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COPYRIGHT 2006 Associated University Presses
Lancastrian Shakespeare: Region, Religion and Patronage, edited by Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003. Pp. xiii + 258. Cloth $74.95; Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare, edited by Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003. Pp. xiii + 267. Cloth $74.95.
A HALF century after Shakespeare's death, Richard Davies, chaplain of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and later rector of Sapperton, declared that Shakespeare "died a papist." (1) For, he suggests, the inscription on Shakespeare's tomb in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford curses anyone who might move his bones, and blesses those who leave them still interred. It is this sepulchral warning that also tempts Richard Wilson, in his fascinating recent book, Secret Shakespeare, to guess that Shakespeare's own copy of the Borromeo Testament of faith brought by Campion to Milan is interred with his bones. (2) In this way Shakespeare carries his secret Catholicism with him to the grave and ensures that it may remain buried. Only a desecration could reveal such a secret, and so it maintains its potent, hidden power, derived from surmise, taboo, and the fear of violation.
But perhaps Wilson's compellingly literal fantasy is better analyzed as a symptom of what might be called the encryption of Catholicism in English historiography, including the history of the page and stage. For Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, the crypt is a relation to the past, a form of repressed and unfinished mourning, a foreign area of incorporation that "keeps the dead alive, intact, safe (save) inside me, but .... only to refuse to love the dead as a living part of me, dead save in me, through the process of introjection, as happens in so-called normal mourning." (3) Sealed off inside the mourner, the dead one can remain intact but at the price of an internal foreignness. Shut up in this way, the past will be safe, but it can never transform the consciousness of the mourner. Wilson's fantasy about Shakespeare's intact, never to be disturbed secret might be better understood as a fantasy enacted in England's peculiar relation to Catholicism. Preserved in the hermetic form of Catholic apologia, and in the polemical, enduring drives of antipa-pistry and Whig history, Catholicism can remain hidden, unseen, fully internal, and at the same time foreign, exotic, and alien. It will never get itself mixed up with the history in which it is encrypted.
Alison Shell has recently described English Catholicism as a "catacomb culture, defined by secret or discreet worship," studied for a long time only by its own loving ancestors, and exiled from English history. (4) Between 1558 when Elizabeth I acceded to the throne and the Supreme Head of the English Church to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Catholicism was mainly associated with certain key events in the Protestant imaginary: the rebellion of the northern earls in 1569, the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, the Spanish marriage for James I's son, Charles, in the 1620s, the Irish Rebellion of 1641, and the Popish Plot of 1678-81. (5) Yet it was a visit to the Christian catacombs outside Rome that helped to convert Sir Toby Mathew, the son of the very Calvinist bishop of Durham, who converted to Catholicism in 1606, and entered the Jesuit order in 1619: "the sight of those most ancient crosses, altars, sepulchers, and other marks of the Catholic religion, having been planted there in the persecution of the primitive Church ... did strike me with a kind of reverent awe, and made me absolutely resolve to repress my insolent discourse against Catholic religion thereafter." (6) Mathew's subsequent history as an exile, poet, chronicler of his own conversion, and historian of Counter-Reformation Catholicism, and later sojourn at Henrietta Maria's court, is precisely an instance of what Anthony Milton has called cross-confessionalism, the imbrication and converse between Catholicism and Protestantism and the movement, surprisingly common, through conversion, between them. (7) In fact the combined effect of the important work of Michael Questier, Anthony Milton, Alison Shell, and Arthur Marotti, to name a few, decisively establishes the pervasiveness and visibility of Catholic culture, and its complete imbrication in early modern culture as a whole.
Richard Wilson is also the coeditor with Alison Findlay and Richard Dutton of an extraordinarily rich series of papers at a conference that gives the collection under review its name: Lancastrian Shakespeare, where Lancashire stands at once for Catholic regionalism but also for the Lancastrian history explored in Shakespeare's two tetralogies. The conference was held at Hoghton Tower and the University of Lancaster in 1999, and its starting point was the possibility, explored in Ernst Honigman's book, Shakespeare: The Lost Years, and before that in the Victorian critic Richard Simpson's work on Campion and Shakespeare in the 1870s, that William Shakespeare was the "Shakeshafte," mentioned in Alexander Hoghton's will in 1581. (8) This will, now in the Lancashire County Records Office in Preston, recommended that the actor Fulk Gillom and William Shakeshafte be taken into the service of Sir Thomas Hesketh or some other good master, and it...
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