rescue from abroad. What makes Asquith's interpretations frustrating, though, is that her decoding procedure consistently offers the narrowest interpretation of the texts that it treats.

Codes operate through strict equivalence. A message is transposed, by a reversible algorithm, into an alternative sequence of signs that effectively hide the meaning of the plain original. Consequently, there is a singular, transcribable message. These aspects of code are deeply antithetical to our current understanding of literature, which tends to insist on the irreducible particularity of the words of the text and on the plenitude of their meaning. Of course, this might be evidence that our current notions of what literature is and how it works are simply wrong--or wrong when applied to Shakespeare's texts. That said, the inclusion of a glossary of coded terms presents the code as mechanical and rigid. Dark is explicated as "The 'dark' new religion, associated with black print and sober dress." The entry for Tempest begins: "The tempest was a widespread image for the Reformation upheaval in England, and it remains a central metaphor in the works of modern Reformation historians." Less objectionable is the succinct entry for Precise, which reads "Puritan." Certainly precise was a marked word that carried suggestions of Puritanism (however that may be defined), much as superstitious was frequently associated with Catholicism. The religious and polemical associations of these two terms were inescapable in a way that the associations claimed for dark and tempest were not.

The glossary does not do justice to the subtlety of many of Asquith's interpretations, and one is tempted to dismiss it as a misguided bit of bookmaking attributable to the publishers. Alternatively, one could argue that the glossary is symptomatic of an interpretive enterprise that ceaselessly works to confine and delimit meanings rather than encourage their proliferation. This uncertainty is relevant to Shakespeare as well. Apart from the well-known and rather dry documentary details of Shakespeare's life, we are forced to glean his opinions from a series of highly literary printed texts. While these texts have their origin in Shakespeare's complex psyche, they are mediated through the prism of literary form and print, both of which make it difficult to ascertain his innermost convictions. A further complication is raised by the possibility of collaboration. Recently scholars have made convincing arguments that Titus Andronicus was the joint labor of Shakespeare and George Peele. Similarly, Shakespeare's last two plays are now widely accepted to have been collaborations with John Fletcher, who replaced Shakespeare as the principal playwright for the King's Men. Fletcher was vigorously Protestant, and it is hard to understand an emphatically Catholic Shakespeare agreeing to work with him. Leaving aside questions of religious identity, collaboration makes the sort of secret allegory described by Asquith, which requires the controlling authority of a single intention, especially difficult. Asquith recognizes the problem and is forced to conclude with an unconvincing argument that Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII were both written entirely by Fletcher, but deliberately attributed to Shakespeare in order to create the impression that the national poet had capitulated to the Protestantism of the establishment.

Though Shadowplay is not the final word on Shakespeare and the Catholic question, it is a wonderfully provocative book that offers consistently ingenious readings of the plays and alerts readers to the abiding importance of religious conflict in Shakespeare's England.

Jesse Lander is assistant professor of English at the University of Notre Dame; his book, Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print, and Literary Culture in Early Modern England, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.