Generations of Englishmen have ignored or smothered the Bard’s 'treacherous' popery

Why is Shakespeare so mysterious? 

Because he was a Catholic 

in an age of vicious persecution

by Joseph Pearce

Today is St George’s Day. It is also Shakespeare’s birthday and, believe it or not, it is the day on which Shakespeare died. Apart from the astonishing coincidence that Shakespeare died on his own birthday, it is also singularly appropriate that England’s greatest poet should have been born and should have died on the feast day of her patron saint. It seems appropriate, therefore, that we should celebrate the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birthday with a reference to cricket, that most quintessential of all English sports. Shakespeare is “450, Not Out”, continuing to hit his audiences for six after reaching several consecutive centuries of continuing relevance.

On such a prestigious anniversary it would do well to remind ourselves of the enduring stature of the Bard of Avon.

Arguably the three greatest writers of all time are Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare. Of the first of these, very little is known. Homer, it seems, has disappeared amid the murk and mists of history. So great and wide is the chasm that separates him from us that he is almost invisible. What we know of him, for what it’s worth, is gleaned from allusive and elusive clues embedded in his work. Thus, for instance, it is widely presumed that, like Milton, he was blind. If so, like the blind seer Teiresias, he sees more in his blindness than those blinded by their own unwillingness to see.

Much more is known of Dante, a devout Catholic and a disciple of the Scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas, who lived much of his life as a political exile from his beloved Florence. Perhaps the fact that he is 1,000 years closer to us than Homer might explain the greater knowledge. If so, why is it that such mystery continues to surround the seemingly elusive figure of William Shakespeare? In terms of the time that has elapsed from his time to ours, it would seem reasonable to presume that we should know more about the Bard of Avon than about the divinely inspired poet of Italy, the latter of whom lived 300 years earlier.

Much of the mystery surrounding Shakespeare is linked to the age in which he lived. It was an age in which a large and alienated section of the population was considered outlaws by the state. In Elizabethan and Jacobean England it was a criminal offence to practice or propagate the Catholic religion, an offence that for priests was punishable by death. 

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