On Thu, 13 Oct 2005, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> Incidentally, one of the hottest topics in Shakespeare studies right now
> is the extent to which Shakespeare (I mean the author to the plays and
> poems, whoever he was) belonged to [the Catholic] church as well. Orthodox
> scholars (those who think the man from Stratford was the author) are in
> the lead, suggesting an extensive underground Catholic life for
> Shakespeare during the "lost years" (losing those years when he was
> apparently so young looks like carelessness), possibly as a tutor in a
> recusant family in Yorkshire, and possibly in the orbit of the Jesuit
> intellectual Edmund Campion, executed under Elizabeth.
>
> It's always been difficult to explain what Hamlet's father is doing in
> purgatory when purgatory has been officially outlawed
That's true. But it's equally impossible to regard that particular element as something covert. Everyone in his audience knew Protestants didn't believe in purgatory, and it was a very live issue for them. If Shakespeare's story was impossible to reconcile with the Protestant thought of its time, it would have been a very public and spectacular avowal of Catholicism.
There is actually a very classic book by John Dover Wilson entitled _What Happens in Hamlet_ (1935) that takes this problem as the central jumping off point for a magnificent attempt at a unifed field theory of everything in Hamlet. He claims that the status of ghosts was a very hot intellectual topic at the time, precisely because all Elizabethans believed in them, but there seemed to be no way to account for them theologically once purgatory was outlawed. The simplest resolution was simply to say they were all demons trying to snare us, which is exactly what King James wrote in his _Demonology_ (1597), just a few years before the play came out. But that didn't seem to entirely square with the "empirical" evidence, and there were many competing views. According to Wilson, this not only gave the play its immediate intellectual reputation -- it was a contribution to the debate -- but provided the main motor of the drama. On his view, Hamlet doesn't vacillate at all. The entire first half of the play is simply him trying to find an efficient test whether the ghost is a demon and theorizing on its existence. As graduate students from Wittenberg -- ground zero for Lutherian theology -- he and Horatio were on the cutting edge of such theories.
If you're a Hamlet fan, Dover's book is a lot of fun, because making everything make sense is almost like solving the transformation problem. In practice, every performance of Hamlet is forced to emphasize some bits at the expense of making other parts not really make sense. It's part of why it's a continual revelation. Dover's book is therefore dazzling, as well as charming and full wonderful manuscript scholarship that still endures.
However, it's a real question whether this understanding can be performed for people who live in a different worldview. It was most famously attempted by Sir John Gielgud in the Hamlet he directed starring Richard Burton, which was great, but very distinctive precisely because, as one critic said, "It's impossible to imagine Burton's Hamlet hestitating." (Another said "As Hamlet he was an excellent Corialanus.") But even there, legend has it that halfway through the production Gielgud threw the script across the room and bellowed plummily "Damn J. Dover Wilson!"
> Recently the literary evidence for Shakespeare's Catholicism has been
> gathered (some would say over-gathered) by Clare Asquith in a nevertheless
> entertaining book, SHADOWPLAY: THE HIDDEN BELIEFS AND CODED POLITICS OF
> WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
An excellent example of an earlier point that "a good war halloweth any cause" -- in other words, that a smart and diligent person devoted to a crackpot thesis can turn up valuable new evidence that no one else could without that perspective and motivation.
BTW, Wilson, points out in passing that Shakespeare's patron at this time, the Earl of Southampton, was a declared Catholic, and there were quite a number of Catholic sympathizers in the audience. So having part of Hamlet's drama be a debate on "ghost theory" that allowed all schools (including the Catholic) to have their say made good commercial as well intellectual and dramatic sense. The presence of Catholic ideas does not necessarily negate the Protestant ones in these fluid times. And there are other plays in which Shakespeare seems quite a vehement protestant propagandist.
Michael