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.
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.
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.
Dr. White continues his first session on Macbeth with a discussion of how the characters are seemingly living in the future as the action of the play unfolds. Interspersing his commentary with well-practiced readings, Dr. White explores man’s role as the preserver of moral order, and how that role is blurred as it is surrendered to Lady Macbeth. Then he proceeds to dissect the actions and motivations of the play’s characters.
In this, part one of Dr. White’s first discussion of Macbeth, he reveals that there were dozens of strange stories and myths surrounding this particular Shakespeare tragedy. He goes on to set the stage with a brief background comparing the different characteristics of tragedy vs. comedy; then details Shakespeare’s Catholic heritage and how it influenced the spiritual conflict that is a part of all the poet’s great tragedies.
Dr. White continues his discussion of the results of incompetence in authority figures as represented in Measure for Measure, showing how the corruption of their society affects the characters, especially Isabella, who seeks refuge in the restraint and order of a convent. The character of Claudio is discussed as “the only sane and sensible character in the play.” Dr. White discusses the biblical references and Christian imagery in the play, and proves it to be, in one sense a Christmas play. Special attention is given to Isabella’s decision to grant forgiveness to the man who wronged her, bringing the idea of Mary’s Fiat to the play’s climax and resolution. The lecture closes with a few thoughts on Shakespeare’s Catholicism and Dr. White’s conviction that, in the words of a contemporary Protestant minister, “Master Shakespeare died a Papist.”
