Posted on 05/13/2006 9:45:58 PM PDT by marshmallow
When in disgrace with fortune and mens eyes / I all alone beweep my outcast state
What does William Shakespeares immortal Sonnet 29 really mean?
Was the melancholy Bard transmitting a coded message? The hypothesis that the playwright concealed his secret Catholic identity during the years of Elizabethan persecution has long been the subject of academic daydreams.
But startling revelations in a book that is so far available only in German may take the hypothesis out of the realm of dreams. In a previous issue of the Register (Feb. 5-11), Jennifer Roche wrote about recent textual discoveries.
Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummels book The Hidden Existence of William Shakespeare: Poet and Rebel in the Catholic Underground covers recent historical discoveries. A centerpiece in the book is a hitherto unknown entry in the Pilgrims Book of the English College in Rome. On April 16, 1585, a Gulielmus Clerkue Stratfordienses (William, Secretary of Stratford) signed his name on arriving to the college. Was this the same William who was born in Stratford-on-Avon?
Shakespeare would have been 21 at the time. Similar entries are to be found in 1587 and 1589. Remarkably, these three visits in Rome coincide with the so-called seven lost years in Shakespeares official biography. It also coincides with the dates that English Catholics in exile met in Rome with their leaders Robert Parsons and William Allen to develop new strategies of resistance in the Protestant England of Queen Elizabeth I.
Scholars have long agreed that Shakespeares family background was staunchly Catholic, as Roche reported. Hammerschmidt now offers further details that support the thesis that Shakespeare held to the faith of his family, preferring to hide his true colors and work secretly rather than risk martyrdom.
For seven years, William was taught at the Latin school by Simon Hunt, a Catholic. In 1575, Hunt went to the Jesuit Collegium Anglicum in Douay, which in turn moved to Rheims, France, in 1578. Perhaps not coincidentally, Rheims figures as a place of study in Shakespeares The Taming of the Shrew. Hammerschmidt claims that the young Shakespeare, on reaching college age in 1578, would have gone to study there.
Rheims was then the only English Catholic college, and represented the normal route for other English Catholics who desired to study humanities. This education there would have provided him with all necessary requisites for his later career in poetry.
Hammerschmidt cites a record of Shakespeares father John raising a major loan that year and surmises that its purpose may have been to finance these studies. As Ernst Honigmann points out in his book on Shakespeares lost years, William took a job as a private tutor in 1580 in the household of Alexander Hoghton in Lancashire under the name Shakeshafte, which had already been used by his grandfather. At that time, the place where he taught was a Catholic stronghold or even, as Richard Wilson writes in the Times Literary Supplement (Dec. 19, 1997), nothing less than the secret college and headquarters of the English Counter Reformation, equipped with a big library and dedicated to an intense apologetic work against the Anglican heretics.
Furthermore, Shakespeare is mentioned in Hoghtons will. The same document, in what Hammerschmidt calls coded language, gives hints to Hoghtons involvement in a secret organization for the protection of hiding Catholic priests.
In 1582, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway and took up residence at Stratford. What would he have been doing in Rome three years later, then, in order to have signed the colleges guestbook? Hammerschmidt proposes that Shakespeares sudden departure from England may have been triggered by the embroilment of the Arden-Somerville family his mothers family in a Catholic conspiracy. He may have feared that his own membership in a Catholic secret organization could have brought him into trouble, and might have preferred to disappear for a while. Only in 1592 does the historical record definitively resume as Shakespeare again surfaces in London at the beginning of his illustrious career.
Even then, Shakespeare may have remained secretly linked to the Catholic resistance. Shakespeare acquired part of the London Blackfriars building (though he himself never lived there). The Dominican facility was riddled with hidden tunnels and passages, and was a meeting place and refuge for persecuted priests. The buildings purpose came to light in 1623, after Shakespeares death, when a ceiling suddenly collapsed during a secret Catholic service, killing 99 of the faithful. They were denied Church burial by the Anglican archbishop of London. When Shakespeare bought this property, in the contract he gave indications that reveal, as Hammerschmidt writes, an almost perfect arrangement of the Catholic underground: The poet contributed the lodging and the owner of the Mermaid Tavern the food provisions; a magnate of a ship secured the transportation and the business manager of Shakespeares company the organization. The nearby theater could provide costumes, wigs and false beards, if required.
Shakespeare provided for the houses upkeep even after his death.
Could he then have traveled once more to Rome? In October 1613, the presumed pseudonym Ricardus Stratfordus appears on the colleges guestbook Richard was the name of Shakespeares paternal grandfather and also of the last of his brothers, buried in Stratford in February 1613. As Jennifer Roche and some Register readers already pointed out, not a few passages of Shakespeares work take on fresh meaning in the light of his crypto-Catholicism and the inner conflict of conscience occasioned by the high opinion in which London society held their most-esteemed poet.
Hammerschmidt reads sonnets 29 and 66 as bemoaning the desperate situation of the Catholic population of Elizabethan England.
Curiously, X-ray research now tells us that the poets famous flower-portrait was painted over a beautiful picture of the Blessed Virgin Mary with her child. Does that mirror the fact that Shakespeare himself led a double life?
If Hammerschmidts theories are true, Shakespeares genius is further reflected in his ability to so discreetly reflect on Catholic issues in public, that his true intentions are revealed only to the eye of the initiated.
And Elizabeth herself, one of Shakespeares greatest admirers, would have been shocked to learn his real intent in writing the concluding line of Sonnet 29: I scorn to change my state with kings.
Legionary Father Andreas Kramarz teaches at the Legionaries of Christs Novitiate and College of Humanities in Cheshire, Connecticut.
Interesting theory; of course it's only fair that this pops up on the heels of the hopelessly-overrated daVinci thing. Still, it's a nice comeback, and it puts William Shakespeare on the side, if not of the angels, then of the True Faith. After all, Shakespeare did have a hand in translating the King James version of the Bible, and if Shakespeare is good enough for Jesus Christ, he's more than good enough for me!
Of course this will also resurrect (sorry) the old did-Bacon-write-Shakespeare thing; and did Shakespeare ever write Bacon back? (hee hee)
The English aristocracy has never been happy with the idea that the greatest practioner of the English tongue was a commomer; therefore the notion that Bacon wrote the plays. This is not a new proposition, his being Catholic, but it appears that there is new evidence to support it.
Not trying to be difficult, but at that time in England everyone's "family background" was "staunchly Catholic."
Not in the 1570's and 1580's. By then the Catholic faith had been overturned in England (despite the brief reign of Mary in the 1550's) for a generation. Those who remained Catholic throughout the 1540's, 50's, 60's and so on would have had to have been "staunch" to say the least.
What is this famous "flower portrait" the article refers to?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4471515.stm
It says, "family BACKGROUND."
Background IS one generation or more....and it was all catholic.
Technically, the Catholic faith, btw, was not overturned in England. The "Roman" variety of Catholicism was rejected.
The nation reverted to its Old English Catholic background that existed prior to William the Conqueror.
So he wasn't preaching the gospel in India or Ireland?
(Just kidding... I don't mean to ridicule this, as I have long been interested in the proposed Catholicism of Shakespeare.)
There is nothing "Catholic" about defacing sacred art; ruining monasteries and abbeys; executing monks; throwing out sacred vessels, altar linens, and other artifacts; banning practices like the veneration of the Cross upon pain of imprisonment, etc.
It's a nice little Anglican conceit that they were bringing England back to its true Catholic heritage, but if you look at what actually happened, it was a religious revolution.
Early Christianity in England looked farther east than to Rome. One of the reasons for Williams conquest was to bring England into the Roman fold it had previously resisted.
The following is a really well done site and fun to tool around in.
I don't know that you'll like the history in it, but the design has always impressed me, and I think the history is pretty good.
I'm sending you to a religion page on the site, but go to "home" as well
http://battle1066.com/faith.shtml
Some believe that Psalm 46 may have been translated by Shakespeare. The King James version of the Bible was printed when Shakespeare was 46 years old. Moreover, the 46th word from the beginning of the psalm is "shake" and the 46th word from the end of the psalm is "spear."
Also, "WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE" is an anagram of "HERE WAS I, LIKE A PSALM".
Good stuff. Thanks.
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