Clare Asquith's 'Shadowplay' 2005

 

Public Affairs first edition - 2005

It's not often that I get to discuss a book with its author. I stayed at Clare Asquith's lovely home in Mells - to research quite another topic - and had a most enjoyable (for me, at least) hour or so ruminating on her arguments in support of Shakespeare's 'hidden beliefs and coded politics'. I told her the book was a tour de force and thought-provoking and asked her if she had changed her mind over the ensuing seventeen years since publication, or had she doubled-down? It was definitely the latter!

A major problem with reviewing the book is that one simply doesn't know enough - to argue, refute or concur with the synopsis. I was most comfortable with the Introduction and Chapter I The Silence of Nobody. Both during my Sixth Form and University studies, as well as in my teaching career up to the late 1980s, the standard secondary sources of information came from such titans as A.G. Dickens (Thomas Cromwell and the English Reformation, 1959; The English Reformation, 1964); S.T. Bindoff (Tudor England, 1950); G. R. Elton (England Under the Tudors, 1955); Owen Chadwick (The Reformation, 1964). Moreover, J.E. Neale's magisterial biography of Elizabeth I (Queen Elizabeth, 1934) still held sway. Hovering in the background were the so-called Whig Historians, most recently epitomised by G.M. Trevelyan. The Roman Catholics were damned by their association with 'Bloody' Mary's burnings, by the treacherous behaviour of, particularly, the Jesuit priests during the long reign of Elizabeth. As for Shakespeare? I simply read and watched them for shining a light into not just the English past but also the present of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The Comedies I enjoyed for the humour. 

We regularly visited Ludlow (and braved the often inclement weather) for the town's annual Summer Shakespeare festival and saw the following plays:

As You Like it (1992); Othello (1993); The Taming of the Shrew (1994); Richard III (1995); King Lear (1996); Much Ado About Nothing (1997); Hamlet (1998); A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999); Pericles (2000); Macbeth (2001); The Merry Wives of Windsor (2002); The Merchant of Venice (2003); Twelfth Night (2004); Richard II (2005); A Midsummer Night's Dream (2006); The Comedy of Errors (2007); Richard III (2008); Romeo and Juliet (2009); Othello (2010); Twelfth Night (2011). Not once did I think they were all harbouring a dangerous secret - Roman Catholic shadowplays. I think I am correct in saying that in none of the Programme notes accompanying the plays was this angle drawn attention to.

Certainly, by the last two decades of the twentieth century, a new generation of Reformation scholars were emerging, who, as Clare Asquith maintains, painted a picture of widespread resistance, surveillance, coercion and persecution in 16thc England. Their accounts traced the growth of a coded, dissident language in the repressive years following the Reformation, years of censorship and propaganda during which the subjects of religion and politics were forbidden to dramatists. I was aware of, and certainly read and made use of, some of these historians: J.J. Scarisbrick (The Reformation and the English People, 1984); Rosemary O'Day (The Debate on the English Reformation, 1986); Eamon Duffy (The Stripping of the Altars, 1992); Christopher Haigh (English Reformations, 1993). Instead of a late medieval church, administered by corrupt and carnal priests, presiding over outmoded services, raking in money from relics and pilgrimages, Duffy argues against this Protestant myth and suggests the religious life of the laity in this period was rich and varied and the majority in England resisted these changes in all manner of ways - from overt rebellion (1536, 1569) to more secretive methods (Jesuit infiltration in the 1580s onwards). The Reformation had been an act of state, an imposition by Tudor despots riding roughshod over the predominant wishes of their people.

I have recently purchased Nicholas Orme's excellent Going to Church in Medieval England (Yale, 2021). It charts, on a wide canvas and over a long period, the story of the parish church and its role in daily life during the Middle Ages and through the 16th century. Towards the end of the book he emphasises how much survived despite the Reformation. Reformers remained attached to many aspects of the past: a Christian state and society, parish structures, church patronage, infant baptism, a set liturgy with traditional features, adult communion, and many calendar observances. Churches could only be adapted, not rebuilt, for Reformed worship. It was unwise to push the congregations too far...the Reformation may be likened to a tide washing over a reef. At the upper level the tide carries all before it, but underneath the reef remains: in historical terms the resistant compound of customs, vested interests, and stubborn human nature.

It is Clare Asquith's belief that William Shakespeare was part of this 'majority'; moreover he skilfully developed a hidden code on nearly all his works - poetic and dramatic - employing a sophisticated art form, integrating it into his more familiar work with dazzling skill. The essence of this coded method of writing, of course, was that it be 'deniable' - in other words, incapable of proof. The Protestant Reformation, far from being welcomed by the English, was opposed by the majority, mainly through passive resistance. The two bêtes noire of the author are William Cecil and his son Robert, who supervised the repression, almost the police state. Clare Asquith charts Shakespeare's life and works through the prism of a time of persecution, not helped by the serious misjudgement of Pope Pius V's Bull of 1570, which turned Catholics into putative traitors.

In a series of closely argued chapters, amply backed up by quotations from the texts of his plays and poems, Shakespeare is shown to have cleverly (and dangerously) inserted clear messages to the English Catholics, often doing more than hinting to both Elizabeth I and James I what he was about. I am not attempting in this short Blog to give a detailed analysis of the author's arguments. They are powerful but, inevitably, there are many instances of 'it could have been' or Shakespeare 'must have known'. 

Critiques of her thesis include:

...the interesting elements are swamped by the way Asquith attempts to shoehorn everything into a simplistic historical framework in which the Reformation was unambiguously negative... she presents Shakespeare and all of his work as being solely motivated by a desire to defend Catholicism.

...code-breaking author Clare Asquith is an excellent interpreter and fashions a page-turning thriller from a tangled web of period politics...it's the breadth and depth of Asquith's research in support of her conclusions that make the book so compelling...

the book is a tendentious peroration disguised as literary analysis...one problem with Asquith's thesis is that there remains zero proof that Shakespeare was Catholic...her palpably aggrieved history of the Reformation is so acute...her bias is so manifest that it severely undercuts her credibility.

...along come Clare Asquith with a remarkably erudite study of an aspect of the plays which, as far as I am aware, has never been taught before...revelatory of Shakespeare as someone intensely involved with the England of his times...your appreciation of the Bard will be enhanced by this text, whether you agree with Ms Asquith or not.

It is not an easy book to read, but I shall certainly be returning to it whenever I have gone to a Shakespeare play in the future e.g. The Tempest at Stratford in February next year.