From Peter Milward S.J.

 

Please allow me once again to offer my comments on your latest issue of StAR, which inevitably, centring as it does on Shakespeare, is surely one of your best issues.

a. As usual I admire your editorial, especially for your judicious quotations from Newman and Chesterton.  Your English style is superb.  Only, I have to point out that Shakespeare’s enemy at Charlecote was not a Sir Richard but Sir Thomas Lucy.  Still, you may be relieved to hear that this places you in the same category as CS Lewis, who in his English Literature of the Sixteenth Century names the great Catholic champion in controversy with John Jewel “John Harding”, instead of Thomas Harding.  It seems you both have an unconscious prejudice against the name of Thomas!

b. I have to thank you for kindly publishing my article, though I failed to recognize the title – even to the extent of wondering what was “the turning-point in Shakespearian drama”?  Similarly, I also failed to see myself in the following article by Veronica Lyter, devoted to an elucidation of my Pattern in Shakespeare’s Carpet, even though (or rather because) she keeps on repeating my name, which got on my nerves – as if she is dissociating herself from everything I seem to be saying.  For instance, why does she speak of Shakespeare’s “ideal” heroines “as Milward terms them”?  I think anyone would term them as such!  And when it comes to All’s Well,all isn’t well with her comments on the play, which is surely, like so many of Shakespeare’s plays, on the theme of the Prodigal Son.  Nor does she notice the evidence I adduce to show that Helena is explicitly a Mary-figure, in the estimation both of the French king, whom she cures, and of the Countess, in her remarks concerning her wayward son. 

c. As for Graeme Garvey’s interview with you, I find it raising two interesting points.  First, you speak about the period “in which England was almost pathological in its hatred of the faith”.  That is true, but it elicits in my mind the all-important question, Why?  The answer I would give, after long consideration of the matter, is simply the name of Lord Burghley, who also got John Foxe to publish his Book of Martyrs in 1563, and behind him, of course, there was the rabble of Puritan fanatics (patronized by Burghley) who figure collectively in Spenser’sFaery Queene as “the Blatant Beast”.  Secondly, in dealing with the distinction between “a Catholic writer” and “a Catholic who was Catholic”, you come down, quite rightly, on the former alternative for Shakespeare.  But I have heard (with my own ears when I was at Oxford) Evelyn Waugh coming down on the latter both for himself and, I suspect, for Graham Greene as well.  Incidentally, mightn’t these two Catholic writers make a good subject for your next venture into the genre of “literary biography”.

d. As for the article on Tolkien and Shakespeare, I regret to say that Fr Dwight is quite right.  I have, in fact, reviewed a whole book on this subject, whose title and author I have forgotten.  Anyhow, I can see that Tolkien is quite prejudiced against Shakespeare, not just like so many English schoolboys who leave school saying they won’t touch Shakespeare again, but because of his allergy to allegory, which he came to share with CS Lewis.  If only he could have recognized the metadrama behind the drama, and the fantasy behind the fact in all the plays!  Still, I found the article a little strange, in that Fr Dwight seemed to be leading me up the garden path, in order to spring a surprise, only he didn’t, with some evidence that Tolkien highly esteemed Shakespeare after all.

e. In John Beaumont’s article on Joe Sobran, while I approve of his refusal to touch on that author’s “lunatic fringe” (no doubt under the influence of a certain Thomas Looney), I fully approve of his author’s common-sensical disapproval of the scholarly search for “the real Jesus”.  Once I was staying at Georgetown University and I was having breakfast in company with the famous Jesuit scripture scholar, Fr Joe Fitzmyer.  In the course of our conversation I happened to express my opinion that the whole search for “the real Jesus” behind the Gospels was a waste of time, and he got so angry – he wouldn’t speak to me again.  But I am unrepentant – except in the Ignatian sense of coming to know the heart of Jesus by meditating on the Gospels.

f. I really think Dena Hunt hits the nail on the head in her review of your book on love, when she remarks, “One cannot recognize – cannot see – something one simply does not know, something one does not even believe really exists.”  Such is the mentality of those Shakespearian agnostics, whose minds are closed to all our arguments!

g. With reference to the other review by Clara Sarrocco, in my whole approach to Shakespeare I accept what CS Lewis mistakenly rejects as “the personal heresy”.  It is precisely through the plays that we touch on the heart of the dramatist, and (as you say about “the Catholic writer”) it is a Catholic heart, as I find it so clearly revealed in “the pattern in Shakespeare’s carpet”, to which I am afraid Veronica Lyter was so blind.

h. I warmly concur with the two reviews, the one on Robert George, with whom I made contact on reading his excellent book, and he kindly replied to me, and the other on the sad downfall of Notre Dame, which has become so secularized.  My ideas on the latter university I obtained many years ago through E Michael Jones, when he was editor of Fidelity and I was a frequent contributor of book reviews for him.

So once again my thanks for this wonderful issue, and my best wishes for the New Year!

 

                                                                Peter Milward SJ