Continuing my habit of including visitors to this site in some of my correspondence, I thought I’d share my response to someone who queried the extent of Shakespeare’s Catholicism, arguing that “there’s something I see in Dante that I don’t always see in Shakespeare (something that isn’t simply dealing with the accident of historical time/place/context)”. Here’s my response:
Please remember that the experience of being a member of the Church Militant changes from age to age. Dante was writing in the golden days of scholasticism, in the immediate afterglow of the brilliance of Thomas Aquinas, a brilliance that shines forth in every Canto of the Divine Comedy. In Dante’s day the Church Militant often sounded like the Church Triumphalist (if not, of course, the Church Triumphant). Shakespeare was writing in the dark days of the English Reformation, in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the monasteries and in the midst of the bloody martyrdom of England’s Catholics, a destructive and bloody darkness that overshadows almost every play, whether ostensibly a tragedy or a comedy. In Shakespeare’s day, in England, the Church Militant invariably sounded like the thing it had become: the Church Catacombed! I would argue that Shakespeare is as Catholic as Dante. The difference is that Shakespeare is living in a humanist and proto-secularist culture, which had declared war on the Faith, whereas Dante is living in a scholastic culture, in which the Faith had declared war on secularism.
Moreover, Catholics are not parrots.
But–
The almost miraculous thing about Catholic poets and artists is that, although they speak centuries apart, there is never so much as a contradictory comma.
That nothing in any of Shakespeare’s works contains even a suggestion of contradiction to the Church is nothing less than remarkable, even without considering the hostility of the time in which he lived and wrote. The only wonder is–how did he get away with it?
I think that perhaps one way to express the difference between Shakespeare’s works and Dante is that while Shakespeare was in his necessarily cryptic was defending Catholicism to people radically opposed to it, Dante was reveling and glorying in the Catholicism of his time. Shakespeare from time to time popped up briefly like Punch in a Punch and Judy show, delivered a pro-Catholic sentiment then popped back off the stage before the anti-Catholic audience had noticed what he had done. He used the secular reality of his time to, by contrast, demonstrate the hidden truths of Catholicism. Dante, on the other hand, simply assumed the open Catholicism of his audience and used it to comment on the secular events of his time and of pagan history. Dante was, in an odd way, almost an apologist for secular culture while Shakespeare was a sub rosa apologist for Catholic culture.
I didn’t state this very well, but perhaps at best it gives a slight but useful tweak to the above posting’s descriiption of the basic differences between the great Italian poet and the great English poet/dramatist.
By the way, I very much enjoyed The Quest for Shakespeare. From the time I was in high school, Isuspected, based on what I saw in his plays, that Shakespeare was a Catholic. By the end of The Quest, I was sure that I was right. Thank you for the excellent book.