We have been blessed over the years to enjoy Fr. Milward’s critique of the contents of each new issue of the St. Austin Review and to publish his comments here on the Ink Desk. I’m doing so again but feel it necessary to defend some of our contributors from what I take to be Fr. Milward’s misreading of Hamlet. My own reading of this play is to be found in chapters thirteen to twenty-one of my book Through Shakespeare’s Eyes, which I will not expand upon here. Needless to say, I respect Fr. Milward’s exemplary contribution to Shakespeare studies, especially his groundbreaking work revealing the evidence of the Bard’s Catholic faith, but this does not mean that we need to agree with all that he writes and believes. All of the foregoing having been said, I’m delighted to publish Fr. Milward’s comments:

 

Comments on StAR Mar/Apr 2016

 

From your fine editorial: What a wonderful turn of phrase, “our tainted nation’s solitary boast”!  Britain isn’t worthy of him, but England was.  England was a Catholic country, but Britain is Protestant.  I take issue with Ben Jonson, as being an apostate.  Shakespeare is very much of his age, as all his plays attest, whereas modernist producers and critics like to bring him “up to date”.  Good, that “none can claim him but all should acclaim him”, except that Elizabethan Catholics have every right to claim him.  Better say “Catholic orthodoxy”, rather than “Christian orthodoxy”, considering that Protestants, too, may lay claim to the latter.  Your criticism of Zeitgeist is excellent!

 

On Frank Brownlow’s article, He has found a happy hunting-ground on “what Shakespeare’s editors don’t know”.  He could have filled a whole book on the subject. Yes, England is indeed not just (as Cardinal Basil Hume recognized) a post-Christian, but still subconsciously an anti-Catholic country.  So for the English to do justice to the annotating of a Shakespeare play would require “an unthinkable revision of the entire historical narrative”.  Here the main emphasis is on Shakespeare’s remarkable familiarity with the Catholic liturgy, as I have also pointed out in an Appendix to my Renaissance Monograph, The Plays and the Exercises (2002), but the question remains, how could he have acquired such familiarity?  Was it from books of devotion, such as the primers, or possibly from actual experience whether in houses of Catholic recusants (such as William Byrd) or even abroad?  As for Ophelia’s relapse into Catholic speech during her madness, it strangely contrasts with her evidently Puritan family as depicted in the third scene, and thus it serves to show how shallow is the Puritan conscious overlay to a deeper subconscious Catholic memory in Elizabethan England,  Here I disagree about the exclamation, “Angels and ministers of grace, defend us!”  It is indeed a characteristic hendiadys of Shakespeare’s, evidently based on his favorite Psalm 103 (104) 4.  I, too, think – on the basis of incontestable evidence – that Polonius is a spoof on Lord Burghley.  As I have said, Ben Jonson himself turned government spy after the “exposure” of the Gunpowder Plot.  He is not to be trusted!  As for Macduff’s horror at the despoliation of “the temple” in the murder of Duncan, it may be compared not just to the absence of the Blessed Sacrament from churches in Elizabethan England, but also and much more to the spoliation of so many monasteries in Henrician England – by means of which Cromwell promised to make Henry the richest man in Europe.  As for the Countess’ reference to the Virgin Mary in All’s Well, there is, I submit, a calculated ambiguity between the Virgin and the heroine, as so often in the plays – as I have shown in detail in my preceding article.  The same ambiguity recurs even more impressively in Pericles, when the hero recognizes his daughter as “Thou that begettst him that did thee beget” – which is a literal translation of the hymn Alma Redemptoris Mater, “Tu quae geuisti (Natura mirante) tuum sanctum genitorem”, as I have also pointed out in my article.

 

Lydia Martin on “Married Virtue” One can’t trust Hamlet when he claims any degree of virtue, least of all in his closet scene with his poor mother.  He may lay claim to neither mercy nor justice.  It does poor Lear an injustice to concentrate on his opening lack of justice in the distribution of his kingdom.  That is just a preliminary to his growth in self-knowledge, culminating in his sermon against injustice, in his pity on “poor naked wretches”, as personified in Edgar, and in his eventual reconciliation with Cordelia, when she exchanges her original “Nothing” for her repeated “I am, I am!” The weakness of The Merchant of Venice is seen in the requirement that Shylock become a Christian.  No Christian may force his faith on another, least of all a Jew, and yet there are all too many examples of it in the history of the Church,

 

Andrew Seeley on Hamlet.  From his opening sentence, “I have never really liked Hamlet, neither the character nor the play,” I find myself in full agreement.  Indeed, I have written a whole book, Meta-drama in Hamlet (2013), to bear out my agreement. Yes, Hamlet’s words are powerful, because they are Shakespeare’s words, but Hamlet himself is such a muddle-headed hero (if he can be called a hero), with his education in Luther’s Wittenberg and his position as a recusant back in Denmark/ England.  In so far as he is a recusant in agreement with the former regime under his Catholic father, and his disagreement with the present secularist regime, his problem of “To be or not to be” may be seen illustrated partly in his own hesitancy, which he castigates as cowardice, partly in those disaffected Catholic gentlemen like Robert Catesby who went ahead first with the Essex Rebellion, then with the Gunpowder Plot. Yes, at the heart of the play is the problem of conscience, but it has to be recognized that there are (even in those days) two meanings of “conscience”, that of a moral conscience, as exhibited by Claudius and eventually by Gertrude, and that of an intellectual consciousness, which is emphasized by Hamlet.  In Hamlet himself I find no signs of a moral conscience.  Yes, “much has been made”, by critics such as CS Lewis, “of Hamlet’s new-found sense of Providence in Act V” (but Lewis knows nothing of Shakespeare) – oddly including the signet ring that enables him to send Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their certain deaths in England, “Not shriving time allowed”.  Yet it would seem as if it is the guidance of Providence that leaves the stage awash in blood, and the members of the audience bewildered at what the dramatist means by it all.  Did he himself really know?

 

On Maria Devlin’s Logos and Language in Macbeth.  Again, if only she could have read my Meta-drama in Macbeth she might have come upon many clues as to the dramatist’s

hidden meaning, with reference not so much to the contemporary usage of words as to the contemporary situation of Elizabethan England.  After all, it has to be emphasized that Shakespeare is interested not in Hamlet’s Denmark, nor in Macbeth’s Scotland, nor in Lear’s Britain, but in Elizabethan England, his own age and his own nation.

 

Finally, on Benedict Kiely’s “Sword of the Spirit”, while agreeing with all he says, and especially with his quotations from Chesterton, I would add that “The Book of Job” is also one of Shakespeare’s favorite books of the Bible, partly because it is the one book of the Bible that comes closest to Greek drama, as exemplified in the plays of Aeschylus, partly for its reflections on life after death in the early chapters (from 7 to 14).  I have counted so many echoes from Job (50) in Hamlet and (25) in King Lear.