There is no doubt that my two books on Shakespeare have been more controversial than any other books that I’ve written. It seems that the evidence that Shakespeare was Catholic has the power to enrage some people and enrapture others. Amongst those it seems to enrage are those puritanical Catholics who send me sugar-coated hate-mail because I am defending the Bard, or the Bawd as they would prefer to dub him. Others who are equally enraged are those in the secular academy who have been brought up with a specific view of Shakespeare, normally a secular view suspiciously reflective of the postmodern prejudices of the academics themselves. The very thought that Shakespeare could be a Catholic shakes the very foundations of their prejudiced perceptions and the reputations that they have erected on such fallacious foundations. To put it bluntly, the Catholic Shakespeare is a threat to the suppositions and the reputations of many academics. No wonder there is such hostility to the rising tide of evidence for the Papist Bard. Having been the recipient of a degree of abuse and hostility since my books were published, I am going to allow myself the indulgence of posting some supportive comments by a literature scholar who has found my books helpful:
Jennifer Pierce writes: I was going through back issues of First Things recently and saw the controversy in the letters and in the review of The Quest for Shakespeare and for the second time, I wished that I had caught that when it first ran! I would have written a letter in defense of your book. I think I told you this already–but I found your book indispensable in my dissertation (which the editors of Fordham University Press are interested in at the moment, so keep your fingers crossed for me). My dissertation is not dependent upon a Catholic Shakespeare but on a Catholic context, which is undeniable, given the critical mass of post-Whig scholarship sweeping history departments at the moment. I did feel it was a question I had to take on but needed to do it efficiently as it was sort of tangential to the overall thesis of the book, and your book presented the best distillation of the scholarship that I could find, bar none.
I also don’t know if I shared this with you at the time–but I reviewed it informally on my blog and the Boston Globe picked it up and ran it on the front page of their online paper so it got a fair amount of play time.
http://piercework.typepad.com/just_jen/2009/07/joseph-pearces-quest-for-shakespeare.html
I’m happy to add to the defense of a book that should become a seminal resource. I saw–briefly, I was just glancing, really—that a student from NYU contacted you, eh? Don’t be surprised if you become that kind of a resource to graduate students. There is a strong Catholic turn in history departments, super strong. Not coming from “believers” either but from people who just can’t deny the evidence of the Catholic majority in England during the Reformation(s). Literature departments are slow coming round, but you’ve now got Stephen Greenblatt, Peter Ackroyd, etc all admitting how ludicrous it is to deny Shakespeare’s Catholic context.
My advisor has actually referred several graduate students to me for assistance on the “Shakespeare Catholic” issue–and I’ve uniformly recommended your book to them for a comprehensive and even handed read of the evidence; even if they don’t ultimately agree with your conclusions, I tell them, that’s the weight of the evidence that you must work up against. Everyone finds it very useful.
Those scholars who dismiss the evidence for the Catholic Bard have not kept themselves apprised of the currents in history departments, and cling to the Shakespeare was agnostic/atheist/secular humanist/Protestant they all know and love. Or like Bloom: he’s too brilliant to entangle himself in religious affairs.
It’s easy to do that when you’ve kept yourself isolated (through tenure) from the scholarship going on in other departments, particularly medieval philosophy and history. Younger scholars just aren’t thinking that way.
So your book is hitting a nerve with the grad students who I know have read it and used it–in the sense that it reflects the currents of post-Whig history in history departments that now drama and literature students MUST take into account or else further isolate the field of arts and letters from the rest of scholarship as anything that anyone should take seriously.
For Jennifer:
That’s an interesting post. I think students of history (my discipline is literature) have long been aware of subjective reading of history in general (The cynical “history is written by victors” is now a widely known quote even among non-academics) and of the revisionist histories that have resulted from heavily invested political and economic interests–like the history of the Church of England, for example.
But the situation also says a great deal about the stifling atmosphere of academia that quells genuine inquiry and disregards valid research. (“Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” by Ben Stein comes to mind.) To become resident in the Hallowed Halls these days is to submit to intellectual tyranny, quite literally, and to enforced participation in the lynching of anyone who doesn’t. Genuine scholarship is not merely suppressed now, but murdered.
Joseph Pearce’s courageous exposition of the facts regarding Shakespeare’s almost too obvious Catholicism would get him killed in any given state university English Department. Thanks be to God (and to that courage) that we do not have to depend on professorial career ambitions in order to learn the truth about history and literature. But it’s a sad commentary indeed, isn’t it, when we must turn to non-academic sources to find out the truth?
I am grateful, personally, to be now safely retired, but my heart goes out to all those young freshman instructors in English Departments. I know what they face; I can only imagine what those in History Departments confront.
Joseph has, perhaps inadvertently, hit a nerve, the ramifications of which extend beyond–maybe far beyond–literary interests.
Hi Dena: thanks for your comments.
There HAS been a hard Catholic turn in the literature world recently, as everything seems to be reaching a critical mass at once. From post-Whig history to the popularity of mainstream writers like Eammon Duffy and Diarmaid MacCullough. Herbert Butterfield was the first formal historian to identify Whiggishness in 1923, and its sort of come into vogue again under the aegis of “aggrieved cultures” which ironically, post-colonialists have to now consider Catholic culture as well. (Begrudgingly, almost.)
You’ll actually see a very strong Duffy influence on the Showtime Series The Tudors, for example.
But it is also becoming a more mainstream topic amongst literature scholars as well (my PhD is in dramatic literature). Stephen Greenblatt and Peter Ackroyd are two very prominent scholars stating Shakespeare’s Catholic context as an obvious fact, that barely needs confirmation. They resist reading Shakespeare’s interior belief that way, naturally, but they are both at least savvy about his Catholic culture and context and the obvious recusant connections of the Shakespeare and Arden families.
Realistically, the context is all we can know for certain. Though his silence on the most pertinent topic of the age, is itself a form of evidence.
He relies on a form of irenic ambiguity which makes an absolute reading either way difficult, but again, irenic ambiguity suggests one of two things, he was either trying to please two sides or trying to hide his true point of view.
The reason this kind of suffocating, monolithic viewpoint you describe in academe is nothing to really be upset about any more is quite simple. Google and Lexis Nexis don’t really take either disciplinarity or academic fashion seriously. Just lexical relevance. This next generation of scholars is far more apt to tackle things from a more holistic viewpoint.