Catholic Theology in Shakespeare's Plays (review)

Catholic Theology seeks to demonstrate Shakespeare's "Catholic sensibility" (p. 39) or even "discreet" church papistry (p. 56)—the book hesitates between these claims—on the basis of a credible hermeneutic. The book does not decode plays, but (in good Protestant and Thomist fashion) argues from the literal sense and with a clear grasp of the issues dividing Protestants and Catholics (p. 22): penance; indulgences; pilgrimages; purgatory; celibacy; and meritorious works, but not predestination, prevenient grace, or the other great themes of their shared Augustinian heritage. Although the Hamlet chapter lapses into topical allegory (Hamlet figuring failed Catholic regicides [p. 86]), the book generally abides by its own principles—albeit with mixed results.

It makes a very strong case for the sheer pervasiveness of allusions to Catholic doctrine and practice in Shakespeare's plays; references to chantries, unction, confession, nuns, intercessory prayer, and requiem Masses thread across the entire corpus, including plays set in non-Catholic lands, e.g., Ephesus and Illyria. Throughout the comedies, wise and holy friars do their best to set things right and, on occasion, succeed. The Catholic material is sometimes used metaphorically, as in the erotic penances imposed in Two Gentlemen of Verona, but more often not; the chantries Henry V builds are literal chantries, where priests sing for Richard's soul (p. 31); Juliet, like a good Catholic, is shriven prior to her marriage (pp. 30, 81); Hamlet Senior, like a pretty good Catholic, resides in purgatory. But calling these allusions to Catholic rites and the Catholic supernatural "theology" seems inaccurate. Rather, it seems almost as though the plays inhabit a Roman Catholic world; as though the Reformation never happened; as though shrift before marriage were a normal social practice, and Shakespeare's audience would have trembled at the thought of dying unhousled. The frequency and explicitness of the Catholic material is puzzling, not least because neither Shakespeare's audiences nor the censors seem to have objected or even noticed. David N. Beauregard's work thus has major implications for our understanding of English mainstream religion c. 1600. It is not just another book claiming Shakespeare for one's own side but opens a window on the still largely unknown field where Catholic and Protestant vectors intersect and merge; where they absorb, deflect, distort, amplify, or diffuse each other; where they do something besides merely collide.

Yet rather than explore this new terrain, Catholic Theology for the most part sinks back into Shakespeare-on-my-side polemic. The Hamlet chapter is an exercise in tendentious political allegory. Although certainly right about Shakespeare's benevolent friars, Beauregard ignores his overwhelmingly negative depiction of prelates, beginning with Winchester in I Henry VI. Instead, he labors to clear King John's Pandulph from charges of being a Machiavellian agent provocateur on the ground that the cardinal merely predicts "the course events will likely take," and prediction is not intrigue (p. 134). He neglects to mention, however, that the prediction concludes with Pandulph instructing the dauphin to invade England, while he himself will go to "whet on the King" (3.4.181). Nor is this the only instance of strategic omission. The discussion of Henry V's prayer in the opening scene of act IV gives no hint that the lines are spoken right before the Battle of Agincourt, that Henry is asking God "not to-day" to punish him for "the fault/My father made in compassing the crown"—not, that is, to punish him with defeat in battle. By leaving out this context, Beauregard makes it seem as though Shakespeare's point were to show this great and glorious monarch as a devout Catholic praying for his father's soul in purgatory (p. 31). Equally disturbing is the book's tendency to misrepresent Protestantism, even at the risk of self-contradiction. The comparison of Protestant and Catholic teaching on repentance begins with the fine observation that in the Elizabethan church, the Roman doctrine of satisfaction due to...