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.
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.
In this enlightening lecture, Dr. White comments on how the modern adaptations of The Merchant of Venice turn a beautiful comedy into a tragedy of Shylock, thus ruining the play’s comedic purpose and message. He sets about refuting this false view and showing the audience what Shylock’s real place in the play is, disclosing his true role as the villain or problem of the play, and how he comes to be in that position to begin with. He discusses the role of outsiders in Shakespeare’s great comedies in relation to Shylock, and refutes the charge of racism leveled against the playwright, pointing out among other things that there were hardly enough Jews in England in Shakespeare’s time for him to conceive a driving hatred of them. An exposition of Shylock’s intense hate of Antonio and all he stands for leads into a brilliant discussion of the problem of usury within the context of the play and the fundamental disorderedness of usury in general.
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.
