CHAPTER V.

the reliGION OF THE PLAYS.

I sometimes do believe, and sometimes do not.

As You Like It, v, 4.

HE religious world of Elizabeth was divided into two great

THE

and antagonistic sects: Catholics and Protestants; and the latter were, in turn, separated into the followers of the state religion and various forms of dissent.

Religion in that day was an earnest, palpable reality: society was set against itself in hostile classes; politics, place, government, legislation-all hinged upon religion. In this age of doubt and indifference, we can hardly realize the feelings of a people to whom the next world was as real as this world, and who were ready to die agonizing deaths, in the flames of Smithfield, for their convictions upon questions of theology.

We are told that William Shakspere of Stratford died a Catholic. We have this upon the authority of Rev. Mr. Davies, who says, writing after 1688, "he died a Papist." Upon the question of the politics of a great man, the leader of either one of the political parties of his neighborhood is likely to be well informed; it is in the line of his interests and thoughts. Upon the question of the religion of the one great man of Stratford, we may trust the testimony of the clergyman of the parish. He could hardly be mistaken. There can be little doubt that William Shakspere of Stratford-on-Avon died a Catholic. But of what religion was the man who wrote the Plays? This question has provoked very considerable discussion. He has been claimed alike by Protestants and Catholics.

To my mind it is very clear that the writer of the Plays was a Protestant. And this is the view of Dowden. He says:

Shakespeare has been proved to belong to each communion to the satisfaction of contending theological zealots. . . But, tolerant as his spirit is, it is certain that the spirit of Protestantism animates and breathes through his writings.'

What are the proofs?

1 Dowden, Shak. Mind and Art, p. 33.

I. HE IS OPPOSED TO THE PAPAL SUPREMACY.

The play of King John turns largely upon the question of patriotic resistance to the temporal power of the Pope; and this is not a necessary incident of the events of the time, for the poet, to point his moral, antedates the great quarrel between John and the Pope by six years.

He represents King John, upon Ascension Day, yielding up his crown to Pandulph, the Pope's legate, and receiving it back, with these words:

In scene 3

Take again

From this, my hand, as holding of the Pope,

Your sovereign greatness and authority.'

of act iii, he makes Pandulph demand of the King why he keeps Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, out of his see; and King John replies:

What earthly name to interrogatories

Can task the free breath of a sacred king?
Thou canst not, Cardinal, devise a name

So slight, unworthy and ridiculous,

To charge me to an answer, as the Pope.

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;

But as we under heaven are supreme head,

So under him, that great supremacy,
Where we do reign, we will alone uphold,
Without the assistance of a mortal hand:
So tell the Pope; all reverence set apart,
To him and his usurped authority.

King Philip. Brother of England, you blaspheme in this.

King John. Though you, and all the kings of Christendom,
Are led so grossly by this meddling priest,

Dreading the curse that money may buy out;
And, by the merit of vile gold, dross, dust,
Purchase corrupted pardon of a man,
Who, in that sale, sells pardon from himself;
Though you, and all the rest, so grossly led,
This juggling witchcraft with revenue cherish;
Yet I, alone, alone do me oppose,

Against the Pope, and count his friends my foes.

It is scarcely to be believed that a Catholic could have written these lines.

'King John, V, 1.

And it must be remembered that King John is depicted in the play as a most despicable creature; and his eventual submission of the liberties of the crown and the country, to the domination of a foreign power, is represented as one of the chief ingredients in making up his shameful character.

It is needless to say that Bacon had very strong views upon this question of the Pope's sovereignty over England. He says in the Charge against Talbot:

Nay all princes of both religions, for it is a common cause, do stand, at this day [in peril], by the spreading and enforcing of this furious and pernicious opinion of the Pope's temporal power.

II. HE HONORED AND RESPECTED CRANMER.

But it is in the play of Henry VIII. that the religious leanings of the writer are most clearly manifested.

It is to be remembered that it was in this reign that Protestantism was established in England, and the man who above all others was instrumental in bringing about the great change was Thomas Cranmer, the first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury. He, above all other men, was hated by the Catholics. He it was who had sanctioned the divorce of Henry from Katharine; he it was who had delivered the crown to Anne upon the coronation; he had supported the suppression of the monasteries; he had persecuted the Catholic prelates and people, sending numbers to the stake; and when the Catholics returned to power, under Mary, one of the first acts of the government was to burn him alive opposite Baliol College. It is impossible that a Catholic writer of the next reign could have gone out of his way to defend and praise Cranmer, to represent him as a good and holy man, and even as an inspired prophet. And yet all this we find in the play of Henry VIII.; the play is, in fact, in large part, an apotheosis of Cranmer.

In act fifth we find the King sending for him. He assures hin. that he is his friend, but that grave charges have been made against him, and that he must go before the council for trial, and he gives him his ring, to be used in an appeal, in case the council find him guilty. The King says:

Look, the good man weeps!

He's honest on mine honor. God's blest mother!

I swear he is true-hearted; and a soul

None better in my kingdom.

The council proceed to place Cranmer under arrest, with intent to send him to the Tower, when he exhibits the King's ring and makes his appeal. The King enters frowning, rebukes the persecutors of Cranmer, and says to him:

Good man, sit down. Now let me see the proudest,

He that dares most, but wag his finger at thee. . . .
Was it discretion, lords, to let this man,

This good man (few of you deserve that title),

This honest man, wait like a lousy foot-boy

At chamber-door? . . .

Well, well, my lords, respect him.

Take him and use him well, he's worthy of it.

I will say thus much for him, if a prince

May be beholden to a subject, I

Am, for his love and service, so to him.

All this has no necessary coherence with the plot of the play, but is dragged in to the filling up of two scenes.

And, in the last scene of the play, Cranmer baptizes the Princess Elizabeth, and is inspired by Heaven to prophesy:

Let me speak, sir,

For Heaven now bids me.

And he proceeds to foretell her future long life and greatness.

He says:

In her days, every man shall eat in safety,

Under his own vine, what he plants; and sing

The merry songs of peace to all his neighbors;
God shall be truly known.

It is not conceivable that one who was a Catholic, who regarded with disapproval the establishment of the new religion, and who looked upon Cranmer as an arch-heretic, worthy of the stake and of hell, could have written such scenes, when there was nothing in the plot of the play itself which required it.

The passages in the play which relate to Cranmer are drawn from Fox's Book of Martyrs, and the prose version is followed almost literally in the drama; but, strange to say, there is in the historical work no place wherein the King speaks of Cranmer as a "good" man. All this is interpolated by the dramatist. We have in the play:

Good man, sit down.

This good man.

This honest man.

Good man, those joyful tears show thy true heart.

Etc.

There is not in Fox's narrative one word of indorsement, by the King, of Cranmer's goodness or honesty.

A Catholic writing a play based on Protestant histories might have followed the text, even against his own prejudices, but it is not to be believed that he would alter the text, and inject words of compliment of a man who held the relations to the Catholics of England that Cranmer did."

We cannot help but believe that the man who did this was a Protestant, educated to believe that the Reformation was right and necessary, and that Cranmer was a good and holy man, the inspired instrument of Heaven in a great work.

The family of Bacon was Protestant. They rose out of the ranks, on the wave of the Reformation. His father was an officer of Henry VIII.; his grandfather was tutor to the Protestant King Edward. During the reign of Mary, the Bacons lived in retirement; they conformed to the Catholic Church and heard mass daily; but, upon the coming in of Elizabeth, they emerged from their hiding-place, and Bacon's father and uncle, Burleigh, were at the head of the Protestant party of England during the rest of their lives. All the traditions of the family clustered around the Reformation. They faithfully believed that "God was truly known" in the religion of Elizabeth, and they were as violently opposed to the Papal supremacy as King John or the Bastard.

It is a curious fact that Bacon alludes, in his prose works, to the reign of Elizabeth, in words very similar to those placed in the mouth of Cranmer. He says:

This part of the island never had forty-five years of better times. . . For if there be considered of the one side the truth of religion established, the constant peace and security, the good administration of justice, etc.'

THE WRITER OF THE PLAYS WAS TOLERANT OF CATHOLICITY.

But how does it come to pass that in the face of such evidence it has been claimed that the writer of the Plays was a Catholic?

Because, in an age of violent religious hatreds, when the Catholics were helpless, suspected and persecuted, the author of the Plays never uttered a word, however pleasing it might be to the court and the time-serving multitude, to fan the flame of animosity

1Advancement of Learning, book i.