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The divine pork butcher

Ferdinand Mount

Wednesday, 25th April 2007

The current favourite obsession is that Shakespeare was a secret Roman Catholic. Some of his Arden relations were undoubtedly recusants and several of the schoolmasters at Stratford Grammar were scholars who had contacts with the martyred Campion (so not just a bog-standard comprehensive then). Then there was William Shakeshafte, a player in service with the Catholic Hoghton family in Lancashire during the lost years. Could this have been the bard learning his trade under an alias (not much of an alias and Lancashire would not be very handy for dashing down to Stratford to impregnate Anne before zipping on to London to take his place in Lord Strange’s company)? And there is the ‘spiritual testament’ of Shakespeare’s father John, found hidden in the rafters of a Stratford house in 1737, full of references to Purgatory and ending with an ‘Ave Maria’. Such testaments follow a form set down by Cardinal Borromeo and are said to have been brought to England by Campion in the 1580s. But three years ago, the scholar Robert Bearman produced evidence to show that English versions of these wills did not begin to appear until the 1630s, suggesting that John Shakespeare’s one was an 18th-century fake. Father Thomas McCoog, the archivist of the British Jesuits, cannot see any evidence that links Shakespeare to the Jesuits at all. It remains possible that Shakespeare was a secret Catholic who had conformed in order to survive in those cruel chancy times, but if so, on the evidence of the plays he was such a secret one that the fact is no more important to Shakespeare as a writer than whether Glasgow Rangers’ new signing is a left-footer in the religious rather than the football sense. For Shakespeare is not a religious poet as Donne, Milton and Herbert were, and he is not a religious playwright either.

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