John Shakespeare: A Papist or Just Penniless?

William Shakespeare's religious beliefs have long been a source of speculation and necessarily so, as there is no surviving documentary evidence to suggest anything but conformity with the state's requirements. Since this has not deterred those who have sought to pin a doctrinal label upon him, attention has turned to the religious beliefs of his father on the very reasonable supposition that the faith in which Shakespeare was reared would have had a significant, perhaps profound, effect on him. John Shakespeare is also a more promising subject, for there is a considerable body of evidence to draw on. However, although this evidence is plentiful, scholars have been divided for many years on the issue of John's religious convictions. More recently, in particular, there has been a vigorous development of the view that he remained true to the Catholic faith until his death in 1601.¹

Much of this debate has centered not on the evidence for John Shakespeare's business and municipal career but on two hypotheses which will not be considered here. One is the theory that William Shakespeare, then aged sixteen or seventeen, is synonymous with the William Shakeshafte who in 1581 belonged to the household of Alexander Hoghton, a wealthy Catholic gentleman of Lea in Lancashire. John, the argument goes, would hardly have allowed his son to have been placed in such a position if he, too, had not been a Catholic. However, this theory is founded on evidence that is insufficient to justify such an interpretation.² The second theory concerns John Shakespeare's so-called "Spiritual Testament," an overtly Catholic declaration of faith which was allegedly discovered in the roof of his house in Henley Street. Here again, however, the evidence, when scrutinized, merely confirms what Edmond Malone suspected—that this document bears all the hallmarks of an eighteenth-century hoax and that subsequent attempts to link it to the Jesuit Mission of the early 1580s are unjustified.³

Can a reexamination of the surviving documentary evidence for John Shakespeare's public life settle the question of his Catholicism? Here, there is a measure of agreement among scholars that John Shakespeare's adult life can be divided into three parts: a steady twenty-year climb up the twin ladders of civic responsibility and material wealth, a decade or more of difficulty extending from the late 1570s into the early 1590s, and a final ten years of quiet recovery. But disagreement arises over the cause of his mid-life difficulties. Could this be attributed to his continuing adherence to the Catholic faith, or is there a less-sensational explanation, one of commonplace failure in business?⁴ The latter could have been a formative experience for the youthful Shakespeare even though it does not rule out the possibility that John retained his affection for, if not attachment to, the faith of his fathers. Recent work on the Reformation has made it clear that, for the first twenty-five years or so of Elizabeth's reign, there was no mass conversion of the population to Protestantism, especially in rural areas, but rather a gradual process of accommodating traditional beliefs within a new system.⁵ By the late 1570s it was becoming clear that no natural swing back to the Catholic fold would occur; at the same time the state was becoming increasingly confident that it could insist on Protestant conformity. Those with a lingering attachment to the old faith had to choose between open recusancy (and the consequent threat to their livelihood) or an outward conformity. In John Shakespeare's case the issue is whether his difficulties of the late 1570s and early 1580s can be attributed in any way to a decision to adhere to the beliefs in which he had been reared, or whether he was able to reconcile his personal faith with outward conformity, thus indicating that his economic struggles were largely the result of unsound business practices. To establish religious belief as...