Was the greatest writer in the English language a (secret) Catholic?
- CofComCat
- Aug 18
- 5 min read
William Shakespeare is among the greatest writers of all time. His impact on literature and the English language are incalculable. In English speaking nations only the Bible is more widely read than his writings. His plays have been translated into every major living language on Earth and are performed more often than those of any other playwright in history.
Also, his works are replete with Christian morality.
What's more, historians are uncovering growing evidence that Shakespeare wasn't merely a Christian. He was a Catholic.
When Shakespeare lived (1564 to 1616 AD), practicing the Catholic faith was illegal in England. King Henry VIII, in breaking from Rome and separating the Church in England from the Universal Church (it became the Church of England thereafter) had declared that he was the head of a state-controlled church (a practice which continues today) and that this state-sanctioned religion was the only one to be tolerated. After this English Reformation started in the 1530s (with the Act of Supremacy making it treasonous to recognize the Pope's authority) Catholics faced centuries of persecution. The prohibitions on recognizing the Pope's authority or attending the Mass continued as various penal laws heavily restricted Catholic worship and barred Catholics from holding public office. The first significant relaxation of these laws did not occur until 1791 and full civil rights weren't restored for Catholics until 1829 by the Catholic Emancipation Act. During the worst decades of Catholic persecution, priests and those who tried to hide them from the tyrannical Protestant monarchy and government were tortured and put to death. (The English and their diaspora really hated Catholicism, and many still do. It's deeply ingrained in English [British] culture. To learn how much of an English phenomenon this is, check out this lecture from Alexander Gray Ryrie who is Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University, where I studied from 2012-2014).
The term "recusant" was applied to Catholics who refused to attend Church of England services (and they were fined heavily for doing so). Shakespeare's mother's family were famous recusants and Shakespeare's father was fined for his recusancy in 1592.
So, Shakespeare was clearly at least born into a family that (or at least had) practiced the Catholic faith at a time when it was very risky to do so.
But all indications are that Shakespeare himself actually remained a lifelong Catholic.
It seems he was forced to leave Stratford-upon-Avon (the town he was born in and ultimately died in) for London with his wife and children due to an ongoing vendetta against him by Sir Thomas Lucy. Lucy who, as Queen Elizabeth's chief Protestant Inquisitor in the area, had led searches of local Catholic homes had very probably searched Shakespeare's own home.
In London, Shakespeare enjoyed the patronage of the Earl of Southampton, a known Catholic who history indicates had St. Robert Southwell as his confessor. St. Robert Southwell was a Jesuit priest who was arrested and imprisoned in 1592, intermittently tortured and questioned by priest hunter Sir Richard Topcliffe, and tried and convicted of high treason against Queen Elizabeth. He was hanged in 1595 and canonised by Pope St. Paul VI 1970. There are many allusions to St. Robert Southwell in Shakespeare's plays, including in The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and King Lear. (What's more, many other saints appear in or heavily influenced Shakespeare's plays, including St. Francis of Assisi, St. George, St. Thomas More and St. Edward the Confessor. Read more about some of them here.)
Shakespeare's likely Catholicism can also be presumed from a court case in which he was accused (his co-defendants included known Catholic recusants) of threatening violence against two men who were outspoken persecutors of London's Catholics. These men boasted of taking part in raids on Catholic homes and the burning of Catholic books and crucifixes. Shakespeare was thus defending himself alongside devout and defiant Catholics against seeming enemies who were known and boastful persecutors of Catholics.
Further, in May of 1606 Shakespeare's daughter was on a list of recusants brought before Stratford-upon-Avon's church court. The likelihood that Shakespeare's daughter would be practicing the Catholic faith in a militantly anti-Catholic culture surely indicates that she was given the faith in the home (i.e., by her parents). The likelihood of an Anglican converting to Catholicism at the time was near zero. Thus, Catholicism had almost certainly lived on in the Shakespeare family, being passed from one generation to the next (i.e., William Shakespeare instructed his children in the Catholic faith).
And perhaps the most striking evidence for Shakespeare's commitment to the Catholic faith came in 1613. Shakespeare purchased the Blackfriars Gatehouse which was part of the former Blackfriars Priory. It was a notorious center of Catholic activities and had originally belonged to the Dominican Order until the dissolution of the monasteries under King Henry VIII during his revolt against the Catholic Church. The Dominicans had been there for centuries but in 1539 the Priory was forcibly surrendered to King Henry VIII. Thus, Shakespeare chose to buy one of the most known Catholic houses in London and leased it to John Robinson Jr., whose father of the same name was an active Catholic. For example, it was reported in 1599 that John Robinson Sr. had sheltered a priest, Richard Dudley, in his home. Further, one of John Sr.'s two sons (i.e., Edward, John Jr.'s brother) entered the English College at Rome and became a priest. Shakespeare thus knew that in leasing his newly purchased investment property to John Jr. that he was leaving it in the possession of a recusant Catholic, brother of a priest and a member of an active multigenerational Catholic family.
The evidence of Shakespeare's Catholicism continues:
He links social upheaval and chaos with Protestantism: In Hamlet (full title is The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark), Hamlet and Horatio are "students at Wittenberg" (the center of Protestantism) and Denmark is portrayed as a newly Protestant regime, clearly linking the Protestant revolution and the coming curse of murder, fratricide, incest, madness and chaos on the country;
He is never recorded as having attended an Anglican liturgy, which he was legally required to do;
He left almost everything in his will to his aforementioned Catholic daughter (Susanna) and nothing to his Protestant family members; and
In the late 1600s, an Anglican minister wrote that Shakespeare "dyed a Papyst".
So who cares?
Well, if you're reading this, you can communicate in English. The very language itself was and continues to be shaped by William Shakespeare. It is impossible to overstate the influence his works have had on the way we read, write, speak and study what has become the lingua franca of business, government and medicine. And he was (it seems) a Catholic living in a dangerously anti-Catholic country, incorporating his Catholicism into his works (in often subtle ways). Keep this in mind the next time you (or, more likely, one of your kids in school) are reading or watching Shakespeare's work.
You're swimming in Catholic literature and language even if you don't know it.
God bless,
Travis
