Shakespeare

Which is as much as to say that his sympathies, such as they were, lay entirely with the unfolding of the drama. It might even be suggested that the food riots at the beginning of the play (not present in the source, which merely describes the popular clamour of the Romans against usury) may simply have been Shakespeare’s way of arresting the attention of his audience. It was a way of allowing them access to the world of ancient Rome. It was a way of gaining their imaginative assent by presenting something topical and familiar. Certainly the theme of dearth disappears from the gathering drama. Once it had achieved its purpose, it was forgotten. It is an important token of Shakespeare’s true response to the world, which may well have been one of utter calmness and even of disinterest.

It has sometimes been surmised that he treats Coriolanus himself with a respect not untinged with admiration. He seems to be aware of his follies but forgives them for the sake of the character he presents to the audience. And that is the important point. The dramatist is intent upon presenting a character of power. Individual power is theatrical. Power misused and abused is also dramatic. Coriolanus is a thing of power; when he ceases to be that, he ceases to exist. That is the only reason Shakespeare chose him out of Plutarch. In a very interesting essay on Coriolanus William Hazlitt asserts that “the imagination is an exaggerating and exclusive faculty … which seeks the greatest quantity of present excitement by inequality and disproportion.” Thus poetry puts “the one above the infinite many, might before right.” 4So the position of Coriolanus, reviled by the mass and exiled from Rome only to vow a terrible vengeance, is infinitely dramatic and elicits from Shakespeare some of his finest poetry.

One of the most powerful figures in Coriolanus is the mother of the eponymous hero, Volumnia, who has sometimes been considered to be a portrait of Shakespeare’s own mother. One Danish critic, Georg Brandes, described Volumnia as the “sublime mother-form.” 1By curious coincidence Mary Arden died in the late summer of 1608, even as Coriolanus was being written, and on 9 September was buried in the parish church. She had outlived her husband and four of her children; whether the evident success of her oldest son compensated for the losses among her other children, is an open question. She had seen him rise to eminence in his dual profession as actor and writer, and purchase one of the grandest houses in the town. There is every reason to believe that she was proud of his achievements, and perhaps somewhat over-awed by them. We may recall here the admonitory words of Coriolanus to himself, that he must stand (2946-7)

As if a man were Author of himself,

And knew no other kin.

His mother had been occupying the old house in Henley Street together with Shakespeare’s sister, Joan Hart, who continued to live there after Shakespeare’s own death.

Shakespeare must have visited his mother there before her death. It has even been suggested that Coriolanus was written at Stratford because of the large supply of stage-directions in the published text. Thus there is written, “In this Mutinie, the Tribunes, the Aediles and the People are beat in” and “Martius followes them to gates, and is shut in.” The argument postulates that he did not intend to be present for any of the rehearsals of the first performances, and so had to be more than usually explicit in his directions for the actors. It is a possible circumstance.

Just before his mother’s death Shakespeare sued a Stratford neighbour, John Addenbrooke, for debt in the borough court; the sum of £6 was not forthcoming and so Shakespeare sued Addenbrooke’s “surety” for the money. The case continued for ten months, a clear sign of Shakespeare’s determination in such matters. In October he stood as godfather to the infant son of the alderman, Henry Walker, who was christened as William; he left the child a bequest in his will. It is important to note that Shakespeare could be accepted as a godfather only if he had outwardly conformed to the Church of England. There were clear rules on this matter, particularly since the godfather was charged with the spiritual education of the child. No nonconformist or recusant would have been permitted in that role. Before the ceremony, Shakespeare would also have received holy communion as a token of his orthodox faith. As the child of a recusant household, attached to the old faith but conforming to the observances of the new, he would have grown up with a profound sense of doubt. That is why ambiguity became one of the informing principles of his art. And why should it not be a mark of his behaviour in the world?

This raises the vexed question of his religion, endlessly debated through the centuries. It is true that he used the language and the structure of the old faith in his drama, but that does not imply that he espoused Catholicism. His parents are likely to have been of the old faith, but he did not necessarily take it with him into his adulthood. The old religion was part of the landscape of his imagination, not of his belief. As Thomas Carlyle stated, “this glorious Elizabethan Era with its Shakspeare, as the outcome and flowerage of all which had preceded it, is itself attributable to the Catholicism of the Middle Ages.” 2

There have been many studies of the association between Catholicism and the theatre itself, at the time “most of our present English actors (as I am credibly informed) being professed Papists.” 3William Prynne’s asseveration does not help to untangle Shakespeare’s private allegiances, however, and at most suggests that as an actor and dramatist he might have evinced a certain sympathy with the old faith. It must be said that there are a large number of friars and nuns, handled with gentle circumspection, within his drama; his contemporaries, in contrast, tended to treat them as an object of scorn or obloquy. There are also incidental references to Catholic rituals, services and beliefs that suggest some previous acquaintance with them; there are allusions to purgatory, to holy water, to the sacrament of penance, to the Blessed Virgin, and so on. They are all perfectly explicable on the understanding that the young Shakespeare was brought up in a household that professed the old faith. But his interest in ritual and sacramental observance was also part of his interest in the theatre. It was an aspect of his concern for the panoply of power, whether sacred or spiritual. He summons the pagan deities, for example, as frequently as he invokes the Christian God.

His own adult beliefs are much more difficult to estimate. It is possible that he was, in the language of the period, a “church papist”; he outwardly conformed, as in the ceremony of christening, but secretly remained a Catholic. This was a perfectly conventional stance at the time. There is also the statement, by Richard Davies, the Archdeacon of Coventry, that he “dyed a papist.” 4The archdeacon was a zealous Anglican, and would not have passed on this report with any great pleasure. It is not known how he received the information, but it is not necessarily inauthentic. It can be taken to mean that Shakespeare was given the sacrament of extreme unction at the time of his death. But this may have been at the instigation, or even the insistence, of his recusant family. He may have been too weak and too sick to comprehend the matter. Yet it is also sometimes the case that lapsed or quondam Catholics will, in extremis, embrace the possibility of redemption.

So there is only evidence by default. He seems to have avoided attending Anglican worship. There is no record for him in the token books (to prove that he had received holy communion) or vestry minute books of Southwark; he may have moved in with the Mount joys since, as a member of a Huguenot household, he was not bound to attend the Anglican service. But, on the other hand, there is also no reference to him in any of the prolific records of Catholic recusants. He made no protest and incurred no fine. Once more he becomes invisible. That invisibility, or ambiguity, is reflected in his work itself. Despite the myriad allusions to the old faith, Shakespeare in no sense declares himself. In the tragedies, for example, the religious imperatives of piety and consolation are withheld; these are worlds with no god. He never adverts to any particular religious controversy, unlike the satirists of the contemporaneous theatre. It should be added that there is also very little sign of religious sensibility in Elizabethan drama as a whole; it is as if the dramaturge, having been banished from temple and church, shook the dust from his feet and built his own temple in the unhallowed ground without. The safest and most likely conclusion, however, must be that despite his manifold Catholic connections Shakespeare professed no particular faith. The church bells did not summon him to worship. They reminded him of decay and of time past. Just as he was a man without opinions, so he was a man without beliefs. He subdued his nature to whatever in the drama confronted him. He was, in that sense, above faith.