Shakespeare's Catholic Language

When the issue of Shakespeare's Catholicism or crypto-Catholicism, or Church Papism comes up, I always think of the Catholic language and imagery of his plays; the good friars, the true nun, etc. This article from The Guild of Our Lady of Ransom reminds us of how Shakespeare reminded his audiences of their Catholic past:

Shakespeare lived during the worst religious division England has known. It has been remarked that one of the most curious aspects of his writing is the apparent absence of any plays on the main themes of the age – belief, religion, and the church. . .

Nevertheless, he was born when the Catholic religion was effectively in retreat and indeed under accelerating persecution, under forbidding injunctions intending that ‘there remain no memory of the same’.‍ . . .‍

The official hope was that Catholic belief and practice would abate with the dying out of priests, places of worship and the forms of prayer and devotion that legislation now banned. . . .

The author, Edmund Matyjaszek, then cites two examples of Shakespeare recalling very Catholic words, practices, and images, one from Richard II and the other from Henry V:

'I’ll give my jewels for a set of beads,
My gorgeous palace for a hermitage,
My gay apparel for an almsman’s gown,
My figured goblets for a dish of wood,
My sceptre for a palmer’s walking staff,
My subjects for a pair of carved saints,
And my large kingdom for a little grave,
A little, little grave … (Act 3, scene 2)

and 

‘Do we all holy rites:
Let there be sung Non Nobis and Te Deum,
The dead with charity enclosed with clay:
And then to Callice, and to England then
Where ne’er from France arrived more happy men.’ (Act 4, scene 8)

He could have also cited Henry V's words about how he was trying to make up for his father's sins against Richard II, before the Battle of Agincourt:

Not today, O Lord,
O, not today, think not upon the fault
My father made in compassing the crown.
I Richard’s body have interrèd new
And on it have bestowed more contrite tears
Than from it issued forcèd drops of blood.
Five hundred poor I have in yearly pay
Who twice a day their withered hands hold up
Toward heaven to pardon blood. And I have built
Two chantries where the sad and solemn priests
Sing still for Richard’s soul. More will I do—
Though all that I can do is nothing worth,
Since that my penitence comes after all,
Imploring pardon. (Act 4, scene 1)

Although those last three lines seem to call the effectiveness of all those efforts of prayers and Masses for Richard's soul and his father's pardon into doubt. Nevertheless, as in Hamlet, Shakespeare has recalled the practice of Prayer for the Dead in Purgatory to the minds of his audience.

As Matyjaszek concludes his article:

How did the works of this possible crypto-Catholic (certainly one steeped in its imagery), spread throughout the whole world carrying this rich, resonant and sacramental imagery? At the core of all this is the “echo chamber of remembrance “ that is, in effect, the English language itself.‍

This continued to appear and inform the language and the culture throughout the 270 years of Catholic suppression, emerging to inform Newman’s ‘Second Spring’ that inspired the foundation of our Guild. This language not only underpins our country and its culture, but is still evident – and potent – in the most unlikely places today.

A Catholic Hamlet in a Protestant Denmark?

In First Things, Peter J. Leithart reviews a book about Hamlet and his "To Be or Not to Be" soliloquy:

Most readers and viewers of Hamlet take Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy as a meditation on suicide. In Hamlet, Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency, John E. Curran, Associate Professor of English at Marquette University, argues there are bigger things at work. Hamlet is opposing two ontologies, religious universes, moralities.

The first Curran labels “the Be.” The Be is the realm of predetermined fixity, without freedom, choice or contingency. It is an either/or, zero-sum world where every divine initiative must be at the expense of human merit, where signs and things stand in antagonistic opposition rather than seeking reconciliation. The Be is static, atemporal, a world within which human action is meaningless. In the Be, things stay what they are. The Be is cold, logical, technical, empty. The Be is a Protestant world.

On the other side of the great ugly ditch is “the Not to be,” which is everything the Be is not. It is a world of both-and, a world of real contingency and freedom, a world where grace and merit, sign and thing, live together in merry fellowship. Human action makes sense, and makes a difference, in the Not to be, because the Not to be is dynamic and temporal. In the Not to be, anything can happen, even bread becoming flesh. The Not to be is warm, moist, organic, teeming. The Not to be is Catholic.

Hamlet’s dilemma, according to Curran’s interpretation, is that of a man of Catholic sensibilities and aspirations who finds himself stuck in a Protestant world. In his heart, he is a man of the Not to be who wants to breathe free of the stifling stagnant air of Geneva or Wittenberg; but he learns, with growing frustration, that he lives in the Be. By the beginning of Act 5, he is resigned to the fact that the Not to be is not to be. After that, there is nothing more to say. Submitting to the Be leaves us speechless and dehumanized. The rest is silence.

Leithart has some problems with Curran's interpretation:

Curran’s book is filled with footnotes to both secondary literature on Hamlet and an abundance of primary and secondary literature on Elizabethan theology. He has read a lot, but despite the genuine erudition, Curran is no theologian. His portrayals of Catholic and Protestant “ontologies” amount to caricatures. He knows a few things about Protestant and Catholic theology, and extrapolates from those ideas to conclusions about what Protestants and Catholics – especially Protestants – must have believed. But the things he knows are not entirely accurate, and his extrapolations even less so. In characterizing Protestantism as steady-state determinism, for instance, he ignores the significant continuities between medieval Catholic and Protestant theologies, the prominent role of sanctification in Calvin’s and Puritan theology, the notion of regeneration. He ignores the cross as an epoch-making event. In fact, a plausible – I think convincing – argument can be made that one of Protestantism’s great contributions to the church was a rediscovery the historical dimension of Christianity.

Read the rest at First Things.