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.
In the character of Portia, Dr. White discerns a beautiful example of Catholic femininity. He discusses how Portia takes on the role of intercessor and peacemaker between the conflicting characters of the play, the theme of risking all for a beloved continued in her daring disguise and intervention in Antonio’s court case. Dr. White extends this theme to the deep friendship between Antonio and Bassiano, a friendship which makes Antonio willing even to die for his friend. Portia’s justly famous speech on “the quality of mercy” is explained clearly and in detail, and the third plot of Portia’s ring analyzed. Dr. White ends this lecture on the Christian comedy of The Merchant of Venice by tying it into to the spiritual world of a Christian, viewing the play’s ending as a vision of the Biblical Marriage Feast of Cana. His insight and clear explanation of the themes and elements of The Merchant of Venice are invaluable to a proper understanding and appreciation of Shakespeare’s genius.
In “The False Tragedy of Shylock” the modern view of Shylock as a tragic hero is skillfully refuted and Shylock’s character and fate examined. Dr. White explains the play’s themes of the Old Testament idea of justice vs. the Christian idea of mercy and tackles the difficult subjects of usury and anti-Semitism fairly and from a truly Catholic viewpoint. He shows that Shylock, while not a good character, is not a two-dimensional, stereotypical scoundrel, but a rounded, lifelike villain with emotions and affections. Dr. White shows how deep his hate for Antonio runs, how the basis of his conflict is the bare fact of his being an outsider, not specifically that he is a Jew, and how he brings his fate upon himself by his demand for justice.
The most famous speech in the play, perhaps in all of English literature, appears in Act Three. The question is about suicide. Hamlet’s pattern of thought now brings him to this. In the first act when he speaks of suicide, he decides not, it is against God’s law. Now he considers the act. Now dealing with an abstract question. There is nothing that is good or bad but only thinking makes it so. There is no pattern to life, only fortune, whimsy, and change. Hamlet cannot act because he believes in nothing. Hamlet gives voice to the turmoil in Shakespeare’s own life. He himself was overwhelmed, full of doubt, was not sure what to believe. He was on the verge of loosing balance. This is the playwright working it out in art. When Hamlet rebukes Ophelia, he severs his last link with sanity. Shakespeare used virtuous women in his tragedies for the spiritual health of the men. Hamlet’s treatment of her is the mark of how far he has fallen. This act is the center of the play, where the climax takes place. For the fist half of the play, there is thought without action. Now there is action without thought.
