The Catholic Queen?

Clare Asquith provides a useful summary of some of the recent scholarship on Shakespeare's possible Catholic sympathies. However, while some of the individual allusions Asquith identifies are plausible, her extended readings of The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado About Nothing are deeply flawed.

To take the first play only: Asquith argues that Shakespeare wrote the play as an encoded message to Queen Elizabeth to encourage her to return the country to the Catholicism of her youth. Unfortunately for Asquith's argument, Elizabeth (born to the Lutheran Anne Boleyn) was raised a Protestant, not a Catholic, and thus would have been unlikely to have been particularly stirred by the play's liturgical allusions--if indeed she even saw the play; there is no evidence to suggest that she did. Finally, in the play, Portia (who, Asquith argues, represents Shakespeare's idealized version of Elizabeth) is ultimately subordinated to her husband--a very unlikely and dangerous comparison to make to England's unmarried and all-powerful virgin queen. Although I am as eager as Asquith to learn more about Shakespeare's religious background, the evidence does not yet stretch nearly so far as her article implies.

BROOKE CONTI 

New York, N. Y.

THE AUTHOR REPLIES:

Brooke Conti considers my interpretation of The Merchant of Venice "deeply flawed" because it rests on the assumption that Elizabeth was raised a Catholic. She needs to reread my article, which refers only to "the Catholicism she would have remembered from her childhood." My argument is not that Elizabeth was ever a Catholic, but that Catholic ritual was something with which she was familiar, and that the echoes of the Easter liturgy would have been more recognizable to her than to the average modern reader. There were two periods of her life when the young Elizabeth had to attend Catholic services, whether she liked it or not. Her father, Henry VIII, hotly defended the liturgy and practice of the old religion, so the young Elizabeth paradoxically attended Mass even though she was being educated by reformers. Like her future adviser, Lord Burghley, she conformed outwardly to Catholicism during the reign of her sister Mary. Finally, the enlightened Lutheran cast of mind she inherited from Ann Boleyn and Catherine Parr was closer to Catholicism than the narrow Calvinism that prevailed in the church she governed. In evoking the Easter liturgy Shakespeare was appealing to the queen's known predilection for church music and ceremony, a tendency--deplored by her churchmen--that gave constant hope to the country's Catholic majority.

I am grateful to Leo Gafney who is absolutely right: I misrepresented Dr. Johnson. It was Sidney who championed the unities. Johnson censured Shakespeare for a different form of indiscipline--an obsession with verbal puns and quibbles at the expense of character and plot. Johnson's ear as always is acute: the superfluous passages that so irritated him often included topical references that were already forgotten by his day.

James Beiersdorfer's best chance of finding the writings of Schneider is to locate the work of the German scholar Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummell. Her latest book produces evidence (well argued but much disputed) that Shakespeare visited seminaries in Douai and Rome under an alias. Schneider's view that Shakespeare "is" sacred Scripture, a view shared by many, is not as absurd as it sounds. My book Shadowplay argues that Shakespeare was deliberately restating the case for the Catholic faith in a form that sidestepped the ban on controversial religious discussion in an increasingly irreligious age.

CLARE ASQUITH