Will in the World: How Shakespeare became Shakespeare.

Written by Stephen Greenblatt Published by W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2005, ISBN: 0393050572, Hardcover, pp. 386, $39.00 CAN

Harvard scholar Stephen Greenblatt has written a book with a curious title. A "Note to the reader" mentions that England in the 16th century was a record-keeping society, but shows how hard it is to establish the biographical facts of its subject. The Stratford vicar John Bretchgirdle noted in his parish register the baptism of "Gullielmus filius Johannes Shakspere" on April 26, 1564. But the scholars who assumed that there was ordinarily a three-day interval between birth and baptism, and therefore have fixed the date of Shakespeare's birth as April 23, were only indulging in speculation. Similarly it is assumed that Shakespeare studied at the Stratford grammar school; where else would he have gone? But there are no records to show that he did so.

From 1571 to 1575 the schoolmaster was Simon Hunt, who received a B.A. from Oxford in 1568. He would thus have been Shakespeare's teacher from the age of seven to eleven. Around July 1575, Hunt went to France to study at Douai, a Catholic university, and he became a Jesuit in 1578. This would indicate that Shakespeare's early teacher was a Catholic. But there is no hard-and-fast proof that Shakespeare attended the grammar school, and moreover there was another Simon Hunt in Stratford, who died in or before 1598, and he might have been the schoolmaster. It seems highly likely that Shakespeare went to the Stratford grammar school, and while there, had a Catholic teacher; but in these details as in so much else from Shakespeare's life, Greenblatt writes, there is no absolute certainty.

Stratford had nominally become Protestant when Henry VIII broke with Rome in 1533; but many a convert to Protestantism must have felt some twinges of Catholic belief in years to come. During the reign of Henry's son Edward VI, from 1547 to 1553, England's ruling elite moved decisively to Protestant doctrine and practice. When Edward's sister Mary, a Catholic, came to the throne, the nation moved in the opposite direction. Some leading Protestants were burned at the stake, and the memory of these deaths sharpened the anti-Catholic sentiments of the reformers. When Mary died childless in 1558, Elizabeth made it clear that she would follow in her father's footsteps.

In 1570, when Shakespeare was six years old, a well-to-do Catholic, John Felton, nailed to the door of the Bishop of London's house a papal bull excommunicating Elizabeth and directing the English people not to obey her. Felton was tortured, tried, and executed, but obviously English Catholics were regarded with suspicion; by 1585 it was treason to be a Catholic priest, or to shelter one.

The third chapter of Greenblatt's book, entitled "The Great Fear," discusses what is known about Catholic influences on Shakespeare. His mother, Mary Arden, came from a strong Catholic family; when her father died in 1556, he commended his soul, like a good Catholic, to God "and to our blessed Lady Saint Mary, and to all the holy company of heaven." John Shakespeare held a steady succession of municipal offices, and so he must have accommodated himself to the Protestant regime. He was responsible for removing all traces of Catholicism from Stratford's fine Guild Chapel; workmen went in with buckets of whitewash and ruined the medieval paintings, while others broke up the altar and pulled down the rood loft. Yet he left a "spiritual testament," found in the 18th century between the rafters and the tiling of a house the Shakespeares once owned, in which he prayed for the special protection of the Virgin Mary and his own personal saint St. Winifred, and expressed a sense of his own unworthiness as a "member of the holy Catholic religion."

A seventeenth century writer, John Aubrey, declared that when Will left Stratford he did not immediately find a place in a theatre company or go to London, but instead "became a schoolmaster in the country." Many scholars take seriously a claim, first made in 1937, that he spent some time, perhaps two years, in Lancashire, where the old religion was still strong, and that he was employed by a prominent Catholic gentleman, Alexander Hoghton. Greenblatt writes that the vicious, murky world of Tudor religious conflict might explain why an adolescent boy fresh from school might have ventured to the north and made a connection with a powerful Catholic family there. The devout Hoghtons almost certainly harboured priests illegally, and had Catholic books and devotional objects on their premises. They would have wanted as servants only those they could trust to keep their dangerous secrets. John Cottam, who taught Shakespeare's younger brother at the King's New School in Stratford and whom Shakespeare undoubtedly knew, came from a family whose property was only ten miles away from one of Hoghton's residences, and he might very well have recommended Will to their attention.

John Cottam had a brother Thomas who had gone to France and become a priest. In June 1580 he secretly returned to England, as part of a mission headed by the brilliant Jesuit Edmund Campion and his fellow Jesuit, Robert Parsons. But an English Catholic named Sledd informed on Cottam, who was arrested and eventually, in May 1582, suffered the grisly fate of all those convicted of treason--to be hanged, drawn, and quartered.

It is now known that the form of spiritual testament used by John Shakespeare was based on a formulary prepared by a great Italian scholar, Cardinal Charles Borromeo. Campion and Parsons stayed with him in Milan before going to England, and would have received the text directly from him. In the spring of 1581, Campion was in Lancashire, writing a defence of the Catholic position called Ten Reasons while scurrying from one recusant house to another to confound the government spies and informers. Among those he stayed with were the Heskeths and Hoghtons--families with which Will Shakespeare was involved--and Greenblatt speculates about the possibility that the sixteen-year-old fledgling poet and actor and the charismatic forty-year-old Jesuit priest actually met and talked. Campion was persuasive and appealing, but he "was also filled with a sense that he knew the one eternal truth, the thing worth living and dying for ..."

"There are many forms of heroism in Shakespeare," Greenblatt writes, "but ideological heroism--the fierce, self-immolating embrace of an idea or an institution--is not one of them. Nothing in his work suggests a deep admiration for the visible church. Several of his conspicuously Catholic religions figures--Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet is an example--are fundamentally sympathetic, but not because they are important figures in the Church hierarchy. On the contrary, Shakespeare's plays almost always depict powerful prelates as disagreeable, and his little-known history play King John, though set in the early thirteenth century, attacks the Pope in highly charged, anachronistically Protestant terms. How dare the Pope, King John indignantly asks the papal legate, attempt to impose his will upon a sacred king?

   Thou canst not, Cardinal, devise a name
   So slight, unworthy, and ridiculous
   Tell him this tale, and from the mouth of England
   Add this much more: that no Italian priest
   Shall tithe or toll in our dominions;
   ... as we, under God, are supreme head.

This coarsely explicit piece of Protestant pope-baiting, Greenblatt writes, is by no means the sum of Shakespeare's mature attitude toward the Catholicism in which he had been immersed as a young man. But if he actually saw Campion in 1581 he would even then probably have shuddered and recoiled inwardly, pulling away from the invitation, whether implicit or declared, to join in a pious struggle for the Catholic faith: "If his father was both Catholic and Protestant, William Shakespeare was on his way to being neither."

By 1582 he was back in Stratford, and in the village of Shottery nearby he met the daughter of a staunchly Protestant farmer named Richard Hathaway. "In the summer of 1582--as if to mark the decisive distance from Campion, from the deep piety and the treasonous murmur.... Will was making love to her. To this secret life too there were momentous consequences, of a very different kind. By November they were married, and six months later their daughter Susanna was born."

If chapter three of this book raises intriguing and perplexing questions about religious influences on Shakespeare, Chapter 10, "Speaking with the dead," raises more profound questions concerning how to face death in a world from which rituals which gave help and comfort to those facing it had been banished. There were no more masses for the dead, no prayers for the dead, no candles on the stripped-down altars, no possibility of shortening the time a soul would have to spend in purgatory (purgatory had been banished). Greenblatt shows how the death of Will's son Hamnet in 1596, and the prospect of his father's death as well, compelled him to ask questions of God and to interrogate his own faith--which was not securely bound to the Catholic Church or the Church of England. He realized that the death rituals in his culture had been gutted. "But he also believed," Greenblatt writes, "that the theater--and his theatrical art in particular--could tap into the great reservoir of passionate feelings that, for him and for thousands of his contemporaries, no longer had a satisfactory outlet.... He responded not with prayers but with the deepest expression of his being: Hamlet."

In these chapters, Shakespeare has found an interpreter who is in the deepest sense, thought-provoking.