For many, Shakespeare’s faith is inconsequential: for Catholics it is important. His lineage proves his Catholicism. His paternal grandfather, Richard, worked on the estate of a prominent and devout Catholic family. His father, John, married a daughter from this family, Mary. Despite the difference in their class, the unifying trait is their Faith. John became a prominent member of the community. His fortunes began to fall circa 1577 or 1578 due to the persecution of Catholics. Young William at 11 years old witnessed the great medieval Mystery Plays depicting the Catholic Faith, thus exposing him to theater as Catholic education. Later as a young playwright in London, William knew a number of prominent Catholics. When he retired, he purchased a property in London that was later learned to be a Mass center, where priests could come and secretly say Mass. Why is Shakespeare so important? T.S. Eliot said that Dante and Shakespeare share the world between them. Dante is a spiritual writer, Shakespeare is secular; he has one foot in the medieval world and the other in the modern world. He is a divided man and uses drama to battle out the differences. He is one of the greatest storytellers of all time.
William Shakespeare was not a courageous man, and subject to human frailty. When he married Anne Hathaway, she was already pregnant. She was eight years his senior, and stayed behind in Stratford with the children while he lived and worked in London, suggesting a strained marriage. He learned of different types of love, and was inspired to write beautiful sonnets. He also had an adulterous affair, which tore him apart emotionally and spiritually, and wrote of this too. This understanding of love helped in writing Romeo and Juliet. The play is about authority not exercising its proper role. There is fighting in Verona between the prominent Capulet and Montague families because the Prince is weak. The parents are weak. The young adults have the leisure of wealth, and thus fall in and out of love on a whim. The Friar, while a good and holy man, is also weak and makes poor decisions. The result: Romeo and Juliet do fall in chaste love, marry in secret, and commit suicide. The horror of their self-inflicted murders shocked Elizabethan Catholics who understood this not as a sentimental act, but sin. Order is restored at the end of the play after these unnecessary deaths.
Conversion is a two-step process: restore the humanity in the person to help them reconnect to the world, then connect them to God. Restore man to man, then man to God. The reason for this is because humanism excluded man from God, and the modern world removed man from nature. Man has to be restored to his nature for him to understand the nature of God. The study of the plays of Shakespeare is an excellent means to accomplish this. Have students memorize large sections of his work. They will carry this for their entire life. Hi characters are fully human, full of vice and virtue. They struggle with this and teach us to see our own struggles. His plays follow the mysteries of the Rosary. His comedies are the Joyful Mysteries (Comedy of Errors, Midsummer Night’s Dream) and are full of joy and wonder. He tragedies are the Sorrowful Mysteries (Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth) and track his dark days and struggles of doubt and even despair. His last plays reflect the Glorious Mysteries (Winter’s Tale, The Tempest) and show resolution in his life; they come at the very end of his career, and include visions of heaven and eternity.
The last four plays of Shakespeare’s career are his romances (Pericles, Cymbeline, The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale.) In these plays he sums up all he has learned about life and his craft. They are filled with religious notions that his Catholic audience will recognize. He is sending them a message of hope. These plays too are a unique blend of comedy and tragedy. All drama is based in conflict. The conflict in comedy deals with individual desires verses the social norm. In the end a comprise is made and all parties are satisfied. The conflict in tragedy is an individual who challenges the metaphysical and gets crushed in the process. Wisdom is the fruit of this suffering. In the romantic plays there are no gigantic characters like Macbeth or Othello; rather the plot drives the play. There are no external forces to tempt the main character to do wrong; they just do it. The natural and supernatural (fantasy) is woven throughout to help move the plot along. In The Winter’s Tale the king without reason accuses his best friend and faithful wife of infidelity. He decides what is real and what is not: the very principle of Protestantism.
The first three acts of The Winter’s Tale contain the tragedy of the play. The final two acts, based on the principles of comedy, resolve the tragedy. King Leontes accuses his faithful wife Herimone and best friend King Polixenes of adultery. He flees to save his life and she is put on public trial. She stands firm in her defense; the king will hear none of it. Even a message from the oracle claiming her innocence does not set with the king: the oracle is wrong in the mind of the demented royal. Their son Mamillius has taken ill over his mother’s plight, and with the denial of the oracles decree, dies. His death represents the loss of grace. It is Leontes versus the truth, and he and his family and his kingdom will lose and suffer. Once the imagination becomes corrupt, man is capable of anything. Shakespeare is showing us in the short span of these first three acts what will take centuries for the world to reap as the consequences of denying the Roman Catholic Church. But this is a play of hope, and the final two acts resolve the damage done in the fist three.
Comedy, the conflict of the individual verses society, rules this fourth act. The story now shifts to Bohemia, and we get a sense that this is a simpler land, a land of peace and grace. This is a new world. This new land is protected in some manner, a place of small problems but not large destructive patterns. The infant daughter of Leontes and Herimone, Perdita, who was ordered by her father to be abandoned in the woods to die, was saved and is now 16 years old. She knows nothing of her parentage. She hasm become a woman filled with grace, like her mother Herimone. She has fallen in love with Prince Florizel, son of King Polixenes, and the father has refused the marriage. Camillio, now the good servant to Polixenes, but places loyalty to the truth above loyalty to man, spirits the young couple back to Sicily, knowing that Polixenes will follow. This is a marriage that can bring new life, new order. Purity that was lost is recovered. This act provides the transition needed from the derangement, despair and death of the first thee acts and sets the stage for the reunions and miracle of the last.
