SHAKSPER 2002: Re: Proto-Catholilcs? Proto-Prods?

From: Hardy M. Cook (editor@shaksper.net)
Date: 02/26/02 

The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 13.0566  Tuesday, 26 February 2002

[1]     From:   Martin Steward <MSteward@mds1974.freeserve.co.uk>
        Date:   Monday, 25 Feb 2002 18:27:04 -0000
        Subj:   Re: SHK 13.0547 Re: Proto-Catholilcs? Proto-Prods?

[2]     From:   R. Schmeeckle <rschmeec@u.washington.edu>
        Date:   Monday, 25 Feb 2002 14:52:20 -0800 (PST)
        Subj:   Re: SHK 13.0547 Re: Proto-Catholilcs? Proto-Prods?

[3]     From:   Peter Hyland <phyland@uwo.ca>
        Date:   Monday, 25 Feb 2002 14:54:32 -0800
        Subj:   Re: SHK 13.0547 Re: Proto-Catholilcs? Proto-Prods?


[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Martin Steward <MSteward@mds1974.freeserve.co.uk>
Date:           Monday, 25 Feb 2002 18:27:04 -0000
Subject: 13.0547 Re: Proto-Catholilcs? Proto-Prods?
Comment:        Re: SHK 13.0547 Re: Proto-Catholilcs? Proto-Prods?

I'm always pleased to have warmed someone’s cockles (although I will
have no truck with backchannels). Sam makes a valiant effort to equate
Shakespeare's conservatism (which I too sense in the plays) with Roman
Catholicism:

"All I can say is that many of the plays and more so the poems suggest a
conservative morality; extreme maybe, perhaps a longing for the days of
Eden.  I refer to Love's Answer from the 20th poem in The Passionate
Pilgrim:

"'If that the world and love were young,
And truth in every shepherd's tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move
To live with thee and be thy love.'

"The second line I find most intriguing.  We all know it is a long time
ago when shepherds knew how the wide world works.  A very long time
ago.  Is this a reference to a heavenly origin of mankind?  How young is
Shakespeare meaning in line one?  Even if my tenuous deliberation has
some merit it still does not make Shakespeare a Catholic until we
appreciate that conservative Christians in the 1590s would be more
attracted to Romanism than the apparently self-serving Anglicanism
barely 70 years old." [More which was also interesting but this will
do...]

Let's pass over the difficulties of talking about "Anglicanism" in the
1590s, as I'm sure we all understand what Sam has in mind. What bothers
me is that the pastoral ideal he locates at the centre of Shakespearean
conservatism seems to have more in common with aristocratic radical
Protestantism than Roman Catholicism. I think this is an aesthetic
inheritance rather than an ideological one, however (for me, WS is a
high church Protestant like Hooker and Andrewes, a moderate, a
conservative, a humanist, did not like a fuss, etc.): it's what he takes
away from Sidney, Spenser and (to a certain extent) Marlowe. Compare Ben
Jonson's explicit disavowal of this aesthetic heritage during his Roman
Catholic period.

Actually, I've not thought about it in this way before, and it's
intriguing.  So I heartily maintain that my self-interest in warming
said cockles has been generously repaid.

m

[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           R. Schmeeckle <rschmeec@u.washington.edu>
Date:           Monday, 25 Feb 2002 14:52:20 -0800 (PST)
Subject: 13.0547 Re: Proto-Catholilcs? Proto-Prods?
Comment:        Re: SHK 13.0547 Re: Proto-Catholilcs? Proto-Prods?

   Sam Small wrote,

> I, like everyone else, have no proof of Shakespeare's confirmed
> religion.

   Sam, conservatively, asserts only what can be known.

> Even if my tenuous deliberation has
> some merit it still does not make Shakespeare a Catholic until we
> appreciate that conservative Christians in the 1590s would be more
> attracted to Romanism than the apparently self-serving Anglicanism
> barely 70 years old.  As in R&J, Titus and other plays, Shakespeare is
> terrified of social chaos - hardly the calling card of a social
> progressive.  But again we cannot apply modern constructs of religious

Horrors!  Shakespeare seems to be the one thing Sam loathes more than
Catholicism, a conservative.

>  Perhaps then Catholicism was more of a
> political movement than a Christian flavour, as it is today.  Natural

Nice touch.  It reminds me of Paul Goodman (a good Jew, by the way)
saying that anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the liberals.

> conservatives have an instant aversion to any new ideas, especially when
> the propagators take an aggressive stand, as Henry VIII and his daughter
> Elizabeth both did against the old, orthodox Catholic world.  This would
> also account for Shakespeare's apparently immoral gallivanting about
> with young women in their bedchambers.  The narrowly focused, sexual

Sam sticks by his guns re wild Bill "gallivanting about," despite it
having been pointed out by several on this thread that there is no
evidence to support this slanderous assertion (although Sam might regard
it as complimentary) other than dubious interpretation of some of the
poetry.  So, given the lack of conclusive evidence, why does one choose
(or is it just a case of subconscious wish fulfillment?) to believe that
Shakespeare was a sexual predator?

> If you get past the polite diplomacy of most western Christians and
> scratch the surface just a little deep you will find that they will
> admit to the thought that the world would be better if it were all
> Christian.  A little deeper and they will tell you that Moslems,
> Buddhists, Hindus etc are just plain wrong.  Cut them till it hurts and
> they will tell you that those other groups are Satanic.  The sad truth
> of this wide and wicked world is that all other organised religions have
> exactly the same mindset.  Hence their desperate expansionist policies
> which could take us all to hell.  And so we come right back to the
> preoccupation of Shakespeare - the avoidance of destructive conflict.

These are strong assertions, all belied by my personal experience and my
knowledge about Catholicism.  If Sam wants to contact me privately I
will tell him why I reject them, while admitting that they contain a
shred of truth.

But the tone of Sam's discourse reminds me of the priest who said, with
regard to Christianity, either one pope or every man his own pope.  So
why should we heed Sam's ipse dixit?

  Roger Schmeeckle

[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Peter Hyland <phyland@uwo.ca>
Date:           Monday, 25 Feb 2002 14:54:32 -0800
Subject: 13.0547 Re: Proto-Catholilcs? Proto-Prods?
Comment:        Re: SHK 13.0547 Re: Proto-Catholilcs? Proto-Prods?

Sam Small writes,

>I, like everyone else, have no proof of Shakespeare's confirmed
>religion.  All I can say is that many of the plays and more so the poems
>suggest a conservative morality; extreme maybe, perhaps a longing for
>the days of Eden.  I refer to Love's Answer from the 20th poem in The
>Passionate Pilgrim:
>
>If that the world and love were young,
>And truth in every shepherd's tongue,
>These pretty pleasures might me move
>To live with thee and be thy love.

Mr Small builds a large argument out of a strained reading of a poem
that, unfortunately for his theory, was not written by Shakespeare. It
was cobbled together out of poems by Marlowe and Raleigh, presumably by
the publisher of THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM, the egregious William Jaggard.
The lines quoted by Mr Small are the opening lines of Raleigh's "The
Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd."

This is surely a flimsy foundation, even for Mr Small's "tenuous
deliberation" about Shakespeare's Catholicism and his prelapsarian
yearnings. Unless, of course, he wants to argue that Raleigh plagiarised
the poem from Shakespeare. I'd certainly like to see the evidence for
that.

Peter Hyland

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