The Quest for Shakespeare: The Bard of Avon and the Church of Rome (review)

The question of Shakespeare’s Catholicism has recently reinvigorated the increasingly rarefied field of Shakespeare studies. The Bard’s religion is perhaps the last remaining central topic of interest to a nonspecialist audience.

In The Quest for Shakespeare Joseph Pearce sets out to “assemble the considerable body of biographical and historical evidence that points to Shakespeare’s Catholicism” (p. 10). Thus what he has produced here is not a biography of Shakespeare, but a sequence of biographical and historical topics that pertain to the great dramatist’s alleged Catholicism. The overall case is convincing. Against the academic skeptics who defensively call for positivistic evidence and raise objections, Pearce rightly argues from what Cardinal John Henry Newman called “converging probabilities,”¹ a more sensible criterion given the nature of historical evidence about Catholics of the time. He takes us through Shakespeare’s background; his family connections; his father’s Catholic Spiritual Testament; his Catholic schoolmasters; the literary links with Marlowe, Greene, and Chettle; St. Robert Southwell’s reference to his “cousin, Master W. S.”; his purchase of the Blackfriars gatehouse; and his will. All of these elements have been explored over the course of the last century. Pearce provides nothing new, but he usefully summarizes past scholarship. Along the way he provides a good deal of historical context and interesting, if sometimes loose, speculation in a readable and lively style.

Less satisfying are the two short appendices, preludes to a second book on the evidence from the plays. In appendix A, Pearce speaks of “authorial authority” and “the transcendent nature of the creative process” (pp. 175, 176)—rather anachronistic phrases that he derives from J. R. R. Tolkien, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and T. S. Eliot. He seems unaware of the mimetic poetic of Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare, all of whom aimed to “figure forth” passions, virtues, and vices. In appendix B, Pearce restates the old optimistic “coded” Christian interpretation of King Lear with Lear ending deliriously happy, mystically united with the suffering Christ, all “enshrined in the play’s happy ending” (p. 198). Forget about the wages of sin, the death of the innocent Cordelia, and the sorrowful endings of Elizabethan-Jacobean tragedy. Jesus died and saved us all.

In sum, Pearce provides an informative and readable summary of the evidence for a Catholic Shakespeare, especially useful for undergraduates and the general reader. However, he might have enhanced his book by covering the arguments of his skeptical, agnostic, or Protestant opponents. In contrast with these positions, the Catholic case is remarkably strong. What is the evidence for the Protestant Shakespeare? There has been some occasional criticism, but no one has mounted even the outline of an overall argument. What is the evidence for a secular Shakespeare, whose “secular” values are supposedly in the Enlightenment tradition of freedom, tolerance, and skepticism? How can this be squared with Shakespeare’s notions of hierarchy, sin, grace, virtue, and providence? These questions are largely ignored in Pearce’s book.