Shakespeare

So Stratford contained a very large Catholic constituency of which the Shakespeares were a part. This does not necessarily imply that Shakespeare himself professed that faith – assuming that he professed any – only that he found the company of Catholics familiar. It seems in certain respects to have been a clannish society. The family of Nicholas Lane, a Catholic landowner who lent money both to John and to Henry Shakespeare, bought their clothes from a Catholic tailor in Wood Street.³ In the same context, therefore, it also seems likely that affluent Catholics preferred to lend money to their coreligionists. In later years Shakespeare purchased his great house from a Catholic, William Underhill, who was compelled to sell as a result of the vast sums of money he had expended on recusancy fines. We may see in Shakespeare’s purchase a mixture of shrewd commercial calculation and semi-fraternal sympathy.

On any conservative reckoning it is possible to identify some thirty Catholic families within the town, and of course the available records are by their nature incomplete and inconclusive. There would have been many more papists, who concealed their private beliefs from the local authorities. They became, in the language of the day, “church papists” whose attendance at the Protestant churches masked their true faith. It has been speculated that the majority of churchgoers in Stratford were of this sort.

The religious situation in Stratford was in any case well known. Hugh Larimer, the reformer and Bishop of Worcester, declared that Stratford lay at “the blind end” of his diocese, and one of Latimer’s colleagues confirmed that in Warwickshire “great Parishes and market Townes [are] utterly destitute of God’s word.”⁴ One of his successors, John Whitgift, complained in 1577 that in the area around Stratford he could obtain no information on recusants; in a tolerant and like-minded community, neighbour would not denounce neighbour. The papistical images in the guild chapel were lime-washed, on the orders of John Shakespeare, more than four years after a royal injunction had ordered their removal. It only finally occurred after the leading Catholic family in the town, the Cloptons, had fled abroad for safety. In any case the lime-washing of the offending images was hardly in direct obedience with the administrative injunction to “utterly extinct and destroy” such images so that “there remains no memory of the same.” John Shakespeare merely covered them over, perhaps in the hope of better days.

Lying concealed upon the walls of the chapel were depictions of two local Saxon saints, Edmund and Modwena, for those who wished to celebrate the blessedness of their region; there was a fresco of the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, while kneeling at the altar of St. Benedict in Canterbury; there was a painting of St. George in mortal combat with the dragon, a princess standing behind him. Here also were images of angels and of devils, saints and dragons, monarchs and armed men in battle. Here in this Stratford chapel were hidden the images of the Catholic world. We will see some of them freshly revealed within Shakespeare’s plays.

Certain of Shakespeare’s schoolteachers were Catholic. If John Shakespeare had indeed espoused Catholicism, his example shows there was no hindrance to high office in the town, which in turn suggests a measure of quiescence or even sympathy among its leading citizens. But it represented a fragile compromise. External legislation, and the presence of religious commissioners, could create tensions within the community. Overtly partisan steps, like the concealment of renegade priests, could cause serious problems for those concerned. And in any case the general drift of the time was towards a grudging acceptance of the new religion and the steady abandonment of the practices of the old faith. By the early seventeenth century Stratford had become notably more Protestant in tendency. The town was never ruled by “precise fools” or “Scripture men,” as the more formidable Puritans were known, but it eventually came to accept the ambiguous orthodoxy of the Church of England. Yet in the latter half of the sixteenth century, despite royal injunctions and local purges, fines and sequestrations and imprisonments, the persistence of the Catholic faith in the town can clearly be seen.