Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare - Hardcover

Asquith, Clare

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1586483161 ISBN 13: 9781586483166

Publisher: PublicAffairs, 2005

Synopsis

In 16th century England many loyal subjects to the crown were asked to make a terrible choice: to follow their monarch or their God. The era was one of unprecedented authoritarianism: England, it seemed, had become a police state, fearful of threats from abroad and plotters at home. This age of terror was also the era of the greatest creative genius the world has ever known: William Shakespeare. How, then, could such a remarkable man born into such violently volatile times apparently make no comment about the state of England in his work?

He did. But it was hidden. Revealing Shakespeare's sophisticated version of a forgotten code developed by 16th-century dissidents, Clare Asquith shows how he was both a genius for all time and utterly a creature of his own era: a writer who was supported by dissident Catholic aristocrats, who agonized about the fate of England's spiritual and political life and who used the stage to attack and expose a regime which he believed had seized illegal control of the country he loved.

Shakespeare's plays offer an acute insight into the politics and personalities of his era. And Clare Asquith's decoding of them offers answers to several mysteries surrounding Shakespeare's own life, including most notably why he stopped writing while still at the height of his powers. An utterly compelling combination of literary detection and political revelation, Shadowplay is the definitive expose of how Shakespeare lived through and understood the agonies of his time, and what he had to say about them.

About this title

About the Author:

Clare Asquith has lectured on Shakespeare in England and Canada. Her article on The Phoenix and the Turtle was published in 2001 by the Times Literary Supplement, and her essay on Love's Labour's Lost appeared this year in Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England. She lives in London.

From The Washington Post:

Few masterpieces contain as many chestnuts as Hamlet. Take this one: "The play's the thing/ Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King." With these words, Prince Hamlet welcomes a theatrical troupe whose performance will unmask adultery and regicide in the Danish court.

Aphorisms wither faster than cut flowers, but sometimes old saws reveal new truths. Long before these lines became shopworn, they hinted at Shakespeare's modus operandi: In Shadowplay, Clare Asquith argues that the bard was using the theater of his day just as Hamlet did -- to send dangerous, skillfully encoded messages to his audience and his monarch. Hence, she writes, "it took not only intellectual brilliance but exceptional courage and constancy" to create and perform the greatest plays ever written.

Asquith is surfing an intriguing new wave of research: Shakespeare, it goes, was a closet Catholic at a time when the Church was banned. And far from presiding over the Golden Age, Queen Elizabeth I was running a police state, marked by raids, seizures, imprisonment and grisly executions, where informants snitched on private citizens. The court of her successor, James I, was worse.

Shakespeare's plays, Asquith suggests, encouraged patience and perseverance among the beleaguered Catholics and urged England's rulers to curtail the frequent crackdowns and persecutions.

What we do know: Shakespeare's Stratford was a center of religious resistance to the "new religion"; his father left a written testament of his enduring Catholic faith; Shakespeare's daughter, Susannah, was a "recusant," charged with refusing to attend Protestant services. The Ardens, Shakespeare's mother's family, were staunch Catholics whose chieftain, Edward Arden, was executed for his beliefs in 1583 by the usual method (he was dragged on a hurdle behind horses, then hanged, cut down alive, disemboweled and castrated before his heart was cut out).

Shakespeare was famously private about his life and habits -- as were many Catholics anxious to conceal their recusancy and attendance at illegal masses. But does that suggest he was Catholic? Asquith points out that most Elizabethans were, up until the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. The line was a murky Neverland -- some "Catholics" hid priests, risking their lives; others complied publicly, merely remaining "Catholic" at heart. Catholic playwrights took huge chances, dropping hints and references in their scripts. Asquith isn't the first to fish in these waters, of course. Scholars have been poring over Shakespeare's plays for decades, trying to find clues about his attitude towards his times.

But Asquith is no nitpicking professor. She's not afraid to wing it. By taking unscholarly chances, she may have unlocked a door. We may have been looking at the plays with a microscope, hunting for political comment in the odd line or two, when what we really needed was a wide-angle lens.

For example, in "King Lear," two sisters, motivated by material gain, falsely promise that they will give all their love to their father. Their honest sister is exiled for saying she must divide her love for her father with the obedience she will owe her husband. Significantly, religious dissidents at that time were refusing to pledge fealty to King James over their faith and the pope. Similarly, when Elizabethan audiences watched Laertes protest the brief obsequies given his sister Ophelia, they knew that Catholics were furtively burying their loved ones with the old rites, while publicly holding fake burials with the "maimed rites." Violent quarrels sometimes erupted in churches, and zealous Protestants exhumed bodies in the night.

That said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and some of Asquith's "markers" are farfetched. It's possible, as she suggests, that Shakespeare's tall, fair heroines represent the Catholic ideals, and the short, swarthy ones represent Protestant principles. But it's even more likely that Shakespeare really did have a dark mistress who influenced his poems and plays. And likely, too, that he was acknowledging contemporary fashions and pandering to a fair, redheaded (and notoriously vain) queen. Such sweeping conjectures detract from the merits of Shadowplay.

Asquith claims that Shakespeare did not retire quietly to Stratford in 1610 -- he was silenced. She links his sudden disappearance with the shockwaves created by the assassination of Henry IV of France. That king was a champion of tolerance who was murdered by a mad friar. Within a few years, all the major playwrights of the time had quit the theater, with the noteworthy exception of Ben Jonson, who publicly renounced Catholicism in 1610. They drifted back in the 1620s, but by that time, Shakespeare was dead -- and England was irrevocably Protestant.

Asquith smashes the familiar icon of Shakespeare as a determined conformist who brilliantly skated the political thin ice that cracked under his less skillful countrymen. Her Shakespeare is darker and more complex -- a tormented dissident who died in defeat. Asquith is far from alone in her conjectures. The portrait that is emerging shows that Shakespeare was a hero as magnificent as any he created.

Reviewed by Cynthia L. Haven
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: PublicAffairs
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1586483161
• ISBN 13: 9781586483166
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 368