Book review

 A few weeks back, a friend lent me his copy of Joseph Pearce's The Quest for Shakespeare.  I thought I would give it a review here for any interested.

In this work, Pearce sets out to prove that Shakespeare was a Catholic.  The short version of my review of his book would be this: an interesting idea badly argued.

The idea that Shakespeare was a recusant Catholic living at a time when it was illegal to be Catholic in England and when punishments for Catholics were increasing has been bandied around from time to time. There are some tantalizing clues that he may have been so.  His father may have been Catholic.  His mother came from an area of England known for recusants, and she had ties to many.  The Hathaways, the family of Shakespeare's wife, also had many ties to Catholic recusants.  One of their daughters, Susanna, was included on a list of recusants living in Stratford in 1605.  Around the time of his retirement, Shakespeare bought a property in London where clandestine masses were said to occur, at least after the time he owned it, and possibly before.  

That is the main evidence.  He knew Catholics, had connections to Catholic places.  Some of the evidence is stronger than others. If, for example, his father and Susanna could be proven to be Catholics- and the evidence that they were is fairly strong- that would be strong evidence that he was as well.

Now, you may think that this evidence is insufficient to write an entire book on, and you'd be right.  Most of Shakespeare's life has been lost to us.  The known details boil down to a few dates and little else.  This lack of evidence allows authors to come out with a new crop of Shakespeares every publishing season, all of whom look and act suspiciously as their author wants them to.

Pearce, I am afraid, is no different.  Had he left the book as an examination of the evidence in the light of the hypothesis that Shakespeare was a recusant, I think he would have penned a better book. However, instead of writing a book that went over the evidence that Shakespeare may have been Catholic, Pearce set out to write a book that would prove that Shakespeare was a Catholic. As such, Pearce is forced to stretch too little too far to try and reach the conclusion he desires.  Along the way, he occasionally plays fast and loose with the truth.  For example, fairly early in the book (I returned the book, so I no longer have the exact page and quotations at hand, my apologies for that) Pearce mentions that a new round of penal laws against Catholics occurred in 1580,  with the new punishments including the confiscation of Catholic property.  This coincides very neatly with Shakespeare's father selling off several of his holdings.  Pearce hypothesizes that Shakespeare senior did that to keep his property safe from confiscation.  It is a fair hypothesis.  But about twenty or thirty pages later, Pearce again refers to the 1580's, and notes parenthetically that this was around the same time that Shakespeare senior sold off his property to avoid the new punishments.  In other words, he is treating his early unproven supposition as an established fact.

He also employs rhetorical questions extensively to cover over gaps and to help provide confirmation where evidence is completely lacking.  He will dismiss usual interpretations, or safer ones, for his own, through the use of questions.  'Is it not more likely...?' he would say.  'Is it not more probable....?' And then, of course, within a relatively small number of pages he will be treating what was stated as a question as an established fact.

He also makes some omissions.  For example, Shakespeare's only known London address is from his time as a boarder at the house of the Mountjoys.  The Mountjoys were French Huguenots who fled persecution in France for the safety of the newly Protestant England.  Pearce says that living with the Huguenots would have been to the advantage of a recusant Catholic, as members of Huguenot households were exempt from the laws requiring citizens of England to attend church on Sunday- the only church, of course, being the Church of England.

That is an interesting possibility, but there is another issue: the Huguenots were persecuted in France by French Catholics, including an event known to history as 'The Massacre in Paris', which was a popular theme for the English stage.  Shakespeare's contemporary and rival, Christopher Marlowe, had dramatized the slaughter for his theatre company.  To borrow Pearce's fondness for rhetorical questions, let us ask: given that the mortal enemies of the Huguenots were Catholics, how likely would it be that a family of Huguenots would have a Catholic living in their home with them?

In the last chapter he turns to the plays and tries to apply a Catholic lens to their interpretation.  The play he chose was King Lear.  His contention is that Lear was really a comedy and that the titular king died- and I am not making this up- of happiness at the thought that he and Cordelia would be together in heaven.  As a former teacher of Shakespeare who read many strange essays with bizarre interpretations of the Bard, I would have to say that this one is entirely new, and in a class of its own.  I would say it is 'wrong', but 'wrong' seems to be entirely too small a word for this occasion.

Shakespeare's attitude towards Catholics from what we can gather in the plays is complex.  On the one hand, he is not as rabidly anti Catholic as some of his contemporaries. On the other hand, he does indulge in it from time to time.  In King John, the Bastard is sent out to get money from the churches and monasteries, and he responds that neither bell, book nor candle would stop him. All's Well has one character say that a nun's lips are not better suited for a monk's mouth, and Measure for Measure ends with a man dressed as a monk saying he will marry a woman dressed as a nun, all of which was red meat for the Protestants in the crowd.

I think Pearce's thesis has some merit.  As I said, there are tantalizing hints and clues, but, on the whole, I think Pearce tries to make too much out of too little, and occasionally employs a sleight of hand to try and give his arguments more weight.  His book would have been better, me thinks, had he set his aim a little lower.